Propaganda and Class Hostility

By Deadly Buda

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda, ©1928 Horace Liveright inc.

Thus Edward L. Bernays, considered the inventor of the American public relations industry, unflinchingly begins his 1928 handbook, Propaganda. “Crystallizing public opinion,” was Bernay’s stock and trade. As he explained it, the powers-that-be (or the more commonly used, “men of best character”) must be able to mold and shape the public mind, otherwise, chaos would ensue. He called this “Organizing Chaos” (also the title of his first chapter in Propaganda*). At the time, the industrial revolution had unleashed a marvelous array of devices (radio, television, telephone, and wire) with which to communicate ideas all over the earth, particularly the far-flung populated regions of the United States. Battling with these devices, strong industry, business and social groups could now direct society in an orderly fashion.

The “men of best character” concept was fundamental to the idea of responsible propaganda. It assumed that those with money and power, such as the ‘captains of industry”, and families comprising the banking system, had the most knowledge, intelligence and trustworthiness to guide our society. Bernays assumed, like many of his social background, that “men of best character” must be relied on to gently guide a democracy to the “right” decision. This would be done with “propaganda”. A well-orchestrated campaign of advertising and public address, could mold the pubic mind in such a way as to condition them to support products, politics, social concepts, and in times of national distress, wars.

Assuming that there was a better-suited group of people to guide the society was not so very far-fetched. Obviously, this group of people was smart enough to see an opportunity and jump on it in the first place, would be informed with the most recent developments in industry, and were required an amount of civic service to keep up good public appearances. More importantly, America was not entirely familiar with the concepts of class and privilege and what they entailed. Theoretically, America is entirely opposed to the feudal implications of hierarchy (After all, we are taught that our country was formed with the idea of breaking away from the English crown). So when wealth was concentrating during the industrial age, the social implications could not be entirely forecast by the majority, or the fortunate. Furthermore, the concentration of communication power “at the top” was not entirely unbeneficial at the time, because the wealth was created in recent memory, and seemed to directly address the current economic and leisure needs of the population. So during this time, economic and communication power concentrated among a newly formed social class. As power concentrates among a class of people, the eventual result has always been their eventual isolation and disengagement from the general populace. The generations of families that result after the initial fortune seem to functionally degenerate in relation to the society (even while the family’s’ fortune increases) as they are put into positions of power and privilege by birth-rite rather than a more universally functioning understanding of their business. Furthermore, a soft hostility emerges as the friends and families among the class intertwine, against those equally or more adept, from the outside. This hostility in America is particularly subtle, as it takes the form of manners and expectations, dress, tastes in music, art, and literature in a persons early stages of development (usually their adolescence) and then makes itself clearly evident as they get older with

their economic grounding, geographic location and political persuasions. Since the early part of the century, America has ingested a steady diet of propaganda from the captains of industry and their financiers, descendents and accessory social classes (the upper middle class). These are not democratic enclaves of concerned citizens, they are families and the social groups attached to serve them, with their own prejudices, predilections, projections and self-interests. Advertising, media focus, dramatic broadcast, sports, radio and television news, daily papers and periodicals are all part of a nervous system that informs the social body on it’s status and direction, intellectually, physically, and emotionally. When a particular segment of that body monopolizes the communication process the results can be detrimental to the whole. For instance, when a certain product or commodity is no longer useful or needed in the quantity it once was, such as tobacco or oil, those industries embark on massive campaigns of dis-information. Dodgy scientific studies and their statistics scream across the daily headlines, politicians’ palms are greased, new laws are proposed, billboards go up all over the place, characters in movies are chain-smoking, Bruce Willis in “Armageddon” hits golf-balls off an oil rig at Greenpeace boats, and advertising agencies are flooded with dollars in an effort to lie and brainwash as many people as often as possible. All this so that one tiny segment of the population can continue to live in a manner it is accustomed to, while giving nothing positive back to society.

Day in and out, every person now comes into contact with information in their field of knowledge they know is inaccurate at best, false at worst. When one puts it all together a completely illusory world emerges that somehow influences peoples’ interaction. Though we don’t really agree with aspects of this strange world of illusion, we must go along with it, because we assume everyone else is. So one instance after another is based on a completely false set of values, morals, and information. So it goes something like this...The Bank decides to loan business money based on how it conducts itself-”like a real business”. This constitutes a certain pre-conceived notion of dress sense, attitude, moral subscription and of course, target market. So, most of the money loaned for businesses goes to those that most readily subscribe to the pre-formed preconceptions of the lenders. This creates a superficially homogenous atmosphere that permeates the upper middle class of most of the Western Hemisphere. Despite their disagreement about certain topics, such as say, marijuana legislation, they diligently tow the line to pay off their mortgages and college loans, etc., rationalizing the whole thing with any number of reasons. The ideal target market is, of course, the upper middle class for these ventures, and so project after project is targeted at this market, based on an assumption of their prejudices, which are really the supposed mirrored standards of their financiers and employers who, in plenty of cases, don’t subscribe to the standard of behavior they feel they must impose on everyone else.

In America, we have a quite interesting situation with the ruling classes and their propaganda: their relevance is increasingly called into question... by their propaganda. We are read statistics to us daily by talking heads that are telling us how we think en masse. It is obviously very important to take surveys because the people making discussions have ceased to identify with the voter and consumer, and must increasingly rely on an intermediary. It is portrayed as a “Shocking Revelation” that no one cares who Clinton slept with or that people are uncomfortable giving out personal information when they buy batteries at Radio Shack. I ask: shocking to whom? Apparently there is a segment of society that feels completely comfortable prying into everyone else’s business, whilst carefully guarding theirs.

When will we be shocked at how insulting their programming, slogans and sound-bites are to the intelligence of the general population? “Political Action Committees” and ad agencies work hand in hand to address and then force issues so despised by the majority, that one can only laugh at the vehement desperation to uphold a clearly transparent sense of decency and social control that these people feel so strongly to enforce upon the population.

But it really isn’t funny at all. Every day people are being put in jail for things that the majority do not think are crimes. Our social will is so obviously subverted by insular and incestuous powers that obviously have far more control on our society than the majority. Even when someone disagrees with a policy, they will go along with it, because “that’s what the guy upstairs thinks, and he pays my bills.”

So the propaganda is getting increasingly vacuous, and the products made and marketed get worse and worse in most cases, to ensure a profit, to pay back a loan, to live in a social illusion. After years and years of this happening, the society is left with bland, homogenized, dishonest hack jobs in virtually every arena. In fact, honest, emotional, challenging and experimental works or products are almost banned from society because they are “too risky”-Although everything is marketed to us as having those values— with a “classic rock” soundtrack blaring in the background, like ‘Born to be Wild” or some such nonsense.

As the propaganda continues, it produces an ever-more cynical society. We are harassed at borders, put in jail for superfluous reasons, and taxed to pay for our exploitation and brainwashing. Political parties are laughable exercises in boredom, the sheer repetition of the ineptitude bludgeons us into accepting obviously stupid ideas and despairing that things will never change. Lives are destroyed, the environment gutted, and the sell-out continues to escalate the physical, mental and psychic carnage of even the perceived “winners”, while our entertainment industry does nothing but perpetuate a vacuous consuming culture, constantly looking for new methods of diverting peoples attention spans from the fact that things are going to hell quickly, while the ruling classes continue to be hypnotized by the simulacra they call statistics, opinion polls and surveys. Virtually our entire society is only relating to each other as stereotypical images.

Commercial capitalism, as an instrument, has powerful tendencies to become institutionalized, to the injury of continued economic advance. Such institutionalization arises when pursuit of profit becomes dominant over the real, if remote, goals of any economic system. These real goals include high enjoyment of wealth, and can be analyzed into high production, high distribution, and high consumption of goods. As long as the pursuit of profits serves to assist these goals, any profit organization of the economic system remains an instrument, but this is likely to continue only as long as the trading system is a competitive one. As long as the competitive aspect of the organization continues, each entrepeneur seeks to obtain a larger share of the total trade for himself, and invest his savings, as in ships, wharves, or warehouses, in order to do so. Such investment increases the total volume of trade, which, in turn, increases the total volume of production on one side, and the total volume of consumption, on the other side. This increase in wealth has, eventually an adverse effect on the volume of profits, since profits (meaning a surplus over the total of the costs of production and distribution) require a scarcity system. Increase in volume, by making goods less scarce, reduces the margin by which retail selling prices exceeds costs, and thus, in general terms, jeopardizes profits. When this occurs, and the commercial traders are in a position to reduce their mutual competition, they seek to manage the market, by reducing volume in order to raise profits. In this way profits become dominant over wealth as an economic goal, to the jeopardy of volume and high living standards. Means have become ends-or, as we put it, an instrument becomes an institution. When this process took place in our own Western Civilization about the seventeenth century, we generally say commercial capitalism (or the “Commercial Revolution” in the older books) was transformed into mercantilism. In Canaanite society we speak of the rise of a “commercial oligarchy” in the later days of Phoenicia or of Carthage. When this occurred, the society ceased to expand by economic means (that is, by increasing volume of wealth, or by intensification of economic activities) and tried to expand by political means ( that is, to increase profits by extensification of economic activities by bringing wider geographic areas under the institutionalized economic organization). thus, the economic imperialism and wars typical of Stage 4*** of any civilization replaced the earlier economic expansion (which also involved geographic expansion, but by exploration and colonization rather than by imperialist wars).”

-Carroll Quigley, on Canaanite capitalism (2200-50 B.C.) in “The Evolution of Civilizations”©1961 The Macmillan Company.

In this book, Quigley presents a 7 stage pattern of change in Civilizations resulting from the fact that each civilization has an “instrument of expansion”(an organization in the society generating surplus so the society continues to grow) that becomes an “institution”. i.e.The civilization rises while this organization is an instrument, and declines as this organization becomes an institution.

***”As soon as the rate of expansion in a civilization begins to decline noticeably, it enters Stage 4, the Age of Conflict. This is probably the most complex, most interesting, and most critical of all seven stages. It is marked by four chief characteristics:

(a) it is a period of declining rate of expansion;

(b) it is a period of growing tension of evolution and increasing class conflicts, especially in the core area;

(c) it is a period of increasingly frequent and increasingly violent wars; and

(d) it is a period of growing irrationality, pessimism, superstitions, and otherworldliness.”

-Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations” ©1961 The Macmillan Company