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Century of Bernays
This week for Technologies of Persuasion class we watched the BBC documentary The Century of the Self (Parts 1 & 2) and read some of Propaganda by Edward Bernays. I had swottily volunteered to lead the discussion of the Century of the Self.
Here were some of my thoughts on the watching and the reading:
Proposition: the people are irrational and cannot be trusted
1. Who are the people?
2. By whom can’t they be trusted?
3. If an elite needs to control the masses, who will constitute this elite and how can their rationality, and therefore trustworthiness, be established?
4. Who suppresses the savage barbarism of the elite as they suppress that of the masses?
The elite is constituted by those in power right now and those who can grab power – so it is not determined rationally but by the powerful and ruthless, not the rational.
Does anyone see themselves as being a member of the masses? Are the masses always something other than the self that talks about them? Me vs. everybody else.
Is the irrationality of the masses consituted by not acting in the interests of the people deeming them to be irrational?
Change from Citizenship to Consumerism:
Will Hutton: Shopping and Tut Tutting
“The opinion-forming classes are so busy delivering their views while juggling their overcrowded lives that they rarely have the time to surrender to savouring that moment when they might unexpectedly enhance their lives by finding another diverting item on which to spend money - in short, by shopping.
They deplore the outcome - industrialised shopping malls, mass advertising, the manipulation of desire by producers and retailers - as if the consumers at the other end of all this effort were just brainwashed dolts colluding unwillingly in the destruction of their spiritual life and the interpersonal relationships which are central to their happiness. Shopping on this scale and with this degree of commitment, in this worldview, is a form of psychosis.”
This was a really bizarre article to read by an esteemed thinker like Hutton. The premise of his article - that shopping is a form of self expression that should be enjoyed with abandon is simplistic and uncritical. He makes some good points though about the arguments that are often made against shopping and consuming as a form of expression - there is an interesting overlap between arguments about the dumb shopping machines created by consumerism and Bernays’s contempt for the stupid masses.
Propaganda and relative truth
Is something true if enough people think it is true?
“So how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. ‘Scientists today said … scientists revealed … scientists warned.’ And if they want balance, you’ll get two scientists disagreeing, although with no explanation of why (an approach at its most dangerous with the myth that scientists were “divided” over the safety of MMR). One scientist will ‘reveal’ something, and then another will ‘challenge’ it. A bit like Jedi knights.”
The notion that the truth of an idea rests on how many people are convinced it is true is one that has considerable currency among many people. High profile examples that occur to me are:
*Government money going to “complementary therapies” in the UK
*Blair’s focus groups
*Law against incitement to religious hatred
PR
We had to bring an example of an article that showed evidence of PR to class. I brought an article about the iPod nano that appeared on the BBC website. There is something awesome and worrying to me about the fact that a news organisation that is paid for by British tax payers and which is not allowed to advertise would be happy to publish what was clearly an advertisement poorly disguised as a press release that they clearly hadn’t bothered to add any information of value to those other than potential customers of Apple, and all that for free.
What a great PR job Apple’s people have done to convince so many people that their product releases are news - the web, newspapers, and blogs were full of articles about a personal stereo just because they were selling it. Bernays would have approved.
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