Managing Consent: The Art of War, Democracy and Public Relations
Written by Ramzy Baroud
Sunday, 19 August 2007
It is Edward Bernays who fine-tuned the art of public relations in the 20th
century. Using many of the psychoanalytic theories put forward by his uncle
Sigmund Freud, he developed a mastery of public manipulation, suggesting that
such manipulation was essential to democracy itself. Bernays strongly believed
that people are simply "stupid" and in need of being told how to behave, what to
believe, what to eat, what to wear, and how to vote. The outcomes of such an
experiment reverberate to this day.
Some historians credit Bernays's efforts in the 1920s and 1930s for turning the
modern citizen into a modern consumer. Not only did he convince Americans that a
"hearty breakfast" must include eggs and bacon, as opposed to the traditional
toast and coffee, he also managed to convince women at the time that cigarettes
were a symbol of man's power and domination; to challenge the male sense of
superiority, women needed to smoke. A few public stunts later, sales of
cigarettes (which Bernays termed "torches of freedom") soared, eventually
doubling the market for tobacco manufacturers, who, among many other businesses,
were Bernays's clients.
It was only natural that such tactics would soon become politicized. Various
presidents and presidential candidates utilized Bernays's theories and services
in the interests of power and profit, though some did try to outset the
increasing influence of big businesses on American democracy. Roosevelt's New
Deal in the early 1930s — which purported to reengage the citizen as a vital
component in a functioning democracy — was resented by the corporations, and
they ferociously fought to win consumers back and defeat the democratic
initiative. Ultimately, they succeeded.
Freud argues that a person's subconscious desires would be utterly violent and
sadistic if uncontrolled; his nephew suggested the cure was to curb these
desires in a way that generated immense profits.
It didn't take long for Bernays's tactics to be applied in US foreign policies.
Guatemala is a textbook example; when the country was ready to embrace serious
popular change in the 1950s, with democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz
implementing equitable land reforms that ran counter to the interests of the US
United Fruit Company (which was naturally unwilling to concede its highly
profitable "Banana Republic"), media manipulators in the US immediately set
about to convince Americans that Arbenz somehow posed a threat to American
democracy. A CIA-engineered coup deposed the elected president and installed its
operative Castillo Armas, who was hailed by visiting US vice president Richard
Nixon as a "liberator."
Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents argues that a person's subconscious
desires would be utterly violent and sadistic if uncontrolled; his nephew
suggested the cure was to curb these desires in a way that generated immense
profits. Successive US administrations have taken note, and their greatest
achievement has been to exploit the subconscious factors that infuse fear and
paranoia among the masses. Wars have been waged, regimes overthrown, and bombs
dropped in the midst of sleeping populations, all in the name of democracy. What
Bernays brazenly dubbed "managing consent" — and Chomsky and Herman more
honestly referred to as "manufacturing consent" — remains the defining factor
that subverts true democracy in the US, and it often leads to the most violent
consequences in countries that fall under the US sphere of influence.
Despite serious public efforts to counter the anti-democratic union between the
state and corporations in the 1960s and 1970s, the latter managed to prevail,
using direct repression at times, but also by underhandedly exploiting the same
discontented popular movements to promote their ideas and products. This tactic
has manifested itself invariably every time a discord between the state and
corporation on one hand and the people on the other took place.
A more recent example is the way in which President George W. Bush has
constantly attempted to manipulate to his advantage the anti-war movement that
opposed his 2003 war and invasion of Iraq. His logic — also used by former
British prime minister Tony Blair — was simple, yet most deceptive: The war in
Iraq is aimed at achieving the same kind of democracy that allows millions of
Americans to disagree peacefully with their government without facing the
persecution they suffer under Saddam.
While one finds laughable the deduced notion that Iraqis are now reaping the
benefits of democracy, one can hardly deny that Bush's logic took hold among
many, even those opposed to the war. Such dialectics managed to shift the debate
in many circles from the illegitimacy of the war and its true intentions to
altruistic arguments about how "the world is better off without Saddam." This
type of manipulation is anything but new and is hardly exclusive to the Iraq
case.
Since World War II, the US government and corporate America have carried the
democracy banner whenever they sought war and profits. While doing so, the CIA
has managed to topple many popular, democratic governments around the world,
replacing them with handpicked, puppet regimes. The Palestinian elections in
January 2006 were the closest the region had seen of true democratic elections
in many years, and yet the fact that it was Hamas — who violently fought the
Israeli military occupation and who strongly opposed US policies in the region —
was elected to power justified an entire population being starved, physically
confined, and violently oppressed by Israel, with the full support of the US and
the world's banking system. The Palestinian experiment is unlikely to conclude
soon, but the outcomes have been utterly devastating thus far.
Edward Bernays's direct influence is long gone, but his ideas continue to define
the relationships between the corporations, the American state, and the
consuming citizen, and even the relationships between the state-corporations'
union and the rest of the world. The carefully managed relationships have
undermined democracy and unleashed sadistic wars and uncontrollable violence, of
which Freud had warned, but which his nephew shamelessly exploited.
