Where We Stand
Chapter One
THE MATH:
If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.
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At the turn of the 20th century, the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, predominantly Sigmund Freud, exposed to the world an important piece of the puzzle of how our minds work. With that knowledge, the founding fathers of “Public Relations”, invented by Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, were able to maneuver our democracy towards consumerism. If you’ve seen Adam Curtis’ documentary “The Century of the Self” from 2002, I will only recap. (If you haven’t seen it, or seen it again recently, I highly suggest you watch, to flesh out my initial position here and because it is vital information.)
This tool of manipulation called PR is the most powerful synthetic force in our life and it has completely changed the playing field. In the year 2025, we now exist in a world downstream from that, where “data is gold”, meaning the insight into our personal psychology, our “customer behavior and preferences”, is amplified a thousandfold to refine marketing strategies as sharp as a surgeon’s knife. You might say: I am well aware of PR and propaganda and the sway of advertising, but this is not the greatest threat we face. I am positing that it is, for we can do nothing to protect ourselves from any other threats if we are still vulnerable to and effectively handicapped by the sabotage of this intervention. Because it doesn’t just succeed at getting us to buy some new thing, it can successfully manipulate our behavior and opinions to contradict our values, causing detrimental but invisible psychic damage.
The actual physical threats that might appear more injurious than a public relations campaign are the things we have a natural, instinctive capability to defend ourselves against, like any other animal on earth. There is no effort from inside the animal kingdom which tricks its creatures into eating poisonous plants with cunning words or subliminal imagery; animals do not wait and listen to the hunter’s rationalizing arguments as he creeps towards them. It is only because of the human invention of the PR campaign that we can be manipulated into behaving abnormally, unnaturally, against our better instincts, our very survival instincts. Where instead of defending ourselves competently we have been fooled into trusting our attackers and parroting their own excuses and justifications for why their attacks are something we must accept as fair and legal inevitabilities of our environment.
So let us zero in on our environment:
In a capitalist economic and social system like our own, private ownership and free markets determine production, distribution, and consumption of goods. Because of this consumption part, our consumption, the system is heavily dependent on consumer spending and the goods we choose to consume. Our spending decisions, our "consumer sovereignty", holds significant power because it dictates what goods and services are produced and how businesses operate, influencing the economy and shaping the market. Theoretically, businesses must adapt to changing consumer preferences and demands to stay competitive, potentially leading to innovation or shifts in business models. This is how it was intended to work anyhow.
While the West has evidently preferred a capitalist system to communism, anarchism or a tyrannical dictatorship, our current working version of consumer capitalism includes that the system manipulates consumers into buying things they don't need, creating artificial desires. This was the big switch. For the biggest industry players in our environment, I’ll refer to them going forward as “Bad Companies”, this dynamic has been tweaked further, to also include us buying things that harm us.
We’ve been persuaded to deviate from what is Good and reasonable under Natural Law, in the buying and also hoarding of material things over and above what we actually need to survive and thrive, which then limits the potential of as many people as possible surviving and thriving. Beyond this, there is even greater atrocity committed by this all-powerful adversary which results in death. We view dictatorships elsewhere and breathe our sighs of relief to live in such a more liberated and safer democracy, and don’t see the tyranny in our own system because it masquerades as our choice. Instead of the obvious abuse blatantly visible in a more oppressive-looking governance, despots of our free society can only compel us to self-harm.
If we examine the history of the most deadly of these campaigns, we see a very similar pattern. There is a direct cause and effect between the PR tactics and the self-harm. The reason this dynamic has succeeded for this long without sufficient resistance is that the Bad Companies have been able to insert a crucial component in between the cause and the effect which obscures the connection—this is the fog of our cognitive dissonance. As a result, we are subconsciously motivated to reduce the dissonance by changing our beliefs, behaviors, or perceptions relating to the harmful situation in order to restore the balance. Unfortunately, this creates a conflict between the actual reality we need to protect ourselves from and the manufactured reality the Bad Companies offer us with their false claims of safety.
The opponents of Natural Law work to sever us from our own inborn adherence to it, to confuse our understanding of it, and to convince us that choosing what they offer is the more desirable, greater good. Natural Law and reason work hand in hand. Reason discovers the natural law and that it is moral. Every natural law is reasonable—what is the good thing to do is also the wise and reasonable thing to do. So, to disconnect us from Natural Law they must first disconnect us from our reason.
The most terrible things done to Americans, with the worst outcomes, are things that the population had the capability to resist, if they had thought things through properly. Those that do these terrible things rely on the bombardment of diversions which sap the time and energy and focus necessary for us to think clearly. The distracted and exhausted state of mind of the collective may not even be able to realize what in the environment requires the greatest examination, so our aim can be shaky from the start.
Bernays' theories, based on the work of his uncle Sigmund Freud in Austria, describe the “masses” as irrational and subject to herd instinct, and he laid out how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desired ways. The idea was that the masses are driven by factors outside and beyond their conscious understanding, therefore their minds can and should be manipulated by a select capable few. The most critical piece of his methodology, for us to consider in the context of our participation, is the understanding that you can get people to behave irrationally if you link products, or also ideas as products, to their emotional desires and feelings. Bernays referred to this work as “psychological warfare”.
Using Freud’s concepts about the unconscious mind, Bernays discovered that the way to sell a product was not to advertise it to the intellect—the idea that you ought to have this or do this, based on necessity or an established morality—but more, that you will feel better about yourself if you have this or do this, based on desire. The buyer could now be engaged emotionally, personally. Using the product would affect their own life and status. Many corporations accurately imagined the bonanza it would be if people bought beyond what they actually needed. They set out to shape a redesigned mentality, where man’s desires overshadow his needs. This marks the monumental transformation from a vital active citizenry of workers and thinkers to the mass of passive consumers, from loyalty to country and ideals to loyalty to product makers. Also PS, from this set of ideas comes the Stock Market—where ordinary Americans transition from owning shares of land to owning shares of a product, “citizens” of that product, competing with other products.
A community can flourish when all are positioned toward the same ideals, if those are connected to the highest Good, like the collaborative harmony we see in the natural world. If the majority can be made to follow a different set of ideals or a different set of metrics for morality, because they’ve succumbed to the powerful persuasion of those who break from Natural Law, it can lead to great harm.
Understanding how Bernays’ work is inexorably linked to the rise of modern propaganda techniques that erode democratic engagement and suppress dissent, it’s not surprising to know that he was often compared to European fascists including Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler. (Goebbels read and used all his books.) Recognizing and analyzing these methods in our own recent history can help us better make sense out of how we end up in our current state of oligarchical corporate crony capitalism—where our economic, political and judicial systems are controlled or influenced by corporate interests and how our world has become integrated under the power of transnational companies. We must be able to see precisely where and how the oligarchical model accomplishes this.
In the early marketplace, there was a simple and direct relationship between the salesman and the customer, where rationality was naturally at play. If a snake oil salesman made false claims about his product, when enough people realized it didn’t work he would be run out of town. If his product made people sick, he might suffer an even worse fate. Back then, we could recognize the swindler by his bad fruits and instinctively, effectively root him out. Where we are now is on the other side of a massive cloud of man-made interference that lies between us and the swindler, which makes things not so simple and visible anymore.
After World War I ended, Edward Bernays transitioned from selling the war using his invented catchphrase “making the world safe for democracy”, and entered the public sphere to use his new tactics on a general public in peacetime. His first and most famous experiment, (after he coined the term “public relations” to deter away from the negative connotations of the word propaganda), was his work for the Tobacco Industry. He tested out his methods of influence on the minds of the popular classes of the United States—to see if he could persuade women to smoke.
Tobacco smoking has no health benefits. None. It is a substance that only produces disease, debilitation and death. There is no level at which tobacco smoke is safe for the consumer or the people around them. In the 1920s, it was taboo for women to be seen smoking in public, so the president of American Tobacco, George Hill, hired Bernays to try to affect this lost share of the market. Bernays consulted with fellow student of Freud, American psychoanalyst Abraham Brill, who posited that for women, the cigarette was a symbol of male power. He suggested that women’s feminine desires were increasingly suppressed by their role in the modern world and if Bernays could associate cigarettes with a challenge to this male power, then they would smoke.
So Bernays masterminded America’s first publicity stunt. During the popular Easter Parade in New York with thousands attending and journalists and photographers covering the event, he paid a group of upper class debutantes to dramatically light up cigarettes in front of the photographers. Meanwhile Bernays slipped information to the press that he heard a bunch of suffragettes were planning to “protest” by lighting up what they called “torches of freedom”. He planted the story and gave the press the symbolic slogan and it went viral, in all the newspapers, all over the country and the world. It had everything: the psychological symbol, the image, the catch phrase. The nations’ coolest girls doing something edgy and provocative—rebellious protest! They were in full fashion standing up to their oppressors, claiming their own power, fighting for something noble—their freedom. They modeled to the rest of the world how to accomplish this reclaiming of power and freedom, by using this product. Pinning smoking to a noble cause translates the use of the product to “anybody who believes in this kind of equality must support them, the smokers, in the ensuing debate about freedom and women’s rights”. Conversely, anyone who is against cigarettes must therefore be against freedom for women. Brilliant!
From that day the market share of women who used the tobacco product went up and up and up. He had made cigarettes socially acceptable with a single campaign. A product became an idea which became an ideology. If a woman is modern, powerful and independent—she smokes. Women lit up at the breakfast table and blew the smoke in the faces of their children, that’s how powerful and free they were. The idea that smoking actually made women freer was completely irrational, but it made them feel more independent. And the feeling is real. FEELINGS are easier to manipulate than TRUTH. This meant that irrelevant objects could become powerful symbols of how you wanted to be seen by others.
Within the tobacco industry, marketing experts successfully defined and exploited all aspects of this new approach of social engineering. Society and culture could be manipulated through public relations to create a marketing environment that favored a particular product, in this instance the cigarette. Individuals’ purchase of a particular product was equivalent to their giving consent to the underlying meaning-centered campaigns.
With all the current issues we are facing, you might feel a pang of impatience going back a hundred years to discuss cigarettes. The frustration being that there have been a dozen more pressing issues since then and the ones we face now must take precedence. It’s true society has moved on from focusing on this campaign—but without learning the lessons from it. The tricks Big Tobacco used on the public to get us to harm ourselves are still at work, still succeeding, and have continued to block us from eradicating that harm. The point of this whole endeavor is to show that these tricks were then used by any Bad Company or entity willing to put profit over people and then they also succeeded to degrade the environment and harm the population every decade that followed and we have somehow been blocked from defending ourselves from any of that devastation, still.
Big Tobacco became the global leader in these mass manipulation techniques, more politely disguised as cutting edge advertising, marketing, and public relations. And then each other major industry copied their playbook. We are chasing our tail trying to battle the outcomes of these assaults when we've done nothing to plug up that original hole in our defense.
These great marketers learned long ago that they are not selling a product; they are selling a solution. Edward Bernays launched a school of thinking which suggests the individual is ruled by irrational unconscious desires and feelings. If the marketers could identify those—they could be sexual, psychological, sociological, a demand for status or recognition, things hidden from the individual himself—then they could manipulate purchasing. The continuation of this technology is how algorithms now work on us, leading us to ads and products, even toward a certain decision or ideology they’ve deduced we might be coaxed to opt for, based on our psychological make up. The historian Noah Yuval Harari infamously predicted the “algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself”. Beyond just offering a product, marketing strategies have figured out how to remove any and all defenses a consumer might have to accepting a product...or accepting anything.
Bernays called this “the engineering of consent”. The problem is that when our consent has been engineered, as opposed to naturally occurring from of our actual beliefs, we are left to deal with troublesome hypocrisies, recognized or buried, that we cannot justify. When we then press forward on this distorted path, further and further away from what we truly desire, or need, or think is Good, the dissonance that creates only leaves us more susceptible to these tactics.
The cigarette companies’ public relations teams took a product that had no inherent or pre-existing necessity and remade it into one of the most popular, successful, and widely used items of the 20th century. And this was only the first tier of that marketing brilliance. The more unfathomable paradox was that the eventual disclosure to the public that this product caused addiction, disease and death would not be enough to impede the Bad Company’s continued practices or profits and did not lead to us crafting any reinforced protection against the next campaign.
We have a history of being lied to. We currently reside in a problematic reality where our health and our lives are put at great risk because of the lies we are told and because we have not yet figured out a way to adequately defend ourselves against them. The largest corporate powers of Big Tobacco, Big Chemical, Big Agriculture, and Big Pharma have all produced and sold a product, if not multiple products, which caused great harm to the population, including death, lots and lots of death. Like with cigarettes, disclosure of the fatalities does not remove their products from the environment, or stop the companies from doing business, or do anything to prevent them from lying and harming again.
Thus, we are trying to retrace the steps of our “logical reasoning” to see where the error in our calculations happened between recognition and resistance, since we haven’t at all reduced the damage from the repeated deception.
Is it that we haven’t exactly figured out just how the Bad Companies deceive? Is it that we’ve misinterpreted the deception as something different or lesser? Is it that we’ve been convinced there is no way to shield ourselves from the deception? Is is that we haven’t asked ourselves these questions or ignored the need to ask them? Is it anything in between or is it all of the above?
+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law =
We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….
Such a disturbing but true history. Look forward to listening to the next chapter! Great to see you recently!! 💗