The invisible governors
"It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind... and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world" (Edward Bernays, "Propaganda", 1928)
Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)
This is the first of several posts intended to provide some important context for what we see in the media today.
Try for a few moments to imagine life in 1928.
King George V is on the throne. Stanley Baldwin is Prime Minister. And Huddersfield Town AFC have been the most successful English football team of the past few years.
The Great War — now known as World War I — is recent history. The Great Depression is just around the corner. And the BBC is still in its infancy — with the first public television service still several years away.
This is the era in which Edward Bernays, who is often referred to as “the father of public relations”, wrote the book Propaganda, which I first featured in this post. The text is available to read for free e.g. here. A Kindle edition is available for 49p.
An invisible government
Bernays begins Propaganda with these words (emphasis added):
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.
We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons — a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million — who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
Those strike me as remarkable words:
An invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… invisible governors who are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet… A relatively small number of persons… who pull the wires which control the public mind, who… contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
I wonder how people would react if someone in public life stood up and spoke like that today. And, in particular, how long it would be before someone mentioned “conspiracy theory” — a term that was almost unheard of before 1960:
Somehow I doubt that many people in the late 1920s would have reacted in quite that way.
The power of propaganda
Here are some other quotes from the book (emphasis added) along with occasional pictures and comments:
[Link] As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.
With the printing press and the newspaper, the railroad, the telephone, telegraph, radio and airplanes, ideas can be spread rapidly and even instantaneously all over the whole of America.
H. G. Wells senses the vast potentialities of these inventions when he writes in the New York Times:
“Modern means of communication — the power afforded by print, telephone, wireless and so forth, of rapidly putting through directive strategic or technical conceptions to a great number of cooperating centers, of getting quick replies and effective discussion — have opened up a new world of political processes. Ideas and phrases can now be given an effectiveness greater than the effectiveness of any personality and stronger than any sectional interest. The common design can be documented and sustained against perversion and betrayal. It can be elaborated and developed steadily and widely without personal, local and sectional misunderstanding.”
To the technical means… invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented — the printing press and the newspaper, the railroad, the telephone, telegraph, radio and airplanes — we might of course add the television, the cinema, the computer, the internet, the smartphone, social media…
[Link] It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind, and to tell how it is manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or commodity…
[Link] Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group.
This practice of creating circumstances and of creating pictures in the minds of millions of persons is very common. Virtually no important undertaking is now carried on without it, whether the enterprise be building a cathedral, endowing a university, marketing a moving picture, floating a large bond issue, or electing a president. Sometimes the effect on the public is created by a professional propagandist, sometimes by an amateur deputed for the job. The important thing is that it is universal and continuous; and in its sum total it is regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.
Modern propaganda… a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events… universal and continuous... regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers. In 1928.
[Link] In our present social organization approval of the public is essential to any large undertaking. Hence a laudable movement may be lost unless it impresses itself on the public mind. Charity, as well as business, and politics and literature, for that matter, have had to adopt propaganda, for the public must be regimented into giving money just as it must be regimented into [preventing disease]…
Propaganda does exist on all sides of us, and it does change our mental pictures of the world…
…anyone with sufficient influence can lead sections of the public at least for a time and for a given purpose. Formerly the rulers were the leaders. They laid out the course of history, by the simple process of doing what they wanted. And if nowadays the successors of the rulers, those whose position or ability gives them power, can no longer do what they want without the approval of the masses, they find in propaganda a tool which is increasingly powerful in gaining that approval. Therefore, propaganda is here to stay.
It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the [First World War] that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. The American government and numerous patriotic agencies developed a technique which, to most persons accustomed to bidding for public acceptance, was new. They not only appealed to the individual by means of every approach — visual, graphic, and auditory — to support the national endeavor, but they also secured the cooperation of the key men in every group — persons whose mere word carried authority to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. They thus automatically gained the support of fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social, and local groups whose members took their opinions from their accustomed leaders and spokesmen, or from the periodical publications which they were accustomed to read and believe. At the same time, the manipulators of… opinion made use of the mental clichés and the emotional habits of the public to produce mass reactions against the alleged atrocities, the terror, and the tyranny of the enemy. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace.
As a matter of fact, the practice of propaganda since the war has assumed very different forms from those prevalent twenty years ago. This new technique may fairly be called the new propaganda.
It takes account not merely of the individual, nor even of the mass mind alone, but also and especially of the anatomy of society, with its interlocking group formations and loyalties. It sees the individual not only as a cell in the social organism but as a cell organized into the social unit. Touch a nerve at a sensitive spot and you get an automatic response from certain specific members of the organism.
As a then-contemporary example, Bernays goes on to describe how, when velvet manufacturers were facing ruin because their product had long been out of fashion, propagandists were employed to bring it back into fashion:
[Link] A velvet fashion service, openly supported by the manufacturers, was organized. Its first function was to establish contact with the Lyons [manufacturers] and the Paris couturiers to discover what they were doing, to encourage them to act on behalf of velvet, and to help in the proper exploitation of their wares. An intelligent Parisian was enlisted in the work. He visited [the fashion houses] Lanvin and Worth, Agnes and Patou, and others and induced them to use velvet in their gowns and hats. It was he who arranged for the distinguished Countess This or Duchess That to wear the hat or the gown. And as for the presentation of the idea to the public, the American buyer or the American woman of fashion was simply shown the velvet creations in the atelier of the dressmaker or the milliner. She bought the velvet because she liked it and because it was in fashion.
The editors of the American magazines and fashion reporters of the American newspapers, likewise subjected to the actual (although created) circumstance, reflected it in their news, which, in turn, subjected the buyer and the consumer here to the same influences. The result was that what was at first a trickle of velvet became a flood. A demand was slowly, but deliberately, created in Paris and America. A big department store, aiming to be a style leader, advertised velvet gowns and hats on the authority of the French couturiers, and quoted original cables received from them. The echo of the new style was heard from hundreds of department stores throughout the country which wanted to be style leaders too. Bulletins followed dispatches. The mail followed the cables. And the American woman traveler appeared before the ship news photographers in velvet gown and hat.
The created circumstances had their effect. “Fickle fashion has veered to velvet,” was one newspaper comment. And the industry in the United States again kept thousands busy.
Bernays then goes on to ask who the influencers are:
[Link] Who are the men, who, without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell us whom to admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the ownership of public utilities, about the tariff, about the price of rubber, about the Dawes Plan, about immigration; who tell us how our houses should be designed, what furniture we should put into them, what menus we should serve at our table, what kind of shirts we must wear, what sports we should indulge in, what plays we should see, what charities we should support, what pictures we should admire, what slang we should affect, what jokes we should laugh at?
And answers:
If we set out to make a list of the men and women who, because of their position in public life, might fairly be called the molders of public opinion, we could quickly arrive at an extended list of persons mentioned in “Who’s Who.” It would obviously include the President of the United States and the members of his Cabinet; the Senators and Representatives in Congress; the Governors of the forty-eight states; the presidents of the chambers of commerce in our hundred largest cities, the chairmen of the boards of directors of our hundred or more largest industrial corporations, the president of many of the labor unions affiliated in the American Federation of Labor, the national president of each of the national professional and fraternal organizations, the president of each of the racial or language societies in the country, the hundred leading newspaper and magazine editors, the fifty most popular authors, the presidents of the fifty leading charitable organizations, the twenty leading theatrical or cinema producers, the hundred recognized leaders or fashion, the most popular and influential clergymen in the hundred leading cities, the presidents of our colleges and universities and the foremost members of their faculties, the most powerful financiers in Wall Street, the most noted amateurs of sports, and so on.
Such a list would comprise several thousand persons. But it is well known that many of these leaders are themselves led, sometimes by persons whose names are known to few. Many a congressman, in framing his platform, follows the suggestions of a district boss whom few persons outside the political machines have ever heard of. Eloquent divines may have great influence in their communities, but often take their doctrines from a higher ecclesiastical authority. The presidents of chambers of commerce mold the thought of local business men concerning public issues, but the opinions which they promulgate are usually derived from some national authority. A presidential candidate may be “drafted” in response to “overwhelming popular demand,” but it is well known that his name may be decided upon by half a dozen men sitting around a table in a hotel room.
In some instances the power of invisible wirepullers is flagrant. The power of the invisible cabinet which deliberated at the poker table in a certain little green house in Washington has become a national legend. There was a period in which the major policies of the national government were dictated by a single man, Mark Hanna. A [man like] Simmons [the founder and leader of the second Ku Klux Klan] may, for a few years, succeed in marshaling millions of men on a platform of intolerance and violence.
Such persons typify in the public mind the type of ruler associated with the phrase invisible government. But we do not often stop to think that there are dictators in other fields whose influence is just as decisive as that of the politicians I have mentioned. As Irene Castle can establish the fashion of short hair which dominates nine-tenths of the women who make any pretense to being fashionable. Paris fashion leaders set the mode of the short skirt, for wearing which, twenty years ago, any woman would simply have been arrested and thrown into jail by the New York City police, and the entire women’s clothing industry, capitalized at hundreds of millions of dollars, must be reorganized to conform to their dictum.
There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes.
[Link] Now, what is still more important, the extent to which our thoughts and habits are modified by authorities.
Bernays gives further examples from the world of fashion, such as where a large American firm is influenced by a single leading tailor in London. Or a silk manufacturer, seeking a new market for its product, suggests to a large manufacturer of shoes that women’s shoes should be covered with silk to match their dresses:
The idea was adopted and systematically propagandized. A popular actress was persuaded to wear the shoes. The fashion spread. The shoe firm was ready with the supply to meet thee created demand. And the silk company was ready with the silk for more shoes.
More broadly though:
The man who injected this idea into the shoe industry was ruling women in one department of their social lives. Different men rule us in the various departments of our lives. There may be one power behind the throne in politics, another in the manipulations of the Federal discount rate, and still another in the dictation of next season’s dances. If there were a national invisible cabinet ruling our destinies (a thing which is not impossible to conceive of), it would work through certain group leaders on Tuesday for one purpose, and through an entirely different set on Wednesday for another. The idea of invisible government is relative. There may be a handful of men who control the educational methods of the great majority of our schools. Yet from another standpoint, every parent is a group leader with authority over his or her children.
The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses. To advertise on a scale which will reach fifty million persons is expensive. To reach and persuade the group leaders who dictate the public’s thoughts and actions is likewise expensive.
For this reason there is an increasing tendency to concentrate the functions of propaganda in the hands of the propaganda specialist. This specialist is more and more assuming a distinct place and function in our natural life.
A hundred years on
Propaganda was written almost a hundred years ago. I wonder what Bernays — who in 1928 described “modern propaganda” as “universal and continuous” — would say about today’s world.
In terms of fashion, I guess that, if he were writing today, he might note the phenomenon of e.g. The Rachel:1
And that he might have something to say about the rise in popularity of tattoos:2
And maybe the style evolution of e.g. singer Sam Smith:3
And former One Direction member Harry Styles:4
It is [the invisible governors] who pull the wires which control the public mind... and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world
But I suspect that the influence of the invisible governors now runs beyond anything that Bernays would even have dreamt of in 1928.
Related:
Dear Church Leaders most-read articles
Some posts, including a version of this one, can also be found on Unexpected Turns
The Big Reveal: Christianity carefully considered
Not that I am inclined to think of The Rachel as having originally been deliberately engineered
NB also programmes such as Miami Ink, Ink Master and Tattoo Fixers
Quite a contrast with these pictures taken during the 12 months after he won the BBC’s Sound of 2014:
