by Janet Levy, American Thinker:
Humankind is supposedly ruled by reason. But logic isn’t effective in influencing people, individually or in a group. Advertising, public relations, and propaganda succeed precisely because they bypass reason. They hack the shortcuts the brain uses, changing people’s beliefs and behavior without their realizing it.
Sadly, we are not taught how to guard against these techniques, writes Michelle Stiles in One Idea to Rule Them All: Reverse Engineering American Propaganda. This ignorance, she says, has “devastating consequences for both individuals and society as a whole.”
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Some techniques are as old as civilization. Many books cover those used in advertising. Stiles’s scholarly book instead addresses how the ubiquitous manufacture of consent has eclipsed faith in the media and democracy, with stagecraft and narrative supplanting the search for truth. Like a 21st-century Orwell, she warns that tyranny begins with control and abuse of language. She aims to help us recognize the modus operandi of Idea Bullies, who use nefarious means to make an unwary public accept the dominant narrative.
Stiles begins with a startling fact. It wasn’t Nazi Germany or communist dictatorships that first mastered mass persuasion. It was the American government in the lead-up to U.S. involvement in World War I. The working and middle classes saw the war as a businessman’s venture and were reluctant to enlist. To overcome this resistance, President Woodrow Wilson set up the Committee on Public Information (CPI) headed by George Creel. Other key figures were Arthur Bullard, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippmann.
Together, they drew on and orchestrated the skills of intellectuals, journalists, local leaders, artists, businessmen, and others to get young men to believe in the cause and sign up to fight. Every means was deployed to sell the war to Americans and the world—the printed word, the spoken word, motion pictures, posters, and radio. ‘Four-minute men’—essentially paid shills—would give seemingly extempore speeches at public meetings, plays, and other places to push the war effort. They doubled up as snitches. Those expressing anti-war sentiments were shamed, censored, or faced legal action. In the end, Creel could boast that the committee’s work was a “vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.”
World War I poster with Wilson’s making the “world safe for Democracy” slogan. Public domain.
Stiles traces these techniques to Gustave Le Bon’s 1896 book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Le Bon, a French polymath of elitist bent, distrusted revolutions and the common person’s ability to make collective decisions. He discerned that the masses could be controlled and societal upheavals avoided by manipulating the subconscious mind of the crowd through the creation of illusions and the affirmative declaration of ‘truths’ repeated to the point of contagion (going viral, in current usage). He predicted the Era of Crowds and, well before the arrival of mass media, foresaw its use in shaping public attitudes.
Le Bon identified five pillars of influence that made greater impact than facts, logic, or persuasion: authority (what experts think); experience (seeing is believing); social pressure (what others think and do, translated in current advertising jargon as social proof); imagination (cultural stories); and language (framing the debate). This is common knowledge today, says Stiles, but was path-breaking in Le Bon’s time. His acuity lay in recognizing that, soon, reason would prove ineffective as a means of persuasion.
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