Standing awash in the misrepresentations, prevarications, and falsehoods that flood our consciousnesses, we must acknowledge the contribution of Edward Bernays,
Freud's favorite nephew, and amanuensis when the old man was in the Colonies.
Bernays' "genius" was to recognize the inherent, social power of insights into human behavior to be gathered from Pavlov's e.g. "Behaviorialism," Taylor's Scientific Management, and Unca Sig's "Love/Death" aporia, and to operationalize/weaponize them under the rubric of "Public Relations," which is now humanity's pre-eminent epistemological resource.
Propaganda is nothing but the "other side of the coin" of PR. Indeed, ya can't spill one without the other.
I don't know whether Bernays ever contemplated the inherent totalitarianism of his system.
He worked with Raymond Loewy (who designed the pack) to sell Lucky Strikes. His book, Propaganda, was published in 1928. He taught women to smoke cigarets in the Teens. And he assisted Wilson dragging the US into WW 1.
You don't have to tell people how to think if you can tell them what they experience in words and images that, subtley or not, privilege any one viewpoint.
Ninety-nine percent of people experience the world outside their immediate local through media, and not from a "disinterested" perspective. Mediation of reality is occurring faster and more comprehensively than our Pleistocene brains can process. We are in WAAAAY over our heads.
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