source: Wikipedia
Essentially this is another post about how our democracy isn't a democracy at all. We've been reduced to mere customers, not only in the market of goods and services, but in our ability to help shape the politics by which we're governed. In order to know why this is the case, we'll have to dive into the subject of propaganda, how it has saturated our culture, and Edward Bernays' scarily honest exposition of its use by the wealthy few in his book Propaganda. Before we delve into that, let's first explain, for the uninitiated, what the "Torches of Freedom" are.
In the beginning of the 20th century, it was still taboo for women to smoke, or to smoke in public anyway. The attitude towards women smoking in public is depicted in today's cover image: this 1890s satirical cartoon from Germany illustrates the notion that smoking was considered unfeminine. The cigarette industry realized that this taboo was depriving them from 50 percent of their potential customer base:
In 1928 George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company, realized the potential market that could be found in women and said, "It will be like opening a gold mine right in our front yard." [...] To expand the number of women smokers Hill decided to hire Edward Bernays, who today is known as the father of public relations, to help him recruit women smokers. Bernays decided to attempt to eliminate the social taboo against women smoking in public.
source: Wikipedia
Bernays then hired some attractive women to smoke their "Torches of Freedom" while they were walking in the highly publicized Easter Sunday Parade of 31 March 1929. This created a public scandal, but that was exactly what Bernays expected and what he wanted; any propaganda is good propaganda. You see, Bernays wasn't selling a product, he was instead selling an idea. These were the years when the women's rights movement gained prominence, and women were fighting to gain equal rights to men. Smoking was associated with men in the public conscience until then, and the "Torches of Freedom" eventually for women came to symbolize "rebellious independence, glamour, seduction and sexual allure".
This is the perfect example of how propaganda is used to influence and change the customs, habits, ideas and ethics of an entire population. Bernays' strategy of selling an idea instead of a product also illustrates the direction in which propaganda and advertisement went from then on. Manufacturers previously sold their product by advertising its quality and price; my product does this and it costs that. Not anymore; products are now attached in our minds to an idea or an ideal, with "freedom" still being one of the most powerful and most used. The idea that a car makes a man attractive to women also came from Bernays' mind as he told car manufacturers to place attractive women next to their new models in advertisements.
To really understand the power of propaganda, and to see how it undermines democracy, we need look no further than the very first paragraphs of the very first chapter of Edward Bernays' book:
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 are 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.
source: Propaganda
This is the essence of the book, and it's the essence of how our society is structured and governed. This first chapter is titled "Organizing Chaos", which tells us much about what Bernays and his clients in the ruling class think about democracy; they don't believe it's realistic that a population so large, and with so many different opinions, interests and ideals, is capable of governing itself. Leaving the noble task of governing to the masses could only result in chaos. Now here's an interesting point where advertisement for products and the manipulation of the masses in order to concentrate power into the hands of a few invisible rulers overlap.
When manufacturers still advertised the quality and price of their products, their problem was how to sell enough of their goods to the existing customer base. But with the advent of mass production they were faced with a different problem; how can I make the customer base large enough to sell the amount of goods to make my factory profitable? When creating products became a proverbial breeze, they had to create customers. That's when advertisement's main objective became to make the public feel that they needed these products, whether they did or not. It became a game of creating wants and needs, based on generalized basic human instincts, urges and disgusts. If we understand this, it's but a small step from creating the ideal customer, to creating the ideal voter.
Propaganda is expensive, so it's only the rich and powerful who have the means to reach an audience of millions. It's therefore logical to assume that they use propaganda to mold our minds, form our tastes and suggest our ideas to align with their interests. And this is exactly what Bernays is calling for, and exactly what's been happening for a century now. There are certain bounds which public conversation will not cross, and those bounds are found to the left of what's politically acceptable; read yesterday's post on our populist future to understand why that's the case. Propaganda is a tool wielded by the powerful and the rich in order to stay rich and powerful. Many books have been written on the subject, a prime example being the famous 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, but we've still not broken loose from its shackles.
The internet and the World Wide Web availed the wider public of the use of its own propaganda, and many believed, me being one of them, that it would usher us into a new era of political freedom, a better democracy. But the same happened with the internet as happened with the printing press, radio and television before it; it's dominated by a few rich and powerful corporations who use it for even better, even stronger propaganda than was possible before. Now they've got the power of strong algorithms that are used to serve us highly personalized propaganda, and provide the propagandists with never before seen amounts of data on our every move, thought or idea. Something radical has to happen, like I already said in yesterday's post, but it all starts with the knowledge and acknowledgement of the machinations of power, before we can start making our own Torches of Freedom...
Please watch the below linked video as it explains all this and more better than I ever could. And like it's said in that video, I recommend you all read Edward Bernays' book, as it is essential to understand the society we're living in right now.
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