O NE OF the first major modern studies of the nature of government was by David Hume, a great philosopher and political philosopher as well. He wrote on what he called the “foundations of the theory of government,” and one thing he pointed out was that in every state, no matter what type—whether it’s feudal, militaristic, whatever it was—“power is in the hands of the governed.” They can, if they get together, take power. As long as they can be made to feel that they don’t have power, then the powerful can rule. But if they come to understand that they do have power, then repressive and authoritarian governments alike will collapse. That’s one of the reasons why we have this enormous public relations industry.
The public relations industry is a phenomenon that developed in the freest countries, in Britain and the United States, and the reason is pretty clear. A century ago it became clear that it was not going to be so easy to control the population by force. Too much freedom had been won through labor organizing, parliamentary Labor parties in many countries, women starting to get the franchise, and so on. It was kind of like the ’60s, the danger of democracy, and the reaction was sort of similar. A crucial part of it was the rise of the PR industry.
Its leading intellectual figure and kind of guru was Edward Bernays, a Wilson/Roosevelt/Kennedy progressive talking from the so-called left end of the political spectrum. He wrote a book called Propaganda—the term was used honestly in those days—which was a kind of manual, providing theoretical guidance for the rising public relations industry. He explained the purpose in kind of Madisonian terms. He said the country has to be governed by the “intelligent minority,” which is of course us—anyone who advocates this is part of it. So the intelligent minority has to run the country in the interests of the general population. You can’t let them make the decisions, because they’ll make terrible decisions. Part of the way we do this is by what he called “engineering of consent.” They’re too dumb to understand so we’ll engineer their consent to what we decide, and that’s the purpose of the public relations industry.
You find this doctrine all through progressive intellectual thought, like Walter Lippmann, the major progressive intellectual of the twentieth century. He wrote famous progressive essays on democracy in which his view was exactly that. “The public must be put in their place” so that the responsible men can make decisions without interference from the “bewildered herd.”
It was understood and expressed that you have to control people through beliefs and attitudes. Well, one of the best ways to control people in terms of attitudes is by what the great political economist Thorstein Veblen called “fabricating consumers.” If you can fabricate wants, make obtaining things that are just about within your reach the essence of life, they’re going to be trapped into becoming consumers. You read the business press in the 1920s and it talks about the need to direct people to the superficial things of life, like “fashionable consumption,” and that’ll keep them out of our hair.
In fact, Bernays had major achievements in his lifetime that are worth looking at. The first of them was to get women to smoke. Women didn’t smoke in those days, and he organized big publicity campaigns—I think in those days it was for Chesterfield, around 1930—to convince women that smoking was what we would today call “cool.” You know, proper, something a model liberated woman would do, and so on. No one can calculate how many tens of millions of deaths you can attribute to that success. (Another major success of his was in the 1950s, when he was working for the United Fruit Company, and convinced people to overthrow the democratic government of Guatemala—because it was threatening company control over the economy and the society—which led to over fifty years of horrors and atrocities).
Now these are elite concepts that run right through history. The advertising industry just exploded with this goal—fabricating consumers, trapping people into consumerism—and it’s done with great sophistication. The ideal is what you actually see today where, let’s say, teenage girls if they have a free Saturday afternoon will go walking in the shopping mall, not to the library or somewhere else. Kids will feel, “I haven’t achieved anything in my life unless I have another electronic gadget.”
The idea is to try to control everyone, to turn the whole society into the perfect system. The perfect system would be a society based on a dyad—a pair. The pair is you and your television set, or maybe now you and your iPhone and the Internet, and that presents you with what the proper life would be—what kinds of gadgets you should have, what you should do for your health. Then you spend your time and effort gaining those things that you don’t need or don’t want—maybe you’ll throw them away—but that’s the measure of a decent life.
If you’ve ever taken an economics course you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. I don’t have to tell you, that’s not what’s done. If advertisers lived by market principles then some enterprise, say, General Motors, would put on a brief announcement of their products and their properties, along with comments by Consumer Reports magazine so you could make a judgment about it.
That’s not what an ad for a car is—an ad for a car is a football hero, an actress, the car doing some crazy thing like going up a mountain or something. If you’ve ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices—that’s what advertising is.
Some years ago it came to be recognized in the advertising industry that there’s a sector of the population that they’re not reaching—children. Children don’t have any money so they hadn’t been directing advertising to children. It was understood that that’s a mistake. Children may not have money but their parents do. So something new developed in the advertising industry—it’s called “the psychology of nagging.” So, applied psychology departments now, in the academic world, study various kinds of nagging—if the advertiser wants the kids to nag for this thing, they’ll advertise in a particular way; if you want them to nag for a different thing, they’ll advertise another way. Parents are familiar with this because they see it happening. When I watch television with my grandchildren, by the time they’re two years old they’re being inundated with propaganda—what their parents have to buy them. It starts from childhood, and you can see it clearly. Actually, there are good studies of the effects of this on children and adults as they grow up. So that’s one form of trapping people.
Another very significant form of trapping people is by debt. It wasn’t invented here, and it has an interesting history. You go back to the 1830s, when the British were abandoning slavery in their colonies and they had a problem. What are you going to do when the slaves are free? How are you going to keep them working on the plantations? After all, there’s plenty of land and they can go off, get themselves a patch of land, and live quite happily. Well, they hit on the same method. What we have to do is trap them into consumerism. Carry out enough propaganda and teasers and so on to make freed slaves feel they’ve got to have these commodities. They go to the company store and they get them, they’re in debt, and pretty soon they’re trapped—the slave economy’s back.
When the same institutions—the PR system—run elections, they do it the same way. They want to create an uninformed electorate that will make irrational choices, often against their own interests.
Democracy is supposed to be based on informed citizens making rational decisions. But the PR industry runs the campaigns so that all you get is glitz, and illusion, and personalities, and so on. Keep away from issues—and the reason that you have to keep away from issues is clear enough. On issues there’s a big, substantial divide between public policy and public opinion. So let’s drive the population to marginal things, and that way we can undermine democracy the same way we undermine markets—and also contribute to the general purpose of marginalizing, atomizing people and directing their attitudes and concerns away from what might matter to them as functioning people in a free, vibrant, democratic society to just working for us.
They’re to be spectators, not participants. Then you get a “properly functioning democracy”—straight back to Madison and on to the Powell Memorandum and so on. And we see it every time one of these extravaganzas takes place.
Right after the election, President Obama won an award from the advertising industry for the best marketing campaign of 2008. It wasn’t reported here, but if you go to the international business press, executives were euphoric. They said, “We’ve been selling candidates, marketing candidates like toothpaste ever since Reagan, and this is the greatest achievement we have.”
I don’t usually agree with Sarah Palin, but when she mocks what she calls the “hopey changey stuff”—she’s right. First of all, Obama didn’t really promise anything, that’s mostly illusion. Go back to the campaign rhetoric and take a look at it. There’s very little discussion of policy issues, and for very good reason—because public opinion on policy is sharply disconnected from what the leadership of the two parties and their financial backers want. Policy, more and more, is focused on the private interests that fund the campaigns—with the public being marginalized.
If you think about it, the advertising industry—which spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to create the kind of individual who’s focused on fulfilling artificial, externally imposed wants, and who is an uninformed consumer making irrational decisions—the reason they’re spending huge funds on that is because they believe people are rational. Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother. They’re trying to turn people into irrational creatures, and they’re putting huge efforts into it. And I think they’re right. They’re not wasting their money. If they didn’t do that, people would be making rational decisions, and I think the rational decisions would be, essentially, dismantling illegitimate authority and hierarchic institutions.
Nothing appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of EGYPT, or the emperor of ROME, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or praetorian bands, like men, by their opinion.
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 . . .
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 to take 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 . . .
Ours must be a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses.
Is this government by propaganda? Call it, if you prefer, government by education. But education, in the academic sense of the word, is not sufficient. It must be enlightened expert propaganda through the creation of circumstances, through the high-spotting of significant events, and the dramatization of important issues. The statesman of the future will thus be enabled to focus the public mind on crucial points of policy, and regiment a vast, heterogeneous mass of voters to clear understanding and intelligent action.
[I]t is questionable whether smoking would have become as popular among women as it did if tobacco companies had not seized on this opportunity in the 1920s and 1930s to exploit ideas of liberation, power, and other important values for women to recruit them to the cigarette market. In particular they needed to develop new social images and meanings for female smoking to overcome the association with louche and libidinous behaviour and morals. Smoking had to be repositioned as not only respectable but sociable, fashionable, stylish, and feminine. The goal was a potential doubling of the market. As described in 1928 by Mr Hill, the president of American Tobacco, “It will be like opening a new gold mine right in our front yard”.
The explosion in children’s advertising occurred during the 1980s. Many working parents, feeling guilty about spending less time with their kids, started spending more money on them. One marketing expert has called the 1980s “the decade of the child consumer.” After largely ignoring children for years, Madison Avenue began to scrutinize and pursue them. Major ad agencies now have children’s divisions, and a variety of marketing firms focus solely on kids. These groups tend to have sweet-sounding names: Small Talk, Kid Connection, Kid2Kid, the Geppetto Group, Just Kids, Inc. At least three industry publications—Youth Market Alert, Selling to Kids, and Marketing to Kids Report—cover the latest ad campaigns and market research. The growth in children’s advertising has been driven by efforts to increase not just current, but also future, consumption. Hoping that nostalgic childhood memories of a brand will lead to a lifetime of purchases, companies now plan “cradle-to-grave” advertising strategies. They have come to believe what Ray Kroc and Walt Disney realized long ago—a person’s “brand loyalty” may begin as early as the age of two. Indeed, market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name . . .
The bulk of the advertising directed at children today has an immediate goal. “It’s not just getting kids to whine,” one marketer explained in Selling to Kids, “it’s giving them a specific reason to ask for the product.” Years ago sociologist Vance Packard described children as “surrogate salesmen” who had to persuade other people, usually their parents, to buy what they wanted. Marketers now use different terms to explain the intended response to their ads—such as “leverage,” “the nudge factor,” “pester power.” The aim of most children’s advertising is straightforward: Get kids to nag their parents and nag them well.
Like plantation societies throughout the nineteenth-century world, the abolition of slavery and challenge of free labor relations encouraged landed classes to seek new forms of control over agricultural labor. In all post-emancipation societies the balance between the possibility of land ownership and self-sufficiency for ex-slaves and their dependence on wager labor determined the tightness of this labor control. In the US South planters effectively transformed ex-slaves into an agricultural proletariat with a gamut of labor relations ranging from tenancy to sharecropping to debt-peonage. The necessary political corollary of this labor system was the preservation of white supremacy.
Just weeks before he demonstrates whether his campaign’s blend of grass-roots appeal and big media-budget know-how has converted the American electorate, Sen. Barack Obama has shown he’s already won over the nation’s brand builders. He’s been named Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008.
Mr. Obama won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads and marketing-services vendors gathered here at the Association of National Advertisers’ annual conference . . . “I honestly look at [Obama’s] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers,” said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions.