Propaganda In Our Time

Propaganda is like the air we breathe. To save our democracy, we need to know it and know how to live outside of it.

Edward Bernays

This is the first post in a series about the techniques of propaganda and how propaganda is a threat to democracy. I will probably do 10-12 posts in this series; however, each post can be read independently.

We teach rhetoric for two reasons. First, so that speakers and writers can persuade others and reach consensus to support some greater good—without resorting to violence. Second, so that we, as an audience, are not manipulated by unethical speakers and writers.

The concern about rhetoric potentially distorting truth and ignoring ethics has been at the core of rhetorical theory since Plato’s Gorgias (380 BCE). In that dialogue, Gorgias, a prominent Sophist, brags that he could persuade the sick to take a medical cure more effectively than a physician. Plato’s concern is that Gorgias does not have the knowledge of a physician, and he, thus, should not be treating patients. In Plato’s view, rhetoric is dangerous because it gives power to those who do not have knowledge, including the knowledge of how to use it ethically.

In the first line of his Rhetoric (circa mid-fourth century BCE), Aristotle answered Plato’s concerns: “Rhetoric is the counterpart to dialectic.” The dialectic is the means to arrive at truth; rhetoric is the means to persuade an audience to act on truth. Think of smoking tobacco. We have scientific studies that confirm smoking is unhealthy, but we need effective ads to convince smokers to quit.

In On Christian Doctrine (426 CE), Augustine addressed the ethics of rhetoric pragmatically. He wrote that evil people will use rhetoric to advance their ends, so why should we deprive good people from using rhetoric to counter evil?

The same kind of debate does not typically happen with propaganda, which is a form of rhetoric. Propaganda is typically considered unethical, but we don’t always recognize how the techniques of propaganda have entered other forms of persuasion.

We typically think of propaganda as a tool of fascist and communist regimes, a mode of persuasion that emerged in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, that now exists in repressive countries like North Korea, but the techniques of propaganda have crept into all forms of communication. We now encounter propaganda on a daily basis, even in democratic countries.

Edward Bernays, who helped to plan American propaganda during World War I, took what he learned in wartime and used it to establish modern public relations and advertising.

In Propaganda (1928), Bernays discusses ethics—sometimes, not consistently—but much of his discussion presents a view that propaganda is unavoidably a part of democracy:

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. . . . 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...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Public relations, advertising, and propaganda certainly existed before Bernays and World War I. Pope Gregory XV coined the term “propaganda” in 1622. He wanted the church to more systematically spread the faith, especially in the New World. But Bernays is largely responsible for moving the techniques of propaganda into all phases of communication, especially public relations and advertising.

Notice that Bernays, in the above quote, speaks of not just “opinions” but also “habits.” Habits structure our daily lives in more ways than we realize. George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, says that current forms of communication, including propaganda, can change our mind without changing our beliefs. We can change how we act habitually without consciously willing that change and even without realizing we have changed.

Bernays seems relatively unconcerned about this. Lakoff has a much darker view. I side with Lakoff.

All modern political campaigns now use techniques that originated in World War I war propaganda. We may never again have anything like the Lincoln-Douglas debates—at least, at the core of a political campaign. But we can strive for something closer to propaganda lite. And we can educate citizens so that they will know the difference between a political rally and a mob. We need to find ways to ameliorate the damage of propaganda and ways to promote democratic dialogue. That is what I hope to do in this series on propaganda.

I will begin with a definition, which will, I am sure, need to be modified before I finish this series:

Propaganda is a state sponsored form of manipulation that uses words, images, and sound to establish absolute adherence to an ideology and uses force to eliminate opposing views.

Propaganda is certainly the dark underbelly of rhetoric. It developed primarily during the middle of the twentieth century, within the history of totalitarianism, and it needs to be comprehended in the way that Hannah Arendt wanted to comprehend totalitarianism itself. In the Preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt wrote of “comprehension”:

It means examining and bearing consciously the burden that events have placed upon us—neither denying their existence nor submitting weakly to their weight as though everything that in fact happened could not have happened otherwise. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.

I doubt that Arendt could have written a grocery list without, in some way, reshaping our understanding of the act of eating. Here, in a single definition, she blends opposing ways of thinking. As a historian, she wants us to face the brutal facts of totalitarianism—to see and bear all of its horrors. As a political theorist, she wants us to understand that history could have taken a different turn and that we can, if we learn to think, avoid repeating it.

To avoid slipping into totalitarianism, or some new version of it, we must become more aware of how our beliefs and our habits, which form so much of our reality, are being shaped by communication that uses techniques of propaganda—communication that limits our freedom and weakens democratic dialogue.

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