We've discussed this before (I pointed out that Bernays' actual greatest move was convincing people that he was effective). I cited Hugo Mercier's Not Born Yesterday, which collects a lot of research on this (hence the conclusion that mass persuasion has been a massive failure). But I don't think you addressed the points I made in my previous response ITT. What is it exactly that people are persuaded of? Different people say different things, in part because people choose media that tells them what they want to hear and then convince themselves that everyone else is brainwashed. And how are you able to resist the pull?
And at any rate, even if you believe that the media, advertising, and academia (?) are more persuasive than studies suggest, it's stretching beyond reason to say that they control people.
In response to this I looked at a few excerpts from Hugo's book, and read an interview of him. I dont think he is saying anything revolutionary about propaganda or misinformation, what he says is people use information to confirm pre-existing biases and that our reasoning will always push to do that. Here is a statement from the interview:
"Nowadays, you are going to see a lot of people who will
doubt information from a variety of sources that this epidemic is bad, that the virus is much worse than the flu and all of this. You’re going to see a lot of people doubt that and this is going to be a much more important problem than people accepting false information. For instance, if someone accepts that it’s all a conspiracy by the Chinese, it is unclear that it will make them act in a way that is really deleterious, whereas if they reject that the virus is worse than the flu and they do nothing, there you have a problem."
And what happened? Politicians here actually told people this was no worse than the flu. That
became the false information that people accepted, and it cost lives. And we have measurable data that dismissal of the virus killed many more people depending on
how they vote.
Here was his response to being asked about vaccine information:
"What it comes down to is this. The vast majority of the people are going to trust their doctors in these decisions. And the core of people who don’t, the core of people who are really against vaccination, they were already resistant before."
He seems to make consistent appeals to authority in his work, which is funny. That people will just...be told what to do by the right people. Yet we saw a new phenomenon during COVID and since, we saw people
become anti-vaxxers about
only one vaccine. On this very board people did mental backflips to become resistant to vaccine data, people who had been vaccinated themselves, even people who actually got the covid vaccine, railing against it, while being perfectly fine with the idea of vaccination in other contexts...because they allowed themselves to be convinced that at least some part of the pandemic was a hoax. It seems all Mercier would say is it only worked because it played on their beliefs, and came from a source they trusted. Yeah no sh*t, that's Propaganda 101. However, many people did NOT trust their Doctors, people who had gotten previous vaccines. In fact we had regular occurrence of people convinced they were NOT dying of COVID, because it wasn't real.
For my experience, I have taken psychology courses IN film school designed to alert us to understanding how the images we create effect people. This included studying propaganda, subliminal messaging, etc. To suggest that Bernays was unsuccessful and that the role of propaganda is meaningless or a massive failure is just wrong, if there was no substance to it it wouldn't be an essential part of media training. I've also worked for a National Level advertiser, much of my early career was in advertising. Ad execs tend to be painfully uncreative, what they specialize in is figuring out stupid things that get into people's heads.
As for Bernays himself, he was a massive narcissist. But understating his importance is just silly, the guy was compared to fascist leaders in his day. The only reason he wasn't ostracized on a global scale was because while he openly advocated for propaganda, he would often say that democracy allows for pluralism of propaganda while fascism only allows for State propaganda, otherwise he was pretty heralded by basically everyone:
"The
Bulletin of the Financial Advertisers Association examined profit figures in 1935 and then called Bernays 'the outstanding counsel on public relations in the United States today, a profession he was largely instrumental in creating.'"
I think there is plenty of evidence that large portions of people can be controlled. I mean if there weren't there wouldn't be tens of thousands of Scientologists. Q-Anon would have quickly faded into oblivion. Americans wouldn't be driving gigantic penis-enhancement trucks that destroy our roads and kill children, with the impression that they're safer the larger a vehicle is. Hell we wouldn't be driving much at all, nor would we be pursuing "the American Dream" nor would we be lamenting for something that was entirely propaganda in the first place:
This sh*t was all over TV in the 50's, along with anti-gay, anti-communist, and anti-integration ones I could post.
www.numbeo.com
www.newsweek.com
www.presidency.ucsb.edu
