Save Civilization: Send Them Out to Work with Their Mouths Taped Shut
By: Peter Avanti
Tags: Corporatism, Propaganda, Media Industry, Covid 19, Inequality

Save Civilization: Send Them Out to Work with Their Mouths Taped Shut

To know the art of impressing the imagination of crowds is to know at the same time the art of governing them (Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1896)

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies” (Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the news, 1919)

Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.” (Richard Salant, former President of CBS News)

Look out kid they keep it all hid (Subterranean Homesick Blues, Bob Dylan, 1965)

In “Propaganda: Positive Control of Public Opinion” (1930), Kimball Young tells us the term propaganda came into modern use in 1633 with the “Congregatio de propaganda fide to foster Roman Catholic missions. It meant simply religious proselyting.” The term had a positive connotation, to proselytize, or propagate through information, advertising, or education. But the people doing it certainly believed they were bringing the word of god in the form a religious truth to civilize and colonize the minds and bodies of heathens living in darkness in places where gold and silver are mines and cocoa and sugar grow marvelously.

This earlier sense of the term was extended with the 1928 publication of Edward Bernays book Propaganda. Bernays begins his work with these words:

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.

In this sense propaganda means manipulate and produce popular opinions and attitudes and control the political ideas, actions and horizons of large segments, if not a majority, of the population: in his words “regiment the public mind.” Bernays makes clear the power and the motives of the propagandists are unseen: their goals and purposes unknown to the public. Young distinguishes between the earlier use of the term, meaning to propagate, and concludes: “propaganda then is the propagation of ideas, opinions and attitudes, the real purpose of which is not made clear to the hearer or reader.”

Bernays’ ideas emerge from a mix of Freudian analysis of unconscious drives, and the highly influential work of Gustav Le Bon whose Psychologie des Foules (1895, translation 1896, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind ) defined the general population as “the masses” and framed modernity as a struggle between barbarism and culture.

The masses, pictured as more or less mindless crowds ruled by passions, incapable of “reason,” and “always intellectually inferior” (often racially defined), are poised to take over. Le Bon warns, any democracy that includes the uncontrolled masses would lead to an inevitable demise of civilization and a reversion to savagery (1896, p. 14).

To save civilization, for Le Bon educating the masses is not an option. The masses must be controlled, they must be fed illusions, since they have no interest in truth they do not deserve it, and would not know how to recognize it:

[Crowds are] powerless . . . to hold any opinions other than those which are imposed upon them . . . what seduces them . . . The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.

Le Bon did not believe in democracy; he was an anti-communist reactionary, and a racist. In the early 20th century as great numbers of immigrants and recently liberated African Americans arrived in northern cities, seeking economic opportunity and freedoms they had never known, controlling the crowd was a matter of great interest to those in power and those seeking it. American President Theodore Roosevelt was listening and is said to have kept a copy of The Crowd at hand. In Europe, so were Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler.

Following on Le Bon’s basic concept of creating illusions that channel and control ideas and actions, Edward Bernays became the father of public relations, and advertising. His influence was broad and deep, from government projects to Americanize the masses, to making cigarettes and bananas worldwide consumer staples and the corporations that produce them powerful political forces. The term “banana republic” was born in relation to Bernay’s client the United Fruit Company and its control of much of Central America after World War II.

Bernays believed the “masses” (that is human beings) were prey to unconscious desires and actions and needed to be manipulated, directed, and controlled by those capable of greater understanding: “Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.” (Propaganda, p. 159). Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, openly acknowledged Bernays’ influence (it didn’t seem to bother Goebbels that Bernays was Jewish).

After WWII, Bernays, updating a term coined by Walter Lippmann in 1921, “manufacturing consent”, reformulated the concept of propaganda more broadly as The Engineering of Consent, an outline for action by “intelligent men” to influence the direction of public opinion. Controlling the population does not require violence Bernays insists, only coordinated, targeted and coherent forms of propaganda that come from multiple sources but with convergent goals that mold a population into consensus and/or silence so as to fulfill the legislative, policy, production, and consumption goals of those in power.

The binary of an enlightened elite whose responsibility is to mold the opinions and actions of “the masses” has little to do with the ideal, promise, and practices of a democratic society. The idea of news service, or public service, reporting and facilitating democratic discourse on public policy choices across social status, in ways that are not and cannot be reduced to economic marketing power and/or social status, becomes little more than caricature and sham. The mass media technological marvel of television with its mesmerizing mix of moving images, music and sound presenting a combination of advertising, entertainment and news was nothing if not a marvelously fertile national garden for the realization of Bernays’ vision, and enormous private profit.

Obviously, framing and controlling political and economic discourse is easier with greater concentration of ownership of the sources of information. The passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (with only token opposition in the U.S. Congress) opened the door for mergers, buyouts, and shutdowns; a consolidation of media corporations that has placed the vast majority of public information (media) is in the hands of a few very powerful corporations and individuals with enormous, veritably unfathomable, wealth. Today, more than 90% of all information and entertainment sources from screens to print in the US are owned by 6 huge corporations. They feed news and entertainment to the world.

However diverse, these publically traded corporations are profit motivated. Their prime objective is to expand advertising revenue and secure their position in the market. Profitability, freedom from regulation and competition, and minimizing taxation are inevitable goals of every major corporation. This invariably leads to advocating for candidates for public office, and lobbying for legislative and economic policies amenable to the interests and goals of their board of directors and major shareholders. The “conscious and intelligent manipulation” of information, as Bernays would have it, to avoid the “chaos” of democratic debate and choice is unquestioned writ.

Since we all have been educated to see news broadcasting and print as sources of information in the service of the community, it would be edifying and useful if we began to see these outlets as the media industry, and refer to them not by their news trade names but by the names of their giant corporate owners. Thus the full names of our news services would look something like ViacomCBS, ComcastNBC/MSNBC, FoxNewsCorp, AT&TNews, NYTCo, DisneyNewsBroadcasting, and BezosWashingtonPost.

In the digital realm, the 5 giants Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon have near total control of online speech using a business model that surveils and monetizes user’s private information: In Ramesh Srinivasan’s words, behind these platforms for production, consumption and expression, “data is captured, attention is monetized, and surveillance is legitimated.” This adds a profound new 21st century twist to Bernays and Le Bon as mass “seduction” and “opinion” become the products of a surveillance-analysis-options loop that channels us into a controlled, marketable, online information, entertainment, advertising environment.

The effect of merged control and integration of information, entertainment and personal surveillance data is to breakdown distinctions between spectacle and reality, information and advertising, truth and fiction (what does it mean to spend 4 or 5 hours a day watching actors acting or the president speaking?) We tune into channels of information that essentially tune us, channeling the information we see, and defining the data we have to think with to make decisions. (How often do we go past the first page of a Google search?)

This is not to deny the amazing ocean of information that is available, rather to ask what the objectives are of those offering the information, and what tools we are being furnished with to navigate the ocean?

As the online world increasingly becomes the environment where we work, socialize, get informed, shop, and play what knowledge and choices do we have in how it is structured and where else we might go? What is the public’s control over what is now an essential public utility owned and operated by private corporations? If our democracy is mediated by the corporations who control the utility, who then guarantees access, who guarantees fair, unfettered public discourse? What are the terms of this agreement? In 2019 Facebook had 2.5 billion users producing over $60 billion dollars in advertising revenue.

Donald Trump’s presidency exemplifies this confusion of public/private, advertising, news, and entertainment. His screen education was 1950s and 60s film and television a patriarchal world of white men served by people of color, as they spread American goodness while subduing nature, natives, foreigners, and the evils of communism (Bonanza, Wagon Train, Mission Impossible come to mind). He honed his professional image as a Reality Television star, and his campaign for the presidency was covered by the media industry as a reality TV spectacle. His twitter account has become the administration’s public policy platform and bully pulpit feeding the media industry with daily fodder as they narrate and analyze his nightly ejaculations.

June 16th 2015, Trump hired an audience to cheer as he announced his candidacy but the media industry chose not to report the obvious sham. The NYTCo gave Trump front page coverage even as it relegated US Senator Bernie Sanders’ candidacy deep in the back pages. Later in the campaign, then Chairman of the Board of Directors of ViacomCBS, Les Moonves quipped that Trump’s candidacy: “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” (Shortly thereafter Moonves left CBS after revelations of gross sexual misconduct)

Surfing to Serfdom

The giant media corporations never operate in isolation, they have myriad cross interests with other industries. Given the demands of profitability and competition within a controlled market, they necessarily frame all cultural, social, and political discourse within a range that is amenable and acceptable to their corporate owners, their market objectives, their advertisers, investors and investments, and their friends in political office. All other opinion, and often facts, are marginalized, hedged, or swept aside as either irrelevant or potentially disruptive.

In politics, corporations and unimaginably wealthy individuals (invariably with large corporate interests) chose and fund candidates for office, fund organizations that write and propose legislation, spend over 3 billion dollars a year in legislative and regulative lobbying, and offer lucrative consulting and lobbying positions to legislators when they leave office. To imagine an election or legislative process that reflects the opinions and will of a democratic majority in this reality is either naïve or disingenuous. Resistance is circumscribed.

The near instant demise of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 primary campaign as it approached victory is to the point, “the corporate elite had no intention of letting a non-corporate candidate skate across the finish line without serious intervention.”

At the height of Nazi/Fascism during the Second World War, in The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek warned that government control of our economic lives amounts to totalitarianism. “Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest,” he wrote, “it is the control of the means for all our ends.” His was a warning about both Soviet style socialism and National Socialism, and he saw the breakdown of community norms for national goals achieved through national propaganda as ultimately the loss of individual and economic freedom. The book became the foundational justification of neoliberal vilification of Keynesian economics, government regulation, and social programs in the 70s and 80s. It is a brutal irony that Hayek’s ideas were used by his own disciples to justify private corporate control of information, government, and thus “the means for all our ends.”

Today government is little more than a tool in a corporatist box, and serfdom in the US might well be seen in the $1.5 trillion student debt mountain, mining personal information and movements for profit during our indispensable use of social media and the internet, the lack of union protections for workers, the 160 million workers whose healthcare depends on their continuing employment, the 60% of American working families that are one disaster away from homelessness, or globally that 26 billionaires own as much wealth as half the human population of Earth.

54 years after Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane,” the pandemic is a chilling exhibition of how the commodification of human health and care as contract products for purchase from for profit corporations is not only morally reprehensible, but catastrophic for the security and health — mental, physical, and economic — of our society. With a death toll rolling past 70 thousand at a rate of over 2 thousand a day, neither presidential candidate is proposing substantial modification of the corporate for profit health insurance industry. Nor is there any media industry discussion of its inefficiency, inhumanity, and brutality, and the incontrovertible necessity for a national and nationally coordinated health care system.

The present Covid-19 pandemic has ripped the lid off of the cruel inhumanity of raging economic inequality, the exploitation of bodies and minds, or actions and speech, and corporate control of every aspect of our lives. Everybody sees it, everybody knows, the conversation is being suffocated with face masks, American flags, and body bags.

Speaking of Apocalypse

Free speech, a promise of a democratic society, has come to be associated with money: more money equals a bigger audience, no money equals no way and nobody to speak to (no voice). Money equals speech, the freedom to say whatever you want, and to have an audience too.

Social media offer an illusion of freedom but can be instantly patrolled or subverted by well-funded gaslighting and trolling. The effect is like free for all wrestling, orchestrated body slams that ultimately channel participation into likeminded groups. But the illusion goes deeper because the wells of money go deeper, and the power to create an audience is policed by the media industry who select the speakers and critique or ignore the speech. An army of highly-paid experts are on hand to contrast, contradict, and discount whatever does not fit the script. Henry Kissinger once said, an expert is someone deputized by the institution to defend the institution. (Notoriously guilty of crimes against humanity in South East Asia, Central America, Chile, South Africa, Angola, Iraq, East Timor to name the most obvious, Kissinger received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1973).

We have arrived at the moment in time where, as Slavoj Zizek quiped: “it seems easier to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the ‘real’ that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe”(The Spectre of Ideology, 1994, p.1). Covid-19 is of course a global ecological catastrophe, it tells us how our mastery of nature is tenuous, and environmental pollution from our exploitive and production systems weaken human immune defenses. Death comes in direct relation to the pre-existing conditions of poverty, poor nutrition, substandard housing, air pollution, and lack of access to proper health care.

Categorical climate denial, active carbon emission boosterism, repealing environmental regulations, and dismantling disease control readiness by the Trump Administration makes us wonder if Wall Street plans to be open for trade under water. Covid-19 offers a preliminary reading, as governments world over open public coffers to shore up markets and “investor confidence” (billionaires and banks), the dead are deposited in refrigerated trucks, and people die by the thousands in underfunded and/or ill prepared and/or negligent prisons, nursing homes, and health facilities, they die alone afraid to go to hospital, or suffer anxiety and depression from unemployment and the threat of homelessness.

Meanwhile Lilliputian Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, thinks to affirm America’s injured innocence with racist accusations that amount to little more than a craven denial of the administration’s responsibility for the welfare of the American people, “China has a history of infecting the world,” as if it somehow justifies the stupid, the failure, or the dead.

We are only beginning to see the true dimensions of the disaster, the undercounting of the dead and the psychological effects of the pandemic. It is becoming clear that the long term economic effects will be deeper and transformative as they slowly but inevitably roll around the world. We have not yet begun to imagine what ‘normal’ will look like come September 2021, but it will certainly be enormously different from ‘normal’ in September 2019.

One thing is for certain the USA will be a much diminished country in the eyes of the world, decrepit infrastructure, a sad unequal and unfair education system, outsourced security, immense racial disparities, and a health care system that is not worthy of the name.

Where is the world leadership and security of a country that has outsourced manufacture of almost all pharmaceuticals and medicinal equipment supplies to its chief rival? What good an $800 billion in defense spending by “the richest most powerful country in the world” if you cannot produce PPE, and your security agencies send unread or disregarded memos to remind the administration of the imminent arrival of a killer virus? In what way is the US a world leader in other than the numbers infected and dead?

The Empire has fallen off the wall and all the Drone bombers, $100 million F-35s, and $10 billion aircraft carriers cannot be put back together again. We have dramatically failed our own citizens, and told the “free world” to f*ck off in no uncertain terms. What faith can others in the world hold for America’s friendship, humanity and competence (beyond strongmen in need of bombing aid) after this is over?

Responses to the pandemic offered thus far do not hold much promise for a better world but more of the same, more corporate consolidation and control and more government in the service of corporate interests. The coming 2020 election in the US is set to offer two completely corporate minded candidates. One whose personal and business interests are all related to the market and its opportunities, and the other a 50 year career politician in the service of the financial, defense, fossil fuel, and healthcare industries.

Get open, get open or there’ll be body bags of dead businesses

Examining the results and codifying the world that Le Bon and Bernays ideas did so much to create, in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Edward S, Herman and Noam Chomsky offered a practical model of how large corporations, government, and mass media form a unity to control public discourse, direct social imaginary, identity, and inhibit political dissent: “to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.” All within a larger narrative of democratic freedom of speech and free elections of a representative democratic government.

Their analysis remains pertinent to fully appreciate how media consolidation damages access to an unfettered range of information and unbiased reporting that is vital to democratic discourse. How neoliberal policy and the media industry control that discourse as they dismantle democratic opposition and guide public policy and legislation to favor corporate interests, dismantle and deny social programs, and privatize the common wealth while insisting on public responsibility for whatever damage inflicted on the society. Who will pay for the damages US private health care has caused? The dead of course, and the survivors: the public who have been meticulously subject to what amounts to economic leeching by the health industry in exchange for uncertain care.

Chomsky and Hermann’s analysis foresaw, but could not then envision the breathtaking reach into public life, the massive occlusion of government transparency, and the increase in its freedom of suppression and violence brought forth with the Patriot Act after 9/11/2001, nor its convergence with the ubiquitous reality and allure of internet surveillance media.

As markets stabilize, the death count rises, and the racial and economic disparities of risk and death emerge, what is being revealed is a level of inhumanity, callous cruelty, crackpot nonsense, and ghoulish policy that has no relation to the establishment of justice or the promotion of our general welfare. The corporate powers acted immediately to protect the market but not working people, elected officials and newscasters talk of the dead without mourning, like they are reporting a sporting event. Every conspiracy theory that casts blame is offered by the media industry to fuel the spectacle, and private political interest groups foment armed white supremacist protests to end lockdown, get back on the job and let the virus do what it may.

Personal advisor and TV economist Stephen Moore told Trump to “Get open, get open, get open [or] you’ll have body bags of dead businesses.” Business is our business, workers must work, the vulnerable can die, it is acceptable. We have heard this before. Civilization must be saved from the mob, work makes you free.