November 2, 2023

Humankind is supposedly ruled by reason. But logic isn’t effective in influencing people, individually or in a group. Advertising, public relations, and propaganda succeed precisely because they bypass reason. They hack the shortcuts the brain uses, changing people’s beliefs and behavior without their realizing it.

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Sadly, we are not taught how to guard against these techniques, writes Michelle Stiles in One Idea to Rule Them All: Reverse Engineering American Propaganda. This ignorance, she says, has “devastating consequences for both individuals and society as a whole.”

Some techniques are as old as civilization. Many books cover those used in advertising. Stiles’s scholarly book instead addresses how the ubiquitous manufacture of consent has eclipsed faith in the media and democracy, with stagecraft and narrative supplanting the search for truth. Like a 21st-century Orwell, she warns that tyranny begins with control and abuse of language. She aims to help us recognize the modus operandi of Idea Bullies, who use nefarious means to make an unwary public accept the dominant narrative.

Stiles begins with a startling fact. It wasn’t Nazi Germany or communist dictatorships that first mastered mass persuasion. It was the American government in the lead-up to U.S. involvement in World War I. The working and middle classes saw the war as a businessman’s venture and were reluctant to enlist. To overcome this resistance, President Woodrow Wilson set up the Committee on Public Information (CPI) headed by George Creel. Other key figures were Arthur Bullard, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippmann.

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Together, they drew on and orchestrated the skills of intellectuals, journalists, local leaders, artists, businessmen, and others to get young men to believe in the cause and sign up to fight. Every means was deployed to sell the war to Americans and the world—the printed word, the spoken word, motion pictures, posters, and radio. ‘Four-minute men’—essentially paid shills—would give seemingly extempore speeches at public meetings, plays, and other places to push the war effort. They doubled up as snitches. Those expressing anti-war sentiments were shamed, censored, or faced legal action. In the end, Creel could boast that the committee’s work was a “vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.”

World War I poster with Wilson’s making the “world safe for Democracy” slogan. Public domain.

Stiles traces these techniques to Gustave Le Bon’s 1896 book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Le Bon, a French polymath of elitist bent, distrusted revolutions and the common person’s ability to make collective decisions. He discerned that the masses could be controlled and societal upheavals avoided by manipulating the subconscious mind of the crowd through the creation of illusions and the affirmative declaration of ‘truths’ repeated to the point of contagion (going viral, in current usage). He predicted the Era of Crowds and, well before the arrival of mass media, foresaw its use in shaping public attitudes.

Le Bon identified five pillars of influence that made greater impact than facts, logic, or persuasion: authority (what experts think); experience (seeing is believing); social pressure (what others think and do, translated in current advertising jargon as social proof); imagination (cultural stories); and language (framing the debate). This is common knowledge today, says Stiles, but was path-breaking in Le Bon’s time. His acuity lay in recognizing that, soon, reason would prove ineffective as a means of persuasion.

Stiles presents a list from Le Bon’s playbook for fooling the masses:

  • Images and words: the vaguer and more evocative of connection, value, community, and fairness, the better.
  • Ideas simplified: reducing complex ideas to a least common denominator because the mass mind abhors complexity.
  • Illusions: creating and sustaining them. Popular art and entertainment play a major role in this, acting directly on the imagination.
  • Experience: spectacle and extreme incidents can impress the masses or cause widespread fear, and sharing such experiences can catalyze opinion change.
  • Affirmation, repetition, contagion, and imitation: formulaic ideas must be offered as truths, repeated often, and disseminated widely, perpetuating chains of imitation.
  • Prestige and authority: humans are primed to fit in, so they will think and do what others, especially those they admire, are thinking or doing. This is also linked to humans’ instinctive need for leaders whom they will follow without question.

Le Bon’s work gained a wide readership, influencing Freud, Hitler, Mussolini, and Roosevelt. In America, Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, gained sophistication in using Le Bon’s methods while working with Creel on the CPI, and parleyed them into a multimillion-dollar industry as the putative father of public relations. Besides writing books such as Propaganda and Crystallizing Public Opinion, he made women’s smoking and heavy breakfasts fashionable, marketed pianos, and made green a popular color—all through staged events and news management. He even influenced the 1954 overthrow of a communist government in Guatemala for the United Fruit Company.

Stiles shows how those methods have been magnified in the present day. Moving back and forth between past and present, she lays bare the framework of these methods and the modifications they have undergone. At the core lies an elitist disdain for the public: Le Bon had it, and so, Stiles reveals, did Walter Lippmann. A supposed liberal Democrat, he believed a technocracy must guide society for its own good and “thought very little of the people reading his daily opinion pieces.” He insidiously advocated organizing opinion through the intervention of disinterested experts—not explaining how they could be disinterested and who would hold them accountable.