The Bernaysian Manipulation of the Human Psyche

Steven MacMillan

Edward Bernays was the master of influencing and shaping public opinion who developed upon the ideas of earlier social psychologists and the work of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, in order to create techniques to manipulate the subconscious desires of the masses.

Throughout his 103-year lifespan, the “father of public relations” was at the pinnacle of his field advising US Presidents Coolidge, Eisenhower, Hoover and Wilson, as well as inventor Thomas Edison, US industrialist Henry Ford and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. He also reportedly refused invitations by Hitler and Franco to work on fascist propaganda campaigns in Europe.

At the end of World War 1 Bernays served as a propagandist for America before going on to work with various government departments and corporations throughout his lifetime, including: the US Department of State, CBS, Procter and Gamble, and the American Tobacco Company, as well as designing the propaganda campaign for the United Fruit Company which led to the CIA coup against the Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954. 

Bernays combined the work of people such as the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon to create techniques which appeal to the subconscious emotions of the public, as opposed to engaging the public in rational and intellectual debate. Le Bon studied the mental characteristics and the behaviour of the crowd, believing that when part of a mass, individuals are subordinate to the crowd mind and that a human behaves in a more emotive, irrational manner. Bernays observed that if a propagandist could understand the “motives of the group mind”, they would possess the ability to “control and regiment the masses”: 

Reversing The Edward Bernays Effect

How to end a century of lies and mass mind manipulation ushered in by one man

Bernie Suarez

America has been plagued by a powerful mind control tactic which was suggested, experimented with, and fully implemented over a century ago by a man named Edward Bernays. The time has come for Americans to come to grips with the content and theories that Bernays used to influence American history. It’s time to call out the legacy of deceit and manipulation that this man brought to American history; by doing this, only then can America begin to heal from the web of psychological damage inflicted on a nation.

This tactic of psychological manipulation, control and deceit has spawned into a world-wide media propaganda practice (which he personally developed for the CIA) that has proven venomous and destructive, and that has been directly and indirectly responsible for the death of tens of millions of people in the past century alone.

It was the deceptive Bernays who studied his uncle's work (Sigmund Freud) on psychoanalysis and thought through his own theories about human behavior and how to manipulate the masses. When speaking of Bernays we are talking about a man who seemed unattached to human suffering. Bernays seems to have walked through life proud of what he had discovered. There seems to be no indication that he ever actually realized the magnitude of the damage he inflicted on humanity by putting into practice his deceptive mind control theories, to be used for promoting ideas that were not necessarily true and ideas that would be used to control humans. Bernays’ pride seemed to have come from knowing that his predictions about human behavior were correct. There are no indications that he felt any remorse for what he had done.

JOHN PILGER — Flying the flag, faking the news

Loud noises from Washington about a US pull-out from Iraq are a poor disguise for America’s determination to keep waging war.  And the same sort of spin is at work here in Britain 

My Catbird Seat

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda.  During the First World War, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe.  In his book Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the “intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society”, and that the manipulators “constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country”.  Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism “public relations”.

The American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women that they should smoke in public.  By associating smoking with women’s liberation, he made cigarettes “torches of freedom.”  In 1954, he conjured a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the democratically elected government, whose social reforms were threatening the United Fruit Company’s monopoly of the banana trade.  He called it a “liberation”.

Bernays was no rabid right-winger.  He was an elitist liberal who believed that “engineering public consent” was for the greater good.  This could be achieved by the creation of “false realities” which then became “news events”.  Here are examples of how it is done these days. 

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