'''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.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware
of the identity of their fellow members in the
inner cabinet.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership,
their ability to supply needed ideas and by their
key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude
one chooses to take toward this condition, it
remains a fact that 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 – a
trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty
million – who understand the mental processes and
social patterns of the masses. '''It is they who pull the
wires which control the public mind''', who harness old
social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide
the world.
It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible
governors are to the orderly functioning of
our group life.
'''In theory, every citizen may vote
for whom he pleases.''' Our Constitution does not
envisage political parties as part of the mechanism
of government, and its framers seem not to have
pictured to themselves the existence in our national
politics of anything like the modern political machine.
But the American voters soon found that
without organization and direction their individual
votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens or hundreds of candidates,
would produce nothing but confusion. '''Invisible
government, in the shape of rudimentary
political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since
then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and
practicality, that party machines should narrow down
the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three
or four.'''
In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on
public questions and matters of private conduct. In
practice, if all men had to study for themselves the
abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved
in every question, they would find it impossible to
come to a conclusion about anything.
'''We havevoluntarily agreed to let an invisible government
sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so
that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical
proportions. From our leaders and the media they
use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and
the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions''';
from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a
favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we
accept a standardized code of social conduct to which
we conform most of the time.
It might be better to have, instead of propaganda
and special pleading, committees of wise men who
would choose our rulers, dictate our conduct, private
and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes
for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to
eat. But we have chosen the opposite method, that
of open competition. We must find a way to make
free competition function with reasonable smoothness.
To achieve this '''society has consented to permit
free competition to be organized by leadership and
propaganda.'''
Some of the phenomena of this process are criticized – the
manipulation of news, the inflation of
personality, and the general ballyhoo by which politicians
and commercial products and social ideas are
brought to the consciousness of the masses. '''The instruments
by which public opinion is organized and
focused may be misused. But such organization and
focusing are necessary to orderly life.'''
…
'''The minority has discovered a powerful help in influencing
majorities. It has been found possible so to mold
the mind of the masses that they will throw
their newly gained strength in the desired direction.
In the present structure of society, this practice is
inevitable.'''
'''Whatever of social importance is done
to-day, whether in politics, finance, manufacture, agriculture,
charity, education, or other fields, must be
done with the help of propaganda. Propaganda is
the executive arm of the invisible government.'''
As civilization has become more complex, and as
the need for invisible government has been increasingly
demonstrated, the technical means have been
invented and developed by which opinion may be
regimented.
Propaganda (1928)
by Edward Bernays