p37
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 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 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 of 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 without anything. We have voluntarily
agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the
outstanding issue 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 question; 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.
In theory, everybody buys the best and
cheapest commodities offered him on the market. In practice, if every
one went around pricing, and chemically tasting before purchasing, the
dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale,
economic life would be hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion,
society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects
brought to it attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is
consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds
in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea.
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.
p59
Who are the men, who, without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell
us whom to admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the
ownership of public utilities .. about immigration who tell us how our
houses should be designed, what furniture we should put into them, what
menus we should serve at our table, what kind of shirts we must wear,
what sports we should indulge in, what plays we should see, what
charities we should support, what pictures we should admire, what slang
we should affect, what jokes we should laugh at?
p60
A presidential candidate may be "drafted" in response to "around popular
demand," but it is well known that his name may be decided upon by half
a dozen men sitting L.. around a table in a hotel room.
p61
A man buying a suit of clothe imagines that he is choosing, according to
his taste and his personality, the kind of garment which he prefers. In
reality, he may be obeying the orders of an anonymous gentleman tailor
in London. This personage is the silent partner in a modest tailoring
establishment, which is patronized by gentlemen of fashion and princes
of blood. He suggest to British noblemen and others a blue cloth instead
of gray, two buttons instead of three, or sleeves a quarter of an inch
narrower than last season. The distinguished customer approves of the
idea.
But how does this fact affect John Smith
of Topeka?
The gentleman tailor is under contract
with a certain large American firm, which manufactures men's suits, to
send them instantly the designs of the suits chosen by the leaders of
London fashion. Upon receiving the designs, with specifications as to
color, weight, and texture, the firm immediately places an order with
the cloth makers for several hundred thousand dollars' worth of cloth.
The suits made up according to the specifications are then advertised as
the latest fashion. The fashionable men in New York Chicago, Boston, and
Philadelphia wear them. And the Topeka man, recognizing this leadership,
does the same.
Women are just as subject to the commands
of invisible government as men. A silk manufacturer, seeking a new
market for its product, suggested to a large manufacturer of shoes that
women's shoes should be covered with silk to match their dresses. The
idea was adopted and systematically propagandized. A popular actress was
persuaded to wear the shoes. The fashion spread. The shoe firm was ready
with the supply to meet thee created demand. And the silk company was
ready with the silk for more shoes.
p63
The new profession of public relations has grown up because of the
increasing complexity of modern life and the consequent necessity for
making the actions of one part of the public understandable to other
sectors of the public. It is due, too, to the increasing dependence of
organized power of all sorts upon public opinion. Governments, whether
they are monarchical, constitutional, democratic or communist, depend
upon acquiescent public opinion for the success of their efforts and, in
fact, government is government only by virtue of public acquiescence.
Industries, public utilities, educational movements, indeed all groups
representing any concept or product, whether they are majority or
minority ideas, succeed only because of approving public opinion. Public
opinion is the unacknowledged partner in all broad efforts.
The public relations counsel, then, is
the agent who, working with modern media of communications and the group
formations of society, brings an idea to the consciousness of the
public.
p71
The systematic study of mass psychology revealed t7 students the
potentialities of invisible government of society by manipulation of the
motives which actuate man in the group. Trotter and Le Bon, who
approached the subject in a scientific manner, and Graham Wallas, Walter
Lippmann, and others who continued with searching studies of the group
mind, established that the group has mental characteristics distinct
from those of the individual, and is motivated by impulses and emotions
which cannot be explained on the basis of what we know of individual
psychology. So the question naturally arose. If we understand the
mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control
and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing
about it?
p73
If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious
cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway. But
men do not need to be actually gathered together in a public meeting or
in a street riot, to be subject to the influences of mass psychology.
Because man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a
herd, even when he is alone in his room with the curtains drawn. His
mind retains the patterns which have been stamped on it by the group
influences.
p73
Trotter and Le Bon concluded that the group mind does not think in the
strict send of the word. In place of thoughts it has impulses, habits,
and emotions. In making up its mind, its first impulse is usually to
follow the example of a trusted leader. This is one of the most firmly
established principles of mass psychology. It operates in establishing
the rising or diminishing prestige of
p74
But when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must
think for itself, it does so by means of clichés, pat words or images
which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences. Not many years
ago, it was only necessary to tag a political candidate with the word
interests to stampede millions of people into voting against him,
because anything associated with "the interests" seemed necessary
corrupt. Recently the word Bolshevik has performed a similar service for
persons who wished to frighten the public away from a line of action.
By playing upon a old cliché, or
manipulating a new one, the propagandist can sometimes swing a whole
mass group emotions.
p75
It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud( who have pointed
out that many of man's thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes
for desires which has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired
not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has
unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire
for which he is ashamed to admit to himself. A man buying a car may
think he wants it for purposes of locomotion, whereas the fact may be
that he would really prefer not to be burdened with it, and would rather
walk for the sake of his health. He may really want it because it is a
symbol of social position, an evidence of his success in business, or a
means of pleasing his wife.
This general principle, that men are very
largely actuated by motives which they conceal from themselves, is as
true of mass as of individual psychology. It is evident that the
successful propagandist must understand the true motives and not be
content to accept the reasons which men give for what they do.
p75
Human desires are the steam which makes the social machine work. Only by
understanding them can the propagandist control that vast, loose-jointed
mechanism which is modern society.
p84
while, under the handicraft of small-unit system of production was that
typical a century ago, demand created the supply, today supply must
actively seek to create its corresponding demand. A single factory,
potentially capable of supplying a whole continent with its particular
product, cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it
must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda, with
the vast public in order to assure itself the continuous demand which
alone will make its costly plant profitable. This entails a vastly more
complex system of distribution than formerly.
p109
No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people
expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the
people expresses the mind of 3 the people, and that mind is made up for
it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who
understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of
inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas
supplied to them by the leaders.
Fortunately, the sincere and gifted
politician is able, by the instrument of propaganda, to mold and form
the will of the people.
p110
The political apathy of the average voter, of which we hear so much, is
undoubtedly due to the fact that the politician does not know how to
meet the conditions of the public mind. He cannot dramatize himself and
his platform in terms which have real meaning to the public. Acting on
the fallacy that the leader must slavishly follow, he deprives his
campaign of all dramatic interest. An automaton cannot arouse the public
interest. A leader, a fighter, a dictator, can. But, given our present
political conditions under which every office seeker must cater to the
vote of the masses, the only means by which the born leader can lead is
the expert use of propaganda.
Whether in the problem of getting elected
to office or in the problem of interpreting and popularizing new issues,
or in the problem of making the day-to-day administration of public
affairs a vital part of the community life, the use of propaganda,
carefully adjusted to the mentality of the masses, is an essential
adjunct of political life.
p119
It is not necessary for the politician to be the slave to the public's
group prejudices, if he can learn how to mold the mind of the voters in
conformity with his own ideas of public welfare and public service. The
important thing for the statesman of our age is not so much to know how
to please the public, but know how to sway the public.
p120
Good government can be sold to a community just as any other commodity
can be sold.
p120
One reason, perhaps, why the politician today is slow to take up methods
which are a commonplace in business life is that he has such ready entry
to the media of communication on which his power depends.
The newspaperman looks to him for news.
And by his power of giving or withholding information the politician can
often effectively censor political news. But being dependent, every day
of the year and for year after year, upon certain politicians for news,
the newspaper reporters are obliged to work in harmony with their news
sources.
p123
Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless he has something to say
which the public, consciously or unconsciously, wants to hear.
p123
The criticism is often made that propaganda tends make the President of
the United States so important that he becomes not the President but the
embodiment of the idea of hero worship, not to say deity worship. I
quite agree that this is so, but how are you going to stop a condition
which accurately reflects the desires of a certain part of the public?
The American people rightly senses the enormous importance of the
executive's office. If the public tends to make of the President a
heroic symbol of that power, that is not the fault of propaganda but
lies in the very nature of the office and its relation to the people.
END
The average Christian fails to understand the incredible
power of suggestion (article: The Deadly Deception Of Designated
Drivers) and use of propaganda to deceive and persuade the human
mind. Many Christians who love the Lord, study the Scriptures and attend
church regularly, still don't realize that they've been deceived by
Luciferian-worshipping groups who
intentionally
infiltrate and influence the churches with occult teachings. There's
no better example than the
modern corrupt Bible versions which have infiltrated most of our
evangelical and even soul-winning Independent Baptist churches. 
The
Bible is our only source of information on the true malign character of
Satan (Lucifer). The Bible describes Satan as a liar and murderer (John
8:44). Satan is a master deceiver, disguising Himself as Christ, and his
false ministers as preachers (2nd Corinthians 11:13-15).
Literally, as hard as it may be to grasp, many of the world's leaders,
judges, preachers, teachers, executives (and others from all walks of
life), look like any other normal person by day, but worship Satan in
occult rituals, bizarre human sacrifice, sex orgies, and unthinkable
behavior at night. 
Edward
Bernays (1891-1995) was a heathen propagandist, a manipulator, a
Christ-rejecting Zionist. Mr. Bernays was highly sought out by various
groups, corporations and governments worldwide to help them manipulate
the masses, which is a really horrible way to live. The shallowest
victory in the world is victory over another. I'd hate to spend my life
taking advantage of the weakness in others. Satan is a cunning wolf, who
understands human weakness, and preys upon the masses. Yet, we can learn
much by knowing our enemy. The Luciferian ruling elite believe they have
a right to manipulate the masses according to their own human wisdom,
but they have no regard for neither God nor man. The United States is
built today upon propaganda...
