Chapter 5 The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations by John Coleman

Do we have what H.G. Wells called "An Invisible Government?"

CHAPTER 5

As I have previously related, the modern science of making public opinion through advanced techniques of manipulating mass-opinion began at one of the West's most advanced propaganda factory situated in Britain at Wellington House. This facility dedicated to social engineering and creating public opinion at the commencement of World War I, was under the aegis of Lords Rothmere and Northcliffe, and the future director of studies of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), Arnold Toynbee. Wellington House had an American Section, whose most prominent members were Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays. As we discovered later, Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, a fact carefully hidden from public view.
Jointly, they centered work on techniques to "mobilize" support for World War I among the masses of people who were opposed to war with Germany. The public perception was that Germany was a friend of the British people, not an enemy and the British people saw no need to fight Germany. After all, was it not true that Queen Victoria was the cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm II? Toynbee, Lippmann and Bernays worked to persuade them that war was necessary, using the techniques of the new science through new arts of mass-manipulation via the communications media for its propaganda purposes tinged with willingness to lie, which was just getting into its stride, having learned a great deal of experience during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902).

Polling to secure the "correct" opinion

It was not only the British public whose perception of events had to be altered, but also a recalcitrant American public. To this end Bernays and Lippmann were instrumental in getting Woodrow Wilson to establish the Creel Committee, which created the first body of methodological techniques for dissemination of successful propaganda and for the science of polling to secure the "correct" opinion.
From the beginning the techniques were designed in such a way that polling (public opinion-making) was based on one obvious, but striking feature: - it was concerned with people's opinions, not with their understanding of the processes of science. Thus, by intent, the pollsters elevated an essentially irrational element of mind to a primary level of public focus. This was a conscious decision to undermine the grasps of reality of masses of people in an increasingly complex industrial society.

"Fox News" and Pictures in Our Heads

If you have ever watched "Fox News" where viewers are given the results of a poll about "what Americans are thinking," and then for the next hour found yourself shaking your head and wondering what the results of the poll reflected about your own thinking processes, then you could only have felt more puzzled than ever.
The key to understanding Fox News and the poll might lie in what Lippmann had to say about such matters. In his 1922 book, Public Opinion, Lippmann outlined Tavistock's psychological warfare methodology.
In an introductory chapter, "The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads," Lippmann stressed,

"that the object of study of the public opinion social analyst is reality as defined by internal perception or images of that reality. Public opinion deals with indirect, unseen, and puzzling facts, and there is nothing obvious about them. The situations to which public opinions refer are known only as opinions...."

"The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures, which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters. The picture inside so often misleads men in their dealings with the world outside."

From this evaluation, it is easy to take the next decisive step made by Bernays, - that the elites who run society can and do marshal the resources of mass communications to mobilize and alter the "herd" mind.
One year after Lippmann's book, Bernays authored Crystallizing Public Opinion. He followed that in 1928 with a book entitled quite simply: Propaganda.
In the first chapter, "Organizing Chaos" Bernays wrote:

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, that we have never heard of... Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.

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 conductor 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.

In Propaganda, Bernays followed his praise of the "invisible government" by underscoring the next phase that propaganda techniques would follow:

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. With the printing press and the newspaper, the telephone, telegraph, radio and airplanes, ideas can spread rapidly and even instantaneously over the whole of America.

To back up his point, Bernays quoted the mentor of "public opinion manipulation," H. G. Wells. He cited a 1928 article in the New York Times in which Wells welcomed "modern means of communication" for "opening up a new world of political processes," and for allowing "the common design" to be "documented and sustained against perversion and betrayal." For Wells, the advent of "mass communication" leading up to television meant fantastic new paths for social control beyond the wildest dreams of the earlier mass-manipulation fanatics of the British Fabian Society. We shall return to this vitally important subject later herein