218.
Freud's Nephew: The Underground HIstory of American Education by John Taylor
Gatto from archive.org
Freud's
Nephew
Early in the
twentieth century, official language, including official school language, became a deliberate, systematic exercise
in illusion. Governments have always lied, of course, but at the beginning of the twentieth century an
accretion of psychological
insights gathered from past epochs of magic, theology, philosophy, arts,
warfare, rumor, and madness, were
collected, codified, and the conclusions sold to the leaders of political states, global corporations, and other
powerful interests, welded into a technology of professionalized dishonesty. Secrets of
crowd behavior and the presumed instrumental wiring of human nature were made available to anyone with
the price of admission. The newly
official pragmatic philosophy became a kind of anti-morality, superior to
any ethical code fashioned out of
custom and philosophy.
Four hundred years
after Niccolo Machiavelli wrote his treatise on scientific deceit, Edward L. Bernays began to practice the
scientific art of public deception, trading heavily on his uncle Sigmund Freud's notoriety. A decade
earlier, Ivy Lee's publicity savvy
had rescued the Rockefellers from their Ludlow Massacre disgrace. Public Relations as political science was off
and running on the fast track.
Bernays was only a
solitary word magician at the time, of course, but he was in an ideal position to capitalize quickly upon his
rhetorical talent and to set his stamp on the new science's future. In 1928, Bernays published two books in
quick succession which planted his
flag in the dream terrain of the "unconscious." The first,
Crystallizing Public Opinion, and
the second, Propaganda. Adolf Hitler is said to have displayed both on a table in his office under a
poster-sized picture of Henry Ford.' The new world was blazing a trail into an even newer
world than it imagined. Both of Bernays' books argued that language could be used successfully to create new
realities. Psychological science
was so advanced, he claimed, it could substitute synthetic reality for
natural reality, as urban society
had successfully replaced our natural connection to birds, trees, and
flowers with a substitute
connection to billboards, cars, and bright lights.
Crystallizing Public
Opinion and Propaganda had much to say to the newly minted administrative classes burgeoning all
over American schools and colleges. In
Propaganda, Bernays redefined democratic society, in the interests of
the mass- production economy. I've
selected three short excerpts from Bernays' classic which enriched him with
corporate work in the seven decades of life he had left — he died inl995 at the age of 105 — after its
publication.
The first assertion
of Propaganda was that common people had to be regimented and governed from behind the scenes. Here
are Bernays' actual words:
The need for
invisible government has been increasingly
demonstrated,
the technical means have been
invented and developed by which public opinion may be regimented.
The next important
contention was that the critical pollution of language necessary to make this work was already in use:
We are governed, our
minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. We are
dominated by a relatively small number of
persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the
masses. It is they who pull the
wires which control the public.
Finally, Bernays attempts to provide a "moral" justification
for proceeding as he suggests: The conscious manipulation of
organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate
this unseen mechanism constitute
an invisible government which is the true ruling power in this country.
This attitude of
manipulation as an important component of "democratic"
management entered the urban
factory-school classroom in a big way at a time when psychology was taking over from academics as the tool
of choice in America's German-inspired teacher training institutions. Bertrand Russell had been both a
witness and an actor in the new
climate of public deceits which characterized the post-WWI epoch. When
its first phase was complete, he
wrote in The Impact of Science on Society (1952) that the most important subject for the future would
be "mass psychology" and "propaganda", studies which would be "rigidly confined
to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated.
"(emphasis added)
Less than a decade later, Bernays was proud to add Adolf Hitler to his
list of clients.
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