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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