218. Freud's Nephew: The Underground HIstory of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

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.