Although it was a progressive period for media during which time Walter Lippmann’s and Edward L. Bernays’ articles were written, I have to laugh at how overwhelming they, especially Lippmann, perceived the flow of information was.
Lippmann says, “It is bad enough today—with morning newspapers published in the evening and evening newspapers published in the morning, with October magazines in September, with the movies and the radio—to be condemned to live under a barrage or eclectic information, to have one’s mind made the receptacle for a hullabaloo of speeches, arguments and unrelated episodes.”
It made me think of the paper—monks—Jon Krakauer wrote about in Into the Wild, where they risked their lives to leave the Iceland when the first handful of Norwegians showed up because they thought the country had become too crowded. As I’m sure the paper would be totally jarred if they were dropped off in, say, present-day Manhattan, Lippmann would likely weep if he surfed the Internet or flipped through news channels for a few hours.
“The Disenchanted Man” seems to be written for those who experience and immerse themselves in media and democracy, and how it all relates to the struggle of the private man, the private citizen, to attain sovereignty, or lack thereof, by taking part in governing his country. Lippmann draws from his own experiences and has concluded that the masses are incapable of governing in democracy, are powerless to make change and are unable to process and absorb the immeasurable amount of information needed to take actions and be effective in democracy as it stands. Lippmann says about himself, “…although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy.” Simply, as he quotes from Swedish Socialist Deputy Gustaf F. Steffen, “Even after victory there will always remain in political life the leaders and the led.”
Where Lippmann is distrustful and skeptical of government, bureaucracy, and propaganda, Bernays argued propaganda and manipulating public opinion was not only good for society, but necessary, too. Lippmann says the greater the masses, the more complex the collection of men, which creates an ambiguous sense of unity, and the simpler the common ideas.
Bernays, it seems to suggest in “Manipulating Public Opinion: The Why and How,” would say that is exactly why propaganda is necessary, because the masses are essentially incapable of making decisions themselves, the need to be guided. The manipulation, therefore, serves the social purpose of gaining the acceptance for new ideas. Bernays, however, does not deem the masses as completely helpless. He holds to the idea that, “Today the privilege of attempting to sway public opinion is everyone’s.” But as Lippmann pointed out, the masses are not in control of how the government works. Their only significant input is done from inside a polling booth, and then everything else is “an attempt to control the actions of others from the outside.”
It sucks—that’s the right word—to think the most effective way to capture people’s interest and make them act, as Berneys claims, is to create a “dramatic moment,” as if they won’t respond to anything less than a kick in the pants. No credit is given to the masses, nor is any asked. Fox reporter Lou Dobbs was on the Daily Show last night talking about who’d-have-guessed the Republican primaries would be interesting, exciting, and he said he loves it. Is that what the people want? A dramatic…whatever…to pull them in and make them feel anything, to care?
The ideas proposed by Lippmann and Bernays are firing from two totally sets of synapses, two totally different realms of thinking. Lippmann says the masses have a chance to gain back some of its sovereignty: “The true public, in my definition of that term, has to purge itself of the self-interested groups…Open debate may lead to no conclusion and throw no light whatever on the problem or its answer, but it will tend to betray the partisan and the advocate. And if it has identified them for the true public, debate ill have served its main purpose.”
Bernays’ line of thought, however, suggests that the leaders have more or less a civic duty to manipulate the public, for without the guidance of leaders, the masses’ participation in democracy is but futile. What Lippmann rightly fears is the way that political leaders, propagandists, and anyone else who stands to gain from advancing a certain agenda take advantage of the ignorance of the masses. Bernays was brainwashed and high off Freud’s ass until he renounced his stance in his 1928 article on his deathbed 67 years later. He was wrong. End of long discussion.
