Saturday, March 23, 2024

All Roads Lead to Sigmund Freud by R.E. Prindle Texts: Bernays, Edward,: The Edward Bernays Reader, From Propaganda To The Engineering Of Consent, Ig Publishing, 2021 Freud, Sigmund: Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego, Standard Ediition, 1922 Le Bon, Gustave: The Crowd: A Study Of The Popular Mind, 1895 Samuel, Maurice: You Gentiles, 1924 Read that subtitle of the Bernays entry closely, both titles of works by the Jewish propagandist Edward Bernays. Now turning the book over let us read the sales pitch: Quote, Edward Bernays (1891-1995) was a pioneer in the art of propaganda and public persuasion. Combining theories on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytic ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays elucidated how public opinion could be shaped. His seminal 1928 book, Propaganda, laid out how propaganda could be used to regiment the collective mind, while his 1923 classic, Crystallizing Public Opinion set down the principles that business and government have used to influence public attitudes over the past century. Unquote. Let's examine this innocuous sounding text. In Bernays work: Propaganda he attempts to make positive a term that has always had negative connotations.that is, propaganda. In general it meant probably using untruths to get people to do what you want and they don’t. In other words he says that now propaganda can be a good thing ignoring the element of lying in the term. And then in 1923 he published Crystallizing Public Opiniion which I understand to mean converting you propaganda into incontrovertible stone. The public then accepts the propaganda which may or may not be beneficial for them into ‘truth.’ So, Bernays is corrupting the integrity of the word. He then goes on to explain the method, ‘engineering’ public opinion, or, how to achieve your goal essentially by hypnotizing your public. Note this was written and published openly. Nothing clandestine here. Now note how these ideas were put into use during the Roosevelt administration from 1932 to 1945. Then extend the method to the open corruption of the current Biden administration. Now Freud read Le Bon's The Crowd sometime after 1895 as he was forming his ideas on psychology based on the ideas of the French psychologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet. Freud’s ideas jelled after the disaster of World War I. One can’t be sure but perhaps Freud saw the astounding success of George Creel's efforts of propagandizing and crystallizing public opinion in the United States with his and President Wilson’s Committee on Public Information. There was the matrix for Freud’s Group Psychology. Creel requires a separate study as do the years 1920 to 1925. The crux of the matter was the failure of its advocates to persuade Americans to accept the League of Nations. Out of that failure came the Counsel of Foreign Affairs that collaborated with or adopted Freud's thinking and Bernays’ formulations 'Propaganda' and the 'Engineering of Consent' which today is pursued so relentlessly on the internet. Due to the interface on the internet opinions counter to official doctrine can be denied with no discussion. I will develop this further.

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