Meeting 3. Engineering Consent: Edward Bernays, Psychoanalysis and the Hack of the Human Mind
The Episode 3 Primer Podcast is Live! Listen Now:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ihvsu2rzgidYm7VEQ4yIDJA26KYGHa1w/view?usp=drive_link
Link to Zoom Event: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88017563202?pwd=zV69WMJdSZ82jksa8ENdooVj08fo7k.1
See you Thursday April 30th at 6pm!
Join John Thor Cornelius, MD and Mathew Stanley as discussant for a 3 part Zoom Series Focussing on Edward Bernays' hack of the human mind, and what we can do about it.
Dates: April 9th, 23rd and 30th: 6-7:30PM Sponsored by the Forward Party of Sacramento.
Summary: In 1955, Edward Bernays, a self-professed liberal, supporter of feminism and member of the NAACP, published a book titled The Engineering of Consent. In it he chronicled his playbook to influence America as one of the first PR men in the United States. He used the technique to become the fathers of modern public relations, gaining vast wealth while working with major corporations, political parties and presidents.
Leaning on the understanding of the human unconscious he gleaned from his uncle, Sigmund Freud, he laid out a blueprint for how a "powerful and select few" should influence the behavior of the masses and thus maintain democracy.
His archives, supported by modern psychoanalytic ideas and neuroscientific evidence, reveal how his method manipulates the human mind by bypassing rational thought- a mechanism that preys on our insecurities but manipulates our natural tendencies to seek support. The ‘hack’ sells products, tells us who to hate, who to be afraid of, and who to love - and it works, again, and again, and again via its influence over the fundamental unconscious machinery of who we are.
Yet the playbook, run increasingly frequently by CEO’s and politicians since he developed it, has a dark side. Even as it tenaciously steamrolls rational thought, it destabilizes the human mind – even the minds of the ‘select’ who seek to use it. It allowed a liberal to think he can destroy democracy to ‘save’ it. It allows a health advocate to sell deadly products. It gets judges to think they are ‘incorruptible’ even as they take bribes. It influences us to vote against our better judgement and interests. For Bernays, it paved the way for the genocide of his own people and brought the nation he loved to a hairsbreadth of nuclear Armageddon.
And it’s going on right now. . . . a lot.
Join John Thor Cornelius, MD, a medical doctor, psychoanalyst, writer and educator, for a 3-part online series decoding this playbook with Mathew Stanley, author and philosopher, to act as discussant. To help us, we will use curated podcasts that synthesize material from multiple sources before and between meetings, with primary sources available for review.
Session 1: The Biology of Influence
Date/Time: April 9th 6-7:30PM
We begin by introducing us to Edward Bernays, identifying his theories as well as the biological underpinnings of the propaganda model. This will include an introduction to the psychology and brain science that lay the groundwork for the rest of the meetings. We’ll review the way Bernays recognized how once you can "understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses," you can "pull the wires which control the public mind".
Session 2: The Illusion of Choice
Date/Time: April 23rd, 6-7:30PM
In this session, we analyze the power of the "Torches of Freedom" campaign and how it crystalized Bernay’s approach to generate an illusion of choice, targeting our deep unconscious fears and desires in such a way that we don’t even consciously recognize the manipulation, or even when we do recognize it, that consciousness does not protect us from it’s grip.
We’ll explore the sheer scale of its use in the modern world of advertising and how deeply the subterfuge runs, as well as the increasing use of this technique politically by all sides. We’ll also begin to explore how the process began to derail Bernay’s own mind and family and the tendency of this technique to develop into a self-fulfilling prophecy of destruction.
Session 3: The Brink of Armageddon
Date/Time: April 30th, 6-7:30PM
In the final session we begin by examining the crucial role Bernays played in the 1954 overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Guatemala as detailed in The Father of Spin and Bitter Fruit by Stephen Schlesinger & Stephen Kinzer. We will see how Bernays and the United Fruit Company applied his technique on a massive, but increasingly familiar, scale. Utilizing the terror of a "Soviet Beachhead" and the seduction of a "Liberation" narrative (via the fake "Voice of Liberation" radio) Bernays sacrificed his own principles to help United Fruit maintain economic dominance, but created a disaster that has haunted not only the region, but the entire world for decades. This includes the germination of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the chronic destabilization of Central and South America that has affected the entire Americas into the present day.
We will close with a discussion how these same weapons of mass influence are now turned inward within the United States, fueling a "civil war of the mind" where each side justifies its actions while being context blind to its own role in the conflict. And hopefully, we will explore the painful necessity of Right Hemisphere thinking, the potential of principled action and entering into what psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called the Stage of Concern as a possible path forward.