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> Of course the general technique of associating identity with consumer products is still problematic and that's probably the core idea that Century wanted to get across.

I think there's a lively debate to be had around whether or not this is actually a bad thing. Here is my argument for why it might a positive force in society. Let's focus on the "torches of freedom" [1] event.

The key thing that Bernays did was associate a physical symbol (cigarettes) with a much deeper need/desire: women's rights. What if this really did lead a lot of women to advocate and assert their rights more? What if lighting up that cigarette was the first symbolic act towards deeper change? For a personal example, a year or two ago I felt I needed to make some radical changes in my life, and one of the first things I did was dye my hair blonde. That physical change paved the way for some deep psychological changes. It's very easy for us to judge the torches of freedom thing as "bad" because we now know that cigarettes are bad for health. But they didn't know that now. Actually, we can replace cigarettes with another consumer product that served the similar purpose of women's empowerment (without any of the health problems): jeans. Women wearing jeans was a big political act of rebellion back in the day. If the jeans makers capitalized on that and associated themselves with women's empowerment, is that a bad thing? I think the counterargument here is that people take on these symbols (cigarettes, jeans) as part of their identity and stop there. I.e. it's not the first step of a deeper transformation. You just get a surface level symbol of the identity you want to portray and then stop there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom

> after reading Propaganda I got more of a sense that Bernays was tapping into something powerful and hadn't thought of all the shitty second-order and third-order effects of his methods.

The most important thing to remember about Propaganda is that it, too, is propaganda. Bernays wanted this book to help normalize the use of propaganda within the commercial sector since this is how he made his living.

A wise point, it took me a while to realise this - intellectual honesty can lead to the habitual expectation it will be reciprocated and upheld by others.

That's true, but that doesn't mean the argument he lays out isn't grounded on a sound analysis for the most part.

An important insight one gets from Propaganda is that propaganda is an inevitable effect in a society that goes through an explosion of the amount of available information, and it becomes more about how to deal with it than trying to suppress it. That is in fact what the book is about originally, rather than what "propaganda" has come to mean nowadays. In a way, it's more of a book about how to deal with bounded rationality than about how to persuade people for more or less nefarious purposes (there are better books about that).

To Bernays, propaganda was an essential tool in a democracy. He didn't regard ordinary people as qualified decision makers and saw influencing the masses as the proper function of people like himself. This is what he literally says in the opening paragraphs of his 1928 Propaganda:

> The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

> We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.

It's pretty clear he is talking about propaganda in the modern sense - using rhetorical and persuasive techniques to bypass the target's rational decision making procedures in order to achieve specific policy goals.

Remember Bernays was an alumnus of the first truly industrial scale propaganda effort, the Creel Committee, set up to convince US citizens they should support US entry into WWI.

According to him, it

> bombarded the public unceasingly with enthusiastic reports of the nation's colossal war effort [...] Dissenting voices were stilled, either by agreement with the press or by the persuasive action of the agents of the Department of Justice.

> Intellectual and emotional bombardment aroused Americans to a pitch of enthusiasm. The bombardment came at people from all sides - advertisements, news, volunteer speakers, posters, schools, theaters; millions of homes displayed service flags. The war aims and ideals were continually projected to the eyes and ears of the populace. These high-pressure methods were new at the time, but have become usual since then. [...]

> The most fantastic atrocity stories were believed.

(- Bernays, Public Relations, 1951, via [1])

Bernays indeed saw this as desirable and necessary, and very much cast himself as a member of the "invisible government."

If you grant impeccable intentions and absolute probity to the "invisible governors" this might still seem a cogent viewpoint, though offensive to most modern sensibilities.

Realistically, though, modern history should have taught us the devastation that can result from adoption of propaganda as the primary tool of government, and its inimicability with true democracy.

Democracy proper relies on informed consent, and consent under a propagandising state can only ever be misinformed consent.

1: https://everything2.com/title/Edward+L.+Bernays

I still don't read it that way, or at least I think there's more to it.

What he's expressing is a structural property ("logical consequence") of representative authority, applied to information, much like it is applied to power in democracy.

The point is that there's always a limit to informed consent, and that technocracy/"government of experts" is more or less an inevitable property of ("true") democracy itself rather than a choice.

That consent can only ever be misinformed is the point or at least the argument debated here.

I'll note here however that my other comment in this thread [1] is somewhat inconsistent with the "Bernays was tapping into something powerful and hadn't thought of all the shitty second-order and third-order effects of his methods" idea I mentioned above. In that other comment I said that he was aware of this force and may have been somewhat motivated by public interests to make the tactics wider known. I don't really have a horse in this race and don't care about attacking/defending Bernays. Just sorting out my own thoughts in realtime.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27700192

Jeff Bezos probably doesn't think he is a villain either. The ego and surrounding yourself with yes-men allows people who made decisions out of greed to rationalize their actions then into thinking they are a misunderstood hero.

The same documentary claims that it was the cigarette manufacturers who were looking to make more money from the other half of the population--women who at the time did not smoke as it was considered unladylike. Bernays was happy to spin a made up story to tap into that underdeveloped market. If you read that Wikipedia page closely you will find that he was happy to engage in projects that are hard to defend on moral grounds like setting up a fake news agency. He later rebranded propaganda as public relations, but his methods have not changed. His 'Propaganda' was admired by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of ... Propaganda.

Is this the first example of "woke capitalism"? Are there any earlier ones?

Companies today frequently posture as supporting sociopolitical movements as a sales technique. Ex. All of the rainbow capitalism during pride month - even from companies which give money to anti-lgbt politicians.

Did Bernays invent this too?