The Engineering of Consent: Bernays Writes the Manual

Edward Bernays published Propaganda in 1928, and its first paragraph is the most quoted thing he ever wrote:

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.

He meant it approvingly. His argument, which he made consistently for sixty years, was that mass democracy contains too many people making too many decisions on too little information for the process to be left to itself, and that the alternative to organized persuasion is chaos. Someone will shape opinion; better that it be done competently and openly by professionals.

He had come to this through the war. Bernays worked for the Committee on Public Information, the Wilson administration's propaganda body, and observed that techniques developed to sell a war could be applied to anything. The word propaganda was still neutral in 1928 — it acquired its present meaning largely through the 1930s — and he used it plainly.

By 1947 he had changed the phrasing. The essay was called The Engineering of Consent, and the substitution is the whole of the man's insight.

Consent is not compelled. It is produced, by arranging the conditions under which a person decides, and the person then experiences the decision as their own.

The mechanism, stated in the vocabulary of Part 1, is frame control. What Bernays did in every campaign was determine which associations were available at the moment of choice. He did not argue that women should smoke; he made smoking mean freedom. He did not argue that bacon was healthy; he made a doctor's survey the available frame for what breakfast is. The target's own reasoning does the work, and reasoning that produces its own conclusion is not experienced as influence.

That is why engineered consent is more durable than coercion, and it is why it is harder to defend against. A person who has been coerced knows it and resents it. A person whose premises were arranged reaches a conclusion, defends it, and treats an attack on it as an attack on their judgment.

Bernays's clients included Procter & Gamble, General Electric, CBS, the American Tobacco Company and the United Fruit Company. The last of those is the next chapter but one, and it is where the argument that this is compatible with democracy becomes very difficult to sustain.