We've been looking up the actions of Edward Bernays lately, and his actions and ideology have largely become gospel for late stage capitalism.
Bernays was an advertising and propaganda genius, and the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He used his uncle's finding to become the first propagandist to use psychological tactics.
His philosophy is the same as many reactionary luminaries. That the masses could not be trusted to lead themselves, and that the handful of the "best and brightest" would be needed to move society in the right direction.
He believed that to protect the masses from themselves and to protect society from Democracy, wartime propaganda would be needed to be used in peace time to engineer their wants and desires (this is not editorializing, he flat out called what he did propaganda; in fact, that's the title of his first book).
His ideal future was straight out of a conspiracy theory book. He believed in what is essentially an illuminati like group of wealthy businessmen serving as, in his own words, a "shadow government" to engineer the direction of society and to save capitalism and society from the demands of Democracy.
It was he who encouraged President Eisenhower to promote and encourage people's fears and create Red Scare 2 in order to unify the nation on a single cultural mission. He was also on contract for United Fruit company, who was losing profits because of Guatemala nationalizing its resources (there are a lot of conflicts of interest in his stories like this, but to him that's just how the game worked). He killed two birds with one stone by creating the myth of Communist influence in all national self-determination movements in order to secure western business interests around the world.
Most damningly, it was he who engineered cultural consumerism as a way to artificially drive up demand. The US was a needs based culture and industrial overproduction essentially became an unsolvable problem. Bernays, with the backing of many business interests, transformed it into a consumerist culture; and prior to the Great Depression (which not even he could handle) that was seen as the silver bullet that solved capitalisms boom-bust problem.
(Also, he HATED FDR and the New Deal precisely because it relied on scientific polling from the people and gathering data for feedback. He believed the people couldn't be trusted and thought it was the business class who should be calling the shots).
We started out with him because his philosophy has largely been adopted by the US as a cultural control mechanism, and puts a lot of modern history into context.
Despite some rather noteworthy bumps in the road, by the time they got to 1992, they won. The conservative counter-revolution had defeated the old left entirely, and the "left" opposition party adopted their ideology and policy to stay relevant. Clinton was effectively a successor of Reagan.
Then things broke down. If advertising is a "shadow government," then like the much maligned sequel of the original Deus Ex, they began to launch an invisible war. A free floating anxiety was in the air that would make a show like The X-files only possible in that cultural moment. This only got worse as time went on.
On top of that, propaganda wasn't solely aimed "downward" anymore, it's omnidirectional. Businesses propagandize to governments, and vice versa. Everyone is being manipulated to manufacture consent for this and that thing. That's become a core part of capitalism's function.
On a national agenda level, internal propaganda was leaned on more and more heavily (especially after Karl Rove rather heavy-handedly used 9/11 to manufacture consent for Gulf War 2). The more they relied on that the more it became obvious ("These pipes mean Iraq has WMDs").
The latest disaster (the pandemic) was not one capitalism was equipped to solve. They essentially surrendered to keep the markets open and the profits flowing. And all of these hopeful "the economy will recover" messages (which were propaganda in themselves aimed to put faith in the market and soothe people's fears) did not reflect the reality people faced.
With current events in Ukraine and (especially) in Palestine, the capitalist class including the propagandists have proven they are out of touch and panicking. Putin thought the majority of people in the Donbass region wanted to rejoin Russia. Netanyahu thought people (Jews in particular) around the world would be on his side in his quest to eradicate Palestine after the events of October 7th.
Neither turned out to be the case, and the capitalist class panicked. The propaganda isn't working, people aren't believing what they are "supposed" to believe and nothing is working.
This is one of the reasons that the effort to destroy democracy for the sake of capitalism is escalating (that's something we're gonna cover in a separate post, this has been the long term goal of the conservative counter revolution since 1971). The control mechanism meant to engineer the masses is breaking down.
Anyway, figured we'd get those thoughts out, it helps us a lot to understand the current state of things after seeing the history of internal propganda, figured we'd help someone else too.