Snippets

1. Public Relations (and marketing) is such a central part of our lives that it is difficult to imagine that it had a beginning and that Edward Bernays – nephew of the famous Sigmund Freud - is the man who can reasonably claim to have invented it. Until I came across the work of documentarist Adam Curtis I hadn’t heard of Bernays - and it was only at the weekend that I got the chance to start reading the first book he ever wrote about his work – the 1923 “Crystallising Public Opinion” which has an excellent introduction written by someone who spent several hours chatting to him shortly before he died in 1995. Here’s what Bernays had to say in his second book - 

“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 govern-ment - which is the true ruling power of our country”.

Eduard Bernays “Propoganda” (1928) 

For more on this important topic see the footnote below.......

2. I am currently half-way through an important book about contemporary Germany – written by someone whose German father had to leave Bratislava rather quickly in 1933 and settled in Britain. The son became a foreign correspondent in both East and West Germany in the 1980s and 1990s and criss-crossed the country more recently to ensure his account was an up-to-date one. The result is the highly readable Why the Germans do it Better – notes from a grown-up Country; John Kaempfner (2020) which is nicely summarized here 

The truth of this book’s title statement is shown in what Kampfner has to say about industrial relations and how Germans have outperformed comparable countries in economic prowess. Read the fifth chapter, ‘The Wonder’, and you can stop wondering about the secret of Germany’s success. The pivotal role of the Mittelstand (small- to medium-sized firms), the thoroughness of apprentice training, the philosophy of long-termism, Mitbestimmung (representation of the workforce on company boards): most of this is simply unthinkable to a true-blue British capitalist.

When Theresa May, after the election of 2017, briefly flirted with some kind of German-like worker participation in company decisions, the idea was branded as unadulterated socialism and ditched as soon as it had reared its German head.

 

As an explanation of how Germany functions in 2020, Kampfner’s book is a triumph of insight and lucidity. But it also, inadvertently, exposes the limits of cross-fertilisation between countries and the deeply anchored differences of mentalities and historical preconditions. Could Westminster ever abjure its adversarial theatrics and convert to the idea of a grand coalition – the sharing of governing responsibility between the two main parties - which has latterly become the backbone of Germany’s uneasy yet stable political culture?

How about a written constitution, the love and pride of Germany since 1949?

Or a proportional electoral system, treating all votes cast as a true mirror of the volonté générale?

Those who want to know more about Germany might want to look at my E-book "resource" German Musings which contains one of the best annotated bibliogaphies on the country which I should now update

3. Plucked from the Web is one journalist’s excellent weekly collection of links – real quality stuff... 

 4. Social Enterprise and cooperatives are the types of enterprise system I most favour and it was useful to get an update on their progress from a Social Europe article which pointed me in turn to links to the most recent comparative status report from the EC. The site also gives the various country reports – including the UK  

 5. Although I am currently subscribed to a French and German daily newspaper – Liberation and FAZ - I have to confess I don’t spend long with them and all too often activate the google translate. Those who speak English as their first language are, of course, to be found in several countries throughout the world – including the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada – each of which has a very distinctive culture. Who on earth, these days, could hope – as I discussed a few weeks ago - to understand present day USA?

But we do need to make more effort to see the world from the point of view of other countries – which are all too easily scapegoated (in the new sense that Walter Lippmann gave the word in 1921 and on which Eduard Bernays built in his “Crystallising Public Opinion”).

The Reading the China Dream website continues to do a great job on that front - with the translation of this long article about globalization and the pandemic which seems to be a pretty balanced assessment of the situation from the point of view of a Chinese intellectual

Footnote; This is an excerpt from the excellent intro to Bernay’s “Crystallising Public Opinion” 

As the United States entered “The Great War” in 1917, Walter Lippmann played a pivotal role in convincing President Woodrow Wilson to deploy a vast propaganda bureau designed to deflect widespread skepticism and bring public opinion on board.

After the war, Lippmann held fast to the idea that the American people were incapable of self-rule. For democracy to work, the machinery of the public mind needed to be understood and managed by an educated elite. This idea was central to Lippmann’s pivotal book, “Public Opinion” (1922), whose influence is evident in the title, and throughout the pages, of Bernays’s “Crystallizing Public Opinion”, which appeared the following year.

Lippmann’s “Public Opinion” remains one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Its diagnosis of “the public mind,” along with its ideas about how leaders can manage it, remains the most articulate statement regarding the exercise of power in the United States on to the present, and underlined the critical importance of what Lippmann termed “the manufacture of consent.”

 

Two of Lippmann’s ideas were particularly significant as Bernays crafted the job of the “public relations counsel.” The first of these was Lippmann’s argument that people’s view of reality was guided by the “pictures in their heads.” Living within the cocoons of their personal lives, and with minimal direct access to the outer world, most people’s sense of reality was shaped by what he termed “pseudo-environments.” While this meant that ordinary citizens were not able to intelligently comprehend the real issues of their world, their reliance on pseudo-environments provided educated elites with a powerful tool for effective leadership.

“The new psychology … the study of dreams, fantasies and rationalizations, has thrown light on how the pseudo-environment is put together,” he wrote. If patterns of perception could be unearthed, if scientists could uncover the “habits” of people’s eyes, they might also learn to engineer “pseudo-environments” which could persuade people to see their “larger political environment … more successfully.”

Perception management, he contended, would defend democracy from the prospect of capricious authoritarianism. Though it is itself an irrational force, the power of public opinion might be placed at the disposal of those who stood for workable law as against brute assertion.

 

A second idea that stands conspicuously within Bernays’ thinking, was Lippmann’s introduction of the modern usage of the word “stereotype”. Prior to the twenties, stereotype was a term relating to the printing trades, but Lippmann redefined it, describing stereotypes as a “repertory of fixed  impressions” that “we carry around in our heads,” rigid mental templates that frame individual experience in an increasingly anonymous world.

 

For Lippmann, stereotypes did not emanate from the individual, but were an inexorable by-product of their surrounding culture, a perceptual reflex that imposed itself between people’s eyes and the world they believed they were seeing.

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture. Unconsciously, but aggressively, people relied on them for a sense of where they belong in the world.

 

These preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, governs deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the

difference, so that slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange is sharply alien. As central components of people’s mental equipment, Lippmann described stereotypes as the “foundations” of their “universe.”