Strategy (62 page)

As he reflected on the Dreyfus affair in France during the 1890s (the controversy surrounding a Jewish officer's conviction of spying for Germany), Tarde observed a collective opinion developing without individuals gathering together. From this came his view of the public as a “spiritual collectivity, a dispersion of individuals who are physically separated and whose cohesion is entirely mental.”
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For this reason he could not agree “with that solid writer, Dr. Le Bon, that this was ‘the age of the crowd.' ” It was the “age of the public, or the publics—and that is quite different.”
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An individual could only join one crowd but could be part of many publics. A crowd might be excitable but a public would be less emotional with calmer opinions.

Park developed this idea of a dichotomy between crowds—homogenous, simple, and impulsive, responding emotionally to perceptions of events—and
the much more admirable public—heterogeneous and critical, addressing facts, comfortable with complexity. The hope for an ordered and progressive society depended on the public, which “precisely because it is composed of individuals with different opinions—is guided by prudence and rational reflection.”
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Once the public ceased to be critical, it became tantamount to a crowd, with all feelings moving in the same direction.

Whether the crowd or the public would predominate depended on the role of the media. The so-called muckraking journalists saw the newspapers as an agent of enlightenment and democracy. “Publicity,” wrote one in the 1880s, is “the great moral disinfectant.”
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But if the media lost its higher role and pandered to the crowd, the public could be pulled down with it. The possibility that the suggestibility of crowds could be magnified rather than countered was underlined by the experience of the First World War. The U.S. Government's Committee on Public Information (CPI), set up as the country entered the war in 1917, impressed all those involved with the apparent ease with which a bellicose opinion could be shaped by using every available means to put out the word about the danger of German militarism and the need for a robust response. Led by former progressive journalist George Creely, who famously observed that “people do not live by bread alone: they live mostly by catch phrases,” the CPI used all media from townhall meetings to movies to get across core messages.

One of those who had urged the formation of the CPI, was involved in its activities, and was impressed by its performance was Walter Lippmann.
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A precocious, high-minded, articulate, and influential journalist, Lippmann was alive to the intellectual currents of the time. Before the war, he had struck up a friendship with the elderly William James and was intrigued by the psychoanalytical movement's insights regarding the development of consciousness and the sources of irrationality. He had become uneasy about how the popular press was always pointing to conspiracies and searching for sensationalist revelations. He saw this as fomenting unrest and making rational debate impossible. In 1922 he published his landmark book
Public Opinion
. What people knew, he argued, was only through a “picture in their heads” of the “pseudo-environment” to be found between people and their real environment. Understanding the way these pictures were formed, sustained, and challenged was important because it affected behavior. “But because it
is
behavior,” Lippmann observed, “the consequences, if they are acts, operate not in the pseudo-environment where the behavior is stimulated, but in the real environment where action eventuates.” Or, as Chicago sociologist William Thomas put it a few years later in a theorem which came to bear his name: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
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Lippmann also noted the extent to which individuals clung on to their “system of stereotypes” because it provided an “ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves.” Because of this,

any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the foundations of the universe. It is an attack upon the foundations of OUR universe, and, where big things are at stake, we do not readily admit that there is any distinction between our universe and the universe. A world which turns out to be one in which those we honor are unworthy, and those we despise are noble, is nerve-racking. There is anarchy if our order of precedence is not the only possible one.
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In addition to the familiar perceptual problems of prejudicial stereotypes, most people lacked the time and the inclination to engage in a more disciplined search for the truth. If they relied on newspapers, then what they got was selective and simplified.

Some form of picture was unavoidable but, picking up on a standard progressive theme, Lippmann feared that the pictures would be drawn by sectional interests or by a press which played to natural selfishness, supported by dubious advertising. All this meant that “public opinion” was suspect. Contrary to the notion of a “common will” emerging naturally from the people, public opinion in practice was a construct and democratic consent could therefore be manufactured. The test of good government was not the degree of public participation in the process but the quality of the output. Unlike Dewey, who was confident that people were the best judges of their own interests and participatory democracy the best means of creating a sense of shared community, Lippmann was firmly on the side of representative democracy. He was, however, with Dewey in his optimism about science, including the social sciences, as a motor of progress.

Lippmann regretted that the social scientist was not yet playing this role, whereas the engineer had been doing so for some time. He put this down to a lack of confidence. The social scientist was unable to “prove his theories before offering them to the public,” yet “if his advice is followed, and he is wrong, the consequences may be incalculable. He is in the nature of things far more responsible, and far less certain.” Social scientists were therefore explaining decisions already taken but not influencing those yet to be taken. “The real sequence,” according to Lippmann, “should be one where the disinterested expert first finds and formulates the facts for the man of action, and later makes what wisdom he can out of comparison between the decision, which he understands, and the facts, which he organized.” They could bring another
dimension to government, representing “the unseen” with a “constituency of intangibles,” covering “events that are out of sight, mute people, unborn people, relations between things and people.” Contrary to later suggestions that he wanted experts to rule, Lippmann's prescription went no further than encouraging them to tutor governments in what would make for wise policy. Nor was he arguing that experts were superior to ordinary people. They were required not so much as a counter to the masses but to the standard progressive bugbears—the urban party machines, the big trusts, and a press that was driven more by advertising revenue than a mission to inform.
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One form of expertise that he saw coming to the fore was “persuasion” as “a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government.” He continued with what turned out to be understatement: “None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how we create consent will alter every political premise.” Like many others writing on this topic at this time, he was prepared to describe this as “propaganda” without necessarily implying a sinister meaning. The term's origins lay in the Catholic Church's methods of taking its teaching to those who were not yet converted. The standard definition of the time simply saw propaganda as any method “for the propagation of a particular doctrine or practice.”

During the Great War, it had acquired its more sinister meaning as accusations were made of deliberate lying in order to bolster morale or to confuse or slander enemies. Harold Lasswell, who was to become a major figure in U.S. political science, made his name with a theory of propaganda. By his definition it involved “the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols” and was socially “indispensable” given the unavoidable gap between the public and the elite. He deplored the negative connotations the concept had acquired. It was no more moral or immoral than a “pump handle.” It was necessary because individuals were poor judges of their own interests and so had to be helped by officially sanctioned communication. With experts on the mobilization of opinion, what could once “be done by violence and intimidation must now be done by argument and persuasion.”
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The strategic challenge for the propagandist was “to intensify the attitudes favorable to his purpose, to reverse the attitudes hostile to it, and to attract the indifferent, or, at the worst, to prevent them from assuming a hostile bent.”

This sense of a struggle between reason and emotion, evident in the individual but now elevated to a feature of a whole society, was become increasingly influenced by Freudian theories. Freud challenged the distinction between individual and group psychology. After the war he moved on from
his dialectic of the unconscious and the conscious to a more complex structure.
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Now he identified the “Id,” reflecting those unconscious, instinctual, passionate, amoral, disorganized aspects of the personality, seeking pleasure, “a cauldron full of seething excitations,” which the organized, conscious, knowing ego seeks to manage by bringing in line with reality. It represented reason and common sense, acting on the Id like “a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse.” Its task was complicated by the super-ego, which brought to bear considerations of conscience and morality—a legacy of the father figure and a reflection of external influences such as teachers—posing socially appropriate behavior against whatever instant gratification was sought by the Id.

An example of Freud's influence was William Trotter, a British surgeon who became an early follower. In 1916, Trotter published his book on the “herd instinct,” based on articles written in 1908 and 1909 but reinforced by the experience of war. Trotter argued that human beings were naturally gregarious, and so were insecure and feared loneliness. This led to a fourth instinct—in addition to self-preservation, nutrition, and sex—which had the distinction of exercising “a controlling power upon the individual from without” so that it impelled people to do things they would not otherwise wish to do. Trotter saw this as a source of the tension between individuals and society, between commonsense and prevailing norms, the source of senses of sin and guilt. The idea of the “mass mind” and a fascination with the psychology of crowds was not new, but those who had written on it before were apt to see it as a negative force, the source of mob actions, whereas Trotter encouraged a more positive view. Freud respected Trotter's views, although he judged that they took too little account of the role of leadership and the need of members of a group to be “loved” by their leader.
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The practical possibilities of these various ideas were demonstrated by Edward Bernays, the best available example of the working propagandist at this time. He was a nephew of Sigmund Freud and he traded on this relationship when explaining his understanding of emotions and irrationality. After getting involved in the CPI, Bernays set himself up in 1919 as a public relations counsel (he was the first to use the descriptor). Though his methods were all his own, both Lippmann and Freud were major influences on his thinking. Politically he was a progressive and optimistic that the techniques he was describing could be used for the betterment of society, although this optimism was shaken when he discovered that Goebbels's library contained his books. His first book,
Crystallizing Public Opinion
, was published in 1923, a year after Lippmann's
Public Opinion
, from which Bernays quoted liberally. He sought to demonstrate that his was a respectable profession with serious
credentials, rooted in social science and psychiatry. In a complex society, governments, corporations, parties, charities, and a number of other groups were constantly striving to gain favor and advantage. Even if they had wanted to ignore public opinion, the public had an interest in what they were up to. He noted that large corporations and labor unions were now seen as “semi-public services” and that the public, now enjoying the benefits of education and democracy, expected a voice in their conduct. Given this, there was a requirement for expert advice about how to do this effectively.
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This much in Bernay's argument was unexceptional. What was striking was the blunt language he used to describe what public relations professionals could offer, and the presumption of success. In
Crystallizing Public Opinion
, Bernays explained how “the natural inherent flexibility of individual human nature” made it possible for governments to “regiment the mind like the military regiments the body.” He opened a 1928 book, entitled
Propaganda
, by asserting that: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” Those responsible constituted “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” As a result, “we are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” He argued for a strict ethical code for his profession, including that the needs of society as a whole come first. He insisted that the masses could not be made to act against their core interests and that political leaders were by far the most important influences when it came to creating “the established point of view.” Nonetheless, his formulations aggravated the sense of an affront to democracy. If, as Lippmann also appeared to be saying, opinions were shaped from the top down, this undermined the view that in democracies, power should come from the bottom up. The conclusion that Bernays drew from this was that by understanding the “mechanism and motives of the group mind” it might be possible “to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.” This he thought could be done “at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.”
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