MOONDEERS NOTES on Bernays' PROPAGANDA

The group has mental characteristics distinct from those of the individual, and is motivated by impulses and emotions which cannot be explained on the basis of what we know of individual psychology. In certain cases we can effect some change in public opinion with a fair degree of accuracy by operating a certain mechanism, just as the motorist can regulate the speed of his car by manipulating the flow of gasoline.

If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway. Because man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a herd, even when he is alone in his room with the curtains drawn. His mind retains the patterns which have been stamped on it by the group influences.

But when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must think for itself, it does so by means of clichés, pat* words or images which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences. Not many years ago, it was only necessary to tag a political candidate with the word interests to stampede millions of people into voting against him***. By playing upon an old cliché, or manipulating a new one, the propagandist can sometimes swing a whole mass of group emotions.

It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud who have pointed out that many of man's thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself. That men are very largely actuated by motives which they conceal from themselves, is as true of mass as of individual psychology.

* Suspicously appropriate
** Don't get why being tagged with interests would be politically damaging? What are you, a socialist?