Motus Mentis

I’ve just read Propaganda (1928), by Edward Bernays. Bernays, who died in 1995 at the uncommonly advanced age of 103, was the founder of the modern era of marketing and public relations. (Some would call this a “science”, as it does have an empirical and experimental side.)

Bernays makes clear his opinion that the great mass of men are docile and unimaginative: that they do not form their own opinions, but must be led to ideas and preferences by experts who can guide them to a desired mindset by the precise manipulation of influences. (Bernays was himself was the modern-day prototype of such an expert, and made a very good living at it.) To him the public was a “herd”, and he was a shepherd-for-hire.

We read:

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. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

(Fact-check: mostly true. Have you heard of Bernays? )

On page 38, Bernays writes:

Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens of hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.

There is significant overlap here with what Sir Henry Sumner Maine, as we noted here five years ago, wrote about in Popular Government: the idea that, unlike an individual monarch, a sovereign multitude cannot be imagined to have a unitary will — and that even if it somehow did, it would have no means to express it in a single voice without some party, or individual, to act as a channel. Maine called the person who guides the masses into these channels “the Wire-puller”, and understood that, in the absence of such manipulation, the fulmination of the multitude would produce, as Bernays later said, “nothing but confusion”. Such is inevitably the nature of democracy, and Bernays generalized this understanding to include not just politics, but every aspect of public life. (Bernays even used the same expression — “wire-puller” — which makes me think he might well have read Maine’s book.)

In his book Bernays gave an example of how a “public-relations counsel” goes about stimulating the public’s interest in a product. To stimulate the sale of American silk, the manufacturer’s association was advised to draw on the influence of a major artist: the French ironworker Edgar Brandt. The silkmakers produced a collection of prints featuring Mr. Brandt’s designs, and the prints were then exhibited at the Louvre. Sales of American silk enjoyed a substantial boost because of this public connection with such a renowned and prestigious artist.

When I read this, I was a bit taken aback: I’d never even heard of Edgar Brandt. (Have you?) I looked him up; the man was a genius.

Look, for example, at this:

..and this:

…and this:

…and this:

And that’s not all that Edgar Brandt did. Have a look here. This was a truly extraordinary man, and enormously influential in his lifetime.

Which brings me to the real point of this post: the evanescence of all things mortal. I’ve asked quite a few people now — educated people — if they’ve ever heard of either Edward Bernays or Edgar Brandt. Not one had. Caught up by the same idea, a little while back I’d tried asking people — friends, acquaintances, ordinary folks — if they’d ever heard of Charles Evans Hughes, who lived from 1862 to 1948. Have you? Well, he was not an insignificant person: besides being the Republican presidential nominee in 1916, his resume also included Governor of New York, U.S. Secretary of State, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But nobody not a historian now seems to know that he ever even existed.

From Marcus Aurelius:

How soon will time cover all things, and how many it has covered already… How many after being celebrated by fame have been given up to oblivion; and how many who have celebrated the fame of others have long been dead?

In 2006, I wrote a post about my mother-in-law, Lily Phillips, and her memory of her father:

Lily is old now, in her eighties, and she is frail. Her mother and her father are of course long dead, and so far as she knows, everyone she knew as a girl is gone as well. Many, if not most, of their friends and relatives died in the Holocaust. It may well be that there is nobody else alive today who has any personal recollection of Lily and her family from those long-ago days in Austria.

When Lily dies, there will be no one. A mild-mannered Viennese gentleman who worked hard to take care of his little girl, and who liked to play the violin, will be no more than the subject of a third-hand story or two, and a face in a grainy photograph. After another generation or two, the distributed light of memory will fade altogether, and he will be gone.

We live in cities built by the forgotten, speaking in tongues framed by ghosts. We are the distant fruit of the passion of lovers now become dust.

We are like the waves of the sea – the water rises briefly, then subsides.