By Lida Prypchan
An attempt to influence opinion (1)
It is possible to conceive of a world dominated by an invisible tyranny that wears the trappings of democratic government. (Kenneth Boulding)
We are sold the image of a political candidate just as we are sold a commercial product. Adlai Stevenson complained about precisely this during the 1952 U.S. elections when he was defeated by General Eisenhower. Stevenson said, “The idea that political candidates for the highest office can be marketed like breakfast cereal… is the ultimate indignity of the political process.” Not only is it an indignity, it is also highly dangerous.
It is dangerous because as surely as we are in the era of the masses, so are we also in the era of the “isolated” individual. We should not heedlessly dismiss the idea of man as an isolated being – this solitary type has his roots back in history. To understand this, we should look at the two main elements that characterize man’s evolution during the nineteenth century: firstly, the structural and spiritual standardization of the world and secondly the demographical and environmental evolution that occurred. The first aspect deals with how man became a participant in public life, and the second with the tragic consequence of the resultant accumulation and impersonality: the breakdown of this traditional units (the family, for example). The upshot of all this was that since man felt isolated and disoriented, he sought refuge in the false sense of human warmth emanating from the masses. People who live in huge impersonal cities experience fear: fear of unemployment, of war and of poverty. Propagandists, the political image-builders, take advantage of this situation. This is why political propaganda has gained a bad name. But I believe the error lays not so much in political propaganda and those who are behind it, but rather in the concept of man within society. To explain what I mean, let’s take Aldous Huxley’s famous vision of the future in his Brave New World. In this book Huxley satirized the preconditioned mind, where conditioning begins as soon as a child is born and continues throughout school, society and numerous other institutions. If we are trained from birth like puppy dogs in a cage, it’s logical for us to be accustomed to servitude. On the other hand, the longer we savor freedom the more self-willed we become. Human beings should not be pigeonholed or typecast – they should be taught to reason, not to accept. Then they could develop the ability to avoid swallowing so many myths, which are nothing but “seductive havens where internal effort is replaced by comfortable subservience.”
Political propaganda, opinion manipulation, or whatever you’d like to call it, is not an invention of the twentieth century. Ever since political rivalry has existed, that is, since the beginning of time, propaganda has existed and played a role. Here we are reminded of Demosthenes, Philip, Cicero, Catiline, Napoleon, Lenin and Hitler. Napoleon was a true artist in this field. He had what he himself called his “Bureau of Public Opinion” for “creating political trends to order,” but his impact was certainly nothing compared to that of Lenin and Hitler. These two masterminds of propaganda left a deep impression on our recent history, but in a very different way.
After 1950 political propaganda took a giant leap forward, based on the findings of Pavlov, Freud and Riesman as well as Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn – Pavlov with his conditioned responses, Freud with his paternal images, Riesman and his concept of the modern North American voter as a spectator consumer of politics, and B. B. D. and O. and their theory of mass merchandising.
We must add to this the accepted concept of politics and opinion. It’s well-known that for Freud there was no such thing as basic social instinct; an individual’s “world” is limited to a small group of people who have acquired “supreme importance” among themselves. Gallup has confirmed this: “The tendency of the majority must be interpreted as the tendency to follow, not the opinion of the population in general, but rather that of the small intimate group that represents the extremely limited world of the voter.”
In election campaigns, publicity agents manipulate the candidate’s image more than anything else. It’s all about cult of personality, cult of the paternal figure. Eugene Burdick who wrote The Ninth Wave, which deals with irrational political trends, gives an excellent summary of the perfect President: “An extremely likeable man, who inspires confidence rather than admiration and is not so perfect that he seems unreal; he must have accomplished things in fields other than the political arena and must possess a genuine sense of humor.” “I’m just one of many,” or “Put yourself in my place,” are phrases to which statesmen in democratic countries frequently resort.
