I have had this idea for some time that most of our collective thinking is centered around ‘brands’. Probably most of you think about a brand in reference to a consumer product or service such as KFC and Doritos or H&R Block and Metropolitan Life. A brand is just a name, a pronoun –nothing more. It does not have an inherent irrevocable meaning or quality. The Coca-Cola of today does not have the same taste as decades ago.
Think of a cattle brand. It is simply a unique identifier and has no universality. Any meaning it might have is only in the mind of its creator and was probably fanciful and not attached to a serious idea. It just identifies cows that belonged to the same collective or owner. Compared to modern product or service brands, identifying cattle was pretty straight forward.
Nowadays, everybody is frequently involved in rehashing the collective thinking. Common identifiers are used all the time – ‘the poor’, sustainable development, conservatives, etc. We all have a limited range of thoughts about any number of subjects such as some version of politics, religion, sports or some superficial groups of humans. Even thinking that you like to entertain alternative ideas is usually about as radical as drinking Dr. Pepper instead of Pepsi or Coke – just another manufactured option that isn’t quite as mainstream. Even outliers have brand options that they can adopt. True originality is rarely accepted or praised until it is shoehorned into a socially acceptable package.
The modern implementation of marketing, public relations and branding got codified by a nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward L. Bernays. His career started when he became a senior staff member of the ‘Committee of Public Information’ which was an independent agency of the US government created at the beginning of America’s involvement in WWI. Their mission was to create propaganda campaigns to generate public support for the war effort.
After the war, Bernays became a powerful figure in what became known as the field of public relations. He engineered many of the modern habits of our society, pitched products in very clever ways and was a world-renown propagandist. The use of the ‘press release’ and the cloak of ‘news’ became one of his favorite techniques to promulgate products and instilling in the public the ideas of businesses and governments.
From the book Propaganda (1928) by Bernays [downloadable via the Web]:
Chapter 1 – ORGANIZING CHAOS
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. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Looking critically through the past 100 years to the present does not leave much doubt about the potency of his vision or abilities or how these techniques and mindsets that have been implemented. These techniques have become standard operating procedure for business and government to make use of the media machine that now dominates our waking lives. In varying degrees we all live by the thoughts and notions given to us.
To get another broader view of Bernays’s influence and how our culture has been shaped deliberately by contrivance, consider viewing the BBC 4-part documentary series from 2002 by Adam Curtis called The Century of Self. Watch all four episodes here.
As monolithic as the propaganda machine seems to be sometimes the public players don’t always ‘get the memo’ or they choose to ignore the official version of reality for some reason. For example, consider General William Odom who was the National Security Agency Director under President Reagan:
In a major policy speech- America’s Strategic Paralysis, given in 2005 at Brown University for the Watson Institute for International Studies. “The Iraq War may turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in American history. In a mere 18 months we went from unprecedented levels of support after 9-11..to being one of the most hated countries…Turkey used to be one of strongest pro-US regimes, now we’re so unpopular, there’s a movie playing there- Metal Storm, about a war between US and Turkey. In addition to producing faulty intel and ties to Al Qaida, Bush made preposterous claim that toppling Saddam would open the way for liberal democracy in a very short time… Misunderstanding the character of American power, he dismissed the allies as a nuisance and failed to get the UN Security Council’s sanction… We must reinforce international law, not reject and ridicule it.”
Odom, now a Yale professor and Hudson Institute senior fellow, was director of the sprawling NSA (which monitors all communications) from 1985-88 under Reagan, and previously was Zbigniew Brzezinski’s assistant under Carter. His latest 2004 book is America’s Inadvertent Empire.
Even if the invasion had gone well, Odom says it wouldn’t have mattered: “The invasion wasn’t in our interests, it was in Iran’s interest, Al Qaida’s interest. Seeing America invade must have made Iranian leaders ecstatic. Iran’s hostility to Saddam was hard to exaggerate.. Iraq is now open to Al Qaida, which it never was before- it’s easier for terrorists to kill Americans there than in the US.. Neither our leaders or the mainstream media recognize the perversity of key US policies now begetting outcomes they were designed to prevent… 3 years later the US is bogged down in Iraq, pretending a Constitution has been put in place, while the civil war rages, Iran meddles, and Al Qaida swells its ranks with new recruits. The US Army is stretched to the breaking point and the majority of Americans have deep doubts. We have lost our capacity to lead and are in a state of crisis- diplomatic and military.”
Odom believes in an immediate phased withdrawal. “There isn’t anything we can do by staying there longer that will make this come out better. Every day we stay in, it gets worse and the price gets higher.”
He decried the “sophomoric and silly” titled war on terrorism. “Terrorism cannot be defeated because it’s not an enemy, it’s a tactic. A war against Al Qaida is sensible and supportable, but a war against a tactic is ludicrous and hurtful… a propaganda ploy to swindle others into supporting one’s own terrorism … and encourages prejudices against Muslims everywhere. What if we said, ‘Catholic Christian IRA hitmen’? ”
“The hypocrisy is deeper than this. By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism- in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.”
He said the fixation on spreading democracy was wrongheaded. “Holding elections is easy, creating stable constitutional orders is difficult. Only 8-9 of 50 new democracies created since the 40’s have a constitutional system. Voting only ratifies the constitutional deal that has been agreed to by elites- people or groups with enough power- that is guns and money, to violate the rules with impunity… Voting does not cause a breakthrough… One group will win out and take them off the path to a liberal breakthrough .. Spreading illiberal democracy without Constitutionalism is a very bad idea, if we care about civil liberties. We are getting that lesson again in Hamas.”
Odom called for a “great reduction in US oil consumption” and pilloried our “energy policy of no energy policy. As long as large sums of money roll into the coffers of a few Middle East states, a lot of it will leak into the hands of radical political activists. A “$2-3 a gallon tax could fund massive R+D programs for alternative fuels and generate a strong demand for greater fuel efficiency … Getting serious about nuclear power could also lessen our oil dependency.”
“No government that believes radical terrorist groups in Middle East are serious threat to us would do any less on energy policy.”
This guy was definitely not following the talking points of officialdom. If he made a splash in the media at the time, I am sure it was rather short lived.
The uses of notional words or phrases have become placeholders for abstractions that are not part of reality. An ‘energy policy’ or ‘war of drugs’ becomes a sad joke. It is not a specific action plan. It is a manifesto or a mission statement. Exactly what it means can be defined and re-defined as necessary. Odom discredited the War on Terror concept. Dictionaries published only a few decades ago only referenced nation states as being implementers of terror not extra-national groups with agendas and tactics that are hard to pin down.
The federal law ‘The No Child Left Behind Act’ is another example. This euphemistically named law is supposedly a plan to fix diverse educational systems in the US that historically have been only under state and local control. The notion of being ‘left behind’ implies a contest or being abandoned. In fact this faux compassion hardly goes beyond a photo op. The idea of education has been corseted into a national testing program whose results allow schools to continue to get federal money if the children answer sufficient questions correctly. This is the new definition of education.
In a similar vein is ‘The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act’. It is not about anything implied by the name. The emotive words ‘protection’, ‘affordable’ and ‘health’ mean very little in the nuts and bolts of the law. How that vague bureaucratic promise will be fulfilled, we have yet to see but there is no objective reason to think that people will become healthier because of it. What is considered affordable for a person, an insurance company or the government can certainly be molded and tweaked as necessary. As for real health care where sickness is not managed in a capital-intensive fashion with mounds of requisite paperwork – that is just too farfetched to imagine given our current collective and hypnotic mindset!
Which way do you want to go? The names of these roads mean nothing. They are only brands. Where they lead you is all that matters.
The Parallel Reality 
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