Book Excerpt Of The Week, "The Assault On Reason" By: Al Gore

"Psychology-based communication was first developed by another Austrian of Hitler's generation, Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew. Bernays adapted the revolutionary insights of his uncle to create the modern science of mass persuasion- based not on reason, but on the manipulation of subconscious feelings and impulses. Bernays, considered the father of public relations, left Austria ling before the Nazi rise to power and immigrated to the United States, where he transformed commercial advertising and began a similar transformation of political persuasion.

The combination of psychologically driven public relations and electronic mass media broadcasting led to modern propaganda. Reason was displaced not only by the substitution of broadcasting for print, but also by the science of PR as the principal language by which communication occurs in the public forum- for both commercial and political purposes.

One of Bernays' first breakthroughs involved his work for the American Tobacco Company, when he interviewed psychoanalysts to discover the reason women in the 1920s would not smoke cigarettes. Upon learning their view that women of the era saw cigarettes as phallic symbols of male power and thus inappropriate for women, Bernays hired a group of women to dress and act as suffragists. They marched down New York's Fifth Avenue in a parade for women's rights and upon passing news photographers pulled out and lit cigarettes, proclaiming them 'torches of freedom.' The strategy worked to break women's resistance to cigarettes.

A second victory involved another corporate client, Betty Crocker. Bernays discovered that women were not buying cake mixes because they felt ashamed to present their husbands with a cake that required so little work. Bernays advised changing the formula to require the addition of a fresh egg, and once again, the strategy worked. Women felt they had done enough to deserve praise for their baking and the cake mix began to sell robustly.

Bernays' business partner,Paul Mazur, understood the larger significance of the new techniques of mass persuasion. 'We must shift America from a needs to desire culture,' Mazur said. 'People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man's desire must overshadow his needs...'

Inevitably, Bernays also began to apply his psychological and mass marketing insights to the sale of political ideas." -From, "The Assault On Reason" By: Al Gore