So democracy is just about the best idea we've ever come up with for running a country or
so we have been told again and again but like any system it can be hacked.
It can be subverted, it can be compromised, broken and manipulated.
So if you examine democracy as a piece of software it's simple enough to spot the vulnerability.
A one hack democracy has been available, some argue, since World War I and it has been proven
to be incredibly effective.
The hack is called 'The Manufacture of Consent' and as best I can I'll attempt to demonstrate
how it works and how you might be playing an active part in the hack and not even know
about it.
But first we have to look at how democracy is supposed to work.
Democracy means decisions are made through votes, through participation, should we do
this or should we not do this?
But decisions can only be made with the best information available to the public so if
it was possible to control what information the public saw perhaps you could control what
the public think and to do this you use propaganda.
"Some of people's concerns have grown out of bogus claims that we plan to set up panels
of bureaucrats with the power to kill our senior citizens.
It is a lie plain and simple.
Nothing has drawn as much controversy as the so-called death panel.
The so-called death panel.
There is no death panel.
Death panels the lie of the year.
I heard that death panel argument from Sarah Palin.
Such a charge would be laughable.
Just another example of President Obama lying.
So cynical and irresponsible.
Deceiving the people.
Deception, does that include the death panel which were never real?"
It's really quite simple.
Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.
In a dictatorship it doesn't matter so much what people think because you can control
the population by force.
But in a democracy you can't really get away with controlling people by force so you have
to control what people think and this is the manufacture of consent.
It's the ability of powerful people to influence not only what you do but what you think.
So how does it work?
Well we'll start with this guy.
His name is Sigmund Freud and he's a very controversial figure but some of his psycho
analytic theories really do stand up and one was the subconscious mind - a part of the
mind that doesn't vocalise its thoughts and you're generally not even aware that it's
there.
Another thing that really stuck around was the idea that humans are irrational in what
motivates them and they're often not even aware of what drives them to act because of
their subconscious mind.
So then there is this guy Edward Bernays and he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and he
used all of Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses into doing things they wouldn't have
ordinarily done.
"One day Mr. George Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company called me in and
said we're losing half of our market and I said 'Why Mr. Hill?' he said there's a taboo
by men that does not permit women to smoke.
So I called up Dr. Brill who is one of the great disciples of my uncle Sigmund Freud
and asked him what cigarettes meant to women and he answered very quickly.
Cigarettes are torches of freedom to women.
They want to smoke to dramatise man's taboo against women by not permitting them to smoke
and that's why they want to smoke.
So I called up a debutante friend of mine asked her to get another friend and two young
men whom they liked and to walk from 34th street to 57th and back and forth lighting
torches of freedom to protest man's inhumanity to women by a taboo against smoking.
Next morning there wasn't a newspaper in the United States even the New York Times had
a front page story 'Debutantes light torches of freedom to protest man's inhumanity to
women by a taboo against smoking.'"
So how does this work in the mass media?
Well the first time these ideas made their way into the mass media was during World War
I in the United States because everybody at that time was kind of 'muhhh' about going
to war so they wanted to whip up some anti-German frenzy and it was incredibly successful and
an anti-German hysteria was fostered in American intellectuals at that time.
Walter Lipmann was a major player in that organisation, he was a journalist and he said
this,
"We can manufacture consent by the means of propaganda."
And by that what he means is we can get the people to do the things that we want through
propaganda.
Edward "I got ladies to smoke" Bernays was also heavily involved and he said "The more
intelligent members of the community can drive the population into whatever they want."
By what he called the "engineering of consent."
It is the "essence of democracy" he said.
So from the early part of the 20th Century you had some very clever people working in
some powerful and effective organisations suggesting that democracy is not about people
knowing what is going on in the world and offering their vote upon it instead it was
about a small number of people manipulating the will of the voting class to their own
ends.
Edward Bernays would later in 1954 turn a total lie into reality for political gain.
So in 1954 a company called the United Fruit company had got a little concerned about the
Guatemalan president.
They were concerned that this president's policy of giving land to the people was going
to make their business practice particularly difficult.
"Less than 3% of the landowners held more than 70% of the land.
So our bans nationalise more than 1.5 million acres including land owned by his own family
and turned it over to peasants."
So they employed Edward Bernays to smear the reputation of the Guatemalan president and
Bernays played into the huge fear of communism that was so apparent at that time.
"The American people recognise that the one real issue, not the phony issue, is the issue
of communism, corruption, all tied up with the Korean War.
It means that the American people are sick way down deep inside it must be going on."
He convinced the United Fruit company to find a top Latin-American politician to condemn
the actions of Jacob Arbenz.
He planted stories in the press about the "growing influence" of Guatemalan's communist.
He set up a network of intelligence agents to survey Guatemala and he then passed these
agents on as legitimate sources to journalists.
Despite all of this information being false his campaign worked.
It created an atmosphere of fear in the American public's mind and people feared for no good
reason the Guatemalan government which compelled a United States led intervention.
So the democratically elected President Arbenz was overthrown and replaced by a dictator.
The United Fruit company got what they wanted and it was Bernays manipulation of people's
fears which had helped them to get it.
So the tools that Bernays has developed are powerful ones.
They demonstrate just how malleable the masses are if carefully designed propaganda is placed
in the right place at the right time.
He also showed that people could be manipulated politically and not just manipulated into
buying things they don't really need.
His methods have been proven to be effective.
This is called the manufacture of consent where you absorb carefully designed information
much like the information presented by Edward Bernays and then you spew out an opinion or
a thought or an action which has been very carefully planned for.
Bernays believes this to be the "essence of democracy".
So what do you think?
Is this a good way to run a society?