Silent Film Comedy and American Culture
By Alan Bilton 2013
Page 15 – 16
[Edward] Bernays’ critical idea that the mass media might be used as a tool to pacify and control the irrational and voracious unconscious of the great American public… which he considered a barbaric destructive crowd. He was suspicious of the very concept of democracy. Man could not be expected to make rational political decisions, he believed, because man was not governed by rational, lucid or reasonable impulses. Rather, civilization was merely the fragile (and temporary) subjugation of primeval sexual and aggressive forces, primitive reminders of our animal past that could erupt ant any point.
Vindicated by WW1 trenches, antisemitism, Bolsheviks
Bernays’ solution: if unconscious desires could be linked to the marketplace, urges both stimulated and satiated by images, products and luxury goods, then mass culture itself could be used as a tool to domesticate and pacify the energies of the subconscious. The masses had to be scientifically managed, public opinion strictly controlled: Bernays called this ‘the engineering of consent’. The key to this was not reason, but the irrational forces psychoanalysis had dragged into the light.
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