Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [34]
Just as ominously, the war unleashed radical new forms of mass propaganda and mass manipulation that made it possible to engineer public opinion through the technological innovations of radio, cinema, photography, cheap mass publications, and graphic art. Mass propaganda astutely exploited the new understanding of mass psychology, led by thinkers such as Gustave Le Bon (The Crowd), Wilfred Trotter (Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War), Graham Wallace (Human Nature in Politics), and Gabriel Tarde (On Opinion and Conversation), as well as the work of pioneering psychologists such as Sigmund Freud.
The war destroyed values and self-perceptions that had once characterized American life and replaced them with fear, distrust, and the hedonism of the consumer society. The new mass propaganda, designed to appeal to emotions rather than disseminate facts, proved adept at driving competing ideas and values underground. It effectively vilified all who did not speak in the language imparted to the public by corporations and the state. For these reasons, it presaged a profound cultural and political shift. It snuffed out a brief and robust period of reform in American history, one that had seen mass movements, enraged at the abuses of an American oligarchy, sweep across the country and demand profound change. The rise of mass propaganda, made possible by industrial warfare, effectively killed populism.
The political upheavals in the years before the war had put numerous populists and reformers in positions of power, including the election of Socialist mayors in cities such as Milwaukee and Schenectady. While a few of these would linger until the 1950s, the war would chart a new course for the country. War propaganda not only bolstered support for the war—including among progressives and intellectuals—but also discredited dissidents and reformers as traitors.
The rise of mass propaganda signalled the primacy of Freud, who had discovered that the manipulation of powerful myths and images, playing to subconscious fears and desires, could lead men and women to embrace their own subjugation and even self-destruction. What Freud and the great investigators of mass psychology realized was that the emotions were not subordinate to reason. If anything, it was the reverse. Prior to World War I, much current American thinking, following post-Enlightenment European thought, relied on the assumption that reason could rule, that debate in the public sphere was driven most powerfully and effectively by strong, rational underpinnings. The dream was of a “pure dialectic,” embodied in data, facts, postulates, deduction, or induction, stripped of emotion and conditioning. What Freud and the mass psychologists, and in turn, their godchildren, the mass propagandists, had rediscovered was a deep psychological truth grasped first and perhaps best by the philosophers and rhetoricians of Classical Greece. Greek philosophers did celebrate reason as nous, as a reflection of divine truth enacted in the human mind. But the Greek philosophers were trained in rhetoric before dialectics. Logical argumentation had to have a rhetorical, emotional resonance if it were to sway and shape public opinion. On the Pynx of Athens and later in the Forum of Rome, rhetors exercised powers of persuasion that appealed to emotions, alongside the appeal to reason and fact. Many Classical philosophers, beginning with Plato, warned that the appeal to emotion was only as good as the man making the appeal. But in twentieth-century mass propaganda, this warning was cast aside. The idea was to sway, and to use any means to do it. The moral aspect of public persuasion was pushed aside in pursuit of the targeted arousal of mass emotions. As the Greeks already knew, and