"There is a five-step process that has been used, with minor variations, to sell every major product and policy of the last century. It works for breakfast. It works for engagement rings. It works for regime change wars.
1. Simplify. Reduce a complicated reality to one sentence. No qualifiers.
2. Find the emotional lever - and make it visual. The best simple stories aren’t sentences. They’re images. A cocktail on the beach. A vial held up to the light. A mushroom cloud over a city. The image arrives before the critical mind can engage.
3. Route through authority. Doctors, institutions, heads of state. The claim doesn’t need to be true. It needs to come from someone trusted.
4. Make questioning it feel wrong. Frame the story so that scepticism looks like moral failure.
5. Act before verification. By the time anyone checks the facts, the action is irreversible.
This process was first documented in 1928 by a man named Edward Bernays, in a book titled _Propaganda. He later rebranded the concept as “public relations,” which was itself a masterclass in the discipline he was naming."
Just a note for the reader: Think about how this article/blog is presented: Frame work, a number of historically ordered examples from the US, then a present example (conflict with Iran).
1. The framework presents an organizing structure or principle.
2. The historical examples provide evidence of (1).
3. The current conflict is supposed to be seen as analogous to (2) and thus be another example of (1).
Questions or concerns we might have:
i. Are there other organizing or interpretive frameworks missing that could have been mentioned in (1)? It seems plausible there could be.
ii. Why does the analysis of some of the historical examples omit key details about just how the example fits the framework? For instance, the first example for bacon says: "Steps 1-3, clean execution. Today, 70% of bacon consumed in the United States is eaten at breakfast. The “traditional American breakfast” was invented by one man in a PR office." No articulation of steps 4 and 5, so is there reason to double this is necessarily an example of (1).
iii. What work does providing a list of historical examples to? Plausibly, the reader thinks the framework in (1) is manipulative in some manner and thus wrong to implement. So, by providing a historical examples from past to present, from consumer choices to wars, readers are presented with an amplification of emotional stakes and moral wrongness: stakes and wrongness increase from bad (breakfast choice manipulation) to worse (support for wars, killings). Moreover, the current conflict (3) presented last in the list of historical examples arguably connotes as a kind of historical inevitability (one that albeit shouldn't be one), which brings the emotional resonance and sense of wrong to crescendo.
What I've written here doesn't allow us to conclude the author is wrong. What I take it to do is give us pause to think about why it might have seemed plausible, why it might have resonated with the reader, and to ask whether its structure and mode of presentation (content selection) are doing more evidentiary work than it first appears.
> I find this simultaneously the most useful and the most disturbing thing I’ve ever learned about human beings. Useful because - if you can see the playbook - you can choose not to be played. Disturbing because the playbook has been visible for a century, and we keep falling for it anyway.
If you can see the playbook, you can choose not to be played. But you will then see billions of people being played anyway. And then, you will be played again because someone will improve on that playbook so you won't see it in time to do anything.
Obvious solution: make children learn about countering techniques of manipulation at school. Result: a nation of anarchists?
The prologue summary are just awesome:
"There is a five-step process that has been used, with minor variations, to sell every major product and policy of the last century. It works for breakfast. It works for engagement rings. It works for regime change wars.
1. Simplify. Reduce a complicated reality to one sentence. No qualifiers.
2. Find the emotional lever - and make it visual. The best simple stories aren’t sentences. They’re images. A cocktail on the beach. A vial held up to the light. A mushroom cloud over a city. The image arrives before the critical mind can engage.
3. Route through authority. Doctors, institutions, heads of state. The claim doesn’t need to be true. It needs to come from someone trusted.
4. Make questioning it feel wrong. Frame the story so that scepticism looks like moral failure.
5. Act before verification. By the time anyone checks the facts, the action is irreversible.
This process was first documented in 1928 by a man named Edward Bernays, in a book titled _Propaganda. He later rebranded the concept as “public relations,” which was itself a masterclass in the discipline he was naming."
> 4. Make questioning it feel wrong. Frame the story so that scepticism looks like moral failure.
You antisemite!
Just a note for the reader: Think about how this article/blog is presented: Frame work, a number of historically ordered examples from the US, then a present example (conflict with Iran).
1. The framework presents an organizing structure or principle. 2. The historical examples provide evidence of (1). 3. The current conflict is supposed to be seen as analogous to (2) and thus be another example of (1).
Questions or concerns we might have: i. Are there other organizing or interpretive frameworks missing that could have been mentioned in (1)? It seems plausible there could be.
ii. Why does the analysis of some of the historical examples omit key details about just how the example fits the framework? For instance, the first example for bacon says: "Steps 1-3, clean execution. Today, 70% of bacon consumed in the United States is eaten at breakfast. The “traditional American breakfast” was invented by one man in a PR office." No articulation of steps 4 and 5, so is there reason to double this is necessarily an example of (1).
iii. What work does providing a list of historical examples to? Plausibly, the reader thinks the framework in (1) is manipulative in some manner and thus wrong to implement. So, by providing a historical examples from past to present, from consumer choices to wars, readers are presented with an amplification of emotional stakes and moral wrongness: stakes and wrongness increase from bad (breakfast choice manipulation) to worse (support for wars, killings). Moreover, the current conflict (3) presented last in the list of historical examples arguably connotes as a kind of historical inevitability (one that albeit shouldn't be one), which brings the emotional resonance and sense of wrong to crescendo.
What I've written here doesn't allow us to conclude the author is wrong. What I take it to do is give us pause to think about why it might have seemed plausible, why it might have resonated with the reader, and to ask whether its structure and mode of presentation (content selection) are doing more evidentiary work than it first appears.
Quoting last paragraph of article:
> It works every time.
> I find this simultaneously the most useful and the most disturbing thing I’ve ever learned about human beings. Useful because - if you can see the playbook - you can choose not to be played. Disturbing because the playbook has been visible for a century, and we keep falling for it anyway.
If you can see the playbook, you can choose not to be played. But you will then see billions of people being played anyway. And then, you will be played again because someone will improve on that playbook so you won't see it in time to do anything.
Obvious solution: make children learn about countering techniques of manipulation at school. Result: a nation of anarchists?
> Result: a nation of anarchists?
From your lips to God's ears.
Related, by Adam Curtis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
It's on YT...
Well written article. PR runs the show in this age.
Operation Epstein's Fury