Are Your Thoughts Your Own?

Back when I was a student taking high-school English, the big literary question was free will. Do we have any? Or is everything we do predestined by God? Was Judas Iscariot really guilty of selling out Jesus? Or was he simply fulfilling a destiny over which he had no choice?

Today's world is far more secular than the one I grew up in. But I still wonder to what extent we are pilots of our own vessels. What I see out there doesn't appear to be original thought so much as received wisdom. Or talking points as they're called, that are circulated, ingested, and regurgitated.

Are we really the free thinkers we fancy ourselves to be? Or are we just mind-controlled zombies?

That's a depressing thought. For comfort, I turn to Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and father of the public relations industry. Here's a passage from Bernays' classic 1928 book, Propaganda...

Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought.

Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.

So is Bernays saying propaganda is evil? No, not at all. On the contrary, he considered it a public service and a necessary mechanism of democracy. How could the common man be expected to keep up without guidance from a small core of persuasive experts? This group he called the "invisible government" of which Bernays considered himself a member.

And what did Bernays do with his seat in this invisible government?

Well, in 1929 when he worked for the American Tobacco Company, Bernays launched a campaign called Torches of Freedom. In those days, it was taboo for women to smoke in public. Bernays changed that by linking smoking with women's liberation in the young female mind.

As studies emerged linking smoking to cancer, Bernays ran massive disinformation campaigns to drown out any misgivings. And yet, Bernays' own daughter recalled him breaking up Mother's cigarettes and flushing them down the toilet.

In the 1950s, one of Bernays' clients was United Fruit which was at odds with the newly-elected democratic government of Guatemala. Much has been written about those times but the issue comes down to this: Guatemala wanted to lift its people out of poverty, while United Fruit wanted the country to remain a literal banana republic under its control.

The Guatemalan government undertook a program to expropriate large holdings of uncultivated land and redistribute it among the peasant class to farm. The former owners would be reimbursed according to the value they had declared for tax purposes. The debt would be repaid over time from the proceeds of farming.

In response, United Fruit hired Bernays who launched a massive campaign to convince America that democratic Guatemala was really communist and something needed to be done. In time, President Eisenhower approved a CIA-led regime change, which brought decades of violent dictatorship, bloody civil war, and a Mayan genocide.

So, what do you say? Should we start cultivating our own thoughts and plans? Or just keep swallowing whatever the invisible government is putting out for us?