Propaganda

by Edward L. Bernays

The myth of the detached manipulator and compliant crowd has, since the Twenties, also been abundantly re-echoed by academic students of mass suasion. “Convictions in a demagogue are a weakness and may prove a very serious injury,” asserted social psychologist Frederick C. Venn in 1928. “They are the last infirmity of some otherwise very splendid demagogues.”11 So it still is, often, with intellectual studies of successful rabble rousers—the analyst projecting his own rationality onto the firebrand in question, as if assuring us that he is too intelligent and self-possessed to fall for that spellbinder who excites the vulgar herd. Indeed, the same myth of the unmoved mover has been amply reconfirmed by some of history’s most effective agitators: Hitler liked to cast himself as a detached appraiser of his own frenzies at the podium, and Goebbels too believed himself to be completely cold inside, even as his oratory thrilled the crowd.