Your Thoughts Are Not Your Own Volume Two: Marketing, Movies and Music

by Neil Sanders

By as early as 1928, Edward Bernays already saw the immense potential of film to be used as a tool to standardize thought: “The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions. The motion picture avails itself only of ideas and facts which are in vogue. As the newspaper seeks to purvey news, it seeks to purvey entertainment.” Bernays summarised: “As civilizations becomes more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which the public opinion can be regimented.”