In light of the mind-bendingly effective media influence over people within the last 2 years, I decided to read Edward Bernays’ Propaganda. I also read a couple of books on traditional vaccines which happened to describe real-life examples of some of the methods described in Bernays’ book. Before getting into what I learned about propaganda from the books in the context of Covid, I think its important to understand the difference between dialectic and rhetoric.
Dialectic is the use of facts, rationality, evidence and logic to find truth through reasoned argumentation while rhetoric is the use of persuasive language to illicit an emotional response. Propaganda relies heavily on rhetoric as opposed to dialectic and is the systematized deployment of persuasive messaging to coerce public opinion and action towards a specific cause. When considering the nature of propaganda, it’s worth keeping in mind the root word propagate: it’s simply the propagation of an idea by any means necessary.
Throughout the Covid era, we have seen excessive use of rhetoric by the mainstream media through phrases such as ‘don’t kill granny’, ‘protect our NHS’, ‘new normal’, or ‘we’re all in this together’. We have also seen the use of faulty dialectic which postures as though its transmitting functional information but isn’t. One such example is the excessive use of graphs showing deaths with Covid as opposed to of Covid (deaths within 28 days of a positive test is a god-awful metric, especially when considering the nature of the PCR test). Another example is when media claim that unvaccinated are at higher risk by citing near-useless data which counts people who have had 1 injection within the last 14 days as ‘unvaccinated’. And no, endlessly repeating ‘safe and effective’ does not make it so.
Importantly, propaganda is not just found in media forms such as news, television, articles, movies, pamphlets, etc. Bernays (as the one who coined the term) emphasizes the importance of public relations for propagating an idea into the public. A public relations department can influence people in more subtle ways which go far beyond the traditional media sources one thinks of when they think of propaganda. Consider this doctor’s description of Gardasil’s public relations department marketing an HPV vaccine:
I first learned about the HPV vaccine in 2006, over a gourmet dinner with my colleagues paid for by a vaccine manufacturer. The event was at a fine restaurant in Portland. I rarely could find time to attend these presentations, but I really wanted to learn more about this new vaccine, and combining learning with a gourmet meal seemed like an efficient and pleasant way to do so. An infectious disease expert from Oregon Health and Science University, our state’s premier medical institution of higher learning and its only medical school, gave the presentation. For an hour a group of medical doctors and other health professionals ate dinner and drank on Merck’s nickel as we learned about the epidemiology of the human papilloma virus and how the leading strains responsible for cervical cancer were selected for the vaccine. We learned that the prelicensing trials showed that the vaccine was so effective that the researchers stopped the follow-up trial after less than four years to rush it to market. I enjoyed both the presentation and the charbroiled filet mignon with roasted red potatoes. I left feeling good about Gardasil, the only HPV vaccine on the market at the time. I felt optimistic that the vaccine would help us significantly reduce cervical cancers and genital warts… So I started giving the vaccine in my office. The direct marketing by Merck to the public was so effective that I had many parents calling wanting the vaccine. A win-win for everyone. Only it wasn’t. In my practice we saw a child lose consciousness within minutes of vaccination, which left me and my staff deeply concerned. I started doing extensive research to better understand the risks and benefits of this vaccine. (Dr. Paul Thomas, The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, pg. 275-276, )
Think of how many doctors were propagandized by this banquet, how many nurses were then influenced by those doctors, and then how many patients were then influenced by those nurses. The exponential effect at play here is immense, which is why Bernays writes that “there are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions” (Bernays, Propaganda, pg. 25). This is also why I emphasized earlier that propaganda isn’t always transmitted directly through media: it may be flowing top-down from a public relations council through entire medical departments into the patients, all unbeknownst to those who propagate the material. Bernays uses an example from education to illustrate a similar point: “there may be a handful of men who control the educational methods of the great majority of our schools, yet from another standpoint, every parent is a group leader with authority over his or her children.” (Bernays, pg. 37)
During the Covid era we were essentially told to sit down, shut up and ‘trust the experts’. However, even experts, like most, “are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their actions” (Bernays, pg. 45). Even experts are humans which, as a general rule, are not rational animals but rationalizing ones who justify post hoc. Even an expert could be one of those individuals which Aristotle described who is unpursuadable by dialectic and can only be influenced by rhetoric.
Public relations departments can have their hands in an incredibly wide range of institutions from schools, universities, media, governments, hospitals to businesses. You may have noticed that there was essentially unilateral agreement amongst mainstream Western institutions with regards to the actions to take in response to Covid. How? It seems clear that a public relations department was sent to these various key institutions in order to make sure that they had the appropriate signage, infrastructure, protocols and attitudes in place to reinforce the pandemic. If this sounds far-fetched, consider the fact that the Belarusian prime-minister has stated that the World Bank and IMF offered him a bribe of $940 million in ‘Covid relief Aid’ in exchange for him to impose strict a lockdown, mandate facemasks, enforce a police state and essentially crash the economy. Lower institutions and groups simply followed suit to the higher ones: “if you can influence the leaders… you automatically influence the group which they sway” (Bernays, pg. 49).
It cannot be overemphasized how much the widespread use of facemasks played a critical linchpin-type role in propagating the idea of a dangerous pandemic: every single person wearing a facemask essentially became a walking fear-billboard. The widespread use of facemasks alongside the remodelling of stores to include plexiglass, (anti)social distancing stickers, one-way systems and hand sanitizers definitively freed Covid propaganda from the confines of the TV screen and media into the physical, tangible world. Every time one of these pieces of Covid paraphernalia was encountered in the flesh, the idea of a deadly pandemic infiltrated and seeped into unsuspecting minds. Another tipping was reached once citizens and experts became inadvertent mouthpieces for public relations departments by bringing their talking points from the digital to the dinner-table.
These factors combined allowed Covid propaganda to dramatically break the fourth wall, transcending media barriers and unfettering it from the television into the tangible. Thus, it was not the actual death of people around them which made people perceive a deadly pandemic; it was the relentless media rhetoric, the strategic deployment of public relations into key institutions and the reshaping of our physical world which propagated the notion.