PS: Propaganda by Edward L. Bernays

This book is more a general survey of the use of propaganda in public relations and marketing in the US in the early twentieth century. It has value in observing the extent of the use of propaganda in various spheres of society up to 1928AD. Eighty-four years later here in the early twenty-first century we can contrast our current situation of consolidated control of media outlets, spin-doctoring, and general over-saturation of marketing to the point where we all must endure this time of universal deceit. Not using propaganda and simply speaking the truth is now a revolutionary act (to paraphrase Orwell), but I diagress...I was disappointed with this small book (now in PDF), because I was looking for a more practical exposition of the various elements of propaganda and how to best effectively use them to achieve the desired results. I shall have to look elsewhere for my on-going research. The book does have value for historical perspective and to give some general ideas on the more benign aspects of propaganda as used in public relations and marketing. Another valuable aspect of this book is the window into the elitest/oligarchic view of the masses as objects for manipulation that the professional propagandist holds; here illustrated by the following quote:

"No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders."

The book also brought to mind Asimov's idea of the psycho-historian in his Foundation Trilogy. On balance, the book is worth reading.

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Personal Update

I give thanks and praise to God for the small measure of peace He has given me recently. I am back to reading again and shall soon take up my keyboard and write again. I started to attend a writers group led by an excellent about-to-be published historical fiction writer. After taking to heart the constructive criticism of my writing, I realized that I needed to go back to the fundamentals of good prose. I am going all the way back to work on sentence structure, paragraph structure, and style/texture. Once I have improved beyond embarrassing myself, I hope to go back to the group.

Most of my past writing has been non-fiction essays or papers for school, and in recent times this blog. Now I am trying my hand at fiction writing--a completely different way of expression. When I was writing creatively in high school, I concentrated on poetry, and at the time I concurred with writers from olden times who believed that poetry was the highest form of literature. But we must fast-forward several hundred years later to the present day where the novel, graphic novel, and screenplay are the most popular media for telling stories. Writing fiction is more difficult than it first appears, and I must go through much failure before anyone will like my stories. I hope my Lord Jesus Christ will help me to persevere so that I can tell the many stories locked up inside my head; if the Lord allows, I hope to give greater glory to Him, by blessing readers with good reads. It is a tall order, and I still feel too much, but by His grace.....

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