Manufactured Consent, Fake News and Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

As we sift through the rubble on the eve of the inauguration of Donald Trump, most of us are feeling as if we have completely lost our bearings. Fake news, dossiers, Wikileaks, Buzzfeed, black is white and up is down. Everything is fake, nothing is true yet everything is so horrifyingly true that it seems fake. All of this is doubleplus ungood. We live in a terrified new world. How did we get here?

I needed to make a pilgrimage to some sort of ur-text about media. Naturally, I turned to Noam Chomsky and his book, Manufacturing Consent.

Then I got confused, scared and paranoid and put the book down for a week.

Here’s the thing: Noam Chomsky is inscrutable without the help of a weekly lecture and notes. He is, in other words, inaccessible and between that and the fact that he is both a loved and loathed academic rock star provocateur, Chomsky’s views can indeed be taken to be scary and slightly conspiratorial if not properly imbibed. I was beginning to feel pretty paranoid all round and I wanted to avoid this feeling. So I delved deeper.

Chomsky discusses the idea of “social engineering” which, because and despite its association with bad, evil cabals is an actual thing but how it is used and by whom is not necessarily well documented, outside the realm of the CIA/Cold War, Soviet, Nazi propaganda machine and the world of advertising and marketing which employed these techniques during their salad (read: Mad Men) days in the US in the 1950s and 1960s. But we knew that. These things are not done anymore. Right? Welcome to bonkersville.

Ideas of social engineering came forth from the ideas of Sigmund Freud, who famously suggested that humans have inner, unconscious, primitive drives. Freud and his proteges viewed the horrible actions of Nazi Germany as proof that humans could be manipulated into despicable group behavior by exploiting these drives through the use of propaganda. After Freud’s death, his daughter Anna continued his legacy and psychology and psychiatry became a fascination world over, but primarily in Europe and in the US. The focus was primarily a post-WW II analysis of how large groups of humans were persuaded to act as they did.

Freud had a nephew named Edward Bernays, known contemporarily as “the father of spin” who used the theories his uncle had developed and applied them to the idea that democracy was best kept stable through the use of “social engineering” — that if the Nazis and others could use a methodology of group behavior for evil — that America could use it for good. If Americans were motived by their external wants and desires and if these desires were cars, cigarettes, washers, fashion and other consumer goods, then Americans would be more patriotic and committed to democracy as a system. This approach is obviously troubled. Bernays felt that the masses could not be trusted to make good decisions and so they should be influenced and led to having the “right” mindset. Turns out Bernays may have had a point here, but let us not dwell.

It didn’t take long for Bernays to become quite famous for this work and he is considered the founder of the now common but at the time non-existent profession “public relations”. Bernays was quite conscious of that choice of words to describe changing attitudes about veritably anything. He believed that capitalism and democracy went necessarily and firmly hand-in-hand and that persuading Americans to be good consumers was part and parcel of maintaining a stable democracy. It was Bernays who pioneered the use of the word “engineered consent” — which Chomsky later called “manufactured consent”.

Adam Curtis’s documentary The Century of Self is quite interesting and at times a bit sinister, as Curtis is wont to be, but leaves off inclusion of other contributing factors (as Curtis is also wont to do) to American consumerism like the writings of De Tocqueville about capitalism and class in America and the deeply embedded cultural ideals of “the American dream” found in everything from our founding narrative to our folklore and popular culture. I was troubled by excluding these other factors, as they are significant in and of themselves.

Curtis is currently a media darling, ironically enough for his film Hypernormalisation, which, I’ll be honest here, is like a fever dream you might have on a bad camping trip and it left me with a headache behind my eye. But I digress.

I listened to a radio interview of a guy who sounds really reasonable talking about social engineering (if one can make that sound reasonable) until he puts forth that Curtis doesn’t go far enough in Century of the Self, he doesn’t really reveal who “they’ are. Ladies and gents, I want to see what the hell is going on in Bonkersville but when anybody starts saying “they”, that’s when I get very uncomfortable.

Be that (or they) as it may, I began to have a better grasp of the current media picture, past and present, in ways that were more fact-based and less based on BLIND TERROR.

Fight the good fight, that’s what I always say. Endeavor to persevere.

Turns out, there are indeed historical and present day truths that “manufactured” or “engineered” consent existed before, exists now and has an impact on society, its behavior and beliefs and I’m pretty sure we all think sadly about the Marlboro Man about now. The idea of manipulated media does not belong in the same category as Reptilian, 9/11/Roswell conspiracy theories. Experiments, some successful, some abject failures, with media meant to manipulate predates “fake news” by decades. Do you see a skeleton in that ice cube?

Many actors have indeed exploited the (at the time) new fields of psychology and group behavior theory to achieve any number outcomes. But there is no, one, organized “they” and humans continue to surprise pollsters, analysts and psychologists with unpredictable behavior.

All of this is exceedingly relevant at this current juncture, when America finds itself under siege by “fake news”, which is a monolithic term that fails to successfully describe the chain of events from the advent of the internet to media de-regulation to Moldavian bots to Donald Trump.

This clip from the Rubin Report, in which Dave Rubin interviews Eric Weinstein, presents definitions of the four kinds of fake news: 1) Narrative driven (example: mass media coverage of Hillary Clinton as the inevitable winner of the US presidential election) 2) Algorithmic driven (example: social media bubbles; Facebook feeds) 3) Institutional driven (funded think tanks, cherry picked studies presented as fact or as journalism) 4) False news (straight up fake news, Alex Jones, Moldavian bots generating authentic falsehoods.)

Media literacy programs as they currently exist became outdated virtually overnight on November 8th, 2016 and need a total overhaul to address the current challenges and techniques used today. Media literacy, or teaching critical thinking skills about media is not in widespread use in most of the world in the first place, given the widely varying exposure to media and given that it is, on many levels, directly subversive to states in power.

But we’re way past skulls in ice cubes or “hey kids, does this advertisement for a watch seem to promise a happier life?” No, things have changed. But they didn’t change overnight.

Here is where we find ourselves. We must take a clear-eyed look backward at the history and ideas of “social engineering” and how media has been a partner in these ideas, for everything from creating a consumer society to electing politicians. This poses important questions about group behavior, media influence, ethics in media and journalism and to a large degree — free will in societies. I don’t think anybody has THE answer right now, but the alarm bells are clanging and 2 + 2 is not 5.