Noam Chomsky

Deconstructing Edward Bernays’ ‘Propaganda’ (Part 10)

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“In the ethical sense, propaganda bears the same relation to education as to business or politics. It may be abused. It may be used to overadvertise an institution and to create in the public mind artificial values. There can be no absolute guarantee against its misuse.” E Bernays

EdwardBernays

Part 10 of Evans’ 13-part mini-series dissecting Edward Bernays’ seminal text ‘Propaganda” focuses on Chapter 8 (‘Propaganda for Education’), which alludes to themes of standardized testing, the dichotomy between theoretical and practical knowledge, and the general limitations of Educational systems.

Did Edward Bernays’ contempt for ‘ordinary’ people influence his views on Education? Find out in our latest episode!

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Chapter 8 Transcript – “Propaganda For Education”

Education is not securing its proper share of public interest. The public school system, materially and financially, is being adequately supported. There is marked eagerness for a college education, and a vague aspiration for culture, expressed in innumerable courses and lectures. The public is not cognizant of the real value of education, and does not realize that education as a social force is not receiving the kind of attention it has the right to expect in a democracy.

It is felt, for example, that education is entitled to more space in the newspapers; that well informed discussion of education hardly exists; that unless such an issue as the Gary School system is created, or outside of an occasional discussion, such as that aroused over Harvard’s decision to establish a school of business, education does not attract the active interest of the public.

There are a number of reasons for this condition. First of all, there is the fact that the educator has been trained to stimulate to thought the individual students in his classroom, but has not been trained as an educator at large of the public. Continue reading →

Deconstructing Edward Bernays’ ‘Propaganda’ (Part 5)

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“If you turn on a television set, you see in one minute that the goal of advertising is to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices.” ~Noam Chomsky

EdwardBernaysGuy Evans examines Chapter 5 of Edward Bernays’ ‘Propaganda’. Chapter 5 features several recurring topics; notably, aspirational culture, the manufacture of new customers, and controlling the public mind.

Guy looks at each of these key themes, and with the help of Mad Men‘s Don Draper investigates the strength of the emotional connection between ourselves and the products that we buy.

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Chapter 5 Transcript – “Business And The Public”

THE relationship between business and the public has become closer in the past few decades. Business to-day is taking the public into partnership. A number of causes, some economic, others due to the growing public understanding of business and the public interest in business, have produced this situation. Business realizes that its relationship to the public is not confined to the manufacture and sale of a given product, but includes at the same time the selling of itself and of all those things for which it stands in the public mind.

Twenty or twenty-five years ago, business sought to run its own affairs regardless of the public. The reaction was the muck-raking period, in which a multitude of sins were, justly and unjustly, laid to the charge of the interests. In the face of an aroused public conscience the large corporations were obliged to renounce their contention that their affairs were nobody’s business. If to-day big business were to seek to throttle the public, a new reaction similar to that of twenty years ago would take place and the public would rise and try to throttle big business with restrictive laws. Business is conscious of the public’s conscience. This consciousness has led to a healthy cooperation. Continue reading →

Deconstructing Edward Bernays’ ‘Propaganda’ (Part 3)

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“A presidential candidate may be ‘drafted’ in response to ‘overwhelming popular demand’, but it is well known that his name may be decided upon by half a dozen men sitting around a table in a hotel room.” – Edward Bernays

EdwardBernaysGuy Evans examines Chapter 3 of Edward Bernays’ seminal text ‘Propaganda’. In this chapter, ‘The New Propagandists’, Bernays characteristically boasts that the public are not aware of the ‘invisible rulers’ that control elected figureheads behind the scenes. He suggests that public opinion must be molded by the ‘intelligent few’, and argues that in many aspects of our daily lives, we are influenced by deceptive trend-setters that manipulate our desires and cause us to make uninformed, irrational choices. Enjoy the podcast and share with a friend!

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Smells Like Human Spirit is a DAILY podcast that covers society, culture, and everything in between! Previous guests include Professor Noam Chomsky, Dan Carlin, Michael Ruppert and many others…

Chapter 3 Transcript – “The New Propagandists”

Propaganda

WHO are the men who, without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell us whom to admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the ownership of public utilities, about the tariff, about the price of rubber, about the Dawes Plan, about immigration; who tell us how our houses should be designed, what furniture we should put into them, what menus we should serve on our table, what kind of shirts we must wear, what sports we should indulge in, what plays we should see, what charities we should support, what pictures we should admire, what slang we should affect, what jokes we should laugh at? Continue reading →

Noam Chomsky ~ Who Owns The Earth?

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Paul Craig Roberts July 10 2013

Criticism of the Israeli government
Noam Chomsky

Paul writes ~ In my latest book, The Failure Of Laissez Faire Capitalism And Economic Dissolution of The West:Towards A New Economics For A Full World (Clarity Press, 2013), I emphasize that nature’s capital, not man-made capital, is the limiting factor for life on earth. I learned from ecological economist Herman Daly and others who were able to escape dogma and to think independently that the measure used by economists to measure economic success–the growth of GDP–does not include the most important costs.

What this means is that economics as presently understood is defective and is leading humanity to its destruction.

Noam Chomsky has a brilliant mind and the courage to use it. As a critic of Israel’s inhumane policies toward the Palestinians, Chomsky has been branded by the Israel Lobby as an anti-semite and a “self-hating Jew.” See for example:http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/articles/Is%20Noam%20Chomsky%20an%20Anti.htm There is an entire industry that demonizes Chomsky. See, for example, http://chomskywatch.blogspot.comand http://www.masada2000.org/selfhate2.html

Continue reading →