Captain America - The Man with Two Brains
By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog,March 21, 2021
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Introduction – If America Dissolves…
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 1 of 5
Bernays and Propaganda - Part 2 of 5 -- The Marketing of War
Bernays and Propaganda - Part 3 of 5 –– Democracy Control
Bernays and Propaganda - Part 4 of 5 --The Transition to Education and Commerce
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 5 of 5 — Propaganda Continues Unabated
Epilogue - Captain America --The Man with Two Brains
An earlier essay titled, "If America Dissolves . . ." formed an introduction to the series on Bernays and Propaganda. This essay functions as the epilogue.
I will briefly repeat here several observations I made earlier, in order to develop a point that requires some elaboration.
In the essay titled The Utopia Syndrome, I mentioned Elizabeth Anderson's theory of what I call 'The Propaganda Mask', which states that when political ideals or the 'official story' diverge too widely from reality, the ideals or the official narrative themselves become a kind of mask that prevents us from perceiving the gap. When the tenets of the propaganda are too far removed from factual truth, the victims lose their ability to separate fact from fiction and become unable to recognise the discrepancy between their ideals and their actions, or between their convictions and the truth. In the same essay I outlined that Americans are guilty of what I call 'the Utopia Syndrome', comparing themselves not with the real world of their actions but with some utopian standard of ideals that exists only in their own imaginations, a world of fancy and illusion divorced from reality. Next, I noted the black and white mentality that pervades America, the result of their Christianity and the work of Bernays, whose methods of manipulation of the public mind created a kind of binary mentality. Bernays claimed the excessive emotional loading in his propaganda could produce only a limited range of powerful emotional responses in his victims, forcing one's emotional switch into a binary 'on or off' mode, with no other choices.
