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Bernaysian Persuasian
How much of our minds are made up of our bits of intelligence and volition? I'd argue that the most accurate test of intellect in the modern era is won by our understanding of collective influence. And our departure from it when necessary.
Fellow Optimizer
02 Apr
The Architect of Influence
Edward Bernays didn’t just pioneer public relations—he industrialized persuasion. Born in 1891 and trained in journalism and psychology, Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. But where Freud sought to understand the unconscious mind, Bernays sought to manipulate it. His work didn’t merely reflect the spirit of the 20th century—it engineered it.
Bernays' genius was simple: if you could understand what moved people emotionally, you could move them behaviorally. His campaigns were less about facts and more about framing. He sold bacon as a patriotic breakfast, turned cigarette smoking into a symbol of female liberation, and helped the United Fruit Company destabilize a Guatemalan democracy—all by manipulating public consensus.
But perhaps his most consequential contribution wasn’t a single campaign—it was the template. In his 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays argued that society needed an "invisible government" of thought leaders to guide the masses, who were too irrational to decide for themselves. Once considered edgy, that idea has become the default operating system of institutional messaging.
The great Allied campaign to celebrate (or sell) Democracy, etc., was a venture so successful and, it seemed, so noble that it suddenly legitimized such propagandists, who, once the war had ended, went right to work massaging or exciting various publics on behalf of entities like General Motors, Procter & Gamble, John D. Rockefeller, General Electric.
It is impossible to examine the rise of the modern medical-industrial complex without seeing Bernays' fingerprints. From hospital boards to pharmaceutical marketing to how health crises are communicated to the public, we still use his playbook: identify emotion, bypass logic, and sell the narrative before the data catches up.
The point isn’t that medical influence is fallible; it’s that regardless of the industry - trust in it is manufactured and malleable. And the medium of that trust, more often than not, is public relations disguised as consensus.
Bernays gave us the blueprint. What followed was an era of effective medical messaging that entire populations internalized it as truth—until, in some cases, the consequences became impossible to ignore.
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