Review of Bernays' Propaganda

Very much the Göring of America’s neo-colonial age, the dispassionate way he writes about the burgeoning Spectacular economy is quite terrifying. He articulated the methods for America (then the global West) to reconfirm its aristocracy, and executed them.

When Debord came face to face with this reality, he understood it as a fundamental restructuring of economics and created novel cultural movements in an attempt to negate it.

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. (First line of Society of the Spectacle, which mirrors the first line of Capital)

Bernays simply accepted it as a reality, leading to this dispassionate discourse on how to evaporate reality. He certainly does have his pretences about the rich: “men who through from a sense of inferiority despise money, seek to win the good will of men who love money.” But this is also just real.

We “Lacan-reading hipsters” have been whipped by people like this for decades now; what is to be done?