Numerous studies have shown that, due to a myriad of cognitive biases such as belief perseverance and confirmation bias, facts unfortunately do not change people’s minds. Propaganda, on the other hand, works very well on this front, something we see clearly from how people and groups have used it over the past century. The Flex commercial, which taps into human emotion to depict birth and home birth as beautiful and desirable, is a form of positive propaganda.
The word ‘propaganda’ comes from the Latin propagare, which simply means ‘to spread’ or ‘propagate’, and finds its origins in the context of furthering Catholic missionary activity. However, its contemporary usage connotes the spreading of an idea or ideology through any means, often of a negative, manipulative nature. Some therefore view the concept of ‘positive propaganda’ as an oxymoron due to the word’s association with manipulation.
As seen in cases such as the Flex commercial, however, propaganda can also bring about a real transformation of a public mindset for the good. Martin Luther King Jr believed in the need for positive propaganda, as did W E B Du Bois, the latter of whom spoke of propaganda’s power in the arts. The intelligent use of words and images is of central importance to these undertakings.
In the United States, the key 20th-century figure who understood how to use propaganda was Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the father of the field of public relations. Born in Vienna, Austria in 1891, Bernays died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1995, living a long, prolific life and architecting profound changes in US society from behind the scenes.
Surprisingly, Bernays and his ideas exist beneath the radar for most contemporary scholars. I first learned about him during my graduate school years, but that knowledge came from an intellectual outside of university walls. Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale University, has examined propaganda at length and argues we must understand how it works. But Bernays is seldom of central focus to academics as they discuss such hot-button topics as war, racial equity, climate justice, etc, and many in the academic sphere have never heard of him even though his ideas on propaganda could have an impact on everything they talk and write about.