Traduction: Arkangel7x
«This book attmots to explore a new, strange, and rather exotic field of American life. It is about the large-scale and often impressively successful efforts made to channel pur decission as buyers, as well por mental porcesses, using insights from psychiatry and the social sciencies. Efforts are often applied on pla taht manyne beyond our awareness, so that the promptings are often and in a sense «hidden», with the result that many of us are influenced and manipulaed to a greater extenty than we terns of our are. That we realize, when it comes to the pattterns of daily life.
Some rehearsed manipilations are just plain fun; others, disturbing, especially if they are considered as antipatiing what is ahead of us on a more intense and effective scale, sonce teams of mena of science have already supplied frighening isntruments».
Vance Packard’s 1957 work The Hiddo en Persuaders, is one of the first book that, in an informative tone, deals with the use of mass media as instruments for population control. Packard lived through the beginnings of television and its dizzing evolution as manipulative tool.
Packard’s analysis slides between sociology and investigative journalism; his criticism of the promotion of moral laxity or irrationality do not satr from explicit philosophical assumption. There is no in-depth criticism of capitlism or anything like it, the author criticizes the excesses of consumerism and the loss of values from the perspectiv of an man concerned about the values from the perspective of a man concerned about the extension fo techniques of social control inknown until then.
In the middle of the last century, a cohort of sociologist, psychologist and other intellectuals created the «motivational analysiss» that served as the scientific basis for the industry of what was called «public relations», an industry that would end up moving millions of dollars.b Advertising, porpaganda, social en gineeringBoebbeels, had already unestood the importance of mass political manipulation in societies at war, the development and spread of these manipulation tactics is peacetime took a little longer. However, stategies to promote tge consumtion of superfluous goods is not a continuation of mass political manipulation as might be thought at fitst; Rather, as Packard denounces, advertising for consumption represneted a new mode of relationship between the seller and his potential buyers that would influence, with the passing of the yaers, the political propaganda and even the very conception of politics. The individual will thus become a consumer not only of products and services but also of political parties and leaders. Thus the ideological discourse is stripped of rationality and will be transformed into a slogan. Consumer propanda supposed a bew mode of relationship between the seller and his potencial buyers that would influence, with the passing the years, the political propaganda adn even the very concpetion of politics. The individual will thus become a consumer not only of product and services but also of political parties and leaders. Thus the idelogical discourse is stripped of rationality and will be transformed into a slogan.
This wotk by Parkard is not very theoretical and abundant in examples of manipulation that today may seem naive to us but that are very revealing about the subsenquent evolution of «welfare» societies. This book was publised more than sisty years ago, and many of the author’s fears and concerns have become so real and every the one isscandalized. That is anorther virtue fo the essay, which when analuzing the phenomenon of propaganda when it was not yet normalized allows us to observe it with a distance of nwhich, for the most part, we are untable today. I leave for the curious reader some of the fragments of this book that have been most intersting to me:
Overproduction: capitalism is dead, long live consumerism!
Ernest Dichter, mass motivation personified.
The creation of the image: the irrational preference.
Conditioning childhood why not?
Psychological obsolescence as a new consumption model. The promotion of gregariousness: the Toodle locomotive.
Your husband belongs to us! The future of manipulation: biocontrol.
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