Arendt On The Corruption Of Culture By The Methods Of Advertising

Hannah Arendt continued:

To the many genres in the art of lying developed in the past, we must now add two more recent varieties.  There is, first, the apparently innocuous one of the public relations managers who learned their trade from the inventiveness of Madison Avenue.  Public relations is a variety of advertising, hence has its origin in the consumer society, with its inordinate appetite for goods to be distributed through a market economy.  The trouble with the mentality of the public relations man is that he deals only in opinions and "good will," the readiness to buy;  that is, in intangibles whose concrete reality is at a minimum.  This means that for his inventions it may indeed look as though the sky is the limit, for he lacks the politician's power to act, to "create" facts, and thus that simple everyday reality which sets limits to power and brings the forces of imagination down to earth.

Notice that Arendt was careful to specify the innocuousness of Madison avenue with the warning that its harmlessness was merely apparent.  Advertising is expected to be a series of "little white lies" but if the path to hell can be paved with good intentions, even small lies are a far more common pavement for that superhighway. If there was ever a true domino theory, it is that small lies habituate us to accepting huge ones.

Other than, perhaps, the New York Times and Washington Post on a national level and a few other print-on-paper sources regionally or locally, the politically significant media in the United States is the electronic media, the networks, the cabloids and others. Significant, also, are Republican-fascist hate-talk radio, with influential online sources. Some of which might be called "journalism" with some accuracy but most of them are nothing like what should be called that (though many "journalists" seem to consider them that). Starting with the beginning of radio advertising and sponsorship, electronic media has always been even more a creature of the same kind as the public relations industry.  Advertising is what has financed most effective media, organs of "journalism" and, even more so, the entertainment media, print and electronic, which is also associated with supposedly informative media.  You have to have an audience and an audience has to be persuaded to read or listen or watch.  The previous passage from Hannah Arendt's brilliant essay, Lying in Politics, noted that lies can be crafted to be a far easier sell than the truth almost ever can be.  I will forego the temptation to, once again, point to the criticism of the entertainment sections of newspapers and magazines, something that the brilliant Karl Krauss fingered as dumbing down the population and polluting what most people took to be journalism in the period of WWI, thus playing a major role in producing that world-changing catastrophe.  Little did he know how bad radio and the movies and later TV and the internet which he could have known nothing about  would be in that regard.

It is essential to note in regard to the role that the media can play in this that the truth is often a. concealed by those who generate the facts that constitute truth and don't want the public to know them, b. even when not actively concealed, truths are often not given out freely but must be actively obtained to tell them when public knowledge of them is not in the interest of those who hold them, c. because of those two things, professional, paid reporters are needed to get that information and so the truth is far more expensive to the media companies and the corporations and billionaires owning them, who may share in the very same motives of concealment.  The economics of reporting as opposed to peddling opinion and that interest in manipulating "information" leads inevitably in commercial media to the dominant traffic in "opinion 'journalism'" and the overt peddling in lies that Rupert Murdoch has turned from scorned tabloid trash to mainstream "journalism."  Which is exactly what the porn merchant's American citizenship was expedited to facilitate on behalf of Republicans and the wealthy, in general.  And, as many of us predicted almost forty years ago, that was the effect of him and his journalistic presstitutes and pimps doing in the United States what he had previously done in Australia and Britain.

When the First Amendment talks about "the press" when Thomas Jefferson made his celebrated and idiotic statement about preferring newspapers to governments when he certainly knew we could have both, all of those facts about published lies were already true in the age of page-at-a-time printing presses.  They were true in the earliest ages of recorded human history.

In my recent review of Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, the complaints about the journalism and pamphleteer against the adoption of the Constitution among the likes of Adams, Jefferson and Madison proves the peddling of inaccurate information, or what they would have taken as lies was known to them, some of their allies participated in it, too.  Which makes the silence of the First Amendment on the difference between publishing the truth and publishing lies all the more notable.

Perhaps they took such a truth as there being no right to lie was so self-evident that they didn't need to codify the difference.  I cannot believe that the other politicians who had a hand in writing it didn't understand the serious and dangerous character of lies and the desirability, in general, of truths being known, perhaps their neglect to make certain that that distinction between "the press" publishing lies and the press publishing the truth was differentiated.  

But the framers of the Bill of Rights may not have anticipated a later development in the amoral materialist "enlightenment" they believed they favored, such as in the post-WWII period in which the highest level of the college credentialed class would decide that the plain language reading of the First Amendment meant that laws against slander and libel, which had been in place since the time of the adoption of the Constitution, were unconstitutional.*  In that period the alternative to a law suit may have been a duel to the death, as the one that ended Alexander Hamilton's political career and gave a lying Broadway musical its melodramatic and dishonest denouement.  Whatever the reasons for it, that likely innocent  neglect in making that distinction has been a serious and dangerous fact of life in the United States for the past fifty-eight years.  As Hannah Arendt's essay written during the Nixon years proves, the position of lies in our elections and the politics that are generated by those elected was already a serious danger that was responsible for the deaths of many tens and hundreds of thousands.  

The only limitation to what the public relations man does comes when he discovers that the same people who perhaps can be "manipulated" to buy a certain kind of soap cannot be manipulated - though, of course they can be forced by terror - to "buy" opinions and political views.  Hence the psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.  But such doctrines do not change the way people form opinions or prevent them from acting according to their own lights;  the only method short of terror to have real influence on their conduct is still the old carrot-and-stick approach.

The reign of lies has, obviously, gone to the point of the use of broadcast and cable and, especially, online distributed terror peddled to a susceptible, gullible and, in so many cases, entirely prepared audience to have that influence their actions.  The high emotional experience of terror seems to be an addictive mental state, though I don't get it at all, no more than I get slasher movies and thrillers.  That addiction is certainly a consciously used political tool, especially on the American fascist far-right, which is practically the only right we have, now.  It is certain that the wife of at least one of the Supreme Court "justices" is a true believer in such thrilling terror and, by his rulings and talk, her husband is justifiably believed to be all-in on that, or at least the use of it to his own demented ends.

It is not surprising that the recent generation of intellectuals, who grew up in the insane atmosphere of rampant advertising and were taught that half of politics is "image making" and the other half the art of making people believe in the imagery, should almost automatically fall back on the older adages of carrot and stick whenever the situation becomes too serious for theory.  For the, the greatest disappointment in the Vietnam adventure should have been the discovery that there are people for whom carrot-and-stick methods don't work either.

I don't believe that Hannah Arendt would have agreed with me but I think that observation made about the cynicism and nihilism of intellectuals is a direct result of the widespread adoption of materalism as the ideology of the intellectual class and the moral nihilism that is usually a part of that.  But that's, of course, a somewhat different argument because if there is one thing that is certain about American conservatism and Trump era Republican fascism, that moral nihilism is not an exclusive holding of intellectual materialism but is rampant in the vulgar materialism which so many of those among them who profess religion the loudest really hold.** Of course, that is exactly what The Gospel, the Epistles,' The Law and the Prophets' critique of religion is, so that should always have made unsurprising to those who took them seriously.  I may go back to commenting on Jeremiah soon.

Oddly enough the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States.  Because of the immensity of his job he must surround himself with advisers, the "National Security Managers" as they have recently been called by Richard J. Barnet, who "exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him.  The President, one is tempted to argue, allegedly the most powerful man of the most powerful country, is the only person in the country whose range of choices can be predetermined.

I have to think of Rahm Emannuel's role in the Obama Administration when I read this and how he certainly didn't encourage Obama to take advantage of the best hand a Democratic President had been given by the Voters since 1964, though I see no evidence that Obama, likely among the five smartest men to have ever held that office, had any intention of taking bold action to create the justice and equality that his campaign publicity and image claimed he would.  I could say almost the same thing about another remarkably intelligent Democratic President, Bill Clinton and his Chiefs of Staff.  I think it is remarkable that Joe Biden has been far more aggressive in pursuing extensive building of that than the younger, more media savvy Obama and Clinton. I often have to remind myself that Biden's Congressional career started about the time this essay was published as an anti-war Congressman.  

This, of course, can happen only if the Executive branch has cut itself off from the legislative powers of Congress;  it is the logical outcome in our system of government when the Senate is both deprived of and reluctant to exercise its powers to participate and advise in the conduct of foreign affairs.  One of the Senate's functions, as we now know, is to shield the decision making process from the transient moods and trends of society at large, in our case, the antics of the consumer society and the public relations managers who cater to them.

As I mentioned the world of a half a century ago even as seen by one of the most acute as well as insightful intellectuals of the time can seen quaint, so far have things gone to hell.  It would be impossible to imagine a Republican-fascist Senate playing the role or being as circumspect as Hannah Arendt could still claim.  It is certain that the two Republican-fascist quislings with "D" after their names holding up Democratic legislation are still pretending something like that description still holds, the better for them to ratfuck President Biden's agenda.  Far from Republicans in the Senate and a Republican president acting as checks on each other, they go from collaboration to collusion with each other to steal the commonwealth and destroy electoral democracy to maintain themselves in power.  The Bush vs. Gore case adds the Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court to that and I have no doubt that the Roberts court ratfucking of elections will continue that partisan Supreme Court corruption.  

In the Republican-fascist practice of promoting and selecting entertainment media figures as presidential candidates such as Reagan and Trump, both of them having roles not honestly held to be apart from the interests of the advertisers in their show-biz careers, the melding of the con-job that advertising is and the con-job of electing politicians dedicated to the interests of the wealthy elite to the cost of the large majority of Americans is a machine that is reaching perfection.  The alleged journalistic profession, the really politically important part of that in the largest, especially electronic media are already all-in, or virtually so, with the same interests. Only next time they will choose someone more like Bush II who is less disturbingly vulgar to those still pretending that there is something higher to what they do. Assuming they can peddle someone less cruelly demented than Desantis to the Republican-fascist base and gulled independents.

As the lying to sell the invasion of Iraq, only one of the two disastrous wars of the Bush II-Cheney administration, following on Bush I's Gulf War (perhaps incited by his ambassador, April Glaspie) proves, there were no lessons learned from the revelations of caution or morality derived from the Pentagon Papers and the disaster that the American war in Vietnam was.  Of course, there were people, especially in the Republican right whose only lesson from Vietnam was to be more ruthless in selling a disastrous war for the benefit of private interests.  The unmaking of the hard wisdom gained from the disaster of Vietnam was by and large accomplished as much through movies and TV shows lying about it, especially in the period beginning with Reagan's presidency, as it was on talk TV and radio.

I should also point out that America's war-making in Vietnam expanded into other countries, something not revealed,. as I recall, until after Arendt wrote her essay and published it.  That should stand as deadly a confirmation of her observations on the danger of political lies if not my point that to the extent possible, those lies should be discouraged and suppressed as well as refuted, refutation of lies requiring truths that have all of the more problematic features of unpleasant and surprising truth as opposed to lies lied with the art of advertising for easy sale.  

* Of the many extremely important points Hannah Arendt brought up in her essay on the role that lying played in bringing the United States into the self-made quagmire that the Vietnam war was, I would very much like to go into her brilliant analysis of the similarities and differences between the technocratic "problem solvers" of the Kennedy through Nixon administrations and the ex-communist neo-cons whose theoretical approach in replacement of reality.  I think, in an important way, the technocrats and the degenerate intellectual cold-warriors had one common point, both of them believed in an essentially materialistic ideology.  Her explanation of the foundational error of the technocrats faith in the calculability of reality was, I realized last night, something which Joseph Weizenbaum noted in the only part of her essay which I believe I had read before last week.  I will probably base another post on that issue.  

** For the entire history of Christianity, especially in the period of its political potency, the enormous record of discrediting discredit earned for "Christianity" has almost always come as a result of those who openly, obviously and flagrantly violated the moral teachings of Jesus, Paul, James, etc. What could be rightly considered the Mammonism that Jesus said was contradictory to the religion that he taught is almost always the unspoken faith of those who did those things.  No one who honestly and carefully followed the teachings of Jesus would have earned the same kind of discredit for Christianity.  The Republican-fascist Bible thumpers are, to a person, Mammonists, whether Southern Baptist, "evangelical" Pentacostalist or "traditionalist" Roman Catholics (and a very large percentage of the incumbent U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops) are full blown worshipers of Mammon.  They are also, for the most part, habitual liars. I've seen their media, honesty is not its stock in trade.