How it Began

 

Edward Bernays is the father of modern sales, marketing, and public relations.  Those three separate fields are interconnected because they come from the same two roots; Sigmund Freud and Joseph Goebbels.  Of course, there was no direct connection between Freud and Goebbels.  Freud was Jewish, and Goebbels was a Nazi.  It took Freud’s nephew and protege, Edward Bernays, to synthesize the two approaches into a master blueprint for manipulating the public.

Freud’s most remarkable talent was as a salesperson.  He fooled generations of women into thinking they were jealous for not having a penis.  He started as a legitimate researcher, but his original work was too controversial.  He discovered that what he called “female hysteria” was caused by molestation and familial incest.  The backlash against this was so severe that it threatened Freud’s professional and financial future.

Faced with ostracism for telling the truth, Freud redirected his immense intelligence to the cause of evil.  Being a skilled psychologist, Freud exploited his critic’s confirmation bias and found new ways to tell them what they wanted to hear.  He walked back his accusations of molestation and placed the entire blame on the women. 

He did it so brilliantly!  He changed every point that might have screwed with his tenure and replaced them with utter nonsense like Oedipus Complexes and Penis Envy.  I’m convinced he pulled those ideas straight out of his ass.  But his revised theory was still controversial enough to stay in the public eye, plus it helped reinforce male dominance.  It was an international sensation!  He held mental health back a hundred years and caused untold misery for girls and women, but it brought him the fame and fortune he wanted.  Freud was the sales representative from hell.

 Notice that he had every prop he needed to sell the revised version of his work.  He had the all-important “Dr.” in front of his name.  He was also a sharp dresser.  He set the fashion for European professors for decades to come.  And, of course, he published books.  Even the book he retracted added to his mystique as a real-life professor.  Sigmund Freud was Seminar Guy on steroids. 

Contrast this with Joseph Goebbels, who was plain nuts.  There’s no other explanation for his dedication to the Nazi Party.  He wasn’t just the propagandist but a senior administrator in the Nazi Bureaucracy.  He even became Chancellor near the end of the war.  Goebbels was crazy, but that doesn’t mean he was stupid.  Crazy people can do extremely intelligent and brilliantly premeditated things for the worst reasons.  But it sounds good to them.

Goebbels’s blind worship of the little asshole with the dorky mustache was one of his mental health symptoms.  He thought Hitler stood ten feet tall and the world trembled when he spoke.  And Goebbels wanted the whole world to see Hitler the same way.  So he worked at it with the determination of a true evangelist, sacrificing truth and accuracy in favor of ideological correctness. 

One of his dirty tricks was to stage Hitler’s speeches by hiring pretty girls to scream, cry, and faint when Schicklgruber showed his ugly puss.  Goebbels made sure those girls were right where everybody could see them, and he was damned careful to take photographs or even movies.  Then an amazing thing happened.  It caught on across the Reich, and women spontaneously swooned over the little pile of dog shit.  Sounds crazy.  Goebbels compared it to the dancing hysteria during medieval times.  Less than 20 years later, Brian Epstein used the same trick to send The Beatles to fame and fortune.  Today, staged excitement has become a standard publicity tool.  And it all began with Joseph Goebbels. 

So why did people listen to that sawed-off little loon in the first place?  Goebbels had the all-important “Dr.” in front of his name.  True, he was a doctor of literature, but that didn’t matter to the public.  Goebbels was a professor and received respect for the title.  He was also a sharp dresser.  Being a major figure in an up-and-coming political party also added to his credibility.  Just like Freud, he had the right props.  See how the right props can make the biggest loser look like the king of the world?

Not that Goebbels always had it easy.  Most Germans used to laugh and call him “Poison Dwarf.” But Goebbels persevered.  He understood the myths and bigotry in the fabric of European civilization.  Goebbels carefully crafted his propaganda into a simple formula that Bernays improved and expanded on.  He told enough of the truth to sound legitimate, then slipped into bat-shit crazy.  He was right on in his criticism of the German Socialists.  They really screwed the pooch after the end of WWI.  Then, after he had his audience’s guard down, Goebbels took a swan dive into utter insanity.  For instance,  Goebbels blamed the Rothschild family for everything because they provided banking for trade unions. 

The German public was scared, angry, and feeling helpless.  Goebbels offered them a target for their fear and anger, and by turning on the Rothschilds, they felt less vulnerable.  This is the purpose behind all conspiracy theories.  From The JFK assassination to the 911 conspiracies, they are meant to confuse the public.  And Edward Bernays learned that trick by studying Joseph Goebbels. 

Another point I should mention before getting to Bernays: Goebbels inadvertently discovered cognitive framing.  And he did it by attacking Freud.  Goebbels’s unhinged attacks on the person, sex habits, and Jewishness of Freud caused many well-meaning people to jump to his defense.  Many good but misguided people didn’t know who or what they were defending.  So there were two sides, each with no basis in truth, but Goebbels made Penis Envy look sane.  So Bernays’ Uncle Sigmund came out smelling like a rose.  We’ll go deeper into cognitive framing in future posts.

This leads to Edward Bernays, a man born to be a Batman villain.  There are many articles, documentaries, and quasi-legitimate YouTube Videos on Bernays.  They all list his many sins and transgressions.  But I don’t think I’ve seen one that listed his one unforgivable act.  He took the way his uncle sold himself as a neurologist, took Goebbels propaganda tricks, and used the scientific method to blend them.  Then he combined them.  Then he refined them into easy-to-use manuals.

Everything Bernays did, was an experiment performed under strict controls.  The results were cataloged, studied, inspected, rejected, dejected, and repeated until they got consistent results every time it was used.  By the time he did his hit job on the Central American governments, Bernays had overseen thousands of hours of observations.

They will give you a script and pointers if you go into an entry-level sales position.  That script and those pointers were the results of decades of marketing research.  Anybody with a third-grade education can follow them and make a living.  If you were like me, you could catch all the main points and rewrite the script, and that’s how you become an even better salesperson.  And it all started with Sigmund Freud and Joseph Goebbels. 

I didn’t know anything about the history of my profession when I began in the early 1980s.  I wonder if I would have stayed in the career had I known what I know now.   But if I had to choose again, I think I’d prefer to do something else.  And always remember to choose kindness.

 

 I promised you a reading list, and here is the second book.

“I Can Sell You Anything.” This book is thirty years outdated, but it’s still an excellent primer on sales and advertising.  Before buying from Amazon, please check your independent bookstore, public library, or thrift store.  But if all else fails, here’s the link.

 

 Next post, I’ll go into further detail on Bernays’ work and that all-important branch of science, statistics, and the law of big numbers.