[W]e have a huge industry in the United States — public relations industry, advertising industry. We know what it’s for. Its founders told us. The founders of the industry, like Edward Bernays in the 1920s, when the industry was developing one of the main leaders, wrote a major book on this called Propaganda. In those days propaganda didn’t have the negative connotations that it has today. It just meant persuasion.

He discusses there what he calls engineering of consent. This is our task as responsible men is to engineer junior the consent of the masses. He did it for example by a major project which succeeded in getting women to smoke. Models walking down 5th Avenue holding cigarettes, saying, this is the way to be a modern woman and so on. And he did succeed in getting women to smoke. It’s one of the first major successes in engineering consent. We can count up the number of corpses that led to it.

At the same time that he was writing, the leading public intellectual of the 20th century Walter Lippmann was writing on what he called manufacture of consent, which he described as a new art in the practice of democracy. It’s a way to ensure, as he put it, that the bewildered herd, the general population, will be controlled. That we, the responsible men, will not be subjected to the trampling on the roar of the bewildered herd. Now, their task is to be spectators, not participants.

I mean, I’ve started publications. I’ve worked a lot with advertisers who were advertising. They don’t have that much control. They try a lot of things. Some of them work, some of them don’t. If you get people hooked on cigarettes, the advertising helps. But the nicotine is really doing a lot of work for you. But there are tons of movies that have gigantic advertising budgets and they flop. There are tons of political projects and political candidates. Like, in my State of California, Meg Whitman spent about $150 million of her own money to lose by more than 10 percentage points. I mean, Jeb Bush’s campaign spent about the same amount only to see him drop out early in the primary.

So there is a relationship here where the public has some power, too. And what ends up happening, it always seems to me is sort of in the Venn diagram of what power wants and what there’s money to try to get people to want, but also what the public wants. And a lot of that stuff is not great, but I don’t think it’s quite as much a capacity for mind control, as some of the more totalizing versions of this theory hold.

Well, I agree with that. These are efforts. Efforts don’t have to succeed. But what we’re talking about is the massive extraordinary effort that goes into creating wants, shaping opinion, ensuring that doctrines are not questioned. A separate question is whether it works. Well, that’s a mixed story. Sometimes, it does. Sometimes, it doesn’t. But underlying it is the fact that one of the major factors components of our social order is a huge attempt to manufacture consent to create wants, to ensure doctrinal conformity.

And it often does work.