The Father of Public Relations and the Engineering of Consent
Supporting material for Breadcrumbs Episode 10: "Why We Are Encouraged to Forget Who We Are"
Edward Louis Bernays (1891–1995) was Sigmund Freud's double nephew — his mother was Freud's sister, his father was the brother of Freud's wife — and he leveraged that bloodline with ruthless ingenuity. While Freud sought to understand the unconscious mind, Bernays figured out how to exploit it. He is widely regarded as the father of public relations, though the term itself was his invention, a gentler rebrand of something he initially called exactly what it was: propaganda.
Bernays's 1928 book Propaganda opens with a disarmingly honest confession: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." He wasn't warning us. He was writing a manual.
His later work, The Engineering of Consent (1947), refined the thesis further. Democracy, Bernays argued, was too important to be left to the whims of the uninformed public. Elites needed tools to guide popular opinion toward rational outcomes. The catch, of course, is that "rational" was defined by whoever was paying Bernays's fee.
Bernays didn't just theorize — he ran campaigns that reshaped daily American life in ways most people never questioned, precisely because they were designed to feel inevitable rather than manufactured.
Bacon and Eggs. In the 1920s, the Beech-Nut Packing Company hired Bernays to increase bacon sales. Rather than advertise the product, Bernays asked a physician to confirm that a heavier breakfast was healthier than a light one. He then distributed that doctor's endorsement to thousands of physicians, who in turn recommended bacon and eggs to their patients. A corporate sales problem became medical advice. The "traditional" American breakfast was born — not from tradition at all, but from public relations.
Torches of Freedom. In 1929, the American Tobacco Company wanted to break the taboo against women smoking in public. Bernays hired a group of fashionable debutantes to march in the New York Easter Parade while lighting cigarettes, which he staged as a feminist act of liberation — "torches of freedom," as he called them. He tipped off the press in advance. Newspapers ran the story as news, not advertising. Women's smoking rates climbed. A tobacco company's revenue problem had been repackaged as women's suffrage.
Fluoride in Water. When the aluminum industry faced questions about fluoride as an industrial waste product, Bernays was brought in to reframe the conversation. He orchestrated endorsements from dental associations and public health authorities, positioning water fluoridation as a straightforward public health measure. Whatever one's position on fluoride's dental benefits, the campaign itself is a textbook example of Bernays's method: route a corporate interest through the language of science and public welfare until the two become indistinguishable.
The Guatemala Coup. Perhaps the darkest chapter in Bernays's career was his work for the United Fruit Company in the early 1950s. When Guatemala's democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, proposed modest land reforms that threatened United Fruit's vast holdings, Bernays launched a media campaign framing Árbenz as a communist threat. He arranged junkets for American journalists, supplied them with company-approved narratives, and cultivated editorial relationships. The resulting media coverage helped build the political justification for the CIA-backed coup of 1954, which installed a military dictatorship and plunged Guatemala into decades of civil war and suffering. A banana company's real estate problem became a Cold War crisis — because Bernays made it one.
Bernays's deeper legacy, beyond any individual campaign, was a philosophical shift in how corporations relate to human beings. Before Bernays, advertising was largely informational: here is a product, here is what it does, here is its price. Bernays pioneered the idea that you don't sell products to people — you sell people to themselves. You connect a commodity to an identity, an aspiration, an unconscious desire. You don't buy a car; you buy freedom. You don't buy a cigarette; you buy rebellion. You don't buy a dress; you buy the woman you wish you were.
This was Freud's psychology weaponized for commerce. The unconscious mind, with its anxieties and desires, became a target market. And the more effectively advertisers could tap into those hidden drives, the more effectively they could redirect human energy away from self-knowledge and toward consumption. Buy something, feel something, forget the emptiness, repeat.
Bernays understood that a person in touch with who they truly are — their actual needs, their authentic desires, their genuine values — is a terrible consumer. Such a person might grow their own food, repair their own clothes, find meaning in relationships rather than products. The engine of consumerism requires a population perpetually off-balance, perpetually reaching for the next purchase to fill a void they can't quite name.
This is where Bernays connects to the broader theme of Episode 10. The machinery he built — refined over a century by his intellectual descendants in advertising, political consulting, and social media — is fundamentally a machinery of forgetting. It encourages us to forget that our desires are often manufactured. It encourages us to forget that "public opinion" is frequently engineered. It encourages us to forget that the stories we tell about ourselves — what we eat for breakfast, what freedom looks like, what progress means — were often written by someone with a product to sell or a regime to install.
Most insidiously, it encourages us to forget that we have an inner life independent of the marketplace. Bernays's great innovation was to collapse the distinction between the citizen and the consumer, between the self and the brand. When that collapse is complete, the question "Who am I?" gets answered not through reflection, community, or spiritual inquiry, but through purchasing decisions. Identity becomes a product category.
Bernays lived to be 103 years old. He watched his techniques evolve from newspaper plants and staged parades into television advertising, focus groups, and eventually the early internet. He could not have imagined algorithmic social media feeds, but he would have recognized them instantly: machines for engineering consent at a scale he could only have dreamed of.
The question Bernays forces us to ask is not whether we are being manipulated — he told us plainly that we are. The question is whether we can recover what the manipulation was designed to bury: an authentic sense of who we are, independent of what we've been sold.
"The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest." — Edward Bernays, 1947
Read in context, that sentence is less a defense of democracy than a confession about its vulnerability. Bernays showed us — showed everyone willing to pay attention — that the line between persuasion and control is as thin as the line between a news story and a press release. The first step in remembering who we are is recognizing just how much infrastructure has been built to make us forget.