This is the story of an evil genius who used the techniques of wartime propaganda to invent modern marketing. If you’ve ever seen an influencer touting a product, considered that a country might stage a false flag operation, or heard that smoking could help you lose weight, you’ve been living in Edward Bernays’ world all along.
Bernays began his career as a PR man for the U.S. Army during World War I. His job was to convince an isolationist American public that self-sacrifice was their patriotic duty. The key insight that made his work so effective was that he connected actions to a person’s desire to feel a certain way, not just to a need.
After the war, he brought this key insight to the private sector and fundamentally changed the world.
If any of this sounds familiar, you might remember me mentioning Bernay’s legacy in my video about Mel Robbins and Jay Shetty—where I took a brief detour into the history behind their manipulative techniques.
Before Bernays, advertising was straightforward. It assumed you would only buy what you needed. Coca-Cola sold its ability to quench thirst; car ads focused on the convenience of not having a horse.
Bernays changed all of that. His innovation was making the act of buying something fundamentally change who you are as a person. Today, a car commercial sells “love” and adventure, not just transportation. A Coke commercial sells friendship. A phone ad sells happiness. They are not selling products; they are selling the idea of how the product will transform your experience of reality itself.
In 1929, Bernays put this insight to work for the tobacco company Philip Morris. Seeing the rise of feminism, he hired women to smoke publicly in a New York Easter parade as an act of protest, calling the cigarettes “Torches of Liberty.” He then invited reporters to stoke fake outrage. The campaign worked: smoking rates among women doubled in less than a year.
There’s another detail here that is going to blow your mind: Bernays is the nephew of Sigmund Freud. And the relationship doesn’t only give you insight into how Bernays developed his ideas, but also, perhaps more problematically, why Freud is popular at all.
The story we’re told is that Freud’s work grew organically in academic circles, but the truth is that Freud was just a regional academic in Austria. He was only taken seriously as a global academic after Bernays, the world’s most powerful publicist, took his case.
Bernays acted as Freud’s agent, making his books controversial and getting the word out. As mentioned in one documentary on Bernay’s life, “first, Eddie created Uncle Siggy in the U.S., made him acceptable, and then capitalized on Uncle Siggy.” This raises a powerful question: do academic theories gain traction because they are true, or because a marketer manipulates the public to believe they are?
In his 1928 book, “Propaganda,” Bernays codified his ideas, writing that the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”
He coined the term “engineering consent,” a concept where “invisible” stakeholders shape public opinion and consumer habits. According to Bernays, “those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
This isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s the playbook he wrote himself.
He argued that propaganda is the life force of the consumerism that powers the American economy. Corporations need to manufacture demand to make their costly plants profitable, and Bernays showed them how. This ideology transformed our world away from a needs-based economy into one of endless, destructive consumption.
The repercussions of Bernays’s methods reached far beyond marketing. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, told an American journalist that he was inspired by Bernays’s work.
Later, Bernays went on to advise the American government and the CIA. The most atrocious example came in 1950 when he was hired by the United Fruit Company. To counter a democratically elected leader in Guatemala who was a threat to their business, Bernays orchestrated a PR campaign. He created a fake news agency that bombarded American media with press releases claiming Moscow was planning to use Guatemala as a beachhead to attack America. This helped the CIA stage a coup, overthrowing the democratically elected government and installing a new leader.
The legacy of Bernays’s work is everywhere. The “soullessness of the social media business model is merely the logical completion of the project Bernays started.” Companies today serve you a non-stop stream of personalized advertisements, making you feel special if you just buy the right product or use the correct discount code.
Peter Thiel, CEO of surveillance company Palantir, famously asked, “What if we could change the way the government works through technological means?” This is the logical conclusion of Bernays’s work. The world we live in is the world that Edward Bernays gave us. It is difficult to know where your individual desires end and the marketing impulses you’ve been fed begin.
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