It Works the Same Way In Any Country
Here is a conversation that happened in a prison cell on the evening of April 18, 1946.
Göring: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the simple people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
The man who said those words was Hermann Göring. He had been, at various points during the Third Reich, commander of the Luftwaffe, president of the Reichstag, founder of the Gestapo, and Hitler’s designated successor. He was the second most powerful man in Germany for most of the war. He was sentenced to death at Nuremberg and, some months later, took cyanide in his cell the night before he was to be hanged.
The man he was speaking to was Gustave Gilbert, the American prison psychologist assigned to the Nuremberg defendants. The record he kept was published in 1947 as Nuremberg Diary, and the exchange above is one of the most quoted in the book.
What is striking are the words’ chilling matter-of-factness. Göring is not apologizing. He is offering what he considered a neutral professional observation about the mechanism he had helped operate for thirteen years. And the observation was this:
Populations do not want war. They can be brought to war anyway. The method is standard. It works the same way in any country, and it always has. Which brings us to a basic question: Why?
If populations do not want war, and if leaders can nonetheless reliably bring them to war, then something in the population is doing the work of convincing us, as a whole, to go against our own best interests, and in many cases, our most deeply held values.
The Forces That Make Manipulation Possible
It’s like there’s a reliable set of levers that can be thrown, and when they are thrown, it activates a form of individual and collective hypnosis. When you look at the last hundred and fifty years of serious thinking about this — not the popular accounts, but the work of people like Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Sigmund Freud, Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, Hannah Arendt, Stanley Milgram, Solomon Asch, and Carl Jung, you find that the levers cluster into seven specific forces. Each of them operates below conscious awareness, and each of the forces can either serve the forces of life, or the forces of anti-life.
The chapters that follow will take each in turn.