Some of our misconceptions are formed in school but most of us learn more from television, movies, newspapers, magazines and books. We trust the press, but we should also fear it because the media can literally build or rebuild our society in the image it chooses -- or in the image chosen by whoever controls the media.
It has happened. When Hitler took power in Germany he used the newspapers, radio stations and movie studios to shape a modern, civilized country to his ends. With full control of the national press his propaganda minister Paul Josef Goebbels developed sophisticated and very effective tools of propaganda to control public opinion in Germany, and even in other countries.
Propaganda works because if you repeat something often enough in mass media, and if no contrary information is published, most people will accept whatever you publish as the truth; even if it's directly counter to what they used to believe.
Modern propaganda techniques may be the most dangerous weapon developed in the Second World War, but the danger has been ignored by some and covered up by others. The atom bomb scared so many people that mass movements tried to control it, but the general public does not seem to understand the danger of propaganda.
While governments spent billions to improve nuclear weapons and to test a few of them in isolated areas, private companies in the advertising industry spent even more to develop new propaganda techniques, and to test and use them on all of us.
Some modern advertising agencies have bigger budgets and more actual power than Goebbels did. Their power is not as naked as his but, because they control the money, they control the media.
And while Goebbels controlled relatively few radio stations, newspapers and billboards, the power of advertising is exerted through much more, and more powerful, media.
When American psychologist Wilson Bryan Key thought he saw subliminal imagery in magazine advertisements, he wrote a book about them. The Clam Plate Orgy was a best seller, but the images are still there.[1]
Most Americans think it's illegal to use subliminal advertising on movies and TV but it's not only legal, it's commonplace. During the presidential election of 2000 Americans were shocked when a Bush campaign commercial was found to show the words "rats," flickering over an image of Al Gore.[2] George W. Bush denied responsibility but there is no question that the technique was used. After it was discovered the commercial was shown, slowed down so the subliminal message was plain to see, on national news programs.
Are there other techniques we don't know about? It sounds paranoid, but we have to assume there are techniques that even many advertising people don't know about. We are talking about a multi-billion dollar business in which one agency's secret technique can give it an advantage over another. The only thing we can be sure of is that major agencies have tens of millions of dollars to fund research, and that they have good reason to keep their discoveries secret.
Advertising agencies pretend that they use their power only to sell commercial goods but we know that professional advertisers plan election campaigns for politicians, and that public relations professionals "manage" the public's perception of governments. Politicians pretend that their advertising and PR managers have no political power but it's obvious that the man who controls the election must have considerable influence over the politician.
And advertisers and others use the media to manage our perceptions of the world for their own benefit. Writing in 1995 David Korten, president of the People-Centered Development Forum, reported that North American public relations agencies have 170,000 people to manage and manipulate news while North American news media has only about 40,000 reporters to report it. In 1990 a study found that nearly 40% of the contents of American newspapers began with press releases or other information from public relations agencies.[3]
That study counted only "honest" public relations releases, that made no pretense to be anything else. In addition to the overt public relations organizations both Canada and the United States are home to dozens of "think tanks" and "institutes" that "study" problems and make public pronouncements and recommendations. Their work is presented as "science" or "scholarship" but -- especially since many such organizations refuse to reveal the source of their funding -- we must assume that some of them are in fact mouthpieces for specific interests and that their pronouncements are attempts to control public opinion.
Most reporters say they are not controlled by advertisers or public relations companies and they think they are telling the truth. When I worked as a reporter, I wrote what I believed to be true.
But as a reporter I had some very pleasant vacations in Europe, Mexico and resort areas of the U.S.A. and Canada, and a lot of memorable meals at the expense of public relations people. They didn't buy my opinions but they did spend a lot of money to make friends.
And I have myself been party to deliberate manipulation of the news. In the mid 1960's I shot free-lance newsfilm for several TV stations in southern Ontario. When a pressure group wanted the Canadian military to lend a Hercules transport plane to a group that was trying to get aid to one side in the Nigerian civil war, CFTO-TV sent me to cover the group's "demonstration" outside the Air Transport Command station at Trenton, Ont.
By the time I got there several other TV crews were waiting, but there were no "demonstrators." On schedule a car and a couple of vans arrived. A PR man got out of the car and spoke to us, then to the guards outside the station, then waved his people out of the vans.
For a few minutes about a dozen "demonstrators" marched in circles, waved signs and chanted slogans in front of the gate while we of the press took pictures and film, choosing our camera angles to make the dozen people look like a mob.
When the PR man asked if we had enough I pointed out a Hercules plane parked in the airfield across the road. If I used a long lens and if the "demonstrators" marched in exactly the right place, I could get a shot of them marching with the plane in the background.
They did and I did, until I got the shot. Then the "demonstrators" all climbed into the vans and went home. They didn't give a damn about the planes or about Nigeria, all they cared was that they had been paid to march in front of the cameras.
I told the news editor about this when I gave him my film. He told me that he already knew about it, and that it had all been properly "arranged." So much for the integrity of the press.
THE SOCIAL ACTION BUSINESS
We've seen a big increase in the use of propaganda and information management in the past 30 years, partly due to the Vietnam war. This next bit is speculation, but it's speculation is on the level of "if I jump out of the window I may fall to the ground."
We know that there was considerable opposition within the States to the Vietnam War, and we know that Russian intelligence services had access to some very powerful propaganda and persuasion techniques and a spy network that spread through most of the free world.
I have no proof or even evidence that Russian undercover agents taught propaganda techniques to activists at American universities but if they did not, the Russian intelligence service did not do its job.
Idealistic professors also taught propaganda techniques during this period and probably some semi-secret techniques leaked out of advertising agencies. One way and another, a lot of people learned a lot about the science of persuasion and manipulation in the years from 1960 to 1980.
And however they learned their techniques, there is no question that since the 1970's some of the people who protested the Vietnam War have done very well in the social action business. Organizations that began as idealistic crusades for equal rights or to save the whales or the seals or other animals now have budgets of tens of millions of dollars a year.
They're all non-profit, of course, but the managers and employees are still paid for their work and they can be paid very well. When a for-profit organization makes a profit it either banks it as a capital reserve or pays it out as a dividend to its shareholders, but a non-profit organization is required to spend all its income, one way or another. If all else fails, executive wages and benefits can always be increased.
The salaries paid to top executives of Canadian charities are supposed to be public information but Hamilton-Wentworth MP John Bryden reports that about 25% of Canadian charities -- more that 18,000 organizations -- do not report the salaries they pay to top executives.
One of the few politicians to worry about propaganda-based businesses, Bryden published a two-booklet report on the funding of special-interest groups in 1994 and one on charities in 1996.[4]
The 1996 report says Canada has 73,000 registered charities and another 66,000 non-profit organizations, with total revenues that Bryden estimates at more than $100 billion. The report has to estimate the total because financial information on the 66,000 non-profit organizations is "confidential" -- bureaucratic for secret -- but numbers for the 73,000 "charities" are available.
Between them they share a total income of about $86 billion dollars -- about 13% of Canada's total economic activity -- they have about $109 billion in assets and they employ about 1.3 million people or about 12% of Canada's total work force. The numbers are not quite so mind-blowing when you remember that most hospitals and universities are "charities," but they are still pretty big.
We expect to see big numbers in the funding of hospitals and universities but most of the 73,000 registered Canadian charities are neither universities nor hospitals, and some of them are open to serious question. By definition a charity helps people in need but some Canadian charities confine their activities to special groups.
Bryden cites as one example the Quimby Foundation of Red Deer, Alberta, founded in 1979 to preserve and promote the writings of Phineas P. Quimby, a 19th-century American clockmaker and spiritual leader. The Quimby Foundation issued receipts for donations totalling $69,526 in 1994.
The Osborn Foundation of Canada which gave receipts donations of $151,667 in 1993, apparently uses the money to support a "temple" in Oklahoma. The assets of the temple, Bryden says, include some valuable works of art and a 1923 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost automobile.
Some non-profit organizations appear to be outright frauds. Bryden says that in 1990 the Auditor General reported that one Canadian corporation had donated $5 million to several foundations whose directors were related to the corporation, and that the foundations had immediately loaned the money back, plus interest charges. Because the money was given to registered charities the gifts were deductible for tax purposes, and loans are not taxable.
But at least those foundations had directors. Bryden says that journalists who investigated a charity in Saskatoon contacted three of the people named as directors. Two of them had never heard of the charity, and the third had no connection with it.
Some companies make a business of raising funds for charities and noon-profit organizations. Many of them do a very good job, but when professionals raise funds they are will paid for it. In some cases, the fund-raisers take 80% of the funds raised and the charity that people think they are giving to gets only 20%. Salaries for the employees of the charity have to come out of that and, when you give $10 to your favorite cause, the people you want to help may get only one dollar.
By law a public charity is supposed to devote 80% of the money it receives in donations to charitable works but many Canadian charities get most of their money from the government or from business. Because they do not describe these gifts as "donations," there is no control on how they spend them.
Bryden reports that in 1994 The Standards Council of Canada received $33,000 in donations, $6 million in funding and $3 million as payment for services. Gross revenues were $8,877,974, management and administration costs were $8,515,864 and the council spent $8,916 on "charitable activities."
That's about 1/10 of 1% of the Council's total income! The council could argue that it was not established to perform "charitable activities," but it is registered as a charity.
Charities represent a significant part of our Gross Domestic Product but, while some of them perform a valuable function, they do not produce wealth. I would not want to live in a country without charity but, at the same time, I would not want to live in a country in which charity is just a tax-free commercial business.
THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT
The women's movement is by far the most powerful of modern social movements. Most women see feminism as a question of personal freedom and self-realization, but its more important impact is economic.
The modern women's movement began in 1963, when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique,[5] but it took a while to get rolling.
Friedan is a former magazine writer who watched the rise of the advertising agencies and the decline of the women's magazines she wrote for. In the 1930's and 40's the good women's magazines offered a high-quality mix of fiction, articles about career women and some home-oriented service articles, but in the 1950's they began to concentrate on service articles for housewives.
Friedan blamed the change on the move from mostly-women to mostly-men writers and editors, but she misses the point. She admits that women worked cheaper than men, so the magazines didn't save money with the change. This was part of the take-over of American media by the advertisers.
Because publishers who play the Numbers Game see their readers only as consumers, magazines were changed to encourage them to consume more. Some women, like Friedan, reacted against the change but most did not and it's a safe bet that even the women who reacted also consumed more.
Friedan's book reached relatively few women but it converted them to the cause and, slowly, they spread the word to others.
The movement hit the big time when Australian writer Germaine Greer's book The Female Eunuch[6] was published in the early 1970's. The book came just when feminists who had been converted by Friedan were ready to apply the techniques of persuasion that were now available.
As the word spread feminists gained considerable support from business and government, probably because one of the tenets of feminism is that women should work for a living. That's good for the Numbers Game, but it's most certainly not a new idea.
The fact is that women have always worked and they have been a vital part of every human economy. The change that feminism made was to bring them into the Numbers Game.
In the very early days of humanity our male ancestors hunted and our female ancestors gathered food, and the gathering was usually more productive than the hunting. Gatherers are vital to a hunter-gatherer society because hunting alone can't supply enough food and because humans can't live well on just meat.
Even among Mongol herdsmen and the Inuit -- both of whom are generally considered to be meat eaters -- the diet includes roots, berries and teas or soups made of bark, lichen, berries and grasses.
In most tribal societies women own the farms, until the farming turns to grain. At that point men take over the farms and women stay home, partly because grain takes a lot of preparation before we can eat it. While men worked the fields women worked at home, cleaning and grinding the grain and baking bread. In most societies women also dress hides, collect fibers, weave cloth and make clothing.
Even in industrial times women made, washed and repaired clothes, baked bread and prepared other foods. the Numbers Game sees a woman at home as a non-producer but through most of human history, the home has been a primary center of production.
Even while they raise children women working at home can also produce tangible wealth. When my mother was a child, early this century, her family never bought women's clothes. Instead a professional seamstress came to the house for one month each year, to help my grandmother and her six daughters make everything they would need for the year.
When I grew up in the 1940's my mother still made most of her own clothes, most of my father's shirts and many of her children's clothes. Her work did not show on the GDP but the clothes she made were much better quality than we could buy and they were worth a considerable amount of money.
My mother also made most of the family meals from scratch and during the Second World War she knitted socks for soldiers, and grew much of the family food in a "Victory Garden." We were not poor, but that was the way people lived in those days.
Women's work at home has always been an important source of wealth but that wealth is not counted by the Numbers Game. On the other hand a woman who works in the cash economy may produce only cost goods but, because she is paid in cash and she spends the cash to buy goods her family needs, she contributes to the GDP and is a player in the Numbers Game.
Today's working women are more likely to buy clothes than to make them, and to buy prepared food and restaurant meals rather than cook their own. Working women need more clothes, cars and services than women who stay home, thus creating more consumption for the business community and more taxes for government. More numbers for the game.
Lawyers, "therapists," psychiatrists benefit from the break-up of families. Even real estate investors and agents profit, because men and women who need only one house or apartment as a couple need two if they live apart.
The destruction of marriages also increases the need by both men and women to put on a show of wealth and conspicuous consumption. The mate selection period, when both men and women do their best to look impressive, is extended indefinitely.
The destruction of families also creates jobs for social and child care workers and other government employees, and a whole new industry of day-care for the children of working mothers. Partly because mothers who did not care for their own kids feel guilty and partly because kids who are not cared for by their mothers are more demanding, sales of toys also benefit.
But there is some question about whether women benefit or not. Several studies have found that the average working wife and mother does not earn enough to cover the tax on her pay, the increased tax on her husband's pay, and the extra taxes she incurs by going to work.
The women's movement insists that women should be paid as much as men for the same job but the flood of working women has put a cap on wages. Whether they are paid as much as men or not working women increase the size of the work force, thus creating unemployment and a lever to keep wages down. That's one of the reasons the average Canadian has lost about 20% of real purchasing power since the mid-1970's.
And while the numbers in the economy are increased, the production of wealth is not. Most new-age women don't want to run farms or work in factories, they want to be lawyers or media personalities or bureaucrats. They want to produce cost goods, rather than benefit goods.
In the Numbers Game all jobs are considered to be productive and when governments "create" jobs, they "create" jobs that people want rather than jobs the economy needs. Canadian federal and provincial governments responded to the demands of feminists with the creation of jobs that would employ women, but that did not produce benefit goods.
The Ontario government, for example, created 1,500 new jobs it called "bridging positions." These were frankly make-work jobs, and their sole purpose was to put women into "executive" positions.[7] Because the first job of a civil servant is to find something to be seen doing, most of these jobs soon appeared to be an integral part of the machine of government.
Now the original "bridging positions" are established jobs and the people who fill them have private offices, secretaries and assistants. It may be partly because of such make-work executive positions that by 1993, according to the Globe and Mail, 25.2% of all government employees were "managers".[8]
Governments also encouraged businesses to hire women and, by passing regulations that demanded more clerical work in business, created the need for more jobs that women could fill. The result was a big increase in both the size of government and the need for women workers but, because most of the new jobs produced cost goods, there was no increase in the production of wealth.
Women working at home did not contribute to the Numbers Game but they did create wealth. Women in the workplace contribute to the numbers game, but they may or may not create wealth.
Women who work outside the home, for example, buy more prepared foods and thus create work for the people who prepare them and package them. In the Numbers Game that looks good because more people are working and earning money -- but we don't have any more food than we had before. In fact we have less food produced in Canada, because many of the prepared foods are imported.
We also have many more restaurants and fast-food outlets and more people working in them but, again, these do not produce more food. The people who work in a hamburger stand are part of the cascade and, if the hamburger stand is part of a chain with an American franchise, it exports part of it's profits to the United States.
Women who work for wages rather than at home contribute to the prosperity of government and big business, but their contribution to the wealth of the country is less noticeable.
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