HUME QUOTE:
Nothing appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of Egypt, or the emperor of Rome, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or prætorian bands, like men, by their opinion.

DOUGLAS QUOTE:
But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. -- Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, "Let there be Light," has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light.


SELECTED WIMBERLY QUOTES:
- Most individuals are quick to note that they are no dupes and harbor many suspicious and critical thoughts about propaganda. But, in trying to evaluate the impact of propaganda, it has to be remembered that propagandists have almost no interest in the individual. Propagandists focused on mass subjectivities—human beings in their collective social relationships and actions. It is perfectly possible that an individual might feel as an individual that she is critical and little impacted by propaganda: after all, does not she know that it is all smoke and mirrors? However, what we are judging is not what the individual thinks but what the public does. An individual may think whatever she wants, but if in her collective actions (e.g., as an 18- to 34-year-old television watcher, an automobile consumer, or a corporate or university worker) she acts in the collective fashion the propagandists create (e.g., watches the television, buys a nice midsized SUV, or completes the university administration–mandated course assessment work), then what do the rebellious thoughts of the individual matter to the propagandist who is measuring TV viewership, automobile sales, or how well a university serves its core customer base? Put otherwise, the propagandist seeks to forge mass subjectivities, which it calls the publics, to carry out the conduct their clients want, not to focus on the beliefs of individuals: “Very frequently propaganda is described as a manipulation for the purpose of changing ideas or opinions… . This is completely wrong… . The aim of modern propagandist is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action.”If the terms of mass subjectivities, large groupings of psychologically bonded individuals, give no room for those individual rebellions to crystallize into collective social action but instead reliably lead to the conduct corporations want, then one can perfectly well feel as an individual untouched, critical, or even radicalized but nonetheless still remain massively governed. In fact, isn’t it all the better that individuals believe themselves ungoverned, critical, and unaffected if that results in complacency and a lack of motivation for action? The point is that the thoughts of the individual and the conduct of the publics have to be distinguished: though one might feel critical as an individual, the question is how social and public relationships of subjects are constituted and conduct themselves. If a radical still buys the dress, movie ticket, or 12-piece dinner set, what does it matter that it is a radical who buys it when there is no room for that radicalism to manifest itself in the public? Propagandists would tell us that the appropriateness of the language of subjectification versus modification has to be judged at the level of the conduct of the public, not at the level of the thoughts of the individual.

- Certainly, authors like Stanley (epistemological interpretation) and Marcuse (ideological interpretation) are both correct insofar as propaganda does lie and repress. However, I will argue that these functions are subsidiaries of a much more threatening function of propaganda: its ability to shape human beings’ “body and soul and spirit” in the quest to produce the relationships that would sustain corporate growth.1The stakes in misinterpreting propaganda are high. If you take propaganda to present a problem of belief, then the solution is to replace false belief with true. If you take propaganda to be ideological, covering over true human desire with false and destructive desires, then the solution is to recover true desire and banish the chimera of the false. Both of these ways of interpreting propaganda place true belief or true desire as the untouched savoir of contemporary life; the true remains present and unaltered whatever the deceptions propagandists foment and it is the critic’s job to recover them. But if the aim of propaganda is to produce new subjects who will cooperatively and spontaneously adopt the wanted relationships with corporations, then there is no going back: the subject is not deceived but transformed, and the task of combatting propaganda will not be best conceived as a project of enlightenment but of subjectivation. The future will have to be created by producing new subjects and not through recovering what has been supposedly hidden but is better described as lost. Without grasping the impact of propaganda, attempts to counter it are unlikely to be effective.

- For instance, when Bernays wanted to get women to smoke Lucky Strikes, he had to change not only the image of cigarettes but also the self-image of the women who would smoke them. Bernays and psychoanalyst A. A. Brill determined that women would smoke if cigarettes if women viewed themselves as crusaders for liberation and the cigarette was positioned as a symbol of equality, freedom, and pleasure. To get women to smoke, Bernays guided women into thinking of smoking as an act of defiance and empowerment that would make them revolutionaries. Every woman could conceive of herself as contributing to women’s liberation, just by smoking a Lucky Strike. Bernays kicked off this campaign on Easter Sunday in 1929, when he recruited women to break the law against public smoking by women in New York by smoking Lucky Strikes in the Easter Day Parade. He used this symbolic gesture to link smoking to the liberation of choice, pleasure, and voice and as an act of resistance against patriarchy. Feminist Ruth Hale encouraged women to join in, saying, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”72 The aim was to get women to regard themselves and cigarettes differently such that women would form the relationship to cigarettes that Lucky Strike wanted (e.g. as avid and fierce consumers)...Bernays wanted to redirect drives—the true drives—to point at new ends; he did not falsify desires but rechanneled them from their source. He created objects of desire as true as any by working with their unconscious sources.