The myth of the programmable masses

We are all too eager to believe that the masses are being programmed. It is a comforting idea, because it explains in a single stroke why the others disagree with us so stubbornly: they are the dupes, played by forces they cannot see through. Science tells a soberer and more uncomfortable story.

Bernays and the invisible government

Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, joined his uncle's psychology to the mass media and so built modern public relations. He called it the engineering of consent, the deliberate shaping of agreement. In his 1928 book Propaganda he wrote it without flinching: the conscious, intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democracy, and whoever controls that mechanism forms an invisible government that truly governs. He turned cigarettes for women into "torches of freedom," and believed that the irrational desires of the masses could be channelled by anyone who knew the levers.

The hypodermic-needle model has been refuted

But it is precisely that image, a passive crowd into which you inject a message that is swallowed without question, that communication science long ago abandoned. The "limited effects" tradition showed that people are no will-less pigeons: they resist, reinterpret, ignore, are more influenced by their own circle than by the media directly, and above all believe what they already wanted to believe. The actual persuasive power of something like Cambridge Analytica is strongly doubted by researchers. And that company was, after all, selling its own power, so it had every interest in the myth. Mind you: it is not zero. Messages tailored to your profile work at the margins, and in elections decided by a single percentage point, small can turn out large. But influence is mediated, resisted, and far smaller than the story "they are programming us" claims. No remote control for your mind.

Researchers even found a detour: most people are not persuaded by the media directly, but by the few people in their own circle whom they trust, the uncle who understands politics, the friend who reads everything. The message flows in two steps, and at each step it is filtered, tested, recoloured. That is not an injection; it is a conversation with intermediaries who are just as headstrong as you. It makes the masses far harder to steer than the puppeteer hopes. And far more human than his model allows. People are not a screen you project onto; they are an audience that talks back.

No one at the wheel

And perhaps the modern threat is even the opposite of Bernays. The recommendation algorithm is not a propagandist with a goal, but an amplifier without one: it does not optimise for a message and not for the truth, but for your attention. And it discovered that outrage holds it best. Hannah Arendt saw the deepest danger already: not that you come to believe a single lie, but that you lose the capacity to tell true from false. Not manufactured consent, but manufactured confusion. Not the puppeteer, but the empty control room.

The comforting myth

So hold two things at once. The manipulation is real, and it is overestimated. And the overestimation is itself a form of manipulation, because "the masses are programmed" excuses your own camp and declares your opponent a will-less dupe. It is more comfortable to believe that the other is being played than that he, just like you, has simply weighed things differently. The defended mind keeps its certainty in proportion to its evidence, including, and especially, about how played the others are supposed to be.

A moment to carry with you: when did you last attribute someone else's opinion to "they've been programmed". And how sure are you that you yourself have not been?