The Engineering of Consent
How the PR Industry Laid the Foundation for Questioning Truth
There isn’t a day that goes by without my newsfeed containing news of at least one religious leader calling into question the COVID-19 vaccination. Most of it seems to come from within the bowels of Christendom. I’m sure there are other religious groups who have an outspoken view against being vaccinated, but the more vocal ones seem to be aligned with the Christian faith.
It’s not a new thing. Christendom has had a chequered past with science. Whether it’s against Al Gore and his early crusade to raise climate change awareness, or its approach today to the COVID-19 vaccine. All it needed to do was sow the seeds of doubt, whether the doubt may be based on the luducrous (“the vaccine contains the mark of the beast”) or some faux-scientific explanation that such science is unproven. It didn't matter. What mattered was the doubt.
Christendom’s approach was not a behaviour it had developed on its own. It learned the approach from the Tobacco Industry and its well oiled PR machine, which, only a few years previous to the cataclysmic religious liberation of the 1960s, had found itself embroiled with the scientific community’s discovery of the link between Lung Cancer and Cigarette smoking.
In the late 1950s, it was emerging that cigarette smoking was the primary cause for the alarming increase in lung cancer. Today, this is a given. Very few people would argue otherwise, but that was not the case in 1956 when the American Cancer Society, along with a growing body of professional and scientific opinion took this position:
“Although the complicity of the cigarette in the present prevalence of cancer of the lung has not been proved to the satisfaction of everyone, yet the weight of evidence against it is so serious as to demand of stewards of the public welfare that they make the evidence known to all.”[1]
The Tobacco Industry found itself in trouble. Scientific evidence was pointing out the harms of smoking. In response, and in self-preservation, the Industry developed a public relations machine of disinformation to undermine and distort the emerging science. It was the blueprint that many leaders and political parties still use today. And it is one that Christendom has taken on as its own and one that has heavily influenced the approach to apologetics today.
This blueprint is what early public relations theorist Edward Bernays called “the engineering of consent.”[2]
In his words, Bernays describes engineering consent as,
“use of an engineering approach — that is, action based only on a thorough knowledge of the situation and on the application of scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs.”[3]
It formed the basis of the public relations industry and with it, its approach to the study of consumer behaviour. The Tobacco industry, through its public relations consultants, took the “engineering of consent” to a level that was never previously envisioned. The Tobacco Industry was already well-positioned at empowering people to use its products. Bernays himself was the architect of the campaign in the late 1920s to entice women to smoke in public by building on the emergence of female power and freedom. But the scientific evidence that was coming out threatened to undo all the corporate public relations success up until that point.
Building on Bernays blueprint, instead of empowering people to use their products, the Tobacco Industry empowered people to engage with the positive value of scientific skepticism of science itself.[4]
“The tobacco industry’s program to engineer the science relating to the harms caused by cigarettes marked a watershed in the history of the industry. It moved aggressively into a new domain, the production of scientific knowledge, not for purposes of research and development but, rather, to undo what was now known: that cigarette smoking caused lethal disease. If science had historically been dedicated to the making of new facts, the industry campaign now sought to develop specific strategies to “unmake” a scientific fact.”[5] [6]
It’s hard to believe today that this tactic worked, but it did. Because of the impact of the Tobacco Industry’s political lobbying, it was more than fifty years after the 1958 US Surgeon General’s recommendations before the first effective regulatory action from the US federal government was passed. The Tobacco Industry got its own scientists who, though they did not entirely refute the scientific findings of the link between cigarettes and lung cancer, produced enough disinformation to cause people to question the scientific findings.
“By the early 1960s — despite categorical research findings indicating the harms of smoking — a significant “controversy” had arisen (at the behest of the tobacco industry) over the validity and meaning of these findings.”[7]
Many bought into it, especially the United States Republican Party, whose many constituents were in the Tobacco belt of the south-east United States. It was so effective that the sales of cigarettes in the 1960s had increased by over 100 billion per year compared to the 1950s.[8] Christendom played its part as well. Public distrust in scientific findings would pave the way for the new future of apologia.
Today, you can see this same public relations approach toward climate change and toward the COVID-19 pandemic, and the same attitude of Christendom.
***
Up in Smoke
The world still has not come to grips with the fact that the Tobacco Industry openly led a campaign of lies, confusion, and distrust, only to find out what was already well known by the scientific findings in 1958, that cigarette smoke causes cancer, at the cost of many millions of lives. And that hasn’t changed still today, as the World Health Organisation states:
“The tobacco epidemic is one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced, killing more than 8 million people a year around the world. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.2 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke. Around 80% of the 1.1 billion smokers worldwide live in low- and middle-income countries, where the burden of tobacco-related illness and death is heaviest. Tobacco use contributes to poverty by diverting household spending from basic needs such as food and shelter to tobacco. This spending behaviour is difficult to curb because tobacco is so addictive.”[9]
Today, this form of engineering of consent has gone further than anyone could have envisaged. When the President of the United States called COVID-19 a Democrat hoax at a campaign rally in South Carolina,[10] it caused enough confusion for people to not take seriously the threat of a looming pandemic. This could be seen when Pastor Landon Spradlin, who was a proponent of the virus being a hoax, died from the virus. His family’s response was to blame the media for the confusion around the matter, rather than the President who openly contradicted his own scientific staff. This, in light of the fact that, in the United States, only one major media outlet sided with the President, the overwhelming majority of the media had been warning people of the gravity of the situation.[11]
And so today, Christendom uses its apologia as the same public relations tactic as the Tobacco companies did, by having people engage with the positive value of scientific skepticism of science itself, all the while not submitting themselves to the same healthy skepticism.
It’s no wonder why, in the western world, Christendom is declining as fast as cigarette smoking. The tactic may give you the advantage today, but in the long run it will end up compromising your integrity.
[2] Brandt AM, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (New York, NY: Basic Books; 2007).
[3] Bernays, Edward, The engineering of consent (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955).
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/#bib3
[5] Proctor RN, Schiebinger L. Agnotology, The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; 2008 ).
[6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/#bib4
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tobacco
[10] Feb. 28, 2020
