A pathway · 4 stops

How Persuasion Was Built

From Bernays to the broadcast eye — the documented machinery of manufactured desire.

Start at the source text. In 1928 Edward Bernays named the craft outright — the engineering of consent, propaganda as an instrument of modern society.

Stop 1 of 4

Book · 1928

Propaganda

by Edward Bernays

In the Library →

Read how it was built into the century: Bernays, Lippmann, and the advertising of manufactured desire — the modern, undeniable face of the ancient art.

Stop 2 of 4

Pillar P4

The Engineering of Consent

The ancient art of image-control did not disappear with the Byzantine emperors and the Protestant reformers. It was industrialized. In the 1920s, Edward Bernays named the project, documented the methods, and built a commercial practice out of it. The mechanism Plato theorized — images bypassing reason to reshape the interior — became, in the twentieth century, an applied discipline with clients, fees, and a published literature. It is the most documented layer of the war over images, and the one most people are still not reading.

Read the pillar →

See it wear a logo — the broadcast eye, the symbol a network chose to watch the very audience it was built to persuade.

Stop 3 of 4

Decode

The CBS television network logo — a single human eye inside an oval

The CBS Eye

The eye of a sun-god, rendered corporate and broadcast into a billion living rooms.

2 symbols assembled

And end where persuasion meets force — the bound rods of state power, displayed in plain sight at the center of the republic.

Stop 4 of 4

That's the route. Wander on into the Dictionary, or follow another path below.

The CBS Eye

The Fasces