Preface: Continuing from the previous piece. This article was co-written with ChatGPT.

Bernays was very explicit in his view that lies are an inefficient tool in long-term communication. Lies are easily exposed, and once uncovered they quickly erode trust; a communication structure that loses trust cannot operate over time. What he pursued, therefore, was never short-term deception that happens to work once, but a public-opinion structure capable of operating steadily and sustainably. In this sense, his rejection of lies was not a moral stance but a functional one: lies lack systemic durability.

From this judgment, Bernays advanced a further key premise: facts do not automatically generate meaning. In his view, facts are always scattered and fragmented; meaning is not inherent in facts but assigned to them. Public opinion is never a simple accumulation or statistical sum of facts, but the outcome of organization and structuring. Consequently, the work of propaganda does not lie in fabricating facts, but in selecting which facts are presented, determining how they are ordered, deciding how they are interpreted, and linking them into a coherent narrative. Meaning does not arise from facts themselves, but from the relationships deliberately constructed among them.

At this level, Bernays further emphasized that “selection” itself is unavoidable. Even if one claims to practice “objective reporting,” one cannot escape selection: deciding what to report and what not to report, choosing headlines, determining placement and prominence. All of these are acts of selection, and selection itself already shapes meaning. What Bernays did was not invent this bias, but lay it bare—so-called neutrality does not mean the absence of structural choices.

This leads to another commonly misunderstood point: what Bernays called propaganda is not equivalent to “brainwashing.” In his view, the very notion of brainwashing rests on a false assumption—that people are passive containers into which ideas can simply be poured. His judgment was the opposite: people are not passive recipients of information, and one cannot simply insert an idea into another person’s mind. People make choices within preexisting psychological structures, emotional patterns, and social identities. Accordingly, his aim was never to remake people’s thinking, but to activate, amplify, and rearrange psychological tendencies that already existed.

For this reason, Bernays relied far more on fear, identification, shame, honor, and conformity than on logical argument. He did not attempt to create new desires, but to mobilize and reorganize existing desires and emotional resources, making a particular attitude feel like the most natural and least effortful choice.

Below, I present a case he worked on are used as illustrative examples: the events involving the United Fruit Company in Guatemala.

From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Guatemala’s central predicament was not ideological but institutional: weak public finances, inadequate infrastructure, and heavy dependence on a single export. The government urgently needed capital, technology, and transportation networks, and thus introduced foreign companies through concessionary arrangements, trading privileges for the construction of railways, ports, and export capacity.

The United Fruit Company entered during this window and rapidly acquired powers far beyond normal commercial activity: land concessions, tax exemptions, long-term privileges, and exclusive control over key nodes. Initially, this was an exchange in which companies compensated for state weakness; it soon became a situation in which the company replaced the state.

First was the issue of land. United Fruit did not acquire land piecemeal, but concentrated ownership—under favorable government terms—of the country’s most fertile lowlands and river valleys suited for export crops. A substantial portion of this land was not put into production but kept idle as strategic reserves. This blocked local farmers and competitors from entering high-value agriculture and left the state with little room to maneuver in agricultural policy or land distribution. Land remained privately owned in name, but functionally detached from social production and public allocation, becoming an instrument through which the company controlled market structure.

Second was transportation and logistics. Through affiliated companies, United Fruit controlled the railway system linking plantations to ports and directly operated key port facilities. This meant that bananas were not only produced by United Fruit, but also transported, loaded, and exported by it. The lifeline of national foreign trade—the export corridor—was effectively in corporate hands. Even when the government formulated trade or transport policies, it could not implement them without passing through this private infrastructure. The transport network was a commercial asset in form, but a national public utility in function, with decision-making power entirely outside the state.

Third was communication and information. Control of railways and ports often entailed control over telegraph and communication nodes. This was not merely a technical matter but a source of structural information asymmetry. Whoever could obtain data on transport, prices, and market shifts more quickly held the advantage in negotiation and decision-making. The state lagged in information access, further weakening its governing capacity.

Fourth was the fiscal structure. United Fruit consistently minimized its tax burden by undervaluing land and assets in its tax declarations. Given the state’s already fragile finances, this low taxation was not simply a concession but a direct cause of chronic public-budget shortfalls. More importantly, taxation ceased to function as an instrument of state economic regulation and instead became a cost variable defined by corporate accounting practices. The state’s fiscal authority was structurally hollowed out by corporate self-reporting.

Fifth was the labor regime. In areas under its control, United Fruit imposed high-intensity, low-protection labor systems, with workers heavily dependent on the company for employment, housing, and basic goods. This “company town” structure made labor-rights issues difficult to address through national legal institutions. The state’s role in labor regulation was replaced by internal corporate rules, while social tensions were suppressed within the company system and accumulated over time.

Taken together, these five dimensions produced a critical outcome: the state continued to exist formally, with sovereignty and law intact, but in practice could no longer make independent decisions regarding land, transport, finance, labor, or exports. Government policy space was compressed into a narrow zone that did not touch corporate interests. Once it did, systemic backlash was inevitable.

Thus, when the Guatemalan government attempted to restore discretion over land, taxation, and public resources through legal means, this was not a mere “policy adjustment,” but a fundamental challenge to the existing structure. Under such conditions, the conflict necessarily exceeded the scope of an ordinary commercial dispute. For United Fruit, the issue was no longer whether a particular interest was harmed, but whether the state would once again become a state.

At that time, President Jacobo Árbenz was the figure advancing reform. Árbenz did not come to power through revolution or military coup, but through election within Guatemala’s constitutional framework (1951–1954). This background shaped the nature of his policies: he did not seek to abolish private property or remake social ideology, but to restore the state’s basic governing capacity within a long-distorted economic structure. Guatemala’s core problem in the mid-twentieth century was not a choice between capitalism and socialism, but whether the state retained the ability to allocate land, taxation, and public resources.

Land reform lay at the center of Árbenz’s agenda for good reason. For decades, Guatemala’s agricultural structure had been severely imbalanced: a small number of large landowners and foreign companies controlled vast areas of prime land, while the majority of farmers lacked arable land and depended on low-wage, seasonal labor. Crucially, a significant share of land remained idle—neither productive nor serving any public purpose—blocking agricultural expansion and social stability. Under such conditions, low productivity, rural poverty, and mounting social tensions became structural challenges to governance.

Accordingly, Árbenz’s land reform was not a comprehensive expropriation or a rejection of private property, but a targeted intervention aimed at the specific problem of long-idle large estates. The law clearly distinguished between land in production and idle land, with only the latter subject to expropriation. This limitation alone shows that the reform aimed to increase land utilization, not to pursue ideological redistribution. Whether land was expropriated depended not on ownership identity, but on whether it fulfilled a productive function.

In terms of compensation, the reform relied on land values as declared by owners for tax purposes. For years, large landowners and corporations had systematically undervalued their holdings to reduce tax burdens, a practice tolerated under the existing system. Árbenz’s reform simply applied those declared values in compensation, introducing no new valuation standards or punitive measures. From the government’s perspective, this was an internally consistent application of existing rules: if low valuations were accepted for taxation, they should also apply in expropriation. It was precisely here that the reform exposed the system’s internal contradictions.

Expropriated land was then distributed to landless or land-poor farmers. The objective was not merely social equity, but the restoration of agricultural productivity and rural stability. With access to land, farmers could engage in subsistence and market production, expand domestic food supply, reduce dependence on a single export crop, and gradually form a more stable tax base and internal market. Land reform thus served both economic repair and social stabilization, rather than political mobilization.

Overall, Árbenz’s land reform was not a negation of the existing system, but a correction of long-standing structural distortions. It sought to transform land from a speculative asset back into a productive resource, and to reposition the state from a passive bystander to an active allocator of public resources. For this reason, the true trigger of conflict lay not in ideological confrontation, but in the reform’s direct impact on entrenched interests that profited from distortion. Once the state began to exercise sovereignty according to its own rules, conflict became inevitable.

It was within this structural conflict that Edward Bernays entered the historical stage. Bernays did not participate in legal negotiations over land, nor did he intervene directly in Guatemalan domestic politics. His role operated at a higher level: reshaping the narrative framework of the conflict so that an economic dispute of “state sovereignty versus private corporate interests” came to be understood as an ideological struggle of “the free world versus the communist threat.”

At its core, the initial conflict was a straightforward issue of economics and governance. On one side, United Fruit Company’s land, tax, and monopoly interests were challenged by reform; on the other, Jacobo Árbenz sought to restore state discretion over public resources. In a normal international order, such conflicts would fall under the category of “state sovereignty versus private interests,” to be addressed through law, diplomacy, or negotiation. Bernays’s first move was to elevate this governance dispute into an ideological and security issue. In his narrative design, land law, tax declarations, and compensation rules were systematically removed from the center of discussion and replaced with labels such as “leftist government,” “communist infiltration,” and “Soviet presence in the Western Hemisphere.” In this way, the issue underwent a qualitative transformation—from domestic governance dispute to a matter of U.S. national security.

Bernays’s second move was to remove corporate interests from the narrative altogether. He understood that if the American public perceived the issue as “a U.S. company pushing to attack a foreign government for profit,” any intervention would lose moral and political legitimacy. United Fruit was therefore kept out of the foreground, while journalists, scholars, “Latin America experts,” and think-tank commentators took center stage. These voices appeared independent in form but converged on the same conclusion. What the public saw was not corporate lobbying, but “multiple independent sources agreeing that Guatemala posed a serious problem.”

The third move was to manufacture a “pre-policy consensus.” Bernays’s primary targets were not ordinary citizens, but three key groups: major media editors, policy and bureaucratic circles, and the overall interpretive environment of Congress and the executive branch. Through sustained reporting and commentary, claims such as “Guatemala is unstable,” “the government is influenced by extremist ideology,” “it threatens Central American security,” and “the United States cannot remain passive” gradually hardened into default assumptions. This step was decisive, because once policy debate began, the question was no longer whether to intervene, but how.

When this interpretive environment had fully matured, the CIA’s subsequent launch of Operation PBSUCCESS encountered ample “political oxygen.” Within government, there was no need to reestablish the existence of a threat; in Congress, there was little organized opposition; in public opinion, the action was perceived as defensive and preventive. The direction of causality matters here: it was not that the CIA decided on a coup and then searched for justification, but that a threat narrative had already crystallized, making the coup an acceptable option. Bernays had completed the psychological and discursive infrastructure in advance.

For this reason, his influence cannot be described as mere observation. In the U.S. institutional context, military or intelligence operations do not occur automatically; they require public tolerance, political defensibility, and bureaucratic cooperation. Bernays addressed precisely these prerequisites. He did not decide that a coup must happen, but he ensured that if it did, it would not immediately be perceived as an overreach, a scandal, or an illegality.

Compressed into a single causal chain, his role becomes clear: United Fruit’s interests were threatened; Bernays ideologized the conflict; U.S. media formed a consensus around the “Guatemalan threat”; corporate interests disappeared from the narrative; the policy system assumed that a response was necessary; the CIA gained legitimate operational space; and in 1954, Árbenz was removed from power and the coup succeeded.

Bernays did not overthrow the Guatemalan government. He simply made overthrowing it seem reasonable in the United States. In mass democracies, it is often this sense of “reasonableness,” rather than direct command, that determines the course of historical events.