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

Edward Bernays (1891–1995) was born in Vienna, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and emigrated to the United States with his family at a young age. He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. This familial connection is not a biographical curiosity, but an important contextual factor in the formation of his thought. Bernays did not follow an academic research trajectory; although he received a university education, he developed primarily through practice in journalism, publicity, and government information work rather than within the academy.

During the First World War, Bernays participated in the U.S. government’s wartime propaganda and information mobilization apparatus. Through this involvement, he observed at close range—and took part in—the use of media, symbols, and narrative to mobilize a democratic society in support of war. After the war, he systematized these experiences and redirected them toward serving corporate, governmental, and political interests. In the process, he helped reframe the highly politicized notion of “propaganda” into the more neutral-sounding concept of “public relations.” He was not the sole architect of this emerging field, but he was among the earliest and most influential figures to articulate and operationalize its professional roles, technical logic, and social function.

Bernays’s life spanned the First World War, the interwar period, and the early Cold War. He was both a witness to and an active participant in the full formation of mass society. He did not see himself as a conspirator or merely a manipulator, but positioned himself consciously as a kind of “social engineer,” attempting to answer what he regarded as an unavoidable question: once mass society has irreversibly emerged, how is social order to be maintained?

The “cold premise” underlying Bernays’s work was not an emotional or moral judgment, but a structural one. In Propaganda, he repeatedly emphasized that he was not accusing ordinary people of stupidity, but describing the objective conditions faced by mass society. The scale of information in modern society far exceeds any individual’s capacity to process it. Domains such as finance, diplomacy, science, and law are highly specialized, and no individual can genuinely understand all public affairs through personal experience alone. The problem, therefore, is not a deficit of individual rationality, but the structural necessity that judgment be outsourced and delegated to intermediary systems.

On this basis, Bernays drew a sharp distinction between individual reasoning and collective behavior. Drawing on contemporary theories of crowd psychology, he argued that individuals may remain rational under certain conditions, but once embedded in large-scale groups, behavior tends to become emotional, imitative, and polarized, driven by symbols, slogans, and identity. His concern was not moral condemnation, but practical consequence: at the scale of mass society, collective decision-making is more prone to instability and loss of control than to convergence on truth.

This risk was intensified by the expansion of democratic institutions. Around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the extension of suffrage, the proliferation of mass media, and rapid urbanization and industrialization occurred simultaneously. Bernays’s assessment was that small-scale societies could rely on custom, familiar networks, and informal constraints to maintain order, but mass society could not depend on such “spontaneous order.” Without shared narratives and directional coherence, society was more likely to fall into cycles of emotional reaction, issue fragmentation, and uncontrolled mobilization.

It was in this context that Bernays introduced the concept of the “Invisible Government.” This idea is often misinterpreted as a conspiracy theory, but in Bernays’s own formulation it did not refer to secret meetings or a single hidden organization. Rather, it described a functional layer that emerges inevitably under the conditions of mass society. It was not artificially designed, but formed organically under structural pressure.

In Bernays’s account, this “invisible government” is not composed solely of politicians, but of a network of interacting roles. Media editors and agenda-setting mechanisms influence which issues enter public visibility and how they are framed. Experts, scholars, and research institutions lend professional authority to particular judgments. Public relations and communication planners design narrative frameworks that connect interest groups with media systems. Opinion leaders and social symbols translate abstract issues into tangible, imitable forms. These actors need not conspire; they need only operate according to the same underlying logic.

The power exercised by this structure does not primarily take the form of law, policing, taxation, or military force, but of shaping cognitive boundaries. Traditional governments regulate behavior; this “invisible layer of governance” regulates the range of legitimate topics, acceptable forms of expression, and plausible conclusions. It does not command people to think in a specific way, but renders alternative possibilities increasingly invisible or unserious by controlling visibility and framing.

In Bernays’s view, the inevitability of this structure followed from a closed logic. Mass publics cannot process highly complex public affairs; therefore judgment must be mediated. Once mediation exists, it solidifies into structure. That structure will either operate unconsciously, producing disorder, or be consciously organized to maintain order. Bernays explicitly chose the latter. His concern was never whether manipulation exists, but who performs it and according to what principles.

This position led to his most controversial conclusion. In his reasoning, transparency alone does not automatically produce rationality; under certain conditions, it may instead amplify panic, polarization, and systemic instability. As a result, fully unmediated public self-determination appeared to him as a dangerous illusion. For democracy to function in a mass society, it must be engineered.

What makes this logic unsettling is not its moral stance, but its explanatory power and its close fit with modern social structures—along with the fact that it has repeatedly proven effective in practice. This helps explain why Cold War psychological warfare, contemporary political communication, and platform-based information distribution systems often operate along lines remarkably consistent with Bernays’s framework.

In compressed form, Bernays’s concept of the “Invisible Government” refers to the structural layer that determines how people come to understand the world in a mass society. It requires no additional legitimacy because it precedes legitimacy itself, determining which questions are treated as valid and which are considered worthy of serious discussion.

In this sense, Bernays’s core insight has not disappeared with time, but has been technologically extended in the present. What he outlined was a schematic for “opinion engineering”; contemporary platform algorithms have transformed this schematic into systems that operate automatically and at scale. Human psychology and social structure have not fundamentally changed—only the level of execution has shifted, from human coordination to continuous machine operation.