The term ‘public relations’ was created in the 20th century by the infamous socialite and media consultant Edward Bernays. Similar to Walter Lipmann, he represented a new strata of experts and advisors that would utilize a changing media landscape to manage public opinion. Broadcast radio and later television, along with the cheaper production of paper media, meant that a new layer of technology could be utilized to mediate relation between governments and citizens, corporations and consumers, and between classes. Bernays, Lipmann and others, who knew how to use these tools to provide favourable perception management to the highest bidder, flourished.
Along with the success of the public perception consultant, we also witnessed an ideological emergence of rationalist elites who believed in liberal democracy—but also on a savvy perception management class that must frame and mediate communications to best refine (one could say manipulate) the outcome of democratic practices. Look at this era and style of governance with admiration or distaste, either way—it’s over.
Broadcasting and radio facilitated the perfect mixture of enough presence to create familiarity and reassurance from elites towards other groups in society, while controlling the interaction (editing, scripting, cherry picking questions, lighting ect.) was advanced enough to not let these communications reveal unwanted truths. In other words, the media offered opportunities for controlled communications that could turn higher demands for political accountability (not to mention loyalty given the threat to loyalty posed by global capital) and turn these demands into propaganda opportunities. The 20th century’s media culture—as a controllable, short term, finely curated form of communication—provided exactly this capacity.
The recent interview between Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin marks the concrete end to this era. For the first time in history a sitting leader of a nuclear-armed super power exposed themselves to a two hour long, unedited, open conversation; all the while being in the middle of a hot war on his border—and having to negotiate a hostile, sanctioning West, with his own domestic population who carry their own expectations and goals. Why accept the interview, the added risk, stress and complication, given the context of the situation? Additionally, Putin even seemed to suspect Carlson might still be a CIA asset. Yet, he accepted the interview anyway. This is a curious decision to make.
The interview itself is worth analysis in detail—although I won’t go through the content of this conservation here—but simply to point to the remarkability of its occurrence. Its historical significance stems from the fact that it shows a completely novel event (novel since the end of WW2) of a leader willing to expose himself so mis-understanding and misrepresentation and genuine discussion to a foreign journalist. On the other hand, the Western media’s ethos has been, since WW2— but more radically in the past fifteen years— one of aggressive perception management that would likely never allow such a risk. Maybe we could rationalize and argue that most of Russia won’t watch the interview(language barrier) and that the West labels him a monster in their press on a daily basis, so there’s nothing to lose. Nonetheless, it marks a serious change in what is expected from leaders in their communication with the general public through media.
I recall in my own country in Ireland, after the financial crash of 2008 and the revelation of corruption and incompetence that followed, that it became common for random, angry citizens to catch political and corporate elites in a public places and ask them difficult questions on camera. Not being able to give a justifiable answer, or even a coherent one, it began an exposure campaign revealing how odd it was that these people, who could barely string together a few coherent sentences in responses to (inter)national crisis, happened to be in charge us, our nations and our futures.
These moments are not the result of a surge of progressive or democratic sentiment and more so one of basic indignation and confusion regarding how these people got into power in the first place. The spreading of these snippets of media online and the general loss of perception controls is rarely posited as one of the causes of populism today—but there is an unwritten history of causation just waiting to be discovered in this regard. The liberal-democratic optimism which argued the internet would spread deliberative democratization to nations like Egypt or Libya, has ironically instead accelerated the loss of prestige of liberal elites themselves.
This irony stems from the loss of perception control which new internet technologies have brought with it. Yet, it also stems from the historic accident of having an elite that became radically over reliant on perception management methods (Public relations) that were created in the 20the century.
Ask yourself a question: would a western politician be willing to sit down in a relatively uncontrolled interview setting with a Russian journalist for two hours straight? The question is less so a matter of willing—and more so a matter of ability. Even from a skewed ideological perspective, PR-dependent western elites have largely lost the ability to even string together coherent viewpoints for any length of time. Trump’s victory was largely the cause of taking comical advantage of this lack of coherency. Although, jokes are only funny for so long. Eventually we would all stop laughing and start demanding an account, a vision, or a coherent explanation.
This is where the likes of Putin, or America’s RFK, come in. RFK is just about the only other political figure willing to endure long form, unedited interviews. The lack of perception control which these sorts of media interactions demand, has been turned into an opportunity to actually form a coherent viewpoint. Putin and RFK share the same rare traits (at least among the political class) insofar as they actually seem to have some interest in their areas of concern, they have read widely and have memorized and prepared for the wielding of this knowledge for combative environments where this knowledge is used create coherent explanations of current realities. Basically, what I mean by this is what university students used to have to to the pass their thesis. Politics is going back to school, we could say.
We are quickly entering a new era whereby if a political figure wants to retain or assume authority as well as power, he must be willing to endure the arena that so many random young people, for a whole variety of interests and concerns (mostly unpaid ) do on regular basis: a podcast.
Those post-war elites who have become so dependent of the methodologies invented by Bernays and the professions of PR consultants are soon becoming obviously distinct from those who can endure—or even thrive in it. How determining will this division become? As I said before, it won’t remove power from the existing elites but it will drain whatever minimal authority they have held onto.
The truth is that people like articulate, coherent and passionate representatives who can engage in philosophical, historical and even spiritual matters in a relatively free and uncontrolled manner. It is a cynical dogma that people only desire leaders that tell them what they want to hear—or that only act to satiate their material interests. Although, this demographic of people is and has always been there, the universalization of these people through economistic, bourgeois societies is nothing more than a projection of the class of people that have benefited and created these modalities of governance and public relations to begin with.
In truth, there is a need for the engagement of concerns through coherent public discourse, no matter how ‘useless’ it may be deemed at any given historical time. It is also somehow intrinsically a marker of a good leader. Those who can’t, will have to rely on the methods of image creation to fill the gap. This may have worked when it was rare to encounter coherent intelligent personas outside of university campuses. The technocratic and business-orientated strata of ‘practical’ variants of leadership(which has manifested in technocracy and populism) can no longer avoid universities in order to appear wise. The internet has bestowed a sense of claustrophobia whereby the task of demanding an explanation can no longer be so easily avoided. For all the terror, loss of privacy, superficiality and narcissism that the internet has caused, undermining traditional public relations methods typically used by political and institutional leaders could be its redeeming potentiality.
However, there is an even deeper explanation for the merging distinction between the likes of Putin or RFK in contradistinction to the likes of Clinton, Biden or Angela Merkle or Boris Johnson, who at best can only conjure up noticeably false PR stunts and carefully controlled , shortened media snippets(usually glazed over and given the green light by the government itself before airing). More than just the capacity to endure uncontrolled and long term dialogue, this distinction also marks a clear distinction in cognitive ability: in particular articulation and memory. That is, paradoxically enough: Anger.
We have endured a long history of rationalistic association of the passion of anger with stupidity and a loss of cognition. This dogma is crumbling now more than ever. As Nietzsche polemically(and somewhat dismissively) argues, hatred is the most sublime basis for a good memory. Ressentiment he labelled it—and there’s no doubt that the energies (thymotic) that he emphasized have their own self-deceptive, nihilistic and corrosive potentialities. However, what does a prosperous, safe and dominant civilization such as the US inevitably empower with leadership? Biden—the closest thing to a dementia patient that has ever taken office of any modern nation.
On the other hand, Putin and RFK have something common. Their encyclopaedic knowledge—agree or not with the ideological framing—is largely the result of being spokespersons for the losing sides of the late 20th century: the Kennedy family and Russia.
In fact, to use an example from the popular television series Game of Thrones, we can see this symbiotic link between anger and memory. One of the children of the losing families in the realm of fantasy power politics (the Starks) creates for herself a nightly ritual—one might say a prayer—in which she recounts her kill list: those who murdered and destroyed her family. She claims she can’t sleep without giving the nightly account: ‘Cersei, Walder Frey, Merin Trent, Taiwin Lannister, The Red Woman,……’
A somewhat darker causation for the clear lack of articulate memory and coherency lies behind the liberal, technocratic and neo-conservative victors of the late twentieth century. Unchallenged, safe, aging, prosperous and enjoying a global system of technological, military and financial, structural reassurances, the winners of the middle and late 20th century now have enemies whose historical situation has given them two options. The first is death or derangement—a frequent result of total loss. But for those who persevere, they will emerge not only with determination but with a frighteningly good memory.
This is already a somewhat ignored reality—likely ignored due to the character of the ‘end of history’. Nations that find themselves in situation that demand perseverance necessities against harsh conditions and bad luck, often find a sprit of perseverance through memory rituals. Irish rebellion songs, Spartan training obsessiveness(we would likely claim that the Spartans had OCD if we were to observe them today), Islamic sacred places that usually linger around geographic locations of historical injustice (Jerusalem). Cultural memory and ritual is often the result of the remembering of accounts, as Sloterdijk eloquently describes in his text Rage and Time. Speaking in more current terms: Is it not now ironic and fitting with this theme that the social and political losers of the early 21st century (the cancelled, exiled, marginalized and frowned upon) are the only ones who appear to either have anything interesting to say or any capacity to give and explanation or justification to anything?
Putin's encyclopaedic knowledge and cognitive sharpness—at least comparatively— is the result of standing for a country that has endured so many betrayals, hardships and catastrophes. It can only persevere as a whole by being led by an accountant of historical betrayals, deceits and false promises. (NATO’s false promise to not expand eastward, for example). Putin still attempts to stand for rational, technocratic modern leadership—likely also attempting to tame some of the more militant forces inside his nation—but when one listens to his sharp historical accounts; they can’t but help realize that this knowledge was earned, likely as all good memory is, through suffering on the one hand, and on the other, of the shared hope of a fair trial. He could be contrasted to Biden who couldn’t tell you what happened two weeks ago.
Somewhat of a similar dynamic can be seen generationally in the West itself. The younger generation’s exclusion from the prosperity, stability and social capital which was enjoyed by the boomer generation, is now ultimately dried up. Those existing in the post 08’s crash world ultimately exist within a world with a broken social contract. This betrayal is supplemented by a change in media ecosystems; a move away from the perception management tools created by advertising gurus, designed to appeal to short-term pleasure seeking, towards a long form discourse model of media where the winners will only be those who can give coherent accounts in a relatively uncontrolled environment.
The noticeable decline in post- war elites, and the increasingly noticeable distinction between them and their opponents shouldn’t be seen as a merely technological change in media culture which they have failed to adapt to in time. This differentiation is itself the manifestation of memory and psycho-politics. A desire for vindication and cultivation of spirit through experience of struggles creates memory—Nietzsche would have argued it is, in fact, the very substance of it—while the cosy gerontocratics are common in lands far away from danger, intoxicated with the drug of always getting their own way—and with absolutely no experience in choppy waters. The Hegelian reversal of the master is a memory game—and a media one.
Conclusion:
The media ecosystem created by the like of Bernays and Lipmann was designed in a manner that was so corrupted by the technique of advertising—which created cultures of memory loss by way of directing all communicative energies towards short term gratifications—and was also designed to elevate the prestige of the nations and peoples that this liberal, capitalist way of life created. In short, the dominant media ecosystem created in the late 20th century was both the expression and the creation of a civilization of memory loss. Immediate pleasure seeking, pacifying overstimulation and an end of historical character that viewed all historical accounts of injustice as irrational, ultimately gives itself symptoms of incoherency, short sightedness as no capacity for historical context.
The media landscape is now altering in such radical ways that are of a very different character; one that is quickly revealing the deeply flawed idea that advanced methodologies of perception management are adequate replacements for memory.
This is one of the best, most prophetic, and most insightful pieces of writing I've come across. The point that the Putin-Carlson discussion marks a change in history was strong enough, but then you followed it up with an incredible connection between memory and anger. Masterful, absolutely masterful.
Great piece!