overthrow the government of Guatemala and install one more sympathetic to the company’s aims.1 In 1929 Bernays launched a PR campaign to get more women to smoke cigarettes, glamorizing it (because at the time women smoking was not considered to be respectable) and successfully legitimizing it. You may not have heard of him, but his influence on our modern world has been profound. In 1947 he wrote an essay, The Engineering of Consent, describing what a public relations engineer does and telling his audience how to do it.
As the 16 th-century Japanese leader, Hideyoshi, put it, “You must make the bird want to sing.” Public relations is all about getting the bird (the public) to sing your song.Įdward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, is little-known outside of the public relations industry, although he certainly was one of the foremost founders of it. “Good PR” is how a great many things get done. Today it’s a whole industry, consulted regularly by politicians, business leaders, and even churchmen. In His parable of the dishonest steward, Our Lord observed that worldly, secular people know the ways of the secular world, and more profitably navigate them, better than the children of light know what they should know.Īmong the arts that make the secular world go round, the science of public relations stands tall. “For the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.” (Luke 16:8)