MOONDEERS NOTES on Bernays' PROPAGANDA

The great enemy of any attempt to change men's habits is inertia. Civilization is limited by inertia. Comstock drops his mantle of proselytizing morality on the willing shoulders of a Sumner; Carnegie his on Schwab, and so ad infinitum. Opposing this traditional acceptance of existing ideas is an active public opinion that has been directed consciously into movements against inertia.

Public opinion was made or changed formerly by tribal chiefs, by kings, by religious leaders. Today the privilege of attempting to sway public opinion is everyone's. It is one of the manifestations of democracy that any one may try to convince others and to assume leadership on behalf of his own thesis.

A social service organization undertook to fight lynching, Jim Crowism and the civil discriminations against the Negro below the Mason and Dixon line. The decline in lynching is very probably a result of this and other efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The very activities of social service are propaganda activities. Social progress is simply the progressive education and enlightenment of the public mind in regard to its immediate and distant social problems.