There is a hidden hand which exercises strong influence over public thinking, the “consent engineering” craft. (”Elites hoard knowledge about thought reform techniques to advance their own agendas”.) The centrally organized “engineering of consent” as a coherent, dark craft, was made possible by unprincipled research in psychological manipulation conducted in the latter half of the 19th century. Freud tapped the pulse of a certain, highly exploitable trend in the psychological manipulation of large masses of the populace. This was in his book “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”, “concerned with the individual man as a member of a race, of a nation, of a caste, or a profession, of an institution, or as a component part of a crowd of people who have been organized into a group at some particular time for some definite purpose.”
The principle heir to this dark understanding, in the first half of the 20th century, was Freud’s nephew twice-over, Edward Bernays. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.…[I]n almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics [the House of Morgan ran both parties’ candidates in two Presidential elections] or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.” – Edward Bernays, “Propaganda“
The tradecraft secret that makes possible the manipulation of billions of people, the barbed bait on a piano wire, is in the fact that the unorganized mass emotion of powerlessness is able to be directed by the hidden hand of consumer-psychology into the temporary respite of organized rage.
A typical scenario in an episode of the 1960s television series “Gunsmoke”, is that one bar patron will throw a punch, with a large mass of others quickly erupting in a pointless donnybrook with no identified factions. Reality departs from this standard cul de sac plot formula, not that the sheriff conventionally puts a stop to the fight, but in the fact understood by the dark psychologists, that the group identifies a scapegoat, achieves fleeting catharsis by persecuting the target, and can thus be manipulated to cohere under the hidden leadership of “community organizers”.
― George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Not to be too picky, but can anyone explain what the author was trying to say in each part of this sentence? In particular, the second part starting with "the grisly details..."?