The Century of the Self (2002)
Notes to accompany ‘The Century of the Self’ by Adam Curtis
Episode One: ‘Happiness Machines’
The series is about how the ideas of Freud were used to manipulate the masses in the twentieth century. The first to do this was Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays:
The founding father of public relations. Lacking his uncle’s renown outside the world of business history, this nephew of Sigmund Freud was among the most influential people in the 20th century. Well versed in the then-new science of psychiatry and mass psychology, Bernays, from the 1920s onwards, helped to consolidate a fateful marriage between theories of mass psychology (that had previously been used by government propaganda agencies) and schemes of corporate and political persuasion and the creation of popular consent for causes, products, and ideas. While there had been major press agencies before Bernays, he was the first to adapt the theories of psychology to the formation of mass public opinion. (A Dictionary of Marketing)
Bernays ‘showed American corporations, for the first time, how they could make people want things they didn’t need by linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.’
Viennese elites didn’t like Freud’s theories because examining the self means examining things in general, which was a threat to their power. Freud saw WWI, which began in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as proof of his theory of repressed violence.
Bernays was employed to promote America’s role in the war as spreading democracy to the world, not helping to maintain old empires.
When he saw the way the victorious Wilson was greeted by the crowds in Paris after the war, he got to thinking whether propaganda couldn’t be used in peacetime too.
The 1920s saw the emergence of public relations, a term first used in 1807 by Thomas Jefferson in a message to Congress. Edward L. Bernays introduced public relations counsel in his Crystalizing Public Opinion (1923), and the decade saw the general acceptance of the profession by business and government, if not by every military commander. (The Oxford Companion to American Military History)
Torches of freedom:
One of the Bernays’s most famous campaigns was the 1929 Torches of Freedom march, in which he had 10 carefully chosen women walk down Fifth Avenue in New York City smoking cigarettes. The women were advancing feminism while setting the stage for a surge in smoking by women. What the public and press did not know was that the American Tobacco Company employed Bernays. He also helped to establish beer as “the beverage of moderation” and created innumerable “front groups,” such as the Trucking Information Bureau and Better Living through Increased Highway Transportation, to pursue private interests with the support and assistance of the general public. (Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications)
During the 1920s the tobacco market soared, particularly among women. Innovative advertising campaigns that targeted women, such as American Tobacco’s “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet” and “Torches of Freedom,” helped triple smoking rates among female teenagers between 1925 and 1935. During World War II (1939–45) the sale of cigarettes continued to grow, and tobacco companies donated millions of cigarettes to accompany soldiers’ C rations (canned meals issued to army members). When the soldiers returned home, the tobacco industry had a steady stream of customers who were addicted to the nicotine the cigarettes delivered. (Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History)
Throughout his lifetime Edward Bernays worked on countless public relations campaigns. Many are remembered as examples of effective, even brilliant marketing. He played an important role in the first National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) convention held in 1920 in Atlanta, Georgia, promoting the vital contributions of African Americans to the whites living in the South. The campaign earned Bernays an award from the NAACP. Perhaps his most famous effort was on behalf of the American Tobacco Company, during which he arranged for a group of young models to march in the 1929 Easter parade in New York City smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes and posing as women's rights marchers carrying “torches of freedom.” (The Literature of Propaganda)
In the 1920s it was not socially acceptable for women to smoke in public, so when Bernays was engaged by the company making Lucky Strike cigarettes, he got some models at New York’s Easter Parade to light up cigarettes, which were called “torches of freedom.” The event made the news and helped increase women’s cigarette smoking, while proving Bernays’ idea that news was more effective than advertising in promotion. (50 Politics Classics)
Paul Mazur, the third non-family member to join Lehman Brothers, wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 1927, ‘We must shift America, from a needs to a desires culture’.
Curtis refers to an American journalist writing, in 1927, ‘The American citizen’s first importance to his country is now no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.’
Walter Lippmann thought that, if humans are driven by irrational, unconscious motivations, then the principle of mass democracy was wrong.
A founding editor of the New Republic magazine in 1914, Lippmann emerged as one of the Progressive Era’s leading social theorists with two influential early books. A Preface to Politics (1913), reflecting his encounter with Sigmund Freud’s work, examined the irrational aspects of politics. […] World War I soured Lippmann on progressive idealism. His Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925) criticized the media and advocated intervention by experts to help the masses deal with complex issues. (The Oxford Companion to United States History)
Bernays claimed to have come up with what Lippmann was calling for. This was the ‘manufacture of consent’,
the art of manipulating people without them being aware of it. Bernays […] argued that people can be enticed to want things that they do not need if these are linked to their unconscious desires, a notion pursued by Dichter. (A Dictionary of Media and Communication)
That is, Ernest Dichter, the ‘father of motivation’.
Then someone came to power who agreed with Bernays: ‘President Hoover was the first politician to articulate the idea that consumerism would become the central motor of American life.’
Democracy went from being something that challenged power structures to something that maintained them. But this is the 1920s, before ‘neoliberalism’, even before the glorious thirty years after the Second World War. It’s like mass democracy was over before it even began.
The Great Depression caused people to stop buying things they didn’t need. The consumer boom ended and PR fell out of favour.
In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud argued that civilisation is not a sign of human achievement, but rather something to control humans’ animal desires.
In his study of the modern condition—entitled Civilization and Its Discontents—Freud theorizes that modern civilization inevitably breeds discontent and resistance, and that its perpetuation thus involves an element of mental or physical coercion. The picture of modernity that emerges from Freud’s analysis is far from peaceful and benign. The rule of reason has psychologically traumatic consequences. From the individual’s point of view, it cannot be an unambiguous blessing, as it leaves quite a considerable part of human needs downgraded, unattended, or starved. This is why reason’s rule is continuously resented and can never be complete; it will go on prompting rebellion against itself. Again and again, people pressed to abide by the cool and unemotional rules of calculation of costs and effects will rally instead to the defense of suppressed affections, natural urges, and the immediacy of human contact. (The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World)
Curtis: ‘What was implicit in Freud’s argument was that the ideal of individual freedom at the heart of democracy was impossible. Human beings could never be allowed to truly express themselves, because it was too dangerous. They must always be controlled, and would thus always be discontent.’
National Socialism was a reaction against selfishness and the chaos it creates. Freud had warned that the libidinal drives could be directed towards a leader, and the aggressive drives towards an out-group. The Nazis encouraged these forces because they believed they could master and control them.
FDR believed that laissez-faire capitalism could no longer run modern industrial economies – the job had passed to government. Goebbels agreed – he praised the New Deal.
But unlike the Nazis, FDR believed that humans are rational and that the public could take an active role in government. He wanted to explain his policies to the public and find out what the public thought. He turned to George Gallup:
The inventor of modern political and opinion polling. Gallup was trained in psychology and worked in advertising before founding the American Institute of Public Opinion (1935) and the private firm Gallup and Robinson, which still lends its name to the Gallup polls. The Gallup poll is usually a survey of a random sampling of the public designed to gauge public opinion on issues of public interest.
Gallup’s first major electoral survey correctly predicted the 1936 victory of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Electoral polling has since become a ubiquitous part of democratic political processes worldwide, and Gallup’s methods arguably provide the dominant means of representing the modern public. Gallup’s signal contribution to the social sciences was to prove the value of (and establish a methodology for) random sampling. His writing includes The Pulse of Democracy (1940). (Dictionary of the Social Sciences)
Gallup (and Elmo Roper) disagreed with Bernays’s view that people are controlled by unconscious desires. They believed the public could say what they wanted in response to factual questions.
FDR beat big business. Big business fought back using PR. The National Association of Manufacturers used Bernaysian methods to create an emotional attachment between big business and the American public:
Its anti-union policies hardened in the New Deal Era, as leading steel, automobile, chemical, domestic oil, food, and tobacco firms focused the NAM’s attention on the threat that big government and big labor allegedly posed to employers’ “right to manage.”
While many enterprises gradually accommodated the New Deal system of contractual labor relations, a limited welfare state, and increased federal spending, the NAM served as the voice of anti-union and anti-statist business interests. It proved especially active in postwar struggles over full employment, business taxation, and labor law reform, and played a central role in the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 that weakened trade unions. Like other national multi-industry business groups, the NAM operated primarily as a public-relations service. Its activities in the 1930s and beyond anticipated the institutionalized interest-group lobbying of modern politics.
Especially after 1945, the NAM prepared congressional testimony, supplied radio stations and newspapers with probusiness stories, and launched a series of educational campaigns on behalf of “free enterprise.” (The Oxford Companion to United States History)
Bernays used the 1939 New York World’s Fair to make the point that democracy and capitalism are two sides of the same coin – you can’t have one without the other. Business would respond to people’s desires in a way that government cannot. People are not in charge, their desires are.
In many ways this major international exhibition typified the global economic, commercial, and corporate power and influence wielded by the United States of America by the time of the Second World War. Many of that country’s leading companies, such as General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Kodak, and Westinghouse, contributed major buildings and exhibitions on the Flushing Meadow site and generally sought to portray themselves as major contributors to a utopian future world in which they played a key role in satisfying consumer desires and needs. […] In essence, the NYWF can be seen as an expression of a commitment to technological progress, eagerly endorsed by many major American corporations that sought to promote in the public’s eyes a futuristic utopian era where corporate enterprise was seen to play a beneficial role for society as a whole. (A Dictionary of Modern Design)
In 1938 Freud fled Vienna for London, but he died the following year. The Second World War transformed the US government’s attitude to democracy. Events in Europe convinced them that there are powerful drives within people that need to be controlled – and they turned to the Freud family for help.
