"When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." Twain / "I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of these contradictions out for myself." Montaigne / "I write because I have found no other means of getting rid of my thoughts." Nietzsche / "Writing is an integral part of the process of understanding." Arendt / "Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." Asimov.
This is Chomsky's last long-form documentary. It came out in January, but I hadn't heard about it until recently. I paraphrased/transcribed the 72 minute video liberally with links to further readings below.
It's about the American Dream: the idea that you can be born poor but work hard enough for a home and car and good schools - that's all collapsed. We profess to like the values of democracy, so public opinion should have an influence on policy and the government should carry out actions determined by the population, but the privileged sector doesn't like democracy. We have extreme inequality with a super wealthy group in the top 1/10th of the top one percent. It's unjust in itself, but it's got a corrosive effect on democracy.
The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power
Concentration of wealth yields concentration of power, especially as costs of elections skyrocket forcing politicians into the pockets of corporations. This translates into legislation that increases the concentration of wealth through fiscal policy (taxes, deregulation, rules of corporate governance) designed to increase the concentration of wealth and power in a vicious cycle of progress.
"Oh, what can we do in a case like that? Nothing to do but sit on your hat, or your toothbrush, or your grandmother, or anything else that's useless."
Those are the butchered words of a Burl Ives song I sang as a kid until my sister corrected me. The last word is actually helpless, not useless. But it made so much more sense to think of my elders as full of vim and vigour, but just spinning their wheels. They're not helpless, but they don't effect anything significantly either. You can't go to them to try to make a difference on anything significant. It probably got meshed in my head with my dad's gentle refrain beaten into my head, "Do try to be useful," whenever anything was happening around me, like groceries or housecleaning or dinner.
I have no memory of the song being about a whale. To my young mind, it was about the sad incompetence of the older generation, and it I was the first protest song I sang as I pictured the youth suffocating their elders in order to make shit happen. But then I became a useless elder and the cycle continues.
I've been thinking about my uselessness lately, and then I watched HyperNormalisation and listened to an interview with Adam Curtis, who said that radicals started giving up the fight in the 1970s. I felt a little vindicated as he lamented the movement towards self-absorbed obsessions with working out; I loathe exercise for its own sake. But that was quickly replaced with a bit of shame as he turned to the radicals that retreated into their art and writing as a quieter form of protest that's essentially useless. Okay, that hit a nerve. He argues that what we need is for people go to protest sites, whatever cause is near and dear, and don't tweet about it, but just participate. And participate until it's fixed. Don't just make an appearance, take a selfie, then congratulate yourself on the way back home, ummm, like I do with the marches I attend. (But doesn't making lengthy documentaries fit in with making art?)
And that reminded me of a great book I was fortunate to be forced to read in university: Sources of the Self, by Charles Taylor (listen to a shorter version here), a Canadian philosopher who happens to be in the news everywhereright now since winning the Berggruen Prize for advancing humanity. His sudden wave of publicity gives me great hope that we're on the verge of actually paying attention to his ideas. His extraordinary tome traces philosophy from the beginnings to now and suggests that we've gotten ourselves into a muddle because we've shifted from asking questions about human nature (philosophy) with an interest in furthering society, to thinking entirely about ourselves and the ordinary life (psychology, particularly of the self-help variety) with an interest in developing our personal potential. The way to end our malaise is to go back to the source to figure out what we're all about. It's a call to reject the notion that values are subjective. That's a tiny nutshell for several hundred pages, but I'll get to the rest of it another day.
We've shifted to soft relativist positions that don't really allow us to have ideals. Instead of getting into the nooks and crannies of right and wrong, thinking and figuring out which really is the best action for the greater good, we largely look for ways to justify doing what we want. And a general attitude that says "your way is just as valid as mine" encourages us all on our merry way, ignoring atrocities along the path. But many think the opposite slides down a slope towards totalitarianism. If I imply your reasoning is questionable and your choices immoral, then I'm telling you what to do. And what give me that right?? I'm labeled arrogant and the argument is dismissed. People need to be willing to discuss these things in a learned way until we get to some discovery of essential values.
And at the same time, I've been reading a book on Sartrean Ethics, which argues for the opposing idea, that values are completely subjective and we can all be useful if we choose values that we can live up to: "It is up to man himself to give meaning and use to his life...by choosing to value and seek goals that are attainable" (53). Sartre is exciting to read because he's not at all judgmental about people's lapses into bad faith, and his version of the virtuous life is so possible. It feels good to read him. But, as much as I like much of what he says, I believe it's part of the reason for this mess we're in.
If I have to choose a path, then I'm with Taylor on this one. There are some values that exist outside ourselves and that can't be ignored even if it's uncomfortable for us to face the reality of our selfishness and the errors of our ways up to this point. I also agree with Curtis that we have to change the way we express ourselves radically. A personal expression isn't going to do jack shit to change anything. We need to focus less on ourselves, on our art and music and writing and on our bodies, and actually take some risks and suffer a bit to promote real change for the future. We can't change the world from the comfort of the couch. These views take us into far more difficult terrain that's not rewarding in the ways we're used to. It means working for something that will benefit the next generation knowing we might never be remembered for our efforts as we get lost in a sea of protesters, but we can't continue to do so little if we want the next couple of generations to survive. Especially now that Trump is at the helm.
Taylor writes, "We want our lives to have meaning, or weight, or substance, or to grow towards some fullness.... But this means our whole lives. If necessary, we want the future to "redeem" the past, to make it part of a life story which has sense or purpose, to take it up in a meaningful unit" (50). Nietzsche uses these words, "To redeem the past and to transform every 'It was' into an 'I wanted it thus' - that alone do I call redemption" (TSZ-161). We get caught up in linear progressions. The present has to be better than the past, and it all has to add up to something that makes sense to us. When we're in a lull in our life, or hit a crappy part, it's disconcerting that it was all for naught. But if we want our lives to have real substance, then it will only happen if we add our voices to a collective call to action beyond our individual pursuits. The internet makes us feel connected, but it's just an illusion. We have to leave the house and come face-to-face with other human beings willing to go the distance with us.
It's not necessary to succeed, but we have to begin.
I added the subtitle above because this is one trippy film, but it's important to see (or read this summary in about 15 minutes) after last night. It actually helps explain Trump. After Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self, a very straight-forward documentary (albeit 4 hours long), this one, at just shy of 3 hours, is absolutely bizarre by contrast. News footage is mixed with feature film content and inane YouTube videos all with a soundtrack mix of NIN, 80s techno, discordant carnival music, and creepy singing children. It has the intentional effect of a funhouse mirror. It was perfect to watch as the votes came in last night.
We’re living in strange times. Huge superpowers have no ability to deal with extraordinary events and no vision for the future. And the counterculture is also sucked into this make-believe world, so they have no real effect on anything either. Most of events in the film were outlined by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine a decade ago, but Curtis adds in some further connections (like Trump’s involvement) and takes us on a journey through it. It's not just that politics have changed, but the way we've been trained to think has shifted dramatically.
1975: A TALE OF TWO CITIES
Two ideas about how to run the world without politics took hold in 1975: intentional political negotiations of old were being replaced by a market driven trajectory and an absurdist fabrication of government.
New York was on the verge of collapse from politicians borrowing too much and the middle class exodus eroding the tax base. The banks were expected to buy bonds in return for loans, but one day they refused. This started a significant shift in power as banks insisted that if they’re protecting the loans, they must be allowed to take over the city. A committee was formed made almost entirely of bankers, and the financial institution took control, kickstarting neo-liberalism. They enforced austerity and many teachers, police, and fire fighters were fired. In the old system, politicians solved crises with negotiations; now bankers were letting the market run society, and the market can’t be negotiated with.
Nobody opposed this shift. The counterculture retreated. It was concurrent with a rise of individualism that doesn’t support collective political action, so radicals just watched the destruction with cool detachment and criticized it with art and music. Capitalists took advantage of it. Donald Trump recognized he couldn’t get state funding for housing, but could get cash by refurbishing old buildings. He got the biggest tax break ever and huge bank loans because the city was desperate. He transformed NYC at virtually no cost to himself.
By contrast, in Damascus, the capital of Syria, a conflict was brewing between the president, Hafez al-Assad, and Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State. Assad wanted to negotiate politically in order to unite Arab countries to be able to stand up to the west. Assad believed there could only be peace if Palestinian refugees were allowed to return to their homeland. They never integrated in host countries, like Syria.
Kissinger leaned towards running the world as a stable market system. He had been an expert in nuclear strategy's "delicate balance of terror" and aimed to keep the world in balance through turmoil, the birthpangs of a better system. Dislocation provides opportunity for a global society. A strong Arab centre would destabilize his ideal balance of power, so he set out to fracture the Arab world by breaking their alliances. He played a double game, "constructive ambiguity," and at once persuaded Egypt to help Israel while he led Assad to believe he was helping the Palestinian situation. When Assad found out, he was enraged and stopped trusting in the global political system. [The grandson of Salvador Allende is currently calling for the arrest of Kissinger.]
The doublespeak of these negotiations became the norm. In the Soviet Union, technocrats pretended everything was running smoothly even though citizens could all see the economy was falling apart. The people became hopeless and apathetic. Everyone just played along with the fake version of reality; they couldn't see a viable alternative. The people were so much a part of the fake system, that they couldn't see outside of it. This façade of life became hypernormal. (Listen to Curtis discuss the word - why we want change but it never happens.)
THE HUMAN BOMB
Reagan was voted in with a vision of a moral American society, but he was stuck with Kissinger's legacy and the fury of Assad.
In 1982, Israel was determined to destroy Palestine. In Lebanon, where Palestinian refugees were living in refugee camps, the Israeli army allowed the Christian Lebanese militia, Phalange, into the camps and then watched as a massacre took place. Reagan was forced to react and sent marines to Beruit claiming to be neutral. Assad saw the troops as an attempt to divide the middle east into factions, and focused on getting the US out. He formed an alliance with Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. who created "the poor man's atomic bomb" as he convinced his followers to join a suicide mission in order to save the revolution (even though suicide is prohibited in the Qur'an), and mobilized 10,000s boys to walk through minefields to create gaps so the Iranian army could get across.
Assad took this idea of an unstoppable human weapon further and had followers strap bombs to themselves. They drove trucks into US marine barracks in Beruit, killing 241 Americans in October 1983. Hezbollah was formed with Iranians but under the control of Assad [something I've not heard before], and was used to attack America. In February 1984, Reagan became paralyzed by the complexity of the situation and retreated.
But an important part of this is the mythology of the martyr that was created. It has become firmly entrenched. It has to be; it's the only way families of the suicide bombers can cope with their loss.
The power of the banks in NYC spread, but it was all covert. Banks and corporations were linked through computer systems that were invisible to citizens AND politicians. The networks gave them extraordinary powers of control. With no laws or politicians to intervene, brutal corporate power could flourish.
Others saw the internet as a platform for a new utopia, a safe place for radicals. Instead of fixing the world, they entered an alternative reality online. This has its roots in Leary's 1960s "LSD country" when the counterculture first looked to be liberated from politics. This is another myth we live by - the mythology that we can live more freely ignoring the political world. It was advance in the '90s by John Perry Barlow who focused on protecting the independence of cyberspace from politicians. He paints of picture of the internet as borderless, anarchist, independent of tyrannies, and free from hierarchies.
But two hackers, Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak, found and uploaded Barlow's credit rating online to demonstrate the hierarchies that exist already. The financial powers online can now know far more about us than ever before and therefore control us far better with less effort. The utopian rhetoric is a convenient camouflage hiding the emergence of the corporate powers.
THE COLONEL
Reagan created another mythology, that of the good Americans fighting against evildoers. He created an imaginary villain in Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. He was rejected by other Arab rulers and without global influence. But in December 1985, when terrorists attacked a Rome Airport, Reagan announced Gaddafi was behind the attacks even though all evidence pointed to Assad. There were far fewer consequences to the US to attack Gaddafi than Assad.
Gaddafi turned the crisis into a global drama and threatened suicide attacks against the US. He promoted himself as a revolutionary to liberate the repressed worldwide including blacks in America. He hired German engineers to build him a rocket to explore space, which gave him the capability of attacking Europe. He became a super-villain at the head of a rogue state. He was blamed for other attacks that he likely had nothing to do with, and he accepted the blame. He wanted an audience for his Third Universal Theory of a utopian socialist state.
Reagan prepared to bomb Libya using Gaddafi's rantings as fact regardless evidence to the contrary. In April 1986, the US bombed Tripoli, and their aim was so inaccurate many children were killed. Gaddafi stood on the rubble and denounced the US.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
In the '80s, the US started testing weapons to conquer the Soviet Union, but when spotted, they promoted a fake conspiracy that they were misleading the population about aliens. They chose select people to find fake documents proving contact with UFOs. But the tactics fueled wider growing belief that the government lies and conspiracies are real. The blurring of fact and fiction became a central part of US government's "Perception Management" that aims to tell graphic stories to grab citizen's imagination as a way to distract them from dealing with the complexities of the real world.
The counterculture gave up revolutions and started making workout videos. The population, no longer able to have any effect on politics, focused their energy on something more important: controlling their bodies through a created obsession with workouts and diets. [I knew it!] The old system was dying, and a new system was about to be born.
MANAGED OUTCOMES
The Soviet Union collapsed and it was the final failure of a dream of politics being used to create a new world. In the new system, politicians stopped trying to change things and focused on managing a post-political world. Ulrich Beck was first to describe this change. Politicians hoping to make changes are suddenly seen as dangerous. Their new job is to predict dangers and avoid risks. The political class has been reduced to trying to steer society, putting out fires rather than doing anything actually effective. The new heroes will be the ones with the most accurate predictions. Larry Fink started BlackRock and built a huge supercomputer, Aladdin, which he used to predict with certainty the risk of any investment or event. He now manages 7% of the world's total wealth. His town is also where Prozac became most popular: everyone's brainwashing each other to be happy.
Other computer programmers were trying to develop artificial intelligence programs. As a joke, Joseph Weizenbaum created a computer psychotherapist that responds like Carl Rogers (by just reflecting back whatever we say) in order to parody the hopeless attempts at AI. But people found talking with Eliza helpful - even people that knew how it worked. It makes us happy and secure to have ourselves reflected back at us. The programmers started making systems to do that - intelligence pages - that gather data about people, look for patterns, and predict what they might want to see or hear or buy. It ordered the world and reassured the anxious. And it was highly profitable.
A CAUTIONARY TALE
There's a dangerous flaw in the system because not everything can be predicted from data. Trump discovered that at his own cost in Atlantic City in 1990. His casino was losing money from a "whale" - a top gambler - Kashimagi. Trumped hired a different whale to set him up. When Kashimagi lost everything to the house, Trump thought he'd get his money back, but then mobsters got to him before Trump could. Banks saw that Trump couldn't pay the interest on his loans, and Trump went bankrupt.
Back in Damascus, Assad wanted revenge against the US. In December 1988, a plane was bombed over Lockerbie. Investigators pointed the finger at Syria, but the US focused on Gaddafi. Some journalists thought it was because the US and Britain needed Assad as an ally in the war against Hussein. Assad had released forces he couldn't control though, and his ideas jumped from Sunni to Shia Islam, and Hamas was formed [but many other sources seem to suggest Hamas is entirely Sunni?]. Shia are seen as the more brutal faction. They used suicide attacks in the heart of Israeli cities and went much further than Hezbollah ever had, which shocked the Sunnis, apparently. [I watched this bit twice, but I'm still confused because it runs counter to every other article I can find. Anyway...] The whole thing worked against Assad's original plan which was to join all Arab countries together to defeat the US.
AMERICA AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Any optimistic vision of the future disappeared. The film has a crazy long montage of all the apocalyptical films created before 2001. Media provoked an intense fear of terrorism in the west. Then 9/11 happened.
In 1980, Reagan had a moment when he could have confronted the complexity of Syria, Israel and the Palestine crisis, but retreated and left Syria to fester and mutate. He went for Gaddafi instead because it was an easier battle to wage. But it changed the way people understood terrorism. Instead of violence being a result of complex political struggles, we got a simplistic image of an evil tyrant at the head of a rogue state and a sense that toppling the super-villain will save the world.
Blair and Bush set their sights on Hussein in Iraq. They believed stories about him instead of investigating reality. This is legend now, but the primary source that he had WMD was taken from the movie The Rock.
Then in 2003, Syria, under Bashar al-Assad (the younger son of Assad), sent Shia suicide bombers to attack Americans in Iraq as the first step in a plot to take over the Middle East. Within a year almost all foreign fighters were coming across Syria. Then things really got out of control as jihadists in Iraq joined Al Qaeda and turned to kill Shiites, and suicide bombers started to kill Syrians. Blair and Bush needed a way to show that the invasion had been a good idea, so they got Gaddafi, the fake super-villain, to become a fake global hero. They got him to publicly state his intentions to dismantle his WMD (which he didn't actually have) as a direct result of the Iraq invasion, and he took credit for the Lockerbie bombings. It was all new lies on top of old lies - the highest achievement of perception management. PR companies were paid millions to go to Libya and "reframe the narrative." As a world thinker, Gaddafi got to explain his Third Universal Theory to the United Nations and Trump offered to let him lease his land for the night, and made a fortune even though Gaddafi never stayed there.
A WORLD WITHOUT POWER
The west has turned away from politics and deeper into cyberspace.
Judea Pearl worked on Bayesian networks which could predict behaviours even with incomplete data. They created software to mimic humans. With our current technology, we can upload millions of images and videos and the web feels much more like the real world. Then his son became the first journalist captured in Pakistan and beheaded on video.
Governments used Optic Nerve to take stills of people to look for terrorists, but mainly found amateur porn. The internet allows users to present themselves as they want to be seen. People are mesmerized by themselves. Social media sites created filters to see what people like and feed it back to them to the extent that people move in bubbles isolated from opposing information. Algorithms ensure that newsfeeds don't challenge preexisting beliefs. A few corporations are shaping everything we see and think. [We're like the robots in Westworld. We feel real, but we've all been programmed.]
BUT, another utopian version emerged when people realized they could use the internet to start revolutions. After the crash of 2008, Occupy Wall Street emerged. It was Barlow's dream incarnate. And then Arab Spring started with the "Facebook Youth" out in the tens of thousands. With social media, a revolution can be created quickly to take down a fascist leader.
But it ended up causing chaos instead of democracy. Radicals thought this new way of organizing was key to real change, but they didn't have a clear vision of the future. They were too focused on how to manage the people because that's what we're all swimming in - management. [I wrote a bit about this trend before, and I think one place to look for leadership with a real action plan is here, but that's just me.] In Egypt, social media brought people together, but once there, they had no clue of what new society to create. When the movement stalled, the Muslim Brotherhood rushed into fill the vacuum, and the left ironically turned to the military for help.
In the west, politicians have given so much power away to the banks that they have no real power to effect change themselves. They're just managers with a simplistic vision of the world, which is truly dangerous. In Russia, Putin saw that the lack of any belief in politics could work to his advantage. He turned politics into a strange theatre, which kept his power unchallenged. He was influenced by the sci-fi writings of the Strugatsky Brothers who wrote about the ease of manipulating the masses once we can shape reality to be anything. Putin's technologist advisor, Vladislav Surkov, went further to take avant-garde ideas from the theatre into politics, to not just manipulate the public, but play with them and undermine their perception of the world to the extent that they're never sure of what's really happening. He turned politics into a bewildering spectacle. The key to this was to let it be known that they were backing opposing groups and clearly lying to keep constant confusion in the air.
That brings us to today and Trump's entire campaign. None of his policies are fixed; everything he does and says shifts constantly. He attacks all sides to perpetuate confusion so we can't quite tell precisely where he sits. Exposing his lies is irrelevant. Liberals are outraged, but algorithms made sure they were only heard by people who already agreed with them. Their wave of angry messages benefitted only corporations who know that "angry people click." Anger is good for business. Trump's strategy is to counter himself constantly. He realizes that the version of reality politics presented is no longer believable. Stories politicians tell don't make sense. In the face of that, we can play with reality and further weaken old forms of power.
Look at how the west dealt with Assad. He's evil, but Britain, America, and France bombed terrorists which had the effect of keeping Assad in power. And Russia sent troops to support Assad. This is Sarkov's strategy of non-linear warfare. The underlying aim is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a state of destabilized perception in order to undermine and control the masses. In March 2016, Russia announced it was leaving Syria, and held a concert to celebrate, but never made any motion to actually leave.
And now we have stirrings of fascism in the US.
Curtis leave no sense that we can actually do anything to get out of this mess in any way, but at least we can be aware of the absurdity of it all. And dance.
I just watched this four-hour doc on propaganda and social change and how we're swimming in Freudian concepts like it or not. It's older (2002), but it's compelling viewing useful to weed out the ideas of Freud from those of his followers. My notes are paraphrased (and editorialized) below:
1917 - the Emotional Root of our Desires
Edward Bernays (1891-1994), the father of public relations, is the nephew of Sigmund Freud, the son of Freud's sister and Freud's wife's brother. At just 26, he was asked to join Woodrow Wilson in creating a "Public Relations Council" to promote the war effort. He used conversations with his uncle Freud, whose ideas were soon after published in General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, to understand how people make decisions. Freud's writing was just about understanding why we act. Bernays used that framework of the psyche to develop a means to influence the collective behaviour of the masses.
As much as we like to think our reasoning abilities make us markedly different from other animals, we can be easily persuaded to act if someone plays on our irrational emotions. Bernays' first experiment to test the idea involved marketing cigarettes to women, which involved breaking a strong social taboo at the time. He convinced some suffragettes to march in the Easter parade, smoking, and called the cigarettes "torches of freedom." He spun the taboo into an oppressive restriction to be overcome, which made smoking immediately a symbol of power and independence. This was a brand new way of marketing products.
There was a growing concern with industrial overproduction, so Bernays helped the US shift from a culture focused on satisfying needs to one obsessed with fulfilling desires. He promoted the idea of regular citizens buying shares in companies, and he got film stars to come to parties at the White House, forever after linking politics with celebrity right up to today when Americans are choosing between Meryl Streep and Scott Baio.
1920s - Consumerism Will Save Us from Ourselves
Bernays arranged for Freud's works to be published in the U.S. and gain a widespread audience. He was his unofficial agent in the U.S. Freud wrote about how easily unconscious aggressive drives can be activated in crowds, concluding that man is a sadistic species. Bernays decided that if people are driven by irrational forces, then they need to be guided. If he could stimulate the inner desires of people and satiate them with things, then they wouldn't act on their aggressive impulses. Consumerism was a means to pacify the people as well as to make profits. He developed a system some called "enlightened despotism," or, as Walter Lippmann called it, "the manufacturing of consent, " a term made popular by Chomsky. Bernays saw how ads could create desire which could be easily satisfied and thus transform people into happiness machines.
Herbert Hoover agreed, and democracy became palliative. Democracy was no longer about challenging the relations of power, but about sustaining them.
1930s - Roosevelt Appealed to our Reason
Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents and clarified that civilization is a necessary means to restrain our animal forces. Individual freedom is impossible and far too dangerous, so we must be controlled externally (to suppress our violent and sexual urges), and therefore we will always be somewhat discontented. It's necessary to be limited individually in order to survive collectively but that's not to say, as Bernays suggested, that we should be controlled en masse to pacify the masses or otherwise (increase profits). But Bernays was right that we can be.
After the market crashed, the U.S. faced angry mobs out to fight corporations. Government used the power of the state to control the market (Roosevelt's "New Deal"). Roosevelt worked with George Gallop to poll people's ideas. They rejected Bernays' ideas, instead believing that people could be trusted to make wise decisions. They were going to avoid any manipulation and appeal to citizens' rational faculties.
Meanwhile, in Germany, Hitler abolished the huge numbers of parties running, and the National Socialists were elected. They took control of business with a motto of "service not self." He aimed to channel desires towards a better society rather than satisfy the selfishness of individuals. Joseph Goebbels was in charge of promoting ideas to the people, and he admired the way Roosevelt was controlling markets. Goebbels went further to encourage aggressive forces in citizens as he believed officials could control them to serve their final ends. He was right.
In 1936, Roosevelt pressured more control over big business and was re-elected. Businesses fought back with help from Bernays, starting an ideological warfare against the New Deal. They created the National Association of Manufacturers, which launched campaigns to create emotional connections between brands and businesses. He filled papers with the messages that business, not government, created America, and he created a vision of a potential utopia for the masses that couldn't happen with government restrictions on the market. The government was worried about the affiliation between the press and corporations and started creating national newsreels to teach people how to check for bias in the news, but it was just a matter of time before controlling the markets in any way, even price controls to benefit the poorest in society, would be linked to fascism.
Bernays' methods were instrumental in persuading the public towards a pro-corporate stance, and he was called to help the CIA to reestablish government control over citizens. He appears to have had few allegiances except money and maybe the thrill of figuring out what persuasive measure would work in a given situation.
1940s - We Can Be Masters of Our Domain
After Freud's death, his daughter, Anna Freud, began writing and speaking more. She started with her dad's premise that people must be controlled for society to work, but she believed people could be taught to control themselves. Freud thought we need to understand our desires and the unfortunate necessity of external controls, but Anna believed we could train our desires internally by changing how children are raised. She started by experimenting on two depressive children, and became close with their mother. When she saw the results of the Nazis unleashing the instincts of their citizenry, she started working intensively with large groups of children in need. Primarily she thought children need to be trained to conform to rules of society as a way to strengthen their ego, which will in turn help them control their own unconscious. (She also established specific defence mechanisms well beyond her father's work, yet they're almost always credited to Sigmund.)
Almost half of the returning soldiers suffered mental breakdowns. Psychoanalyst Martin Bergmann was recruited by the U.S. government to interview returning soldiers, and it was the first time people started exploring and discussing feelings. Bergmann decided that stress and mental breakdown are not caused from conflict, but from soldiers' personal childhood desire for aggression. According to him, they weren't traumatized by the aggression itself, but by their eager participation in it, by their own letting go of their instincts to fight. He further surmised that chaos at the base of human personality can infect society, so people need to internalize democratic values. This led Truman to create the National Mental Health Act to deal with the number of unstable men returning from war.
Psychiatrist brothers, Karl and Will Menninger, wanted to use Anna Freud's ideas on a wide scale to control the unconscious desires of citizens, so they invented Guidance Counselling Centres everywhere and encouraged everyone to go. Their focus was on controlling the "fire of emotions" within.
1950s - Identifying with Brands is Promoted as Therapeutic
Things shifted a bit as Harold Blum came on the scene and thought we could be "appropriately emotional," that we should be allowed to let go within limits since we can master our own passions. And Ernest Dichter, Freud's old neighbour, set up Motivational Research centres. This was the dawn of the focus group and the Mad Men style of marketing. Focus groups would have people free associate about products, encouraged to express their feelings and associations. A famous case is when they asked women why they didn't buy instant cakes, and realized just letting women add an egg to the mixture would increase sales dramatically. The underlying idea driving Dichter was similar to Bernays: that we can use the environment to strengthen and stabilize human personality; it's therapeutic and confidence-boosting for people to identify with specific brands. It was also hugely profitable, which likely didn't hurt. It's hard to say which was more important for the psychiatrists.
Bernays worked with Howard Hunt of the CIA to launch a "terror campaign" and stage a coup in Guatemala by making the conditions in the public and in the press more amenable to such a thing after a more socialist leader insisted on better working conditions (and thus lowered profits) in the American-owned United Fruit Company. The psychological warfare worked enough to provoke the army to stand down. They linked the former leader to communism, made the previous government seen as a threat to democracy, and made business interests seen as democracy incarnate. Bernays openly believed that most people are terribly stupid and can be manipulated to act like automatons.
Government money was given to psych departments in universities to do experiment on brainwashing. Ewing Cameron, of UCLA but working in at McGill in Montreal, used drugs and electroconvulsive therapy in an attempt to wipe and replace people's memories. It didn't work the way he hoped (with some horrific results); and he surmised that people are more affected by external persuasion than internal manipulation.
Anna Freud kept working on children conforming to social norms. She was friends with Ralph Greenson, Marilyn Monroe's therapist, who got Marilyn to move into his home as he decided that his family was the social model to follow.
1960s - Anti-Conformity Rebellions Led to Corporate Losses
After Monroe's suicide, Arthur Miller argued against this psychiatric method that suggests any suffering is a problem. Miller insisted we must let suffering inform our lives, not try to cure any and all tumults we feel. The method advocated by Greenson attempted to control people rather than free them.
Herbert Marcuse also criticized the method. He called it a childish application of psychoanalysis and explained that the planned obsolescence of our time, with a huge variety of things to have and do, leads to a schizoid existence. The destructiveness of the individual is due to "empty prosperity." He called out psychiatry for being used for corrupt purposes, and Anna Freud for increasing repression in her patients through forced conformity. Evil isn't from maladjusted inward conflict, but from society, and it must be challenged, not adapted to. Martin Luther King Jr. agreed with the words, "I am proud to be maladjusted" to a corrupt society. And then the two children that Anna Freud started her method on, both committed suicide. This provoked a new student left to attack this system of social control, sometimes violently.
Wilhelm Reich challenged Freud's premise that people are driven by animal instincts and society is a controlling force that keeps our raging inferno of emotions in check. He countered that our drives are positive and repression by society distorts them. Reich thought violence is a result of denying our libido full expression; neurosis is a result of ineffective orgasm. And then things got really weird with the Human Potential Movement and confrontational experiences and encounter workshops that involved violent and sexual release. Werner Erhard got on board with the EST movement, believing that we can create ourselves individually, only the individual matters, and we can largely ignore society. Students and young adults became less political as they became more self-obsessed.
The downside of all this self-exploration was a corporate loss, particularly to life insurance companies, which are built on the protestant ethic prompting us to sacrifice for the future. Too many people were living for today. The new enlightenment needed products to help people express their individuality, but, at the time, variety wasn't cost-effective for factory production.
1970s - We Can be Reduced to a Lifestyle
The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was used to measure and test desire satiation. Abraham Maslow, a humanistic psychologist famous for his self-actualization test, also created a tool to measure people's values on a hierarchy of needs that rises as people liberate their feelings. This was the beginning of categorizing society for marketing purposes. He believed we can be defined by the choices we make, and he surveyed people to see how people fit a set of identifiable types he called: lifestyles. The Values and Lifestyles survey (VALS) categorized people into more specific purchasing types than could be determined by age or income: Mainstreamers have a need for security and belonging; aspirers have a need for status; succeeders have a need for control; and reformers have a need for self-esteem. If a product reflects their attitudes, people will buy it. Instead of focus groups discussing products already invented, they used market research to invent new products. This would soon help elect politicians as well.
1980s - We Can Buy our Identity
Self-actualization seminars from the likes of Wayne Dyer and inner self work became more popular (polls showed an increase in interest from 5% in 1970 to 80% in 1980). Reagan ran on the new individualism model with his speech "Let the People Rule" (his We the People speech 8 years later has a similar flavour) knowing that people now embrace whatever gives the illusion of independence. It polled well and many former republicans voted conservative because of the PR spin, which allowed neo-liberalism to thrive. People feel entitled to have the best and to have power over their leaders, and they want their every whim satisfied.
New technology allowed short runs of consumer goods, so people were now able to buy their identities. They felt liberated, yet were more dependent on business than ever. Products were now necessary to their happiness and their very sense of self. Without things, people no longer have any identity. Scary.
Matthew Freud, of Freud Communications (great grandson of Sigmund, and son of an MP accused of pedophilia), helped manufacturers get control over how their corporation appeared in print. And Rupert Murdock's right in there too, of course.
Robert Reich laments that we no longer have a society, just a bunch of individuals focused on themselves. Bernays found a way to get people to see goods as a means to respond to deep emotional yearnings. Politicians used these business methods to find out what voters want and give it to them, and they stopped caring about having a clear and specific mandate. They summoned the greediest aspects of human nature by focusing on individual personal satisfaction. It was a triumph of the perspective that individuals are purely emotional beings easily led off a cliff.
According to Reich, the left used to persuade people we have common interests. Roosevelt persuaded people to join together in labour unions, which drove the democratic party. The worst thing Reagan did was to make denial of compassion a respectable trait.
1990s - Fluctuating Desires Drive the New Democracy
To get re-elected, Clinton bowed to this pressure to satisfy individual voter concerns. (Tony Blair did the same thing in Britain.) It turned politics into a consumer business that can fulfill personal desires. They could learn what voters want and move themself there. Clinton conducted neuro-personality polls to find day-to-day concerns and ran on a platform of V-chips for TVs and mobile phones on busses rather than the typical foreign and domestic policies discussed in previous elections. This was spun as a means to end elitist politics in that the people are now being heard, but the practice suggests that democracy is nothing more than pandering to primitive desires. It's a politics of the self. It's a problem because people are contradictory: they want lower taxes and better public services. We're trapped in short-term, conflicting policies.
This isn't a better form of democracy, a "continuous democracy," it's just propaganda for corporations. Remember that Bernays didn't believe democracy could work and that the masses had to be led, that it's too dangerous to let people have control over their own lives. Consumerism is a way to give the illusion of control while allowing the responsible elite to continue managing society. This is the end result of that premise. We just feel like we have more say now. People's desires are in charge instead of their will. Democracy has been reduced from something that assumes an active citizenry to something which now is increasingly predicated on the idea of the public as passive consumers.
We have to appeal to the public to care for others more. We forgot that we can be more than our immediate desires. Reich summed up the two views of human nature: essentially emotional or rational. The Freudian view suggests we're just bundles of emotions, and businesses have honed their skills at responding to that. But politics must be more than that. Politics and leadership are about engaging the public in a rational discussion and deliberation about what is best for society. People need to be respected for their rational abilities to debate what is best.
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2000s - Do We Know Enough to Change?
Now we know, or think we know, about neural pathways. The more we restrain ourselves, the easier it gets to avoid certain stimuli. If we have chocolate around, but stop ourselves from eating it, it will get easier to avoid it, and eventually we'll stop being so drawn to it. I practice this myself by actively avoiding social media at certain times of day, and it's something I don't have to actively work at quite so much anymore. The corollary is also true, that the more we do something, the easier it is to do and the more likely we are to do it. The more we allow ourselves to have public outbursts, the more likely we are to have them. We have to practice self-restraint.
This leans towards Anna Freud's work, but she went too far dictating what all needs to be controlled, and not far enough with other tactics to help alleviate profound depression. I think it's less a training that we need, but more of a constant reminder about our goals for ourselves as people so we're not led astray.
Today we also know about neuromarketing. They don't need market research or focus groups when they can look at our brains directly to find out which ads cause a dopamine spike. The masses can clearly be led towards consumerism or acts of genocide, so we need to be ever vigilantly thinking about why we feel like we need new clothes or why we feel a hatred for one group or another.
The fact that Bernays and others are able to manipulate society is testament to Freud's original theory hitting a nail on the head in determining how our drives affect us. But what some people do with that understanding is frightening. This clarifies a pivotal role for schools (complete with lessons on Freudian theory) to ensure we wake people up to their own decision-making as well as to their internal drives. We need to demand a democracy based on collective will for the benefit of society, not individual desires for the benefit of the self.
