Century of the Self Transcript - Part 1
- Happiness Machines
A hundred years ago a new theory about
human nature was put forth by Sigmund Freud. He had discovered he
said, primitive and sexual and aggressive forces hidden deep inside
the minds of all human beings. Forces which if not controlled led
individuals and societies to chaos and destruction.
This series is about how those in power
have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in
an age of mass democracy.
But the heart of the series is not just
Sigmund Freud but other members of the Freud family.
This episode is about Freud's American
nephew Edward Bernays.
Bernays is almost completely unknown
today but his influence on the 20th century was nearly as great as
his uncles. Because Bernays was the first person to take Freud's
ideas about human beings and use them to manipulate the masses. He
showed American corporations for the first time how to they could
make people want things they didn't need by linking mass produced
goods to their unconscious desires.
Out of this would come a new political
idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying people's inner
selfish desires one made them happy and thus docile. It was the start
of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate our world today.
Part One
Happiness Machines
Freud's ideas about how the human mind
works have now become an accepted part of society. As have
psychoanalysts.
Every year the psychotherapists ball is
held in a grand place in Vienna.
"This is the psychotherapy ball.
Psychotherapists come, some advanced patients come, former patients
come, and many other people - friends as well as people from the
Viennese society who like to come to a nice elegant comfortable ball.
" - Dr. Alfred Fritz, President World Council for Psychotherapy
But it was not always so. A hundred
years ago Freud's ideas were hated by Viennese society. At that time
Vienna was the center of a vast empire leading central Europe. And to
the powerful nobility of the Hoffman accord Freud's ideas were not
only embarrassing, but the very idea of examining and analyzing ones
inner feelings was a threat to their absolute control.
Countess Erzie Karolyi - Budapest: You
see at that time these people had the power and of course you just
weren't allowed to show your bloody feelings, I mean you just
couldn't. You know if you were unhappy, can you imagine for instance
you see someone in the country in a castle you are deeply unhappy you
are a woman; you couldn't go to your mate and cry on her shoulders,
you couldn't go into the village and complain about your feelings, it
was assailing yourself to someone you just couldn't. You know.
Because they had to respect you. Now of course Freud put that very
much into question - you see to examine yourself you would have to
put other things into question - society, everything that surrounds
you and that was not a good thing at that time. Why? Because your
self-created empire to a certain extent would have fallen to bits
much earlier already.
But what frightened the rulers of the
empire even more was Freud's idea hidden inside all human beings were
dangerous instinctual drives. Freud had devised a method he called
psychoanalysis. By analyzing dreams and free association he had
unearthed he said powerful sexual and aggressive forces which were
the remnants of our animal past. Feelings we repressed because they
were too dangerous.
Dr. Earnest Jones - Colleague of Freud:
Freud devised a method for exploring the hidden part of the mind
which we nowadays call the unconscious this the part is totally
unknown to our consciousness. That there exists a barrier in all our
minds which prevents these hidden and welcome impulses from the
unconscious from emerging.
In 1914 the Austria Hungarian Empire
led Europe into war. As the horror mounted Freud saw it as terrible
evidence of the truth of his findings. The saddest thing he wrote,
that this is exactly the way we should expect people to behave from
our knowledge of psychoanalysis. Governments had unleashed the
primitive forces in humans beings and no one seemed to know how to
stop them.
At that time, Freud's young nephew
Edward Bernays was working as a press agent in America. His main
client was the world famous opera singer Caruso who was touring the
United States. Bernays' parents had emigrated to America 20 years
before, but he kept in touch with his Uncle who joined him for
Holidays in the Alps. But Bernays was now about to return to Europe
for a very different reason. On the night that Caruso opened in
Toledo Ohio America announced that it was entering the war against
Germany and Austria. As part of the war effort the US government set
up a committee on public information and Bernays was employed to
promote America's war aims in the press. The president Woodrow Wilson
had announced that the United States would fight not to restore the
old empires but to bring democracy to all of Europe. Bernays proved
extremely skillful at promoting this idea both at home and abroad and
at the end of the war was asked to accompany the President to the
Paris Peace Conference.
Edward Bernays - 1991: Then to my
surprise they asked me to go with Woodrow Wilson to the peace
conference. And at the age of 26 I was in Paris for the entire time
of the peace conference that was held in the suburb of Paris and we
and worked to make the world safe for democracy. That was the big
slogan.
Wilson's reception in Paris astounded
Bernays and the other American propagandists. They had portrayed
Wilson as a liberator of the people. The man who would create a new
world in which the individual would be free. They had made him a hero
of the masses. And as he watched the crowd surge around Wilson,
Bernays began to wonder if it would be possible to do the same type
of mass persuasion but in peace time.
Edward Bernays - 1991: When I came back
to the United States I decided that if you could use propaganda for
war you could certainly use it for peace. And propaganda got to be a
bad word because of the Germans using it. So what I did is try to
find some other words so we found the word Council on Public
Relations.
Bernays returned to New York and set up
as a Public Relations Councilman in small office off Broadway. Which
was the first time the term had even been used. Since the end of the
19th century, America had become a mass industrial society with
millions clustered together in the cities. Bernays was determined to
find a way to manage and alter the way these new crowds thought and
felt. To do this he turned to the writings of his Uncle Sigmund.
While in Paris Bernays had sent his Uncle a gift of some Havana
cigars. In return Freud had sent him a copy of his General
Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Bernays read it and the picture of
hidden irrational forces inside human beings fascinated him. He
wondered whether he might be able to make money manipulating the
unconscious.
Pat Jackson - Public Relations Adviser
and Colleague of Bernays: What Eddie got from Freud was indeed this
idea that there is a lot more going on in human decision making. Not
only among individuals but even more importantly among groups that
this idea that information drives behavior. So Eddie began to
formulate this idea that you had to look at things that will play to
people's irrational emotions. You see that immediately moved Eddie
into a different category from other people in his field and most
government officials and managers of the day who thought if you just
hit people with all this factual information they would look at that
say go "of course" and Eddie knew that was not the way the
world worked.
Bernays set out to experiment with the
minds of the popular classes. His most dramatic experiment was to
persuade women to smoke. At that time there was a taboo against women
smoking and one of his early clients George Hill, the President of
the American Tobacco corporation asked Bernays to find a way to break
it.
Edward Bernays - 1991: He says we're
losing half of our market. Because men have invoked a taboo against
women smoking in public. Can you do anything about that. I said let
me think about it. If I may have permission to see psychoanalyst to
see what cigarettes mean to women. He said what'll cost? So I called
up Dr Brille, AA Brille who was the leading psychoanalyst in New York
at the time.
AA Brille was one of the first
psychoanalysts in America. And for a large fee he told Bernays that
cigarettes were a symbol of the penis and of male sexual power. He
told Bernays that if he could find a way to connect cigarettes with
the idea of challenging male power then women would smoke because
then they would have their own penises.
Every year New York held an Easter day
parade to which thousands came. Bernays decided to stage an event
there . He persuaded a group of rich debutants to hide cigarettes
under their clothes. Then they should join the parade and at a given
signal from him they were to light up the cigarettes dramatically.
Bernays then informed the press that he had heard that a group of
suffragettes were preparing to protest by lighting up what they
called torches of freedom.
Pat Jackson - Public Relations Adviser
and Colleague of Bernays: He knew this would be an outcry, and he
knew that all of the photographers would be there to capture this
moment so he was ready with a phrase which was torches of freedom. So
here you have a symbol, women, young women, debutantes, smoking a
cigarette in public with a phrase that means anybody who believes in
this kind of equality pretty much has to support them in the ensuing
debate about this, because I mean torches of freedom. What's our
American point, it's liberty, she's holding up the torch, you see and
so all this there together, there's emotion there's memory and
there's a rational phrase, all of this is in there together. So the
next day this was not just in all the New York papers it was across
the United States and around the world. And from that point forward
the sale of cigarettes to woman began to rise. He had made them
socially acceptable with a single symbolic ad.
What Bernays had created was the idea
that if a women smoked it made her more powerful and independent. An
idea that still persists today. It made him realize that it was
possible to persuade people to behave irrationally if you link
products to their emotional desires and feelings. The idea that
smoking actually made women freer, was completely irrational. But it
made them feel more independent. It meant that irrelevant objects
could become powerful emotional symbols of how you want to be seen by
others.
Peter Strauss - Employee of Bernays
1948-1952: Eddie Bernays saw a way to sell product was not to sell it
to your intellect, that you ought to buy an automobile, but that you
will feel better about it if you have this automobile. I think he
originated that idea that they weren't just purchasing something that
they were engaging themselves emotionally or personally in a product
or service. It's not that you think you need a piece of clothing but
that you will feel better if you have a piece of clothing. That was
his contribution in a very real sense. We see it all over the place
today but I think he originated the idea, the emotional connect to a
product or service.
What Bernays was doing fascinated
Americas corporations. They had come out of the war rich and
powerful, but they had a growing worry. The system of mass production
had flourished during the war and now millions of goods were pouring
off production lines. What they were frightened of was the danger of
overproduction, that there would come a point when people had enough
goods and would simply stop buying. Up until that point the majority
of products were still sold to the masses on the basis of need. While
the rich had long been used to luxury goods for the millions of
working class Americans most products were still advertised as
necessities. Goods like shoes stockings even cars were promoted in
functional terms for their durability. The aim of the advertisements
were simply to show people the products practical virtues, nothing
more.
What the corporations realized they had
to do was transform the way the majority of Americans thought about
products. One leading Wall Street banker, Paul Mazer of Leahman
Brothers was clear about what was necessary. We must shift America,
he wrote, from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained
to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely
consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man's desires
must overshadow his needs.
Peter Solomon - Investment Banker -
Leahman Brothers: Prior to that time there was no American consumer,
there was the American worker. And there was the American owner. And
they manufactured, and they saved and they ate what they had to and
the people shopped for what they needed. And while the very rich may
have bought things they didn't need, most people did not. And Mazer
envisioned a break with that where you would have things that you
didn't actually need, but you wanted as opposed to needed.
And the man who would be at the center
of changing that mentality for the corporations was Edward Bernays.
Stuart Ewen - Historian of Public
Relations: Bernays really is the guy within the United States more
than anybody else who sort of brings to the table psychological
theory as something that is an essential part of how, from the
corporate side, of how we are going to appeal to the masses
effectively and the whole sort of merchandising establishment and the
sales establishment is ready for Sigmund Freud. I mean they are ready
for understanding what motivates the human mind. And so there's this
real openness to Bernays techniques being used to sell products to
the masses.
Beginning in the early 20's the New
York banks funded the creation of chains of department stores across
America. They were to be the outlets for the mass produced goods. And
Bernays' job was to produce the new type of customer. Bernays began
to create many of the techniques of mass consumer persuasion that we
now live with. He was employed by William Randolph Hurst to promote
his new women's magazines, and Bernays glamorized them by placing
articles and advertisements that linked products made by others of
his clients to famous film stars like Clara Bow, who was also his
client. Bernays also began the practice of product placement in
movies, and he dressed the stars at the films premieres with clothes
and jewelry from other firms he represented.
He was, he claimed, the first person to
tell car companies they could sell cars as symbols of male sexuality.
He employed psychologists to issue reports that said products were
good for you and then pretended they were independent studies. He
organized fashion shows in department stores and paid celebrities to
repeat the new and essential message, you bought things not just for
need but to express your inner sense of your self to others.
Commercial spot from 1920s featuring
Mrs. Stillman, 1920s Celebrity Aviator:
There's a psychology of dress, have you
ever thought about it? How it can express your character? You all
have interesting characters but some of them are all hidden. I wonder
why you all want to dress always the same, with the same hats and the
same coats. I'm sure all of you are interesting and have wonderful
things about you, but looking at you in the street you all look so
much the same. And that's why I'm talking to you about the psychology
of dress. Try and express yourselves better in your dress. Bring out
certain things that you think are hidden. I wonder if you've thought
about this angle of your personality.
Clip of man interviewing a woman on the
street in the 1920s:
Man: I'd like to ask you some
questions. Why do you like short skirts?
Woman: Oh because there's more to see.
(crowd laughs)
Man: More to see eh? What good does
that do you?
Woman: It makes you more attractive.
In 1927 an American journalist wrote: A
change has come over our democracy, it is called consumptionism. The
American citizens first importance to his country is now no longer
that of citizen, but that of consumer.
The growing wave of consumerism helped
in turn to create a stock market boom. And yet again Edward Bernays
became involved. Promoting the idea that ordinary people should buy
shares borrowing money from banks that he also represented. And yet
again, millions followed his advice.
Peter Strauss - Employee of Bernays
1948-1952: He was uniquely knowledgeable about how people in large
numbers are going to react to products and ideas, but in political
terms if he were to go out I can't imagine he could get three people
to stand and listen. He wasn't particularly articulate, he was kind
of funny looking, and didn't have any sense of reaching out for
people one on one. None at all. He didn't talk about, didn't think
about people in groups of one, he thought about people in groups of
thousands.
Bernays soon became famous as the man
who understood the mind of the crowd, and in 1924 the President
contacted him. President Coolidge was a quiet taciturn man and had
become a national joke. The press portrayed him as a dull humorless
figure. Bernays' solution was to do exactly the same as he had done
with products. He persuaded 34 famous film stars to visit the White
House, and for the first time politics became involved with public
relations.
Bernays speaking in 1991: And I lined
up these 34 people and I'd say what's your name, and he'd say Al
Jolson, and I'd say Mr. President, Al Jolson. The next day every
newspaper in the United States had a front page story President
Coolidge Entertains Actors at White House. And the Times had a
headline which said President Nearly Laughed, and everybody was
happy.
But while Bernays became rich and
powerful in America, in Vienna his uncle was facing disaster. Like
much of Europe Vienna was suffering an economic crisis and massive
inflation which wiped out all of Freud's' savings. Facing bankruptcy
he wrote to his nephew for help. Bernays responded by arranging for
Freud's works to be published for the first time in America, and
began to send his uncle precious dollars which Freud kept secretly in
a foreign bank account.
Pat Jackson - Public Relations Adviser
and Colleague of Bernays: He was Freud's "agent" if you
will, to get his books published. Well of course once the books were
being published Eddie couldn't help himself but to promote these
books; see that everybody read them, make them controversial;
emphasize the fact that 'do you know what Freud says about sex and
what he thinks cigarettes are a symbol of' and so on and so forth.
How do you suppose all those stories got out? Certainly the academics
weren't spreading these around the country Eddie Bernays was. Then
when Freud became accepted, well then of course to go to a client and
go 'well Uncle Siggy' see then that had some cache. But notice there,
first Eddie created Uncle Siggy in the US, made him acceptable
secondly, and thirdly then capitalized on Uncle Siggy. Typical
Bernays performance.
Bernays also suggested Freud promote
himself in the United States. He proposed his uncle write an article
for Cosmopolitan, the magazine that Bernays represented, entitled 'A
Woman's Mental Place in the Home'. Freud was furious. Such an idea he
said was unthinkable, it was vulgar and anyway he hated America.
Freud was becoming increasingly
pessimistic about human beings. In the mid 20s he retreated in the
summers to the Alps, sometimes staying in an old hotel, the Pension
Moritz in Berchtesgaden. It is now a ruin. Freud began to write about
group behavior; about how easily the unconscious aggressive forces of
human beings could be triggered when they were in crowds. Freud
believed he had underestimated the aggressive instincts within human
beings; they were far more dangerous than he had originally thought.
Dr. Ernst Federn - Viennese
Psychoanalyst: After World War I Freud was basically a pessimist. He
felt that man is an impossible creature and a very sadistic and bad
species and did not believe that man can be improved. Man is a
ferocious animal, the most ferocious animal that exists. They enjoy
torture and killing and he didn't like man.
The publication of Freud's work in
America had an extraordinary effect on journalists and intellectuals
in the 1920s. What fascinated and frightened them was the picture
Freud painted of submerged dangerous forces lurking just under the
surface of modern society. Forces that could erupt easily to produce
the frenzied mob which had the power to destroy even governments. It
was this they believed had happened in Russia. To many this meant
that one of the guiding principles of mass democracy was wrong; the
belief that human beings could be trusted to make decisions on a
rational basis.
The leading political writer, Walter
Lippmann argued that if human beings were in reality driven by
unconscious irrational forces then it was necessary to re-think
democracy. What was needed was a new elite that could manage what he
called the bewildered herd. This would be done through psychological
techniques that would control the unconscious feelings of the masses.
Stewart Ewen - Historian of Public
Relations: And so here you have Walter Lippmann, probably the most
influential political thinker in the United States, who is
essentially saying the basic mechanism of the mass mind is unreason,
is irrationality, is animality. He believes that the mob in the
street which is how he sees ordinary people, are people driven not by
their minds but by their spinal chords. The notion of animal drives,
unconscious and instinctual drives, lurking beneath the surface of
civilization; and so they started looking towards psychological
science as a way of understanding the mechanisms by which the popular
mind works specifically with the goal of figuring out how to
understand how to apply those mechanisms to strategy for social
control.
Edward Bernays was fascinated by
Lippmann's arguments and also saw a way to promote himself by using
them. In the 1920s he started to write a series of books which argued
that he had developed the very techniques that Lippmann was calling
for. By stimulating people's inner desires and then sating them with
consumer products he was creating a new way to manage the irrational
force of the masses. He called it the engineering of consent.
Ann Bernays, Daughter of Edward
Bernays: Democracy to my father was a wonderful concept, but I don't
think he felt that all those publics out there had reliable judgment,
and that they very easily might vote for the wrong man or want the
wrong thing; so that they had to be guided from above. It's
enlightened despotism in a sense. You appeal to their desires and
unrecognized longings, that sort of thing. That you can tap into
their deepest desires or their deepest fears and use that to your own
purposes.
And then in 1928 a President 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. After his election he told a group of
advertisers and public relations men "You Have taken over the
job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly
moving happiness machines. Machines which have become the key to
economic progress."
What was beginning to emerge in the
1920s was a new idea of how to run mass democracy. At it's heart was
the consuming self which not only made the economy work but was also
happy and docile and so created a stable society.
Stewart Ewen - Historian of Public
Relations: Both Bernays and Lippmann's concept of managing the masses
takes the idea of democracy and turns it a palliative, turns it into
giving people some kind of feel good medication that will respond to
an immediate pain or immediate yearning but will not alter the
objective circumstances one iota. The idea of democracy at it's heart
was about changing the relations of power that had governed the world
for so long; and Bernays' concept of democracy was one of maintaining
the relations of power, even if it meant one needed to stimulate the
psychological lives of the public. And in fact in his mind that is
what was necessary. That if you can keep stimulating the irrational
self then leadership can go on doing what it wants to do.
Bernays now became one of the central
figures in a business elite that dominated American society and
politics in the 1920s. He also became extremely rich and lived in a
suite of rooms in one of New York's most expensive hotels where he
gave frequent parties.
Peter Strauss - Employee of Bernays
1948-1952: Oh my goodness he had a home in the corner suite of the
Sherry Netherland hotel and here's this wonderful suite with all
these windows looking out on central park and across at the plaza,
and on the square, and he would use this place to hold a soiree. The
mayor would come, all the media leaders would come, the political
leaders, the business leaders, the people in the arts; it was a who's
who. People wanted to know Eddie Bernays because he himself became a
sort of a famous man a sort of magician that could make things
happen.
Ann Bernays, Daughter of Edward
Bernays: He knows everybody he knows the mayor, and he knows the
senator, and he calls politicians on the telephone as if he did get
literally a high or bang out of doing what he did, and that's fine,
but it can be a little hard on the people around you. Especially when
you make other people feel stupid. The people who worked for him were
stupid, the children were stupid, and if people did things in a way
that he wouldn't have done them, they were stupid. It was a word that
he used over and over - don't be stupid. And the masses - They were
stupid.
But Bernays' power was about to be
destroyed dramatically, and by a type of human rationality that he
could do nothing to control. At the end of October 1929 Bernays
organized a huge national event to celebrate the 50th anniversary of
the light bulb. President Hoover, leaders of major corporations and
bankers like John D Rockefeller were all summoned by Bernays to
celebrate the power of American business. But even as they gathered
news came through that shares on the New York stock exchange were
beginning to fall catastrophically.
Throughout the 1920s speculators had
borrowed billions of dollars. The banks had promoted the idea that
this was a new era where market crashes were a thing of the past. But
they were wrong. What was bout to happen was the biggest stock market
crash in history. Investors had panicked and begun to sell in a blind
relentless fury that no reassurance by bankers or politicians could
halt. And on the 29th of October 1929 the market collapsed.
The effect of the crash on the American
economy was disastrous. Faced with recession and unemployment
millions of American workers stopped buying goods they didn't need.
The consumer boom that Bernays had done so much to engineer had
disappeared. And he and the profession of public relations fell from
favor. Bernays' brief moment of power seemed to be over.
The effect of the Wall Street crash on
Europe was also catastrophic. It intensified the growing economic and
political crisis in the new democracies. In both Germany and Austria
there were violent street battles between the armed wings of
different political parties.
Against this backdrop Freud who was
suffering from cancer of the jaw retreated yet again to the alps. He
wrote a book called Civilization and it's Discontents. It was a
powerful attack on the idea that civilization was an expression of
human progress. Instead Freud argued civilization had been
constructed to control the dangerous animal forces inside human
beings. What was implicit in Freud's argument was that the ideal of
individual freedom which was 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 thus always be discontent.
Dr. Ernst Federn - Viennese
Psychoanalyst: Man doesn't want to be civilized and civilization
brings discontent but is necessarily to survival so he must be
discontent because this would be the only way to keep you within your
limits. What did Freud think about the idea of the equality of man?
He didn't believe in it.
We had 32 parties and Hitler said
"before those parties don't vanish there is no Germany".
That's true you can't have 32 parties so they said this one person
will put an end to this comedy.
Freud was not alone in his pessimism.
Politicians like Adolf Hitler emerged from a growing despair in the
1920s about democracy. The Nazis were convinced that democracy was
dangerous because it unleashed a selfish individualism but didn't
have the means to control it. Hitler's party the National Socialists
stood in elections promising in their propaganda they would abandon
democracy because of the chaos and unemployment it led to.
In March 1933 the National Socialists
were elected to power in Germany and they set out to create a society
that would control human beings in a different way. One of their
first acts was to take control of business. The planning of
production would in the future be done by the state. The free market
was too unstable as the crash in America had proven. Workers leisure
time was also planned by the state through a new organization called
strength through joy. One of it's mottos was service not self.
But the Nazi's did not see this as
return to an old form autocratic control. It was a new alternative to
democracy in which the feelings and desires of the masses would still
be central but they would be channeled in such a way as to bind the
nation together. The chief exponent of this was Joseph Goebbels the
Minister of Propaganda.
Goebbels organized huge rallies whose
function he said was to forge the mind of the nation into a unity of
thinking feeling and desire. One of his inspirations he told an
American journalist was the writings of Freud's nephew, Edward
Bernays. In his work on crowd psychology Freud had described how the
frightening irrationality inside human beings could emerge in such
groups. The deep what he called 'libidinal' forces of desire were
given up to the leader while the aggressive instincts are unleashed
on those outside the group. Freud wrote this as a warning but the
Nazis were deliberately encouraging these forces because they
believed they could master and control them.
Dr Leoppold Lowenthal - Freudian
Psychoanalyst at a rally in Vienna in 2000: Freud was saying that
masses are bound by libidinal forces. They love each other and
delegate their ideas and feelings through the jack on top. What are
libidinal forces? Forces of love. Not hate? No, is delegated on the
others outside the mob.
Clip of man speaking "I could see
from afar how there were hundreds of thousands of people when they
passed Hitler they were completely delirious and shouted Zeig Heil
and here I got confirmation how those irrational forces,
uncontrollable forces in Germany, in the Germans, had erupted, were
brought out running wild where the party was marching, marching
onward."
And in America too democracy was under
threat from the force of the angry mob. The effect of the stock
market crash had been disastrous. There was growing violence as an
angry population took out there frustration on the corporations who
were seen to have caused this disaster. Then in 1932 a new President
was elected who was also going to use the power of the state to
control the free market. But his aim was not to destroy democracy but
to strengthen it. And to do this he was going to develop a new way of
dealing with the masses.
President Roosevelt's in his
inauguration speech: "I am prepared under my constitutional duty
to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of
stricken world may require. But in the event that the national
emergency is still critical I shall not evade the clear course of
duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the congress for the one
remaining instrument to meet the crisis - broad executive power."
It was the start of what would become
known as The New Deal. Roosevelt assembled a group of young
technocrats and planners in Washington. He told them that their job
was to plan and run giant new industrial projects for the good of the
nation. Roosevelt was convinced the stock market crash had shown that
laissez faire capitalism could no longer run modern industrial
economies. This had become the job of government. Big business was
horrified but The New Deal had attracted the admiration of the Nazis,
especially Joseph Goebbels.
Joseph Goebbels speaking in a news
interview: "I am very interested in social developments in
America. I believe that President Roosevelt has chosen the right
path. We are dealing with the greatest social problems ever known.
Millions of unemployed must get their jobs back and this cannot be
left to private initiative. It's the government that must tackle the
problem."
But although Roosevelt like the Nazis
was trying to organize society in a different way, unlike the Nazis
he believed that human beings were rational and could be trusted to
take an active part in government. Roosevelt believed it was possible
to explain his policies to ordinary Americans and to take into
account their opinions. To do this he was helped by the new ideas of
an American social scientist called George Gallup.
New clip voiceover: "Favorite
reading of new deal Washington - the survey of public opinion. From
offices at Princeton New Jersey a famed statistician George Gallup
tells Washington from week to week what the nation is thinking. And
in New York Fortune Magazines analyst Elmo Roper compiles for
publication a continuous record of the nations approval or
disapproval of how the country is being run."
Gallup and Roper rejected Bernays' view
that human beings were at the mercy of unconscious forces and so
needed to be controlled. Their system of opinion polling was based on
the idea that people could be trusted to know what they wanted. They
argued that one could measure and predict the opinions and behavior
of the public if one asked strictly factual questions and avoided
manipulating their emotions.
George Gallup Jr - Son of George
Gallup: Prior to scientific polling the view of many people was that
you couldn't trust public opinion, that it was irrational; that it
was ill-informed, that it was chaotic, unruly and so forth; and so
that it should be dismissed. But with scientific polling I think it
established very clearly that people are rational, that they do make
good decisions, and this offers democracy a chance to be truly
informed by the public giving everybody a voice in the way the
country is run. I know my father wouldn't necessarily say that the
voice of the public is the voice of God, but he did feel very much
that the voice of the people is a rational voice and should be heard.
What Roosevelt was doing was forging a
new connection between the masses and politicians. No longer were
they irrational consumers who managed by sating their desires,
instead they were sensible citizens who could take part in the
governing of the country. In 1936 Roosevelt stood for re-election. He
promised further control over big business. To the corporations it
was the beginning of a dictatorship.
Big business leader speaking in an
interview: "Roosevelt interferes with private enterprise and
he's running the country into debt for generations to come. The way
to get recovery is to let business alone."
But Roosevelt was triumphantly
re-elected. Faced with this, business now decided to fight back, to
regain power in America. At the heart of the battle would be Edward
Bernays and the profession he had invented, public relations.
Stewart Ewen - Historian of Public
Relations: Following that lecture business people start to get
together and start to carry on discussions, primarily in private and
they start talking to each other about the need to sort of carry on
ideological warfare against the New Deal. And to sort of reassert the
sort of connectedness between the idea of democracy on the one hand
and the idea of privately owned business on the other. And so under
the umbrella of an organization that still exists which is called The
National Association of Manufacturers and whose membership included
all of the major corporations of the United States a campaign is
launched explicitly designed to create emotional attachments between
the public and big business; it's Bernays' techniques being used on a
grand scale. I mean totally.
The campaign set out to show
dramatically that it was business not politicians that created modern
America. Bernays was an advisor to General Motors but he was no
longer alone. The industry he had founded now flourished as hundreds
of public relations advisors organized a vast campaign. They not only
used advertisements and billboards but managed to insinuate their
message into the editorial pages of the newspapers.
It became a bitter fight. In response
to the campaign the government made films about the unscrupulous
manipulation of the press by big business and the central villain was
the new figure of the public relations man.
Voiceover from one such film: "They
try to achieve their ends by working entirely behind the scenes
corrupting and deceiving the public. The aims of such groups may be
either good or bad so far as the public interest is concerned, but
their methods are a grave danger to democratic institutions."
The films also showed how the
responsible citizens could monitor the press themselves. They could
create a chart that analyzed the press for signs of hidden bias. But
such earnest instruction was to be no match for the powerful
imagination of Edward Bernays. He was about to help create a vision
of the utopia that free market capitalism would build in America if
it was unleashed.
In 1939 New York hosted the World's
Fair. Edward Bernays was a central adviser. He insisted that the
theme be the link between democracy and American business. At the
heart of the fair was a giant white dome that Bernays named
'Democracity', and the central exhibit was a vast working model of
America's future constructed by the General Motors corporation.
Ann Bernays - Daughter of Edward
Bernays: To my father the World's Fair wan an opportunity to keep the
status quo. That is, capitalism in a democracy, democracy and
capitalism and that marriage. He did that by manipulating people and
getting them to think that you couldn't have real democracy in
anything but a capitalist society which was capable of doing
anything; of creating these wonderful highways, of making moving
pictures inside everybody's house, of telephones that didn't need
chords, of sleek roadsters. It was consumerist but at the same time
you inferred that in a funny way that democracy and capitalism went
together.
The World's Fair was an extraordinary
success and captured America's imagination. The vision it portrayed
was of a new form of democracy in which business responded to
people's innermost desires in a way politicians could never do. But
it was a form of democracy that depended on treating people not as
active citizens like Roosevelt did but as passive consumers. Because
this Bernays believed, was the key to control in a mass democracy.
Stewart Ewen - Historian of Public
Relations: It's not that the people are in charge but that the
people's desires are in charge. The people are not in charge the
people exercise no decision making power within this environment. So
democracy is reduced from something which assumes an active citizenry
to the idea of the public as passive consumers driven primarily by
instinctual or unconscious desires and if you can in fact trigger
those needs and desires you can get what you want from them.
But this struggle between the two views
of human beings as to whether they were rational or irrational was
about to be dramatically affected by events in Europe. Events that
would also change the fortunes of the Freud family. In March 1938 the
Nazis annexed Austria. It was called the Anschluss. Hitler arrived in
Vienna to an extraordinary outpouring of mass adulation but even as
he drove through the city behind the scenes the Nazis were
systematically whipping up and unleashing the hatred of the crowd
against the enemies of the new greater Germany.
Marcel Faust - Resident of Vienna
1930's - The Anschluss was a kind of an explosion of terrible hatred
of so called enemies or whatever they considered as enemies, against
the Jews totally and also against a lot of Austrians who opposed the
Nazis in Austria. They said it's legitimate now you can do what you
want so they did it. Stealing and robbing and killing, I can't stay
there a while; human depravity was always near to normal behavior it
can change very quickly.
As the violence and assassinations
raged in Vienna Freud decided he had to leave. His aim was to go to
Britain, but he knew Britain like many countries was refusing
entrance to most Jewish refugees. But help came from the leading
psychoanalyst in Britain, Ernest Jones. He was in the same ice
skating club as the Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hall, and Jones
persuaded Hall to issue Freud a British work permit and in May 1938
Freud, his daughter Anna and other members of his family set off for
London.
Freud arrived in London as Britain was
preparing for war and he settled with his daughter Anna in a house in
Hampstead. But Freud's cancer was now far advanced and in September
1939 just three weeks after the outbreak of war he died.
The second world war would utterly
transform the way government saw democracy and the people they
governed. Next week's program will show how the American government
as a result of the war became convinced there were savage dangerous
forces inside all human beings. Forces that needed to be controlled.
The terrible evidence from the death camps seemed to show what
happened when these forces were unleashed. And politicians and
planners in post war America would come to believe that hidden under
the surface of their own population were the same dangerous forces.
And they would turn to the Freud family to help control this enemy
within. And ever adaptable Edward Bernays would work not just for the
American government but the CIA and Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna
would also become powerful in the United States because she believed
that people could be taught to control the irrational forces within
them. Out of this would come vast government programs to manage the
inner psychological life of the masses.
Century
of the Self - Part 2 - Engineering of Consent
Written
and Produced by Adam Curtis
Anna
Freud speaking: Lets say a word about dreams. We all have thoughts
which we never knew we had. They are too uncomfortable or too
incompatible with our adult self to be remembered. Yet they are often
disturbing rumbling under the surface like lava in a volcano. The
dream is the royal road to these thoughts. The royal road to the
unconscious.
This
is the story about how Sigmund Freud's ideas about the unconscious
mind were used by those in power in post war America to try and
control the masses. Politicians and planners came to believe That
Freud was to suggest that hidden deep within all human beings were
dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that
it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to barbarism of
Nazi Germany. To stop it ever happening again, they set out to find
ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind.
At
the heart of the story are Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna and his
nephew Edward Bernays who had invented the profession of public
relations. Their ideas were used by the US government, big business
and the CIA to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of
the American people. Those in power believed that the only way to
make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the
savage barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal
American life.
Part
Two
The
Engineering of Consent
The
story begins in the middle of the fierce fighting of the second world
war. As the fighting intensified the American army was faced by an
extraordinary number of mental breakdowns among its troops.
Forty-nine percent of all soldiers evacuated from combat were sent
back because they suffered from mental problems. In desperation the
army turned to the new ideas of psychoanalysis. They made a film
record of the experiment using hidden cameras.
Doctor
interviewing solider: "It says here on your record that you had
headaches and that you had crying spells."
Soldier:
"Yes sir, I believe that your profession is calling it
nostalgia."
Doctor:
"In other words, homesickness."
Soldier:
"Yes sir. It was induced when shortly before the war I received
a picture of my sweetheart. (begins to cry) I'm sorry I can't
continue. (leaves)"
It
was the first time that anyone had paid such attention to the
feelings and anxieties of ordinary people. AT the heart of the
experiment were a number of refugee psychoanalysts from central
Europe. They worked with American psychiatrists to guide and shape
the project.
Professor
Martin Bergmann - Psychoanalyst, US Army 1943-45: When I first came
to America I worked in the psychiatric service with soldiers trying
to rehabilitate them. And I travelled in the train from the east
coast to the west coast I was enormously curious what goes on in all
of those little towns that the train is passing. After my years in
the army I knew exactly what every one was doing in the little towns.
Because I saw so many people who came from there and I understood
their aspirations, their disappointments and so forth. So it was as
if somebody had invited me to a privileged tour into the inner soul
of America.
Doctor
interviewing crying soldier again:
Soldier:
"(crying) I'm not doing this deliberately please believe me."
Doctor:
"This display of emotion is sometimes very helpful."
Soldier:
"I hope so, sir."
Doctor:
"Sure, it gets it off your chest"
Soldier:
"Well sir, to be perfectly honest with you I'm very much in love
with my sweetheart. She has been the one person that gave me a sense
of importance in that through her cooperation with me we were able to
surmount so many obstacles."
The
psychoanalysts used techniques developed by Freud to take the men
back into their pasts. They became convinced that the breakdowns were
not the direct result of the fighting. The stress of combat had
merely triggered old childhood memories. These were memories of the
men's own violent feelings and desires which they had repressed
because they were too frightening. To the psychoanalyst it was
overwhelming proof of Freud's theory that underneath human beings
were driven by primitive irrational forces.
Professor
Martin Bergmann - Psychoanalyst, US Army 1943-45: World War II was a
major shattering experience because I discovered the enormous role of
the irrational in the life of most people. Now that I can say that I
learned that the ratio between the irrational and the rational in
America is very much in favor of the irrational. That there's much
greater unhappiness, much more suffering, it's much more a sad
country than one would imagine from the advertisements that you made,
a much more problematic country.
Victory
in the second world war was celebrated as a triumph of democracy, but
in private many policy makers were worried about the implications of
the analysis of the soldiers. It seemed to show that underneath every
American were irrational violent drives. What had happened in Germany
seemed to bear this out. The complicity of so many ordinary Germans
in mass killings during the war showed just how easily these forces
could break through and overwhelm democracy.
Ellen
Herman - Historian of American Psychology: Planners and policy makers
had been convinced by their experiences during World War II that
human beings could act very irrationally because of this sort of
teeming and raw and unpredictable emotionality. The kind of chaos
that lived at the base of human personality could in fact infect the
society social institutions to such a point that the society itself
would become sick. That's what they believe happened in Germany n
which the irrational, the anti-democratic went wild. It is a vision
of human nature as incredibly destructive and they were terrified
Americans would in fact behave that way or were capable of behaving
that way and they wanted to avoid a rerun of that.
Professor
Martin Bergmann - Psychoanalyst, US Army 1943-45: So what is needed
is a human being that can internalize democratic values so they are
not shaken with the storm and psychoanalysis carried in it the
promise that it can be done. It opened up new vistas as to how the
inner structures of the human being can be changed so that he becomes
a more vital free supporter and maintainer of democracy.
Psychoanalysts
were convinced they not only understood these dangerous forces but
they knew how to control them too. They would use their techniques to
create democratic individuals because democracy left to itself failed
to do this. The source of this idea is not only Sigmund Freud but his
youngest daughter Anna. She had fled with her father to London before
the outbreak of war, and after he died Anna Freud became the
acknowledged leader of the world psychoanalytic movement. She saw her
job as to fulfill her father's dream of making his ideas accepted
through the world.
Anton
Freud - Anna Freud's Nephew: At the center of the Freud movement
stood only Anna because she managed to work herself into that
position. She was recognized as that and not just because she was the
daughter, she worked on that. She was rather forbidding and was not
to me a warm person, not an Aunt that we could kiss and put your arms
around; not at all; and her whole life rotated around the spreading
of psychoanalysis.
Freud
himself had seen the role of psychoanalysis as allowing people to
understand their unconscious drives. But Anna Freud believed it was
possible to teach individuals how to control these inner forces. She
had come to believe this through analyzing children, above all the
children of her close friend Dorothy Burlingham. Dorothy Burlingham
was an American millionairess who in the 1920s fled a failed marriage
and brought her children to Anna Freud in Vienna. They were suffering
terrible anxieties and aggression, but Anna Freud was convinced she
could free them from this by changing the world around them.
Michael
Burlingham - Dorothy Burlingham's grandson: She thought that she
could come in and enter their environment essentially, because they
were children you see and didn't have independent lives of their own,
she could go talk to the parents or the mother, she could go to the
schools she could influence their real world, the actual external
world to change their lives to help them. And to change them as
people? I think that was part of what her idea was, she felt that she
could change them.
From
her analysis of the Burlingham children Anna Freud developed a theory
of how to control the inner drives. It was simple - you taught the
children to conform to the rules of society. But this more than just
moral guidance. Anna Freud believed if children like the Burlinghams
strictly followed the rules of accepted social conduct then as they
grew up the conscious part of their mind, what was called the ego,
would be greatly strengthened in its struggle to control the
unconscious. But if children did not conform their ego would be weak
and they would be prey to the dangerous forces of the unconscious.
Michael
Burlingham - Dorothy Burlingham's grandson: In my father's case they
were concerned that he would be a homosexual and so a lot of their
efforts went into preventing or trying to stop my father from
becoming a homosexual. Whether or not he would have or did you know
is unknown to me. Why would they want to stop that? Because they felt
it was abnormal, it wasn't a normal way to develop. They wanted to
have him develop along lines that society recognized as normal
because if you didn't then you would be under control of forces that
you don't understand, that you are not even aware of.
The
analysis seemed to be a great success and in the thirties the
Burlingham children returned to America. Hey settled down to happy
married lives in the suburbs. What they didn't realize was that their
experience was about to become a template for a giant social
experiment to control the inner mental life of the American
population.
In
1946 President Truman signed The National Mental Health Act. It had
been born directly out of the wartime discoveries by psychoanalysts
that millions of Americans who had been drafted suffered hidden
anxieties and fears. The aim of the act was to deal with this
invisible threat to society.
Newsreel
voiceover: Shocked by the appalling percentage of the emotionally
unstable revealed by the World War II draft figures, Congress in 1946
passed The National Mental Health Act which recognized for the first
time that mental illness was a national problem. Keenly aware of the
tremendous problems ahead is Dr. Robert H Felix, director of the vast
new project. Dr Felix: A primary objective of The National Mental
Health program is to increase our fund of scientific knowledge about
mental health and about mental illness. We're not doing this. Why?
Because there are all too few skilled mental health workers.
Two
of the principal architects of the act were the Menninger brothers
Carl and Will. Will had run the wartime psychotherapy experiments and
now he and his brother begun to train hundreds of new psychiatrists.
The Menningers were convinced that it would be possible to apply Anna
Freud's ideas on a wide scale and to adults as well as children. The
psychiatrists job would be to teach ordinary Americans how to control
their unconscious drives. Psychoanalysis could be used to make a
better society.
Dr.
Robert Wallerstein - Psychoanalyst, Menninger Clinic 1949-1966: They
said psychoanalytic thinking could make for the betterment of
society. Because you could change the way the mind functioned; and
you could take the ways in which people did hurtful things to
themselves and others and alter them by enlarging their
understanding. And this was the vision psychoanalysis brought. That
you could really change people. And you could change them almost in
limitless ways.
In
the late forties a vast project began in America to apply the ideas
of psychoanalysis to the masses. Psychological guidance centers were
set up in hundreds of towns. They were staffed by psychiatrists who
believed it was their job to control the hidden forces inside the
minds of millions of ordinary Americans. At the same time thousands
of counselors were trained to apply psychoanalysis to marriage
guidance, and social workers were sent out to visit people's homes
and advise them on the psychological structure of family life. Behind
all this was the fundamental idea of Anna Freuds' - that if people
were encouraged to conform to the accepted patterns of family and
social life then their ego would be strengthened. They would be able
to control the dangerous forces within them.
Clip
from 'Control Your Emotions' an instructional film: When your
emotions control your actions it affects not only your self but the
people around you. And if this sort of flair up is repeated often it
might lead to a permanently warped personality. You can control the
fire of your emotions so that your personality becomes more pleasant.
Dr.
Harold Blum - Psychoanalyst: So we expected someone who had been
through that experience to more insightful, much more understanding,
and a much better regulated person. And regulation includes being
able to let go as it were, to enjoy a football game or a soccer game.
A more understanding, yes rational, but also appropriately emotional
person. The regulatory aspects of the human mind would really be in
charge, instead of being overwhelmed by our passions and our darker
impulses. That one would be master or mistress over ones own
passions.
Dr.
Neil Smelser - Political Theorist and Psychoanalyst: They just felt
that the road to happiness was in adapting to the external world in
which they lived. That people could be uncrippled from their own
neurotic conflicts and impulses; that they would not engage in
self-destructive behavior, that they would in fact adapt to the
reality about them. They never questioned the reality. They never
questioned that it might itself be a source of evil or something to
which you could not adapt without compromise or without suffering or
without exploiting yourself in some way. So there was this fit with
the politics of the day.
But
it was only the beginning of the rise to power of psychoanalysis in
America. Psychoanalysts were about to move into big business and use
their techniques not just to create model citizens but model
consumers. Last week's episode showed how Freud's American nephew
Edward Bernays had been the first to convince American corporations
that they could sell products by connecting them with people's
unconscious feelings. But now a group of psychoanalysts were going to
take what Bernays had begun and invent a whole range of techniques to
get inside and manage the unconscious mind of the consumer. They were
led by Ernest Dichter. Dichter had practiced next door to Freud in
Vienna, but he had come to America and set up The Institute for
Motivational Research in an old mansion north of New York.
Promotional
Clip: This is The Institute for Motivational Research, a place
devoted to the intriguing business of finding out why people behave
as they do. Why they buy as they do. Why they respond to advertising
as they do. And this is Dr. Ernest Dichter. "We don't go out and
ask directly why do you buy and why don't you, what we try to do
instead is try to understand the total personality, the self image of
the customer; we use all the resources of modern social sciences. It
opens up some stimulating psychological techniques for selling any
new product.
Like
the other psychoanalysts Dichter believed that American citizens were
fundamentally irrational beings; they could not be trusted. Their
real reasons for buying products were rooted in unconscious desires
and feelings. And Dichter wanted to find ways to uncover what he
called 'the secret self' of the American consumer.
Fritz
Gehagen - Psychologist and employee of Ernest Dichter: He was trying
to get out of people's mind the unconscious motivations that they had
for purchasing. These could be sexual, they could be psychological,
they could be sociological, they could be a demand for status a
demand for recognition. There were things that people couldn't
verbalize or wouldn't verbalize because they were too secret to them,
they were a part of their nature, and they would be embarrassed if
they came out and said things like this.
Hedy
Dichter - Ernest Dichter's wife: He would interview people but not
ask them direct questions but let them talk freely like you do in
psychoanalysis, and that was his background.
Fritz
Gehagen - Psychologist and employee of Ernest Dichter: And he said
why can't we have a group therapy session about products? And so
Dichter built this room up above his garage and he said we can have
psychoanalysis of products, they can actually act out and verbalize
their wants and needs. And they could be observed and watched and
other people could comment and they could talk about it and everybody
could join in. He was the first to do this, this was absolutely the
first time this was ever done. And he had a movie projector up there
where you could show advertisements and people could react to them
and he invented the whole technique for mining the unconscious about
the hidden psychological wants that people had about products. This
became the focus group.
Dichter's
breakthrough came with a focus group study he did for Betty Crocker
foods. Like many food manufacturers in the early fifties they had
invented a new range of instant convenience foods. But although
consumers had told market researchers they would welcome the idea in
fact they were refusing to buy them. The worst problem was the Betty
Crocker cake mix. Dichter did a series of focus groups where
housewives free associated about the cake mix. He concluded they felt
unconscious guilt about the new image created of ease and
convenience.
Bill
Schlackman - Psychologist and employee of Ernest Dichter: In other
words he had understood that the barrier to the consumption of the
product was housewives' feeling of guilt about using it. They
basically on one hand wanted to make it easier for themselves but
they felt guilty about it. So what you've got to do in those
circumstances is remove the barrier, the barrier being guilt. And the
way you do that is you give the housewife a greater sense of
participation. And how do you do that? By adding an egg. As simple as
that.
Dichter
told Betty Crocker to put an instruction on the packet that the
housewife should add an egg. It would be an unconscious symbol he
said, of the housewife mixing in her own eggs as a gift to her
husband and so would lessen the guilt. Betty Crocker did it, and the
sales soared.
Bill
Schlackman - Psychologist and employee of Ernest Dichter: The
consumer may have basic needs that the consumer himself or herself
doesn't fully understand. You have to know what those needs are in
order to fully exploit the consumer. Is it wrong to give people what
they want by taking away their defenses, helping remove their
defenses?
Dichters
success led to a rush by corporations and advertising agencies to
employ psychoanalysts. They became known as the depth boys and they
promised to show companies how to make millions by connecting their
products with people's hidden desires. Dichter himself became a
millionaire, famous for inventing slogans like 'A Tiger in Your
Tank'. Even the marketing of the Barbie doll came from a children's
focus group.
But
Dichter was convinced this was far more than just selling. Like Anna
Freud he believed that the environment could be used to strengthen
the human personality, and products had the power both to sate inner
desires and give people a feeling of common identity with those
around them. It was a strategy for creating a stable society. Dichter
called it the strategy of desire.
Ernest
Dichter speaking in a promotional clip: To understand a stable
citizen you have to know that modern man quite often tries to work
off his frustrations by spending on self-gratification. Modern man is
eternally ready to fill out his self image by purchasing products
which compliment it.
Hedy
Dichter - Ernest Dichter's wife: If you identify yourself with a
product it can have a therapeutic value. It improves your self-image
and you become a more secure person and have suddenly this kind of
confidence of going out in the world and doing what you want
successfully. And it's believed that would then improve the whole of
our society and become the best society on this planet.
By
the early fifties the ideas of psychoanalysis had penetrated deep
into American life. The psychoanalysts themselves became rich and
powerful. Many had consulting rooms overlooking Central Park in New
York. Politicians and famous writers like Arthur Miller and Tennessee
Williams became their patients. They were seeking not just help, but
to understand the hidden roots of human behavior.
Professor
Martin Bergmann - New York Psychoanalyst: We were sought after.
Washington was interested in what we think. The important writers,
important politicians were undergoing psychoanalysis. We had waiting
lists because there were so many patients that wanted to be analyzed.
So it gave us a little bit of a swelled head.
And
as the psychoanalysts ideas took hold in America, a new elite began
to emerge in politics, in social planning, and in business. What
linked this elite was the assumption that the masses were
fundamentally irrational. To make a free market democracy like
America work one had to use psychological techniques to control mass
irrationality.
Ellen
Herman - Historian of American Psychology: They actually believed
that this elite was necessary because individual citizens were not
capable, if left alone, of being democratic citizens. The elite was
necessary in order to create the conditions that would produce
individuals capable of behaving as a good consumer and also behaving
as a democratic citizen. They didn't see their activities as
anti-democratic; as undermining the capacity of individual citizens
for democracy; quite the opposite. They understood that they were
creating the conditions for democracy's survival in the future.
The
rise of psychoanalysis to power in America was an extraordinary
triumph for Anna Freud and her tireless promotion of her ideas. She
remained in England living with Dorothy Burlingham. On the surface it
was an idyllic life. She and Dorothy had bought a weekend cottage on
the Suffolk coast. But in the summers Dorothy's children came from
America to visit with the grandchildren. And underneath things were
going badly wrong. Both Bob and Mabbie Burlingham whom Anna Freud had
analyzed in the early 1930s had suffered personal breakdowns and
their marriages were collapsing. Bob was drinking heavily and Mabbie
suffered terrible anxieties. The real reasons for the visits to
England were yet more analysis with Anna Freud.
Michael
Burlingham - Bob Burlingham's son: The problem was that it didn't
look very good did it? Because here you somebody who's having nervous
breakdowns and is having alcoholic binges and this doesn't really sit
well. From a humane standpoint obviously this is not desirable, you
know you want to help these people, but it also had the wider
ramifications of everybody in analysis, in analytic circles knew that
Bob and Mabbie were guinea pigs they were the living proof that this
is a wonderful process. It was very much swept under the rug, it
really didn't get out. I mean these people had such, their power and
influence was such that you were very careful. Anna Freud was a very
powerful person and you were the grandchildren and she knew a great
deal more about what went on in your parents' lives and so forth and
it's not something you were going to tangle with, and you were a
product of the whole situation. But at the same time we knew that
something was really out of whack.
Anton
Freud - Anna Freud's nephew: As he grew older she became more and
more important politically and scientifically but she didn't know
when to stop. She was a bit too righteous that what she did was
always the thing and she would never to my knowledge acknowledge that
she could make a mistake or be wrong. That was my feeling.
But
the power and influence of the Freud family in America was about to
grow even more. Politicians were about to turn to Anna Freud's cousin
Edward Bernays for help in a time of crisis. He was going to
manipulate the inner feelings and fears of the masses to help
Americas politicians fight the cold war.
In
1953 the Soviet Union exploded it's first hydrogen bomb and the fear
of nuclear war and communism gripped the United States. Those in
power became concerned with how to reassure the population.
Committees were set up and public information films made appealing
for calm in the face of new threats like nuclear fallout.
At
this point Edward Bernays was living in New York. In the 1920s he had
invented the profession of Public Relations and was now one of the
most powerful PR men in America. He worked for most of the major
corporations and advised politicians, including President Eisenhower.
Like his uncle Sigmund, Bernays was convinced that human beings were
driven by irrational forces. The only way to deal with the public was
to connect with their unconscious desires and fears. Bernays argued
that instead of trying to reduce people's fears of communism, one
should actually encourage and manipulate the fear. And in such a way
that it became a weapon in the cold war. Rational argument was
fruitless.
Ann
Bernays - Daughter of Edward Bernays: What my father understood about
groups is that they are malleable. And that you can tap into their
deepest desires or their deepest fears and use that to your own
purposes. I don't think he felt that all those publics out there had
reliable judgment; that they may very easily might vote for the wrong
man or want the wrong thing, so that they had to be guided from
above.
One
of Bernays' main clients was the giant United Fruit Company. They
owned vast banana plantations in Guatemala and Central America. For
decades United Fruit had controlled the company through pliable
dictators. It was known as a 'banana republic'. But in 1950 a young
officer, Colonel Arbenz was elected president. He promised to remove
United Fruits' control over the country and in 1953 he announced the
government would take over much of their land. It was a massively
popular move but a disaster for United Fruit and they turned to
Bernays to help get rid of Arbenz.
Larry
Tye - Journalist, Boston Globe: United Fruit brings in Bernays and he
basically understood that what United Fruit Company had to do was
change this from being a popularly elected government that was doing
some things that were good for the people there into this being, very
close to the American shore, a threat to American democracy. This
being at time in the cold war when Americans responded to issues of
'the red scare' and what communism might do, he was trying to
transform this and brilliantly did transform it into an issue of a
communist threat very close to our shores; taking United Fruit again,
as a commercial client out of the picture and making it look like a
question of American democracy, American values being threatened.
In
reality Arbenz was a democratic socialist with no links to Moscow,
but Bernays set out to turn him into a communist threat to America.
He organized a trip to Guatemala for influential American
journalists. Few of them knew anything about the country or its
politics. Bernays arranged for them to be entertained and to meet
selected Guatemalan politicians who told them Arbenz was a communist
controlled by Moscow.
During
the trip there was also a violent anti-American demonstration in the
capital. Many of those who worked for United Fruit were convinced it
had been organized by Bernays himself. He also created a fake
independent news agency in America called the Middle America
Information Bureau. It bombarded the American media with press
releases saying that Moscow was planning to use Guatemala as a
beachhead to attack America. All of this had the desired effect.
Newsreel
clip: In Guatemala the Jacob Arbenz regime became increasingly
communistic after his inauguration in 1951. Communists in the
congress and high governmental positions controlled major committees,
labor and farm groups, and propaganda facilities. They agitated and
led in demonstrations against neighboring countries and the United
States.
Larry
Tye - Journalist, Boston Globe: What was profoundly new in terms of
what Bernays did was he took this menace to our backyard in
Guatemala. For the first time we saw reds a couple hundred miles from
New Orleans, who Eddie Bernays had us believing were a true threat to
us. There was going to be a Soviet outpost in our backyard.
But
what Bernays was doing was not just trying to blacken the Arbenz
regime, he was part of a secret plot. President Eisenhower had agreed
that America should topple the Arbenz government, but secretly. The
CIA were instructed to organize a coup. Working with the United Fruit
Company the CIA trained and armed a rebel army and found a new leader
for the country called Colonel Armas. The CIA agent in charge was
Howard Hunt, later one of the Watergate burglars.
Howard
Hunt - Head of CIA Operation, Guatemala, 1954: What we wanted to do
is have a terror campaign; to terrify Arbenz particularly, terrify
his troops, much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population
of Holland, Belgium and Poland at the onset of World War II and just
rendered everybody paralyzed.
As
planes flown by CIA pilots dropped bombs on Guatemala City, Edward
Bernays carried on his propaganda campaign in the American press. He
was preparing the American population to see this as the liberation
of Guatemala by freedom fighters for democracy.
Larry
Tye - Journalist, Boston Globe: He totally understood that the coup
would happen when conditions in the public and the press allowed for
a coup to happen and he created those conditions. He was totally
savvy in terms of just what he was helping create there in terms of
the overthrow. But ultimately he was reshaping reality, and reshaping
public opinion in a way that's undemocratic and manipulative.
On
June 27th 1954 Colonel Arbenz fled the country and Armas arrived as
the new leader. Within months Vice President Nixon visited Guatemala.
In an event staged by United Fruit's PR department he was shown piles
of Marxist literature that had been found it was said in the
presidential palace.
News
clip showing Nixon speaking in front of piles with Armas: This is the
first time in the history of the world that the communist government
has been overthrown by the people. And for that we congratulate you
and the people of Guatemala for the support they have given. And we
are sure that under your leadership supported by the people whom I
have met by the hundreds on my visit to Guatemala that Guatemala is
going to enter a new era in which there will be prosperity for the
people together with liberty for the people. Thank you very much for
allowing us to see this exhibit of communism in Guatemala.
Bernays
had manipulated the American people but he had done so because he,
like many others at the time believed that the interests of business
and the interests of America were indivisible. Especially when faced
with the threat of communism. But Bernays was convinced that to
explain this rationally to the American people was impossible.
Because they were not rational. Instead one had to touch on their
inner fears and manipulate them in the interest of a higher truth. He
called it the engineering of consent.
Ann
Bernays - Daughter of Edward Bernays: He was doing it for the
American way of life to which he was devoted, sincerely devoted. And
yet he felt the people were really pretty stupid. And that's the
paradox. If you don't leave it up to the people themselves but force
them to choose what you want them to choose, however subtly, then
it's not democracy anymore. It's something else, it's being told what
to do, it's that old authoritarian thing.
But
the idea that it was necessary to manipulate the feelings of the
American population in the interest of fighting the cold war now
began to take root in Washington. Above all in the CIA who were going
to take it much further. They were concerned that the Soviets were
experimenting with psychological methods to actually alter the
memories and feelings of people. The aim, being to produce more
controllable citizens. It was known as brainwashing. Psychologists in
the CIA were convinced that this really might be possible and that
they should try do it themselves.
Dr.
John Gittinger - CIA Chief Psychologist 1950-74: The image of the
human being that was being built up at that time was that there was a
great deal of vulnerability in every human being and that
vulnerability could be manipulated to program somebody to be
something they I wanted them to be and they didn't want to be. That
you could manipulate people in such a way that they could be
automatons if you will for whatever your purposes were, this is the
image that people thought was possible.
In
the late fifties the CIA poured millions of dollars into the
psychology departments at universities across America. They were
secretly funding experiments in how to alter and control the inner
drives of human beings. The most notorious of these experiments was
run by the head of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Ewen
Cameron. Like many psychiatrists at that time Cameron was convinced
that inside human beings were dangerous forces which threatened
society. But he believed it was possible to not just control these
forces but actually remove them.
Dr.
Heinz Lehmann - Psychiatrist and colleague of Dr Cameron: He thought
that psychiatry should not just concentrate on sick people and the
mentally ill, but should actually go into government, that
politicians should listen to psychiatrists; psychiatrists should be
in every parliament and should direct and monitor political
activities because they knew in a rational and scientific way what
was good for people.
Cameron
had set up a clinic in a hospital in Montreal called the Allen
Memorial. It has now long since closed down. Cameron took patients
who suffered a wide range of mental problems. His theory was that
these resulted from forgotten or repressed memories. But he was
impatient with the theory of using psychotherapy to uncover them.
Instead, he would simply wipe them. Cameron used drugs including LSD
and the technique of ECT, electro-convulsive therapy. It was
conventionally used at that time to relieve depression. But Cameron
was going to use it in a new way - to produce new people.
Laughlin
Taylor - Assistant to Dr Cameron 1958-60: He was really using it to
try and change the fundamental function of the individual. To alter
their past memories, their past ways of behaving, and as I think he
said at one point, to just sort of erase everything from their past
so that you then had a slate in which you could record new ways of
behavior. And so he used massive doses of shock, people receiving
several shocks a day and over a course over time hundreds of ECT
treatments so that they were just reduced to sort of a primitive
vegetable state.
Linda
MacDonald - Patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron: I don't remember what
happened to me. I was introduced to Dr. Cameron and I don't remember
Dr. Cameron at all. I don't remember any of that. They shipped me up
to what they call 'the sleep room' and they gave me all of these
electro-convulsive shock treatments and mega doses of drugs and LSD
and all of that and I have no memory of any of that. Nothing of that
time at the Allen Memorial or any of my life previous to that. All
gone. Wiped.
Laughlin
Taylor - Assistant to Dr Cameron 1958-60: And then after having
depatterned somebody or brought them down to where basically nothing
but the essential functions of the body were going on in terms of
breathing and things of this nature, then he would begin to feed
material into these individuals; positive material such that the
brain would be programmed in a positive way so that the individual
would be completely altered.
Linda
MacDonald - Patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron: Then he put these tapes
under our pillows called psychic driving. He would then put back into
this empty brain a program of whatever sort he decided upon. And the
people like myself would wake up another person I guess.
In
fact Cameron's experiments were a complete disaster. All he managed
to produce were dozens of people with memory loss and the ability to
repeat the phrase 'I am at ease with myself'. And it was not an
isolated case, almost all the experiments the CIA funded were equally
unsuccessful. Despite their ambitions American psychologists were
beginning to find out how difficult it was to understand and control
the inner workings of the human mind.
Dr.
John Gittinger - CIA Chief Psychologist 1950-74: We had really been
chasing a phantom, if you will, an illusion - that the human mind was
more capable of manipulation from the outside, by outside factors
than it is. We found out that the human being is an extremely complex
thing. There were no simple solutions. But you've just got to bear in
mind that these were strange times.
The
psychoanalysts had come to power in America because of their theory
that they knew how to control the dangerous forces inside human
beings. But now the psychoanalysts were about to face a high profile
failure that would lead people to begin questioning the very basis of
their ideas. It began in Hollywood.
The
film industry had become fascinated with psychoanalysis, and Anna
Freud was a powerful influence on dozens of analysts in Los Angeles.
They treated film stars, directors, and studio bosses. Anna Freud's
closest friend was the most sought after of all, Ralph Greenson. And
in 1960 the most famous star in the world turned to Greenson for
help. Marilyn Monroe was suffering from despair and had become
addicted to alcohol and drugs.
Celeste
Holm - Actress and former patient of Dr. Ralph Greenson: When I
walked in to dinner here was Marilyn Monroe. And I made a picture
with her called All About Eve. This was dinner at Ralph Greenson's?
Yes. And the only thing was that Ralph was trying to show her the way
a family life ought really to be. So we were walking the dog after
and I said 'what the hell are you doing here?' I said, 'You never
invited me to dinner!' And he said, 'you weren't that sick.' And I
said 'oh.' He said 'this child has no, NO frame of reference.' In
other words she has no idea what the goal is.
What
Greenson did is follow Anna Freud's theory If Marilyn Monroe could be
thought to conform to what society considered a normal pattern of
life. That would help her ego control her inner destructive urges.
But Greenson pushed it to an extreme. He persuaded Monroe to move
into a house nearby that was decorated like his own. He then took her
into his own family life, and he, his wife and his daughter played at
being Monroe's own family. Greenson himself would become the model of
conformity.
Dr.
Leo Rangell - Los Angeles psychoanalyst: And so this someone she
regarded as important and she idealized , if he turned out to be a
very gratifying father figure her ego would benefit from it, that was
the theory. His wife and children, everyone was involved in it. They
were strengthening the person, they were strengthening the mind, they
were strengthening the agent that controls inner life; against
adversity, against insufficiency, against too much frustration, so
that Marilyn Monroe would no longer be a helpless person looking for
love, she'd have enough love.
But
despite all his efforts, Greenson was unable to help Marilyn Monroe.
On August 5th 1962 she committed suicide in her house. The suicide
shocked many in the analytic community, including Anna Freud. And
high profile figures in American life who had previously been
enthusiasts for psychoanalysis now began to question why
psychoanalysis had become so powerful in America. Was it really
because it benefitted individuals or had it in fact become a form of
constraint in the interests of social order. The critics included
Monroe's ex-husband, Arthur Miller.
Arthur
Miller - Interview 1963: My argument with so much psychoanalysis
these days is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a
sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness. When in fact, possibly
the greatest truths we know will have come out of people's suffering.
That the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face
of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to
cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it. And avoid anything but
that lobotomized sense of what they call happiness. There's too much
of an attempt it seems to me at controlling man rather than freeing
him; of defining him rather than letting him go. And it's part of the
whole ideology of this age which is power mad.
At
the same time an onslaught was launched on the way psychoanalysis was
being used by business to control people. The first blow came with a
bestseller, The Hidden Persuaders written by Vance Packard. It
accused psychoanalysts of reducing the American people to emotional
puppets whose only function is to keep mass production lines running.
They did this by manipulating people's unconscious desires, to create
longings for ever new brands and models. They had turned the
population into unwilling participants in the system of planned
obsolescence. The second blow came from an influential philosopher
and social critic, Herbert Marcuse. He had been trained in
psychoanalysis.
Herbert
Marcuse - Interviewed 1967: This is a childish application of
psychoanalysis which does not take at all into consideration they
very real political systematic waste of resources of technology and
of the productive process. For example this planned obsolescence; for
example the production of innumerable brands and gadgets who are in
the last analysis always the same; the production of innumerable
different models of automobiles; and this prosperity at the same
time, consciously or unconsciously leads to a kind of schizophrenic
existence. I believe that in this society an incredible quantity of
aggressiveness and destructiveness is accumulated precisely because
of the empty prosperity which then simply erupts.
Marcuse's
argument is not simply that psychoanalysis had been used for corrupt
purposes, it was more fundamental. Marcuse said that the very idea
that you needed to control people was wrong. Human beings did have
inner emotional drives, but they were not inherently violent or evil.
It was society that made these drives dangerous by repressing and
distorting them. Anna Freud and her followers had increased that
repression by trying to make people conform to society. In so doing,
they made people more dangerous not less.
Dr,
Neil Smelser - Political theorist and psychoanalyst: Marcuse
challenged that social world and he said that's a world that should
not be adapted to. And in fact what the individual was adapting to
was corrupt and evil and corrupting. In other words he switched the
source of evil from inward conflict to the society itself. That the
sickness in society lay at the society level not at the sickness of
human beings in it. And if people did not challenge that then they
were in fact submitting to evil.
Martin
Luther King 1967: Modern psychology has a word that is used probably
more than any other word in psychology, it is the word maladjusted.
It is the ringing cry of modern child psychology, maladjusted. Now of
course we all want to live the well adjusted life in order to avoid
neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But as I move toward my
conclusion I would like to say to you today in a very honest manner
that there are some things in our society and some things in our
world to which I am proud to be maladjusted and I call upon all men
of good will to be maladjusted to these things until the good society
is realized. I must honestly say to you that I never intend to adjust
myself to racial segregation and discrimination. I never intend to
adjust myself to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself
to economic conditions to take necessities from the many to give
luxuries to the few. Never leave millions of God's children
smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent
society.
The
political influence of the Freudian psychoanalysts was over. Instead
they were now accused of having helped to create a repressive form of
social control. Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham lived on in Sigmund
Freud's old house in London. In 1970 Dorothy's son Bob died of
alcoholism, and in 1973 his sister Mabbie returned for yet more
analysis with Anna Freud.
Michael
Burlingham - Bob Burlingham's son: She went back for more analysis;
she was living at 20 Maresfield Gardens in the Freud house, as I
guess she did when she wasn't with her husband, and she committed
suicide. She took an overdose of sleeping pills. In Freud's own
house, right. So obviously there are a lot of implications one can
draw from that and I just happened to think she reached the end of
the rope there. Although it would seem to be a very pointed act.
Obviously suicide is a very politicized act and to do it in Sigmund
Freud's own house is certainly different from doing it Riverdale back
in New York.
Nest
Week's episode will tell the story of the rise to power of the
enemies of the Freud family. They believed the way to build a better
society was to let the self free. But what they didn't realize was
that this idea of liberation would provide business and politics yet
another way to control the self, by feeding its infinite desires.
Century of the Self Part 3
- The Policeman in Our Heads
Produced and Written by
Adam Curtis
This is a series about how
Sigmund Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind have been used by
those in power to control the masses in age of democracy. Last week's
episode showed how Freud's ideas spread throughout America in the
1950s. They were promoted by his daughter Anna, and by Freud's nephew
Edward Bernays who invented public relations. He brought Freud's
theories into the heart of advertising and marketing.
What they both believed is
that underneath all human beings was a hidden irrational self which
needed to be controlled both for the good of the individuals and the
stability of society. But the Freuds were about to be toppled from
power by opponents who said they were wrong about human nature. The
inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled, it should be
encouraged to express itself.
Out of this would come a
new strong type of human being and a better society. But what in fact
emerged from this revolution was the very opposite. An isolated,
vulnerable and above all greedy self. Far more open to manipulation
by both business and politics than anything that had gone on before.
Those in power would now control the self not by repressing it by
feeding it's infinite desires.
The Century of the Self
Part Three
There Is A Policeman
Inside Our Heads He Must Be Destroyed
In the 1950s a small group
of renegade psychoanalysts began a new form of therapy. They worked
in small rooms in New York City and encouraged their patients to
express their feelings openly. It was a direct attack on the theories
of the Freudian psychoanalysts who had become rich and powerful
teaching Americans how to control their feelings.
Dr. Alexander Lowen -
Experimental Psychotherapist 1950s: In Freud's work you see they were
afraid of the feelings. What they wanted was contained people very
proper doing the right thing and living the proper life. That's what
they wanted. And not an intense emotional life. Freud wasn't
emotional himself, I mean he's an intellect Freud. I was an intellect
too, I know, but I'm also more than that now.
The leader of this group
was a man hated by Freud and his family. He was called Wilhelm Reich.
Reich lived an isolated life in a house he had built for himself in
the remote mountains near the Canadian border. Reich had originally
been a disciple of Freud's in Vienna in the 1920s but he had
challenged Freud over the fundamental basis of psychoanalysis.
Freud argued that at heart
that human beings were still driven by primitive animal instincts.
The job of society was to repress and control these dangerous
impulses. Reich believed the complete opposite. The unconscious
forces within the human mind he said were good. It was their
repression by society that distorted them. That was what made people
dangerous.
Morton Herskowitz -
Student of Wilhelm Reich 1949-52: Reich and Freud had two
fundamentally differing views about what was essential human nature.
At its core Freud saw an uncontrolled violent war-like raging inferno
of emotions. Reich said these things are not the way human beings are
originally destined to be, they're the result of not permitting the
original impulse to express itself.
The underlying natural
impulse Reich argued was the libido, sexual energy. If this were
released than human beings would flourish. But this idea brought him
into direct conflict not only with Sigmund Freud, but with Freud's
daughter Anna who believed that the sexual forces in humans were
dangerous if not controlled.
Lore Reich Rubin -
Daughter of Wilhelm Reich: My father thought that you should liberate
the libido and have freedom. He developed a theory rather early that
neuroses were due to lack of good orgasm or any orgasm. And Anna
Freud you know was a virgin, and this was very important because she
never had a sexual relation with a man, and here was this man
preaching that the way to health was through orgasm, and here was
this woman who had been analyzed by her father because she was
masturbating. So here's this woman who's opposed to sexuality really
and here's this man who's preaching sexual freedom and there was
bound to be a clash, wasn't there?
The conflict came to a
head at a conference in 1934 in Switzerland. Anna Freud who had by
now become the acknowledged leader of the psychoanalytic movement
forced Wilhelm Reich out. She had destroyed his career.
Lore Reich Rubin -
Daughter of Wilhelm Reich: She got rid of him, very definitely. And I
guess part of what I am doing is getting rid of her. I think that
Anna Freud shouldn't get away with what she did, that it should be
known. Maneuvering to get him kicked out of the International
Psychoanalytic Association. So you're taking revenge? You might say
so, or wronging a right - No, righting a wrong. You better cut that
one out. Isn't that called a Freudian slip? Yes it is (laughing).
Reich fled to the United
States and built his home and a laboratory. His ideas became
grandiose to the point of madness. He was convinced that he had
discovered the source of libidinal energy. He called it 'orgone
energy' and Reich built a giant gun which he said could capture this
energy from the atmosphere and concentrate it onto clouds to produce
rain. He also said that the gun could be used to destroy UFOs which
threatened the future of the world.
In 1956 Reich was arrested
by the federal authorities for selling a device that he said used
orgonic energy to cure cancer. Reich was treated as a madman. He was
imprisoned and all his books and papers were burned at the order of
the court. A year later Reich died in prison. To the Freudians it had
seemed that their main threat had been removed forever.
But they were wrong. What
the Freudians didn’t realize was that their influence in
American society was also about to be challenged. And in a way that
would lead not only to their decline but to the dramatic resurgence
of Reich's ideas in America and throughout the capitalist world.
By the late 1950s
psychoanalysis had become deeply involved in driving consumers in
America. Most advertising companies employed psychoanalysts. And as
last week's episode showed they had created new ways to understand
consumers' motives, above all with the focus group in which consumers
free associated their feelings about products. Out of this came new
ways to market products by appealing to the hidden unconscious
desires of the consumer.
But in the early sixties a
new generation emerged who attacked this. They accused American
business of using psychological techniques to manipulate people's
feelings and turn them into ideal consumers.
Robert Pardun - Student
Activist early 1960's: Advertising was manipulation it was a way to
get you to do something that didn't come out of you, it came out of
somebody else. Somebody else said 'this year you should be wearing
powdered pink shirts with matching powdered pink buck shoes' and I
said Why? That's not who I am, that's who somebody else is. They
wanted you to be somebody who would buy their stuff. This whole
feeling of being somebody else's tool, I don't want to be that. I
don't want to be somebody else's man. I want to be me.
In the mid sixties a
protest movement began on America's campuses. One of the student's
main targets was corporate America. They accused the corporations of
brainwashing the American public. Consumerism is not just a way of
making money it had become a means of keeping the masses docile while
allowing the government to purse a violent illegal war in Vietnam.
The students' mentor was a
famous writer and philosopher called Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse had
studied psychoanalysis and was a fierce critic of the Freudians. They
had he said helped to create a world in which people were reduced to
expressing their feelings and identities through mass produced
objects. It resulted in what he called one-dimensional man -
conformist and repressed. The psychoanalysts had become the corrupt
agents of those who ruled America.
Herbert Marcuse -
Interviewed 1978: It was one of the most striking phenomena to see to
what extent the ruling power structure could manipulate manage and
control not only the consciousness but also the subconscious and
unconscious of the individuals. And this took place on a
psychological basis by the control and the manipulation of the
unconscious primal drives which Freud stipulated.
Following the logic of
Marcuse's argument the new student left set out to attack this system
of social control. It was summed by the slogan 'There's a policeman
inside all our heads - he must be destroyed'. And that policeman was
going to be destroyed by overthrowing the state and the corporations
that had put him there.
One group, the Weatherman
had begun a series of attacks on companies that they said both
controlled people's minds through consumer products and made the
weapons being used in Vietnam.
Bernadine Dohrn - Founder
of Weatherman Revolutionary Group: There's no way to be committed to
non-violence in the middle of the most violent society that history
has ever created. I'm not committed to non-violence in any way.
Linda Evans - Member of
Weatherman Revolutionary Group: We want to live a life that isn't
based on materialistic values, and yet the whole system of government
and the economy of America is based on profit; on personal greed and
selfishness. So that in order to be human, in order to love each
other and be equal with each other and not place each other in roles
we have to destroy the kind of government that keeps us from
asserting our positive values of life.
The American state fought
back violently. At the democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 the
police and the national guard were unleashed to attack thousands of
demonstrators. It was the start of a phase of repression of the new
left in America. It culminated in the killing of four students at
Kent University 18 months later. In the face of this the left began
to fall apart.
Robert Pardun - Student
Activist early 1960's: We had met the force of the state. It was much
bigger and stronger and more powerful than we realized. And at that
point what seemed to happen was that there was a change in tactics.
Confronted by this violent
repression, many in the left began to turn to a new idea. If it was
impossible to get the policeman out of one's head by overthrowing the
state instead one should find a way of getting inside one's own mind
and remove the controls implanted there by the state and the
corporations. Out of this would come a new self, and thus a new
society.
Stew Albert - Founding
member of Yippie Party: People who had been politically active were
persuaded that if they could change themselves and be healthy
individuals and if a movement grew up just aimed at people changing
themselves then at some point all that positive change going on -
well you could say quantity would become quality - and there would be
sort of a spontaneous transformation of society. But political
activism was not required.
Robert Pardun - Student
Activist early 1960's: It's about making a new you. That if enough
people changed the way they were that the society would change. So
the personal would become political. Without changing the personal
you didn't stand a chance of changing the political. Coming up
against the state power of the United States was not an option. They
outgunned us.
And to produce the new
self they turned to the ideas and techniques of Wilhelm Reich. Since
his death a small group of psychotherapists had been developing
techniques based on Reich's ideas. Their aim was to invent ways that
would allow individuals to free themselves from the controls
implanted in their minds by society.
Their center was a tiny
old motel on a remote coast of California. It was called the Esalen
Institute. The dominant figure at Esalen was a psychoanalyst called
Fritz Perls. Perls had been trained by Reich and had developed a form
of group encounter in which he pushed individuals to publicly express
the feelings inside them society had said were dangerous and should
be repressed.
Michael Murphy - Founder
of Esalen Institute: Perls used to call this getting on the hot seat
in front of a group. If this were the hot seat and you were Perls you
would guide me into this process of self-enactment, self revelation,
of staying present to all the parts of yourself and noticing it then
taking ownership of this. In other words taking ownership of who you
are and how you feel and how you act and giving you autonomy. Owning
your freedom.
What Perls and other who
were at Esalen believed was that they were creating ways that allowed
individuals to express their true inner selves. Out of this they
believed would come new autonomous beings free of social
conditioning. To the left, defeated in the wake of Chicago, it was an
enormously attractive idea. These techniques could be used to unleash
a new powerful self string enough to overthrow the old order.
In the late sixties and
early seventies thousands flocked to Esalen. Only a few years before
it had been an obscure fringe institute. Now it became the center of
a national movement for personal transformation. The human potential
movement.
Michael Murphy - Founder
of Esalen Institute: So it became magnetic. People wanted to join
this stream of exploration. Within about seven years there were 200
hundred of these centers in America looking mainly to Esalen for
leadership. And it took on a big political agenda. You could not
separate personal transformation from social transformation. The two
go together.
As the movement grew the
leaders of Esalen tried to use their techniques to solve social
problems. They began with racism. They organized an encounter group
for white and black radicals. Both groups would be encouraged to
express their inner racist feelings which had been instilled in them
by society. By doing this they would transcend those feelings and
encounter each other as individuals.
George Leonard - Encounter
Group Leader Esalen Institute 1960s: I started a series of encounters
called 'racial confrontation as transcendental experience'. We
thought that we wanted to get that kind of black/white confrontation
so you could really get down to see what was between the two races
not by backing off and trying to be polite but by going right into
the belly of the beast, this beast of racial prejudice. And these
were extremely dramatic, these were the toughest workshops ever
convened at Esalen Institute. Then the blacks got together and
attacked the whites. And they just let us have it. What they called
it was peeping somebody. Peeping somebody means peeping into their
secrets. Into their phoniness and so forth. Like the white liberal,
oh they really got onto the white liberal.
The black/white encounter
groups were a disaster. The black radicals saw it as an insidious
attempt to destroy their power. By trying to turn them into liberated
individuals, Esalen was removing the one thing that gave them power
and confidence in their struggle against racism; their collective
identity as blacks.
So the human potential
movement turned to another social group they believed would benefit
from personal transformation. Nuns. And this time they were more
successful. The Convent of the Immaculate Heart in Los Angeles was
one of the largest seminaries in America. A group of radical
psychotherapists approached the convent. They wanted to try out their
techniques for personal liberation on individuals whose identities
were defined by a series of external rules which they had deeply
internalized. The convent, anxious to appear modern, agreed to the
experiment.
Dr. William Coulson -
Nuns' Encounter Group Leader: And we did weekend encounter workshops
for several hundred Immaculate Heart nuns. Nuns who were reserved,
and they tended to be more reserved than regular people were told
don't be so reserved, let it all out, you are a good person you can
afford to be who you really are, you don't need to play the role of a
nun, you don't need to keep downcast eyes. Prudence is an oversold
virtue.
Immaculate Heart novice
nun - Interviewed during psychotherapy experiment: You are trying to
assert yourself, trying to find out who you are, who you are
becoming, at the same time you are trying to live a life of
dedication of service and you are trying to make all of these things
fit into who you are, and it's such a turmoil at times that you just
blow a gasket and do silly crazy things. Running around the orchard
and stealing oranges and taking Cokes out of the refrigerator, crazy
things.
Another nun: I felt like I
was being a hypocrite and I wanted people to respect me for what I
was not for what I was wearing and so I'm glad for the change. You
feel frightened but you go on. Oh yeah I'm scared to death but it's
worth it.
The experiment began to
transform the convent. The nuns voted to discard their habits in
favor of ordinary clothes. The psychotherapists had found they had
awoken other forces.
Dr. William Coulson -
Nuns' Encounter Group Leader: One of the things we unleashed was
sexual energy, the kind of thing the church had been very good at
restraining was no longer to be restrained. One sister who was a
member of the community she got the idea that she could be freer than
she had been before and she seduced one of her classmates and then
seduced the mistresses of novices who was an older woman very
reserved and her program of freeing this older woman was sexual. She
drove her to the store and when they drove back and when they drove
into the garage she leaned over and gave her a big kiss on the lips
and thereafter the sister who had perhaps never been kissed before
was ready for more.
The effect of the
experiment on the convent was cataclysmic. Within a year 300 nuns,
more than half the convent petitioned the Vatican to be released from
their vows and six months later the convent closed its doors. All
that was left was a small group of nuns, but they had become radical
lesbian nuns who thus gave up the religious life. They became
persons.
By the late sixties the
idea of self exploration was spreading rapidly in America. Encounter
groups became the center of what was seen as a radical alternative
culture based on the development of the self free of a corrupt
capitalist culture. And it was beginning to have a serious effect on
corporate America because these new selves were not behaving as
predictable consumers.
The life insurance
industry in particular was concerned that fewer and fewer college
students were buying life insurance when they left university. They
asked Daniel Yankelovich, America's leading market researcher to
investigate. He had studied psychoanalysis.
Daniel Yankelovich -
Yankelovich Partners Market Research Inc: The life insurance business
more than any other business at the time was built on the protestant
ethic. You only bought life insurance if you were a person who
sacrificed for the future. If you lived in the present you had no
need for life insurance. So they had some sense that maybe the core
values of the protestant ethic were being challenged by some of these
new values that were beginning to appear. And I was really astonished
at what I found. The conventional interpretation was that it had to
do with political radicalism. But what was clear to us was that that
was a mask, a cover. The core of it had to do with self
expressiveness. This preoccupation with the self and the inner self,
that was what was so important to people, the ability to be self
expressive.
Yankelovich began to track
the growth and behavior of these new expressive selves. What he told
the corporations was that these new beings WERE consumers but they no
longer wanted anything that would place them in the narrow strata of
American society. Instead what they wanted were products that would
express their individuality, their difference in a conformist world.
They very things that US corporations did not make.
Daniel Yankelovich -
Yankelovich Partners Market Research Inc: Products have always had an
emotional meaning. What was new was individuality. The idea that this
product expresses me and whether it was a small European car, the
particular music system, your presentation of self, your clothing,
these become ways in which people can spend their money in order to
say to the world who they are. But the manufacturers they had no idea
what was going on with consumers and in the market of life.
Major advertising
companies set up what they called operating groups to try and work
out how to appeal to these new individuals. The head of one agency
sent a memo to all staff. We must conform he told them to the new
non-conformists. We must listen to the music of Bobby Dylan and go to
the theater more. But the problem was fewer of the self expressive
individuals would take part in focus groups. The advertisers were
left to their own devices.
And there was an even more
serious problem. To make more products for people who wanted to
express themselves would mean creating variety. But the systems of
mass production that had been developed in America were only
profitable if they made large numbers of the same objects. This had
fitted perfectly with the limited range of desires of a conformist
society. The expressive self threatened this whole system of
manufacturing. And the threat was about to grow rapidly because an
entrepreneur had invented a way of mass producing this new
independent self. He was called Werner Erhard.
Erhard had invented a
system called EST - Erhard Seminar Training. Hundreds of people came
for weekend sessions to be taught how to be themselves, and EST was
soon copied by other groups like Exegesis in Britain. Many of
Erhard's techniques came from the human potential movement. He
criticized the movement for not having gone far enough. Their idea
that there was a central core inside all human beings was he said
just another limitation on human freedom. In reality there was no
fixed self which meant that you could be anything that you wanted to
be.
Werner Erhard - Founder of
EST - The thesis of the human potential movement was that there was
something really good down in there and if you took these layers off
what you were going to wind up with was a kernel, a something that
was innately self-expressive that was the true self that was going to
be a wonderful thing. In actuality we found people who had gone to
the last layer and took off the last layer and found what was left
was nothing.
The EST sessions were
intense and often brutal. The participants signed contracts agreeing
not to leave and to allow the trainers to do anything they thought
was necessary to break down their socially constructed identities.
Werner Erhard - Founder of
EST - The real point to the EST training was to go down through layer
after layer after layer after layer until you got to the last layer
and peeled it off where the recognition was that it's really all
meaningless and empty. Now, that's existentialism's end point. EST
went a step further in that people began to recognize that it was not
only meaningless and empty, but that it was empty and meaningless
that it was meaningless and empty, and in that there's an enormous
freedom. All of the constrictions, all of the rules that you placed
on yourself, are gone. And what you are left with is nothing, and
nothing is an extraordinarily powerful place to stand because it is
only from nothing that you can create and from this nothing people
were able to invent a life, allowing them to create themselves. To
invent themselves. You could be what you wanted to be.
Jesse Kornbluth -
Journalist, New Times 1970s - What Erhard did was to say that only
the individual matters, that there is no societal concern, that you
living a fulfilled life is all you need to be concerned about. EST
people came out of those training sessions thinking that it wasn't
selfish to only be thinking about yourself, it was your highest duty.
John Denver - EST Graduate
(being interviewed on television) - The training is two weekends and
it was quite an incredible experience in my life, and I'll forever be
grateful for it. I got a great deal out of it. We really want to know
who we are, there are things going on where we learn a great deal
about ourselves all the time, and to really find out what it is about
us that makes us tick and how we are discovering ourselves.
EST became hugely
successful. Singers, film stars, and hundreds of thousands of
ordinary Americans underwent the training in the 1970s. But in the
process the political idea that had begun the movement of personal
transformation began to disappear. The original vision, that being
through discovering and expressing yourself a new culture would be
born, one that would challenge the power of the state. What was
emerging was the idea that people could be happy simply within
themselves and that changing society was irrelevant. One of the
proponents of this was Jerry Rubin. In 1968 Rubin, as leader of the
Yippies had led the march on Chicago. But now he had undergone EST
training.
Jerry Rubin - Founder of
Yippie Party - Interviewed 1978 - I was willing to die and I had a
martyr complex in a sense, I think we all did, and I've given up that
ideal - sacrifice. I'm not as overwhelmingly moved by injustice as I
was. And now we've reincarnated ourselves from within.
Stew Albert - Founder
member of Yippie Party - Basically the politics were lost and totally
replaced by this lifestyle and then the desire to become deeper and
deeper into the self. By now a grandiose sense of the self. And my
good friend and one of the original Yippie founders Jerry Rubin
definitely moved in that direction and I think he was beginning to
buy into the notion that he could be happy and fully self developed
on his own. Socialism in one person. Although that of course is
capitalism.
Werner Erhard - Founder of
EST - That's the whole joke. I think it's funny because people spend
so much of their life being bedeviled by their past and being locked
into their past, and being limited by their past, and there's an
enormous freedom from that, letting people create themselves.
EST was only the most
vivid intense expression of a movement that was moving rapidly
through all strata of American society. Books and television programs
promoted the idea that one's first duty was to be one's self. And
those monitoring this shift were astonished at the speed with which
the idea was spreading.
Daniel Yankelovich -
Yankelovich Partners Market Research Inc. - In 1970 it was a small
percentage of the total population, maybe 3 to 5 percent. By 1980 it
had spread to the vast majority of the public up to 80 percent. That
this pre-occupation with the self and the inner self, traveled and
spread throughout the society in the 1970s. But then the problem
becomes how do you be self-expressive.
And it was at this point
that American capitalism decided it was going to step in and help
these individuals to express themselves and in the process make a lot
of money. The first thing they were going to do was to find a way of
getting inside their heads to discover what these new beings wanted
in order to be themselves. This came not from Madison Avenue but from
one of the most powerful scientific research institutes in America.
Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in California worked for
corporations and government. It had done much of the early work on
computers and was also working for the department of defense and what
would become the Star Wars project. In 1978 a group of economists and
psychologists at SRI decided to find a way to read, measure, and
fulfill the desires of these new unpredictable consumers.
Jay Ogilvy - Director of
Psychological Values Research, SRI 1979-88 - The idea was to create a
rigorous tool for measuring a whole range of desires, wishes, values,
that prior to that time had been overlooked. They say in business,
you know, 'What gets measured, gets done'. We were basically telling
manufacturers if you are really going to satisfy not just the basic
needs but individuated wants, whims and desires of more highly
developed human beings you are going to have to segment, you are
going to have to individuate.
To do this SRI turned for
help to those who had begun the liberation of the self. In particular
one of the leaders of the human potential movement, a psychologist
called Abraham Maslow. Through the observing the work of places like
Esalen, Maslow had invented a new system of psychological types. He
called it the hierarchy of needs, and it described the different
emotional stages that people had went through as they liberated their
feelings. At the top was self-actualization. This was the point at
which individuals became completely self-directed and free of
society.
The team at SRI thought
that Maslow's hierarchy might form a basis for a new way to
categorize society. Not by social class, but by different
psychological desires and drives. To test this, they designed a huge
questionnaire with hundreds of questions about how people saw
themselves - their inner values. The questions were designed to see
whether people fitted into Maslow's categories.
Amina Marie Spengler -
Director Psychological Values Research Program 1978-86 - We were
trying to find out what people really felt like. So we asked these
really penetrating questions and we hired a company that administers
surveys to do them and they said they had never seen anything like
it. Usually you have to send out a postcard and then in six weeks
another postcard and then you have to call the people up, you know to
get the return rates up, we had an 86 percent return and they only
sent out a postcard. People loved filling out this questionnaire. We
got several questionnaires back with a note attached saying do you
have any other questionnaires I can fill out? Because we were asking
people to think about things that they had never thought about before
and they liked thinking them. Like what they felt inside, what
motivated them, what was their life about, what was important to
them. It was sort of like, wow.
The answers were then
analyzed by computer. It revealed there were underlying patterns in
the way people felt about themselves which fitted Maslow's
categories. And at the top of the hierarchy were a large and growing
group which cut across all social classes. The SRI called them the
inner directives. These were people who felt they were not defined by
their place in society but by the choices they made themselves. But
what SRI discovered was that these people could be defined by the
different patterns of behavior through which they chose to express
themselves. Self expression was not infinite, it fell into
identifiable types. The SRI team invented a new term for it -
lifestyles. They had managed to categorize the new individualism.
They called their system Values and Lifestyles, VALs for short.
SRI Values and Lifestyles
promotional video 1983 - At the forefront of this change are three
new VALs groups, groups we call inner directed. These are people for
whom personal satisfaction is more important than status or money.
They tend to be self expressive, complex, and individualistic. Rob is
an I-am-me. I am me's are searching for new values, breaking away
from traditions and inventing their own standards. Rob even invented
his own name - Rob Noxious. Jody is an Experiential. This is a group
seeking inner growth through direct experience. Experientials are in
one place much, this is the try-anything-once crowd, and all that
activity takes goods and services. Their hobbies are hands-on and
their possessions are simple but not always simply priced. Societally
Conscious - (man speaking) I'm a bookseller, I'm a businessman but
that doesn't necessarily mean that I believe in capitalism, it just
happens to be what I am doing now.
SRI created a simplified
questionnaire with just 30 key questions. Anyone who answered them
could immediately be fitted into a dozen or so of these groups. It
allowed businesses to identify which groups were buying their
products and from that how the goods could be marketed so they became
powerful emblems of those groups inner values and lifestyles. It was
the beginning of lifestyle marketing.
Amina Marie Spengler -
Director Psychological Values Research Program 1978-86 - So it
allowed people not just to look at people as demographics of age and
income or whatever, but to really understand the underlying
motivations. I mean most of marketing was looking at people's actions
and trying to figure out what to do, but what we were doing was we
were trying to look at people's underlying values so that we could
predict what is their lifestyle, what kind of house did they live in,
what kind of car did they drive. So the corporations were then able
to sell things to them by understanding them by having labels, by
knowing what people looked like, by where they lived, by what their
lifestyles are.
If a new product expressed
a particular group's values it would be bought them. This is what
made the Values and Lifestyles system so powerful. It's ability to
predict what new products self-actualizers would choose. This power
was about to be demonstrated dramatically. VALs was about to show not
just what products they would buy, but the politicians they were
going to elect. In 1980 Ronald Reagan ran for president. He and his
advisors were convinced they could win on a program of new
individualism. It would be an attack on 50 years of government
interference in people's lives.
Jeffery Bell - Speech
writer for Ronald Reagan 1976-81 - I wrote a speech about let the
people make the basic decisions, get judges out of the way, get
bureaucrats out of the way, get centralized government out of the
way. I gave Reagan a choice of several titles for the speech, and the
one he picked was Let the People Rule, Let the People Regain Rule,
regain control over their own destiny away from a remote elite in
Washington. It was radical. Modern Republicans thought it was
suicide, Jimmy Carter called it ridiculous, the press was extremely
negative, but the odd thing was that it polled it very well in New
Hampshire, the first primary state that we had to win.
What was odd was there
seemed to be a strange mosaic of support for Reagan's policies. The
traditional pollsters could see no coherent pattern across class age
or gender. But those who had developed the Values and Lifestyles
system believed that they knew why. They were testing their system in
both America and Britain and they were convinced that both Reagan's
and Thatcher's message about individual freedom would appeal to the
group at the top of their hierarchy, the inner directed, because it
fitted with the way they saw themselves.
Christine MacNulty -
Program Manager - SRI Values and Lifestyles Team 1978-81 - They were
really concerned about being individuals, about being
individualistic, and so in the early stages when we were looking at
the messages that both Thatcher and Reagan were putting across we
said they are using words that will really appeal to a lot of younger
people and particularly the people who are moving towards
self-actualization. We called them the inner directed people. A lot
of our colleagues said that's absolutely ridiculous because inner
directeds are very socially aware, very socially concerned, they'll
never vote conservative, or they'll never vote for the Republicans,
but we said if Thatcher and Reagan continue to appeal to them in this
way they really will.
The idea that the new self
actualizing individuals would choose a politician from the right not
the left seemed extraordinary. To test their prediction the values
and lifestyles team did a survey of voting intentions and they
correlated it with their new psychological categories.
Christine MacNulty -
Program Manager - SRI Values and Lifestyles Team 1978-81 - When we
said in our surveys who are you going to vote for, sure enough it was
the inner directeds that said they were going to vote for Thatcher
and for Reagan. And they made the difference in those elections. And
it really surprised my colleagues even within my own organization. It
really showed the power of this approach because it's very difficult
to identify inner directed on the street. These people who voted for
Thatcher and Reagan, these inner directeds, came from any walk of
life. It's really hardly correlated in social class at all. I mean if
you just go along and look at age, sex, and social class, you would
never pick them up. But if you really go along with a questionnaire
that gets at their values then you can identify them very easily, and
that was completely new.
At the beginning of 1981
Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president. But he took charge of a
country that was facing economic disaster. The terrible inflation of
the 1970s destroyed much of America's heavy industries. Millions were
unemployed. But true to his campaign promises Reagan told the country
he would not step in to help as all previous governments had since
the war. But America's ailing economy was about to be rescued not by
government, but by the new groups market researchers had identified,
the self actualizing individuals. They were about to become the motor
for what would be called the new economy.
Renee M. Love Chairman and
CEO Omega Group Inc. - One technique is that we ask people the same
question over and over again. We say what do you want, what do you
really want, what do you want that for and they start to talk about
it and they kind of get intimate with what's going on. What we're
doing with that technique is unpeeling the onion. If you want to
think of a person as having layers and layers and layers of
protection, thoughts and belief, we want to get to the center core.
In the wake of the
invention of Values and Lifestyles a vast industry of psychological
market research grew out. And the old technique of the focus group
invented by the Freudian psychoanalysts of the fifties was used in a
new and powerful way. The original aim of the focus group had been to
find ways to entice people to buy a limited range of mass-produced
goods. But now focus groups were used in a different way, to explore
the inner feelings of lifestyle groups and out of that invent whole
new ranges of products which would allow those groups to express what
they felt was their individuality. And the generation who had once
rebelled against the conformity imposed by consumerism now embraced
it because it helped them to be themselves.
Stew Albert - Founder
member of Yippie Party - What capitalism managed to do that was
brilliant was to actually create products that people like me would
be interested in. That people like Jerry Rubin would be interested
in. Capitalism developed a whole industry at developing products that
evoke a larger sense of self, that seemed to agree with us that the
self was infinite, that you could be anything that you wanted to be.
That took our philosophy and agreed with it. And that created
products that supposedly helped you be this limitless self. The
product sells you a way of life, a way of being. The products sells
you values. You dress this way, you live in a house like this, you
have furniture like this, you use this computer, you eat in these
restaurants, there are values there. Hipness, coolness, so the notion
that you could buy an identity would place the original movement
notion that you were perfectly free to create an identity. And you
were perfectly free to change the world and make the world anything
that you wanted it to be.
And this vast range of new
desires fitted perfectly with changes in industrial production.
Computers now allowed manufacturers to economically produce short
runs of consumer goods. The old restrictions of mass production
disappeared, as did the worry that bedeviled corporate America ever
since mass production had been invented. That they would produce too
many goods. With the new self consumer desire seemed to have no
limit.
Daniel Yankelovich -
Yankelovich Partners Market Research Inc. - In the United States the
concern of companies was always that supply would outstrip demand.
That we were producing too much and that there was not a market for
it. You don't hear that kind of talk anymore because you've gone from
a conception of a market of limited needs, and if you've filled them
their filled, to a market of unlimited ever changing needs dominated
by self-expressiveness, that products and services can satisfy in an
endless variety of ways and ways that change all the time. And
consequently economies have unlimited horizons.
Out of this explosion of
desire came what seemed a never ending consumer being that
regenerated the American economy. The original idea had been the
liberation of the self would create news kinds of people free of
social constraint. That radical change had happened. But while the
new beings felt liberated they had become increasingly dependent in
their identity on business. The corporations had realized that it was
in their interest to encourage people to feel that they were
individuals and offer them ways to express their individuality. The
world in which people felt they were rebelling against conformity was
not a threat to business but it's greatest opportunity.
Robert Reich - Economist
and member of Clinton Cabinet 1993-1997 - It was in a sense the
triumph of the self, it was the triumph of a certain self indulgence,
a view that everything in the world and all moral judgment was
appropriately viewed through the lens of personal satisfaction.
Indeed the ultimate ending point of that logic is that there is no
society, there is only a bunch of individual people making individual
choices about their own individual well being.
Next week's episodes tells
the story of how politicians on the left in both Britain and America
turned to the techniques developed by business in order to regain
power. But what they didn't realize was what had worked for business
would undermine the very basis of their political beliefs. They would
find themselves trapped by the greedy desires of the new self.
Century of the Self Part 4 - Eight
People Sipping Wine in Kettering - Transcript
Produced and Written by Adam Curtis
This is the story of the rise of an
idea that has come to dominate our society. It is the belief that
satisfaction of individual feelings and desires is our highest
priority. Previous episodes have shown that this rise of the self was
fostered and promoted by business. They had used the ideas of Sigmund
Freud to develop techniques to read the inner desires of individuals
and then fulfill them with products. This final episode is about how
that idea took over politics. It tells the story of how politicians
on the left in both America and Britain turned to these techniques to
regain power. They believed that they were creating a new and better
form of democracy, one that truly responded to the inner feelings of
individuals. But what the politicians didn't realize was that the aim
of those who had originally created these techniques had not been to
liberate the people but to develop a new way of controlling them in a
new age of mass democracy.
Century of the Self
Part Four
Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering
The roots of the story lie way back in
the America of the 1920s with one man. He was called Edward Bernays,
the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays had been one of the inventors of
the profession of public relations and he was fascinated by his
uncle's theory that human behavior was driven by unconscious sexual
and aggressive drives. Many of Bernays' clients were large American
corporations and he was the first person to show them how they could
sell many more products if they link them through images and symbols
to those unconscious desires that Freud had identified.
Stuart Ewen - Historian of Public
Relations - The strategy he offered them was that people could now
look at goods that emerging within the society and not merely view
those goods as things that they needed in order to deal with some
specific material want but also as goods which will stroke and
respond to deep emotional yearnings. You know, how this bar of soap
or this bag of flour will make me a happier more successful more
sexually appealing less fearful person. Somebody to be admired rather
than reviled. The powerful people in that world are those people who
are capable of reading the public mind and giving the public what it
wants in those terms. Bernays was the guy who was the foremost
articulator of the theories which were driving this new system.
By the 1980s Bernays' ideas had come of
age. A vast industry had grown up in America devoted to reading the
inner desires of consumers. At it's heart was the technique of the
focus group. Previous episodes have shown how the focus group was
invented by psychoanalysts employed by US corporations. The aim was
to allow consumers to express their inner feelings and needs just as
patients did in psychoanalysis. The information was then used to
promote and design new products which would fulfill those desires.
And Edward Bernays who was now nearly a hundred years old was
celebrated as the founding father of this marketing world.
And Bernays' ideas and techniques were
also about to conquer Britain in the 1980s. Unlike America the ruling
elites in Britain had always distrusted the idea of pandering to the
masses. It was epitomized by the patrician elite who ran the BBC.
Even as late as the 60s the popular programs were referred to as
'ground bait'. Their real job was to lure the viewers into watching
more serious programs the elite knew was good for them. And market
research reflected this attitude. Individuals were observed and
classified by market researchers according to their social class from
A through C2, D and E. When people were asked their opinion about
both products and politics they were selected by social class and
asked only strictly factual questions about what they thought. The
idea that one might ask people what they themselves felt and desired
and then give it to them was seen as alien to the ruling elites and
to challenge their belief that they knew was best for the public.
But then in the economic crisis of the
mid-70s British industries were forced to begin to pay attention to
the inner feelings of consumers. As the recession deepened consumer
spending fell dramatically and the advertisers insisted that the only
way for companies to survive was to make their advertising more
effective. And to do this they would have to delve into people's
underlying psychological motives for purchasing. The advertising
industry started to bring in Americans to run focus groups with
British housewives.
The consumers were encouraged to play
at being products from household cleaners to car seatbelts. The aim
was not to talk rational, but to act out and reveal the inner
emotional relationship to products. And then a politician emerged who
also believed that people should be allowed to express themselves.
Instead of being controlled by the state the individual should become
the central focus of society.
Margaret Thatcher - Conservative Party
Conference 1975 - Some socialists seem to believe that people should
be numbers in a state computer. We believe they should be
individuals. We're all unequal. No one thank heavens is quite like
anyone else however much the socialists may pretend otherwise and we
believe that everyone has the right to be unequal. But to us every
human being is equally important. A man's right to work as he will,
to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant
and not as master, they are the essence of a free economy. On that
freedom all our other freedoms depend.
Mrs. Thatcher's vision was of a society
in which the wants and desires of millions of individuals would be
satisfied through the free market. This, she believed, would be the
engine to regenerate Britain. And with her ascent to power the
advertising and marketing industries flourished. Their task was to
find out what the British people really wanted and then sell it to
them. In this new climate, the focus group flourished, and those who
ran them borrowed from the techniques of psychotherapy to delve ever
deeper into people's feelings about products.
Out of this research the marketeers
began to detect a new individualism. In particular among those who
had voted conservative for the first time in 1979. They no longer
wanted to be seen as part of social classes but to express
themselves. And crucial to this were the products they chose to buy.
Stephen Wells - Co-founder, Consumer
Connection - We found that there was this trend towards what we
called individualism where people still wanted to be part of a crowd
but to express themselves as individuals within it. To have their own
personalities, to be, I suppose, their own man.
Business responded eagerly to this new
individualism and it soon became one of the main forces driving the
consumer boom growing in Britain. Using the data from the focus
groups, manufacturers created new ranges of products that allow
people to express their individuality. Business also recategorized
people. They were no longer divided by social class but by their
inner psychological needs.
John Banks - Chairman, Young and
Rubicam - If the primary need is security and belonging we call the
groups Mainstreamers, if it's status and the esteem of others then
it's Aspirers, if it's control it's Succeeders, and if it's
self-esteem it's Reformers.
And this new marketing culture began to
take over the institutions previously dominated by attrition elite,
particularly the world of journalism. The assault was led by the
profession of public relations. In the past PR had been seen as seedy
and corrupt, but now it became a glamorous business promoting
products and celebrities. And one of the rising stars was another
member of the Freud family, Matthew Freud, the son of the liberal MP
(Member of Parliament) Clement. What Freud and other PRs realized was
that they could use their celebrities as levers to infiltrate their
advertising into the editorial content of newspapers. The newspapers
were offered exclusive interviews with celebrities but only if they
also agreed to mention products made by Freud's corporate clients in
terms dictated by the company.
Matthew Wright - Tabloid Journalist
1993-2000 - What happened with Freuds was you effectively got some
kind of product placement or even product-- the manufacturers of
products got some degree of control over how their products would
appear in print. So if for example you wanted to write about
Caprice's passion for stuffed crust pizza you would sign a contract
which guaranteed that you would mention the firm Pizza Hut at least
twice in certain positions in the introductory portion of the article
and you would agree to run the Pizza Hut logo at such and such a size
and such and such a place and of course that you would agree to run
the enclosed pictures of Caprice eating her stuffed crust pizza.
There was no choice about you would run this article as you were
effectively told how to run the article in the press by Freuds. It's
a rise of the corporate culture and the rise of business.
To traditional journalists this
infiltration of advertising into the editorial pages was a corruption
of their profession. But to Mrs. Thatcher's allies like Rupert
Murdoch who owned The Sun and The Times, it was part of a democratic
revolution against an arrogant elite who had for too long ignored the
feelings of the masses.
Rupert Murdoch - Owner, Times
Newspapers (interview from that period) - They hate to see someone
communicating with the masses. They feel that newspapers, the written
word is not for the masses. That should be left to television or
perhaps to nobody. I'm very proud of The Sun and The Sun was not
represented tonight in your film you just took page three which
everyone seems so fascinated with, what about page one, or page two,
every other page of the paper. That was typical piece of slanting and
elitism by the BBC who after all in order to get viewers for this
program put on a very sexy episode of Star Trek which I was just
watching out in the room there. Interviewer: I don't think they put
it on to get us viewers I think we are just lucky to follow them.
Murdoch: They try to carry viewers into these programs, I know how
it's done.
By the late 80s Mrs. Thatcher and her
allies in advertising and the media had brought the desires of the
individual to the center of society. As last week's episode showed it
was the same transformation that President Reagan had brought about
in America. Both politicians had encouraged business to take over
from government the role of fulfilling the needs of the people. In
the process consumers were encouraged to see the satisfaction of
their desires as the overriding priority. To Thatcher and Reagan this
was a new and better form of democracy. But to their opponents in the
parties of the left they had summoned up the most selfish and greedy
aspects of human nature.
Robert Reich - Member of Clinton
Cabinet 1993-1997 - Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher both embraced
an economic philosophy that says the unit of judgment was not only
the individual but it was the individual's personal satisfaction, the
individual's own unique happiness and well being. It was in a sense
the triumph of regarding individuals as purely emotional beings who
have needs and wants and desires that need to be satisfied and can be
satisfied unconsciously. It goes way back to the early part of the
20th century to Freud, to notions of the unconscious, the assumptions
that in terms of our rational minds we are little corks bobbing
around on this great sea of hopes and fears and desires of which we
are only thinly aware and that the world of a marketer, the role of
somebody selling something, including a politician is to appeal to
this great swamp of desire, of unconscious desire.
The left believed the opposite. That
the way to create a better society was not to treat people as
emotional isolated individuals, but to persuade them to realize that
they had common interests with others. To help them rise above their
individual feelings and fears.
President Roosevelt - 1933 - Let me
assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear
itself. Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes
needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
This idea had flourished in America in
the depression of the 1930s. President Roosevelt faced with the chaos
caused by the Wall Street crash encouraged Americans to join together
in trade unions, to set up consumer groups, and to pay for a welfare
system for those trapped in poverty. His aim was to create a
collective awareness which would become a powerful weapon against the
unfettered power of capitalism which had caused the crisis. That idea
had driven the democratic party for fifty years. But now, Roosevelt's
inheritors railed vainly against the effects of the self-interest
encouraged by President Reagan.
Mario Cuomo - Democratic Party
Convention 1984 - (speech) There is despair Mr. President in the
faces that you don't see. Maybe Mr. President if you stop in at a
shelter in Chicago and spoke to the homeless there, Maybe Mr.
President if you asked the woman who had been denied the help she
needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for
a tax break for a millionaire or for a missile we couldn't afford to
use.
Mario Cuomo - Governor, New York
1982-95 - The worst thing Ronald Reagan did was to make the denial of
compassion respectable. He said you've worked hard, you've made your
money, you shouldn't have to feel guilty about refusing to throw it
away on people who choose to be homeless and who choose not to work.
That's what he said. He said it with an elegance and kind of a benign
aspect that disguised it's harshness.
That same idea - marshalling the
collective force of the masses to challenge the entrenched power of
wealth and business had also led the labor party to power in Britain
after the war. But in the 80s labor like the democrats in America
lost election after election as millions who had once voted for them
switched their allegiance to the conservatives. In the face of this a
growing number in the labor party became convinced that if they were
ever going to regain power labor would have to come to terms with the
new individualism. One of them was an advertising executive called
Phillip Gould who had been a life long labor supporter. Gould
believed that labor's leadership had become corrupted by the same
patrician arrogance that dominated all of Britain's institutions.
They denigrated and disapproved the new aspirations of working class
voters.
Philip Gould - Strategy Advisor to the
Labor Party 1985-present day - Labor stopped listening to these
people. And I remember the best example of this was after the
election of 1983 which was the election above all where the people's
voices were just not heard. And I had dinner with a leading labor
party figure who had been heavily involved in the defeat and his wife
said 'God these working class people we give them an education and
give them chances in life and what do they do they read The Sun and
they just don't vote for us.' And there was such a gap between these
people just trying to make better lives for themselves and the kind
of elitism of the labor party there was just this chasm that had to
be filled.
Gould became part of a small group of
modernizers centered around Peter Mandelson. Their aim was to
reconnect labor with the lost voters. To do this Gould turned to the
technique that he knew well from his work in advertising - the focus
group. Gould commissioned focus groups in suburban areas across the
country with small groups of voters who had switched to Mrs.
Thatcher. People were encouraged not to talk rationally about
policies but to express their underlying feelings. And what Gould
discovered was a fundamental shift in people's relationship to
politics. They no longer saw themselves as part of any group but as
individuals who could demand things from politicians in return for
paying taxes. Just as business had taught them to do as consumers.
Philip Gould - Strategy Advisor to the
Labor Party 1985-present day - And I found that people had become
consumers, you know people wanted to have politics and life on their
own terms. I mean not just in politics but in all aspects of life
too. People see themselves as they are, as autonomous powerful
individuals who are entitled to be respected, who are entitled to
have the best not just in (goods) but the best in health and in
education too. All this was about getting the labor party to
understand that people really really really had changed and unless
the labor party changed it would not win.
Philip Gould now set out to try and
persuade the labor party they would have to make concessions to what
he called the new aspirational classes. He was going to face
implacable opposition. In the run up to the 1992 election Gould
argued that the only way to win was for labor not to put up (raise)
taxes. But the Shadow Chancellor John Smith angrily refused. Labor
would stick to it's fundamental policies. They would fight the
election with the promise of tax increases to create a fairer
society. And as the campaign began it seemed as if Philip Gould was
wrong. The traditional polls consistently showed labor ahead despite
the conservative campaign message that labor government would put up
(raise) taxes. Even the conservatives oldest allies in the press
became convinced that by harping on about tax the conservatives were
cutting their own throats. And labor party too was convinced it would
win and finally return to power.
Those running labor's campaign believed
that by modern presentation they would attract back the voters yet
keep the old policies. But Philip Gould was convinced that labor was
going to lose. Through his focus groups he knew that the very people
that were telling the traditional pollsters they would vote labor
were in reality preparing to vote conservative out of self-interest
but they were too embarrassed to admit it. And John Major also knew
this because his focus groups were telling him the same thing.
John Major's victory in 1992 was a
disaster for the labor party. The small group of reformers centered
around Peter Mandelson and Philip Gould were convinced that the only
way for the party to survive was to change it's basic policies. But
their ideas were rejected by John Smith who had now become leader.
Philip Gould left Britain to go work for the campaign to elect Bill
Clinton President in America.
Philip Gould - Strategy Advisor to the
Labor Party 1985-present day - The 1992 election, during and
afterward people felt under great strain and really did feel
demoralized and dejected and to from this to the Clinton campaign was
an extraordinary experience because here suddenly I found articulated
many of the ideas I had but I myself had fully been able to
encapsulate or articulate.
What Gould discovered was that like the
labor party the democrats had also been doing focus groups with swing
voters. The difference was that Bill Clinton had decided to tailor
his policies to fit with these voters desires. Above all with their
ferocious belief that they should only pay tax for things that
benefitted them, not for the welfare of others. The Clinton team
decided that to win they had to promise tax cuts for these suburban
voters. And they also used the focus groups throughout the campaign
to check every appearance, speech and policy with them for their
approval. What Clinton called the forgotten middle class became
central figures in a new type of reactive politics.
Robert Reich - Member of Clinton
Cabinet 1993-1997 - Candidates for the presidency of the United
States has been pre-packaged and designed for many many years. What
was new was an attempt to use very sophisticated or
pseudo-sophisticated techniques to plum the public psychology to find
out precisely what the desires of the individuals were and then to
come up with a candidate and a platform and images and words that
exactly responded to those deep desires. This was packaging at a new
level. This was polling at an extreme.
But Clinton's campaign team led by
James Carvell and George Stephanopolus did not believe that they were
capitulating to the selfish desires of the middle classes. Tax cuts
were the price they had to pay to regain power. But once in power
they would still fulfill traditional democratic policies and help the
poor who had been neglected under Reagan, above all with the reform
of health care. They would pay for the tax cuts by cutting defense
spending and increasing taxes on the very rich. In this way they
believed they were forging a coalition of the new and the old voters
both of whom could be satisfied.
But the democrats optimism was to be
short-lived. In November 1992 Clinton was triumphantly elected
President. But within weeks his administration discovered that the
budgets deficit was far greater than they had anticipated. At a
meeting in the White House in January 1993 the head of the Federal
Reserve told them that the deficit was nearly 300 Billion dollars.
There was no way they could borrow more without panicking the markets
and causing a crisis. The only way to pay for the proposed tax cuts
would be to cut government spending not just in defense but on
welfare. Clinton was faced with a choice between the old politics and
the new and he chose the old. The tax cuts were dropped and he tried
to inspire the country with the old democratic ideal of government
spending to help the poor and disadvantaged.
Robert Reich - Member of Clinton
Cabinet 1993-1997 - At the start of the Clinton administration many
of us including I believe President Clinton himself reverted back to
an older tradition, tried to lift the public to talk about genuine
ideals beyond the individual. And that reformed agenda being not only
universal health care, and child care, and dealing with the widening
inequalities in our society, and homelessness, many things that many
citizens - particularly middle income citizens just didn't want to
deal with.
But the suburban voters who had been
promised tax cuts were not inspired by Bill Clinton's vision. They
felt betrayed and wanted revenge. Their opportunity came in 1994 with
the congressional elections. The Republicans led by Newt Gingrich
promised huge tax cuts and to dismantle the welfare system. The
voters who had defected to Clinton switched sides yet again and the
Republicans won both houses of Congress in a landslide. For Clinton
it was a disaster. Faced with a hostile congress there was no way for
him to get his reforms through. His personal popularity plummeted and
it seemed certain he would not be re-elected in two years time. In
desperation and without telling his cabinet Clinton turned for help
to one of America's most ruthless political strategists, Dick Morris.
Dick Morris - Strategy Advisor to
President Clinton 1994-1996 - Clinton was in serious trouble he had
lost the 94 election, he had lost control of Congress, and he hired
me to come back and save him. So he was basically asking me to
perform roughly the same role as a life preserver would if you are
drowning.
What Morris told Clinton was that to
win re-election he would have to transform the very nature of
politics. The crucial swing voters in the suburbs now thought and
behaved like consumers. The only way to win them back was to forget
all ideology and instead turn politics into a form of consumer
business. Clinton must try to identify their personal desires and
whims and then promise to fulfill them. If he followed those consumer
rules they would follow him.
Dick Morris - Strategy Advisor to
President Clinton 1994-1996 - I said that I felt the most important
thing for him to do was to bring to the political system the same
consumer rules philosophy that the business community has. Because I
think politics needs to be as responsive to the whims and desires of
the marketplace as business is. And it needs to be sensitive to the
bottom line - profits or votes - as a business is. I think all of
this involves a changed view of the voters so that instead of
treating them as targets you treat them as owners. Instead of
treating them as something that you can manipulate you treat them as
something you need to learn from. And instead of feeling that you can
stay in one place and you can manipulate the voters you need to learn
what they want and move yourself to accommodate them.
To get inside the minds of the swing
voters Morris brought lifestyle marketing into politics for the first
time. He went to one of America's most prominent market research
firms called Penn and Schoen and commissioned what they called a
neuro-personality poll. It was a massive survey of hundreds of
thousands of voters but the only political questions it asked were to
find out if someone was a swing voter or not. All the other questions
were intimate psychological ones designed to see whether swing voters
fell into identifiable psychological types.
Mark Penn - Market Researcher for
President Clinton - 1995-2000 - Well we were asking people questions
like do you think you're the life of the party? Do you think when you
see things you like to have a list and organize them? Do you like to
plan things ahead or be more spontaneous? Where do you like to go?
What sports do you like to play? What would you do with your spouse
on a romantic weekend? So we were asking people some very personal
questions about their own lives to see were the kinds of people that
were likely to change their vote also possessing a certain kind of
personality traits and in fact they were.
The neuro-personality poll allowed the
Clinton team to segment swing voters into different lifestyle types.
They were given names like Pools and Patios, or Caps and Gowns who
were urban intellectuals living in university towns. From this, the
team could identify ways in which they could make individuals feel
more secure in their chosen lifestyles. Just as business had learned
to do with products. Dick Morris called it small-bore politics. Tiny
details of peoples personal lives and personal anxieties which
politics never even thought about or noticed before but which now had
become the key to winning power.
Doug Schoen - Market Researcher for
President Clinton - 1995-2000 - It was an America that focused on day
to day practical concerns - should I wear seatbelts, should I stop
smoking, should I wear a school uniform, is my neighborhood being
protected. It was not so much a new individualism as the social order
as we had known it had broken down so we got into people's heads,
understood their psychology about lifestyle, about values, what they
thought was important, what issues they wanted politicians and the
president to address. And these issues proved to be very very
different from what the conventional wisdom had suggested.
As the election campaign began, Clinton
revealed Morris's new approach to a shocked White House. All
traditional policies were to be dropped. Instead he would concentrate
exclusively on policies that targeted the worries of swing voters.
V-Chips would be fitted into televisions to prevent children from
watching pornography and mobile phones would be fitted into school
buses to make parents feel more secure. Dick Morris also persuaded
the president to spend his leisure time in the same way as particular
swing voters. He sent Clinton on a hunting holiday dressed in exactly
the Gortex outfits the group called Big Sky Families liked. The aim
was to reflect swing voters lifestyles back to them. The liberals in
Clinton's cabinet hated this approach.
Robert Reich - Member of Clinton
Cabinet 1993-1997 - I would say Dick why have a campaign if all the
president is going to do is offer up all these little bite-sized
miniature initiatives that appealed to people desires like consumers
buying soap. V-Chips that you could put in your televisions so
children could not have pornography and school uniforms. Why talk
about them, they're so mundane and they're so tiny, and he would say
if we don't do this we may not get re-elected. And I would say what's
the point of getting re-elected if you have no mandate to do anything
when you're re-elected and he'd say what's the point of having a
mandate if you can't get re-elected? Isn't the ultimate goal getting
re-elected?
But Morris's new politics were an
extraordinary success. Clinton's ratings among the swing voters began
to soar and Dick Morris along with the marketeer Mark Penn took
effective charge of making White House policy. Mark Penn set up a
huge call center in an office block in Denver and every night
hundreds of telephone operators called swing voters in suburbs across
the country to check with them every detail of policies Clinton was
proposing.
James Bennet - Washington
correspondent, New York Times - The policy was made by a group of
people manning telephones in Denver Colorado placing calls to voters
in places like Westchester and Pasadena and asking them what they
wanted from their government, and asking them very specifically about
specific policies that Bill Clinton was considering. Would you be
more likely to support him if he offered this particular government
service or if he offered that one. Those people told them what they
thought, Mark Penn transmitted that to Bill Clinton and it came out
of his mouth. So essentially it was suburbanite voters, suburban
voters in the 90s were creating American domestic policy and some of
it's foreign policy as well. Mark Penn was polling on questions like
whether we should bomb in Bosnia, things like that.
Morris also insisted that Clinton make
a symbolic sacrifice of the old politics to convince the swing voters
to trust him. In August 1996 Clinton signed a bill which ended the
system of guaranteed help to poor and unemployed. Welfare would be
cut back after two years in order to force people into work. The new
system was called Welfare to Work and would he said be a hand up not
a hand out. It was the effective end of the guaranteed welfare system
created by President Roosevelt 60 years before. For many in Clinton's
cabinet it was also the end of the progressive political ideal that
Roosevelt had represented. The belief that one used a position of
leadership to persuade the voters to think and behave as social
beings, not as self-interested individuals.
Robert Reich - Member of Clinton
Cabinet 1993-1997 - Dick Morris and the pollsters had won. And by
that I mean the people who ultimately got to the president shared the
president's mind were those who viewed the voters as just a
collection of individual desires that had to be catered to and
pandered to. It suggests that democracy is nothing more and should be
nothing more than pandering to these un-thought about very primitive
desires. Primitive in the sense that they are not even necessarily
conscious, just what people want in terms of satisfying themselves.
And the same triumph of the politics of
the self was about to happen in Britain too. In 1994 Tony Blair had
become the leader of the labor party and the reforming group centered
around Peter Mandelson became all powerful. Almost every night Philip
Gould ran focus groups with swing voters in the suburbs, but this
time he was listened to. The desires and fears of the new
aspirational classes became the force shaping labor party policies.
Philip Gould - New Labor Strategy
Advisor Election Campaign 1997 - In that period I was talking to
people who used to vote conservative and were considering voting
labor and they want it understood they are financially pressed and
there are limits to the extent to which taxation can be improved, and
they think crime is an issue that matters to them, they want welfare
to go to people who deserve welfare not to people who do not. This
was seen by many in the labor party as selfish. I never saw that it
was selfish I believed that Dad or Mom doing the best for their
families was not selfish they're just doing the best for their
families, that's what people do.
Derek Draper - Assistant to Peter
Mandelson 1992-1995 - The philosophy of the campaign is let's
concentrate on swing voters let's focus group them to find out what
they want and what will appeal to them and let's just relentlessly
push those things in the election. Philip Gould was crucial because
he gave the 'raw material' if you like for these politicians to do
this kind of politics, in that when he came up with stuff they'd
follow it, pretty much without exception. Blair himself would pour
over these sort of twelve page memos and say well this is what we
must do. Groups of eight people you know dinking wine and eating
Cheerios what they thought determined effectively everything that the
labor party did.
And although those running the campaign
would like to portray the new approach as their invention it was in
fact copied from the Americans even down to the phrases that the
American marketeers had tested on their swing voters.
Doug Schoen - Market Researcher for
President Clinton - 1995-2000 - Peter Mandelson and their team were
in the United States watching what we did and copied almost verbatim
our approach in their 1997 campaign. Mandelson is not a fool and if
anything he saw something that worked and said why not do it. And I
can remember reading their manifesto and thinking they just took it
lock stock and barrel. You know on the one hand you're proud and on
the other hand you're cursing.
And as in America labor was forced to
drop policies that would not directly benefit the swing voters even
if it meant sacrificing it's fundamental principles. The commitment
to public control of industry which was enshrined as Clause Four of
the party constitution was dropped. The aim of Clause Four had been
to use the collective power of the people to challenge the unfettered
greed of business. But now Tony Blair was faced with crucial voters
who no longer saw themselves as exploited by the free market. They
saw themselves as individual consumers who were fulfilled and given
identity by what business delivered them. The new Clause Four
promised not to control the free market but to let it flourish.
Derek Draper - Assistant to Peter
Mandelson 1992-1995 - What new labor did was suit people who exert
power in society not through the political system or not through the
democratic political system, so it's big business, and it suits
interest in the status quo and just off the top of my head you know
those three things are what the labor party is supposed to be a
counter-force to. What that means is big business get to carry on
exerting their power behind the scenes getting their way because
their no count of adding pressure because you know count of adding
pressure is not going to come from eight people sipping wine in
Kettering.
But those who masterminded labor's
victory in 1997 saw it as a triumphant vindication of a new form of
democracy. By understanding and fulfilling people's inner desires
through the focus group they were giving power to individuals not
treating them as faceless groups who were told by politicians what
was good for them.
Philip Gould - New Labor Strategy
Advisor Election Campaign 1997 - I don't see the focus group as some
marketing tool I see the focus group as a way of hearing what the
people have to say. And I see the focus group as a way to a new form
of politics. 1997 was I think fundamentally important in that I think
it is the end of elitist politics that has dominated Britain for so
much of the last hundred years.
In 1939 Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's
nephew created a vision of a future world in which the consumer was
king. It was at the World's Fair in New York and Bernays called it
Democracity. It was one of the earliest and most dramatic portrayals
of a consumerist democracy. A society in which the needs and desires
of individuals were read and fulfilled by business in the free
market.
Stewart Ewen - Historian of Public
Relations - The World's Fair created a spectacle in which all of
these concerns were met and they met by Westinghouse and General
Motors and the American Cash Register Company and company after
company presented itself as the sort of centerpiece of a society in
which human desire and human want and human anxiety would all be
responded to and it would all be met purely through the free
enterprise system. There was this sort of notion that the free market
was something not guided by ideologies or by political power, it was
something that was simply guided by the people's will.
This was the model of democracy both
new labor and the American democrats had bought into in order to
regain power. They had used techniques developed by business to read
the desires of consumers and they had accepted Bernays' claim that
this was a better form of democracy. But in reality the World's Fair
had been an elaborate piece of propaganda designed by Bernays for his
clients, the giant American corporations. Privately Bernays did not
believe that true democracy could ever work. He had been profoundly
influenced in this by his uncle's theories of human nature. Freud
believed that individuals were not driven by rational thought but by
primitive unconscious desires and feelings. And Bernays believed that
this meant it was too dangerous to let the masses ever have control
over their own lives and consumerism was a way of giving people the
illusion of control while allowing a responsible elite to continue
managing society.
Stewart Ewen - Historian of Public
Relations - It's not that the people are in charge but that the
people's desires are in charge. The people are not in charge the
people exercise no decision-making power within this environment. So
democracy is reduced from something which assumes an active citizenry
to something which now increasingly is predicated on the idea of the
public as passive consumers, the public as people who essentially
what you are delivering them is doggy treats.
The problem for new labor was that it
believed the propaganda. They took at face value the idea promoted by
business that the systems used to read the consumers mind could form
the basis for a new type of democracy. Once in power new labor tried
to govern through a new system that Philip Gould called 'continuous
democracy'. But what worked for business in designing products led
the labor government into a bewildering maze of contradictory whims
and desires. For much of labor's first term the focus groups said the
railways were not a high priority and labors policies faithfully
reflected this. But now those same groups are now blaming the
government for not having invested more money sooner in the railways.
Derek Draper - Assistant to Peter
Mandelson 1992-1995 - The point about focus group politics is that
there isn't one because people are contradictory and irrational and
so you have a problem in terms of deciding what you are going to do
if all you do is listen to a mass of individual opinions that are
forever fluctuating and don't really have any coherence and crucially
are not set in contact. So that's why people can say you know I want
lower taxes and better public services. Well of course they do. You
know you say do you want to pay more taxes to get better public
services and people are less sure. They then don't believe that if
they pay more taxes they will be spent on better public services. So
you end up in this quagmire and the truth is the politicians have to
say look this is what I believe, I believe you should pay slightly
more taxes to make better public services and I pledge that I am
competent enough to use that money wisely do you want now to vote for
me yes or no. And that's what Blair has failed to do. Tony Blair
turned around and tries to feed back to them what they already
believe and give them what they believe is sort of an individual
incoherent contradictory nonsense and that's all he has to offer. And
then he wonders why people don't get him. It isn't that they don't
get him it's that they're looking for someone to do something that
they can't do themselves which is actually come up with a coherent
political opinion that they might have faith in.
New labor are faced with a dilemma. The
system of consumer democracy they have embraced has trapped them into
a series of short term and often contradictory policies. There are
now growing demands that they fulfill a grander vision. That they use
the power of government to deal with the problems of growing
inequality and the decaying social fabric of the country. But to do
this they will have to appeal to the electorate to think outside
their own self-interest. And this would mean challenging the now
dominant Freudian view of human beings as selfish instinct driven
individuals which is a concept of human beings that has been fostered
and encouraged by business because it produces ideal consumers.
Although we feel we are free, in reality we like the politicians have
become the slaves of our own desires. We have forgotten that we can
be more than that, that there are other sides to human nature.
Robert Reich - Member of Clinton
Cabinet 1993-1997 - Fundamentally here we have two different views of
human nature and of democracy. You have the view that people are
irrational that they are bundles of unconscious emotion that comes
directly out of Freud. And businesses are very able to respond to
that, that's what they have honed their skills to and that's what
marketing really is all about - what are the symbols the images the
music, the words that will appeal to these unconscious feelings.
Politics must be more than that. Politics and leadership are about
engaging the public in a rational discussion and deliberation about
what is best and treating people with respect in terms of their
rational abilities to debate what is best. If it's not that, if it is
Freudian if it is basically a matter of appealing to the same basic
unconscious feelings that business appeals to then why not let
business do it? Business can do it better, business knows how to do
it. Business after all is in the business of responding to those
feelings.
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