The Century of the Self.
The Century of the Self is an award-winning British
television documentary series by Adam Curtis. It focuses on how the work of
Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and Edward Bernays influenced the way corporations
and governments have analyzed, dealt with, and controlled people
1. Happiness Machines (17 March 2002)
2. The Engineering of Consent (24 March 2002)
3. There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be
Destroyed (31 March 2002)
4. Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering (7 April 2002)
"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." —Adam Curtis' introduction to the first episode.
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, changed the
perception of the human mind and its workings. The series describes the
propaganda that Western governments and corporations have utilized stemming
from Freud's theories.
Freud himself and his nephew Edward Bernays, who was the
first to use psychological techniques in public relations, are discussed.
Freud's daughter Anna Freud, a pioneer of child psychology, is mentioned in the
second part, as is one of the main opponents of Freud's theories, Wilhelm
Reich, in the third part.
Along these general themes, The Century of the Self asks
deeper questions about the roots and methods of modern consumerism,
representative democracy, commodification and its implications. It also
questions the modern way we see ourselves, the attitudes to fashion and
superficiality.
The business and political world uses psychological
techniques to read, create and fulfill our desires, to make their products or
speeches as pleasing as possible to us. Curtis raises the question of the
intentions and roots of this fact. Where once the political process was about
engaging people's rational, conscious minds, as well as facilitating their
needs as a society, the documentary shows how by employing the tactics of
psychoanalysis, politicians appeal to irrational, primitive impulses that have
little apparent bearing on issues outside of the narrow self-interest of a
consumer population.
Paul Mazur, a leading Wall Street banker working for Lehman
Brothers, is cited as declaring: "We must shift America from a needs- to a
desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even
before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man's desires must overshadow
his needs".
In Episode 4 the main subjects are Philip Gould and Matthew
Freud, the great-grandson of Sigmund, a PR consultant. They were part of the
efforts during the nineties to bring the Democrats in the US and New Labour in
the United Kingdom back into power. Adam Curtis explores the psychological
methods they have now massively introduced into politics. He also argues that
the eventual outcome strongly resembles Edward Bernays vision for the
"Democracity" during the 1939 New York World's Fair.
It is widely believed that the series was inspired and
informed by a book written by the American historian, Stuart Ewen, "PR! A
Social History of Spin
EXCERPTS FROM PR! A SOCIAL HISTORY OF SPIN / Stuart Ewen
A leader or an interest that can make itself master of
current symbols is the master of the current situation. (Walter Lippmann,
Public Opinion, 1922)
The engineering of consent is the very essence of the
democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest. (Edward L. Bernays,
"The Engineering of Consent," 1947)
Edward Bernays: Born 1891 in Vienna, nephew of Sigmund Freud,
Bernays is credited as the "farsighted architect" of modern
propaganda techniques. From the early 1920's onward, he helped consolidate a
marriage between theories of mass psychology and schemes of corporate and
political persuasion. During the First World War, Bernays worked for the U.S.
Committee on Public Information (CPI)--the vast American propaganda apparatus
mobilized in 1917 to promote the war as one that would "Make the World
Safe for Democracy." The CPI would become the mold in which marketing
strategies for subsequent wars would be shaped.
In the twenties, Bernays authored the link between corporate
sales campaigns and popular causes, when--while working for the American
Tobacco Company--he persuaded women's rights marchers in New York City to hold
up Lucky Strike cigarettes as symbolic "Torches of Freedom." In
October 1929, Bernays originated the now familiar "global media
event," when he dreamed up "Light's Golden Jubilee," a worldwide
celebratory spectacle commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the electric
lightbulb, sponsored behind the scenes by the General Electric Corporation.
Bernays work inspired Joseph Goebbels; more than any other
individual, his career maps out the course of North American public relations
from the early 1920's to well after WW II. He is the author of Crystallizing
Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928), "The Engineering of
Consent" (1947), and his autobiographical Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of
Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays (1965).(4)
In his interviews with Bernays, Ewen discovered his
"unabashedly hierarchical view of society. Repeatedly, he maintained that
although most people respond to their world instinctively, without thought,
there exist an 'intelligent few' who have been charged with the responsibility
of contemplating and influencing the tide of history." (9)
As a member of that intellectual elite who guides the
destiny of society, the PR "professional," Bernays explained, aims
his craft at a general public that is essentially, and unreflectively,
reactive. Working behind the scenes, out of public view, the public relations
expert is an applied social scientist, educated to employ an understanding of
sociology, psychology, social psychology, and economics to influence and direct
public attitudes. Throughout their conversation, Bernays conveyed his
hallucination of democracy: a highly educated class of opinion-molding
tacticians is continuously at work, analyzing the social terrain and adjusting
the mental scenery from which the public mind, with its limited intellect,
derives its opinions....While some have argued that public relations represents
a "two-way street" through which institutions and the public can
carry on a democratic dialogue, the public's role within the alleged dialogue
is, most often, one of having its blood pressure monitored, its temperature taken.
(10)
In an incidental reference to "social conscience,"
Bernays had illuminated a historic shift in the social history of property,
shedding inadvertent light on the conditions that gave birth to the practice of
public relations. As the twentieth century progressed, people were no longer
willing to accommodate themselves to outmoded standards of deference that
history, for millennia, had demanded of them. (12)
The explosive ideals of democracy challenged ancient customs
that had long upheld social inequality. A public claiming the birthright of
democratic citizenship and social justice increasingly called upon institutions
and people in power to justify themselves and their privileges. In the crucible
of these changes, aristocracy began to give way to technocracy as a strategy of
rule. Bernays came to maturity in a society where exigencies of power were-by
necessity-increasingly exercised from behind the pretext of the "common
good." (13)
News is any overt act which juts out of the routine of
circumstance....A good public relations man advises his client..to carry out
some overt act...interrupting the continuity of life in some way to bring about
a response (Bernays 18).
PROTOCOLS OF PERSUASION
Bernays insisted that public relations is the science of creating
circumstances, mounting events that are calculated to stand out as newsworthy,
yet, at the same time, which do not appear to be staged. The field of public
relations continues to hold to this dictum, routinely mapping out pre-arranged
occurrences that are projected to look and sound like impromptu truths. (28)
The calculated simulated of enthusiasm...is also common
within contemporary culture. In a variety of configurations, the applause sign
has become a social principle. Statistical poll results are continuously
broadcast, emphasizing the popularity (or lack thereof) of politicians,
policies, products, and of course wars. Grassroots expression is now being
manufactured by firms specializing in the generation of extemporaneous public
opposition or support. In the PR industry, such orchestrated grassroots
mobilizations are referred to as Astro Turf Organizing (29).
The use of unspoken visual techniques to create a mood is
pervasive in our society: dramatic backdrops, logo designs, recycled paper and
"green" graphics. Implicit in all this is a public relations truism:
It's not what you say, but how you say it that matters (30-31).
In a democratic society, the interests of power and the
interests of the public are often at odds. The rise of public relations is
testimony to the ways that institutions of vested power, over the course of the
twentieth century, have been compelled to justify and package their interests
in terms of the common good. (34)
In the 1920's, in his pioneering handbooks Crystallizing
Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928), Bernays described modern society
as one in which "the masses" had become increasingly bold,
increasingly threatening to the customary interests of order. There is, he
wrote, an "increased readiness of the public, due to the spread of
literacy and democratic forms of government, to feel that it is entitled to its
voice in the conduct" of all aspects of society. This sense of entitlement
was the inherent outcome of an historical process that had placed new and
treacherous demands on the higher strata of society (34).
Philip Lesley publishes a bimonthly newsletter Managing the
Human Climate in which he discusses issues encompassing public relations and
public affairs. In the March/April 1994 issue, he suggests that fending off
public opposition--like a disease--requires something like a public relations
vaccine:
No organization now can afford to let the climate of
attitudes develop by accident through outside forces. It must work to create
its own climate.
This calls for the constant efforts to anticipate…to read
trends that may create the climate to be coped with. It is far more effective
to "inoculate" the publics in advance rather than react when an
attack comes. (36)
For nearly a century, the attempt to contain the forces of
"chaos" has possessed the evolution of PR thinking and, more than
anything else, it is the glue that holds the history of corporate public
relations together. (36)
Excerpted from PR! A Social History of Spin, by Stuart Ewen.
(NY: Basic Books, 1996). Fair Dealing Applies.
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