A Slave to My Desires

Clever market research enabled corporations to understand and respond to those emotions and desires, and politics was left on the back foot with its language of solidarity and responsibility. Put simply, what Thatcher and Reagan realised was that they had to retreat in the face of this alliance between consumer and corporate boardroom; what Clinton Democrats tried, and New Labour is trying, to do is copy it. By the end of the series, one is left asking: Bernays was quite clear on this point - he took Uncle Siggy's line that democracy was impossible because people were irrational and ignorant.

The best hope of social order was to have an "intelligent few" who were capable of "regimenting the public mind". Needless to say, Bernays believed that public relations was one of the most important means by which the elite could manipulate the habits and opinions of the masses, and even the "terms of public discourse".

As one commentator put it, Bernays developed a "strategy of social engineering", and though we may not like the PR men and the spin, we fall for it. It is proving more powerful and more enduring than any social engineering attempted by the state, or why do women still turn to smoking for liberation, even when they know it will probably kill them?

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As if all that wasn't depressing enough, it gets worse. The 60s and 70s show how consumer capitalism adjusted to - and ultimately coopted - the counter-cultural leftwing rejection of Bernays's and Freud's pessimistic view of human nature. It is the very versatility of capitalism that finds it triumphing over every challenge to it.

Gramsci summed it up as capitalism's capacity to project itself as the natural order of things. It all started with a simple problem: The answer was that anti-materialistic, freedom-loving hippies didn't want to buy consumer goods; they wanted to find their true selves. They had resurrected the theories of Freud's contemporary, Wilhelm Reich, that individuals were inherently good and of infinite potential; it was society's rules and conventions that held back the individual. So they gave up on achieving political change and decided to transform themselves instead. To hook them back on to buying, marketeers came up with "lifestyle" marketing for the "inner-directeds", selling products that would express their sense of self - hedonistic, freedom-loving and individualistic.

Reagan pulled off a political coup by winning them over with promises of "letting the people loose", while Thatcher declared she would "roll back the frontiers of the state".

Help Me, I Am a Slave to My Desires | About Islam

It was the politics of the consumer king, and the state was in headlong retreat. As the Clinton strategist Dick Morris claimed in an interview, he simply applied to politics the same consumer philosophy that business used - to be responsive to the whims and desires of the consumer. In came the focus groups where those whims could be ascertained.

Philip Gould, the New Labour strategist, imported the ideas from the US, celebrating it as "continuous democracy". Bernays had first consulted a psychoanalyst who, for a large fee, told him that cigarettes were a symbol of male sexual power and if women smoked, they would have their own penises. If only equality was this easy!

Sales of cigarettes to women grew firmly like an erection? To show his gratitude, Freud gave Bernays a copy of his Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis — which greatly influenced him. Products could become compelling emotional symbols of how we want to be seen by others.

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This solved a major problem for American corporations that were afraid that supply could easily outstrip demand because mass produced goods were flying off production lines. Luxury goods were only a province of the rich. Paul Masser, a prominent Wall Street banker who worked for Lehman Brothers at that time realized the value of shifting from a needs-based culture by training people to desire new things before the old had been consumed. They set out to shape a new mentality where our desires overrule our needs.

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Bernays, armed with theories learned from his uncle Sigmund, was the person to bring about this shift, with particular respect to what motivates us. Bernays invented and employed many techniques of consumer persuasion and manipulation that still inform advertising, marketing and sales cultures today. Bernays was the first to link Hollywood film stars to products and also to politicians.

President Coolidge was regarded as something of a national joke but Bernays invited a group of famous actors to hang out with Coolidge. It was picked up by all the major newspapers and suddenly Coolidge was cool. Bernays dressed the stars in the products of his clients, the corporations. He employed psychologists to write reports to tell us that products are good for us, represented as independent studies. He originated the use of questionnaires to determine general trends and opinions.

Psychologists who rely too heavily on such questionnaires today often miss the individual with their one size fits all approach. But Bernays fuelled the idea that we need to express our hidden, individual selves and show our feelings, moods, and values to the world; he largely conceived and gave birth to it. Our very responsibility as a citizen became to support the economy stupid by being an active consumer. The wave of consumption was further fuelled by the Bernays-generated idea that ordinary people should borrow money from the banks his clients to buy shares. But ultimately, the happiness machines crashed when the stockmarket suffered its worst collapse in history in Bernays had written a series of books claiming that he had developed techniques to control the masses by stimulating their inner desires and sating them with consumer products, thereby managing the irrational forces of the Freudian unconscious.

He called this The Engineering of Consent think: Noam Chomsky who opposed such techniques, much later. The key to social control is to manage people as passive consumers. Jump ahead 50 years or so to the s and the human potential movement, ideas of being authentic, being oneself and being present, became employed by American corporations as a way of inducing us to buy things to express our selves ramps up into full-swing.

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Find out what they most want, then sell it to them. With the advent of the new self, products and services have unlimited horizons, they satisfy deep emotional yearnings and promise to make you a better person. These ideas began with Freud, fostered and promoted by Bernays, disseminated by big business and ideologically-celebrated by politicians. But privately, Bernays believed that democracy could not work because we are ruled by unconscious instinctual drives of sexuality and aggression Freud and therefore we must be controlled by a ruling elite.