Who is Edward Bernays? The dude who helped to completely fuck up the idea of freedom/democracy.

[the_future_modernes]

If you needed another reason to side-eye the hell of out Freud and many of his relatives... like Edward Bernays. A seething mass of desires: Freud's hold over history

Tyrrell: The Century of the Self was for me and many others I've spoken to, by far the best TV series for a long time. In four 60 minute programmes on BBC2, you showed how the ideas behind psychoanalysis were responsible for the development of mass consumerism and self absorption in western society. You also explored the link between consumerism and politics in ways that were terrifying to contemplate. How did you come to piece this amazing history together?

Curtis: I'm a journalist who stumbled over a story, not a historian. For me it began when I came across the intriguing information that Freud's nephew Edward Bernays had invented public relations, specifically using his uncle's ideas about human beings and human nature. From there came the idea that I should look at how Freud's ideas have been used generally in social and political ways, not telling the history of psychoanalysis but the history of how psychoanalytical ideas have been applied. When I started to research this I found lots of different stories about the application of psychoanalytical theories which had been missed out in the history of it, largely because psychoanalysis, as I am sure you know, is a very hermetic world …

Tyrrell: … a closed system of thought.

Curtis: Yes, both in the way it treats patients and also in the way psychoanalysts think of themselves. So what I did was to pull together various stories about how psychoanalysis was applied in different ways by some powerful 20th century figures in both business and politics.

As that started to come together, I began to make connections with another idea I was working on — about how today we all talk about our 'selves'. A hundred years ago, people didn't do that — a few rich people did, and you read about it in novels, but most people didn't. The question lurking at the back of my brain was "Why do we now always have this obsession with the self?" MORE

The Century Of The Self 1 of 4 | One: Happiness Machines

The Century Of The Self 2 of 4 | Two: The Engineering Of Consent

The Century Of The Self 3 of 4 | There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads, He Must Be Destroyed

The Century Of The Self 4 of 4 | Four: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering

When I consider this in conjunction with Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and Beyond Elections docu, I start making some interesting connections. Milton Friedman's shenanigans start making more sense to me. I need to reread The Shock Doctrine then rewatch this. And I will say that as I watched the first episode, one of my thoughts were: "Well damn. They treated their own people like shit. No wonder they thought that American people of color were less than dust beneath their feet. Nevermind the people of color who had the misfortune to reside in places with natural resources that these elitist, greedy assholes could steal! I mean DAMN that shit got spelled out for me in this series!

Comments

[buria_q]

fascinating. i'm so disturbed by how freudian analysis is still taken seriously in some quarters.

"He arranged for Freud's work to be published in America in the 1920s and promoted his uncle's books, using all the new tricks of PR. Without Bernays, Freud would have been an insignificant figure and would never have had the influence he did — or have become well known to the public. It was public relations that made him famous, not academic credibility."

[buria_q]

"The question lurking at the back of my brain was "Why do we now always have this obsession with the self?" This is so dominant at the moment in society, whereas the sense of doing your public duty, or fighting in a war or being involved in a political revolution, where your self is absorbed into a grander project, has all but disappeared."

this sort of thing kind of confuses me, actually. the strands of individualism in western societies but also groupthink. can you speak to this? bc i feel like self-absorption and consumerism is present, but aggressive conformity is also present in the form of patriotism and right-wing conceptions of unity that hinge on excluding/punishing ethnic and racial outsiders and gender non-conforming people.

[buria_q]

and plenty of people enlisted after 9/11 for racist reasons. a lot of the us imperial war mongering thrives on kicking up us vs. them ideas, which make people feel like they are part of a group (white, american, righteous) that they must defend.

[the_future_modernes]

bc i feel like self-absorption and consumerism is present, but aggressive conformity is also present in the form of patriotism and right-wing conceptions of unity that hinge on excluding/punishing ethnic and racial outsiders and gender non-conforming people.

Watch the second video. It explains that better than I can.