The Century Of The Self - Part 1: "happiness Machines"

The Century of the Self - Part 1: "Happiness Machines"
The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud
and his American nephew, Edward Bernays.

Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s
and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses.

He showed American corporations how they could make people
want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods
to their unconscious desires.

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques
of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book,
from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts,


to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup
was breaking the taboo on women smoking
by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol
of independence and freedom.

But Bernays was convinced that this was more
than just a way of selling consumer goods.

It was a new political idea of how to control the masses.

By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified,
people could be made happy and thus docile.

It was the start of the all-consuming self
which has come to dominate today's world.

Originally broadcast on 29th April 2002

 

The manipulation

of the American mind:

Edward Bernays

and the birth of public relations
July 9, 2015 6.22am EDT
Author

1. Richard Gunderman
   Chancellor's Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, IUPUI

Edward Bernays applied the principles of propaganda to marketing.
Bruce Henschel/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

“The most interesting man in the world.”

“Reach out and touch someone.”

“Finger-lickin’ good.”

Such advertising slogans have become fixtures
of American culture, and each year millions now tune
into the Super Bowl as much for the ads as for the football.

While no single person can claim exclusive credit
for the ascendancy of advertising in American life,
no one deserves credit more than a man most of us
have never heard of: Edward Bernays.

I first encountered Bernays through an article
I was writing on propaganda,
and it quickly became clear
that he was one of the 20th century’s foremost salesmen of ideas.

The fact that 20 years have elapsed since his death
provides a fitting opportunity to reexamine his legacy.
Bernays pioneered public relations

Often referred to as “the father of public relations,” Bernays
in 1928 published his seminal work, Propaganda,
in which he argued that public relations is not a gimmick but a necessity:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.

Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute
an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed,
and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of….
It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.​

Edward Bernays’ landmark book. chrisch_, CC BY-NC






















Bernays came by his beliefs honestly.

Born in Austria in 1891, the year Sigmund Freud published
one of his earliest papers, Bernays was also Freud’s nephew twice over.

His mother was Freud’s sister Anna, and his father, Ely Bernays,
was the brother of Freud’s wife Martha.

The year after his birth, the Bernays family moved to New York,
and Bernays later graduated from Cornell with a degree in agriculture.

But instead of farming, he chose a career in journalism,
eventually helping the Woodrow Wilson Administration
promote the idea that US efforts in World War I
were intended to bring democracy to Europe.
Bernays rebrands ‘propaganda’

Having seen how effective propaganda could be during war, B
ernays wondered whether it might prove equally useful during peacetime.

Yet propaganda had acquired a somewhat pejorative connotation
(which would be further magnified during World War II),
so Bernays promoted the term “public relations.”

Drawing on the insights of his Uncle Sigmund
– a relationship Bernays was always quick to mention
– he developed an approach he dubbed “the engineering of consent.”

He provided leaders the means to “control and regiment
the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.”

To do so, it was necessary to appeal not to the rational part
of the mind, but the unconscious.

Bernays acquired an impressive list of clients,
ranging from manufacturers such as General Electric,
Procter & Gamble, and the American Tobacco Company,
to media outlets like CBS and even politicians such as Calvin Coolidge.

To counteract President Coolidge’s stiff image,
Bernays organized “pancake breakfasts”
and White House concerts with Al Jolson
and other Broadway performers.

With Bernays’ help, Coolidge won the 1924 election.

Bernays’ publicity campaigns were the stuff of legend.

To overcome “sales resistance” to cigarette smoking among women,
Bernays staged a demonstration at the 1929 Easter parade,
having fashionable young women flaunt their “torches of freedom.”

He promoted Lucky Strikes by convincing women
that the forest green hue of the cigarette pack
was among the most fashionable of colors.

The success of this effort was manifested in innumerable
window displays and fashion shows.

In the 1930s, he promoted cigarettes as both soothing
to the throat and slimming to the waistline.

But at home, Bernays was attempting to persuade
his wife to kick the habit.

When would find a pack of her Parliaments in their home,
he would snap every one of them in half and throw them
in the toilet.

While promoting cigarettes as soothing and slimming,
Bernays, it seems, was aware of some of the early studies
linking smoking to cancer.

Bernays used the same techniques on children.

To convince kids that bathing could be fun,
he sponsored soap sculpture competitions
and floating contests.

These were designed to prove that Ivory bars
were more buoyant than competing products.

Bernays also used fear to sell products.

For Dixie cups, Bernays launched a campaign
to scare people into thinking that only disposable cups
were sanitary.

As part of this campaign, he founded the Committee
for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Food and Drink.
Bernays’ ideas sold a lot

more than cigarettes and Dixie cups

Even though Bernays saw the power of propaganda
during war and used it to sell products during peacetime,
he couldn’t have imagined that his writings on public relations
would become a tool of the Third Reich.

In the 1920s, Joseph Goebbels became an avid admirer
of Bernays and his writings
– despite the fact that Bernays was a Jew.

When Goebbels became the minister of propaganda
for the Third Reich, he sought to exploit Bernays’ ideas
to the fullest extent possible.

For example, he created a “Fuhrer cult” around Adolph Hitler.

Bernays learned that the Nazis were using his work in 1933,
from a foreign correspondent for Hearst newspapers.

He later recounted in his 1965 autobiography:

They were using my books as the basis for a destructive campaign
against the Jews of Germany.

This shocked me, but I knew any human activity
can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones.​

What Bernays’ writings furnish is not a principle or tradition
by which to evaluate the appropriateness of propaganda,
but simply a means for shaping public opinion
for any purpose whatsoever, whether beneficial
to human beings or not.

This observation led Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter
to warn President Franklin Roosevelt against allowing Bernays
to play a leadership role in World War II, describing him
and his colleagues as “professional poisoners of the public mind,
exploiters of foolishness, fanaticism, and self-interest.”

Today we might call what Bernays pioneered a form of branding,
but at its core it represents little more than a particularly brazen set
of techniques to manipulate people to get them to do your bidding.

Its underlying purpose, in large part, is to make money.

By convincing people that they want something they do not need,
Bernays sought to turn citizens and neighbors into consumers
who use their purchasing power to propel themselves
down the road to happiness.

Without a moral compass, however, such a transformation
promotes a patronizing and ultimately cynical view of human nature
and human possibilities, one as likely to destroy lives
as to build them up.

https://theconversation.com/the-man...VyaR69VYBzdVgRsPCY3sL-12BLrcM5M3SC4GlT1jlNe2E

 

Adam Curtis

Century of the Self

Happiness Machines

Edward Bernays

Part 01