Consumerism was not just a way of making money, it had become the means of keeping the masses docile, which allowed the government to pursue a violent and illegal war in Vietnam. ibid.
But the American state fought back violently … a phase of ruthless oppression of the new left. ibid.
And to produce the new self they turned to the ideas and techniques of Wilhelm Reich. ibid.
By the late ’60s the idea of self-exploration was spreading radically in America. ibid.
But while the new beings felt liberated, they had become increasingly dependent for their identity on business. ibid.
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 fulfil them with products. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self IV: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering
Politicians on the left in both America and Britain turned to these techniques to regain power. ibid.
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 linked them to images and symbols, to those unconscious desires Freud had identified. ibid.
By the late ’80s Mrs Thatcher and her allies in advertising and media had brought the ideas of the individual to the centre of society. ibid.
Those running Labour’s campaign believed that by modern presentation they would attract back the voters yet keep the old policies. ibid.
John Major’s victory in 1992 was a disaster for the Labour Party. A small group of reformers centred around Peter Mandelson and Philip Gould were convinced that the only way for the party to survive was to change its basic policies. But their ideas were rejected by John Smith who had become leader. ibid.
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 budget deficit was far greater than they had anticipated. At a meeting at the White House in January 1993 the head of the Federal Reserve told them that the deficit was nearly $300 billion. There was no way they could borrow any 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 on defence but on welfare. Clinton was faced with a choice between the old politics and the new, and he chose the new. ibid.
In August 1996 Clinton signed a bill which ended the system of guaranteed help for the poor and unemployed. ibid.
In 1994 Tony Blair had become the leader of the Labour Party. And the reforming group centred around Peter Mandelson became all powerful. Almost every night Philip Gould ran focus groups with swing voters in the suburbs. ibid.
Privately, Bernays did not believe true democracy would ever work … Consumerism was a way of giving people the illusion of control while allowing a responsible elite to continue managing society. ibid.
New Labour are faced with a dilemma. The system of consumer democracy that they have embraced has trapped them into a series of short-term and often contradictory policies. ibid.
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. ibid.
But in the West scientists were beginning to ask whether the very idea of an integrated self was actually a fiction for everyone. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head VI Are We a Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer? ***** BBC 2021
Inside their brains, human beings have all kinds of different selves. The conscious mind had no awareness of it at all. ibid.
The one self that is conscious constantly makes up stories to explain what all the other selves are doing. But when the connection between the two halves of the brain is cut, it can’t do it … All human beings live in a dream world of stories. ibid.
The 1990s was the high point of the idea of individualism. ibid.
Much of the evidence for priming wasn’t there … You might be able to keep millions of people in a state of constant anxiety online by bombarding them with memes, but you couldn’t alter underneath what they thought and what they believed. ibid.
Once you believe you are being manipulated there is no way back. ibid.
One possible feature is that individualism will disappear, and with it the very idea of individual freedom … Another possibility is that the future will be like the past … The third possibility is to try to imagine genuinely new kinds of futures. ibid.
The reality is that all these societies, not just America and Britain but China and Russia too, are exhausted, empty of any new ideas. All of them have corruption that has burrowed deep into their institutions. ibid.
‘The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.’ ibid. David Graeber
For the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Genesis 8:21
The Kingdom is inside of you. And it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, when you become known, you will realise that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty. And it is you who are that poverty. Gospel of Saint Thomas
For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant ... Brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure. II Timothy 3:2-4
I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self. Martin Luther
Leave those vain moralists, my friend, and return to the depth of your soul: that is where you will always rediscover the source of the sacred fire which so often inflamed us with love of the sublime virtues; that is where you will see the eternal image of true beauty, the contemplation of which inspires us with a holy enthusiasm. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Heloise, 1761
We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. Alan W Watts
All by my own-alone self. Joel Chandler Harris, Nights with Uncle Remus, 1883
She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to the sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
The Buddhist doctrine of impermanence includes the notion that there is no self ... It holds that the idea of a separate, individual self is an illusion, just another form of maya, an intellectual concept that has no reality. To cling to this idea of a separate self leads to the same pain and suffering (duhkha) as the adherence to any other fixed category of thought. Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life ch12
The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile. Plato
To be one’s self and unafraid whether right or wrong is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity. Irving Wallace
Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Freedom with oneself is all important because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world. Eleanor Roosevelt
He who sees by himself, needs no instruction. But the miserable, afflicted fool who delights in pleasures and whose miseries do not cease, is turned round in the whirl of pains. Jaina Sutras bk1
You gotta be who you are in this world, right? No matter what. The Equalizer 2014 starring Denzel Washington & Chloe Grace Moretz & Marton Csokas & Melissa Leo & Bill Pullman & John Skourtis & Haley Bennett & David Harbur & Vladimir Kulich & David Meunier & Alex Veadov & James Wilcox et al, director Antoine Fuqua, him to her