Adam Curtis TV -
What was beginning to emerge in the 1920s was a new idea of how to run mass democracy. At its heart was the consuming self which not only made the economy work but was happy and docile, so created a stable society. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self I: Happiness Machines, BBC 2002
He [Bernays] was about to help create a vision of the Utopia that free market capitalism would build in America if it was unleashed. ibid.
This is the story of how Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the unconscious mind were used by those in power in post-War America to try and control the masses. Politicians and planners came to believe that Freud was right to suggest that hidden deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self II: The Engineering of Consent, BBC 2002
An extraordinary number of mental breakdowns amongst its troops: 49% of all soldiers evacuated from combat were sent back because they suffered from mental problems. It was the first time anyone had paid attention to the feelings and anxieties of ordinary people. ibid.
Psychoanalysts were convinced they not only understood these dangerous forces but they knew how to control them too. They would use their techniques to create democratic individuals because democracy left to itself failed to do this. ibid.
In 1946 President Truman signed the National Mental Health Act. It had been born directly out of the wartime discoveries of psychoanalysts that millions of Americans who had been drafted suffered hidden anxieties and fears. The aim of the Act was to deal with this invisible threat to society. ibid.
Psychoanalysts were about to move into big business and use their techniques not just to create model citizens but model consumers. ibid.
By the early ’50s the ideas of psychoanalysis penetrated deep into American life. The psychoanalysts themselves became rich and powerful. ibid.
And as the psychoanalysts’ ideas took hold in America a new elite began to emerge: in politics, social planning and in business. What linked this elite was the assumption that the masses were fundamentally irrational. ibid.
In reality Arbenz was a democratic socialist with no links to Moscow. Bernays set out to turn him into a communist threat to America. He organised a trip to Guatemala for influential American journalists. Few of them knew anything about the country or its politics … He also created a fake independent news agency in America – the Middle-American Information Bureau. It bombarded the American media with press releases saying that Moscow was planning to use Guatemala as a beach-head to attack America. All of this had the desired effect. But what Bernays was doing was not just trying to blacken the Arbenz regime, he was part of a secret plot. President Eisenhower had agreed that America should topple the Arbenz government. But secretly. The CIA were instructed to organise a coup. ibid.
Bernays had manipulated the American people but he had done so because he like many others at the time believed that the interests of business and the interests of America were indivisible … He called it the Engineering of Consent. ibid.
But the idea that it was necessary to manipulate the inner feelings of the American population in the interests of fighting the Cold War now began to take root in Washington. Above all in the CIA who were going to take it much further. They were concerned that the Soviets were experimenting with psychological methods to actually alter the memories and feelings of people. The aim being to produce more controllable citizens. It was known as brainwashing. Psychologists in the CIA were convinced that really might be possible and that they should try to do it themselves. In the late fifties the CIA poured millions of dollars into the psychology departments across America. They were secretly funding experiments on how to alter and control the inner drives of human beings. ibid.
In fact Cameron’s experiments were a complete disaster. All he managed to produce were dozens of individuals with memory loss, and the ability to repeat the phrase, I am at ease with myself. And it was not an isolated case. Almost all the experiments the CIA funded were equally unsuccessful. Despite their ambitions, American psychologists were beginning to find out how difficult it was to understand and control the inner workings of the human mind. ibid.
High-profile figures in American life who had previously been enthusiasts for psychoanalysis now began to question why psychoanalysis had become so powerful in America. Was it really because it benefited individuals? Or had it in fact become a form of constraint in the interests of social order? ibid.
At the same time [as the CIA’s mind-control experiments], an onslaught was launched on the way psychoanalysis was being used by business to control people. The first blow came with the best seller The Hidden Persuaders, written by Vance Packard. It accused psychoanalysts of reducing the American people to emotional puppets whose only function was to keep the mass-production lines running. ibid.
But the Freuds were about to be toppled from power by opponents who said they were wrong about human nature. The inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled, it should be encouraged to express itself. Out of this would come a new type of strong human being and a better society. But what in fact emerged from this revolution was the very opposite: an isolated, vulnerable and above all greedy self, far more open to manipulation by both business and politics than anything that had gone before. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self III: There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads
In the 1950s a small group of renegade psychoanalysts began a new form of psychotherapy. They worked in small rooms in New York City and encouraged their patients to express their feelings openly. It was a direct attack on the ideas of the Freudian psychoanalysts who had become rich and powerful teaching Americans how to control their feelings. ibid.
Freud argued that at heart human beings were still driven by primitive animal instincts. The job of society was to repress and control these dangerous forces. ibid.
By the late ’50s psychoanalysis had become deeply involved in driving consumerism in America. Most advertising companies employed psychoanalysts … They had created new ways to understand consumers’ motives above all with the focus group. ibid.
But in the early ’60s a new generation emerged who attacked this. They accused American business of using psychological techniques to manipulate people’s feelings and turn them into ideal consumers. ibid.
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.