( -0948 ) (Up-Res) Century of Self (Adam Curtis Documentary on Edward Bernays) (Audio Polished)

( -0948 ) Century of Self (Adam Curtis Documentary on Edward Bernays) (Up-Res)

An important documentary I just had to Up-Res it for you.

Transcript:

A new theory about human nature was put forward by Sigmund Freud.
He had discovered, he said, primitive sexual and aggressive forces hidden deep inside the minds of all human beings.
Forces which if not controlled, led individuals and societies to chaos and destruction.
This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.
At the heart of the story is not just Sigmund Freud, but other members of the Freud family.
This episode is about Freud's American nephew, Edward Bernays.
Bernays is almost completely unknown today, but his influence on the 20th century was nearly as great as his uncle's.
Because Bernays was the first person to take Freud's ideas about human beings and use them to manipulate the masses.
He showed American corporations for the first time how they could make people want things they didn't need by linking mass produced goods to their unconscious desires.
Out of this would come a new political idea of how to control the masses.
By satisfying people's inner selfish desires, one made them happy and thus docile.
It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate our world today.
Freud's ideas about how the human mind works have now become an accepted part of society, as have psychoanalysts.
Every year the psychotherapist's ball is held at a place where the mind is not at its best.
This is the psychotherapy ball. Psychotherapists come, some advanced patients come, former patients come, and many other people come.
Friends, but also people from the Viennese society who like to go to a nice, elegant, comfortable ball.
But it was not always so.
A hundred years ago Freud's ideas were hated by Viennese society. At that time Vienna was the center of a vast empire ruling central Europe.
And to the powerful nobility of the Habsburg court, Freud's ideas were not only embarrassing, but the very idea of the human mind.
And to the powerful nobility of the Habsburg court, Freud's ideas were not only embarrassing, but the very idea of examining and analyzing one's inner feelings as a threat to their absolute control.
You see, at that time these people had the power. And of course you just were not allowed to show your bloody feelings.
I mean you just couldn't, you know, I mean you couldn't. If you were unhappy, can you imagine?
If you sit somewhere in the country in a castle, you are deeply unhappy, you are a woman.
You couldn't go to your maid and cry on her shoulders, or you couldn't go into the village and complain about your feelings.
I mean you couldn't, it was like selling yourself to somebody. You just couldn't.
You know? Because they had to respect you.
Now of course Freud, you see, put that thought very much into question.
Because you see, to examine yourself, you would have to put a lot of other things into question.
Your society, everything that surrounds you. And that wasn't a good thing at that time.
Why not?
Because your self-created empire to a certain extent would have fallen into bits much earlier already.
But what frightened the rulers of the empire even more was Freud's idea that hidden inside all human beings were dangerous instinctual drives.
Freud had devised a method he called psychoanalysis. By analyzing dreams and free association, he had unearthed, he said, powerful sexual and aggressive forces, which were the remnants of our animal past.
Feelings we repressed because they were too dangerous.
Freud devised a method for exploring a hidden part of the mind, which we nowadays call the unconscious, which is a part that is totally unknown to our consciousness.
That there exists a barrier in all our minds which prevents these hidden and unwelcome impulses of the unconscious from emerging.
Good night.
In 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire led Europe into war.
As the horror mounted, Freud saw it as terrible evidence of the truth of his findings.
The saddest thing he wrote is that this is exactly the way we should have expected people to behave, from our knowledge of psychoanalysis.
Governments had unleashed the primitive forces in human beings, and no one seemed to know how to stop them.
At that time, Freud's young nephew, Edward Bernays, was working as a press agent in America.
His main client was the world famous opera singer Caruso, who was touring the United States.
Bernays' parents had emigrated to America 20 years before, but he kept in touch with his uncle and joined him for holidays in the Alps.
But Bernays was now about to return to Europe for a very different reason.
On the night that Caruso opened in Toledo, Ohio, America announced it was entering the war against Germany and Austria.
As a part of the war effort, the US government set up a committee on public information, and Bernays was employed to promote America's war aims in the press.
The president, Woodrow Wilson, had announced that the United States would fight not to restore the old empires, but to bring democracy to all of Europe.
Bernays proved extremely skillful in promoting the United States' political interests.
Bernays proved extremely skillful in promoting this idea, both at home and abroad.
And at the end of the war, he was asked to accompany the president to the Paris Peace Conference.
Then, to my surprise, they asked me to go with Woodrow Wilson to the Peace Conference, and at the age of 1926, I was in Paris for the entire time of the Peace Conference that was held in the suburb of Paris, and we worked to make the world safe for democracy.
That was a big slogan.
Wilson's reception in Paris astounded Bernays and the other American propagandists.
Their propaganda had portrayed Wilson as a liberator of the people, a man who would create a new world in which the individual would be free.
They had made him a hero of the masses.
And as he watched the crowds surge around Wilson, Bernays began to wonder whether it would be possible to do the same type of mass persuasion, but in peacetime.
When I came back to the United States, I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace. And propaganda got to be a bad word because of the Germans using it.
So what I did was to try to find some other words, so we found a word "council" on public relations.
Bernays returned to New York and set up as a public relations council in a small office off Broadway.
It was the first time the term had ever been used.
Since the end of the 19th century, America had become a mass industrial society with millions clustered together in the cities.
Bernays was determined to find a way to manage and alter the way these new crowds thought and felt.
To do this, he turned to the writings of his uncle Sigmund.
While in Paris, Bernays had sent his uncle a gift of some Havana cigars.
In return, Freud had sent him a copy of his general introduction to psychoanalysis.
Bernays read it, and the picture of hidden irrational forces inside human beings fascinated him.
He wondered whether he might make money by manipulating the unconscious.
What Eddie got from Freud was indeed this idea that there is a lot more going on in human decision-making.
Not only among individuals, but even more importantly among groups, than this idea that information drives behavior.
And so Eddie began to formulate this idea that you had to look at things that would play to people's irrational emotions.
And you see that moved Eddie immediately into a different category from other people in his field,
and most government officials and managers of the day who thought if you just hit people with all this factual information,
they would look at that and say, "Oh, of course!" And Eddie knew that was not the way the world worked.
Bernays set out to experiment with the minds of the popular classes.
His most dramatic experiment was to persuade women to smoke.
At that time, there was a taboo against women smoking, and one of his early clients, George Hill,
the president of the American Tobacco Corporation, asked Bernays to find a way of breaking it.
He said, "We're losing half of our market because men have invoked a taboo against women smoking in public.
Can you do anything about that?" I said, "Let me think about it."
And then I said, "Have I your permission to see a psychoanalyst to find out what cigarettes mean to women?"
He said, "Well, of course." So I called up Dr. Brill, A.A. Brill, who was a leading psychoanalyst in New York at that time.
How come you didn't call your uncle? Why didn't you call your uncle?
Because he was in Vienna.
A.A. Brill was one of the first psychoanalysts in America, and for a large fee, he told Bernays that cigarettes were a symbol of the penis
and of male sexual power. He told Bernays that if he could find a way to connect cigarettes with the idea of challenging male power,
then women would smoke, because then they would have their own penises.
Every year, New York held an Easter Day parade to which thousands came, and Bernays decided to stage an event there.
He persuaded a group of rich debutantes to hide cigarettes under their clothes.
Then they should join the parade, and at a given signal from him, they were to light up the cigarettes dramatically.
Bernays then informed the press that he had heard that a group of suffragettes were preparing to protest by lighting up what they called "torches of freedom."
He knew this would be an outcry, and he knew that all of the photographers would be there to capture this moment.
And so he was ready with a phrase which was "torches of freedom."
And so here you have a symbol, women, young women, debutantes, smoking a cigarette in public,
with a phrase that means anybody who believes in this kind of equality pretty much has to support them in the ensuing debate about this, because "torches of freedom."
I mean, what's on all American coins? It's liberty. She's holding up the torch, you see?
And so all of this is there together. There's emotion, there's memory, there's a rational phrase, even though it's using a lot of emotional elements, it's a phrase that works in a rational sense.
All of this is together. And so the next day, this was not just in all of the New York papers, it was across the United States and around the world.
And from that point forward, the sale of cigarettes to women began to rise. He had made them socially acceptable with a single symbolic act.
What Bernays had created was the idea that if a woman smoked, it made her more powerful and independent, an idea that still persists today.
Embrace me, my sweet embrace. It made him realize that it was possible to persuade people to behave irrationally if you link products to their emotional desires and feelings.
The idea that smoking actually made women freer was completely irrational, but it made them feel more independent.
It meant that irrelevant objects could become powerful emotional symbols of how you wanted to be seen by others.
Eddie Bernays saw the way to sell product was not to sell it to your intellect that you ought to buy an automobile, but that you will feel better about it if you have this automobile.
I think he originated that idea that they weren't just purchasing something, but they were engaging themselves emotionally or personally in the product or service.
That it's not you think you need a new piece of clothing, but you'll feel better with the piece of clothing. That was his contribution in a very real sense.
We see it all over the place today, but I think he originated the idea of the emotional connect to a product or service.
What Bernays was doing fascinated America's corporations.
They had come out of the war rich and powerful, but they had a growing worry.
The system of mass production had flourished during the war, and now millions of goods were pouring off production lines.
What they were frightened of was the danger of overproduction, that there would come a point when people had enough goods and would simply stop buying.
Up until that point, the majority of products were still sold to the masses on the basis of need.
While the rich had long been used to luxury goods, for the millions of working class Americans, most products were still advertised as necessities.
Goods like shoes, stockings, even cars were promoted in functional terms for their durability.
The aim of the advertisements was simply to show people the product's practical virtues. Nothing more.
What the corporations realized they had to do was transform the way the majority of Americans thought about products.
One leading Wall Street banker, Paul Mazer of Lehman Brothers, was clear about what was necessary.
"We must shift America," he wrote, "from a needs to a desires culture.
People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed.
We must shape a new mentality in America. Man's desires must overshadow his needs."
Prior to that time, there was no American consumer. There was the American worker, and there was the American owner.
They were left in the factory and they saved and they ate what they had to when the people shopped for what they needed.
And while the very rich may have bought things they didn't need, most people did not.
And Mazer envisioned a break with that where you would have things that you didn't actually need, but you wanted as opposed to needed.
And the man who would be at the center of changing that mentality for the corporations was Edward Bernays.
Bernays really is the guy within the United States more than anybody else who sort of brings to the table psychological theory
as something that is an essential part of how, from the corporate side, of how we are going to appeal to the masses effectively.
And the whole sort of merchandising establishment and sales establishment is ready for Sigmund Freud.
I mean, they are ready for understanding what motivates the human mind.
And so that there's this real openness to Bernays' techniques being used to sell products to the masses.
Beginning in the early 20s, the New York banks funded the creation of chains of department stores across America.
They were to be the outlets for the mass-produced goods, and Bernays' job was to produce the new type of customer.
Bernays began to create many of the techniques of mass consumer persuasion that we now live with.
He was employed by William Randolph Hearst to promote his new women's magazines.
And Bernays glamorized them by placing articles and advertisements that linked products made by others of his clients to famous film stars like Clara Bow, who was also his client.
Bernays also began the practice of product placement in the movies, and he dressed the stars at the film's premieres with clothes and jewelry from other firms he represented.
He was, he claimed, the first person to tell car companies they could sell cars as symbols of male sexuality.
He employed psychologists to issue reports that said products were good for you, and then pretended they were independent studies.
He organized fashion shows in department stores and paid celebrities to repeat the new and essential message.
He brought things not just for need, but to express your inner sense of yourself to others.
There's a psychology of dress. Have you ever thought about it? How it can express your character?
You all have interesting characters, but some of them are all hidden. I wonder why you all want to dress always the same, with the same hats and the same coats.
I'm sure all of you are interesting and have wonderful things about you, but looking at you in the street, you all look so much the same.
And that's why I'm talking to you about the psychology of dress. Try and express yourselves better in your dress.
Bring out certain things that you think are hidden. I wonder if you've thought of this angle of your personality.
I'd like to ask you some questions. Why do you like short skates?
Oh, because there's more to see.
More to see, eh? What good does that do you?
It makes you more attractive.
No?
No.
In 1927, an American journalist wrote, "A change has come over our democracy. It is called consumptionism.
The American citizen's first importance to his country is now no longer that of citizen, but that of consumer."
The growing wave of consumerism helped in turn to create a stock market boom.
And yet again, Edward Bernays became involved, promoting the novel idea that ordinary people should buy shares, borrowing money from banks he also represented.
And yet again, millions followed his advice.
He was uniquely knowledgeable about how people in large numbers are going to react to products and ideas and so on.
But in political terms, if he were to go outside, I can't imagine that he'd get three people to stand and listen.
Wasn't particularly articulate, was kind of funny looking, and didn't have any sense of reaching out for people one-on-one. None at all.
He didn't think about people in groups of one, thought about people in groups of thousands.
[Phone rings]
Bernays soon became famous as the man who understood the mind of the crowd.
And in 1924, the President contacted him.
President Coolidge was a quiet taciturn man and had become a national joke.
The press portrayed him as a dull, humorous figure.
Bernays' solution was to do exactly the same as he had done with products.
He persuaded 34 famous film stars to visit the White House.
And for the first time, politics became involved with public relations.
And I lined up these 34 people and I'd say, "What's your name?"
He'd say, "Al Jolson."
And I'd say, "Mr. President Al Jolson, next state, every newspaper in the United States had a front page story.
President Coolidge entertains actors at White House.
And the Times had a headline which said, "President nearly laughed."
And everybody was happy.
But while Bernays became rich and powerful in America, in Vienna his uncle was facing disaster.
Like much of Europe, Vienna was suffering an economic crisis and massive inflation, which wiped out all of Freud's savings.
Facing bankruptcy, he wrote to his nephew for help.
Bernays responded by arranging for Freud's works to be published for the first time in America.
And began to send his uncle precious dollars, which Freud kept secretly in a foreign bank account.
He was Freud's agent, if you will, to get his books published.
Well, of course, once the books were being published, and he couldn't help himself, but promote these books.
See that everybody read them. Make them controversial.
Emphasize the fact that, do you know what Freud says about sex, and what he says cigarettes are a symbol of, and so on and so forth?
How do you suppose all those stories got out?
Certainly the academics weren't spreading these around the country. Eddie Bernays was.
Then, when Freud became accepted, well then, of course, to go to a client and say, "Well, Uncle Sigi," see then that had some cache.
But notice there, first Eddie created Uncle Sigi in the U.S., made him acceptable secondly.
And thirdly, then capitalized on Uncle Sigi. Typical Bernays performance.
Bernays also suggested that Freud promote himself in the United States.
He proposed his uncle write an article for Cosmopolitan, a magazine that Bernays represented, entitled, "A Woman's Mental Place in the Home."
Freud was furious. Such an idea, he said, was unthinkable. It was vulgar, and anyway he hated America.
Freud was now becoming increasingly pessimistic about human beings.
In the mid-twenties he retreated in the summers to the Alps, sometimes staying in an old hotel, the Posse-en-Maritze in Berchtesgaden.
It is now a ruin.
Freud began to write about group behavior, about how easily the unconscious aggressive forces in human beings could be triggered when they were in crowds.
Freud believed he had underestimated the aggressive instincts in human beings.
They were far more dangerous than he had originally thought.
After World War I, Freud was basically a pessimist.
He felt that man is an impossible creature, a very sadistic and bad species, and did not believe that man can be improved.
Man is a ferocious animal. The most ferocious animal exists.
He enjoyed torturing and killing. He didn't like man.
The publication of Freud's works in America had an extraordinary effect on journalists and intellectuals in the 1920s.
What fascinated and frightened them was the picture Freud painted of submerged, dangerous forces lurking just under the surface of modern society.
Forces that could erupt easily to produce the frenzied mob which had the power to destroy even governments.
It was this they believed had happened in Russia.
To many, this meant that one of the guiding principles of mass democracy was wrong.
The belief that human beings could be trusted to make decisions on a rational basis.
The leading political writer, Walter Lippmann, argued that if human beings were in reality driven by unconscious, irrational forces, then it was necessary to rethink democracy.
What was needed was a new elite who could manage what he called the bewildered herd.
This would be done through psychological techniques that would control the unconscious feelings of the masses.
So here you have Walter Lippmann, probably the most influential political thinker in the United States,
who is essentially saying that the basic mechanism of the mass mind is unreason, is irrationality, is animality.
He believes that the mob in the street, which is how he sees ordinary people, are people who are driven not by their minds but by their spinal cords.
The notion of kind of animal drives, unconscious instinctual drives lurking beneath the surface of civilization.
And so they started looking towards psychological science as a way of understanding the mechanisms by which the popular mind works,
specifically with the goal of figuring out how to understand how to apply those mechanisms to strategies for social control.
Edward Bernays was fascinated by Lippmann's arguments and also saw a way to promote himself by using them.
In the 1920s he began to write a series of books which argued that he had developed the very techniques Lippmann was calling for.
By stimulating people's inner desires and then sating them with consumer products,
he was creating a new way to manage the irrational force of the masses.
He called it the engineering of consent.
Democracy, to my father, was a wonderful concept,
but I don't think he felt that all those publics out there had reliable judgment.
And not that they very easily might vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so that they had to be guided from above.
It's enlightened despotism in a sense.
You appeal to their desires and their unrecognized longings, that sort of thing.
That you can tap into their deepest desires or their deepest fears and use that to your own purposes.
And then in 1928 a president came to power who agreed with Bernays.
President Hoover was the first politician to articulate the idea that consumerism had become the central motor of American life.
After his election he told a group of advertisers and public relations men,
"You have taken over the job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines.
Machines which have become the key to economic progress."
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, and so created a stable society.
Both Bernays and Littman's concept of managing the masses takes the idea of democracy and it turns it into a palliative.
It turns it into giving people some kind of feel-good medication that will respond to an immediate pain or immediate yearning,
but will not alter the objective circumstances one iota.
I mean democracy really, the idea of democracy at its heart was about changing the relations of power that had governed the world for so long.
And Bernays' concept of democracy was one of maintaining the relations of power,
even if it meant that one needed to sort of stimulate the psychological lives of the public.
And in fact in his mind that was what was necessary.
That if you can keep stimulating the irrational self, then leadership can basically go on doing what it wants to do.
Bernays now became one of the central figures in a business elite that dominated American society and politics in the 1920s.
He also became extremely rich and lived in a suite of rooms in one of New York's most expensive hotels where he gave frequent parties.
Oh my goodness, he had a home in the corner suite of the Sherry Netherland Hotel.
And here's this wonderful suite with all these windows looking out on Central Park and across at the plaza and on the square.
And he would use this place to hold a soiree.
The mayor would come, all the media leaders would come, the political leaders, the business leaders, the people in the arts.
I mean it was a who's who.
He wanted to know Eddie Bernays because he himself became a sort of a famous man, a sort of a magician who could make these things happen.
He knows everybody. He knows the mayor and he knows the senator and he calls politicians on the telephone.
As if he did get literally a high or a bang out of doing what he did.
That's fine, but it can be a little hard on the people around you, especially when you make other people feel stupid.
People who worked for him were stupid and children were stupid and if people did things in a way that he didn't, that he wouldn't have done them, they were stupid.
It was a word that he used over and over and over, dope and stupid.
And the masses?
They were stupid.
But Bernays' power was about to be destroyed dramatically and by a type of human irrationality he could do nothing to control.
At the end of October 1929 Bernays organized a huge national event to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the invention of the light bulb.
President Hoover, the leaders of major corporations and bankers like John D. Rockefeller were all summoned by Bernays to celebrate the power of American business.
But even as they gathered, news came through that shares on the New York Stock Exchange were beginning to fall catastrophically.
Throughout the 1920s speculators had borrowed billions of dollars.
The banks had promoted the idea that this was a new era where market crashes were a thing of the past.
But they were wrong. What was about to happen was the biggest stock market crash in history.
Investors had panicked and begun to sell in a blind relentless fury that no reassurance by bankers or politicians could halt.
And on the 29th of October 1929 the market collapsed.
The effect of the crash on the American economy was disastrous.
Faced with recession and unemployment, millions of American workers stopped buying goods they didn't need.
The consumer boom that Bernays had done so much to engineer disappeared and he and the profession of public relations fell from favor.
Bernays's brief moment of power seemed to be over.
The effect of the Wall Street crash on Europe was also catastrophic.
It intensified the growing economic and political crisis in the new democracies.
In both Germany and Austria there were violent street battles between the armed wings of different political parties.
Against this backdrop, Freud, who was suffering from cancer of the jaw, retreated yet again to the Alps.
He wrote a book called Civilization and its Discontents.
It was a powerful attack on the idea that civilization was an expression of human progress.
Instead, Freud argued, civilization had actually been constructed to control the dangerous animal forces inside human beings.
What was implicit in Freud's argument was that the ideal of individual freedom, which was at the heart of democracy, was impossible.
Human beings could never be allowed to truly express themselves because it was too dangerous.
They must always be controlled and would thus always be discontent.
The Civilization of Human beings
Man doesn't want to be civilized and civilization brings discontent, but it is necessary to survive.
Otherwise he couldn't survive. So he must be discontent because this would be the only way to keep him within limits.
But what did Freud think about the idea of the equality of man?
He didn't believe in it.
We had 32 parties and Hitler said, before those parties don't vanish, there is no Germany. That's true.
You can't have 32 parties and so they felt this one person will put an end to this comedy.
Freud was not alone in his pessimism. Politicians like Adolf Hitler emerged from a growing despair in the 1920s about democracy.
The Nazis were convinced that democracy was dangerous because it unleashed a selfish individualism, but didn't have the means to control it.
Hitler's party, the National Socialists, stood in elections promising in their propaganda that they would abandon democracy because of the chaos and unemployment it led to.
The parties promised the heaven and the earth.
In March 1933 the National Socialists were elected to power in Germany and they set out to create a society that would control human beings in a different way.
One of their first acts was to take control of business. The planning of production would in future be done by the state.
The free market was too unstable as the crash in America had proved.
Workers' leisure time was also planned by the state through a new organization called Strength Through Joy. One of its mottos was service not self.
But the Nazis did not see this as a return to an old form of autocratic control.
It was a new alternative to democracy in which the feelings and the desires of the masses would still be central.
But they would be channeled in such a way as to bind the nation together.
The chief exponent of this was Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda.
It may be good to have power that rests on weapons. But it is better and happier to win the heart of a people and to keep it.
Goebbels organized huge rallies whose function he said was to forge the mind of the nation into a unity of thinking, feeling and desire.
One of his inspirations, he told an American journalist, was the writings of Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays.
In his work on Crown Psychology, Freud described how the frightening irrationality inside human beings could emerge in such groups.
The deep, what he called "lebidinal forces of desire" are given up to the leader.
While the aggressive instincts are unleashed on those outside the group.
Freud wrote this as a warning. But the Nazis were deliberately encouraging these forces because they believed they could master and control them.
Freud was saying that masses are bound by "lebidinal forces". They leverage Asia and delegate their ideas and opinions to the Czech on top.
What are "lebidinal forces"?
What are "lebidinal forces"?
All forces of love.
Not hate?
No, hate is delegated to the others outside.
It's a mob.
[Sirens]
I could see from afar, looking up Wilhelmstraße towards Unter den Linden, how those hundred thousand of people, when they passed Hitler, they just became completely delirious.
I began to shout these twice, I will never get out of my ear, heil, sieg heil, they demented.
And here I got confirmation how those irrational forces, uncontrollable forces in Germany, in the Germans, had erupted, had broken out, were running wild, were departing, marching, marching on.
[Sirens]
And in America too, democracy was under threat from the force of the angry mob.
The effect of the stock market crash had been disastrous. There was growing violence as an angry population took out their frustration on the corporations who were seen to have caused this disaster.
Then, in 1932, a new president was elected who was also going to use the power of the state to control the free market.
But his aim was not to destroy democracy, but to strengthen it. And to do this, he was going to develop a new way of dealing with the masses.
I am prepared, under my constitutional duty, to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.
In the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me.
I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis.
Fraud, executive power.
It was the start of what would become known as the New Deal.
Roosevelt assembled a group of young technocrats and planners in Washington.
He told them that their job was to plan and run giant new industrial projects for the good of the nation.
Roosevelt was convinced that the stock market crash had shown that laissez-faire capitalism could no longer run modern industrial economies.
It had become the job of government.
Big business was horrified, but the New Deal attracted the admiration of the Nazis, especially Joseph Goebbels.
We are in the midst of the economic development in America with the greatest positive interest.
And we are the best convinced that President Roosevelt and his advisors are on the right track.
It is indeed the greatest economic and social problem of all time.
The many million unemployed who have lost their jobs to machines and to the companies, to return to their old jobs.
This cannot be left to the private initiative alone.
It is crucial that the public takes positive measures.
But although Roosevelt, like the Nazis, was trying to organize society in a different way,
unlike the Nazis, he believed that human beings were rational and could be trusted to take an active part in government.
Roosevelt believed it was possible to explain his policies to ordinary Americans and take into account their opinions.
To do this, he was helped by the new ideas of an American social scientist called George Gallup.
Favorite reading of New Deal Washington, the survey of U.S. public opinion.
From offices at Princeton, New Jersey, a famed statistician, Dr. George Gallup, tells Washington from week to week what the nation is thinking.
And in New York, Fortune magazine's analyst, Elmo Roper, compiles for publication a continuous record of the nation's approval or disapproval of how the country is being run.
Gallup and Roper rejected Bernays's view that human beings were at the mercy of unconscious forces and so needed to be controlled.
Their system of opinion polling was based on the idea that people could be trusted to know what they wanted.
They argued that one could measure and predict the opinions and behavior of the public if one asked strictly factual questions and avoided manipulating their emotions.
Well, how about this one? Do you think Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal has been bad for the nation in general?
No, that question's loaded. It automatically suggests an answer.
Well, how about this? Is your present feeling toward President Roosevelt one of general approval or general disapproval?
That's better.
Prior to scientific polling, the view of many people was that you couldn't trust public opinion. It was irrational.
That it was ill-informed, chaotic, unruly, and so forth. And so that opinion should be dismissed.
But with scientific polling, I think it established very clearly that people do are rational, that they do make good decisions.
It offers democracy a chance to be truly informed by the public, giving everybody a voice in the way the country is run.
I know my father wouldn't necessarily say the voice of the public is the voice of God, but he didn't feel very much that the voice of the people is a rational voice and should be heard.
What Roosevelt was doing was forging a new connection between the masses and politicians.
No longer were they irrational consumers who were managed by sating their desires. Instead, they were sensible citizens who could take part in the governing of the country.
In 1936, Roosevelt stood for re-election. He promised further control over big business. To the corporations, it was the beginning of a dictatorship.
Roosevelt interferes with private enterprise and is running the country into debt for generations to come. The way to get recovery is to let business alone.
But Roosevelt was triumphantly re-elected.
It looks, my friend, like a real landslide this time. So please let me thank you again and tell you that I hope to see you all very soon and visual and affectionate good night.
Faced with this, business now decided to fight back, to regain power in America.
At the heart of the battle would be Edward Bernays and the profession he had invented, public relations.
Following that election, business people start to get together and start to carry on discussions, primarily in private.
And they start talking to each other about the need to sort of carry on ideological warfare against the New Deal.
To sort of reassert the sort of connectedness between the idea of democracy on the one hand and the idea of privately owned business on the other.
And so, under the umbrella of an organization which still exists, which is called the National Association of Manufacturers, and whose membership included all of the major corporations of the United States,
a campaign is launched explicitly designed to create emotional attachments between the public and big business.
It's Bernays' techniques being used on a grand scale. I mean totally.
The General Motors parade of progress, traveling the high roads and byroads of America,
bringing to millions of Americans in their own hometown the fascinating story behind modern industry.
The campaign set out to show dramatically that it was business, not politicians, who had created modern America.
...a better mode of living for all of us.
Bernays was an advisor to General Motors, but he was no longer alone.
The industry he had founded now flourished as hundreds of public relations advisors organized a vast campaign.
They not only used advertisements and billboards, but managed to insinuate their message into the editorial pages of the newspapers.
It became a bitter fight. In response to the campaign, the government made films that warned of the unscrupulous manipulation of the press by big business.
The central villain was the new figure of the public relations man.
They tried to achieve their ends by working entirely behind the scenes, corrupting and deceiving the public.
The aims of such groups may be either good or bad, so far as the public interest is concerned,
but their methods are a grave danger to democratic institutions.
The films also showed how the responsible citizen could monitor the press themselves.
They could create a chart that analyzed the reporting for signs of hidden bias.
But such earnest instruction was to be no match for the powerful imagination of Edward Bernays.
He was about to help create a vision of the utopia that free market capitalism would build in America if it was unleashed.
In 1939, New York hosted the World's Fair. Edward Bernays was a central advisor.
He insisted that the theme be the link between democracy and American business.
At the heart of the campaign was the idea of a new world.
The idea was to create a vision of the world that would be free market capitalism.
At the heart of the fair was a giant white dome that Bernays named "Democracy City".
And the central exhibit was a vast working model of America's future, constructed by the General Motors Corporation.
To my father, the World's Fair was an opportunity to keep the status quo, that is capitalism in a democracy.
Democracy and capitalism, that marriage, linking, just like that.
He did that by manipulating people and getting them to think that you couldn't have real democracy in anything but a capitalist society.
Which was capable of doing anything, of creating these wonderful highways, of making moving pictures inside everybody's house, of telephones that didn't need cords, of sleek roadsters.
It was consumerist, but at the same time you inferred that in a funny way democracy and capitalism went together.
The World's Fair was an extraordinary success and captured America's imagination.
The vision it portrayed was of a new form of democracy, in which business responded to people's innermost desires in a way politicians could never do.
But it was a form of democracy that depended on treating people not as active citizens as Roosevelt did, but as passive consumers.
Because this, Bernays believed, was the key to control in a mass democracy.
It's not that the people are in charge, but that the people's desires are in charge.
The people are not in charge, the people exercise no decision making power within this environment.
So democracy is reduced from something which assumes an active citizenry to the idea of the public as passive consumers.
Driven primarily by instinctual or unconscious desires, and that if you can in fact trigger those needs and desires, you can get what you want from them.
But this struggle between the two views of human beings, as to whether they were rational or irrational, was about to be dramatically affected by events in Europe.
Events that would also change the fortunes of the Freud family.
In March 1938, the Nazis annexed Austria. It was called the Anschluss.
Hitler arrived in Vienna to an extraordinary outpouring of mass adulation.
But even as he drove through the city, behind the scenes the Nazis were systematically whipping up and unleashing the hatred of the crowd against the enemies of the new Greater Germany.
The Anschluss was a kind of explosion of terrible hatred against the enemies, so-called enemies, or whatever they considered enemies, against the Jews in totally,
and also against a lot of very distraught citizens who had opposed the Nazis in Austria.
They said it's legitimate now, you can do what you want, so they did it. Stealing, robbing and killing, I can't say it otherwise.
And human depravity of course is always very near to normal behavior. It can change very quickly.
[Sound of a train]
As the violence and assassinations raged in Vienna, Freud decided he had to leave.
His aim was to go to Britain, but he knew that Britain, like many countries, was refusing entry to most Jewish refugees.
But help came from the leading psychoanalyst in Britain, Ernest Jones.
He was in the same ice skating club as the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, and Jones persuaded Hoare to issue Freud a British work permit.
And in May 1938, Freud, his daughter Anna and other members of his family set off for London.
[Music]
Freud arrived in London as Britain was preparing for war, and he settled with his daughter Anna in a house in Hampstead.
But Freud's cancer was now far advanced, and in September 1939, just three weeks after the outbreak of war, he died.
[Music]
The Second World War would utterly transform the way governments saw democracy and the people they governed.
Next week's program will show how the American government, as a result of the war, became convinced there were savage, dangerous forces hidden inside all human beings, forces that needed to be controlled.
The terrible evidence from the death camps seemed to show what happened when these forces were unleashed.
And politicians and planners in post-war America would come to believe that hidden under the surface of their own population were the same dangerous forces.
[Music]
And they would turn to the Freud family to help control this enemy within.
[Music]
And ever adaptable, Edward Bernays would work not just for the American government, but the CIA.
[Music]
And Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna would also become powerful in the United States, because she believed that people could be taught to control the irrational forces within them.
Out of this would come vast government programs to manage the inner psychological life of the masses.
[Music]
The Century of the Self continues next Sunday night on BBC2, same time, 8 o'clock. Tonight, the final part of SAS, next.
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Let's say a word about dreams. We all have thoughts which we never knew we had.
They are too uncomfortable, too incompatible with our adult self to be remembered.
Yet they are often disturbing, rumbling under the surface like lava in a volcano.
The dream is the royal road to these thoughts, the royal road to the unconscious.
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.
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They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany.
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To stop it ever happening again, they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind.
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At the heart of the story are Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna and his nephew Edward Bernays who had invented the profession of public relations.
Their ideas were used by the US government, big business and the CIA to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people.
Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.
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The story begins in the middle of the fierce fighting of the Second World War.
As the fighting intensified, the American army was faced by an extraordinary number of mental breakdowns among its troops.
49% of all soldiers evacuated from combat were sent back because they suffered from mental problems.
In desperation, the army turned to the new ideas of psychoanalysis.
They made a film record of the experiment using hidden cameras.
It says here on your record that you had hideous and that you had crying spells.
Yes sir. I believe that your profession is called nostalgia.
In other words, homesickness.
Yes sir. It was induced when shortly before the war.
I received a picture of my sweetheart.
Yes.
[Music]
It was the first time that anyone had paid such attention to the feelings and anxieties of ordinary people.
At the heart of the experiment were a number of refugee psychoanalysts from Central Europe.
They worked with American psychiatrists to guide and shape the project.
When I first came to America, I worked in the psychiatric service with soldiers trying to rehabilitate them.
And I traveled in the train from the East Coast to the West Coast.
I was enormously curious what goes on in all of those little towns that the train is passing.
After my years in the army, I knew exactly what every warrior was doing in the little towns.
Because I saw so many people who came from there.
And I understood their aspirations, their disappointments and so forth.
So it was as if somebody invited me to a privileged tour into the inner soul of America.
I'm not doing this deliberately, so please believe me.
I do believe you.
A display of emotion is sometimes very helpful.
I hope so, sir.
I guess it ought to be cherished.
Well, sir, to be perfectly honest with you, I'm very much in love with my sweetheart.
She has been the one person that gave me a sense of importance.
And through her cooperation with me, we were able to surmount so many obstacles.
Take it easy now. Just talk to...
The psychoanalysts used techniques developed by Freud to take the men back into their past.
They became convinced that the breakdowns were not the direct result of fighting.
The stress of combat had merely triggered old childhood memories.
These were memories of the men's own violent feelings and desires,
which they had repressed because they were too frightening.
Think deeply. Let's go back. When was it you...
To the psychoanalysts, it was overwhelming proof of Freud's theory
that underneath human beings were driven by primitive, irrational forces.
You want that?
World War II was a major, shattering experience,
because I discovered the enormous role of the irrational.
In the lives of most people.
That I can say. That I learned.
That the ratio between the irrational and the rational in America
is very much in favor of the irrational.
That there is much greater unhappiness, much more suffering, much more.
A sadder country than one would imagine it from the advertisements that you get.
A much more problematic country.
Victory in the Second World War was celebrated as a triumph of democracy.
But in private, many policymakers were worried about the implications of the analysis of the soldiers.
It seemed to show that underneath every American were irrational, violent drives.
What had happened in Germany seemed to bear this out.
The complicity of so many ordinary Germans in mass killings during the war
showed just how easily these forces could break through and overwhelm democracy.
Planners and policymakers had been convinced by their experiences during World War II
that human beings could act very irrationally
because of this sort of teeming and raw and unpredictable emotionality.
The kind of chaos that lived at the base of human personality
could in fact infect the society, social institutions,
to such a point that the society itself would become sick.
That's what they believed happened in Germany,
in which the irrational, the anti-democratic went wild.
What was a vision of human nature is incredibly destructive,
and they were terrified that Americans would in fact behave that way,
or were capable of behaving that way, and they wanted to avoid a rerun of that.
What is needed is a human being that can internalize democratic values
so that they are not shaken with the storm.
And psychoanalysis carried in it the promise that it can be done.
It opened up new vistas as to how the inner structure of the human being can be changed
so that he becomes a more vital, free supporter and maintainer of democracy.
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.
The source of this idea was not only Sigmund Freud, but his youngest daughter Anna.
She had fled with her father to London before the outbreak of war,
and after he died Anna Freud became the acknowledged leader of the world psychoanalytic movement.
She saw her job as to fulfill her father's dream of making his ideas accepted throughout the world.
At the center of the world is the idea of a new world,
that the center of the Freud movement stood to Anna because she managed to work herself into that position.
She was recognized as that, and not just because she was a daughter.
She worked, she worked on that.
She was rather forbidding.
She was not to me a warm person, not an aunt you could kiss or put your arms around.
Not at all.
And her whole life rotated around the spreading of psychoanalysis.
Freud himself had seen the role of psychoanalysis as allowing people to understand their unconscious drives.
But Anna Freud believed it was possible to teach individuals how to control these inner forces.
She had come to believe this through analyzing children,
above all the children of her close friend Dorothy Berlingham.
Dorothy Berlingham was an American millionaireess who in the 1920s fled a failed marriage,
and brought her children to Anna Freud in Vienna.
They were suffering terrible anxieties and aggression,
and Anna Freud was convinced she could free them from this by changing the world around them.
She thought that she could come in and into their environment essentially because they were children,
you see they didn't have independent lives of their own.
She could go talk to the parents or the mother, she could go to the schools,
she could influence their real world, the actual external world, to change their lives and to help them.
And to change those people?
And that was part of what her idea was, is that she felt that she could change them.
From her analysis of the Berlingham children, Anna Freud developed a theory of how to control the inner drives.
It was simple, you taught the children to conform to the rules of society.
But this was more than just moral guidance.
Anna Freud believed that if children like the Berlinghams strictly followed the rules of accepted social conduct,
then as they grew up, the conscious part of their mind, what was called the ego,
would be greatly strengthened in its struggle to control the unconscious.
But if children did not conform, their ego would be weak,
and they would be prey to the dangerous forces of the unconscious.
In my father's case, they were concerned that he would be a homosexual,
and so a lot of their efforts went into preventing or trying to stop my father from becoming a homosexual,
whether or not he would have or did, or, you know, it's unknown to me.
Why did they want to stop him?
Because they felt it was abnormal, it wasn't a normal way to develop.
They wanted to have him develop along lines that society recognized to be normal,
because if they didn't, then you're going to be under the control of forces that you don't understand, that you're not even aware of.
The analysis seemed to be a great success, and in the '30s the Berlingham children had returned to America.
They settled down to happy married lives in the suburbs.
What they didn't realize was that their experience was about to become a template for a giant social experiment
to control the inner mental life of the American population.
In 1946, President Truman signed the National Mental Health Act.
It had been born directly out of the wartime discoveries by 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.
Shocked by the appalling percentage of the emotionally unstable revealed by the World War II draft figures,
Congress in 1946 passed the National Mental Health Act,
which recognized for the first time that mental illness was a national problem.
Canely aware of the tremendous problems ahead is Dr. Robert H. Felix, Director of the vast new project.
A primary objective of the National Mental Health Program is to increase our fund of scientific knowledge
about mental health and about mental illness.
We're not doing this. Why? Because there are all too few skilled mental health workers.
Two of the principal architects of the act were the Menninger brothers, Carl and Will.
Will had run the wartime psychotherapy experiments,
and now he and his brother began to train hundreds of new psychiatrists.
The Menningers were convinced that it would be possible to apply Anna Freud's ideas on a wide scale,
and to adults as well as children.
The psychiatrist's job would be to teach ordinary Americans how to control their unconscious drives.
Psychoanalysis could be used to make a better society.
They said psychoanalytic thinking could make for the betterment of society,
because you could change the way the mind functioned.
And you could take the ways in which people did hurtful things to themselves and others
and alter them by enlarging their understanding.
And this was the vision psychoanalysis brought.
That you could really change people?
That you could really change people.
And you could change them almost in limitless ways.
In the late 40s, a vast project began in America to apply the ideas of psychoanalysis to the masses.
Psychological guidance centers were set up in hundreds of towns.
They were staffed by psychiatrists who believed it was their job to control the hidden forces
inside the minds of millions of ordinary Americans.
Yes, I need something done. I need some help.
I need some help.
Did you have any particular teachers that you liked?
I liked all my teachers except one. I don't remember.
What was the couple? This one?
I don't know. She just scared me most of the time.
She'd holler at me and I'd run outside and vomit.
I hate my brother. Losing him. Despising him.
At the same time, thousands of counselors were trained to apply psychoanalysis to marriage guidance.
And social workers were sent out to visit people's homes and advise on the psychological structure of family life.
Behind all this was the fundamental idea of Anna Freud's.
That if people were encouraged to conform to the accepted patterns of family and social life,
then their ego would be strengthened.
They would be able to control the dangerous forces within them.
When your emotions control your actions, it affects not only yourself, but the people around you.
And if this sort of flare-up is repeated often, it might lead to a permanently warped personality.
You can control the fire of your emotion so that your personality becomes more pleasant.
So we expect that someone who's been through that experience to be much more insightful, much more understanding, and a much better regulated person.
And what happens to the guy?
Regulation includes being able to let go, as it were, to enjoy a football game or a soccer game.
A more understanding, yes rational, but also appropriately emotional person.
The regulatory aspects of the human mind would really be in charge.
Instead of being overwhelmed by our passions and by our darker impulses.
That one would be master or mistress of one's own passions.
They just felt that the road to happiness was in adapting to the external world in which they lived.
That people could be uncrippled from their own neurotic conflicts and impulses.
That they would not engage in self-destructive behavior.
That they would in fact adapt to the reality about them.
They never questioned the reality.
They never questioned that it might itself be a source of evil or something to which you could not adapt.
Without compromise or without suffering or without exploiting yourself in some way.
So there was this fit with the politics of the day.
And a balance of emotions is important to a well-rounded personality.
But it was only the beginning of the rise to power of psychoanalysis in America.
Psychoanalysts were about to move into big business and use their techniques not just to create model citizens, but model consumers.
Last week's episode showed how Freud's American nephew, Edward Bernays, had been the first to convince American corporations that they could sell products by connecting them with people's unconscious feelings.
But now a group of psychoanalysts were going to take what Bernays had begun and invent a whole range of techniques to get inside and manage the unconscious mind of the consumer.
They were led by Ernest Dichter.
Dichter had practiced next door to Freud in Vienna, but he had come to America and set up the Institute for Motivational Research in an old mansion north of New York.
This is the Institute for Motivational Research.
A place devoted to the intriguing business of finding out why people behave as they do.
Why they buy as they do.
Why they respond to advertising as they do.
And this is Dr. Ernest Dichter.
We don't go out and ask directly, "Why do you buy? Why don't you?"
What we try to do instead is to understand the total personality, the self-image of the customer.
We use all the resources of modern social sciences.
It opens up some stimulating psychological techniques for selling any new product.
Like the other psychoanalysts, Dichter believed that American citizens were fundamentally irrational beings. They could not be trusted.
Their real reasons for buying products were rooted in unconscious desires and feelings.
And Dichter wanted to find ways to uncover what he called the secret self of the American consumer.
He was trying to get out of people's mind the unconscious motivations that they had for purchasing.
These could be sexual, they could be psychological, they could be sociological, they could be a demand for status, a demand for recognition.
There were things that people couldn't verbalize or wouldn't verbalize because they were too secret to them.
They were too much a part of their nature and they would be embarrassed if they came out and said things like this.
He would interview people but not ask them direct questions.
But let them talk freely like you do in psychoanalysis.
And that was his background.
And so he said, "Why can't we have a group therapy session about products?"
Alright? And so Dichter built this room up above his garage and he said, "We can have psychoanalysis of products. They can actually act out and verbalize their wants and needs."
What we're going to do is try a couple of these salad dressings.
So let's see what happens. There's our typical housewife. She doesn't follow the instructions.
And they could be observed and watched and other people could comment and they could talk about it and everybody could join in.
He was the first to do this. This was absolutely the first thing that was ever done.
And he had a movie projector up there where you could show advertisements and things like that and people could react to them.
And he invented the whole technique for mining the unconscious about the hidden psychological wants that people had about products.
This became the focus group.
It worked!
Dichter's breakthrough came with a focus group study he did for Betty Crocker Foods.
Like many food manufacturers in the early 50s, they had invented a new range of instant convenience foods.
No consumers had told market researchers they would welcome the idea. In fact, they were refusing to buy them.
The worst problem was the Betty Crocker cake mix.
Dichter did a series of focus groups where housewives free-associated about the cake mix.
He concluded that they felt unconscious guilt of the new image being promoted of ease and convenience.
In other words, he understood that the barrier to the consumption of the product was the housewife's feeling of guilt about using it.
They basically on one hand wanted to make it easy for themselves, but they felt guilty about it.
So what you've got to do in those circumstances is remove the barrier, the barrier being guilt.
The way you do that is to give the housewife a greater sense of participation.
And how did you do that?
By adding an egg.
Egg.
Simple as that.
Simple as that.
Dichter told Betty Crocker to put an instruction on the packet that the housewife should add an egg.
It would be an unconscious symbol, he said, of the housewife mixing in her own eggs as a gift to her husband, and so would lessen the guilt.
Betty Crocker did it, and the sales soared.
My cake is ready.
The consumer may have basic needs that the consumer himself or herself doesn't fully understand.
You have to know what those needs are in order to fully exploit the consumer.
Is it wrong to give people what they want by taking away their defenses, helping remove their defenses?
It seems so much longer than last year.
It is. Nearly four inches longer in some levels.
Oh.
Dichter's success led to a rush by corporations and advertising agencies to employ psychoanalysts.
They became known as the Depth Boys, and they promised to show companies how to make millions by connecting their products with people's hidden desires.
Dichter himself became a millionaire, famous for inventing slogans like "A Tiger in Your Tank."
Even the marketing of the Barbie doll came from a children's focus group.
And so it goes.
But Dichter was convinced that this was far more than just selling.
Like Anna Freud, he believed that the environment could be used to strengthen the human personality.
And products have the power both to sate inner desires and give people a feeling of common identity with those around them.
It was a strategy for creating a stable society.
Dichter called it the strategy of desire.
To understand a stable citizen, you have to know that modern man quite often tries to work off his frustrations by spending on self-gratification.
Modern man is eternally ready to fill out his self-image by purchasing products which complement it.
If you identify yourself with a product, it can have a therapeutic value.
It improves your self-image.
And you become a more secure person and you have suddenly this confidence of going out in the world and doing what you want successfully.
Planets believed that that would then improve the whole of our society and become the best society on this planet.
[Music]
By the early 50s, the ideas of psychoanalysis had penetrated deep into Amer