Up until this time, the idea of fashion and buying clothing because it was fashionable did not really exist amongst the ordinary public, it was only something which moved the wealthy upper echelons of society. But Bernays was about to change that. He was to introduce the idea that your choice of clothing had a great deal to do with expressing yourself as an individual and being an interesting person. And that you became powerful by fulfilling your(?) desires.
Many of the ideas and values that we have connected to ourselves and what we value have been “manufactured” by others and forced upon society through psychological manipulation. It is not really that we were unwilling to buy into these ideas, but as Bernays puts it, it was definitely the “engineering of consent”.
What Bernays was doing fascinated Americas 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.
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 Leahman 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 had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs. And Eddie Bernays was just the man for the job.
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 to break it.
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. 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.
We feel we are in control of our decision making and we are doing this autonomously – without outside influence. But are we? We are told repeatedly that we are “strong, independent, and free” to make choices, but this is a lie! A lie that causes much social division and much suffering.
Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, was to introduce industrial America to the idea that the general public not only could, but should, be controlled and directed. He famously stated: “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.”
Bernays is almost completely unknown today but his influence on the 20th century was nearly as great as his uncles. 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 to they could make people want things they didn’t need by linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires
The cultivation of greed and envy in the public at large was consciously promoted beginning in the mid-1920’s. These two qualities were the fuel for the economic engine which was to see a rapid expansion for well over half a century. But has it really been in the interest of humanity?
“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 had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” – Paul Mazur – Lehman Brothers (1920’s)
“For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.” – John Maynard Keynes (1930) – One of the most influential economists of the last century.
“The modern economy is propelled by a frenzy of greed and indulges in an orgy of envy, and these are not accidental features but the very causes of its expansionist success. The question is whether such causes can be effective for long or whether they carry within themselves the seeds of destruction.” – E.F. Schumacher – Economist and Philosopher
“If human vices: such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures.” – E.F. Schumacher – Economist and Philosopher
“I suggest that the foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the modem sense, because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man.” – E.F. Schumacher – Economist and Philosopher
“A person who is not disturbed by the incessant flow of desires—that enter like rivers into the ocean, which is ever being filled but is always still—can alone achieve peace, and not the man who strives to satisfy such desires.” – Bhagavad-gita 2.70
Our view of the world, ourselves and others determine our purpose in life and shapes our search for happiness. These views which we hold can often result in the clash of ideas. When our hopes or aspirations bump up against other peoples’ wills and desires, when we are forced to contend with the limitations of our natural environment and its’ resources, and then, when we experience the fact that material consumption cannot buy us happiness, we experience conflict.
We’re all aware of how political differences, or differences in social philosophies, lead to clashes of ideas, but I’m not dealing with those clashes here. I want to try and take a larger view, a more macro perspective of the conflict of larger ideas, something which is frequently overlooked in the heat of political or social debate.
For example, the world is madly in pursuit of economic development. As a society we place no upper limitations on this pursuit – “I want to be as rich as I possibly can be.” This desire contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited. But we fail to see the inherent conflict in this clash of ideas, or if we do, we quickly discard the concern and push on with “making money”.
Yet the consequences of pursuing unlimited economic growth cannot end in anything less than an utter catastrophe for our planet and its’ inhabitants. But why doesn’t the recognition of this danger, even if the recognition is fleeting, incite me to action? Because – to put it mildly, I’ve lost the plot. I am so invested in the philosophy of materialism I don’t really accept I have any other choice than to move with the herd.
The degree to which we have been brain-washed is not even obvious to us. People are mostly oblivious to the reality that what I consider as my ideas, my desires, my values – are not really my own. I did not form them alone. They were often influenced, if not shaped, by others – and I have often uncritically accepted these ideas as factual. Our shift from a “needs based” society to a “desires based” culture, which was the result of focused social engineering in the late 1920’s, is proof of this fact.
If we are to find solutions to what ails us and much of modern civilization, it requires we understand exactly where we are now and how we got here.
We live in a most extraordinary time, a time that has been described by some as the “post-truth era” or an age without a shared reality.
It would seem to the detached observer that truth has become an entirely subjective reality. You have your truth, I have my truth and having an objective truth is no longer seen as important.
I have, for quite a long time now, become increasingly concerned about this growing trend. It has, become common practice for a large percentage of those who seek to shape public opinion, to actively practice the craft of distorting facts. This has been referred to for some time now as ‘spinning the truth’. The distortion of facts is undertaken to further a variety of political, social, educational, religious, and even so-called ‘scientific’ agendas. The result is that society has collapsed into an appalling and lamentable state of confusion and individuals are increasingly displaying a dangerous erosion of civility towards others.
In this new blog series, I will attempt to examine some of the ‘truths’ and changing values we have accepted as a broader society in the hope of stimulating thoughtful discussion, and a reconsideration of where we are heading as a civilization.
We will discuss how opinion makers have consciously decided that we must all become released from the moorings which have tethered society for hundreds and thousands of years. The result has been that society has drifted precariously into dangerous waters.
We will discuss ethics, moral values and the “greater good” while examining how we got to the place in which we now find ourselves. As a society, and by this, I mean the broader human society, we have grown increasingly unhappy. Despite the astonishing signs of growing affluence, unparalleled in history, and the massive consumption of goods and services, we see that society as a whole has become sick. Symptoms of this sickness are; a sense of alienation, a lack of purpose, the pervasiveness of addictions, the growing daily intake of mood-altering substances now so prevalent in society, of depression, and a frightening increase in self-harming and suicide, particularly amongst the young. Surely any sane person would see this with alarm and question what we have become as a human race. We must also question what has become of our “values”? What do we see as the goal of precious human life?
