How Fashion Became Fashionable

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”.

You’re Going to Love This!

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 Convinced Women to Smoke

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.

How free am I really – to “make up my own mind”?

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