Sigmund Freud believed that humans are irrational and are governed by their subconscious fears and desires. His nephew, Edward Bernays, put his theory to practice and got to work to build a social structure that controls the masses that could not be trusted to control themselves and would pose a threat otherwise.
What Bernays realized was that what people needed was very different from what they wanted. And that the latter was way more profitable for business. Also, as long as people’s desires were fulfilled governments could do pretty much what they wanted.
The National Socialists of Germany essentially shared the same belief about democracy as Bernays did: it didn’t work. Bernays’ solution was to build a system that provides an illusion of democracy and wellbeing, while the Nazis were straightforward: they would abandon democracy for an alternative that would channel the masses uncontrollable energies in ways that held the nation together. That didn’t work out too well either, but at least they were honest about their stance on democracy.
In the socio-economic system Bernays helped build, people are not active participants, but passive consumers. People are not in charge, their innermost (often irrational) desires are.
Ernest Dichter realized that people didn’t always know what they wanted and the origins of their desires were often unconscious.
One of his memorable achievements was when an instant cake didn’t sell well, he figured out it was because house wives felt guilty for not having to work. So they made the women add their own eggs to the mix, which changed the perceived ease of making the instant cake and now women felt like they deserved the credits for their work and sales soared.
The reason why they did what they did was they believed that by regulating people’s wild desires and unconscious fears, we’d live in a better society.
Psychoanalysts believed that ordinary individuals and the masses were not capable of being democratic by themselves unless their unstable way of being was controlled.
People took to the streets and demonstrated against corporations and the government and how they worked together to keep the masses docile while they fought an unjustified war in Vietnam. Demonstrators were overpowered by the state, which resulted in a change of tactics. The personal become political. People started making the changes in themselves they wanted to see happen at a social level. Psychologist that followed and took Reich’s teachings further developed methods for people to express their innermost fears and desires that would allow them to shed the controls and conditioning imposed by society.
Corporations realized they had to conform to the new non-conformist consumers in order to stay in business.
It also became clear that there was a limit to being different: the ways in which people liked to express themselves could be categorized. They called this method the Values and Lifestyles system. The exact same methods were employed in politics.
An old and finite economy based on the static needs of the masses fulfilled by mass produced products was made redundant by an ever changing and infinite number of individual desires that made infinite economies possible. In this new individualistic society, there is no society really. It’s all about the individual and satisfying its desires.
We willingly reduced ourselves to our conscious or subconscious desires and trying to satisfy them at all times. We have forgotten that being human is a lot more than that.
They were not part of a secret society with an evil plan to enslave humanity. They merely acted out of self interest (even believing they were making the world a better place) and in accordance with the incentives their environment gave them. There is no conspiracy. There is simply a profit motive and there are advanced techniques to read people and give them what they (don’t even know they) want.
- Question your own wants and desires – they may not be your own. (Dune)
- To live a good life, you need to work for things bigger than yourself: embrace interdependence, it is not all about individualism.