'A hundred years ago a new theory about human nature was put forth 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.
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.
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.
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. Bernays read it and the picture of hidden irrational forces inside human beings fascinated him. He wondered whether he might be able to make money manipulating the unconscious. So Eddie began to formulate this idea that you had to look at things that will play to people's irrational emotions. Bernays set out to experiment with the minds of the popular classes.
What the corporations realized they had to do was transform the way the majority of Americans thought about products. 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.
After World War I Freud was basically a pessimist. He felt that man is an impossible creature and a very sadistic and bad species and did not believe that man can be improved. Man is a ferocious animal, the most ferocious animal that exists.
What fascinated and frightened journalists 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 re-think democracy. What was needed was a new elite that could manage what he called the bewildered herd.
This would be done through psychological techniques that would control the unconscious feelings of the masses.
And so here you have Walter Lippmann, probably the most influential political thinker in the United States, who is essentially saying the basic mechanism of the mass mind is unreason, is irrationality, is animality.
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 it's Discontents. It was a powerful attack on the idea that civilization was an expression of human progress.
Instead Freud argued civilization had 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 thus always be discontent.
What did Freud think about the idea of the equality of man? He didn't believe in it.
Bernays manipulated people and got them to think that you couldn't have real democracy in anything but a capitalist society which was capable of doing anything.
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 if you can in fact trigger those needs and desires you can get what you want from them.'
