The “Century of Self,” a 2002 BBC documentary by film maker Adam Curtis accurately and entertainingly presents the Twentieth Century as characterized by manipulation of the mass psyche. Successful new psychological ideas and technologies allowed marketers to influence potential customers in ways never before possible. One premise of the series, which consists of four hour long segments,is that marketing has elevated the consumer to the status of king but taken away his free mind. It makes much of Sigmund Freud's notion of the unconscious and his nephew Edward Bernays' techniques of marketing to unconscious desires.
Adam Curtis deplores this wildly successful method of persuasion. He is a statist, disgusted that businesses fill people's heads with nonsensical desires and then takes advantage of those desires. The shows are anti business, of course, and anti consumer. They take for granted that people thus influenced are diminished, those in control as undeserving, and Bernays, himself, among others, as offensively arrogant.
But in the last of the four presentations the show focuses on what Curtis considers the very worst culprit, politicians, whose adoption of these same strategies to win elections has allowed unscrupulous campaigners (Bill Clinton and John Major) to win elections based entirely on their willingness to spout whatever focus groups have demonstrated that voters what to hear, with no intention of actually trying to deliver on their promises.
While the motives of business advertising are essentially straightforward (all they want is to sell a product) when politicians use the same techniques, they do so to lie. Politicians pander to the voter and then, once elected, act much differently than they promised.
Curtis believes that government should be above the callous machinations that compel grubby business. But when he shows that what works for business (finding out what people want and giving it to them) can not work for government, statist that he is, he leaves out the important fact that government power rests upon coercion while competition restrains business. When businesses use focus groups to find out what consumers subconsciously desire, they plan to use the information to actually design and market products that consumers will willingly pay for.
And despite his assumption that business is the heavy and that if only government could escape its pernicious influence and govern in a truly “democratic” style all would be well, the malevolence of political operators fairly pops out at the viewer.
The summation statement at the end of the series, delivered by the well known statist Robert Reich unintentionally sums up the argument of freedom lovers everywhere. Reich gets too close to the enemy he was trying to stare down. By contrasting the relative success of business in satisfying individuals, with government's hopeless defect, Reich inadvertently frames a more important debate that the program hadn't considered at all: whether or not government is even necessary.
To governing elites, successful business advertising seems an easy target. What people in really do want is seldom what the elite consider best for them. After all the Soviet Union produced exquisite Ballet for the masses. Whether they preferred it or not, who knows; without a free market government decides.
And that's the point. Someone gets to decide. In the Soviet Union, the governing elite, wielding power through theft and coercion, decided what entertainment would be available.
Governing elites are like that: what else could they be like? Business elites, living and dieing by voluntary interaction, must pander to their markets.
Which is more benign?
Socialists are in power everywhere, but lucky for freedom, their most articulate spokesmen are intellectual midgets.
Adam Curtis deplores this wildly successful method of persuasion. He is a statist, disgusted that businesses fill people's heads with nonsensical desires and then takes advantage of those desires. The shows are anti business, of course, and anti consumer. They take for granted that people thus influenced are diminished, those in control as undeserving, and Bernays, himself, among others, as offensively arrogant.
But in the last of the four presentations the show focuses on what Curtis considers the very worst culprit, politicians, whose adoption of these same strategies to win elections has allowed unscrupulous campaigners (Bill Clinton and John Major) to win elections based entirely on their willingness to spout whatever focus groups have demonstrated that voters what to hear, with no intention of actually trying to deliver on their promises.
While the motives of business advertising are essentially straightforward (all they want is to sell a product) when politicians use the same techniques, they do so to lie. Politicians pander to the voter and then, once elected, act much differently than they promised.
Curtis believes that government should be above the callous machinations that compel grubby business. But when he shows that what works for business (finding out what people want and giving it to them) can not work for government, statist that he is, he leaves out the important fact that government power rests upon coercion while competition restrains business. When businesses use focus groups to find out what consumers subconsciously desire, they plan to use the information to actually design and market products that consumers will willingly pay for.
And despite his assumption that business is the heavy and that if only government could escape its pernicious influence and govern in a truly “democratic” style all would be well, the malevolence of political operators fairly pops out at the viewer.
The summation statement at the end of the series, delivered by the well known statist Robert Reich unintentionally sums up the argument of freedom lovers everywhere. Reich gets too close to the enemy he was trying to stare down. By contrasting the relative success of business in satisfying individuals, with government's hopeless defect, Reich inadvertently frames a more important debate that the program hadn't considered at all: whether or not government is even necessary.
Fundamentally, here we have two different views of human nature and of democracy. You have the view that people are irrational that they are bundles of unconsciousness emotion That comes directly out of Freud. And business are very able to respond to that. That's what they have honed their skills doing. That is what marketing is really about. What are the symbols, the music, the images that will appeal to these unconscious feelings. Politics must be more than that. Politics and leadership are about engaging the public in a rational discussion, a deliberation about what is best, and treating people with respect in terms of their natural abilities to debate what is best. If it is not that, if it is Freudian, if it is basically a matter of appealing to the same basic unconscious feelings that business responds to, why not let business do it? Business, after all is in the business of responding to those feelings.
To governing elites, successful business advertising seems an easy target. What people in really do want is seldom what the elite consider best for them. After all the Soviet Union produced exquisite Ballet for the masses. Whether they preferred it or not, who knows; without a free market government decides.
And that's the point. Someone gets to decide. In the Soviet Union, the governing elite, wielding power through theft and coercion, decided what entertainment would be available.
Governing elites are like that: what else could they be like? Business elites, living and dieing by voluntary interaction, must pander to their markets.
Which is more benign?
Socialists are in power everywhere, but lucky for freedom, their most articulate spokesmen are intellectual midgets.
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