The business and political worlds use psychological techniques to read, create and fulfill the desires of the public, and to make their products and speeches as pleasing as possible to consumers and voters. Curtis questions the intentions and origins of this relatively new approach to engaging the public.
Part I: “Happiness Machines”
Part II: “The Engineering of Consent”
Part III: “There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads; He Must Be Destroyed”
Part IV: “Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering”
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, changed our perception of the mind and its workings. Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays was the first to use psychological techniques in public relations. His daughter Anna Freud was a pioneer of child psychology Wilhelm Reich, an opponent of Freud’s theories, is also discussed. This documentary explores the various ways that governments and corporations have used Freud’s theories.
The Century of the Self asks deeper questions about the roots and methods of consumerism and commodification and their implications. It also questions the modern way people see themselves, the attitudes to fashion, and superficiality.
Where once the political process was about engaging people’s rational, conscious minds, as well as facilitating their needs as a group, Stuart Ewen, a historian of public relations, argues that politicians now appeal to primitive impulses that have little bearing on issues outside the narrow self-interests of a consumer society.
Paul Mazur, a leading Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in 1927, stated: “We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. […] Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”
Other main subjects are Philip Gould, a political strategist, and Matthew Freud, a PR consultant and the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud. In the 1990s, they were instrumental to bringing the Democratic Party in the US and New Labour in the United Kingdom back into power through use of the focus group, originally invented by psychoanalysts employed by US corporations to allow consumers to express their feelings and needs, just as patients do in psychotherapy.
Curtis ends by saying that, “Although we feel we are free, in reality, we — like the politicians — have become the slaves of our own desires,” and compares Britain and America to ‘Democracity’, an exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair created by Edward Bernays.