The Century of the Self – Episode One: Happiness Machines.

In this weeks lecture, we watched a documentary by Adam Curtis, The century of the Self, and episode one – ‘Happiness Machine.’ This documentary focused on Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Fraud and his importance in the founding of the idea of public relations and advertising. He believed that a crowd could be controlled the crown in an age of mass democracy.  He was the first person to take Freauds ideas about human beings and use them to manipulate the masses, showing large corporations how to sell products to peoples self conscious making them happy and in turn making them a dossal controllable crowd.

Freaud believed crowds were a potentially dangerous and believed World War I was an example of this each human has a dangerous and instinctive side deep inside them. Meanwhile in America Bernays was working in New York managing  opera singer, and was employed to promote America’s aims of bringing democracy to all of Europe both at home in America and abroad. Propaganda made people believe they were now free – which lead Bernays to think if you can control people in wartime, you could do so in peacetime and propaganda turned into public relations.

He looked at the work of his uncle to manage the new crowds and the possibility to make money to manipulate the minds of the individuals by playing to irrational feelings. He started an experiment to try and get women to smoke, which at the time was taboo. The president of the American Tobacco Cooperation, George Hill wanted this taboo broken too. He first employed A.A. Brill, a psychoanalyst who found women thought of cigarettes as a symbol of male sexual power – and believed that if they could find a way to challenge this idea. Bernays persuaded Debutants to smoke in a large public parade calling them ‘torches of freedom.’ As a result he had made women smoking socially acceptable and making her more powerful and sales began to rise. He realised that by linking products to emotional desires and feelings could make people act irrationally. This fascinated American cooperation’s.

Cooperation’s were beginning to fear that after the war there was such a large amount of products available that soon people would have bought enough products as products at this time were sold on a basis of need. For millions of working class American were sold as necessities sold for practicality nothing more. The cooperation’s knew they had to change the way the consumer though about products switching from needs, to desires society.

Bernays was at the centre of this change of the consumer society. In the early 1920’s banks funded the operning of large department stores, which would be the outlet for the sales, and Bernays’ role was to create the new customer. He first was employed to promote a new range of women’s magazines and used techniques to linking  products to famous film stars who were also his clients and began product placement in film and at film premieres and events dressed the stars in products he represented- and also told car manufactures to advertise cars as symbols of male sexuality, as well as fake ‘independent’ studies, fashion shows in department stores. People bought things not just for need, but to show what others would think about them.

In 1927 the consumers had created a stock market boom, convincing people to buy new shirts and using the money bought from other banks he represented. He began to tell people, ordinary people, that they should also buy stocks. In 1924 the President Coolidge had become a national joke and needed an image lift. He persuaded celebrities to come and visit the White House – and essentially did the same for the president as he did for products. 

mean while in Vienna there was a financial crisis and Freud needed help and asked Bernays for help in which he published his book and received money from America. After dismissing the idea suggested by Bernays of writing an article for Cosmopolitan (another magazine Bernays promoted) he retreated to the Alps and began writing about the ferrous animal that humans were in groups. The publishing of his works had a large reaction from American journalist believing the fear of the crowd to over turn the government. Walter Lipmann saw this and believed that the human behaviour of making irrational thoughts meant they could not be trusted with democracy and needed stronger control. Bernays saw this as a chance to promote himself.

Bernays began to write a series of books that claimed he knew the techniques to put into action the ideas Walter Lipmann called for.  In 1928, President Hoover agreed with Bernays that consumerism had become the central motor of American life. He told taken over the job of creating desire and transformed people into happiness machines that would become to key to economic progress – a new idea to run mass democracy, a happy and docile, steady state.

Bernays became wealthy and held many party’s where the mayors, political leaders, journalist, senators would all want to come and know Bernays because he made things happen.

At the 50^th anniversary of the light blub in 1929, Bernays were given word that the New York stock exchange was falling dramatically. 29^th October 1929 – the market collapsed. Millions of American stopped buying products they didn’t need and couldn’t afford and public relations fell out of favour. Violence began in Europe and fraud retreated to the Alps again. He was writing a book that civilization was just to control the animal like behaviour of humans and that individual freedom was impossible and must always be controlled.

Adolf Hitler began with similar thoughts as Freauds that democracy was dangerous and humans were too selfish, and were elected in 1933. The aggressive actions came out on those who opposed – Freaud saw this as a warning. American too was at treat of the angry mob, and took out there angry on the co-operations who had appeared to cause the stock market crash.

With a president  Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and was going to use the power of the state to strengthen democracy’s by developing a new way on dealing with the crowds. This was the start of the ‘new deal.’ New industrial projects began to better the nation. Unlike the Nazis he believed that humans could make rational decisions and would explain policies to them.  He was forging a new connection between the crowed and positions and was sensible citizens.  This what Bernays chance for a come back of Public Relations. – which flourished during the General Motors show.

While Bernays is relatively unknown today, almost everyone has come across his techniques of Public Relation in some form almost every day.