The Century of Self – You Can’t Get Enough

Political spin doctors and advertisers understand what you want and pander to your unconscious desires — and YOU LOVE IT! In fact, you can’t get enough of it — and you don’t even know they are doing it.

• Did women start smoking because they wanted to choke down some tobacco smoke or because they were “lighting the torches of freedom?”
• Is bacon and eggs an all-American breakfast because it was good and healthy, or because it was a successful advertising campaign?
• Ever wonder how Bill Clinton could get people to re-elect him even after losing much of his middle class support in his first term?
• You think Obama won solely on “hope and change?”
• Do you think you wear the clothes you wear or drive the car you drive because you consciously made those decisions?

If you think you are thinking for yourself, politically or otherwise, you may want to rethink that.

The Century of Self is about Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis and how they have been effectively used for almost a century to control group thinking in advertising and politics. Freud’s influence in the 20th century, and beyond, may surprise you.

Edward Bernays, often called the father of public relations, was Sigmund Freud’s nephew. He too was a student of human psychology and believed that if he could understand the motives of group thinking, he could control the masses without them ever knowing it. In fact, you may have been affected by his advertising campaigns and not even know it, to this day.

After using Freud’s ideas to successfully dominate the advertising industry, Bernays moved on to politics where he learned he could apply the same techniques not only to control the masses’ thoughts during times of war, but also in times of peace. Of course, the politicians welcomed his skills – as did Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, who studied his book on propaganda that was written as a study of WWI.

When I came back to the United States, I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace. And “propaganda” got to be a bad word because of the Germans using it, so what I did was to try and find some other words so we found the words “public relations”. ~Edward Bernays

Watch The Century of Self and learn from it. If you don’t know the techniques being used to control you, you have little chance of defending yourself against them.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.  ~Noam Chomsky