The Century of the Self

I've spent the last couple of hours watching the first half of the BBC documentary 'The Century of the Self' on Google video





The series charts the influence of psycho-analysis on the role of politics in business in the West. The first program centers of Freud's nephew - Edward Bernays - the founder of modern PR. He is presented as the first person to really link the power of persuasion to people's unconscious desires. It examines the shift after the first world war from a nation of citizens to a nation of consumers and the role that consumerism was hoped to play in taming the irrationality of the masses and creating a safe society.

What seems so strange to me now is the thought that being people's irrationality was somehow something to fear, although I guess the backdrop of the second world war and instability in Europe is what gave lie to this idea.

The second program continues where the first left off by exploring in more depth the link formed between business and psycho-analysis. It looks at how business took on board the lessons of appealing to unconscious desires to sell products via the Ernest Dichter's Institute for Motivational Research and the focus group. It talks about how psycho-analysis and the consumerism it was affording was seen as a way of empowering society by meeting people's needs and strengthening the ego.

I can't believe that as someone working in qual market research that I've not seen this before, although I'm not sure how well it would work as a motivational tool.

At the end of the programme, it looks at the rise of dissenting voices arguing that the control exerted on people by these techniques in the name of society is actually damaging and that we should be looking more at society as the source of violence and discord.

For example Arthur Miller: "There's a preconception that suffering is somehow a mistake... possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people's suffering"

Or Martin Luther King: "There are some things in our society to which I'm proud to be maladjusted"

Watching has got me thinking about a debate I've been having in my head about whether people can really be trusted to want the right thing from businesses, from politics? Whether some degree of paternalism is desirable or even necessary in today's world?

According to the documentary there was a similar debate going on between Edward Bernays - who believed that people couldn't be trusted to know what they wanted - and Roosevelt/Gallup - who believed that people could.

The question brought up by this film is if, after nearly a century of mass-consumerism, we are still dealing with the same 'self' that we were back then? How deeply has a consumerist way of thinking penetrated our mindsets? And shaped the options for action available to us?