Profit From Pain

Fascinating six-part documentary about the history of public relations in America - created by Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays, who also consequently created the Mythic Figure of Sigmund Freud after Freud found himself destitute and ridiculed in post-World War I Vienna. You history buffs will really enjoy this one. Details how PR execs are hired by the Powers That Be deliberately to subdue us into wanting Stuff and distracting us from what the Powers are up to. "Oh look, honey, that police officer is beating that baby in its carriage. Hey, that's a NICE carriage. Who made that baby's carriage?"

Really made me realize that choosing not to buy something that I want but don't need is a political act, a way of saying, "F#@& you, I am not controlled by any advertiser or persuaded to spend my money on some useless piece of crap that is purposefully designed to break in a year or two so that I will buy another. *I* will be happy with the love, laughter and mercy in my life because I know what has true value. And I won't be distracted from what Dell or ExxonMobil or AstraZeneca or State Farm or Coca-Cola or the GOP is doing to the health and welfare of my people just because their ads make me laugh or choke up a little."

Made me think of that Chris Rock quotation, "Only the white man can profit from pain."

I've also been thinking a lot lately about how every time there is a crisis, our leaders encourage us not to step up and sacrifice but to keep buying. And they don't do it in a subtle way, so that you can't discern the crass consumerism behind it. I mean, after 9/11 the Asshole just stood there and told us, "What you can do to support your country is to keep buying goods and services." What?! How about reaching out to those around me and helping them make their lives better? You're telling me the only thing I can do to keep America safe is to line the pockets of the super-rich with my hard-earned dollars? Money in exchange for security? Ummm, who looks like the terrorist now?

And I remember as a kid wondering why socialism and communism were vilified. They didn't seem like terrible ideas. Difficult to implement - impossible on the large scale because humans will frequently choose to act in their own best interest or to protect their loved ones, rather than for Das Communitas as a whole. But not inherently evil. This documentary shows how Bernays deliberately created the link between capitalism and democracy in the minds of the American people, who he referred to as the masses, the herd, stupid and dopes. When he was hired to engineer the 1939 World's Fair he demanded that the theme be the link between democracy and American business:

The World’s Fair was an extraordinary success and captured America’s imagination. The vision it portrayed was of a new form of democracy, in which business responded to people’s innermost desires in a way politicians could never do. But it was a form of democracy that depended on treating people not as active citizens, as Roosevelt did, but as passive consumers.

Because this, Bernays believed, was the key to control in a mass democracy. "It’s not that the people are in charge but that the people’s desires are in charge. So democracy is reduced from something which assumes an active citizenry to the idea of the public as passive consumers driven primarily by instinctual or unconscious desires, and that if you can in fact trigger those needs and desires, you can get what you want from them."