Citizenship - "Dangerous Citizens"

You likely never heard of Edward Bernays, but his ideas have shaped your life in more ways than you can imagine. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays lived in the U.S., attempting to work out a living prior to World War One. He achieved fame by creating an overnight sensation. Approached by tobacco companies to persuade lawmakers to grant women the right to smoke, he turned to his uncle’s psychoanalysis concerning human cravings. He persuaded some elite women to hide cigarettes under their dresses as they took part in a Fifth Avenue Easter Parade in New York. At a given signal, they lit them up as a group and stunned the bystanders. Bernays had alerted the media to watch for it, even giving the entire show a term: “torches of freedom.” The mass media loved it and smoking by women quickly became accepted.His success at revealing how irrelevant objects could become powerful status symbols prompted America’s huge corporate barons to pay him well to find ways to manipulate the masses to purchase their products. For help, Bernays turned to his uncle, still living in Europe. Freud had been creating a sensation by publishing groundbreaking works about humans actually being dangerous creatures, propelled by inner cravings that could undermine the stability of any society. Though running counter to the prevailing wisdom concerning the freedoms of democracy, European elites increasingly believed Freud to be correct.Corporate and political leaders in America and their counterparts in Canada took the great author’s reasonings to a whole other level. Bernays instructed them that if citizens could be teased into making financial decisions on an emotional rather than intellectual level, then they could be manipulated to do almost anything. Paul Mazer, head of the Lehman Brothers financial empire, fascinated by Bernays’s outlook, challenged his financial counterparts with an evocative proposal:  “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.” Without ever knowing it, we as citizens were becoming pawns in a massive game of political and financial intrigue.By bringing Freud’s psychological theory to mass production, Bernays determined the future direction of capitalism and citizenship. A grand design was undertaken and heavily resourced to shift the average person from a citizen to a consumer. Freud had reasoned that the masses would transition easily into the new paradigm and he was right – people became the great collectors of things. To urge them in this direction, Bernays persuaded the great corporations to fund their own analysis of their products and then he pitched them to the citizenry as independent research. The media bought into it and the birth of public relations and the advertising industry had begun. It also had the adverse effect of creating channels for heavy political donations to political campaigns.This was an important development because it moved politics in America, and to a lesser degree in Canada, ever closer to the corporate agenda. As massive industry boomed in the U.S., politics became more aligned with the wealthy rather than the responsibilities of a democratic state.The effects of this were to be so profound that few were to ever fully realize what had taken place. The world’s young democracies were suddenly overtaken by a kind of materialism that was indeed heady stuff. Industry required the national infrastructure to make and distribute their products and they persuaded governments to use public money to accomplish it. In so many ways it worked, creating dynamic economies that witnessed the standards of living climb dramatically in most modern nations.But as we shall see tomorrow, it was all driven by a few key assumptions. Citizens had to be changed into consumers. Governments became useful only as they laid the groundwork for capitalism. And perhaps the most dangerous construct of all was this: the public can’t be trusted, because, as Freud maintained, they would be dangerous when let loose. This last outlook corresponded perfectly with the designs of the political and financial elites in western countries, permitting them to maintain control while isolating citizens from one another. You, as a citizen, were dangerous, especially as you gathered with others to press your case. To keep that from occurring, you were to be kept docile and content by merely acquiring goods, thereby permitting the powerbrokers to maintain their positions. It was never this simple, but for some it was the grand design. It cheapened citizenship.  Just as young democracies were improving the financial lives of people and should have been enabling citizens to build their own communities, forces were at play that would guarantee that would never happen.I’m not making these developments up. They are, in fact, clearly laid out in the remarkable and award-winning BBC documentary: The Century of the Self (recommended to me by journalist Susan Delacourt). These are lessons we as citizens must learn if we ever hope to get the kind of politics and political parties we wish for – something difficult to do when you’re perceived as dangerous.