The Century of the Self

It cannot have been easy to make a documentary series about the history of advertising and consumer society, about ethics (and their absence), about notions of the self and its manipulation in the interests of power and profit. In "Century of the Self" Adam Curtis lays bare the mechanisms of consumerist brainwashing. He does so in an entertaining and engaging manner, using archival footage, amateur videos and interviews of great historical and ideological value. His voice-over is sometimes humorous but the script never loses touch with the seriousness of the topic. This series is so important and watchable that I expose my students to a few of its most crucial extracts. At the best of times, the more thoughtful students seem anyhow to wonder what weird kind of world they have been dumped into. After seeing this film most of them start asking essential questions about ethics, propaganda, manipulation, individual liberty, etc. Essential viewing, I think, for anyone endowed with a brain, a critical spirit and a modicum of self-respect.

This documentary is about the history of psychology but also about how it affects the average person. It covers early attempts to understand and shape human behaviour which were applied in the context of government and advertising. Really fascinating.

The Century of the Self is a thought provoking, four part documentary describing how Freudian and post-Freudian ideas about human nature were adopted by corporations and politicians to manipulate society and public values in the 20th Century. There is a particular focus on the influence of Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations, on American culture, business, and politics. This is a well crafted, engagingly paced, and consistently interesting documentary, and has developed a bit of a cult following.

This documentary is a bit overly simplistic and tries to fit the messy reality of history into neat little boxes. It gives far too much credit to Freud and his followers, failing to acknowledge that Freud's ideas, even by the 1970s, had been largely discredited and dismissed by the psychological community. The idea of an individual was not new to the 20th Century (let alone Freud or his successors), nor was the idea that most human beings are irrational simpletons (or worse) who must be manipulated and led around by the nose through appeals to their basest emotions and desires, but The Century of the Self tells us that these were revolutionary new ideas and concepts. One didn't need to be a Freudian to come up with advertising that, for example, shows a pretty woman in a short skirt sucking on a tubular popsicle and saying, "Oooh what an exciting man you are!" to a man in a flashy new convertible, but the documentary implies that pretty much all of advertising and public relations until the 1960s was driven by Freudian theories about human nature and the unconscious mind.

An embarrassingly ironic note is struck throughout with the use of mood music prompts to indicate to viewers what values they should attribute to different organizations and ideas, such as by playing foreboding, negative music whenever corporations are mentioned by the narrator. This becomes quite absurd in the context of what is basically an extended criticism of attempts by advertisers and politicians in the 20th Century to influence public sentiment through manipulative emotional prompting rather than honest information and debate about ideas.

Those criticisms aside, The Century of the Self is a good watch and filled with interesting information and insights.

The Century of the Self contrasts whimsical film footage with an ominous narrative.‭ ‬It describes the way our ideas about human nature have changed and how the development of psychology has allowed social institutions to use these ideas to exert more and more control over people.‭ ‬This documentary focuses its attention on Sigmund Freud's family,‭ ‬especially his daughter and nephew,‭ ‬who exerted a surprising amount of influence on the way corporations and governments throughout the‭ ‬20th century have thought about,‭ ‬and dealt with,‭ ‬people.

At the end of the‭ ‬19th century,‭ ‬Freud had a remarkable insight into human behavior.‭ ‬He believed that people were,‭ ‬often,‭ ‬unaware of what motivated them and didn't really know how they felt about things.‭ ‬He called this part of the mind,‭ ‬the part that people couldn't recognize,‭ ‬the subconscious.‭ ‬Being the cynic he was,‭ ‬Freud decided that the unconscious was filled with irrational,‭ ‬destructive,‭ ‬emotions which posed a danger to society.‭ ‬This was,‭ ‬unsurprisingly,‭ ‬a very unpopular point of view when Freud first wrote about it.‭ ‬At the time,‭ ‬people knew that they were,‭ ‬actually,‭ ‬divinely rational beings who were in complete control of themselves.

But Edward Bernays,‭ ‬Freud's American nephew,‭ ‬was a little more receptive to his uncle's ideas,‭ ‬not because he was concerned with whether or not people were naturally destructive,‭ ‬but because Freud's ideas about people having strong emotions might help him convince people to buy things they didn't really need,‭ ‬and make a lot of money for him and his clients in the process.‭ ‬As long as his uncle wasn't completely wrong,‭ ‬then all Bernays had to do was associate emotional ideas with pointless products,‭ ‬and then consumers just wouldn't be able to help themselves.‭ ‬He was right,‭ ‬and his remarkable successes created a new industry,‭ ‬called public relations,‭ ‬which relied,‭ ‬almost entirely,‭ ‬on playing emotional games with people's heads.‭ ‬

Worse,‭ ‬the terrifying events, fueled by Freudian propaganda, that began to occur in Germany during the depression convinced politicians that Freud had been even more right than they suspected.‭ ‬People's emotions were clearly dangerous and had to be controlled.‭ ‬Government agencies began using Bernays‭' ‬PR techniques,‭ ‬and Himmler's propaganda methods,‭ ‬to convince people to suppress their emotions and conform to social norms.‭ ‬Anna Freud,‭ ‬Sigmund's daughter,‭ ‬and one of his most influential evangelists,‭ ‬even decided that she would see to it that her British nephew and niece were raised this way,‭ ‬as an example.

However,‭ ‬one of Freud's students,‭ ‬Wilhelm Reich,‭ ‬eventually decided that Freud had been a little paranoid.‭ ‬Emotions weren't bad,‭ ‬people weren't evil,‭ ‬and the solution wasn't control and repression,‭ ‬but expression.‭ ‬Freud's daughter didn't like the sound of this,‭ ‬especially since her nephew and niece had since grown up to be severely troubled adults,‭ ‬providing an unnervingly good proof of his thesis.‭ ‬This Reich guy had struck a nerve,‭ ‬and so she ostracized him from the psychology movement.‭ ‬But Reich's ideas still caught on.‭

And this didn't make either industry or government any happier than Anna.‭ ‬Neither of them knew what to do with the individuals that self-expression created.‭ ‬They had mass-produced products and policies that they sold through massive public-relations campaigns.‭ ‬Then,‭ ‬they noticed that self-expression gurus were organizing‭ "‬focus groups‭" ‬where people met to work out how they felt about things.‭ ‬All these institutions had to do was ask these focus groups the right questions,‭ ‬and they'd tell them how to sell people more products and policies than they had ever imagined possible.‭

It turned out that all business and government really had to do was categorize people according to their emotional development and social attitudes and then play each category off of one other.‭ ‬Corporations could sell slight variations of the same mass-produced products to people,‭ ‬as long as they associated one variation with one group of people,‭ ‬and then convince them that this variation allowed them to express their true nature.‭ ‬And politicians no longer had to worry about sweeping social changes,‭ ‬they could just play off one segment of voters against another and then sit back and watch all the consumers obsessively buy things, oblivious to social problems.‭

Documentarian Adam Curtis' bewildering collage of film clips, pop-music snippets, and interviews helps portray the slightly absurd and surreal cynicism and manipulation practiced by the 20th-century's supposedly enlightened business and political leaders.

Adam Curtis documents the rise of consumer culture, public relations, propaganda and advertising. The main focus is Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew who used his uncle's behavioral theories in his advertising, public relations, and propaganda business. He was also hired by the US to soften public resistance to entering WWI.

In 1928 Bernays wrote a book called "Propaganda" and its first paragraph should be all you need to read to want to watch this documentary;

"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."

Got that? That was in 1928, His methods have since evolved into predictable science.