The Century of Self

I just finished watching a 4 hour BBC documentary entitled "The Century of Self". It's one of the most impressive documentaries I have seen in a while. It should be required viewing for all people in Western societies to understand why the world is the way it is. It chronicles how the ideas of Sigmund Freud and other members of his family have deeply affected our current society. His daughter Anna Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays have had a huge influence on our consumer and mental cultures.
Freud had many ideas about human nature, but the main point that has stuck with us is that people are irrational and are driven by unseen and unnoticed instincts. At the time, it was a very astute realization and it's undoubtedly true. He is the father of modern Psychology. Not discussed in the movie is the fact that Freud was a coke head, and he saw and studied (almost exclusively) mentally ill people. He concluded that people are unpredictable and dangerous unless their inner drives are suppressed or redirected. I knew all of this because I studied Psychology. What I didn't realize was how far reaching his conclusions have become in our society. This is thanks to Edward Bernays.
Bernays also had a decidedly negative view of human nature, as he agreed with many of Freud's ideas. He was concerned that Democracy was not sustainable if people's impulses were not controlled and manipulated. So he developed modern Public Relations. He believed that the elite few should control how people expend their energy and how they behave by directing their desires to consumer products and appealing to their basest emotions. He wanted conformity through consumerism, and boy how did he succeed! He was a mastermind of getting people to do what companies wanted. For example, it used to be taboo for women to smoke cigarettes publicly. One cigarette company was concerned that half of the market was unavailable to them. Bernays set up a publicity stunt. He got a bunch of well dressed debutantes to march at the front of an Easter Day parade and to light up their cigarettes all at once on his cue. He told the media that suffragettes were going to light up 'torches of freedom' at the parade. It got huge media coverage, and the idea that women were sparking cigarettes for freedom's sake appealed to women, as it challenged men's power. The taboo was broken, and now women wanted to smoke too.
That was just the beginning of Bernay's long career in making people desire things that they didn't need. He worked for the President of the United States as well as many companies finding ways to make people desire their consumer goods. He was a very rich and powerful person. His whole strategy revolved around targeting people's base desires and connecting them to politicians or companies.
Anna Freud moved to America after her father died, and began the study of child psychology. She based her findings on her work with 2 children. She believed that if she could influence the children to conform to society, that it will keep them mentally healthy. Her worked influenced many other psychologists and has gone on to be a dominant influence of modern child psychology. What is bizarre to me, is that out of the two children she based her conclusions on (who were brother and sister), the sister committed suicide, and the brother didn't seem to be too well off either. This leads me to the conclusion that modern child psychology is deeply flawed, and we have Anna Freud to blame for it.
Starting in the 1960's, there came a change to American society's view of conformity. More and more people and a different school of psychologists focused on individual needs, and thought that these are what really drive some people. These inner driven people want to be individual and unique. At first, manufacturers were scared; their business model focused on mass producing goods and conformity. If people didn't want to conform any more, they wouldn't be able to sell their goods. Luckily for them, the same focus groups that were used from the 30's to the 60's changed tactics. Instead of trying to get people to conform, they had people describe their base desires and whims. And then the companies started making products that they might want to buy. What a gold mine! Now instead of losing out on the people that were inner driven, they could keep the conformists and get the inner driven people to buy products that 'expressed' themselves. No consumer left behind?
And America and much of the rest of the world has suffered for this. Rational discussion is no longer possible with many people. They want what they want. It's like we're all spoiled children, demanding to get what is ours. This is why people want lower taxes, and better public services. These are opposite ideas. You need to raise taxes if you want better public services. But politics is now all about pandering to the masses. Whatever they want to hear, they'll say, because being elected is what matters. Later in the documentary is shows how Bill Clinton and Tony Blaire in England changed their political parties forever. At the start of Clinton's presidency, he was pushing for health care reform and welfare. But people saw the increase in taxes as a personal assault on them. He lost popularity and was afraid that he would lose the re-election campaign. He hired Dick Morris, a public relations genius who started doing market research on swing voters (people that might vote Republican or Democrat). From that point on, all Clinton did was pander to those people so that they would vote for him. There was no longer any long term goals, just the short term goals of satisfying swing voter whims. And it worked beautifully. Blaire's campaign followed the same strategy, and his Labour Party gave up on their long time political stances.
How badly has this damaged society? It's hard to tell, but it seems to be damaged beyond repair. How do you get people to realize that they're not independent in this world? Everything is connected. When people have been advertised to so incessantly, and told that they deserve the best of everything and to be focused only on themselves, you can't just strip them of this idea by reason. Because emotions are irrational, and that is what they have been following for so long.

The only thing I can think of right now, is that connections need to be shown. To a married woman with that expensive diamond ring: it depended on people doing backbreaking work for little money, company executives marketing to you, people shipping the diamond, the people at the store selling the diamond, your husband who worked however many dozens or hundreds of hours to afford it, and all the people he interacted with at his company and his customers who paid his wages. It didn't just appear out of nowhere. <-------- This message though is much harder to convey than what diamond commercials have to do. "A Diamond is Forever", show some romantic silhouettes, and the name of the company. Especially hard is the fact that a commercial showing how diamonds actually get to your finger would never make it to a television station. It would hurt their advertisers ability to sell diamonds.

What can be done? How can people be shown that individual well-being should be connected to the well-being of everyone? If rational discussion can't be had, how do you fight base instincts? Through other emotional appeals?