The Century of The Self Comes To An End
Coming Out From Under The Influence. Or how we went mad.
When I'm driving in my car
When a man come on the radio
He's telling me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imaginationThe Rolling Stones - 1965
There was an excellent TV series a few years back, in those ancient days (2002) when the BBC still produced decent documentaries. It was The Century of the Self, and, naturally, it can be found on Youtube.
It told us that American industry faced a problem after World War 1. The war had caused a huge ramp up in industrial production, as the factories raced to supply the European allies. The end of the war meant much of this capacity would soon become redundant, and the industrialists, and their bankers, faced a drastic contraction in their business, and income.
The vast mass of people were buying products, but only according to their needs. Their cars, shoes, clothes, and furniture were chosen according to practicality and durability. This wasn’t enough for the money men. Once the consumers had all the products they needed, they would stop buying, and the factories would become idle. Something had to be done, and they knew it:
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. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.
Paul Mazur, Lehman Brothers - 1928
The answer came from the nascent industry of public-relations, and it’s pioneer, Edward Bernays.
Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and very much a disciple of Freud’s work. He realised that concepts of psycho-analysis could be used not just for therapy, but for influence, or, in other words, manipulation. By associating products with inner irrational desires, industry could manipulate consumers to buy, and then desires would indeed overshadow needs. One of Bernays’ first commissions was from a tobacco company, who were frustrated that women weren’t buying cigarettes. The social norm at the time was that smoking was a male activity. Bernays devised a publicity stunt that associated smoking with the early women’s rights movement. By convincing women that smoking would empower them, he opened the opportunity for the tobacco industry to almost double their sales. So if you thought it was new thing for big business to associate itself with social justice movements, you now know that it was right there at the very start of consumerism…
So here was the start of the influence game in capitalism, and, shortly after, politics, and, then, in everything else really. Products became not just the tools of life, but statements about the owner, even if that statement was just part of the individual’s inner monologue. In fact, it was specifically that inner monologue that the influencers were trying to reach.
In the last hundred years a vast industry has grown up to influence us, probing ever deeper into our psyche, always looking for ever more sophisticated ways to bend our will to serve their needs.
Because every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction, our psyches started to react with these influences, until they became part of us. And, because some of these impulses are quite unpleasant, we start to react against what was happening within ourselves, and then the influencers reacted to that reaction.
So, at times, the influencers found ways to tap into our competitive nature, jingoism, and one-upmanship:
Then, when the competitiveness and one-upmanship turned sour inside us, they reacted to our reaction against it:
Of course, the unspoken message of the first ad is “this is not anything French, British, or a Mercedes”, while the even clearer message of the second is “this is not a BMW”. These are both clearly of the Bernays school of influence. In the first ad we should infer that buying that car will give us wealth, happy children, a beautiful partner, and a body that looks good in swim-wear. But then, at least, it describes some qualities of the product, speed, comfort, and efficiency, that might get us to those benefits. The second ad doesn’t even bother. If we want to be the polite, sophisticated, tall (did you catch that one…?), long haired salesman, if we want to be the opposite of the brash, crude, awful, potential buyer, we just need to buy that car. It doesn’t even attempt to offer a reason WHY a lump of steel and plastic should infer those qualities.
And I wonder where this young man learnt his attitude? Maybe his name is Reinhardt…? Maybe he learned that “money is nothing to be ashamed of” at his dad’s villa in Spain? Maybe he has “always been competitive” because his parents were so keen on beating the Germans to the beach…?
So was Audi changing it’s moral tone to suit a changing society? Or are influencers like this making the changes? At the very least it’s likely to be symbiotic. And how ridiculous is it that a car manufacturer has a moral tone at all! This is the key to the Bernays model; that we associate character traits with things that are not character. This isn’t just with products like cars, but in any area where someone can benefit from manipulating us.
There’s no better example of this than the field of politics. People have come to associate politics with tribalism, but it’s not tribal, at least not in the true sense of tribes. It’s more like the faked distinction between Audi and BMW owners. Government is a tool, a good, just like a car. It is there to do a job. So political parties are like car manufacturers in this sense; they offer us a product (government), and we are given the chance to buy it (vote). Sure, they may have some form of doctrine, but, like The Toyota Way, that doctrine only makes sense if it’s internal and leads to a better product. But that’s hard, it’s much easier to do what Audi did in that second ad; use some public relations tricks to associate their brand with some form of poorly defined righteousness. This happened in UK politics, at the time of that second ad. Tony Blair’s New Labour came in and didn’t change much from the Conservatives. They retained a free market economy, fought wars, and carried on friendly relations with despotic regimes. They even enacted policies that were at odds with their traditional voters; they encouraged mass immigration, and left unchecked the export of heavy industry through globalisation. But, like the svelte Audi salesman, they managed to look more righteous. They implied; “look, we’re not like the other guys, so we must be better, morally better”, and they did it in a smart way. They tapped into a subconscious longing we have to be better than how we were. Even though we were that way because previous influencers had persuaded us to be. It was straight out of the Bernays playbook.
Over the last hundred years, this impetus to influence has exploded in it’s size and scope. There are vast armies of people, trying to leverage every aspect of our subconscious. Everything is analysed through this lens; people work hard to find precisely the right colour for a logo, the ambience of a store or showroom, the compelling nature of a script, the appearance of a TV newsroom, and the moral reaction to a government policy. A hundred years ago, your psyche was your own. Now almost everything you interact with makes a claim on it.
And then came the internet.
Like so many things, the internet exploded this dynamic. Before the internet, a substantial infrastructure was needed to peddle influence . Influence was largely the preserve of corporations, governments and media producers. But the internet dumped a whole new bunch of players into this mix. And because of the interactive nature of the internet, these new players could create new means of influence with immense power. The influence could be instantaneous.
What isn’t often said is that this new type of influence was adding to the influence that went before, and has probably reacted with it in strange ways.
But perhaps this new type of influence will roll-over quite quickly. The new social media platforms gave unprecedented access to the world of influence to all of us. This has exposed us to the process of influence, more than ever before. When Eddie Bernays started his trade, no one knew what he was doing, apart from a tiny number of conspirators and confidantes. Now, there are many thousands of people who have the word “influencer” as a job title. People know how influence works. Everyone has a recording studio in their pocket, and everyone is a publisher, even if it’s just on their personal social media. More and more people understand camera angles, editing, speech intonation, selective interviewing, and all the other tricks of the influence trade. And when everyone knows how the tricks work, there’s no more magic to the act.
And when enough people are performers, there are no more audiences. This is what is happening right now. If everyone is an influencer, then no one is. This grand arc of mass manipulation, started by Eddie Bernays a hundred years ago, will die a kind of heat death, dissipated by it’s own hand.
And then what? In 1927, a journalist noticed, even then, the changing nature of the population.
A change has come over our democracy. It is called Consumptionism. The American citizens first importance to its country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.
Of course, this has spread across the World, it no longer applies just to the United States.
Can we go back? Hasn’t the Century of The Self changed us? Hasn’t the constant manipulation rewired us, and then rewired the rewiring, over and over, again and again? Can we be citizens anymore? Do we really know what that means? I’m not sure we are entirely the same species as we were in 1920. No one is alive who remembers the days before mass media and the coming of influence.
There’s a lot of craziness right now. One can’t help but think that the dissipation of influence leaves a sort of vacuum. It faked all kinds of good things, and those facsimiles give the illusion of satisfaction. Influencers used the Maslow Hierarchy extensively, from top to bottom, to order to make it FEEL like our needs were being met. And it did feel like they were. But that is all, it was only a feeling. The influencers even tapped into the search for self-actualisation through activist rebellion:
This Apple ad was part of the run up to the peak of the Century of The Self , but wasn’t at the very peak. The peak was probably the late nineties, before 9/11 punctured the Truman Show-like clear blue sky, and before the internet blew-up the age of influence, then began to dissipate it.
It is telling that the most notable movie of this era was The Matrix. It tapped into some nagging feeling that all was not as it seemed. That there was some deep, unnamed, dark unsettling truth behind all that was around us. On reflection, it was hardly surprising that we felt that way, given the vast amount of time and effort that had gone into manipulating us.
This movie also gives us the reason for the craziness we see around us:
You have to understand. Most people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured and so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it. — Morpheus, The Matrix - 1999
This is maybe why we are seeing a huge desire to believe unbelievable things. That the Earth is flat, that women can have penises, that men can give birth, that wearing a mask outside, alone, prevents disease, that you can print an infinite amount of money as a substitute for work, that a president who drone-strikes children deserves a peace prize, that women never lie, that airlines are spraying us with chemicals, that in a war there are always unambiguously good guys and bad guys, that asking someone on a date is sexual harassment, calling someone bald is sexual harassment, and… I could go on, but I’ll stop there. I’m sure you can add your own examples.
These all appear to be cries of “please, I beg you, plug me back in. I can’t live in this reality”. It felt good to feel part of a tribe through buying a car, it felt good to feel like a revolutionary by using a computer, it felt good to be on the side of the angels by voting for a political party. These were all as nonsensical as the things people are trying to believe now. It’s hardly surprising that some people are looking high and low for some fiction to give them comfort and meaning. They’ve had it all their lives, we all had it, our parents had it, even many of our grandparents had it.
Eric Weinstein says “The invisible world is first detected in the visible world's failure to close.” A temporary opening is like the falling light in the Truman Show:
Sometimes it is possible to quickly smooth over the anomaly with a narrative device - the light fell from a ‘plane, in this case. But what about when the entire veil starts to become transparent? The closer analogy is the book Nightfall. In this story there is a society on a planet that has never experienced night-time. When an eclipse happens, the inhabitants freak out at the sight of the stars. Their universe was suddenly revealed to be infinitely larger than they knew. All of their assumptions were proven wrong. Then they went crazy and burnt their society to the ground…
But… we are not there, we are here. There are signs of hope. Things are happening that are stepping beyond this World of influence and manipulation. Podcasting is the most singular media phenomena of our time. Two or three people, sitting, talking. That is all. No script, no special effects, no editing, no public relations team, none of the tools of influence. Yet hundreds of millions of people watch these talks, where everything and anything is discussed, be it politics, religion, relationships, sport, the arts, society, finance, all sorts of things. There is another phenomena developing now, unfenced online group chats, using apps such as Discord and Twitter Spaces. Strangers are gathering online to have these podcast-like discussions for themselves.
So maybe this is where the hope lays. Maybe we are taking our first stumbling steps towards remembering who we are. Maybe this is the end of manipulative influence, maybe this is the end of The Century of The Self.