I teach grade 12 university-level philosophy, and I teach it as a university prep-course. So we read primary sources, and we write essays longer and more complex than the standard five paragraphs. And then I brace myself for the complaints.
Why do we have to read about other philosophers? Why can’t we just explore our own philosophy?
I heard this one in art courses too, back when I actually taught art: “Why can’t we just discover our own style?” And I don’t just get it from the students but from parents too. “School should be about self-discovery,” they argue. “These other people are mainly dead, anyway. They don’t matter any more.” And then the real problem surfaces: “This is too hard for them. I can barely read it!”
I answer this the same way every year. First of all, I acknowledge that reading primary sources is the hardest thing many of them have ever been asked to do in their lives of Wikipedia-driven research methods, skimming, and cutting corners. Most textbooks are even summaries of summaries with lots of sub-headings and pictures and cartoons to allow weaker readers to decipher meaning from a variety of cues. Sometimes they're so simplified, they're devoid of real meaning. And here I am with the nerve to cruelly hit them with black text on a white background full of big words, sometimes olden-day words, and long, complicated sentences. These aren’t books they’re given, but just piecesof essays: a bit of Mill, some Thoreau, a dash of Aristotle.... And they’re assigned after reading several bits of essays and discussing what they mean together as a class. We take baby steps but all within one semester - the one semester that's most vital for university admittance.
Peterson was on Bill Maher last month. They're both people that have some clever ideas, but also promote a few questionable notions in a way that's slick enough to just get a pass from some intelligent people instead of necessarily getting the scrutiny deserved. Here's an innocuous and pleasant exchange between mutual fans:
ON POLITICAL CORRECTNESS:
In the video Maher defined political correctness as, "the elevation of sensitivity over truth," and lamented the "emotional hemophiliacs" who will bleed at the littlest thing, but instead of avoiding sharp objects, they make the world cover everything in bubble wrap. Peterson went one step further: "It's more like the elevation of moral posturing of sensitivity over truth." He explained a bit about resilience: "Security doesn't come from making the world safe, because that's not possible. You make people resilient by exposing people to things that make them uncomfortable . . . over-coddling leads to stupid and narcissistic people."
I had a brief Facebook conversation with Massimo Pigliucci about my decision to fritter away a morning watching the rain and petting my cat. He said, "It's up to you to determine whether your morning was wasted or not. But from a Stoic perspective the good use of time comes when one is doing something virtuous." And I started wondering further about what specifically counts as wasted time. So I turned to a thorough re-reading of Seneca's On the Shortness of Life. Here are the bits that stood out to me with chapters noted after each quotation:
Seneca points out that people complain about the cruelty of nature because life is short, even Aristotle did, but it's not short, it's just that we waste much of it (1). Then he lists many examples of what a waste of time looks like:
"soft and careless living...no worthwhile pursuit....held in the grip of voracious avarice....diligence that busies itself with pointless enterprises....sodden with wine....slack with idleness....tired out by political ambition, which always hangs on the judgment of others....desire for trading...in hope of profit....passion for soldiering....striving after other people's wealth....thrown...by a fickleness that is shifting" (2).
"There's violence to knowing the world isn't what you thought. . . . Sometimes the world doesn't make a lot of sense, but how we get through it is, we stick together, okay?" - Gloria Burgle, Fargo
I watched Joe Rogan's interview with (interrogation of) Johann Hari about his new book, Lost Connections. Rogan wasn't quite buying what Hari is selling, which is unfortunate because his premise is intriguing. He told a few stories through the podcast, but his book, while still a casual read, is heavily footnoted, and his view thoroughly supported with the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research. He even encourages us to "Kick the evidence. See if it breaks. The stakes are too high for us to get this wrong" (14). It's just this: Anxiety and depression are not primarily caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and drugs only work a little bit for very few people.
He needs all the footnotes because his claims are extraordinary, and the worst thing would be if this were seen as a mere conspiracy theory against Big Pharma. This is just a brief summary without all the data and examples. He interviewed many contemporary researchers and compiled the evidence necessary to convince the masses of our wrong turn on this one. And it's not about the cellphones!
The book cover says the book "provides the hope and clarity required to change the world." Well, he certainly tries. He's got a plan of action that's possible, but I didn't get the requisite hope necessary to be spurred to action. It's a bit of an overview of many ideas from different places, many of which are already in action somewhere in the world, and it left me with a solid book list to peruse, but it also left me with a sinking feeling that this will never work. We're never going to get our shit together enough to do any of this. But I've been wrong before.
The first part is a mix of Charles Taylor's notion of social imaginaries, Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, Robert Reich's Inequality for All, and Noam Chomsky's talks on solidarity. Then he gets into specifics about our ideas around our communities, environment, economics, and democracy.
He starts with the idea that we need a new story to guide us. Our cultural mythologies (or social imaginaries) give us the range of behaviours that seem reasonable. Monbiot describes it as "narrative fidelity":
I finally got to this pocket-sized book, which is full of the kind of lessons that were passed down from my folks and that I've been saying for decades and of some others that I'm hearing over and over in the past year. The behaviours are nothing new, and it is good to be reminded, but it's the background that's missing from my summary: Snyder's (no relation) clear link between pre-holocaust behaviour and now, what helped and what hindered. From a thorough understanding of history, Snyder gleaned twenty tips to help us avoid global catastrophe or at least preserve some semblance of freedom for ourselves in the coming years:
"The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why" (11).
I merged them all down to five to better remember them all:
I'm struggling with the concept of "bad faith" right now as it relates to our reaction to tragedies. Sartre thinks some people use tragedies to feel better about themselves – they may sign petitions, side with the working class, etc.– while still not seriously questioning themselves. And this is my concern. I'm a letter-writer and FB "like" clicker, but am I just pretending to act, or are these authentic acts in their own right? Is it an act in bad faith if I make a feeble attempt to help because I'm merely following my role? Essentially, what does it look like to question ourselves and our responsibility in the wake of tragedy?
There's something very Groucho about him!
Sartre explains that bad faith is illustrated when we divorce ourselves from our actions or when we make any claim to more limited choices than we actually have. It's what we do when we don't really want to take responsibility for what we're doing - pretending not to notice a hand on our knee, or pretending we had to do x because of the potential for some mild social disapproval. We're inauthentic when we don't admit our part in the game. It's a dishonesty with ourselves. This is what existentialism is chiefly about: challenging the individual to examine their life for intimations of bad faith and to heighten their sensitivity to oppression and exploitation in their world.
This summer, I went on one camping trip with a book on Stoicism, then another camping trip with a book on Existentialism, and I was intrigued by the many similarities. Then I came across this video that has some overlap with what I had noticed.
As they say in the video, Massimo Pigliucci (MP) on Stoicism and Skye Cleary (SC) on Existentialism, both are philosophies that offer a way to live instead of just a way to think about the world. I'm putting it all together here with quotes (names linked to sources) to sort it out for myself. I'm just thinking out loud here. This is too long for any normal person to want to read.
These are both philosophies that allow surveyors to pick and choose from variations on a theme as neither has one authoritative dude overriding all others, and, it would appear, few of the big guns cared to adopt either label anyway. For the Stoics, defining yourself as one is avoided because it's pretentious. In The Role Ethics of Epictetus, it's clarified that we are simultaneously different things, and how we play each role is more important than what our roles are. The roles are often not our choice, but how we do them are, i.e. whether or not we're a virtuous son, mother, teacher, or waiter (MP). For Existentialists, we can't be defined by the roles we take on because we're more than the mere facts about ourselves (SC), so labels become meaningless.
Some Bertrand Russell quotations have been floating around lately, so I read The Conquest of Happiness, first published in 1930, and, boy, did I need this right now! The main ideas and some bits I liked are below by chapter. The book is really just a mix of Stoicism and Epicureanism, so you could just read that instead, but they're not nearly as palatable. This summary is really long, but not nearly as long as the book!
Part I: Causes of Unhappiness 1: What Makes People Unhappy?
This chapter has some racist bit, but I imagine he was still more progressive than most at the time. We won't throw the baby out with the bathwater at any rate. He raises his thesis here: we can only be happy by being prudent with desires and by focusing outward.
I saw the film back in December and outlined his ten-point plan then. The interview followed that format as well, so I'll just summarize the key points here as succinctly as possible. The following is all made of direct or close to direct quotations from Chomsky with bits of Nader included. Check out the transcript if you want the whole thing verbatim to mine for quotes. This is just the idea.
This is Chomsky's last long-form documentary. It came out in January, but I hadn't heard about it until recently. I paraphrased/transcribed the 72 minute video liberally with links to further readings below.
It's about the American Dream: the idea that you can be born poor but work hard enough for a home and car and good schools - that's all collapsed. We profess to like the values of democracy, so public opinion should have an influence on policy and the government should carry out actions determined by the population, but the privileged sector doesn't like democracy. We have extreme inequality with a super wealthy group in the top 1/10th of the top one percent. It's unjust in itself, but it's got a corrosive effect on democracy.
The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power
Concentration of wealth yields concentration of power, especially as costs of elections skyrocket forcing politicians into the pockets of corporations. This translates into legislation that increases the concentration of wealth through fiscal policy (taxes, deregulation, rules of corporate governance) designed to increase the concentration of wealth and power in a vicious cycle of progress.
On the wake of the series 13 Reason's Whygaining a following on Netflix, with some teens actually planning to wear blue nailpolish on April 24th to commemorate the life and untimely death of a fictional character, maybe it's necessary to be reminded of this real life Canadian case. In that case April 7, 2013 is the day to remember.
Rehtaeh Parsons was a victim of assault and revenge porn enacted and filmed by a bunch of teenaged boys who had more power than they might have ever imagined: they could kill from a distance. As Elizabeth Renzetti says of these double-barrel assaults, they are, "not just an act of violence but a spectator sport." And here we thought we had come so far from the bloodlust days of the Colosseum.
The act isn't dissimilar from torturing an animal and showing pictures to people. It's a behaviour that is absolutely depraved. Who looks at those types of visuals without looking differently at the goon who took them? Unfortunately, there's enough of an audience that we need to be afraid. For some people, their body responds to the visuals even if their brain might hope it didn't. So clips are saved and circulated endlessly.
Circulating the film is also a mean of re-shaming the act. After years of the rally cry, "Rape is a crime, not a shame!" some perpetrators are working hard to make people ashamed to be raped for obvious reason: if they're embarrassed by it, they won't tell. But Rehtaeh did tell.
I've been teaching long enough to have watched a generation of students file past me. It's fascinating from a social science standpoint because I can watch trends evolving before my eyes. And, being a bit of a hoarder, I've kept everything I've used and all my marks along the way, so I feel like I have a good handle on changes in this population. And they are stressed out like never before.
To get my Challenges of Change kids in the head space of demographic changes in general, I talked to them about why stress has increased for teenagers, and this is what we came up with.
The first suggestion was that there's just too much work to do. But my many binders of old curriculum show the opposite. In my classes over the past 25 years, I've given progressively less work. The exams from my early career are significantly more focused on nit-picky details and few would be able to pass them today. They were also significantly longer, one requiring two opinion essays in half an hour! Now, I might give one opinion essay in an hour - four times the earlier duration. And I couldn't imagine implementing the standards of yore. So, from my anecdotal evidence (and that of colleagues), the stress level is higher with a diminished workload. How does that happen?
I first saw this at the theatre and, despite the fact that it starts with a whole lot of farting in a wide variety of tones and tempos, the ending is deeply moving. The surface story is about Hank, trapped on a deserted island - sort of - who finds a dead body, Manny, who slowly comes back to life - sort of, and they try to get back home in a Wizard of Oz kind of way. Here are a few different things I think it could be about; I'll likely read much into it because it had me thinking and questioning at every turn. Authorial intention be damned! There are a ton of spoilers, but they won't really ruin anything. This is a film that can be watched over and over.
As always, I loosely summarize/transcribe the important bits below if you don't have 33 minutes to watch the video.
THE PROBLEMS:
This is an astonishing moment in history. The human species has been around for about 200,000 years. Up until this point, people have made decisions about their lives, their immediate futures, but we’ve now reached the point that we have to make a decision about whether or not the species is going to survive in anything like its current form of organization of social systems.
We’re facing two fundamental questions: Nuclear war, which we know that if there were one, everything would be destroyed, and climate change. If we don’t make decisive steps right now, there will be irreversible catastrophic consequences. We’ve already inadvertently made the decision for a huge number of species. Anthropogenic climate warming is on the order of an extinction. We are playing the role of the asteroid this time.
I added the subtitle above because this is one trippy film, but it's important to see (or read this summary in about 15 minutes) after last night. It actually helps explain Trump. After Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self, a very straight-forward documentary (albeit 4 hours long), this one, at just shy of 3 hours, is absolutely bizarre by contrast. News footage is mixed with feature film content and inane YouTube videos all with a soundtrack mix of NIN, 80s techno, discordant carnival music, and creepy singing children. It has the intentional effect of a funhouse mirror. It was perfect to watch as the votes came in last night.
We’re living in strange times. Huge superpowers have no ability to deal with extraordinary events and no vision for the future. And the counterculture is also sucked into this make-believe world, so they have no real effect on anything either. Most of events in the film were outlined by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine a decade ago, but Curtis adds in some further connections (like Trump’s involvement) and takes us on a journey through it. It's not just that politics have changed, but the way we've been trained to think has shifted dramatically.
Charles Taylor gave a lecture on the "Crises of Democracy" two years ago, as part of a "Civic Freedom in an Age of Diversity" program where he explores the very complex situation we're in. He says we're not in a period of democratic stagnation, but in a downward spiral that has to be actively stopped. He takes up the same thread as in his Sources of the Self, that we have to go back to retrieve our past, our trajectory here and all the assumptions we brought with us, in order to understand our current situation. There's is a summary of his ideas below condensed in a way that I can best understand it all.
He's critical of John Rawls's veil of ignorance theory for ignoring an important part of politics. It's correct at the core, but it misses the reality that, at any given time, the capacity people have to put together common actions is limited or augmented by their culture. Whether or not a revolution succeeds or fails has to do with the state of the democratic repertoire, or what Taylor calls the "social imaginaries" of the people. During the American Revolution, people ruling already had a purchase in the habit of electing assemblies, so the notion of what it was to set that up was already familiar. That wasn't the case for the French Revolution, so a lengthy battle ensued.
If people can do something active within institutions outside of democracy, like credit unions and trade unions, then people can learn to act together and accomplish something. But we need a critical mass of people who are able to work together in this way before we can do it as a society.
First of all, I love that this Leo DiCaprio film, directed by Fisher Stevens, was free to watch everywhere on the National Geographic Channel for a while. But if you missed it, here's the gist of it below.
Without ads, it's 90 minutes, jampacked with information. The pacing is good, and that's key. I can't help comparing it to Josh Fox's film, because there are marked similarities - both feature one man, a passionate novice in the field, talking a little too much about himself as he flies around the world narrating his learning experience through listening to a variety of experts - many of the same experts even - as he aims to get some kind of a hopeful conclusion. But Leo's film works so much better. It helps that he has funds and connections - where Fox had footage from drones, DiCaprio had footage from space - and that he's a much better orator and has an incredible cinematography crew (and it doesn't hurt that Trent Reznor did the music), but what Stevens and DiCaprio got from the interviews and what they did with the material, the basic trajectory of the film, is what nails it as the superior vehicle to inspire positive change. In 2000, DiCaprio interviewed President Clinton on Earth Day, and they talked about the need for citizens to use better lightbulbs. He recognizes we're getting nowhere with that kind of rhetoric, and he does a good job at getting at the big picture quickly.
DiCaprio frames the film with a discussion of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych: The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is timely as Bosch died 500 years ago this year and you can take a really interesting, brief online tour of the work. The painting hung over DiCaprio's crib as a child. My parents were wary about giving me a book of his work when I was about ten. It's pretty disturbing for a little one, depicting our deal with God, our fall from grace, and the hell that awaits us for all our sins.
He also starts and ends the film at the United Nations as he took on the role of the UN Messenger of Peace with a focus on climate change back in 2014 when Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon remarked, "If this boat is sinking, then we will all have to sink together." And then he gets moving. Here's a very brief summary of pertinent remarks made with each place or person interviewed:
In the U.S., about 70% of people believe climate change is real, 35% believe it's caused by humans, and 16% are worried about it. The 30-minute film, "The Doubt Machine: Inside the Koch Brothers' War on Climate Science" explains how many people have been tricked into a false belief. It features Michael Mann, who was also in recent films made by Josh Fox and Leo DiCaprio. What makes him so important? He published the "hockey stick graph" in 1999, which shows how industrialization connects directly to the increase in global temperature, and he was summarily attacked for it.
Later used in Gore's Inconvenient Truth.
It was a matter of shooting the messenger. There were death threats made to him and his family, and money was offered to his colleagues to discredit him. He was eventually cleared of all wrong-doings. The smear campaign was funded by Charles and David Koch.
The Koch Brothers own a $100 billion oil, chemicals, and minerals empire. They control 1-2 million acres of the Tar Sands in our fair nation. And you thought this was just an American problem! Their number one goal is to stop any climate action. They do this by controlling Congress and the Senate by paying off politicians directly. The 52% of Senators and 39% of member of Congress that are in their pocket have pledged to stop any policy that will impede their business ventures. Because the US is so influential, this is the single biggest obstacle to climate change action.
The film doesn't say this, but if it weren't for the "intent to destroy" line in the definition, what the Koch brothers are doing is genocidal in nature: deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of a group in whole or in part. Okay, it's not a deliberate intent to destroy life; it's just an unfortunate side effect of their business model that will take down 100s of millions of lives. That's all.
Climate change is all real. The worst predictions keep coming true, and it's going to get so much worse really soon. We stand to pass 2° threshold by 2050. How much money does it take for politicians to allow policies to continue that will destroy the world for your children? About a million dollars on average.
The API - American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying arm of the oil industry, uses the same methods as the tobacco industry to provoke doubt. Remember this?
Charles and David's dad, Fred Koch, was a chemical engineer from Texas who couldn't get an in to promote his tactics in the U.S., so went abroad and set up refineries for Stalin and Hitler. Really. He trained his sons in neo-liberal, small government philosophies. In the 1990s, the Koch family needed clout in Washington to stop regulations that would impact their profits, so they got involved in bribinglobbying politicians for their support. Now their reach is unprecedented in its complexity. Any politician that runs counter to their policies is hung to dry, like republican Bob Inglis.
They have the cash to bombard the public with whatever message they need them to hear. And they have rounded up scientist-types who are making a fortune denying climate change. One of the most famous is Willie Soon, an aerospace engineer who carefully allows people to believe he's a climate scientist, even though the difference is huge. There were some climate scientists who were skeptical, but not now. There is too much evidence matching GHGs to climate change that it's clearly not just a matter of solar variability. No scientist educated in climate studies is currently denying that this is a human effect that requires human action to slow it down.
I just watched this four-hour doc on propaganda and social change and how we're swimming in Freudian concepts like it or not. It's older (2002), but it's compelling viewing useful to weed out the ideas of Freud from those of his followers. My notes are paraphrased (and editorialized) below:
1917 - the Emotional Root of our Desires
Edward Bernays (1891-1994), the father of public relations, is the nephew of Sigmund Freud, the son of Freud's sister and Freud's wife's brother. At just 26, he was asked to join Woodrow Wilson in creating a "Public Relations Council" to promote the war effort. He used conversations with his uncle Freud, whose ideas were soon after published in General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, to understand how people make decisions. Freud's writing was just about understanding why we act. Bernays used that framework of the psyche to develop a means to influence the collective behaviour of the masses.
As much as we like to think our reasoning abilities make us markedly different from other animals, we can be easily persuaded to act if someone plays on our irrational emotions. Bernays' first experiment to test the idea involved marketing cigarettes to women, which involved breaking a strong social taboo at the time. He convinced some suffragettes to march in the Easter parade, smoking, and called the cigarettes "torches of freedom." He spun the taboo into an oppressive restriction to be overcome, which made smoking immediately a symbol of power and independence. This was a brand new way of marketing products.
There was a growing concern with industrial overproduction, so Bernays helped the US shift from a culture focused on satisfying needs to one obsessed with fulfilling desires. He promoted the idea of regular citizens buying shares in companies, and he got film stars to come to parties at the White House, forever after linking politics with celebrity right up to today when Americans are choosing between Meryl Streep and Scott Baio.
1920s - Consumerism Will Save Us from Ourselves
Bernays arranged for Freud's works to be published in the U.S. and gain a widespread audience. He was his unofficial agent in the U.S. Freud wrote about how easily unconscious aggressive drives can be activated in crowds, concluding that man is a sadistic species. Bernays decided that if people are driven by irrational forces, then they need to be guided. If he could stimulate the inner desires of people and satiate them with things, then they wouldn't act on their aggressive impulses. Consumerism was a means to pacify the people as well as to make profits. He developed a system some called "enlightened despotism," or, as Walter Lippmann called it, "the manufacturing of consent, " a term made popular by Chomsky. Bernays saw how ads could create desire which could be easily satisfied and thus transform people into happiness machines.
Herbert Hoover agreed, and democracy became palliative. Democracy was no longer about challenging the relations of power, but about sustaining them.
1930s - Roosevelt Appealed to our Reason
Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents and clarified that civilization is a necessary means to restrain our animal forces. Individual freedom is impossible and far too dangerous, so we must be controlled externally (to suppress our violent and sexual urges), and therefore we will always be somewhat discontented. It's necessary to be limited individually in order to survive collectively but that's not to say, as Bernays suggested, that we should be controlled en masse to pacify the masses or otherwise (increase profits). But Bernays was right that we can be.
After the market crashed, the U.S. faced angry mobs out to fight corporations. Government used the power of the state to control the market (Roosevelt's "New Deal"). Roosevelt worked with George Gallop to poll people's ideas. They rejected Bernays' ideas, instead believing that people could be trusted to make wise decisions. They were going to avoid any manipulation and appeal to citizens' rational faculties.
Meanwhile, in Germany, Hitler abolished the huge numbers of parties running, and the National Socialists were elected. They took control of business with a motto of "service not self." He aimed to channel desires towards a better society rather than satisfy the selfishness of individuals. Joseph Goebbels was in charge of promoting ideas to the people, and he admired the way Roosevelt was controlling markets. Goebbels went further to encourage aggressive forces in citizens as he believed officials could control them to serve their final ends. He was right.
In 1936, Roosevelt pressured more control over big business and was re-elected. Businesses fought back with help from Bernays, starting an ideological warfare against the New Deal. They created the National Association of Manufacturers, which launched campaigns to create emotional connections between brands and businesses. He filled papers with the messages that business, not government, created America, and he created a vision of a potential utopia for the masses that couldn't happen with government restrictions on the market. The government was worried about the affiliation between the press and corporations and started creating national newsreels to teach people how to check for bias in the news, but it was just a matter of time before controlling the markets in any way, even price controls to benefit the poorest in society, would be linked to fascism.
Bernays' methods were instrumental in persuading the public towards a pro-corporate stance, and he was called to help the CIA to reestablish government control over citizens. He appears to have had few allegiances except money and maybe the thrill of figuring out what persuasive measure would work in a given situation.
1940s - We Can Be Masters of Our Domain
After Freud's death, his daughter, Anna Freud, began writing and speaking more. She started with her dad's premise that people must be controlled for society to work, but she believed people could be taught to control themselves. Freud thought we need to understand our desires and the unfortunate necessity of external controls, but Anna believed we could train our desires internally by changing how children are raised. She started by experimenting on two depressive children, and became close with their mother. When she saw the results of the Nazis unleashing the instincts of their citizenry, she started working intensively with large groups of children in need. Primarily she thought children need to be trained to conform to rules of society as a way to strengthen their ego, which will in turn help them control their own unconscious. (She also established specific defence mechanisms well beyond her father's work, yet they're almost always credited to Sigmund.)
Almost half of the returning soldiers suffered mental breakdowns. Psychoanalyst Martin Bergmann was recruited by the U.S. government to interview returning soldiers, and it was the first time people started exploring and discussing feelings. Bergmann decided that stress and mental breakdown are not caused from conflict, but from soldiers' personal childhood desire for aggression. According to him, they weren't traumatized by the aggression itself, but by their eager participation in it, by their own letting go of their instincts to fight. He further surmised that chaos at the base of human personality can infect society, so people need to internalize democratic values. This led Truman to create the National Mental Health Act to deal with the number of unstable men returning from war.
Psychiatrist brothers, Karl and Will Menninger, wanted to use Anna Freud's ideas on a wide scale to control the unconscious desires of citizens, so they invented Guidance Counselling Centres everywhere and encouraged everyone to go. Their focus was on controlling the "fire of emotions" within.
1950s - Identifying with Brands is Promoted as Therapeutic
Things shifted a bit as Harold Blum came on the scene and thought we could be "appropriately emotional," that we should be allowed to let go within limits since we can master our own passions. And Ernest Dichter, Freud's old neighbour, set up Motivational Research centres. This was the dawn of the focus group and the Mad Men style of marketing. Focus groups would have people free associate about products, encouraged to express their feelings and associations. A famous case is when they asked women why they didn't buy instant cakes, and realized just letting women add an egg to the mixture would increase sales dramatically. The underlying idea driving Dichter was similar to Bernays: that we can use the environment to strengthen and stabilize human personality; it's therapeutic and confidence-boosting for people to identify with specific brands. It was also hugely profitable, which likely didn't hurt. It's hard to say which was more important for the psychiatrists.
Bernays worked with Howard Hunt of the CIA to launch a "terror campaign" and stage a coup in Guatemala by making the conditions in the public and in the press more amenable to such a thing after a more socialist leader insisted on better working conditions (and thus lowered profits) in the American-owned United Fruit Company. The psychological warfare worked enough to provoke the army to stand down. They linked the former leader to communism, made the previous government seen as a threat to democracy, and made business interests seen as democracy incarnate. Bernays openly believed that most people are terribly stupid and can be manipulated to act like automatons.
Government money was given to psych departments in universities to do experiment on brainwashing. Ewing Cameron, of UCLA but working in at McGill in Montreal, used drugs and electroconvulsive therapy in an attempt to wipe and replace people's memories. It didn't work the way he hoped (with some horrific results); and he surmised that people are more affected by external persuasion than internal manipulation.
Anna Freud kept working on children conforming to social norms. She was friends with Ralph Greenson, Marilyn Monroe's therapist, who got Marilyn to move into his home as he decided that his family was the social model to follow.
1960s - Anti-Conformity Rebellions Led to Corporate Losses
After Monroe's suicide, Arthur Miller argued against this psychiatric method that suggests any suffering is a problem. Miller insisted we must let suffering inform our lives, not try to cure any and all tumults we feel. The method advocated by Greenson attempted to control people rather than free them.
Herbert Marcuse also criticized the method. He called it a childish application of psychoanalysis and explained that the planned obsolescence of our time, with a huge variety of things to have and do, leads to a schizoid existence. The destructiveness of the individual is due to "empty prosperity." He called out psychiatry for being used for corrupt purposes, and Anna Freud for increasing repression in her patients through forced conformity. Evil isn't from maladjusted inward conflict, but from society, and it must be challenged, not adapted to. Martin Luther King Jr. agreed with the words, "I am proud to be maladjusted" to a corrupt society. And then the two children that Anna Freud started her method on, both committed suicide. This provoked a new student left to attack this system of social control, sometimes violently.
Wilhelm Reich challenged Freud's premise that people are driven by animal instincts and society is a controlling force that keeps our raging inferno of emotions in check. He countered that our drives are positive and repression by society distorts them. Reich thought violence is a result of denying our libido full expression; neurosis is a result of ineffective orgasm. And then things got really weird with the Human Potential Movement and confrontational experiences and encounter workshops that involved violent and sexual release. Werner Erhard got on board with the EST movement, believing that we can create ourselves individually, only the individual matters, and we can largely ignore society. Students and young adults became less political as they became more self-obsessed.
The downside of all this self-exploration was a corporate loss, particularly to life insurance companies, which are built on the protestant ethic prompting us to sacrifice for the future. Too many people were living for today. The new enlightenment needed products to help people express their individuality, but, at the time, variety wasn't cost-effective for factory production.
1970s - We Can be Reduced to a Lifestyle
The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was used to measure and test desire satiation. Abraham Maslow, a humanistic psychologist famous for his self-actualization test, also created a tool to measure people's values on a hierarchy of needs that rises as people liberate their feelings. This was the beginning of categorizing society for marketing purposes. He believed we can be defined by the choices we make, and he surveyed people to see how people fit a set of identifiable types he called: lifestyles. The Values and Lifestyles survey (VALS) categorized people into more specific purchasing types than could be determined by age or income: Mainstreamers have a need for security and belonging; aspirers have a need for status; succeeders have a need for control; and reformers have a need for self-esteem. If a product reflects their attitudes, people will buy it. Instead of focus groups discussing products already invented, they used market research to invent new products. This would soon help elect politicians as well.
1980s - We Can Buy our Identity
Self-actualization seminars from the likes of Wayne Dyer and inner self work became more popular (polls showed an increase in interest from 5% in 1970 to 80% in 1980). Reagan ran on the new individualism model with his speech "Let the People Rule" (his We the People speech 8 years later has a similar flavour) knowing that people now embrace whatever gives the illusion of independence. It polled well and many former republicans voted conservative because of the PR spin, which allowed neo-liberalism to thrive. People feel entitled to have the best and to have power over their leaders, and they want their every whim satisfied.
New technology allowed short runs of consumer goods, so people were now able to buy their identities. They felt liberated, yet were more dependent on business than ever. Products were now necessary to their happiness and their very sense of self. Without things, people no longer have any identity. Scary.
Matthew Freud, of Freud Communications (great grandson of Sigmund, and son of an MP accused of pedophilia), helped manufacturers get control over how their corporation appeared in print. And Rupert Murdock's right in there too, of course.
Robert Reich laments that we no longer have a society, just a bunch of individuals focused on themselves. Bernays found a way to get people to see goods as a means to respond to deep emotional yearnings. Politicians used these business methods to find out what voters want and give it to them, and they stopped caring about having a clear and specific mandate. They summoned the greediest aspects of human nature by focusing on individual personal satisfaction. It was a triumph of the perspective that individuals are purely emotional beings easily led off a cliff.
According to Reich, the left used to persuade people we have common interests. Roosevelt persuaded people to join together in labour unions, which drove the democratic party. The worst thing Reagan did was to make denial of compassion a respectable trait.
1990s - Fluctuating Desires Drive the New Democracy
To get re-elected, Clinton bowed to this pressure to satisfy individual voter concerns. (Tony Blair did the same thing in Britain.) It turned politics into a consumer business that can fulfill personal desires. They could learn what voters want and move themself there. Clinton conducted neuro-personality polls to find day-to-day concerns and ran on a platform of V-chips for TVs and mobile phones on busses rather than the typical foreign and domestic policies discussed in previous elections. This was spun as a means to end elitist politics in that the people are now being heard, but the practice suggests that democracy is nothing more than pandering to primitive desires. It's a politics of the self. It's a problem because people are contradictory: they want lower taxes and better public services. We're trapped in short-term, conflicting policies.
This isn't a better form of democracy, a "continuous democracy," it's just propaganda for corporations. Remember that Bernays didn't believe democracy could work and that the masses had to be led, that it's too dangerous to let people have control over their own lives. Consumerism is a way to give the illusion of control while allowing the responsible elite to continue managing society. This is the end result of that premise. We just feel like we have more say now. People's desires are in charge instead of their will. Democracy has been reduced from something that assumes an active citizenry to something which now is increasingly predicated on the idea of the public as passive consumers.
We have to appeal to the public to care for others more. We forgot that we can be more than our immediate desires. Reich summed up the two views of human nature: essentially emotional or rational. The Freudian view suggests we're just bundles of emotions, and businesses have honed their skills at responding to that. But politics must be more than that. Politics and leadership are about engaging the public in a rational discussion and deliberation about what is best for society. People need to be respected for their rational abilities to debate what is best.
***
2000s - Do We Know Enough to Change?
Now we know, or think we know, about neural pathways. The more we restrain ourselves, the easier it gets to avoid certain stimuli. If we have chocolate around, but stop ourselves from eating it, it will get easier to avoid it, and eventually we'll stop being so drawn to it. I practice this myself by actively avoiding social media at certain times of day, and it's something I don't have to actively work at quite so much anymore. The corollary is also true, that the more we do something, the easier it is to do and the more likely we are to do it. The more we allow ourselves to have public outbursts, the more likely we are to have them. We have to practice self-restraint.
This leans towards Anna Freud's work, but she went too far dictating what all needs to be controlled, and not far enough with other tactics to help alleviate profound depression. I think it's less a training that we need, but more of a constant reminder about our goals for ourselves as people so we're not led astray.
Today we also know about neuromarketing. They don't need market research or focus groups when they can look at our brains directly to find out which ads cause a dopamine spike. The masses can clearly be led towards consumerism or acts of genocide, so we need to be ever vigilantly thinking about why we feel like we need new clothes or why we feel a hatred for one group or another.
The fact that Bernays and others are able to manipulate society is testament to Freud's original theory hitting a nail on the head in determining how our drives affect us. But what some people do with that understanding is frightening. This clarifies a pivotal role for schools (complete with lessons on Freudian theory) to ensure we wake people up to their own decision-making as well as to their internal drives. We need to demand a democracy based on collective will for the benefit of society, not individual desires for the benefit of the self.
