THE CENTURY OF SELF(EPISODE 1):The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world.



THE CENTURY OF SELF(EPISODE 2):The programme explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses. Politicians and planners came to believe Freud's underlying premise - that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. To stop it ever happening again they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind.Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided the centrepiece philosophy. The US government, big business, and the CIA used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. But this was not a cynical exercise in manipulation. Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.



THE CENTURY OF THE SELF (EPISODE 3): In the 1960s, a radical group of psychotherapists challenged the influence of Freudian ideas in America. They were inspired by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, a pupil of Freud's, who had turned against him and was hated by the Freud family. He believed that the inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled. It should be encouraged to express itself.Out of this came a political movement that sought to create new beings free of the psychological conformity that had been implanted in people's minds by business and politics. This programme shows how this rapidly developed in America through self-help movements like Werber Erhard's Erhard Seminar Training - into the irresistible rise of the expressive self: the Me Generation.But the American corporations soon realised that this new self was not a threat but their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. To do this they turned to techniques developed by Freudian psychoanalysts to read the inner desires of the new self.



THE CENTURY OF THE SELF (EPISODE 4)This episode explains how politicians on the left, in both Britain and America, turned to the techniques developed by business to read and fulfil the inner desires of the self. Both New Labour, under Tony Blair, and the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, used the focus group, which had been invented by psychoanalysts, in order to regain power. They set out to mould their policies to people's inner desires and feelings, just as capitalism had learnt to do with products.Out of this grew a new culture of public relations and marketing in politics, business and journalism. One of its stars in Britain was Matthew Freud who followed in the footsteps of his relation, Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations in the 1920s.The politicians believed they were creating a new and better form of democracy, one that truly responded to the inner feelings of individual. But what they didn't realise was that the aim of those who had originally created these techniques had not been to liberate the people but to develop a new way of controlling them.

I am so sick of the 9-11 truth movement. It’s the most divisive thing the left has encountered since the COINTELPRO and CHAOS programs of the FBI and CIA in the sixties and seventies. It bugs the crap out of me for a ton of reasons. First, it’s bad science. Its primary criterion for truth is whether or not it supports this New World Order hypothesis. I’m not buying that one either. Oh, but what about WTC 7? It fell into its own footprint in under 7 seconds. Well, isn’t that just mysterious. Or not? Buildings fall down. It’s happened before and it will happen again. My guess is that it caught on fire and something within it could handle the heat. I’m no scientist and neither are most of the people listening to and buying this garbage. Let’s be honest.
Why should random and peculiar events be evidence of anything sinister? They shouldn’t.

Strange events occur everyday in car wrecks and home fires and tornadoes and hurricanes and so forth. Just pick up a copy of Ripley’s believe it or not. Strange things do occur. Is the New World Order the cause of all of these strange occurrences? Give me a break. But that’s the point. The chief motive behind all of this pseudo-science garbage is an effort to support the theory that claims there is a super-secret group of extremely wealthy people who are satanic whatchamacalits and freaky deakies who are trying to control the world and depopulate and yada yada yada yada. It’s horseshit. When confronted with this nonsense just ask for the evidence. All that can be provided is innuendo or a suspicious lack of evidence. They don’t have any evidence. All they have is an intense fear and inner suspicion. Here’s a link to a tiny bit of info on it. I apologize for all of the advertising on the page. It seems primarily intended to sell you his cooked up DVD’s. http://www.infowars.com/bg1.html
But the real reason this stuff bothers me is that so much of the effort is devoted to undermining and slinging slander on actually credible people on the left end of the spectrum. I mean these are people who have devoted their entire lives to affecting positive change in the world. Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, David Barsamian and anyone else who doesn’t believe them. Either they’re in on it or they’re being used by the people who are. So now they have training programs to teach unwitting kids how to distrust the very people that they should trust. It’s a huge disinformation campaign against these activists. Here’s some video:



This guy cracks me up. All of the points he accuses Chomsky of are things he himself commits much more frequently. Chomksy is usually very careful about citing evidence to support his claims. In fact he is famous for it. Chomsky has debated and won against some of the most powerful intellectuals out there. I mean it’s like listening to a living legend, like Marx or Kant or Mill or any of the other great philosophers. This guy in the video doesn’t compare, but he has the audacity to say that Chomsky uses little tricks to confuse you. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Notice how this guy dismisses the lives of the East Timorese as if they didn’t matter.

That video was in response to these:



None of this would bother me if I too weren’t suspicious of something myself. I think all this 9-11 truth nonsense has been cooked up by the right-wing to discredit, misdirect, and otherwise delude the New Left, who in their opinion are all a bunch of conspiracy theory loonies. So they feed them a bunch of garbage about 9-11 and the bohemian grove and skull and bones and so forth. Then you throw in some nonsense about how paying taxes, global warming, and the women’s liberation movement were all a part of the plan to enslave us. It’s laughable, but people are eating this crap up like it was donuts and chocolate syrup pancake caramel drizzles. Stupid kids are buying into it and establishing another deluded population base, like the Christian right, who will one day give up on the conspiracy nonsense but the residual effects of distrusting Global Warming as nonsense and despising taxes and hating women will all be left over. So they’ll vote republican. Other evidence of this is the fact that all over the place you see people using these conspiracy theories as ammunition for supporting the war. Like you’re either in support of the war or you’re one of those crazy conspiracy theorists. Here’s a quote from one of them:

“THIS VIDEO HAS MY FULL SUPPORT.YES, IT IS MEANT TO STATE AN OPINION AND I DO IT OPENLY. I AM TIRED OF EVERYONE ACTING LIKE A BUNCH OF PUSSIES AND RUNNING AWAY FROM WAR. WE NEED TO FIGHT BACK. IF YOU BELIEVE IN THESE CONSPIRACY THEORIES, YOU'RE DEFINITELY PART OF THE PERCENTAGE WHO IS MENTALLY RETARDED. I DON'T CARE WHO TELLS ME WHAT, I AM NOT GOING TO LET A BUNCH OF FAGS AND IDIOTS (BUT MOSTLY FAGS) TELL ME THAT OUR OWN GOVERNMENT DESTROYED MILLIONS OF PEOPLES LIVES FOR FUCKING OIL, OR BECAUSE BUSH IS A NEO NAZI.1. 9/11 WAS NOT PLANNED BY OUR GOVERNMENT.2. THE TERRORIST ATTACKS ON 9/11 WERE COMMITTED BY TERRORISTS, DON'T YOU THINK THAT MAKES SENSE?3. YES, WE NEED TO BE IN THIS WAR. IF WE PUSS OUT LIKE EVERYONE WANTS US TO, WE WILL BE LEFT OPEN TO ATTACKS ONCE AGAIN.4. I DO NOT HATE EVERYONE FROM IRAQ OF AFGHANISTAN OR ANYWHERE IN THE MIDDLE EAST BUT IF THEY HATE ME, I'VE GOT NO OTHER CHOICE.I AM POSTING THIS VIDEO BECAUSE I AM SICK AND TIRED OF ALL OF THIS. I'M TIRED OF SEEING NOTHING BUT DEATH WHEN I WANT TO SEE VIDEOS OF THE MAGNIFICENT WORLD TRADE CENTER.I'M TIRED OF SEEING PEOPLE WHO WALK BY THE WORLD TRADE CENTERS' FOOTPRINTS EACH DAY AND DON'T THINK ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO DIED THERE.I'M TIRED OF GOING EVERYWHERE AND HEARING PEOPLE TELLING ME BUSH DID THIS.”

It goes on a bit longer but I’ll cut it off there. This sort of nonsense doesn’t help anyone. As you can see above, it just fuels the passion of the right. What Chomsky and others are famous for is pulling the rug out from under their feet. And they’re doing a damn good job of it, but years from now they’re going to show pictures of real activists who are concerned with the lives of people all over the world, who are interested in real institutional analysis and real solutions, standing next to a picture of a placard reading “9-11 was an Inside Job.” And suddenly all their life’s work will be flushed down the drain, because even if it were true, no one will ever convince the people of the world. Occam’s razor: All things being equal, the simplest answer is most likely correct.