Mastering the masses.
I see the neo-libertarian/neo-anarchist movement today as the culmination of the consumer and political psychology ideas that were put into play at the beginning of the last century.
Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, demonstrated that you could change mass behavior by appealing to and manipulating people’s irrational-selves. He did this when he got women to smoke cigarettes, a behavior that only men did because there existed a taboo against women smoking at that time—that is until his shrewd marketing campaign changed all that, practically overnight. Edward Bernays’ insight and technique proved enormously successful. This was the birth of what we now called public relations, and it was the beginning of the purposeful use of human nature to promote corporate and political interests.
This almost pathological delusion of “individual freedom” as an ultimate exclusionary goal that you find at the core of all anarchist/libertarianism today is not original at all, but rather the end result of this deliberate mass marketing of “the self” which has been skillfully disguised as the opponent of “the state”. What surprises me is not that the average Joe would be aware of this, but the fact that among those who are promoting this ideological artifice are those who should know better, namely—academics.
The Century of the Self
The Century of the Self: The Happiness Machine – Watch Part ➤ 1 2 3 4 5 6
The Century of the Self: The Engineering of Consent – Watch Part ➤ 1 2 3 4 5 6
The Century Of The Self: There is a Policeman Inside – Watch Part ➤ 1 2 3 4 5 6
The Century Of The Self: Eight People Sipping Wine – Watch Part ➤ 1 2 3 4 5 6
Sterling Kekoa
