He has a dream

As primaries develop, and no clear presidential candidate is in sight, I find myself rooting for Obama somewhat, as if he was some kind of home sports team. Life becomes so much simpler when you decide who you like and start developing your beliefs to support that. With so many others, I want to believe that there is someone who dreams a good dream and will know what he’s doing and take care of the mess. And so I watch the debates a bit and read about the candidates and pretend to know a thing or two about the issues. But really, I cannot say what is objectively best (if there is such a thing), I cannot adequately grasp the intricacies of argument and background of counter-argument, the complex interrelations of all the affairs that running a country entails, and I know I lack massive amounts of information to be able to even begin to judge the merits of one plan over another. In the end I have to concede that I don’t have the time or inclination to study up on the material required to make a really informed decision. Instead, I succumb mostly to intuitive impressions of who I can identify with more readily, who seems more similar to myself, who seems like a decent person that I would trust to make good judgments. Hillary comes off as something of a demagogue, unsettled, tough, wanting to impress, knowing it all, needing a fight. Barack comes off as reasonable, considerate, thoughtful, respectful, having a good understanding of complexity, approachable, not as authoritarian sounding. Talks of uniting rather than fighting. And the law of this country lets me cast a vote just on the basis of an emotional perception. Is that frightening or what?

Political candidates are consumer goods of course. And the measure of success in the end is not actual achievement but customer satisfaction. It seems bizarre in 2008 to think that there was once a time when getting you, the consumer, to vote for a candidate or purchase a product did not hinge on swaying your emotions. Though this documentary, Century of the Self, claims exactly that, and goes on to say that it was only when Freud’s analysis of the human unconscious was practically implemented that masses began to be deliberately controlled by corporations and organizations through manipulation of feelings and desires. Amazing as that sounds, it seems common sense to see that mass manipulation had obviously existed before the 20th century, and that great orators and leaders of the world had always exploited it – though perhaps through a native, intuitive intelligence. But now the intellect had caught up with what the heart and gut already knew – and methods of controlling people were codified. Bernays is portrayed as the father of mass persuasion in the United States, who replaced the negatively connoted word “propaganda” with the new coinage “public relations”. He had become fascinated with uncle Siggy’s psychoanalysis theories and wondered if he could make money off of it.

At the time, governments and manufacturers are said to have believed that factual information and reason were the way to get people to invest in what they needed: we are shown a commercial for socks that praises their durability and strength. Bernays was to change all that. Particularly interesting was how he got women to smoke in the 1920’s by planting the phrase “torches of freedom” to describe cigarettes. “Freedom” is still such an all-American value and people still have trouble separating the concept itself from the politician who repeats this word the most. Putting trust in verbal association is what we do automatically, once we learn to live through language. Women started to smoke and felt more liberated because of it: customer satisfaction was achieved. Consuming became a way of making you feel better, and capitalism could progress - not based on needs, but for its own sake, for the sake of expansion, of perpetuation. Overproduction would no longer be a concern.

I can understand why the authors of the documentary would choose the quiet, ominous bass tones as background to the following quote by a Paul Mayser: “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 in America. Man's desires must overshadow his needs." Okay, no denying that our world today reflects that. But the way this statement is introduced seems manipulative in itself: sounds like a conspiracy theory where none is necessary. I would tend to think that there is something inherent in human nature which would have us behave that way anyway at the slightest provocation, and without much conspiratorial effort on the part of corporations.

So in the end, I’m left with doubt in everything really. Doubt in the truth of advertising, doubt in everything I have learned, doubt in knowing the whole agenda of any presidential candidate, doubt in my ability to always know when I’m being manipulated. It seems Freud was right about one thing, that we are to a large extent motivated and driven by what is unconscious. Much of what I take myself to be has been shaped in response to impulses and stimuli that I had no conscious decision about. I can't say for myself that there is any discrete isolated rationality. Everything affects everything else. Recognizing that my own preferences are only one possible way of looking at the world, and holding them lightly and open to investigation, while at the same time still acknowledging them and following what I happen to feel is good, has so far been the only approach I have found to keep sane.