Amazing documentary: Century of Self by SIGNYM

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Amazing documentary: Century of Self

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Sunday, November 20, 2016 15:24
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Saturday, November 19, 2016 7:05 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

If you just listen to the first 30 minutes, you'll probably hear 15 things you've never known before.

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Sunday, November 20, 2016 10:32 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

One of the reasons why I find this documentary so fascinating is because it overlaps considerably with the issues of "What are America's Interests?" ... and goes right to "What are PEOPLE'S interests?".

Starting with Edward Bernays' (nephew of Sigmund Freud) ability to manipulate the public ... At the behest of a tobacco company owner -

Quote:
1928 George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company, realized the potential market that could be found in women and said, “It will be like opening a gold mine right in our front yard.”...

Edward Bernays was recruited to find a way to make smoking socially acceptable, and not just the province of "fallen women".

So Bernays portrayed smoking as a NEWFOUND FREEDOM for women, arranging for debutantes in the 1929 NYC Easter Parade to light up en masse, and bringing in newspaper photographers to record these women lighting up their "torches of freedom".
Those of us old enough might remember how this theme was recycled when a cigarette brand (Virginia Slims) was advertised as representing feminism ("You've come a long way, baby")

The documentary describes how advertising and propaganda are the same, how it is possible to manipulate people's emotions, and how manipulated people have been, in every aspect of their social, economic, and political lives, from mass marketing for mass consumption of mass production to The Cold War and beyond. How society was deliberately broken down into individuals, and how advertising follows people even into their individual domains, selling "irrelevant goods" as symbols of... yes, symbols of their "uniqueness", symbols of their "freedom", and even symbols of their "rebellion". Also, how this appeal to individual consumption is translated into political campaigns.

There is a sideways reference to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (Now I know what "self actualization" means, and now I know what a ridiculous concept it is).

There is an explanation of "manufacturing consent" ... those who know of Noam Chomsky will recognize the phrase but not realize that that concept and phrase came into being much earlier.

There is a the role of psychiatry in manipulating people (Psychiatry adjusts people to their society instead of adjusting society to people.)

In my view, this is a BRILLIANT documentary, as deeply insightful as "Man Against Myth". I couldn't stop listening to it and I'm going to listen to it again. There is a lot to think about.

But there is one overall fault in the documentary, and that is that while propaganda and advertising manipulate people's emotions to shape people and their view of society/their role in it (either as disconnected individuals or as part of larger whole) it doesn't address the physical constraints that both people and society bump into. For example, a society based on mass consumption can only function as long as people have the money or credit to mass-consume.

At some point, I'm going to try to fold this into "What are America's Interests" because my focus has been on the nexus between people and society, and not what people "want" or can be induced to desire, but what do people and society NEED in order to survive.

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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

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Sunday, November 20, 2016 10:44 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

What Noam Chomsky says about Edward Bernays

Quote:
[The] American business community was also very impressed with the propaganda effort. They had a problem at that time. The country was becoming formally more democratic. A lot more people were able to vote and that sort of thing. The country was becoming wealthier and more people could participate and a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on.

So what do you do? It's going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think. There had been public relation specialists but there was never a public relations industry. There was a guy hired to make Rockefeller's image look prettier and that sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called Propaganda. The term "propaganda," incidentally, did not have negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War that the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and all those bad things. But in this period, the term propaganda just meant information or something like that. So he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War.

The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies." These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we have these new techniques.

This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala.

His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke. Women didn't smoke in those days and he ran huge campaigns for Chesterfield. You know all the techniques—models and movie stars with cigarettes coming out of their mouths and that kind of thing. He got enormous praise for that. So he became a leading figure of the industry, and his book was the real manual.

http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/bernprop.html

The best way to understand something is by doing. But since we aren't in the business of influencing the masses of people, the next best way to understand how it was done is to study those who did it to us.

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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

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Sunday, November 20, 2016 12:32 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

I watched this and I has some quibbles.

The notion that Freud (Sigmund not Anna) had a breakthrough revelation about human nature is, I think, belied by history. Every ancient despot, from Genghis Khan to a whole string of Caesars (as 2 specific examples) knew that you could influence people either by appealing to subterranean desires, or making people afraid. I think Freud rediscovered the idea, since it had been absent from the western pantheon of ideas for a long time, gave it back to western intellectuals, and provided a language to talk about it. (And it opened up an arena of research - that people are animals after all, not ethereal thought-machines, and so are also driven by ancient, unverbalized impulses, that must be taken into account.)

Nor do I think that western politicians or business interests have a monopoly on 'manufacturing consent'. I think it's true of ALL societies, since every one has a normative physical culture, set of beliefs, and hierarchy (however flat or steep) THAT PEOPLE ARE TAUGHT to adopt and follow.

And I found some of the statements inaccurate, for example that only rich people were acquainted with the idea of luxuries. But we've all seen the movies where the mother hankers after a fine dress, but knows that the family can't afford it, and so, regretfully gives that idea up. The masses knew about luxuries, and also expensive (thus destructive) vices like drinking, drugging, whoring and gambling. What they has was countervailing reasons against them.

I also found that it only briefly touched on the 'singularity' when the economy breaks, and physical reality demands people stop consuming.

And it didn't look at the condition at all of 'manufactured reality' - which is when tptb and the news media present an unbroken wall of fable as news.

OTOH what I found interesting was a number of things.

One was that you could identify and break cultural reluctances to purchase unnecessary things so quickly and easily, and thus turn a guardian of the family's future into a thoughtless consumer. The other was that both business and government had an interest in doing that - and then did so. Another was that there seems to be a robust techniques - the focus group - that can unearth people's mental equations (cigarettes = vices = moral failings = something good women don't do == reset == act of freedom and power that good women can and should adopt), which you can then manipulate to your desired ends. Another was that this technique could be adopted to propagandize people. and another was that, in Western culture anyway, there are distinct identifiable TYPES of consumers that cluster together with similar mental equations.

And what I felt was a pervasive sense of claustrophobia.

I probably won't have the time to get back to it again, but I've bookmarked it just in case I do, and I'll keep the general concept in the back of my head as I look at ads and news.

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Sunday, November 20, 2016 12:48 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

As an aside, I have some major disagreements with Freud.

The biggest disagreement that I have is that Freud portrayed the neuroses of his (often female) patients as resulting from THEIR OWN internal suppressed sexual desires and fixations on their fathers (or boys on their mothers), when in reality he had evidence, and he knew he had evidence, that his patients had been subject to sexual abuse.

So Freud covered up crimes for the Austrian hierarchy, and- as often happens- blamed the powerless victims.

Psychiatry continues that corruption to this day, enabling the powerful by disabling the less-powerful in a multitude of ways, most often by convincing the less-powerful that both the fault and the solution to their problems lie within themselves, when in reality the less-powerful are often simply trapped in circumstances which cannot be conceded to without damage.

However, I think he unwittingly hit on the concept of "unconscious", which has been modified though time to mean the "lizard brain" that we (almost all) have, which continues to operate - sometimes in direct opposition to our higher cognitive functions. In fact, my view of the human brain is that it contains operational functions at all evolutionary levels ... the part which regulates breathing, the parts which regulate sleep and appetite, a primitive form of memory which can be accessed even when our conscious memory is obliterated (from trauma, for example), the parts which associate fear with specific events, and reward with specific events, the parts which pre-process our vision and hearing BEFORE we see and hear, etc. It's all there, operating all the time.

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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

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Sunday, November 20, 2016 3:24 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:

I probably won't have the time to get back to it again, but I've bookmarked it just in case I do, and I'll keep the general concept in the back of my head as I look at ads and news.

There is new material to watch. You don’t have to rerun the old because Adam Curtis www.imdb.com/name/nm0193231/ did two more series reworking some of the same ideas. Both are available on youtube:

1) The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares

“In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed and today people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life, but now they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us: from nightmares.

They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism, a powerful and sinister network with sleeper cells in countries across the world, a threat that needs to be fought by a War on Terror. But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It's a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media.

This is a series of films about how and why that fantasy was created, and who it benefits. At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neo-conservatives and the radical Islamists. Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world, and both had a very similar explanation of what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today's nightmare vision of a secret organized evil that threatens the world, a fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.”

2) The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(TV_series)

“Individual freedom is the dream of our age. It's what our leaders promise to give us, it defines how we think of ourselves and, repeatedly, we have gone to war to impose freedom around the world. But if you step back and look at what freedom actually means for us today, it's a strange and limited kind of freedom.

Politicians promised to liberate us from the old dead hand of bureaucracy, but they have created an evermore controlling system of social management, driven by targets and numbers. Governments committed to freedom of choice have presided over a rise in inequality and a dramatic collapse in social mobility. And abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to enforce freedom has led to bloody mayhem and the rise of an authoritarian anti-democratic Islamism. This, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain. In response, the Government has dismantled long-standing laws designed to protect our freedom.

The Trap is a series of three films by Bafta-winning producer Adam Curtis that explains the origins of our contemporary, narrow idea of freedom.

It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom. This model was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War to control the behaviour of the Soviet enemy.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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