The Century of the Self
This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy. The Century of the Self is grand in its scope. It seeks to analyze the different conceptions of the self in the twentieth century, and how these conceptions were ultimately used by corporations to manipulate consumers into purchasing their products. This video seeks to tell a story about the relationship between the differing conceptions of individualism and the capitalist, democratic institutions (corporations and governments) which organize themselves around these conceptions.
The central figure in this story is Edward Bernays – the father of public relations. He was influenced by his uncle Sigmund Freud. He took Freud’s key thesis that individuals were driven by unconscious irrational forces and used it to develop marketing techniques which are now common place today. Some of the examples described in the documentary are priceless – some so ridiculous sounding that one almost doubts the veracity of the accounts.
One example is the campaign to convince women to smoke. He was told by a psychoanalyst that cigarettes were seen as a source of male sexual power, and that if he could associate the act of smoking with a sort of challenge to that power, then women would flock to it – the cigarette, a phallic symbol, would satisfy women’s penis envy. He organised a group of women to light up cigarettes in a parade at a given cue. He also told the press that he had heard that some suffragettes were planning to light up ‘torches of freedom’ – in a protest against male patriarchial society.
Such examples are common throughout the documentary series – but they illustrate the key idea that people could be turned into pliable consumers by harnessing their irrational fears and drives and associating, through symbols, products to the satisfaction of those drives. This idea remains constant throughout the historical narrative that Curtis weaves. What changes are the varying attitudes to these unconscious drives – and the way the sense of the individual self evolves throughout the century.
Bernays had seen his techniques as the means for producing stable democracies – people were to be made placid and compliant through the satisfaction of their irrational desires with products.
They were not to be trusted – and an elite political and corporate class was to ensure that these desires were sufficiently placated – but decision making, policy creation and ultimate power were to reside with this elite, not the people. As the new assertive, unrepressed self emerges, however, this state of affairs can no longer continue. While it is fine for the corporations who can continue to sell their products unabated, politicians are forced to play a similar game, and the creation of policy increasingly becomes determined by the whims of the demos.
In Korea, after democracy demonstration, society faced new circumstances in 1987.
Mr. Noh Tae-Woo focused on president’s election to keep power. Mr. Noh seemed like politician from military forces. Mr. Noh professed ordinary people for getting rid of military government called Park Jeong-Hee and Jeon Doo-Hwan. Finally He elected president in Korea 1987.
