Bernays had manipulated the American people but he had done so because he like many others at the time believed that the interests of business and the interests of America were indivisible … He called it the Engineering of Consent. ibid.
But the idea that it was necessary to manipulate the inner feelings of the American population in the interests of fighting the Cold War now began to take root in Washington. Above all in the CIA who were going to take it much further. They were concerned that the Soviets were experimenting with psychological methods to actually alter the memories and feelings of people. The aim being to produce more controllable citizens. It was known as brainwashing. Psychologists in the CIA were convinced that really might be possible and that they should try to do it themselves. In the late fifties the CIA poured millions of dollars into the psychology departments across America. They were secretly funding experiments on how to alter and control the inner drives of human beings. ibid.
In fact Cameron’s experiments were a complete disaster. All he managed to produce were dozens of individuals with memory loss, and the ability to repeat the phrase, I am at ease with myself. And it was not an isolated case. Almost all the experiments the CIA funded were equally unsuccessful. Despite their ambitions, American psychologists were beginning to find out how difficult it was to understand and control the inner workings of the human mind. ibid.
High-profile figures in American life who had previously been enthusiasts for psychoanalysis now began to question why psychoanalysis had become so powerful in America. Was it really because it benefited individuals? Or had it in fact become a form of constraint in the interests of social order? ibid.
At the same time [as the CIA’s mind-control experiments], an onslaught was launched on the way psychoanalysis was being used by business to control people. The first blow came with the best seller The Hidden Persuaders, written by Vance Packard. It accused psychoanalysts of reducing the American people to emotional puppets whose only function was to keep the mass-production lines running. ibid.
But the Freuds were about to be toppled from power by opponents who said they were wrong about human nature. The inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled, it should be encouraged to express itself. Out of this would come a new type of strong human being and a better society. But what in fact emerged from this revolution was the very opposite: an isolated, vulnerable and above all greedy self, far more open to manipulation by both business and politics than anything that had gone before. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self III: There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads
In the 1950s a small group of renegade psychoanalysts began a new form of psychotherapy. They worked in small rooms in New York City and encouraged their patients to express their feelings openly. It was a direct attack on the ideas of the Freudian psychoanalysts who had become rich and powerful teaching Americans how to control their feelings. ibid.
Freud argued that at heart human beings were still driven by primitive animal instincts. The job of society was to repress and control these dangerous forces. ibid.
By the late ’50s psychoanalysis had become deeply involved in driving consumerism in America. Most advertising companies employed psychoanalysts … They had created new ways to understand consumers’ motives above all with the focus group. ibid.
But in the early ’60s a new generation emerged who attacked this. They accused American business of using psychological techniques to manipulate people’s feelings and turn them into ideal consumers. ibid.
Consumerism was not just a way of making money, it had become the means of keeping the masses docile, which allowed the government to pursue a violent and illegal war in Vietnam. ibid.
But the American state fought back violently … a phase of ruthless oppression of the new left. ibid.
And to produce the new self they turned to the ideas and techniques of Wilhelm Reich. ibid.
By the late ’60s the idea of self-exploration was spreading radically in America. ibid.
But while the new beings felt liberated, they had become increasingly dependent for their identity on business. ibid.
This rise of the self was fostered and promoted by business. They had used the ideas of Sigmund Freud to develop techniques to read the inner desires of individuals and then fulfil them with products. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self IV: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering
Politicians on the left in both America and Britain turned to these techniques to regain power. ibid.
Many of Bernays’ clients were large American corporations and he was the first person to show them how they could sell many more products if they linked them to images and symbols, to those unconscious desires Freud had identified. ibid.
By the late ’80s Mrs Thatcher and her allies in advertising and media had brought the ideas of the individual to the centre of society. ibid.
Those running Labour’s campaign believed that by modern presentation they would attract back the voters yet keep the old policies. ibid.
John Major’s victory in 1992 was a disaster for the Labour Party. A small group of reformers centred around Peter Mandelson and Philip Gould were convinced that the only way for the party to survive was to change its basic policies. But their ideas were rejected by John Smith who had become leader. ibid.
But the Democrats’ optimism was to be short-lived. In November 1992 Clinton was triumphantly elected president. But within weeks his administration discovered that the budget deficit was far greater than they had anticipated. At a meeting at the White House in January 1993 the head of the Federal Reserve told them that the deficit was nearly $300 billion. There was no way they could borrow any more without panicking the markets and causing a crisis. The only way to pay for the proposed tax cuts would be to cut government spending not just on defence but on welfare. Clinton was faced with a choice between the old politics and the new, and he chose the new. ibid.
In August 1996 Clinton signed a bill which ended the system of guaranteed help for the poor and unemployed. ibid.
In 1994 Tony Blair had become the leader of the Labour Party. And the reforming group centred around Peter Mandelson became all powerful. Almost every night Philip Gould ran focus groups with swing voters in the suburbs. ibid.
Privately, Bernays did not believe true democracy would ever work … Consumerism was a way of giving people the illusion of control while allowing a responsible elite to continue managing society. ibid.
New Labour are faced with a dilemma. The system of consumer democracy that they have embraced has trapped them into a series of short-term and often contradictory policies. ibid.
We like the politicians have become the slaves of our own desires. We have forgotten that we can be more than that. That there are other sides to human nature. ibid.
The Central Intelligence Agency was trying to find ways to wipe the past from people’s minds. To see if they could free them from the conditioning that had been implanted there … They wanted to see if they could implant new patterns of thought into their minds. The CIA set up a secret project called M K Ultra … Dr Cameron’s experiments were a disaster. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head I: Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain, BBCiplayer 2021
For 20 years the CIA had been planning assassinations and overthrowing leaders of foreign governments all around the world. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head III: Money Changes Everything
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then? George Orwell, 1984
Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. ibid.
[The public school system is] usually a twelve-year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority. Walter Karp
Separating families is a common tactic used by mind control groups. Secret Lives of Women: Cults, Tricia Cartledge, WE 2009
Brenda believes they [Jehovah’s Witnesses] have all the hallmarks of a mind control group. ibid.
To convince new members to join God’s Army, the cult uses a mind control technique called ‘love bombing’. I Escaped a Cult, National Geographic 2012
I received a lot of information that I show you here today that indicates a strong possibility that Jonestown and the People’s Temple was in reality a mass mind control experiment conducted by the CIA as a follow up to something called M K Ultra which they conducted from the early ’50s through 1974. Male witness, cited Evidence for Revision IV
Moon would be accused of brain-washing, mind control. Reverend Sun Myung Moon: Emperor of the Universe, BBC 2000