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.
In the early ’60s R D Laing set up a psychiatric practice in Harley Street in London. He offered radical new treatments for schizophrenia and quickly became a media celebrity. But his research into the causes of schizophrenia convinced him that a much wider range of human problems were caused by the pressure-cooker of family life. Laing decided to investigate how power and control were exercised within the world of normal families. And to do this he would use the techniques of Game Theory. Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom: Fuck You Buddy, BBC 2007
Laing produced matrices which showed how just as in the Cold War couples use their everyday actions as strategies to control and manipulate each other. His conclusion was stark. That what was normally seen as acts of kindness and love were in reality weapons used selfishly to exert power and control. From this research, Laing argued that the modern family, far from being a nurturing caring institution, was in reality a dark arena where people played continuous selfish games with each other. ibid.
Laing was radicalised by his findings. He believed that the struggle for power and control that he had uncovered in the family was inextricably linked to the struggle for power and control in the world. In a violent and corrupt society the family had become a machine for controlling people. Laing believed that this was an objective reality revealed by his scientific methods, above all by Game Theory. But these very methods contained within them bleak, paranoid assumptions about what human beings were really like, assumptions borne out of the hostilities of the Cold War. ibid.
The system that was trying to control your mind and destroy your freedom … What Laing and the counter-culture were doing was tearing down Britain’s institutions in the name of freedom. ibid.
A group of right-wing economists in America now put forward a theory why this was happening. At the heart of their idea was Game Theory. They said that the fundamental reality of life in society was one of millions of people continually watching and strategising against each other, all seeking only their own advantage. An assumption had become a truth. The self-interested model of human behaviour that had been developed in the Cold War to make the mathematical equations work had now been adopted by these economists as a fundamental truth about the reality of all human social interaction. ibid.
Public Choice theory … James Buchanan: ‘no meaningful concept that could be called the public interest.’ ibid.
Psychiatry, said Laing, was a fake science used as a system of political control to shore up a violent collapsing society. Its categories of madness and sanity had no reality. Madness was simply a convenient label used to lock away those who wanted to break free. ibid.
All human judgment would be removed and replaced instead by a system based on the power of numbers; they gave up on the idea they could understand the human mind and cure it; instead, American psychiatry created a new set of measurable categories that were only based on the surface behaviour of human beings. ibid.
More than 50% of Americans suffered from some type of mental disorder. ibid.