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Join us on Wednesday July 7th to discuss Century of the Self - Episode 1: “Happiness Machines.” You can view the film before our meeting for free here.
This series will help us further explore ideas that we touched on during the Society of the Spiritual lecture series from the month of Ramadan. While no documentary or text can give us a full account, we hope that this episode will help us to better understand some of the important machinery that makes our world run and that shapes our ideas about our selves - marketing and democracy.
We look forward to seeing you and learning from your insights about the film.
“Happiness Machines” is Episode 1 in a series of 4 of the BBC documentary series entitled The Century of the Self :
To many in politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly, the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?
BBC Description of the Episode:
The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.
His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.
It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world.
Contains some mature themes.