it was the Feeling Brain that was really driving the Consciousness Car. Freud
believed that people’s insecurities and shame drove them to make bad
decisions, to overindulge or to compensate for what they felt they lacked.
Freud was the one who realized that we have cohesive identities, stories in
our minds that we tell about ourselves, and that we are emotionally attached
to those stories and will fight to maintain them.^2 Freud argued that, at the end
of the day, we are animals: impulsive and selfish and emotional.
Freud spent most of his life broke. He was the quintessential European
intellectual: isolated, erudite, deeply philosophical. But Bernays was an
American. He was practical. He was driven. Fuck philosophy! He wanted to
be rich. And boy, did Freud’s ideas—translated through the lens of marketing
—deliver in a big way.^3 Through Freud, Bernays understood something
nobody else in business had understood before him: that if you can tap into
people’s insecurities, they will buy just about any damn thing you tell them to.
Trucks are marketed to men as ways to assert strength and reliability.
Makeup is marketed to women as a way to be more loved and garner more
attention. Beer is marketed as a way to have fun and be the center of attention
at a party.
This is all Marketing 101, of course. And today it’s celebrated as business
as usual. One of the first things you learn when you study marketing is how to
find customers’ “pain points” . . . and then subtly make them feel worse. The
idea is that you needle at people’s shame and insecurity and then turn around
and tell them your product will resolve that shame and rid them of that
insecurity. Put another way, marketing specifically identifies or accentuates
the customer’s moral gaps and then offers a way to fill them.
On the one hand, this has helped produce all the economic diversity and
wealth we experience today. On the other hand, when marketing messages
designed to induce feelings of inadequacy are scaled up to thousands of
advertising messages hitting every single person, every single day, there have
to be psychological repercussions to that. And they can’t be good.
Feelings Make the World Go ’Round
The world runs on one thing: feelings.
This is because people spend money on things that make them feel good.
And where the money flows, power flows. So, the more you’re able to
influence the emotions of people in the world, the more money and power
you’ll accumulate.
Money is itself a form of exchange used to equalize moral gaps between
people. Money is its own special, universal mini-religion that we all bought