invasion and the lulling of large populations into docile servitude through
mindless consumerism—the dude was kind of a genius. Except, he was all in
favor of it—so, make that an evil genius.
Bernays’s political beliefs were appalling. He believed in what I suppose
you could call “diet fascism”: same evil authoritarian government but without
the unnecessary genocidal calories. Bernays believed that the masses were
dangerous and needed to be controlled by a strong centralized state. But he
also recognized that bloody totalitarian regimes were not exactly ideal. For
him, the new science of marketing offered a way for governments to influence
and appease their citizens without the burden of having to maim and torture
them left, right, and center.^12
(The dude must have been a hit at parties.)
Bernays believed that freedom for most people was both impossible and
dangerous. He was well aware, from reading Uncle Freud’s writings, that the
last thing a society should tolerate was everyone’s Feeling Brains running the
show. Societies needed order and hierarchy and authority, and freedom was
antithetical to those things. He saw marketing as an incredible new tool that
could give people the feeling of having freedom when, really, you’re just
giving them a few more flavors of toothpaste to choose from.
Thankfully, Western governments (for the most part) never sank so low as
to directly manipulate their populations through ad campaigns. Instead, the
opposite happened. The corporate world got so good at giving people what
they wanted that they gradually gained more and more political power for
themselves. Regulations were torn up. Bureaucratic oversight was ended.
Privacy eroded. Money got more enmeshed with politics than ever before.
And why did it all happen? You should know by now: they were just giving
the people what they wanted!
But, fuck it, let’s be real: “Give the people what they want” is just
#FakeFreedom because what most of us want are diversions. And when we
get flooded by diversions, a few things happen.
The first is that we become increasingly fragile. Our world shrinks to
conform to the size of our ever-diminishing values. We become obsessed with
comfort and pleasure. And any possible loss of that pleasure feels world-
quaking and cosmically unfair to us. I would argue that a narrowing of our
conceptual world is not freedom; it is the opposite.
The second thing that happens is that we become prone to a series of low-
level addictive behaviors—compulsively checking our phone, our email, our
Instagram; compulsively finishing Netflix series we don’t like; sharing
outrage-inducing articles we haven’t read; accepting invitations to parties and