The Century of the Self, Revisited
Whatever you think about Adam Curtis, this film has stood the test of time
The Century of the Self, originally released in 2002, is a BBC documentary. The filmmaker, Adam Curtis, is a bit of a lightning rod for controversy and says he refuses to label himself despite occasionally voicing support for left-libertarianism. In any case, the film proved to be among the most powerful political documentaries I have ever seen, and I believe that the time is right to revisit it and face the fact that Curtis was spot-on about one very important thing: the ruling class has been wildly successful stripping away what they saw as the excessive dictates of the New Deal.
This film is Curtis’ explanation for this phenomenon, this counter-revolution of a class of scoundrels, oligarchs, and warmongers.
It’s hard not to look at the last twenty-four years and conclude that average Americans have lost their battle with Wall Street and the corrupt duopoly in DC that does its bidding. We have a plutocratic class of warmongers backing a genocidal war criminal. Biden has crippled the First Amendment and instituted a massive and far-reaching censorship apparatus that will now curb what we can say online. Through it all, the creeps in Washington and on Wall Street want us to be busy fighting about gender pronouns and 2nd Amendment rights while they dismantle the Constitution and ensure that there will never be a re-emergence of a welfare state in America.
It’s a downward spiral that’s transforming the United States into a quasi-banana republic, a regime run by puppets for a class of Empire-hungry oligarchs in a country where censorship is legal and the truth a fading memory. Modern America is the bastard child of both neoliberalism and neoconservatism, which is not as absurd as it sounds. The global neoliberal finance capitalism they love so dearly is protected by neocon ghouls via imperial warfare and a network of vassal states. At home, it’s protected by union busting, censorship, gutting welfare, and stripping us of our constitutional rights. Victoria Nuland and Joe Biden, Bill O’Reilley and Rachel Maddow — they’re all buddies now. The Democrats have even embraced Dick Cheney, and war criminals and torture apologists abound, with both parties working together, ready to take their marching orders.
As Curtis’ film points out, these are Smedley Butler’s gangsters for capitalism, and they’re still here. These days, they might not be approaching high-ranking military officers like Butler and attempting to persuade them to violently oust a democratically elected president and found a fascist state run by industrialists. That’s essentially what happened to Germany when the left was crushed by Hitler: capital sided with the Nazi Party. Plus, German capitalists helped the National Socialists identify and purge Jews from the business world.
And liberals are the same: they will suck it up and endure Trump as long as the gravy train keeps chuggin' along. They have no problem scuttling real socialism, for example, universal health care. That's because they fear socialism more than they fear Trump or the Republican Party.
Think about it: What sort of country runs a bloviating racist celebrity like Trump against a genocidal nitwit like Harris? The sort whose ruling class knows it owns you: your heart, your soul, your bank account, your information, and your lives are their property. They will give you rubbish because they consider you to be rubbish. They will empower sociopathic congressional representatives, the vast majority of whom are on the take, because these politicians don’t care for you any more than the billionaire class cares about starving kids or the Pentagon cares about mass slaughter.
If we haven’t lost, if we haven’t been cowed and manipulated, then why did 150 million people vote for Harris and Trump, for Genocide and Racism? Consider that before you tell me I’m wrong. I don’t think Americans are more racist or genocidal than any other group of people, so how was this achieved?
Answer: Through PR, propaganda, and narrative control. When that stops working, they’ll turn the tanks loose on us.
I’m not going to get into Curtis’ past squabbles and controversies, but rather focus on the content of the documentary. It’s important to note that while Curtis cites Max Weber as being a principal influence, he’s mainly interested in the failings of the left, especially the incompetence of orthodox Marxists. He believes the left has failed to create a viable alternative and deal with what the film addresses, namely the way the ruling class, along with the government and other social institutions, have used the ideas of Freud as a tool of marketing and propaganda to control large masses of people. The documentary, which you can easily stream for free on YouTube, focuses on Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, and how he became a masterful propagandist and the inventor of modern public relations.
The Century of the Self offers real-life examples of how Bernays achieved his massive success. One of his earliest PR stunts was a campaign in which he convinced women to start smoking. Bernays had consulted with some Freudians who told him the cigarette was a phallic symbol and by starting to smoke, women were asserting themselves and confronting male power.
Were these women really challenging power? No, but they believed so, on some level. Plus, the campaign sparked the interest among progressive-minded men of the era who espoused equal rights for women. They jumped on board and supported the suffragettes who were “lighting up in protest.” This is key: getting people to take action based on an appeal to the irrational unconscious. The men supporting these suffragettes were not doing anything to help women. In fact, in the long run, it was a complete disaster for women that led to massive addiction, illness, and premature death. But capital and political propaganda are two sides of the same coin, and Bernays realized this and found that the knowledge gleaned from psychoanalysis could help governments control large masses of people.
Later, marketers would continue to use similar techniques to appeal to emotions rather than logic. For instance, the film illustrates how when cake mix was first boxed, women refused to buy it. Then someone came up with the idea of having housewives add milk and an egg instead of putting them into the mix in powder form. That way, women felt less guilty, believing they were behaving more authentically as wives when some work was involved.
Both campaigns were wildly successful.
This is the power of appealing to the unconscious and the irrational. It creates in us unreasonable and harebrained ideas, and it can conquer the minds of even our brightest thinkers, making cogent discourse and the reasonable exchange of ideas an impossibility. I know as I’ve lost several important friends over nothing more than telling the truth. But Americans are like the adult children of alcoholics: they don’t get angry at the real problem, namely the bad news you relayed. No, they get mad at you for showing it to them.
When you voted for Kamala Harris, were you voting to safeguard democracy from Trump? No. You were voting for a war criminal, someone who didn’t win a single primary, whose genocidal boss just destroyed the 1st Amendment. But you were convinced it was the right thing to do, just like many other Americans, including those who believed that someone who crushed a nationwide rail strike was “pro-labor.”
Like those convinced that the Russians blew up their own pipeline.
Not just lies, but preposterous lies. Russiagate? Everyone who reported on that should lose their journalistic credentials.
Capitalism demands unfettered, continuous growth. That’s a matter of mathematical fact, not conjecture. Some people think that with a robust network of laws and regulations, capitalism would flourish. Well, just like the 20th century taught us that Marxist-Leninist style revolution — the kind that seizes the state apparatus and creates a vanguard class to rule by fiat — is most likely doomed to failure, it has also proven that capitalism is a dynamic and ever-evolving beast that cannot be constrained through legislation.
If we want economies like those of Norway and the rest of Western Europe, it means that US corporations would have to accept measures similar to those of the Europeans, which would involve accepting at least a mixed economy, a modern welfare state that allows for private businesses but demands that they be taxed in a way that ensures a better standard of living for all; a nation-state in which essential services, like food, shelter, a living wage, and healthcare, are guaranteed by the government regardless of one’s economic conditions.
The last hundred years have been a testament to the fact that this is the very thing the Democrats, the Republicans, the oligarchs, and weapons dealers want to stop at all costs.
Achieving economic justice demands that we conceive of a different revolutionary path forward, that we learn from the past and move ahead with anti-capitalist principles that work in a contemporary, post-capitalist world. It’s a world that’s veering towards an international rentier economy, as Michael Hudson predicts, or perhaps global techno-feudalism run by platform overlords, which Yanis Varoufikas says has already begun.
The minute corporate America saw the New Deal, they began planning their counter-attack. Today, this class is as devoted as ever to their cause, as genocide, censorship, and the scrapping of all social services clearly illustrate. Assange, universal healthcare, Iraq, Gaza, COVID, the CARES Act — You’ve been lied to and swindled on an epic scale, yet few Americans will stand up and do anything about it.
Part of fighting back would mean addressing this massive machine that controls the political narrative and fills the minds of Americans with nonsense: irrational notions are established and perpetuated by speaking to people’s unconscious and irrational selves. This is what Bernays took from Freud. In fact, his greatest insight, one which political writers like me need to grapple with continually, is that people aren’t moved or persuaded through logical reasoning and factual documentation. People are persuaded when politicians and corporations appeal to their unconscious desires and fears in order to control them and sell them a narrative that benefits only the elite, a narrative that ensures a future of misery for American workers and for those resisting Empire and oppression in the global south and Middle East.
This is why the PMC has to be confronted: for its complicity and smugness in all of this, for its faithfulness to an evil, right-wing, anti-working-class, warmongering party like the Democrats. Kamala Harris was the fresh egg in their batter, a woman and a person of color. Just like the housewife will buy pancake mix if she gets to crack an egg, a university professor or a doctor will vote for Genocide if it allows them to virtue single about tolerance and assuage irrational fears about Trump. They believe themselves to be part of a righteous movement standing up for democracy…
… even though Harris was appointed undemocratically after the Dems scrapped the primaries…
…even though their president is a mad warmonger and influence peddler with as much blood on his hands as Henry Kissinger.
Why would Democrats who are successful professionals — doctors, professors, writers, artists — criticize Biden or Harris when it may mean anything from not getting invited to cocktail parties to being shunned at conferences or getting denied tenure? They would never do this because propagandists speak to fear and irrational desires, namely the irrational fear of Trump. It’s wholly concocted and pushed by our corporate media 24/7.
It’s also very effective, having turned some of the sharpest people I know into fretful little obedient citizens believing in the most ridiculous gobbledygook ever to be conjured up.
These are important lessons for the left, and they also pose some serious ethical questions. Should the left feel fine about appealing to the fear of and irrationality of the US citizenry, just like our right-wing Democratic and Republican parties do? Just like our war machine does? Just like Wall Street does?
I mean, looking at this century, I am sometimes tempted to say “Anything goes!” but I personally draw the line when it comes to manipulating people, even in the service of good, no matter what the cause. To me, there is a clear difference been persuasion and a hustle.
And lies are never acceptable.
Still, we have to take into account, very soberly, the success our enemies have had and consider how to take control of the story and provide a counter-hegemonic narrative.
Unfortunately, Bernays’ methods are as effective today as they ever were, even more so. If you’ve all read my accounts of dealing with liberals who’ve gone completely off the rails, you understand that we are witnessing something unique in terms of denial and cognitive dissonance.
As Curtis moves forward, he gets into the 1960s. This is the meatiest portion of the film for me. The director takes the time to explain exactly how the youth of the 1960s were discouraged from pursuing any class-centered critique of America or any critique of capital in connection to oppression, racism, or the Vietnam War. After the assassination of the real revolutionaries — people like Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King — Americans were subjected to scientifically precise and extremely persuasive marketing and advertising. TV shows and magazine covers, sporting events, movies, and newspapers all pushed this new pop psychology about “going inside” and “reaching your personal goals of self-realization.” Community involvement became seen as a waste of time, engagement futile. It was all about “improving oneself.” Americans were sold on the idea that personal transformation would lead to political change, that in fact it was a necessary first step.
It didn’t, and it wasn’t
In the end, the film shows how marketers, intelligence agencies, researchers, and think tanks found that it’s possible to persuade Americans that what they purchase is a reflection of their self, their agency, their autonomy, and their taste. To ensure unrestricted growth, Americans have been steered away from social engagement and political action — especially anti-capitalist activism — in order to concentrate on their purchasing power, all of them chasing that elusive object of desire until they expire from overwork and exhaustion. Guaranteed, neverending commodity fetishism and frivolous consumption.
A dead end.
But we bought into it, and we also bought into a bogus epistemology that perpetuates this horror and teaches people all the wrong things: new ageism, self-help books, and a whole bunch of shallow psycho-babble. A series of doctrines telling you nothing is wrong with the world. Rather, “It’s your shitty attitude Betsy, so get your ass back to your cubicle.”
As I said before, western propaganda is a science and an art, seamless, authoritative, born from an anonymous source of enunciation. It presents as common sense, and it encourages isolation and ostracization of those who are thinking clearly. This is why I have intelligent and compassionate friends who have disowned me for refusing to vote for a war criminal. Friends who believed every unhinged lie that came down the pike, from prostitutes and pee-pee stories to Biden’s lies about beheaded babies.
As the film progresses, we are reminded of Clinton’s dismantling of financial regulations after the party decided to follow “the third way.” In other words, they abandoned the working class and helped put the country on a path toward pernicious austerity politics and neoliberal rehauls of the welfare state.
Now, post 9/11, we find ourselves in a country very closely resembling a martial state. Pervasive censorship and propaganda control a populace that is forced into supporting genocide and voting against its own interests. We know how this was achieved, and by understanding how the narrative is controlled, we can take Gramsci’s advice and develop a solid and workable counter-hegemony, a new narrative that Americans can believe in.
150 million of your brothers and sisters need our help, and Curtis is right about the left’s total inability to create a vast left-wing constituency that opposes Empire and the duopoly. The more you know about how ruling-class hegemony is maintained, the better prepared you are to lead people out of acquiescence and create a humane world based upon sharing resources and respecting the planet.