Eclectic Writer

I’ve been watching “The Century of Self” by By Adam Curtis on youtube. It is a disturbing series about the way that Freud’s ideas were used by Bernays and others to control humans. This material is not entirely new. I’ve touched upon it in other blog entries “Capitalism, Media Ownership, and Change,” “Globalism – An Historical Fable,” and “Swimming in Cocytus….” Discovering this video, recommended highly by my SIL, has pushed my own ideas about humanity in new ways. The idea that we are driven by unconscious desires that can be manipulated by corporations to sell us things we don’t want and politicians to lead us to places we don’t want to go is disturbing. I have to ask, are we rational beings, irrational beings, or a strange blend of the two?

What this really did was to get me thinking about society, history, and humanity. Because Freud’s ideas were and are used to control what Americans want and believe, I began wondering about history as a whole. It appears, that all of history could be defined by looking at the way that cultures attempted to control people. The way Freud’s ideas are tied up with Democracy and Capitalism are really no different form the ideas of Imperial Britain, or Medieval France. People must be controlled, and so societies were engineered, often with no real idea that they were engineering societies, so that people could be controlled. Clearly that drive to control humans goes back to the beginning.

Our earliest ancestors, I hesitate to call the primitive because clearly their societies were as complex as ours, humans were managed in a different way. For most of our history, we evolved in small, exogamous groups that lived in balance with other species in nature. This, however, greatly limited population and left them prey to shifts in climate. As we moved to agriculture, a more stable source of food was found, but it required more work to control people. This has continued to the present time. The difference is that Freud and his family showed us how we could manipulate people to sell us things we don’t like and to create stable societies. What his has done is to change my very ideas about the nature of freedom. I am not yet entirely sure of where I am going, but my very ideas about our nation, our shared culture, are changing.