Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions. Eliane Glaser
democratic laurels.
So how has this First World fakery evolved? Take for example the father of public relations, Edward Bernays. Bernays was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, and he applied his uncle’s insights into individual psychology to the mass marketing of consumer goods. ‘We are governed, our minds moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of,’ he wrote in his frankly titled book Propaganda, published in 1928. ‘In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.’ For Bernays, this kind of control wasn’t a bad thing. He had lived through war and revolution, and he shared his uncle’s unease about the chaotic and aggressive human impulses that civilisation held in check. He fretted about the huge social changes brought about by urbanisation and universal suffrage, which had left traditional hierarchies in disarray: ‘The steam engine, the multiple press, and the public school, that trio of the Industrial Revolution, have taken the power away from kings and given it to the people.’ As Stuart Ewen notes in his excellent PR!: A Social History of Spin, and film-maker Adam Curtis in his seminal documentary series The Century of the Self, the role of PR was therefore to persuade people not only to buy things they needed, but also things they could be made to want. Consumer dissatisfaction was a great new way to control the unruly herd. ‘If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind,’ Bernays wrote, ‘is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?’ For Bernays, commercial manipulation was the best way to manage that dangerous devil, democracy.
Or take the example of another early PR man, Ivy Lee, who fretted that ‘The crowd is now in the saddle. The people now rule. We have substituted for the divine right of kings, the divine right of the multitude.’ Business had to control the masses, but by stealth, by worshipping them on the false pedestal of the enlightened consumer. ‘Courtiers’ were required to ‘flatter and caress’ the ‘enthroned’ crowd (Vodafone’s ‘Power to You’ slogan comes to mind). And for the journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann, it was essential that ‘the public be put in its place’, so that ‘each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd’. In his 1922 book Public Opinion, Lippmann made a case for ‘the manufacture of consent’, anticipating Bernays’s 1947 pamphlet ‘The Engineering of Consent’ (as well as Noam Chomsky’s 1988 critique, Manufacturing Consent). Since public opinion was an ‘irrational force’, Lippmann rejected what he called the ‘original dogma of democracy’ as a mistaken Enlightenment belief in human rationality. He looked to Hollywood, what he called the ‘dream factory’, to create ‘pseudo-environments’ that would shape the public will by deploying powerful symbols that appealed to their unconscious. ‘We must breathe into the allegory the breath of life,’ he wrote. ‘We have to merge the public’s fantasy life with the sense of what is possible.’ It was a way of replacing overt ideology – ‘the sense of what is possible’ – with covert ideology – ‘the public’s fantasy life’.
Or take the ‘depth boys’, a group of advertisers in the mid-twentieth century who also borrowed insights from Freudian psychoanalysis. The depth boys pioneered the use of ‘motivational research’ to understand not just what we buy but why we buy it: how consumer behaviour is swayed by the deeply buried drives of the unconscious. Instead of making an explicit case for why customers should buy this deodorant over that one, the depth boys designed deodorant bottles that looked like penises. It was motivational research that spawned that darling of the modern commercial and political world, the focus group. Like motivational research, focus grouping pushed selling underground. This wasn’t about asking consumers (or indeed voters) what they wanted. This was about asking them about their hopes, their dreams, their fears; and then pushing those buttons. The modern consumer (and as we’ll see later on, the modern voter) was a product not of conscious choice but of subconscious manipulation.
Focus-grouping was pioneered by the psychologist and marketing expert Ernest Dichter, whose book The Strategy of Desire appeared in 1960. Dichter was famous for focus-grouping housewives to work out how to sell them guilt-free instant cake mixes (his solution: ‘add an egg’). These underhand psychological techniques are still very much in use: when The Strategy of Desire was reissued in 2002, one reviewer noted that ‘It is astonishing that so much of what Dichter explored as early as the late 1930s has come back into vogue.’ And it’s these techniques that have created so much of the curiously topsy-turvy, oppositional culture we inhabit today.
Take the example, if you will, of Femfresh ‘natural balance’ feminine wipes. I was always told that the problem with feminine hygiene products is that they wreak havoc with one’s natural balance. They kill off the benign bacteria that maintain a healthy ecosystem. That would mean that the name of the product is the name of the thing the product destroys. This is not about simple deception: I’m sure Femfresh products have been properly tested. There’s something more subtle and profound going on. The idea of good bacteria is already counterintuitive. And the marketing of Femfresh taps right into our psychology through its play on the close association between solution and problem. Sigmund Freud wrote that the human subject, the ego, is acted on by the superego and the id. When we enter civilisation and become a member of society, we repress our id, our desires. Through that act of repression, those desires are sublimated into the superego: the internalised demands of the outside world that make us conform to social expectations. We tend to think that our desires and our self-control are diametrically opposed; but they’re not. The superego and the id are intimately connected. That’s why when you’re on a diet all you can think about is cake, why strippergrams often dress up in police uniform, and why pious tabloids are so obsessed with scandal. The problem, the desire, is bound up with the solution, the repression.
The kind of ideological culture we’ve developed today is all about authenticity, transparency and participation. As the writer and cultural commentator Thomas Frank describes in The Conquest of Cool, advertising has adapted to anti-corporate critique by incorporating the symbols of that critique into its own lexicon. Problem and solution have become inextricably entwined. Just as mass-market consumerism co-opts countercultural individuality, advertising has become anti-advertising. This helps to explain why we now live in a world that seems on the one hand to be full of lightning innovation and the latest underground trends, but on the other to be curiously static and paralysed: any potential challenge is seamlessly absorbed. You can see this kind of thing in action in Saatchi & Saatchi’s ‘viral’ advertising campaign for T-Mobile, featuring an apparently spontaneous ‘flashmob’ dance-a-thon in Liverpool Street Station and a public ‘singalong’ in Trafalgar Square. Crowds of ecstatic participants film the spectacle on their mobile phones, either unaware of or unbothered by the fact that the event is being orchestrated by a company. The ads are truly an image for our times: a corporate simulacrum of ‘alternative’ festival fun. And a million suckers (me included, but for research purposes, obviously) have watched them on YouTube, happy to collude in the creation of a mass internet sensation.
Even if you’re not into DIY you’re probably familiar with the slogan for the wood preservative Ronseal: ‘It does exactly what it says on the tin.’ In a way, it’s the opposite of Femfresh’s ‘natural balance’: it celebrates plain speaking. And Ronseal wood preservative does do what it says on the tin. But the slogan encapsulates a kind of ‘honest guv’ realism that is now rife in our culture. An appeal to realism, what you might call the Ronseal effect, is the best card in the pack. You can see it everywhere, from John Major’s ‘back to basics’ politics to the justification of market capitalism as a force of nature to evolutionary explanations for male dominance. It’s why a senior aide accounted for one of ex-PR man and arch smoothie David Cameron’s diplomatic gaffes by saying, ‘What you see with David is what you get. He has always spoken his mind and told it exactly as it is.’ And it’s why Nick Clegg introduced his ingenious redefinition of the word ‘fairness’, when the coalition’s public-spending cuts were revealed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies as having a disproportionate impact on the poor, by saying, ‘I think you have to call a spade a spade.’ (Clegg went on to elaborate in a very obscure and unspade-like manner about fairness being about