Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions. Eliane Glaser
India’s Economic Times, and Chinese consumers are getting more ‘savvy and sophisticated’, says the European Business Review. My favourite little example comes from a report by Allegra Strategies, the corporate-strategy consultants working with those coffee chains currently homogenising our high streets. ‘The rise of artisanal independents and the new “Third Wave” of coffee culture is having a significant impact on what the major branded chains are doing in their businesses to create the necessary authenticity required by today’s more sophisticated and savvy consumers,’ they say. ‘We will see much better “crafted” coffee emerging as a result.’ I love this reasoning. Initiatives like those ‘local community’ Starbucks cafés are an attempt to fool increasingly sophisticated and savvy consumers with fake authenticity. But that’s OK, because consumers are increasingly sophisticated and savvy.
This mantra of the rational, discerning consumer is accompanied not only by psychological manipulation, but also by a lack of general awareness that psychological manipulation is still rife. And that’s because our faith in consumer sophistication is accompanied by a rejection of Freudian psychoanalysis. A Time magazine cover in 1993 asked ‘Is Freud Dead?’. A Channel 4 film screened in the same year was entitled Bad Ideas of the 20th Century: Freudism. A slew of books shunning Freud’s legacy was published in the nineties, including Seductive Mirage by Allen Esterson and Why Freud was Wrong by Richard Webster. That decade also saw the rise of cognitive neuroscience and an increase in the use of drug treatments for mental illness.
At the same time that psychological marketing is enjoying an undercover revival, there’s little public discussion of these techniques. Marketers have become publicly coy about their manipulative techniques, and the public has lost its radar. We believe that Freud has been proved wrong, so we don’t realise that psychological techniques are still very much in use. We’ve ceded psychoanalysis to advertisers and PR strategists who use it against us, and we no longer have the means to critique what’s going on. Fascinatingly, Bernays helped to arrange the publication of his uncle’s books in America. He did the PR on Freud, creating the popular persona of ‘Uncle Siggy’. It meant that the antidote was released alongside the poison. But now, although it’s commonplace to acknowledge how influential Freud has been, we’re actually intensely hostile to psychoanalytic interpretations. We have swallowed the corporate line that we are in fully conscious control: that the consumer is king. When in fact the savviness rhetoric is a cover for the deception. We can be savvy, but that means spotting the subtext, what’s really going on.
In 1957, an American journalist called Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders, an exposé of motivational research and other insidious advertising techniques. It explored ‘a world of psychology professors turned merchandisers’, and revealed ‘what makes us buy, believe – and even vote – the way we do’, ‘why men think of a mistress when they see a convertible in a shop window’, and ‘why your children like cereals that crackle and crunch’. The Hidden Persuaders stayed at the top of the US bestseller list for a year, was translated into twelve languages, and by 1975 had sold three million copies. But where are the Vance Packards of the twenty-first century?
When I studied English at university in the early nineties, I was introduced to the work of a sexy group of cultural critics who analysed the world in smart and surprising ways, from Jacques Derrida to Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser to Theodor Adorno. Don’t take the world at face value, they argued; it’s full of traps and tricks. But the influence of that way of thinking was soon on the wane. There was a turn away from the world and into the dusty archive, and big ideas seemed to give way to micro-history and byzantine identity politics. The study of covert ideology faltered just as the phenomenon itself really began to take hold in ways that these academics could only dream of.
Part of the reason the cultural critics turned away was because, like the good post-modernists they were, they denied the existence of an objective, concrete reality that ideology could obscure. Everything was, to some extent, an illusion. I think it’s wrong to stereotype post-modernists as cartoonish relativists who say that white is black and black white. But I do subscribe to the common-sense observation that of course there is a reality, and in the dream factories of contemporary culture it is increasingly mis-sold. Those cultural critics would have their work cut out in the era of Facebook, Twitter, 3D TV and augmented-reality computer games; of ever more sophisticated spin, PR and viral advertising campaigns; of image and spectacle and confected sincerity. But where are they now, when we really need them?
We are in the grip of a very modern pincer movement. Just at the moment when we’re most reluctant to acknowledge our own credulousness, more resources than ever before are being poured into the business of deceiving us. And the ruse-mongers are making full use of this denial, in their faux-egalitarian flattery that the people know best. But how could we, when everything means the opposite of what it says on the tin? I’m not saying people have become more stupid – quite the opposite. The illusion-spotting abilities of the average citizen have been sharpened to a fine point through living in a world of surfaces. But illusion-mongering is super-well-organised, and its practitioners are really smart.
I went out the other day to buy a winter coat, and found myself in the grip of something called false consciousness. The same thing happens every October. As soon as there’s a nip in the air, I take one look at last year’s winter coat and feel compelled to replace it – despite the fact that the price of winter coats puts them in the once-every-three-years garment category. There was nothing really wrong with last year’s coat – it was just a bit bobbly and not on trend. But although I knew that rationally, it didn’t stop me looking for a new one. And down in the ear-splitting, nerve-jangling basement of Topshop, this unnecessary raid on my bank account wasn’t even fun. What I thought was good for me wasn’t good at all.
Although Freud never wrote explicitly about ideology and false consciousness, his ideas help to explain how it works. Psychoanalysis solves the problem of how on the one hand we can be sentient beings, consciously perceiving the world, and on the other hand be utterly in the grip of delusions, often at moments – such as in our own age – when we feel most in control. Freud explains that we are not coherent, unified beings straightforwardly encountering the world around us. Instead, my ego is undercut by the unruly desires of my id, wanting to escape down the pub when I’ve got loads of work to do. But my internalised superego is also my own worst enemy, niggling me about a non-urgent task when I’m trying to relax on a Sunday.
Freud’s insights account for how covert ideology can exist as an underground, unconscious phenomenon; and how it involves self-deception, not just getting the world wrong. Once we get our heads around the fact that we internalise the demands and expectations of society, and that these get bound up with our innermost desires, we can start to see how psychoanalysis gets us beyond the false opposition between coercion and consent. We are constrained by delusions, but we are also oddly attached to deluding ourselves. Call it political emancipation or call it therapy: Freud can still help us to unpick ideology’s tight grip.
It was Marx and Engels who developed the idea of false consciousness as a political phenomenon. They wrote about how capitalism leads the working classes unwittingly to conspire in their own subjection by adopting one of two bogus beliefs: either that this is an inevitable state of affairs, or that they have a realistic shot at upward mobility. For the next hundred years or so after Marx, philosophers and political theorists had fierce debates about false consciousness. If the working classes were being oppressed, why didn’t they join forces and overthrow their rulers? Why did they seem content to remain downtrodden, even regarding their ‘betters’ (royal weddings come to mind) with admiration?
But towards the end of the twentieth century, an acute squeamishness set in about the entire relationship between ideology and social hierarchy. Who is doing the duping, and are some people more duped than others? As the pernicious rhetoric about ‘people power’ illustrates, ideology serves to benefit the rich and powerful. But does this mean that those at the top of the tree are consciously and deliberately duping those at the bottom? And are those at the bottom more gullible than those at the top? So powerless and downtrodden, in fact, that they’ve become blind to their own situation? Is it patronising to expect these people to think and act in a certain way – isn’t it up to them to decide if they are downtrodden or not?
It’s