Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, invented the profession of Public Relations in the 1920s and was listed as one of the most influential Americans of the 20th century by Life magazine. Like his uncle he believed that human beings did not act rationally and were instead subject to ancient emotions from our evolutionary past, such as lust, fear, anger and so forth.
Whether or not this is true, Edward Bernays is one of the fathers of consumerism and he learned how to sell a product, not on the basis of its practical use, but rather by pitching it towards our unconscious urges. Bernays' idea of promoting consumption based on desire rather than need has dominated Western society since the 1920s but he is responsible for some of the more cynical acts by political leaders in recent times. It is one thing to use sex to sell a car but Bernays taught American politicians to use peoples’ fear of the ‘Red Menace’ to manipulate public opinion during the Cold War, he called it ‘Engineering Consent’. More recently politicians sold the Iraq War on the scaremongering basis of WMDs and ’45 minute warnings’ rather than having a serious and genuine debate about regime change and the desirability of spreading democracy by force. With issues such as 42 days and the Iranian nuclear programme looming on the horizon it is hoped that both sides make their case without resorting to scaremongering, sleight of hand and innuendo.
