Everything Is F*cked(55)

It worked. Women started smoking, and ever since, we’ve had equal-opportunity lung cancer.

Bernays went on to pull off these kinds of cultural coups regularly throughout the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. He completely revolutionized the marketing industry and invented the field of public relations in the process. Paying sexy celebrities to use your product? That was Bernays’s idea. Creating fake news articles that are actually subtle advertisements for a company? All him. Staging controversial public events as a means to draw attention and notoriety for a client? Bernays. Pretty much every form of marketing and publicity we’re subjected to today began with Bernays.

But here’s something else interesting about Bernays: he was Sigmund Freud’s nephew.

Freud was infamous because he was the first modern thinker to argue that it was the Feeling Brain that was really driving the Consciousness Car. Freud believed that people’s insecurities and shame drove them to make bad decisions, to overindulge or to compensate for what they felt they lacked. Freud was the one who realized that we have cohesive identities, stories in our minds that we tell about ourselves, and that we are emotionally attached to those stories and will fight to maintain them.2 Freud argued that, at the end of the day, we are animals: impulsive and selfish and emotional.

Freud spent most of his life broke. He was the quintessential European intellectual: isolated, erudite, deeply philosophical. But Bernays was an American. He was practical. He was driven. Fuck philosophy! He wanted to be rich. And boy, did Freud’s ideas—translated through the lens of marketing—deliver in a big way.3 Through Freud, Bernays understood something nobody else in business had understood before him: that if you can tap into people’s insecurities, they will buy just about any damn thing you tell them to.

Trucks are marketed to men as ways to assert strength and reliability. Makeup is marketed to women as a way to be more loved and garner more attention. Beer is marketed as a way to have fun and be the center of attention at a party.

This is all Marketing 101, of course. And today it’s celebrated as business as usual. One of the first things you learn when you study marketing is how to find customers’ “pain points” . . . and then subtly make them feel worse. The idea is that you needle at people’s shame and insecurity and then turn around and tell them your product will resolve that shame and rid them of that insecurity. Put another way, marketing specifically identifies or accentuates the customer’s moral gaps and then offers a way to fill them.

On the one hand, this has helped produce all the economic diversity and wealth we experience today. On the other hand, when marketing messages designed to induce feelings of inadequacy are scaled up to thousands of advertising messages hitting every single person, every single day, there have to be psychological repercussions to that. And they can’t be good.


Feelings Make the World Go ’Round

The world runs on one thing: feelings.

This is because people spend money on things that make them feel good. And where the money flows, power flows. So, the more you’re able to influence the emotions of people in the world, the more money and power you’ll accumulate.

Money is itself a form of exchange used to equalize moral gaps between people. Money is its own special, universal mini-religion that we all bought into because it makes our lives a little bit easier. It allows us to convert our values into something universal when we’re dealing with one another. You love seashells and oysters. I love fertilizing soil with the blood of my sworn enemies. You fight in my army, and when we get home, I’ll make you rich with seashells and oysters. Deal?

That’s how human economies emerged.4 No, really, they started because a bunch of angry kings and emperors wanted to slaughter their sworn enemies, but they needed to give their armies something in return, so they minted money as a form of debt (or moral gap) for the soldiers to “spend” (equalize) when (or if) they got back home.

Not much has changed, of course. The world ran on feelings then; it runs on feelings now. All that’s changed is the gizmos we use to shit on each other. Technological progress is just one manifestation of the Feelings Economy. For instance, nobody ever tried to invent a talking waffle. Why? Because that’d be fucking creepy and weird, not to mention probably not very nutritious. Instead, technologies are researched and invented to—yep, you guessed it!—make people feel better (or prevent them from feeling worse). The ballpoint pen, a more comfortable seat heater, a better gasket for your house’s plumbing—fortunes are made and lost around things that help people improve upon or avoid pain. These things make people feel good. People get excited. They spend money. Then it’s boom times, baby.

There are two ways to create value in the marketplace:

1. Innovations (upgrade pain). The first way to create value is to replace one pain with a much more tolerable/desirable pain. The most drastic and obvious examples of this are medical and pharmaceutical innovations. Polio vaccines replaced a lifetime of debilitating pain and immobility with a few seconds of a needle prick. Heart surgeries replaced . . . well, death with having to recover from surgery for a week or two.

2. Diversions (avoid pain). The second way to create value in a marketplace is to help people numb their pain. Whereas upgrading people’s pain gives them better pain, numbing pain just delays that pain, and often even makes it worse. Diversions are a weekend beach trip, a night out with friends, a movie with someone special, or snorting cocaine out of the crack of a hooker’s ass. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with diversions; we all need them from time to time. The problem is when they begin to dominate our lives and wrest control away from our will. Many diversions trip certain circuits in our brain, making them addictive. The more you numb pain, the worse that pain becomes, thus impelling you to numb it further. At a certain point, the icky ball of pain grows to such great proportions that your avoidance of that pain becomes compulsive. You lose control of yourself—your Feeling Brain has locked your Thinking Brain in the trunk and isn’t letting it out until it gets its next hit of whatever. And the downward spiral ensues.