“You have taken over the job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines, machines which have become the key to economic progress.” — President Herbert Hoover, to a room full of public relations and ad men.
In the 1920′s and 30′s Freud popularized the idea that man, though perhaps seeming tame on the surface, may have irrational, libidinous, uncontrollable animalism raging just below the surface of his well-groomed exterior.
Few things are creepier than the president of a country comparing its people to machines.
Edward Bernays, the so-called father of modern commercialism, employed his uncle Sigmund Freud‘s theories of the Unconscious Mind to advertising and revolutionized commercials from a plodding industry reciting the practical virtues of products to a psychologically savvy form of not-so-subtle brainwashing (….)
