Edward Bernays and how consumerism got going....

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/mar/10/medicalscience.highereducation If you run a society based on the satisfaction of desire, then, of course, there should be no surprise when conventions based in part on duty, such as marriage, begin to collapse. Forty per cent of British households will be home to single adults. Our news does not often ask us to think; it requires us to emote, and our politicians, on the advice of their research and PR men, do likewise. In Bernays's terms, this is all pretty much as it should be. Fearing the unleashed subconscious, Freudians believed that psychoanalysis could normalise people for democracy. Bernays, particularly after the rise and fall of the Third Reich (Goebbels was an assiduous student of his methods), thought that the safest way of maintaining democracy was to distract people from dangerous political thought by letting them think that their real choices were as consumers. He believed, and argued to Eisenhower, that fear of communists should be induced and encouraged, because by unleashing irrational fears, it would make Americans loyal to the state and to capitalism. Dick Morris, special adviser to Bill Clinton, explains how he talked the President into shifting his second election campaign away from big issues - tax and health and welfare - in order to listen to the comparatively tiny concerns of key marginal focus groups. Clinton subsequently ran the entire campaign on the findings of that research - devoting himself, for example, to legislation for a digital device that would screen pornography from family televisions - and won an election he had looked certain to lose. Having found that these methods could win them power, the Blair and Clinton administrations also believed that the sophisticated application of focus groups might prove a way to govern: they hoped that they could tap directly into the wishes of the people, that it would be a new form of very direct democracy, and one where all your wishes came true.