Edward Bernays - how we became consumers - not citizens

With so much trendwise, associated content, spying, spamming, paranoia, writing of the sort that is so hastily posted as to be unintelligible (punctuation and sentence structure is there for a reason), and because Max posted Annie Leonard's Story of Stuff video [1] again to RealNEO, I thought I would share this series of documentaries from BBCTwo:

Edward Bernays [2] and Mass Manipulation:
The Century of the Self: The Untold History Of Controlling The Masses Through The Manipulation Of Unconscious Desires [3]

Here is another way to view the four part series [4] by Adam Curtis [5] for BBCTwo. It takes four hours to view all four parts (each is an hour), but the first two episodes are pretty revealing considering that most of us were born of parents whose lives were changed by these major shifts from citizen to consumer. I dare say we have not been exempt by any stretch of imagination.

Yes, Bernays, Freud's nephew, was the first ever Public Relations professional and he got off to a big start. I discovered this by way of the Flouride Conspiracy [6].

"American ‘education and research’ was funded by the Aluminum Manufacturing, Fertilizer and Weapons Industry looking for an outlet for the increasingly mounting fluoride industrial waste while attaining positive profit increase. The ‘discovery’ that fluoride benefited teeth, was paid for by industry that needed to be able to defend "lawsuits from workers and communities poisoned by industrial fluoride emissions" (Bryson 1995) and turn a liability into an asset. Fluoride, a waste constituent in the manufacturing processes of explosives, fertilizers and other ‘necessities’, was expensive to dispose of properly and until a ‘use’ was found for it in America’s water supplies, the substance was only considered a toxic, hazardous waste. Through sly public re-education, fluoride, once a waste product, became the active ingredient in fluorinated pesticides, fungicides, rodenticides, anesthetics, tranquilizers, fluorinated pharmaceuticals, and a number of industrial and domestic products, fluorinated dental gels, rinses and toothpastes. Fluoride is so much a part of a multibillion-dollar industrial and pharmaceutical income, that any withdrawal of support from pro-fluoridationists is financially impossible, legally unthinkable and potentially devastating for their career and reputation.

Funded by US industrialists, in an attempt to encourage public acceptance of fluoride, Edward Bernays, known also as the father of PR, or the original spin doctor, began a campaign of deception to persuade public opinion. Barnays explained "you can get practically any idea accepted if doctors are in favour. The public is willing to accept it because a doctor is an authority to most people, regardless of how much he knows or doesn’t know"(Bryson 2004). Doctors who endorsed fluoridation didn’t know that research discrediting fluoride’s safety was either suppressed or not conducted in the first place. Fluoride became equated with scientific progress and since it was introduced to the public as a health-enhancing substance, added to the environment for the children’s sake, those opposing fluoride were dismissed as cranks, quacks and lunatics. Fluoride became impervious to criticism because of a relentless PR offensive, but also because of it’s overall toxicity. Unlike chemicals that have a signature effect, fluoride, a systemic poison, produces a range of health problems, so it’s effects are more difficult to diagnose."

I chose not to repost the video here on the realNEO not because I don't know how to post a video, but because you can click through to the video on informationliberation [7] without fear of massive assaults of advertising. There are three innocuous Google ads on a densely informative page. Oh yes, and this:

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill

Now maybe I am just naive and there really is a bigger conspiracy with every click... You tell me.