Bernays - Propaganda - Needs Vs Wants

The curse of consumer "Materialism" in the wealthier countries is allied to the need to keep producing and selling to "feed the system". That has now led to the end-game of approaching probable mass fiscal default. The numbers have grown and the monetary situation has backed itself into a corner. What else could have happened without a major shift? The debt arithmetic defines it. The only real question is how - deliberate or accidental. Trillions given to cheap-labour China for mostly shitty goods all in the name of "free trade" and profits to feed their nice little global domination expansion machine did not help.

Freud's nephew Edward Bernays first understood how this started in his remarkable work "Propaganda". He knew it as the point when different groups, societies, countries, transition from NEEDS to WANTS. This tail-end of that system still needs people to buy and consume and must advertise that fact incessantly and without end.

This written in 1928, when Bernays proudly described how his techniques for mental manipulation had permitted a small elite to control the minds of the American population:

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government that is the true ruling power of this country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… In almost every act of our daily lives… we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who pull the wires which control the public mind."

“We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture,” declared Bernays’ business partner, Paul Mazur. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

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