No one owes you anything !

You simply can’t argue with much of the history of public relations and psychology offered in Century of Self. It simply shatters the notion that government and corporations are mutually exclusive entities vying for power. Government’s motives depend on who is influencing it. Corporations’ motives are always profits. It’s amazing how the field of marketing and PR can make one forget that at the sight of crafted imagery. In essence, Century of Self effectively encapsulates the evolution of how for-profit interests evolved in this area over the 20th century, and how politicians adopted these standards of marketing. Obama’s 2008 campaign serves as a perfect example of this, and his campaign won Advertising Age’s 2008 Marketer of the Year Award, beating out Apple.

The other major notion of so-called “common wisdom” that Century of Self effectively disembowels is the notion of “individuality”. I put that in quotations because it certainly rings hollow outside – what do we call it? Oh, yes: reality. Somewhere along the way, Americans particularly became obsessed with this notion of “individuality”: that is, that we are all autonomous beings that largely determine our own fate and point of view. Not only does Century of Self explore how these unrealistic, self-absorbed claptraps make perfect target consumers, it also illustrates the political overlap during the Reagan and Thatcher era.

The folly of embracing “individualism” in the first place is comical on its face. One is born into a certain family in a certain culture. Right off the bat, it’s not self-determined. Then, our point of view and personality, especially during developmental years in childhood, is formed by how we interact with the world around us. Not to mention, generations before us gave us so much knowledge, technology, conveniences and concepts. We simply don’t live in a vacuum, no matter how much we want to be “individual”, and everything exists relative to everything else. We aren’t “snowflakes” either.

Instead of branding Capitalism as “evil”, the film does a good job of illustrating how it is just another vehicle of concentrated power. In essence, Capitalism and Communism share vastly more similarities than differences. They both have centrally-planned economies and both rely on a top-down distribution of power that propagate an illusion of the bottom tier “rising” through the system. The main difference is the “sell”; Capitalism strokes the “individual” within us and Communism strokes the “worker” in us. Of course, there are elements of both in us, but both systems merely use them for embracing what maintains their centralized power. Like Capitalism and Communism, Nike and Converse didn’t compete because they were different: they competed because they were alike. Nike bought Converse. Capitalism “bought” Communism.

The film’s thesis is critical of equating what is good for profit with what is good for the public. In a non-government free market utopia, what is good for business is good for humanity. In reality, the interests are quite different, and COS illustrates this more than amply. It’s pretty matter-of-fact that profit motive does not reflect having the public interest at heart.

When your argument starts rambling about the Federal Reserve, I get the feeling that you have Zeitgeist and other conspiracy theory films on repeat until your eyes bleed. Talk about missing the obvious: Taxes are in no way comparable to consumer services and products. Please humor me about the DARPA developed internet you use, the federal interstate system you rely on, the NOAA satellites you get weather info from, the public airwaves, the FDA to regulate the safety of your medicine, the FAA to regulate the safety of your airline travel, the workplace safety standards of OSHA, health and human services, etc. Much technology taken for granted was government developed and safety comes from public institutions, not the industries, who are obligated to deliver profits, not serve anyone.

I had a problem with two parts: (1) Wilhelm Reich as someone who went too far, depicting him as some crazy, evil scientist talking about a bogus “orgone energy”; and (2) the Human Potential Movement, which was destroyed because it actually went against narcissism, not into it. Reich had a lot to say against Freud that the filmmaker could have used, in effect, that Freudian denial (of sexuality, but that’s a word with more in it than you think) goes hand-in-hand with fascism. Somebody needs to actually prove orgone energy doesn’t exist before ridiculing it. Werner Erhard gets trashed without ever really understanding his work; you’d think people hung out at “est” retreats to become bigger consumerist a-holes than they already were. Sure, a lot of this stuff went off the rails, but that’s the whole point of the film — how, time and time again, the establishment in any form has used the methods of human liberation against that very liberation. It would have been much enhanced by treating these movements fairly. In fact, I would have loved to know more about just how the government/capitalism/whatever went about mowing down the Human Potential Movement, because that in itself would make a fascinating film.

Andrew Davis Does a nice Tallis and I’m currently listening to the Spivakov/ECM recording of Spiegel/Für Alina.

The unquestioned assumtion here seems to be that if it weren’t for all of these greedy “capitalists” trying to make profits, politicians would be able to focus on doing the right thing for society. This view is naive in the extreme. Politicians by and large seek only one thing: Power, and more of it. They are a class of people who will say anything, promise everything, and deliver nothing but lies and general misery for all people foolish enough to support their grasping for ultimate control. What this documentary calls “capitalism” could be more accurately described as fascism, which is the merger of the political class with a select elite of favored companies and interests from the private classes in order to control society for the benefit of the government and these favored interests. Americans have lived in a fascist economy ever since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, and to call the complex mire of cronyism, lobbyists, and insider power brokering that is Washington DC a thing created by free markets is both insulting to said markets and an uninformed opinion based on a fundamental lack of understanding about the concept of free markets.

I agree on some points in this doc, such as the danger of handing political power over to focus groups and the potential emptiness of the consumer lifestyle, but there is a huge difference between a corporation attempting to manipulate your emotions into buying this or that trinket and a politician manipulating your emotions to start a war or increase your taxes or pass laws that restrict your freedoms. Americans are only beginning to see the damage that can be done by government unbound by any sense of decency or fear of accountability, and yet they still point their fingers at “capitalism”, which is a thing that few who bandy the term about can even describe. You can choose to not be manipulated into basing your life around the things you buy, and freely choose products and services that you want or need. Try making the same choice with your government. Try opting out of your taxes and see what the response is. If you refuse to buy software from Microsoft, they don’t send armed men to haul you away to jail. If you refuse to accept the government of the land in which you live (no matter how far outside of your interests that government may operate, and though it may also operate completely without your consent or agreement) you will be severely punished through imprisonment and perhaps death.

Free markets are not perfect, but this doc seems to advocate putting more control into the hands of the bloodiest killers in history, all in the name of supposed social justice. Politics is not the answer, it has done more than enough harm to far too many people. Peaceful commerce is the lifeblood of human cooperation and survival, and our best chance to make it in a hostile universe. Sorry for being so long winded, just thought it was an important point to make.

When I was a psychology major, I took a lab course in behaviorism. The simple experiments would have been stupid, I thought, except that they proved how well behavior could be manipulated. This was less a theory of “how we learn” than a theory of how to “teach.” I watched my sweet little pigeons and rats go through their predetermined paces and fantasized about the experiments I’d design if I had B. F. Skinner in my laboratory cage instead.

My analysis (which I didn’t dare share with my teachers) was that the experimental subjects had X amount of knowledge and the experimenters had X+1 amount. If the subjects were given X+1, they’d see the game and say “screw this.” The pigeons would KNOW that the blue-colored water would upset their tummies, and not waste their time figuring it out through experience. The rats would SEE the design of the maze and solve it on paper, like a crossword puzzle.

This insight chilled me with the implication, “What don’t I know that I don’t know? Who has the knowledge to manipulate me?” My teachers for a start, I suspected.

Well, I was “astoundaghast” when we got to the part of the documentary where the revolution started to eat its own children. So, Clinton and Blair directed their campaigns by the strategy of literally telling swing voters what they wanted to hear one week to the next. Like the poor rat pressing the bar non-stop to get a pellet now and then, Clinton and Blair darted first one way, then another, trying to get strokes from their undecideds.

The masters had become the subjects. To me, another proof that at the extremes, left (Freud) and right (Skinner) join hands.

I especially took the point made by 60s activists that Chicago 1968 taught them they could never defeat the police power of the state. So they turned from a philosophy of changing society to a philosophy of changing people, in the hope of someday reaching critical mass. That’s a far more satisfying analysis of how the 60s became the 70s than seeing the shift merely as from narcissism to supernarcissism.