The Rational Consumer: Bad for Business and Politics

Democracy at the Crossroads of Nature and Culture

B. Nyamnjoh

• Publisher: Langaa RPCIG
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789956550746
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Rationalism in Philosophy

This book discusses the seminal role played by Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, in the founding of American-style public relations persuasive communication through manipulation of symbols and his huge (and cynical) impact on the American economic and political scene. It provides a substantiated and convincing explanation for what is happening today in Donald Trumps America. In the form of a history of ideas, the book makes clear that the present Trumpian manipulation of democracy and what it means to be American has a long pre-history and continues to go through different phases, involving the cultivation and institutionalisation of strong bonds between business and politics. The book shows how this is intimately linked with a science, intellectualism and practice informed by a series of binary oppositions in human action and interaction (e.g. rationality and irrationality, reason and emotion, mind and body, brain and heart, insider and outsider, us and them) and how unpredictable human nature really is. It makes a convincing argument that being human depends on how successfully we are able to negotiate such apparently contradictory binaries with the intricacies and dynamism of human agency. It is rich and thought provoking and very timely, given the exclusionary politics of fear, anger, hate and nativism we see unfolding not only in the USA but all over the world.

1

Introduction

A certain age-old, stubborn question about human nature is in no hurry to leave us. Put quite simply, the question is to what extent the human being, at the state of nature, should be credited with a sense of morality. A second question is, how much can that human nature be transformed (corrected or corrupted) by belonging to a society (ideal or real) with a clear set of values, a practised sense of direction, a well-oiled morality and an ethics of mutuality? Is the state of nature to be cultivated and domesticated in the interest of a status quo (contrived or consensual, negotiated or assumed) or kept away from the purportedly corrupting influences of established society and taken-for-granted albeit problematic orders of things?

Put differently, the tension between a human being acting in pursuit of personal interests in full autonomy (motivated or not by reason, emotion or both), and a human being acting in solidarity with other human beings in pursuit of common goals and shared interests undergirded by shared principles and values remains largely unresolved, even as it has fired up many a social engineer with sleepless nights throughout the history of humankind as active agents.

When the need to cultivate nature is emphasised in the interest of one collectivist, societal or civilisational objective or another, it has not always been easy to establish just how much cultivation of nature is necessary, desirable or even possible. Often, the tendency has been to make or stake a claim and act in tune with it until a contradiction surfaces, forcing one to concede that human nature is complex, and that to cultivate or to socialise is to make choices about group membership, belongingness and value systems in conversation with nature, human and environmental. Thus, sending one back to the drawing board to explore alternative relationships and configurations between nature and culture, freedom and subjection, autonomy and collective consciousness and action, independence and dependence, individual and society, particularism and universalism, us and them, self and other, me and you.

This notwithstanding, much of the thinking on human nature and relationships is perplexingly dichotomous. It leaves little room for an accommodating and nuanced perspective informed by an appreciation of the complexity of being human in a nonzero-sum manner and in contexts of Ubuntu-ism, where being called upon to choose amounts to a challenge to seek to include as much and as many as one possibly can (Nyamnjoh 2015; 2017[2015]b).

Equally dichotomous and pitched in terms of binary oppositions has been the debate about the place and power of rationality and irrationality, reason and emotion, mind and body, brain and heart, in human action and interaction. People are presented as either rational or irrational, thoughtful or passionate, active or passive in disposition. The dominant scholarly attitude and approach is perplexingly one of giving up even before making an effort at putting together what at face value nature or its (omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent) creator might have put asunder. Not factored in at all or factored in only sparingly is the possibility that in real life circumstances, in the pursuit of individual or collective self-interest, people are both rational and irrational, thoughtful and passionate, active and passive, depending on the context, the relationship in question and the issues at stake. If rational behaviour is that which serves to maximise the self-interest of an individual, a group or a society, why should one exclude a priori behaviour and action driven by emotions that yield maximum outcome for the self-interest of the individual, group or society concerned? A blind and stubborn insistence on the purity and sanctity of apparent divisions or chasms between reason and emotion (and all that are associated with either) ought really to be seen as an excuse to control through claims and denials of social visibility as a technology of power, status and privilege. Thus, for example, just by accusing an individual of being overly emotional and of being governed more by the heart than by the mind is reason enough to deny that individual the social visibility and status that makes possible claims to power and privilege, or to have a say in public affairs. This logic could be and has easily been extended as a blanket of inclusion and exclusion based on hierarchies of humanity and rationality informed by such considerations as race, geography, culture, class, gender, age and sex. The assumption being that the higher up the hierarchies, the more rational and therefore the more entitled is an individual or group to power, privilege, ownership and control over fellow humans and over the natural and supernatural resources of the world.

In view of all these dichotomous and zero-sum assumptions, if only reason or rationality were less of a front and more of a genuine aspiration, one could ask if it wouldn’t be more realistic – closer to the state of things as they actually are, as opposed to how we imagine they ought to be – to seek to ensure balance or, at the very least, fair representation for nature and culture, acting on and being acted upon by others, emotion and reason or logic, mind and body, brain and heart, rationality and irrationality? If being both natured and cultured, active and passive, rational and irrational in thought and action are part and parcel of being human through relationships with fellow humans and with the worlds of nature and supernature, how could we overly emphasise and advantage the one without equally overly de-emphasising and jeopardising the other and the needed balance of being human?

If it is normal and attractive to invest in raw unadulterated emotion (feelings, desires, affect, passions, the heart) as both the corporate world and the world of politics would suggest, and as their consultants in the media and among psychologists and public relations practitioners would agree, why have some civilisations – those usually labelled as “Western” – tended to be packaged, presented and sold to the rest of the world as Civilisations of Exceptions in which reason and the rational trumps emotion and the irrational? In what way could such a civilisation convincingly extricate itself from the charge of keeping up appearances about the triumph of reason, logic and science, while actually relying on superstition, irrationality and emotion as its technologies of daily articulation, sustenance and reproduction? And what are we to make of the fact that the West and the Western have always used as excuse for their penetration and conquest of other peoples, societies, geographies and regions of the world, accusations of the latter of living under the shadowy canopy of irrationality, savagery and the reign of terror by dangerous passions and volcanic emotions? To what intellectual ancestry could we attribute this particular dualism and perception of nature and culture as layered and hierarchical in its virtues and dangers?

There was Sigmund Freud. He was born in 1856 in Příbor, Czech Republic, and died in 1939 in Hampstead, United Kingdom. At the centre of this conversation are his fears and concerns about human nature, and the impossibility of civilisation as a zero-sum game of absolutes – an enterprise of absolute winners and absolute losers. How could any society claim to be truly civilised when it is impossible to fully harness the caprice of human nature? How could any measure of rationality be confidently claimed, when it could always be surprised at every turn of its progression by rebellious snipers from the confederate army of the dark forces of nature it supposedly defeated to claim a premature “victory” of light over darkness? Freud, through his analysis of dreams and free associations and of individual and group psychology (Freud 2010[1931], 1949), first advanced the argument that hidden deep inside the dark tropical jungles of our minds, and rumbling like lava in a volcano, are repressed, dangerous instinctual drives and primitive sexual and aggressive animalistic forces, the unleashing of which could result in the cannibalisation of social order by the devastating barbarism of such forces. Freud’s ideas gave licence to see ordinary people as driven not by their minds but by their basic instincts. Whether acting as individuals or as part of a crowd, the result was the same. Basically, the action was characterised by unreason, irrationality and instinctive animality. It was action that exuded all that is uncultivated, untamed and undomesticated about the human being. In other words, it was the dangerous anti-social action of the human still subjected to the tempestuousness and monstrous instincts of the state of nature. The only way the potential for chaos and destruction in individuals and societies could be tamed or neutralised was to explore ways of keeping in check (monitoring and controlling) such dangerous forces. His major concern was how to liberate people and civilisation from such dangerous subterranean drives.

This essay takes a closer look at how psychologists, as archaeologists of the mind and basic human instincts, have applied Freud’s theory of the unconscious in seeking answers to the conundrum highlighted above. It discusses, as well, how Freud’s ideas have been distilled and applied by public relations agents in the interest of big business (corporations) to promote consumerism, and by politicians to seek and maintain power through targeted political campaigns, elections and a semblance of democracy (Herman and Chomsky 1988; Chomsky 1989, 2002; Tye 1998). This entire analysis is inspired by, draws from and feeds into insights articulated in a four part 2002 BBC television documentary by Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self¹, to which I am deeply indebted. Hardly could Freud have anticipated the uses to which his theory, ideas and insights would be put by corporations and politicians in the 20th and 21st centuries. The popularity of his theory of the unconscious would only further accelerate with added complexity following the explosion in creative innovation made possible by advances in technologies of mass communication and social networking, and especially because of the insidious godlike capacities in these technologies for presence in simultaneous multiplicities. The essay is thus structured around the contested application of Freud’s theory in the emotional manipulation of people by the hidden or not so hidden persuaders (Packard 1981[1957]) actively promoting the idea and ideals of a consumer society underpinned by consumer capitalism and consumer democracy (Jones 1965; Goodwin et al. 1997). In addition to these introductory remarks, the essay consists of five other parts, namely: (2) captured by subterranean forces; (3) Freud adopted and adapted for consumerism by Edward Bernays; (4) the rational consumer: bad for business and politics; (5) freedom at last or wolves of repression in sheepskin?; and (6) conclusion: beyond impoverishing dichotomies.

2

Captured by Subterranean Forces

Seen through the prism of Freud’s unconscious mind, built into modernity, civilisation and democracy are their nemesis – each contains within itself the hidden and not so hidden forces for its very own self-destruction. No society, whatever its level of sophistication and development can fully escape the submerged dangerous forces lurking beneath the surface – forces that could erupt easily to produce a frenzied mob with the power to undo governments and humble any pretentions to the very values it claims and celebrates (e.g. democracy and civilisation). The idea of hidden dangers depicted by Freud is at variance with a basic assumption in democracy that human beings could be trusted to make rational decisions in predictable ways, and to make coexistence possible through robust public debate of ideas and options informed by competing and complementary societal and political visions (Habermas 1989; Goode 2005; Johnson 2006; McChesney and Nichols 2016). If irrationality seems the order of the day even as the rhetoric may be that of rational choices, logical and predictable behaviour, what is there to stop smart salesmen and saleswomen seeking to engineer consent through developing and championing psychological techniques for managing and controlling the unconscious feelings of the unsuspecting masses (Herman and Chomsky 1988; Chomsky 1989, 2002; Tye 1998)? And if humans were basically controlled by animal or unconscious instinctual drives lurking beneath the surface of civilisation, then psychology as the archaeology of the mind would be the science par excellence for understanding the mechanisms by which the individual and popular mind works, specifically with the goal of figuring out how to apply those mechanisms into strategies for social control.

In Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self, we are given a complex and sophisticated account of just how Freud’s ideas of individual and group psychology and of dangerous unconscious forces have been appropriated by powerful corporations and politicians – especially and quite paradoxically in purported democratic societies such as the United States of America (USA) and the United Kingdom (UK) – to seek to control individuals, groups and crowds, and to strengthen the grip on power of the political, economic and cultural elite (Harrison and Madge 1987; Harrison 2011[1976]; Hubble 2006). Produced in 2002, The Century of the Self depicts practices that predated and offer an instructive background for understanding the 2016 liaison dangereuse between Facebook² and Cambridge Analytica (a client of Facebook), involving the misappropriation of the personal data of over 87 million American voters seen to have tipped the election in favour of Donald J. Trump. Cambridge Analytica, – a firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon (Green 2017; Koffler 2017)³ – compiled user data to target American voters,⁴ and in the process proved its willingness to go to extreme lengths, however unethical, to serve the propaganda and ideological interests of its clients and sponsors by providing campaign themes informed by meticulous analyses of various psychological value and lifestyle profiles across a myriad of social networks (Watts 2018).⁵ Cambridge Analytica was also revealed to have been involved with the 2017 Kenyan elections, as a consultant for the presidential candidate who won the controversial elections, Uhuru Kenyatta. According to a report by Jina Moore in the New York Times, Mark Turnbull, a Cambridge Analytica executive, boasted how: “the company twice rebranded Mr. Kenyatta’s political party, wrote his campaign speeches and his political platform, and twice conducted surveys of 50,000 people to ascertain Kenyan voters’ hope and fears”⁶. Note the emphasis on the emotions of hope and fear as drivers of elections, and how little or nothing is said or hinted at on rational choices through the force of thoughtful and logical debates with an interest in distilling the truth of Kenyan politics and society, and promoting values and political action that favour national integration and unity in diversity. Like mercenaries, Cambridge Analytica seemed more interested in assisting the capture of power by their clients than in assuming and ensuring, as well, the ethical responsibilities of what actually is done with that power. Equally noteworthy is the role played by psychologists and psychometry in the development of online data-mining techniques (Laterza 2018; Watts 2018).⁷ Although Cambridge Analytica shut down in May 2018 and filed for bankruptcy, blaming a “siege of media coverage” that had “driven away virtually all of the company’s customers and suppliers,” few would be surprised if the company re-emerges “in some other incarnation or guise”.⁸ For few, especially among the ruling elite, are inclined to give up easily on the idea of hidden persuaders using psychological techniques of subtle persuasion to craft winning formulae and deliver easy victories by playing on and mining people’s hidden desires and fears (Packard 1981[1957]: 232–239). It is simply irresistible for powermongers to ignore or give up on cyberspace as a battleground of choice for propaganda, cannibalisation of the masses and fanning the runaway flames of soaring greed and autocracy (Sanger 2018; Watts 2018).⁹ Given how much we can learn about “what people really think, what they really want, and what they really do”, and in view of the fact that there is “almost no limit to what can be learned about human nature” from Big Data, if we ask the right questions (Stephens-Davidowitz 2017: 158), it is difficult to envisage the political and economic elite turning a blind eye on such a potent and tempting reservoir of wealth and power. Data mining is here to stay, we may well conclude (Watts 2018), even as we recognise the threat to democracy that comes with the systematic, harmful and misleading manipulation of data and “relentless targeting of hyper-partisan views, which play to the fears and prejudices of people, in order to influence their voting plans”.¹⁰

As Edward Bernays discusses at length in the preface to the new edition of his book, Crystalizing Public Opinion (Bernays 1961[1923]: iii–lvi), public opinion has not always found favour with leaders through history, even when presenting itself as “capable of being wooed and won by leaders” (Bernays 1961[1923]: xii). Some leaders seek and maintain power through the purported blue blood of royalty and/or by the brute force of dictatorship and autocracy. They do not hesitate to use the barrel of the gun and blinkering personality cults to evoke fear, energise the desire to hate and extract unconditional respect and loyalty from the cowed populace. They hate to pander to the masses and distrust everything remotely suggestive of meaningful freedoms from the perspective of those masses. They identify with what Barack Obama has termed “strongman politics”, in which a semblance of democracy is maintained, while “those in power seek to undermine every institution or norm that gives democracy meaning”, by absolutely insisting on dictating reality.¹¹ Like the fascist dictators of Europe between 1919 and 1945 such as Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini (Wiskemann 1966; Snyder 2017, 2018; Albright 2018) and the absolute monarchs before them (Beloff 1954), these leaders would find in Nicolo Machiavelli’s The Prince (1992) a trusted and worthy companion in their daily journeys of navigation and negotiation of the enchanting intricacies of autocratic power. Cambridge Analytica type market research and public opinion polls conducted by such leaders tend to be strictly factual in the questions asked, as the overriding concern is far less one of taking heed of how the populace feel and what they desire than know what they think in order best to police those thoughts. The leaders are keen on spotting the way the wind of public opinion blows much more in order to contain and forestall than to enable and encourage. With such leadership it is seldom a question of giving the people what they want. It is taken for granted that, as leaders, they know what is best for their people, and should enjoy uncontested authority and unfettered powers. It is a leadership much more interested in conquest and the art of winning without being right by nipping at the bud any sign of discontent by silenced masses and subjects (Browder 2015; Snyder 2017, 2018; Albright 2018; Frum 2018; Mcfaul 2018). Other leaders, on their part, seek to win and keep the affection of the people by appealing to the positive feelings and desires in them. Fear and terror as a technology of power and government are minimised. Seen through the prism of Freudian ideas and ideals, the logic of this approach is that if leaders are able to use the rule of law, public institutions and loyalty to common ideals to harness the libidinal forces or primordial bonds of love and desire for themselves and their projects, while unleashing on purported outsiders and on their enemies the aggressive instincts of those over whose destinies they preside, they are more likely to be able to control and harness the otherwise unpredi...