Philip Gould – The Man Who Politicized the Normie Mind (Part Four)
Whether applied to business or politics and whether for good intent or ill, the power of psychoanalysis has inevitably corrupted all those who wield it.
When Edward Bernays died in his Massachusetts home on March 9th 1995, he left behind a legacy which remains as immense as it is immeasurable. From the products that fill our homes to the politicians who comprise our governments – from the way we interact with our communities to the way we think about ourselves – scarcely is there an area of our lives not touched by his influence. Yet even today, when that influence is at its most pervasive, Bernays’s name is still relegated (if ever it is mentioned at all) to a footnote within the far more illustrious story of Sigmund Freud. True, it was the ideas of Bernays’ uncle which formed the foundations of his work, but as “The Father of Psychoanalysis” recedes deeper into the bookshelves of academia, his standing in the field grown tenuous, it is “The Father of Public Relations” whose presence, even a quarter century after his death, which continues to cast a shadow deep into the unvisited corridors of our mind.
As subscribers to Midnight at the Matinee may recall, several weeks ago, I published the first part of my critique of The Century of the Self, a 2002 British documentary on how the American publicist Edward Bernays utilized Freudian psychoanalysis in order to grant corporations insight into the unconscious yearnings and unspoken anxieties of the wider public. These techniques, when applied to marketing, proved nothing short of revolutionary, fueling both America’s post-war economic boom, as well as the feedback loop of desire and satisfaction that would foster a more materialistically contented, more politically malleable, and thus more docile society.
In part two of the series, I turned to the work of Freud’s daughter Anna, whose formidable leadership of the world psychoanalytic movement helped cement her father’s philosophy at the center of Americans’ concept of mental health, while in the series’ third instalment, I explored how Wilhelm Reich, one of Freud’s own students, tried to liberate mankind from his mentor’s repressive dogma, but instead succeeded in trapping western civilization inside an ever-expanding, increasingly labyrinthine maze of its own desire.
It is against this backdrop that we reach the final part in the series, when the techniques that Bernays had applied with such effect to business would make their first, equally groundbreaking incursion into politics.
Much of this was thanks to a British advertising executive named Philip Gould. A lifelong Labour supporter and committed adversary of Margaret Thatcher, Gould had been one of the few on the left wing of UK politics to properly grasp the mood of buoyant commercialism that, even among his party’s working class base, had swept the Iron Lady to her 1987 election victory. Stationed on the frontlines of business’s interactions with the public, he and his fellow advertisers had been responsible for importing from America the same marketing methodology which had sustained it – methods directly descended from those Bernays himself had devised.
Chief among them was the focus group. Through these studies, conducted primarily on British housewives, Gould discovered that not only were UK shoppers motivated by the same preoccupations of self as their American counterparts, but also that they were secretly receptive to Thatcher’s policies of free market capitalism, due, in no small part, to the limitless amounts of self-expression and individuation that they would facilitate.
Gould knew what this meant for Labour’s traditional platform. People did not see themselves as part of a collective anymore. Neither did they regard corporations as inherently threatening. Rather, these newly minted nonconformists had come to view the ‘80s proliferation of lifestyle brands as a means of cultivating their own sense of self-image, and so along with Peter Mandelson, one of Britain’s most notorious spin doctors, Gould was assigned the seemingly impossible task of bringing this aspirational, individualistically-minded class of voters back to a staunchly blue-collar Labour.
To do this, they employed the same focus groups Gould knew from his advertising days. The findings only confirmed his diagnosis. What had been created, the men discovered, by the unrelenting waves of goods and services blown in from across the Atlantic, was a population which had come to view government in a purely transactional way. They had little concern for issues such as welfare or a social safety net. Now, they supported the state only insofar as it would benefit their lives, in essence, shedding the mindset of a citizen in favor of that of a consumer.
In this environment, there was only one way Gould could envisage a Labour victory: lower taxes. To many party loyalists, his suggestion was tantamount to heresy. At the very least, it was antithetical to positions that had defined Labour since its inception, and under the command of Neil Kinnock, party leadership summarily dismissed Gould’s counsel, opting instead for a superficial rebranding of their old manifesto.
Frustrated that his judgment was not better appreciated, Gould traveled to America in order to lend his services to a political campaign that would prove, at least in terms of PR, the most transformative of modern times. While working on Bill Clinton’s first presidential bid, Gould was at last employed alongside people who truly shared his pragmatic, people-lead vision.
Not only that, they had the resources to carry it out. Concentrating their efforts on a group of swing voters Clinton referred to as “the forgotten middle class”, Gould and his colleagues set about establishing vast networks of focus groups which would mine the subconscious of these would-be constituents for fears and desires that could then be crafted into policy. What revealed itself, alongside the myopic concerns of middle America, was the same aversion to welfare that Gould had unearthed in Britain. But unlike Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party, Bill Clinton and his ruthlessly ambitious Democrats proved willing to abandon their party’s founding principles, promises of reduced taxes placed front and center of their election platform.
It was not just policies being shaped by psychoanalysis. Using these focus groups as their mirror through which the campaign examined its own reflection, staffers were able to mold Bill Clinton into a duck-hunting, DIY-ing symbol of a self-determined, upwardly mobile America – a compliant media on hand to spoon-feed his ratings-boosting persona to the public.
Upon Clinton’s election, Gould returned to the UK to once more campaign for Labour, who were now under the stewardship of Tony Blair. Like the Democrats of early ‘90s America, Blair considered political convictions useless without a mandate to enact them, and so, in an effort to attain just that, he granted Gould and his team of analysts almost free reign to devise an election platform that would resonate with the British public. An alleged £22 million was spent conducting focus groups throughout the length and breadth of the country, the findings of which lead to a root-and-branch reinvention the party’s army of PR gurus dubbed “New Labour”.
It is this which adds a certain tragic dimension to the story of Philip Gould. Unlike other individuals who have been featured in this series, it appears that he was a true believer in the potential of psychoanalysis as a mechanism for improving people’s lives. It was his contention that through methods such as the focus group, governments could gauge and ultimately enact the will of the public in a purer form of democracy than had previously been possible.
His ideology, however, had one fatal flaw. After all, the public will these focus groups were gauging was little more a collection of incoherent, often contradictory emotional impulses, and consequently, any platform compiled from such impulses would inevitably prove just as incoherent and contradictory. In fact, under men such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, this new image-driven politics soon provided a means for government to hide its true intentions behind superficially popular positions, laying the groundwork for the kind of elite-led society that, over fifty years earlier, Edward Bernays himself had envisaged:
“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 which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
― Edward Bernays, Propaganda
It is worth noting that while it is the work of Edward Bernays which forms the marrow of this series, in truth, he is only one member of the Freuds to have built a career on the psychoanalytic underpinnings established by Uncle Sigmund. Throughout the course of The Century of the Self, (as well as my auxiliary reading), it at times borders on eerie how often and with what success his family has exerted unseen influence over the lives of many, so much so that I might have continued this series indefinitely, into the domains of arts, politics, and broadcasting. Perhaps some day I might. However, until such time, I think readers with a Netflix subscription should probably be advised to do a little digging into its co-founder Marc Randolph.
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