The Age of the Narrative, Part One:

How the discovery of the unconscious helped transform persuasion—and began a journey from psychoanalysis to advertising, public relations and modern political campaigning.

One of the central assumptions of the Enlightenment was that human beings were, broadly speaking, rational creatures. Give men and women access to information. Allow them to debate competing ideas. Free them from censorship and superstition. Educate them. Permit them to exchange goods and ideas freely. And, imperfectly but progressively, reason would prevail. This assumption became embedded in the institutions of liberal civilisation. Democracy asks citizens to choose between competing political programmes. Markets ask consumers to choose between competing products. Courts ask juries to weigh evidence. Universities are supposed to subject propositions to rational scrutiny. Behind all these institutions stands essentially the same figure: the autonomous individual, capable of examining evidence and reaching a reasoned conclusion.

Then, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud complicated the picture. Freud’s achievement was not simply the creation of psychoanalysis. Nor does our argument depend upon accepting all his theories, many of which have subsequently been challenged or substantially modified. His more enduring cultural contribution was to suggest something profoundly unsettling about human beings.

We may not understand why we do what we do.

Beneath the apparently rational surface of human behaviour, Freud identified a turbulent world of unconscious desires, fears, memories, conflicts and repressions. The explanations we consciously give for our actions may not necessarily be their real causes. It was an idea with consequences extending far beyond medicine. If people were not entirely rational in making choices, then perhaps they need not be persuaded rationally either. And one of the people who grasped the significance of this possibility was Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays.

From Vienna to Madison Avenue

Bernays was born in Vienna in 1891 and raised largely in the United States. His mother, Anna, was Freud’s sister. But Bernays did something intellectually remarkable with the emerging understanding of the unconscious. He took ideas that had developed in the consulting rooms of European psychoanalysis and recognised their potential application to mass society. Bernays became one of the pioneers of what we now call public relations. The expression itself is revealing. “Propaganda” acquired sinister associations, particularly after the First World War and later through its association with totalitarian regimes. “Public relations” sounded altogether more respectable. Yet Bernays was remarkably candid about what he believed was happening.

In his 1928 book Propaganda, he argued that modern mass societies inevitably depended upon mechanisms through which public attitudes could be organised and influenced. Millions of people could not independently investigate every political, commercial or social question confronting them. Their perceptions would therefore inevitably be mediated. Bernays called this the “engineering of consent”. It is difficult to imagine a phrase more characteristic of the twentieth century. The old conception of persuasion had largely been rhetorical. Here is my argument. Here is my evidence. Here is why you should agree with me.

Bernays understood that there was another route. Instead of persuading the conscious mind directly, one could associate an idea or product with something the individual already desired at a deeper psychological level. Security. Status. Freedom. Sexual attractiveness. Social acceptance. Rebellion. Prestige. Belonging.

The product itself could become almost secondary. The important thing was what the product meant.

Torches of Freedom

The most celebrated example concerned cigarettes.

In the America of the 1920s, women smoking publicly remained socially controversial. This presented the tobacco companies with an obvious commercial problem: approximately half the population faced a cultural prohibition against consuming their product openly. The conventional advertising response would have been to promote the cigarette. Bernays helped transform the problem. The cigarette could instead become a symbol. During New York’s 1929 Easter Sunday Parade, women were encouraged to smoke publicly in what was presented as an act of emancipation. Cigarettes became associated with “Torches of Freedom”.

The brilliance of the technique lies in the psychological transformation. The cigarette was no longer merely tobacco wrapped in paper. It represented female emancipation and independence. The consumer was therefore not simply purchasing nicotine. She could experience the act as an assertion of autonomy against an outdated social restriction. Whatever we now think about the ethics of selling cigarettes—and with hindsight the health consequences make the example particularly uncomfortable—the underlying communications technique was extraordinarily powerful.

Do not sell the object. Sell what the object means.

Much of modern advertising is contained within that sentence. And, increasingly, so is modern politics.

From Needs to Desires

Traditional economics had generally imagined consumers making relatively intelligible calculations about utility. I need a coat. Which coat offers the best combination of price, warmth and durability? But the psychologically informed advertiser asks a different question. What does the coat say about you? Does it signify wealth? Taste? Youth? Rebellion? Environmental responsibility? Membership of a particular social group? Suddenly we are no longer competing primarily over coats. We are competing over identities.

This helps explain an otherwise peculiar feature of modern consumer society. Mature economies contain vast numbers of products whose functional differences are relatively modest yet whose perceived differences are enormous. A watch tells the time. A car transports its occupants. A handbag carries possessions. A telephone makes calls and processes information. Yet each can acquire a meaning far beyond its function. The watch can represent achievement. The car can represent freedom or status. The handbag can represent taste and social position. The telephone can represent creativity, modernity or membership of a cultural tribe. The great achievement of modern branding was to transform objects into narratives.

And once that principle had been established, there was no reason to restrict it to commercial products.

The Candidate as Product

Political parties eventually discovered that candidates could be positioned in much the same way. A politician has policies, certainly. But a successful political candidate also acquires a psychological identity. The strong leader. The compassionate reformer. The competent administrator. The rebel. The outsider. The defender of ordinary people. The national father figure. The youthful moderniser. The persecuted truth-teller.

Once this identity has become established, an interesting psychological reversal can occur. We imagine that voters examine a politician’s policies and consequently develop an opinion of the politician. Often the process works in the opposite direction. We develop an emotional conception of the politician and subsequently interpret his or her policies through it. The brand precedes the argument. That observation should make us uncomfortable because liberal democracy is theoretically built upon something approaching the opposite process. The citizen is supposed to examine competing propositions and then choose between them.

Modern political communications increasingly asks: What does supporting this candidate say about you?

Voting therefore becomes capable of functioning partly as an act of identity. One does not merely vote for a programme. One votes to demonstrate what sort of person one is.

The Politics of Belonging

This helps explain why political disagreement has become so emotionally charged. If politics concerns taxation rates, infrastructure expenditure or the appropriate level of regulation, compromise is relatively straightforward. One can split the difference. But if political allegiance becomes incorporated into personal identity, disagreement assumes a different character. An attack upon my political party becomes an attack upon my group. An attack upon my candidate becomes an attack upon me. Evidence contradicting my political position can therefore produce something stronger than intellectual disagreement. It can produce psychological discomfort. And that creates extraordinary opportunities for the persuader.

The most effective political narrative does not merely tell us what is happening. It tells us who we are. And almost invariably it tells us who they are as well. We are the forgotten majority. They are the elite. We are the progressive future. They are reactionaries. We are patriots. They are betraying the nation. We are defenders of democracy. They are threatening it. The individual political question becomes embedded inside a much larger moral drama. This is where persuasion begins turning into narrative.

The Ancient Art in Modern Dress

None of this, of course, began with Freud or Bernays. Plato worried about the distinction between philosophy and rhetoric more than two thousand years earlier. The philosopher asks: What is true? The rhetorician asks: What will persuade?

Aristotle was considerably more sympathetic to rhetoric, but he too understood that persuasion involved much more than logical argument. Logos mattered, but so did ethos and pathos: the character of the speaker and the emotional condition of the audience.

Human beings have always told stories. Religions tell stories. Nations tell stories. Revolutions tell stories. Families tell stories about themselves. Political movements construct stories involving injustice, struggle, betrayal, redemption and renewal.

What changed in the twentieth century was not human nature. What changed was our ability to systematise its manipulation.

Freud helped illuminate the unconscious. Bernays recognised that those insights could be applied to populations. Mass media provided the distribution system. Advertising supplied the money. And an enormous new industry of persuasion began to emerge.

The Enlightenment Problem

There is an extraordinary historical irony here. The Enlightenment helped create modern democracy by placing the reasoning individual at the centre of political life. The emerging sciences of psychology then began revealing how complicated that reasoning individual actually was. And the advertising and public-relations industries discovered how to exploit the difference.

This does not mean human beings are irrational automatons. Nor does it mean advertising possesses some magical ability to control minds. Consumers reject advertising every day. Voters regularly confound political consultants. Human behaviour remains gloriously difficult to predict. The point is subtler.

Our capacity for reason coexists with powerful psychological forces that can be influenced without our necessarily recognising the process.

And perhaps the most effective persuasion is precisely that which does not feel like persuasion. Nobody enjoys being sold something. But people enjoy expressing themselves. Nobody likes propaganda. But people love stories. Nobody wants to believe their opinions have been manipulated. But everyone wants to belong. The genius of modern persuasion was to understand that these apparently separate propositions could be connected. The salesman could disappear.

In his place would stand a story.

From Bernays to Packard

By the middle of the twentieth century, the techniques Bernays had helped pioneer were becoming an industry. Advertising agencies were no longer satisfied with discovering what people bought. They wanted to know why. Researchers investigated consumers’ hidden anxieties and aspirations. Psychology entered the focus group. Products were tested not simply for their practical qualities but for the emotional associations they generated. And eventually an American journalist named Vance Packard began asking uncomfortable questions about what was happening. His 1957 book would become a sensation. Its title captured the phenomenon perfectly:

The Hidden Persuaders.

Packard’s concern was not merely that advertising persuaded us. Advertising had always done that. His concern was that a new generation of persuaders was attempting to discover motivations of which the consumer himself might be only dimly conscious—and then using those motivations to influence his behaviour. The implications went far beyond which refrigerator or automobile somebody purchased. For if these techniques could sell a product, they could sell an idea. And if they could sell an idea, eventually they could sell a politician.

That is where our story goes next.

Next: Part Two — The Hidden Persuaders: When Psychology Became an Industry. How Vance Packard exposed the psychological machinery of postwar advertising—and how the battle for the consumer’s unconscious prepared the way for the marketing of politics.