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[Music] don't settle for anything less than you can be make your life a masterpiece this is a series about how Sigmund Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind have been used by those in power to control the masses in an age of democracy last week's episode showed how Freud's ideas spread throughout America in the 1950s they were promoted by his daughter Anna and by Freud's nephew Edward Bernays who invented public relations he brought Freud's theories into the heart of advertising and marketing what they both believed was that underneath all human beings was a hidden irrational self which needed to be controlled both for the good of individuals and the stability of society but the Freud's were about to be toppled from power by opponents who said they were wrong about human nature the inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled which should be encouraged to express itself out of this become a new type of strong human being and a better society [Applause] [Music] but what in fact emerged from this revolution was the very opposite an isolated vulnerable and above all greedy self far more open to manipulation by both business and politics than anything that had gone before those in power would now control the self not by repressing it but by feeding its infinite desires [Music] [Applause] [Music] what goes on here is the liberation of feeling in other words feelings not just memories that have been suppressed for example screaming crying anger you get persons really angry know that I'm an old man listen I can't get all the strength until this that young people would get if they have those feelings in the 1950s a small group of renegade psychoanalysts began a new form of therapy they worked in small rooms in New York City and encouraged their patients to express their feelings openly which was a direct attack on the ideas of the Freudian psychoanalyst who had become rich and powerful tissue Americans how to control their feelings in Freud's work you see they were afraid of the feelings they believed that what they wanted was contained people very proper doing the right thing and living a proper life that's what they wanted but not a lot not an intense emotional life Freud wasn't emotional himself I mean he said he's an intellect fried I was in intellect - I know but I'm also more than that now the leader of this group was a man hated by Freud and his family he was called Wilhelm Reich Reich lived an isolated life in a house he had built for himself in remote mountains near the Canadian border Reich originally had been a devoted disciple of Freud's in Vienna in the 1920s but he had challenged Freud over the fundamental basis of psychoanalysis Freud argued that at heart human beings were still driven by primitive animal instincts the job of society was to repress and control these dangerous forces right believed the complete opposite the unconscious forces inside the human mind he said were good it was their repression by society that distorted them that was what made people dangerous RIKEN Freud had two fundamentally different views about what was essential human nature at its core freud saw an uncontrolled violent war like raging inferno of emotions right said these things are not the way human beings are originally destined to be they're the result of not permitting the original impulse to express itself the underlying natural impulse reich argued was the libido sexual energy if this were released then human beings would flourish but this idea brought him into direct conflict not only with Sigmund Freud but Freud's daughter Anna who believed that the sexual forces in humans were dangerous if not controlled my father thought that you should liberate the libido and have freedom and he developed a theory rather early that neuroses were due to lack of good orgasm or any orgasm and that was enough Freud you know was a virgin I mean this is very important because she never had a sexual relation with a man and here was this man preaching that the way to health was through orgasm and here was this woman who had been analyzed by her father because she was masturbating so here's this woman who's opposed to sexuality really and here's this man who who's preaching sexual freedom I mean that was bound to be a class wasn't there the conflict came to a head at a conference in 1934 in Switzerland Anna Freud who had by now become the acknowledged leader of the psychoanalytic movement forced Wilhelm Reich out she destroyed his career she got rid of him very definitely and I guess part of what I'm doing is getting rid of her well I think that that Anna Freud shouldn't get away with what she did that it should be known maneuvering to get him kicked out of the International Cycling Association you might say so or wronging a right no writing Iran you'd better cut that one yes Reich fled to the United States and built his home and a laboratory his ideas became grandiose to the point of madness he was convinced that he had discovered the source of libidinal energy he called it orgone energy and Reich built a giant gun which he said could capture this energy from the atmosphere and concentrated on two clouds to produce rain he also said that the gun could be used to destroy UFOs which threatened the future of the world [Music] in 1956 Reich was arrested by the federal authorities for selling a device that he said used organ energy to cure cancer Reich was treated as a madman he was imprisoned and all his books and papers burnt in the order of the court a year later Reich died in prison to the Freudians it seemed as if their main threat had been removed forever but they were wrong what the Freudians didn't realize was that their influence in American society was also about to be challenged and in a way that would lead not only to their decline but to the dramatic resurgence of Reich's ideas in America and throughout the capitalist world the consumer is king his whim makes Iran makes manufacturers wholesalers and retailers whoever wins his confidence wins the game whoever loses his confidence is lost by the late 50s psychoanalysis had become deeply involved in driving consumerism in America most advertising companies employed psychoanalysts and as last week's episode showed they had created new ways to understand consumers motives a bubble with the focus group in which consumers free associated their feelings about products out of this came new ways to market products by appealing to the hidden unconscious desires of the consumer green st. amidst is something intimate is going on but in the early sixties a new generation emerged who attacked this they accused American business of using psychological techniques to manipulate people's feelings and turn them into ideal consumers advertising was manipulation it was a way to get you to do something that didn't come out of you it came out of somebody else somebody else said this year you should be wearing powder pink shirts with matching powder pink buck shoes and I said why yeah that's not who I am that's when somebody else is they wanted you to be somebody who would buy their stuff this whole feeling of being somebody else's tool I don't want to be that I don't want to be somebody else's man I want to be me in the mid-sixties a protest movement began on America's campuses one of the students main targets was corporate an hour they accused the corporation's of brainwashing the American public consumerism was not just a way of making money it had become the means of keeping the masses dohsa while allowing the government to pursue a violent and illegal war in Vietnam the students mentor was a famous radical philosopher called Herbert Marcuse ou la cuza had studied psychoanalysis and was a fierce critic of the Freudians they had he said helped to create a world in which people were reduced to expressing their feelings and identities through mass-produced objects it resulted in what he called one dimensional man conformist and repressed the psychoanalysts had become the corrupt agents of those who ruled America it was one of the most striking phenomena to see to what extent the ruling power structure structure could manipulate manage and control not only the consciousness but also the subconscious and unconscious of the individuals and this took place on a psychological basis by the contours and the manipulation of the unconscious primary drives which for it stipulated think about it dear American people out there brainwash kitties get all brainwashed that's why I get here saying right now killed a bum but they look at in the living room you know you're saying kill me [Music] following the logic of Marcus's argument the new student left set out to attack this system of social control it was summed up in the slogan there is a policeman inside all our heads he must be destroyed and that policeman was going to be destroyed by overthrowing the state and the corporations that had put in there one group the Weathermen began a series of bomb attacks on companies that they said both controlled people's minds through consumer products and made the weapons being used in Vietnam there's no way to be committed to non-violence in the middle of the most violent society that history has ever created I'm not committed to non-violence in any way we want to live a life that isn't based on materialistic values and yet the whole system of government and the economy of America is based on profit on personal greed and selfishness so that in order to be human in order to love each other and be equal with each other and not place each other in roles we have to destroy the kind of government that keeps us from asserting our positive values of life but the American State fought back violently at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 the police and the National Guard were Unleashed to attack thousands of demonstrators which was the start of a phase of ruthless repression of the new left in America it culminated in the killing of four students at Kent State University eighteen months later in the face of this the left began to fall apart we had met the force of the state it was much bigger and stronger and more powerful than we realized and at that point what seemed to happen was that there was a change in tactics confronted by this violent repression many in the new left began to turn to a new idea if it was impossible to get the policeman out of one's head by overthrowing the state instead one should find a way of getting inside one's own mind and removing the controls implanted there by the state in the corporation's out of this become a new self and thus a new society [Music] people who have been politically active were persuaded that if they could change themselves and be healthy individuals and if a movement grew up just aimed at people changing themselves then at some point all that positive change going on well you could say quantity would become quality and there would be a sort of a spontaneous transformation of society but political political activism was not required it's about making a new you that if enough people change the way they were that the society would change so the possible became political yes the personal became political without changing the personal you didn't stand a chance of changing the political coming up against the state power of the United States was not an option and they outgunned us and to produce the new self they turned to the ideas and techniques of Wilhelm Reich since his death a small group of psychotherapists have been developing techniques based on Reich's ideas their aim was to invent ways that would allow individuals to free themselves from the controls implanted in their minds by society their Center was a tiny old motel on the remote coast of California it was called the Esalen Institute the dominant figure a Tesla was a psychoanalyst called Fritz Perls Perls had been trained by Reich and had developed a form of group encounter in which he pushed individuals to publicly express the feelings inside them Society had said were dangerous and should be repressed it's a basic fear of that thing inside me like a little demon in there it doesn't come out very often it's really hard to get it over now put the thing inside you on that chair talk to it pearls used to call this getting on the hot seat in front of a group this if this were the hot seat and you were pearls and you would guide me into this process of self enactment self revelation of staying present to all the parts of yourself and noticing it and then taking ownership of this as the demon yes I can come out like we can right out of him and I can push him aside where you see you push I can push you aside give the demon with each one of us I can make you all cry I can't make you all feel terrible maybe even forever I can make the mouth in this mouth here do things and say things I can almost destroy anyone each one of you if I get out there isn't one of you that I would spare not even you yeah how do you feel no I could better I mean I I feel very honest yeah and you notice the increase of power in other words taking ownership of who you are and how you act and how you feel your whole being in the world in other words giving you autonomy owning your freedom I'm frightening but when I have my power I'm frightening see I pride you with my power i frighten you with my power nobody really power you in your muscles my god okay okay okay stop it you it was not phony movement that's what I wanted to do and I did it what pearls and others working at Esalen believed was that they were creating ways that allowed individuals to express their true inner selves out of this they believed would come new autonomous beings free of social conditioning to the left defeated in the wake of Chicago it was an enormous tree attractive idea these techniques could be used to unleash a new powerful self strong enough to overthrow the old order [Music] in the late sixties and early seventies thousands flock to eslint only a few years before it had been an obscure fringe Institute now it became the center of a national movement for personal transformation the human potential movement so it became magnetic people wanted to join this stream of exploration within seven or eight years there were about 200 of these centers in America looking mainly to esslyn for the leadership really and it took out a big political agenda you could not separate personal transformation from social transformation the two go together as the movement grew the leaders of Esalen decided to try and use their techniques to solve social problems they began with racism they organized an encounter group for white and black radicals both groups would be encouraged to express their inner racist feelings which had been instilled in them by society by doing this they would transcend those feelings and encounter each other as individuals I started a series of encounters called racial confrontation as transcendental experience we thought that we wanted to get that kind of black/white confrontation so you could really get down to see what was between the two races not by backing off and trying to be polite but by going right into the belly of the beast of this beast of of racial prejudice and these were extremely dramatic these were the toughest workshops ever convened at Esalen Institute you got guests in Vietnam that's a benefits of slave labor you got building skyscrapers that you nominate and control economically politically and tell me that is not yours it's yours too then the blacks all got together and attack the whites and they just let us have it what the color was peeping somebody peeping somebody means peeping into their secrets into their phone in this and so forth like the white liberal oh they really really got onto the white the liberal so don't give me no [ __ ] man I'm free you're a goddamn liar you white Pink's are my [ __ ] you yeah I don't know what you came down here for you want a black buck huh you looking for a stud huh what did you come here for you sitting there with your legs all gap wide I'll be showing your drawers now why'd you come here for the black/white encounter groups were a disaster the black radicals saw it as an insidious attempt to destroy their power by trying to turn them into liberated individuals Esalen was removing the one thing that gave them power and confidence in their struggle against racism their collective identity as blacks so the human potential movement turned to another social group who they believed would benefit from personal transformation nuns and this time they were more successful the convent of the Immaculate Heart in Los Angeles was one of the largest seminaries in America the group of radical psychotherapists approached the convent they wanted to try out their techniques for personal liberation on individuals whose identities were defined by a series of external rules which they had deeply internalized the convent anxious to appear modern agreed to the experiment and we did we can encounter workshops for several hundred Immaculate Heart nuns nuns who were reserved and they tended to be more reserved than other normal people were told don't be so reserved let it all out you're a good person you can afford to be who you really are you don't need to play the role of a nun you don't need to keep downcast eyes and prudence is an oversold virtue you're trying to assert yourself trying to find out who you are who you're becoming at the same time you're trying to live a life of dedication of service and you're trying to make all these things fit into who you are and you're just you know it's just it's such a turmoil at times that you just use you just blow a gasket and do silly crazy things running around the orchard and stealing orange yeah and taking cokes out of the refrigerator and it's crazy things I felt like I was being a hypocrite and I wanted people to respect me for what I was not for what I was wearing and so I'm glad for the change you feel frightened but you'll go on oh yeah I'm scared to death but but it's worth it the experiment began to transform the convent the nuns voted to discard their habits in favor of ordinary clothes but the psychotherapists found they had awoken other forces one of the things we unleashed was a sexual energy the kind of thing that the church who had been very good at restraining was no longer to be restrained one sister who was a member of the community she got the idea that she could be freer than she had been before and she seduced one of her classmates and then seduced the mistress of novices who was an older woman very reserved and her program of freeing this older woman was sexual she drove her to the store and when they drove back and drove into the garage she leaned over and gave her a big kiss on the lips and thereafter sister who had perhaps never been kissed before was ready for more the effect of the experiment on the convent was cataclysmic within a year 300 nuns and half the convent petitioned the Vatican to be released from their vows and six months later the convent closed its doors all that was left was a small group of nuns but they had become radical lesbian nuns the rest gave up the religious life they did yeah they became persons by the late 60s the idea of self exploration was spreading rapidly in America encounter groups became the center of what was seen as a radical alternative culture based on the development of the self free of a corrupt capitalist culture we just want the freedom to to be ourselves and that's for love for experience positive way of life we don't we don't say that you're wrong we just want to be free to to be what we want to be here what we find ourselves to be as we continue to search our sin and it was beginning to have a serious effect on corporate America because these new cells were not behaving as predictable consumers the life insurance industry in particular was concerned that fewer and fewer college students were buying life insurance when they left University they are Stan your Yankelovich America's leading market researcher to investigate he had studied psychoanalysis the life insurance business more than any other business at the time it was built on the Protestant ethic your wrong way bought life insurance if you were a person who sacrificed for the future if you lived in the present you had no need for life insurance so they had some sense that maybe they sort of core values of the Protestant ethic were being challenged by some of these new values that were beginning to appear and I was really astonished at what the conventional interpretation the dominant interpretation was that it had to do with political radicalism you know it was clear to us that that was a mask a cover the core of them had to do with self expressiveness this preoccupation with the South from the inner self that was what was so important to people the ability to be self expressive [Applause] Jankovic began to track the growth and behavior of these new expressive selves what he told the corporations was that these new beings were consumers but they no longer wanted anything that would place them within the narrow strata of American society instead what they wanted were products that would express their individuality their difference in a conformist world the very things that US corporations did not make products have always had an emotional meeting what was new was individuality the idea about this product expresses me and whether it was a small European car the particular music system your presentation of self your clothing for immediate energy from our muscles and these become ways in which people can expend their money in order to say to the world who they are but the manufacturers that they had no idea of what was going on really with consumers and in the market life major advertising companies set up what they called operating groups to try and work out how to appeal to these new individuals the head of one agency sent a memo to all staff we must conform he told them to the new nonconformist we must listen to the music of Bobby Dylan and go to the theater more but the problem was few of the self-expressive individuals would take part in focus groups the advertisers were left to their own devices there's a new scenario that is so right makes you dance it's a way out of sight this tasty little squares of malted wheat it's crispy and it's crunchy and it tastes on me faster though with more rock than folk and there was an even more serious problem to make products for people who wanted to express themselves would mean creating variety but the systems of mass production that had been developed in America were only profitable if they made large numbers of the same objects this had fitted perfectly with the limited range of desires of a conformist Society the expressive self threatened this whole system of manufacturing and the threat was about to grow rapidly because an entrepreneur had invented a way of mass-producing this new independence sir he was called Werner stuff that we traditionally think of as being in your mind is there actually in the world but you're moving to that do Erhard it invented a system called asked Erhard seminar training hundreds of people came for weekend sessions to be taught how to be themselves and rest was soon copied by other groups like exegesis in britain many of Earhart's techniques came from the human potential movement but he criticized the movement for not having gone far enough their idea that there was a central core inside all human beings was he said just another limitation on human freedom in reality there was no fixed self which meant that you could be anything that you wanted to be the thesis of the human potential movement was that there was something really good down in there and if you took these layers off what you were gonna wind up with was a kernel a something that was innately self expressive that was the true self that was going to be a wonderful thing in actuality you found people who'd gone to the last layer and took off the last layer and found that what was left was nothing yes sessions were intense and often brutal the participants signed contracts agreeing not to leave and to allow the trainer's to do anything they thought necessary to break down their socially constructed identities the real point to this training was to go down through layer after layer after layer after layer until you got to the last layer and peeled it off where the recognition was that it's really all meaningless and empty [Applause] now that's existentialism Zend point s when a step further in that people began to recognize that it was not only meaningless and empty but it was empty and meaningless that it was empty and meaningless and in that there's an enormous freedom all the constrictions all of the rules you've placed on yourself are gone and what you're left with is nothing and nothing is an extraordinarily powerful place to stand because it is only from nothing that you can create and from this nothing people were able to invent a life and allowing them to create themselves invent themselves you can be what you want to be I want you to start to make that sound and on that sound create people the world the way you want to create it what Earhart did was to say that only the individual matters that there is no societal concern that you living a fulfilled life is all you need be concerned about ask people came out of those trainings feeling that it wasn't selfish to think about yourself it was your highest duty [Applause] [Music] hold me like you let me go the training is is two weekends and it was quite an incredible experience in my life I'll forever be grateful for the experience I got a great deal out of it we really want to know who we are there are things going on we learn more and more about us ourselves all the time and to really find out what it makes what it is that makes us tick and how we are describing the South s became hugely successful singers film stars and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans underwent the training in the 1970s but in the process the political idea that had begun the movement for personal transformation began to disappear the original vision had beamed that through discovering and expressing the self a new culture would be born one that would challenge the power of the state we will not let them separate our culture from our politics we are a people we are all together but what is now emerging was the idea that people could be happy simply within themselves and that changing society was irrelevant one of the proponents of this was Jerry Rubin in 1968 Rubin as leader of the Yippies had led the march on Chicago but now he had undergone s training I was willing to die you know and I had a martyr complex in a sense think we all did and I've given up that idea of sacrifice and I'm not as I'm not as overwhelmingly moved by injustice as I was and now we reincarnated ourselves from within basically the politics were lost and-and-and-and totally replaced by this lifestyle and and then the desire to become deeper and deeper into the self by now a grandiose sense of the self and my good friend and one of the original yippy found this Jerry Rubin definitely moved in that direction and and I think he was buying into beginning to buy into the notion that he could be happy and fully self developed on his own socialism in one person although that of course is capitalism that's that's the whole joke I think it's funny I think it's funny because people spend so much of their life being bedeviled by their past and being locked into their past and being limited by their past and there's an enormous freedom from that letting people create themselves [Music] s twas only the most vivid and intense expression of an idea that was spreading rapidly through all strata of American society books and television programs promoted the idea that once first duty was to be oneself and those monitoring this shift were astonished at the speed with which the idea was spreading in 1970 it was a small percentage of the total population maybe three to five percent by 1980 it had spread to the vast majority of the public up to eighty percent you asked the question how do you get self actualized you take this day and you say when I shave every morning I look in that mirror I say to myself I really say this I said nobody is going to ruin this day for you Wayne Dyer nobody that this preoccupation with the self and the inner self travelled and spread throughout the society in the 1970s it helped me to stop living in the past and start building from today and using my experiences in a positive way to be a better person today and tomorrow but then the problem comes well how do you be self expressive and it was at this point that American capitalism decided it was going to step in and help these new individuals to express themselves and in the process make a lot of money the first thing they were going to do was to find a way of getting inside their heads to discover what these new beings wanted in order to be themselves this came not from Madison Avenue but from one of the most powerful scientific research institutes in America Stanford Research Institute in California worked for corporations and government it had done much of the early work on computers and was also working for the Department of Defense on what would become the Star Wars project in 1978 a group of economists and psychologists at SR I decided to find a way to read measure and fulfill the desires of these new unpredictable consumers the idea was to create a rigorous tool for measuring a whole range of desires wishes values that prior to that time had been kind of overlooked they say in business you know what gets measured gets done we were basically telling manufacturers if you're really going to satisfy and not just the basic needs but individuated wants whims and desires of more highly developed human beings you're going to have to segment you're going to have to individuate to do this Sr I turned for help to those who had begun the liberation of the south in particular one of the leaders of the human potential movement a psychologist called Abraham Maslow through observing the work at places like esslyn Maslow had invented a new system of psychological types he called it the hierarchy of needs and it described the different emotional stages that people went through as they liberated their feelings at the top was self-actualization this was the point at which individuals became completely self-directed and free of society the team at SR I thought that Maslow's hierarchy might form the basis for a new way to categorize society not my social class but by different psychological desires and drives to testers they designed a huge questionnaire with hundreds of questions about how people saw themselves their inner values the questions were designed to see whether people fitted into Maslow's categories we were trying to find out what people really felt like so we asked these really penetrating questions and we hired a company that administers surveys you know to do them they said they've never seen anything like it usually you have to send out a postcard in six weeks and then another postcard and then you got to call the people up you know to get the return rates up we had an 86 percent return and they only sent out one postcard people loved filling out this questionnaire we got several questionnaires back with a note attached saying do you have any other question airs I could fill out because people we were asking people to think about things that they had never thought about before and they liked thinking about him yeah like what they felt inside what what motivated them what was their life about what was important to them it was sort of like wow the answers were then analyzed by computer it revealed that the were underlying patterns in the way people felt about themselves which fitted Maslow's categories and at the top of the hierarchy we're a large and growing group which cut across all social classes the s RI team called them the inner directives these were people who felt they were not defined by their place in society but by the choices they made themselves but what s our I discovered was that these people could be defined by the different patterns of behavior through which they chose to express themselves self-expression was not infinite it fell into identifiable types the SR I team invented a new term for it lifestyles they had managed to categorize the new individualism they called their system values and lifestyles vowels for short at the forefront of this change are three new Val's groups groups we call inner directive these are people for whom personal satisfaction is more important than status or money they tend to be self expressive complex and individualistic rob is an I am me I am knees are searching for new values breaking away from traditions and inventing their own standards Rob even invented his own name Rob noxious Jody is an experiential this is a group seeking inner growth through direct experience experiential --zz aren't in one place much this is the try anything once crowd and all that activity takes goods and services their hobbies are hands-on and their possessions are simple but not always simply price a bookseller I fell books I'm a businessman it doesn't necessarily believe mean that I believe in capitalism it just happens to be what I'm doing now SR I created a simplified questionnaire with just 30 key questions anyone who answered them could be immediately fitted into a dozen or serve these new groups it allowed businesses to identify which groups were buying their products and from that how the goods could be marketed so they became powerful emblems of those groups inner values and lifestyles it was the beginning of lifestyle marketing so it allowed people not just to look at people as demographics group of age and income and whatever but to really understand the underlying motivations I mean most of marketing was looking at people's actions and trying to figure out what to do but what we were doing is we were trying to look more into people's underlying values so that we could predict what is their lifestyle what kind of house do they live in what kind of car do they drive so the corporation's were then able to sell things to them by understanding them by having labels by knowing what these people look like where they live what their lifestyles are if a new product expressed a particular group's values it will be bought by them this is what made the values and lifestyle system so powerful its ability to predict what new products self-actualize errs would choose and this power is about to be demonstrated dramatically vowels would show it could predict not just the products they would buy but the politicians they were going to choose to elect in 1980 Ronald Reagan ran as the president he and his advisers were convinced they could win on a program of a new individualism it would be an attack on 50 years of government interference in people's lives [Music] I wrote a speech about let the people make the basic decisions get judges out of the way get bureaucrats out of the way get centralized government out of the way I gave Reagan a choice of several titles for the speech and the one he picked was let the people rule let the people regain rule regain control over their own destiny away from a remote elite in Washington I would like to think that the kind of leadership that I would exercise in Washington is not the kind of leadership that I would pretend that I can solve all the problems I've been discussing here but the together you and I can I would like to be take the lead in taking government off the backs of the American people and turning you loose to do what I know it was radical moderate Republicans thought it was suicide Jimmy Carter called it ridiculous the press was extremely negative but the odd thing is that it pulled very well in New Hampshire which was the first primary state the state that we had to win what was owned was that the seem to be a strange mosaic of support for Reagan's policies the traditional posters could see no coherent pattern across class age or gender but those who had designed the values and lifestyle system believed that they knew why they were testing their system in both America and Britain and they were convinced that both Reagan's and mrs. Thatcher's message about individual freedom would appeal to the group at the top of their hierarchy the inner directions because it fitted with the way they saw themselves they were really concerned about being individuals being individualistic and so in the early stages when we were looking at the messages that both Thatcher and then Reagan were were putting across we said they are using words that will really appeal to a lot of the younger people and particularly to the people who are moving towards self-actualization we call them the inner directed people a lot of our colleagues said you know you better salute be ridiculous inna directeds are very socially aware very socially concerned they'll never vote conservative or they'll never vote for the Republicans but we said if Thatcher and Reagan continue to appeal to them in this way they really will and I vision leadership in taking government off your backs and turning you loose to do what you could be so well thank you the idea that the new self actualizing individuals would choose a politician from the right not the left seemed extraordinary but to test their prediction the values and lifestyles team did a survey of voting intentions when they correlated it with their new psychological categories when we said in our surveys who are you going to vote for sure enough it was the inner directives who said that they would vote for Thatcher and Reagan and they made the difference in those elections because of their their voting for Thatcher and Reagan and it really surprised our colleagues even within my own organization it really showed the power of this approach because it's very difficult to identify in a directeds on the street these people who voted for Thatcher and Reagan these inner directives came from any walk of life it's really hardly correlated with social class at all I mean if you just go along and look at age sex social class you would never pick them up but if you if you really go along with a questionnaire that gets at their values then you can identify them very easily and that was completely new yeah at the beginning of 1981 Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president but he took charge of a country that was facing economic disaster the terrible inflation of the 1970s had destroyed much of America's traditional Heavy Industries millions were unemployed the true tease campaign promises Reagan told the country he would not step in to help as all previous governments had since the war these united states are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions we suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflation's in our national history idle industries have cast workers into unemployment human misery and personal indignity in this present crisis government is not the solution to our problem government is the problem but America's ailing economy was about to be rescued not by government but by the new groups that the market researchers had identified the self-actualizing individuals they were about to become the motor for what will be called the new economy [Music] you can be what you want to be regarding wait what do you really want a tasty product that's good for me what do you want that for one technique is that we ask people the same question over and over and over again and we say what do you want what do you really want what do you want that for and they start to talk about it and they kind of get intimate with what's going on what we're doing with that technique is unpeeling the onions if you want to think of a person kind of having layers and layers and layers of protection and thoughts and behaviors and belief we want to get to that center core in the wake of the invention of values and lifestyles a vast industry of psychological market research grew up and the old technique of the focus group invented by the Freudian psychoanalysts in the 50s was used in a new and powerful way the original aim of the focus group had been to find ways to entice people to buy a limited range of mass-produced goods but now focus groups were used in a different way to explore the inner feelings of lifestyle groups and out of that invent whole new ranges of products which would allow those groups to express what they felt was their individuality and the generation who had once rebelled against the conformity imposed by consumerism I embraced it because it helped them to be themselves what capitalism managed to do that was brilliant was to actually create products that people like me would be interested in that people like Jerry Rubin would be interested in capitalism developed a whole industry at developing products that evoke a larger sense of self that that that seemed to agree with us that the self was infinite that you could be anything you wanted to be that that took our philosophy and agreed with it and then created products that supposedly helped you aids that helped you be this limitless self the product sells you a way of life a way of being the product sells you values you dress this way you live in a house like this you know have furniture like this you use this computer [Music] you eat in these restaurants their values their hip this coolness this is not I repeat not a marketing scheme so the notion that you could buy an identity replace the original movement notion that you were perfectly free to create an identity and you were perfectly free to change the world and make the world anything you wanted it to be well what I wear is a statement this vast range of new desires fitted perfectly with changes in industrial production Computers now allowed manufacturers to economically produce short runs of consumer goods the old restrictions of mass production disappeared as did the worry that had bedeviled corporate America ever since mass production had been invented that they would produce too many girls with the new self consumer desire seemed to have no limit in the United States the concern of companies was always that supply would outstrip demand that we would we were producing too much and that there was not a market firing you don't hear that kind of talk anymore because you've gone from a conception of a market of limited needs and if you fill them they're filled to a market of unlimited ever-changing needs dominated by self expressiveness that products and services can satisfy in an endless variety of ways and where's the change all the time and consequently economies have unlimited horizons [Music] out of this explosion of desire came what seemed a never-ending consumer boom that regenerated the American economy the original idea had been that the liberation of the self would create new kinds of people free of social constraint that radical change had happened but while the new beings felt liberated they had become increasingly dependent for their identity on business the corporations had realized that it was in their interests to encourage people to feel that they were unique individuals and then offer them ways to express that individuality the world in which people felt they were rebelling against conformity is not a threat to business but its greatest opportunity [Music] it was in a sense the triumph of the self it was the triumph of a certain Self Indulgence a view that everything in the world and all moral judgment was appropriately viewed through the lens of personal satisfaction indeed the ultimate ending point of that logic is that there is no Society there is only a bunch of individual people making individual choices to promote their own individual well-being next week's episode tells the story of how politicians on the left in both Britain and America turned to the techniques developed by business in order to regain power but what they didn't realize was that what had worked for business would undermine the very basis of their political beliefs they would find themselves trapped by the greedy desires of the new south