by Hugh Foy

In a recent podcast, the author of Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth, discussed the obsession with ‘growth’ rather than ‘thriving’ in our modern economies. Laying out the origins of marketing, and the manufacturing of ‘wants’ into ‘needs,’ Raworth was exploring the dynamic of consumerism, our individual and collective desire to consume, and the origins of how our consumption compulsion has been manipulated by mass messaging.

The origins of this dynamic can be traced back to the first half of the 20th century and Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the ‘Father of Public Relations’. Born in Austria in 1891, his mother was Freud’s sister Anna, and his father, Ely Bernays, was the brother of Freud’s wife Martha. The year after his birth, the Bernays family moved to New York, and Bernays later graduated from Cornell with a degree in agriculture. He chose a career in journalism, eventually working for President Woodrow Wilson’s administration with responsibility for selling the message that to nurture democracy in Europe the Unites States had to intervene in World War One.

Shaping the public conversation

His successful experience of wartime propaganda led Bernays to explore how this type of mass messaging could shape the public conversation and change thinking. The term ‘the engineering of consent’ describes the motivation and aims of Bernays’ work for the rest of his life, a term later adapted and used by Noam Chomsky in his seminal work Manufacturing Consent. After his work for Wilson, Bernays used the psychoanalytic insights of his uncle Sigmund to create a marketing and public relations industry in which his ideas became the scaffolding of the culture of consumerism that persists to this day.

Hugh Foy is a board member of Open House, Director of Programmes and Partnerships for the International Catholic Missionary Order the Xaverian Missionaries, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts