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, we saw how Freud's ideas spread throughout America in the 1950s.
They were promoted by his daughter, Anna and his nephew, Edward Bernays,
who invented public relations and brought Freud's theories into advertising and marketing.
A man like YOU...!
I mean...with a car like THIS!
What they both believed
was that underneath all human beings,
was a hidden, irrational self which needed to be controlled,
for the good of individuals and the stability of society.
But the Freuds 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.
It should be encouraged to express itself.
Out of this, would come a new type of strong human being
and a better society.
But what, in fact, emerged from this revolution was the very opposite -
an isolated, vulnerable and 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.
What goes on here is the liberation of feeling -
feelings, not just memories, that have been suppressed.
For example, screaming, crying, anger...
You have a person that's really angry and they're gonna let it out.
NO..! I could kill you!
I'm an old man and I can't get all the strength into this that young people would get.
That wasn't bad.
In the 1950s, a small group of renegade psychoanalysts began a new form of therapy.
They worked in small rooms in New York
and encouraged their patients to express their feelings openly.
It was a direct attack on the ideas of the Freudian psychoanalysts
who had become rich and powerful teaching Americans how to control their feelings.
In Freud's way, they were afraid of feelings.
They believed that what they wanted was contained people,
very proper, doing the right thing and living the proper life.
That's what they wanted. And not an intense, emotional life.
Freud wasn't emotional himself!
He's an intellect, Freud!
I was an intellect too, but I'm 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 in remote mountains near the Canadian border.
Reich had been a devoted disciple of Freud in Vienna in the 1920s,
but he had challenged Freud over the fundamental basis of psychoanalysis.
Freud argued that humans were driven by primitive animal instincts.
The job of society was to repress and control these dangerous forces.
Reich believed the complete opposite -
the unconscious forces inside the human mind were good.
It was their repression by society that distorted them -
that was what made people dangerous.
Reich and Freud had two fundamentally different views
about what was essential human nature.
'At it's core,
'Freud saw an uncontrolled, violent...
'war-like...
'raging inferno of emotions.'
Reich said these things were not the way humans were originally destined to be.
They were 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, human beings would flourish.
This idea brought him into direct conflict not only with Freud,
but his daughter Anna, who believed the sexual forces in humans were dangerous if not controlled.
My father thought you should liberate the libido and have freedom.
He developed the theory that neuroses were due to lack of good orgasm,
or any orgasm.
And that was...
Anna Freud, you know, was a virgin.
This is very important because she never had a sexual relationship 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 analysed by her father because she was masturbating.
So, here's this woman who's opposed to sexuality and here's this man who's preaching sexual freedom.
There was bound to be a clash.
The conflict came to a head at a conference in 1934 in Switzerland.
Anna, who was now 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.
Explain. Well, I think Anna Freud shouldn't get away with what she did, that it should be known -
manoeuvring to get him kicked out of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
So, you're taking revenge? You might say so.
Or wronging a right...
No, righting a wrong! You better cut that one out.
Is that called a Freudian slip? Yes, it is.
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 he had discovered the source of libidinal energy.
He called it orgone energy
and built a giant gun which, he said, could capture this energy from the atmosphere
and concentrate it onto clouds to produce rain.
He also said the gun could be used to destroy UFOs which threatened the future of the world.
In 1956, Reich was arrested by the federal authorities
for selling a device that he said used orgone energy to cure cancer.
Reich was treated as a madman.
He was imprisoned and all his books and papers burnt on 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 realise was that their influence in American society
was also about to be challenged 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 or unmakes 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.
As we showed last week, they created new ways to understand consumers' motives -
above all, 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.
Interesting... Memorability...
Sheer deception... Great... Pivotal steering wheels...
Symbolic... It's irresistible... It dreams...
Something intimate is going on...
But in the early '60s, 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 -
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? That's not who I am. That's who 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 wanna be that.'
I don't wanna be somebody else's man. I wanna be ME.
In the mid '60s, a protest movement began on America's campuses.
One of the students' main targets was corporate America.
They accused the corporations of brainwashing the American public.
Consumerism was not just a way of making money -
it had become the means of keeping the masses docile,
while allowing the government to pursue a violent and illegal war in Vietnam.
The students' mentor was a famous radical philosopher, Herbert Marcuse.
He'd studied psychoanalysis and was a fierce critic of the Freudians.
He said people were now reduced to expressing feelings and identities through mass-produced objects.
It had resulted in "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 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 control and manipulation of the unconscious primary drive
which Freud stipulated.
Think about it, dear American people out there...
You're all brainwashed, kiddies.
That's why you're all saying right now, "Kill the bum!"
Following the logic of Marcuse'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."
He WAS going to be destroyed by overthrowing the state and corporations that had put him there.
One group, The Weathermen, began bombing companies THEY said
controlled minds through consumer products and made weapons for use in Vietnam.
There's no way to be committed to non-violence
in the most violent society history has created.
We want to live a life that isn't based on materialistic values.
And yet, the whole system of government and economy of America is based on profit and personal greed.
In order to be human and equal with each other and not place each other in roles,
we must destroy the 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 National Guard were unleashed to attack thousands of demonstrators.
It was the start of ruthless repression of the American New Left.
It culminated in the killing of four students at Kent State University, 18 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 realised.'
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 and the corporations.
Out of this would come a new self and thus, a new society.
People who had been politically active were persuaded
that if they could change themselves and be healthy individuals,
and that if a movement grew up just aimed at people changing themselves,
then, at some point, all that positive change going on -
quantity would become quality - there would be a spontaneous transformation of society.
Political activism was not required.
'It's about making a new you -
'if enough people changed the way they were, the society would change.'
So, the personal 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.
They out-gunned 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 had 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 centre was a motel on the remote coast of California - the Esalen Institute.
The dominant figure at Esalen 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
that society had told them were dangerous and should be repressed.
It's a basic fear of that thing inside me - it doesn't come out very often.
Now, put the thing inside you on that chair and talk to it.
'He used to call this, "getting on the hot-seat".'
If this were the hot-seat and you were Perls,
you would guide me to 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.
Has the demon? Yes.
Yes, I can come out. I can come right out of him.
And I can push him aside...
You! Say it. I can push YOU aside. Yes.
You're the demon with each one of us. I can make you all cry.
I can make you all feel...terrible...
..maybe even forever.
I can...
make...
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.
How do you feel now?
I feel better... I mean, I...
I feel very honest. Did 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!
When I have my power, I'm frightening.
Say, "I frighten you with my power". I frighten you with my power.
Where do you feel power? In your hands?
In your muscles?
A little.
Wake up!
I won't let you go from me, goddam you!
OK, OK, OK!
Stop it!
BLEEP you! That was not phony movement. That's what I wanted to do.
What Perls and others at Esalen believed,
was that they were creating ways that allowed individuals to express their true inner selves.
I want them to applaud for ME!
Out of this, they believed, would come new autonomous beings, free of social conditioning.
To the Left, in the wake of Chicago, it was a very attractive idea.
These techniques could be used to unleash a new powerful self,
strong enough to overthrow the old order.
In the late '60s and early '70s, thousands flocked to Esalen.
Only a few years before, it had been an obscure fringe institute.
It became the centre of a national movement for personal transformation - the Human Potential movement.
'It became magnetic.
'People wanted to join this stream of exploration.'
Within about seven or eight years, there were 200 of these centres in America,
looking to Esalen for leadership.
I feel so liberated. Really? Fantastic.
'It took on a big political agenda.'
You couldn't separate personal transformation from social transformation - they go together.
As the movement grew, the leaders of Esalen tried to use their techniques to solve social problems.
They began with racism. They organised an encounter group for white and black radicals.
Both groups would be encouraged to express the inner racist feelings that society had instilled in them.
By doing this, they would transcend those feelings and encounter each other as individuals.
I started "Racial Confrontation as Transcendental Experience".
We wanted to get that black/white confrontation
so we could see what was between the two races,
not by being polite, but by going right into the belly of the beast of racial prejudice.
And these were extremely dramatic. These were the toughest workshops ever convened at Esalen.
You got clothes on! You got shoes on!
You're lookin' at me! You got the goddam police in the neighbourhood.
You got a government and a mayor!
Oh, really? You got the president! You can vote too!
You got deaths in Vietnam, the benefits of slave labour!
You got buildings that you dominate and control, economically and politically. They're yours too.
'Then, the blacks got together and attacked the whites.
'And they let us have it -'
they called it "peeping" somebody.
It means peeping into their secrets, their phoniness and so forth.
The really got on to the white liberal.
Don't gimme no shit about "I'm free", you white-pink son-of-a-bitch!
I wanna know what you came down here for.
Are you lookin' for a stud?
Huh? What did you come here for?
You're sittin' there with your legs all wide open, showin' your drawers.
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 individuals,
Esalen was removing the thing that gave them power and confidence -
their collective identity as blacks.
Your reason for being here is different.
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.
A 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 internalised.
The convent, anxious to appear modern, agreed to the experiment.
'We did weekends of workshops for several hundred Immaculate Heart nuns.'
Nuns tended to be more reserved than other normal people
and were told to 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 have downcast eyes." Prudence is an oversold virtue.
You're trying to assert yourself and find out who you're becoming.
At the same time, you're trying to live a life of dedication and service
and you're trying to make all these things fit into who YOU are.
It's such a turmoil at times, you just blow a gasket -
running around the orchard, stealing oranges, taking cokes from the refrigerator!
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.
Are you frightened? I'm scared to death, but it's worth it.
The experiment began to transform the convent.
The nuns voted to discard their habits in favour of ordinary clothes.
Psychotherapists found they had awoken other forces.
'One of the things we had unleashed was sexual energy -
'the kind of thing that the Church had been very good at restraining.'
One sister who was a member of the community got the idea that she could be freer than she had been.
She seduced one of her classmates and then seduced the Mistress of Novices,
who was an older woman - very reserved.
Her programme of freeing this older woman was sexual.
She drove her to the store and when they drove back and into the garage,
she leaned over and gave her a big kiss on the lips.
Thereafter, a sister who'd never been kissed was ready for more.
The effect of the experiment on the convent was cataclysmic.
Within a year, 300 nuns - over half the convent -
petitioned the Vatican to be released from their vows.
Six months later, the convent closed its doors.
All that was left was a small group of nuns who'd become radical lesbian nuns.
The rest gave up the religious life.
They gave up being nuns? They did. They became persons.
By the late '60s,
the idea of self-exploration was spreading rapidly in America.
Encounter groups became the centre of a radical alternative culture,
based on self-development - free of a corrupt capitalist culture.
We want the freedom to be ourselves.
We're FOR love, FOR experience, a positive way of life.
We don't say that you're wrong.
We want to be free to be what we want to be and what we find ourselves to be as we search ourselves.
It was beginning to have a serious effect on Corporate America.
These new selves were not behaving as predictable consumers.
The life-insurance industry, in particular,
was concerned that fewer students were buying life insurance after university.
They asked America's leading market researcher, Daniel Yankelovich, to investigate.
He had studied psychoanalysis.
The life insurance business, more than any other at the time,
was built on the Protestant ethic.
You only 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 the core values of the Protestant ethic
were being challenged by these new values that were beginning to appear.
'And I was really astonished at what I found.
'The conventional interpretation - the dominant interpretation -
'was that it had to do with political radicalism.
'But it was clear to us that that was a mask!
'The core of it had to do with self expressiveness...
'This preoccupation with the self and the inner self,'
that was what was so important - the ability to be self-expressive.
Wow! What a feeling!
Free your mind! Let's go!
Yankelovich began to track the growth and behaviour 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.
They wanted products to express their individuality, their difference in a conformist world -
the very things that US corporations did not make.
'Products have always had an emotional meaning.
'What was new was individuality -'
the idea that this product expresses ME.
And...whether it was a small European car...
'a particular music system...
'your presentation of self - your clothing...'
..For immediate energy from our muscles and relaxation...
'These become ways in which people can expend their money
'in order to say to the world who they are.'
But the manufacturers, they had no idea of what was going on really... with consumers and in the market.
Major advertising companies set up "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 non-conformists.
"Listen to Bobby Dylan and go to the theatre more."
But few of the self-expressive individuals would take part in focus groups.
Advertisers were left to their own devices.
# There's a new cereal that tastes so right
# It makes you dance It's way out of sight
# It's tasty little squares of malted wheat
# It's crispy and it's crunchy and it tastes so neat. # Faster, though.
It's a folk-rock with more rock than folk.
There was a more serious problem.
To make products for people 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 manufacture.
GO!
SCREAMING
An entrepreneur had invented a way of mass-producing this new independent self.
He was called Werner Erhard.
Some of the stuff we traditionally think of as being in your mind is actually in the world.
Erhard had invented a system called EST -
Erhard Seminar Training.
Hundreds of people came for weekend sessions to be taught how to be themselves.
EST was soon copied by other groups, like Exegesis in Britain.
Many of Erhard's techniques came from the Human Potential Movement,
but he criticised the movement for not having gone far enough.
Their idea that there was a central core inside all human beings,
was "just another limitation on human freedom".
In reality, there was no fixed self. You could be anything you wanted.
The thesis of the Human Potential Movement
was that there was something really good in there.
If you took the layers off, you would have a kernel -
'a something that was innately self-expressive, that was the true self - 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.
Push!
The EST sessions were intense and often brutal.
The participants signed contracts agreeing not to leave
and to allow the trainers to do anything they thought necessary
to break down their socially-constructed identities.
If I push harder than you do, I'm gonna squash you! So, push fast! Do it!
That's it! Do it! Push! Good!
Good! Good!
Again! Yes...!
Agh...!
'The real point to the EST 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.
AH...!
AH...! STOP IT!
STOP IT!
SCREAMING AND MOANING
Now, that's existentialism's end-point.
EST went a step further in that people began to recognise 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 that 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 it was from this nothing that people were able to invent a life, allowing them to create themselves.
Invent themselves. Invent themselves.
'You can be what you want to be.'
I want you to start making that sound and on that sound,
create and people the world the way you want to create it.
What Erhard did was to say that ONLY the individual matters.
There is no societal concern.
That you're living a fulfilled life
is all you need be concerned about.
'EST people came out of those trainings feeling that it wasn't selfish to think about yourself.
'It was your highest duty.'
# So kiss me and smile for me
# Tell me that you'll wait for me
# Hold me like you'll never let me go... #
'The training is two weekends.'
It was an incredible experience in my life. I'll be forever grateful.
I got a great deal out of it. We really want to know who we are.
We learn more and more about ourselves all the time.
We really find out what it is that makes us tick and we are discovering ourselves.
EST 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 been 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 altogether. BLEEP them!'
What was 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, as leader of the Yippies, he had led the march on Chicago.
But now, he had undergone the EST training.
'I was willing to die and I had a murder complex - we all did.'
I've given up that ideal of sacrifice.
And I'm not as...
I'm not as overwhelmingly moved by injustice as I was.
'We reincarnated ourselves from within.'
Basically, the politics were lost.
They were totally replaced by this lifestyle
and then, the desire to become deeper and deeper into the self -
by now, a grandiose sense of the self.
A good friend and one of the original Yippie founders, Jerry Rubin, definitely moved in that direction.
I think he was beginning to buy into the notion
that he could be happy and fully self-developed on his own.
Socialism in one person.
Was he alone?
Although that, of course, is capitalism.
That's the whole joke.
I think it's funny.
I think it's funny because people spend so much of their life being bedevilled by their past -
locked into their past, limited by their past.
'And there's an enormous freedom from that - letting people create themselves.'
EST was only the most vivid and intense expression of an idea
that was spreading rapidly through all strata of American society.
Books and TV programmes promoted the idea that one's first duty was to be oneself.
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 3-5%.
By 1980,
it had spread to the vast majority of the public -
up to 80%.
How do you get self-actualised? You take this day and you say,
each morning, I look in the mirror and say,
"Nobody is going to ruin this day for YOU. Nobody!"
This preoccupation with the self and the inner-self travelled and spread throughout society in the 1970s.
He helped me to stop living in the past and start building from today,
using my experiences in a positive way to be a better person.
But then, the problem is, how do you be self-expressive?
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.
Firstly, they were going 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 was also working for the Department of Defence on what would become the Star Wars project.
In 1978, a group of economists and psychologists at SRI
decided to find a way to read, measure and fulfil 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 overlooked.
They say in business, "What gets measured gets done".
'We were basically telling manufacturers,
' "If you're really going to satisfy 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."
SRI turned for help to those who had begun the liberation of the self.
In particular, one of the leaders of the Human Potential Movement - psychologist, Abraham Maslow.
Through observing the work at places like Esalen, Maslow had invented a new system of psychological types.
He called it, "The Hierarchy of Needs"
and it described the different emotional stages people went through as they liberated their feelings.
At the top was self-actualisation -
the point at which individuals became completely self-directed and free of society.
The team at SRI thought Maslow's hierarchy might form the basis for a new way to categorise society -
not by social class but by different psychological desires and drives.
They designed a questionnaire with hundreds of questions about how people saw themselves -
their inner values -
to see whether they fitted into Maslow's categories.
We were trying to find out what people really felt like.
We asked these really penetrating questions
and we hired a company that administers surveys to do them.
They'd never seen anything like it.
Usually, you have to send postcards, then call, to get return rates up.
'We had an 86% return and they only sent out one postcard.
'People loved this questionnaire.
'We got several back with a note, "Do you have any others I could fill out?" '
We were asking people to think about things that they had never thought about before
and they liked thinking about them. Like what? Like what they felt inside,
what motivated them, what was their life about, what was important to them.
The answers were analysed by computer.
There were underlying patterns in the way people felt about themselves
which fitted Maslow's categories.
At the top of the hierarchy were a large and growing group which cut across all social classes.
The SRI team called them the "Inner Directeds".
They were people who weren't defined by their place in society but by the choices they made themselves.
The SRI discovered that they could be defined
by the patterns of behaviour through which they chose to express themselves.
Self expression was not infinite - it fell into identifiable types.
The SRI team called it "lifestyles".
They had managed to categorise the new individualism.
They called the system, "Values and Lifestyles" -
VALs for short.
'At the forefront of this change are three new VALs groups -
'groups we call "inner directive".
'These are people for whom personal satisfaction is more important than status or money.
'They are self-expressive, complex and individualistic.
'Rob is an "I-Am-Me". They search for new values, break from traditions and invent their own standards.
'Rob even invented his own name - Rob Noxious!
'Jodie is an "experiential".
'This is a group seeking inner growth from direct experience.
'Experientials aren't in one place much. All that activity takes goods and services.
'Their hobbies are hands-on and their possessions are simple, but not always simply priced.'
I'm a bookseller - I sell books.
Um...I'm a businessman.
It doesn't necessarily mean that I believe in capitalism.
It just happens to be what I'm doing now.
SRI created a simplified questionnaire with just 30 key questions.
Anyone who answered them could be immediately fitted into a dozen or so of these new groups.
It allowed businesses to identify which groups were buying their products
and how the goods could be marketed to become powerful emblems of those groups' inner values and lifestyles.
It allowed people not just to look at people as demographics - age, income, whatever -
but to really understand the underlying motivations.
Most of marketing was looking at people's actions and trying to figure out what to do.
We were looking at people's underlying values,
so we could predict their lifestyle - the house they live in, the car they drive.
The corporations were able to sell things to them by understanding them,
by knowing what they look like, where they live.
If a new product expressed a particular group's values, it would be bought by them.
It's what made the "Values and Lifestyles" system so powerful -
its ability to predict what products self-actualisers would choose.
This power was about to be demonstrated dramatically.
VALs could predict not just products they would buy, but politicians they would choose to elect.
The next President of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan!
In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran for President.
He and his advisers were convinced they could win on a programme of a new individualism.
It would be an attack on 50 years of government interference in people's lives.
I wrote a speech about letting the people make basic decisions -
get judges, bureaucrats, centralised government out of the way.
I had several titles and Reagan chose, "Let The People Rule".
Let the people regain control over their own destiny,
away from a remote elite in Washington.
I would like to think that the kind of leadership I would exercise in Washington
is not the kind of leadership that I would pretend that I could solve all the problems.
But that together, you and I can.
I would like to take the lead in taking government off the backs of the American people
and turning you loose to do what I know you can do.
'It was radical. Modern Republicans thought it was suicide.'
The press was extremely negative,
but it polled very well in New Hampshire - the state that we had to win.
What was odd was that there seemed to be a strange mosaic of support for Reagan's policies.
The traditional pollsters could see no coherent pattern across class, age or gender.
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 were convinced that Reagan's and Thatcher's message about individual freedom
would appeal to the Inner Directeds as it fitted with the way they saw themselves.
'They were concerned about being individuals.'
In the early stages, when we were looking at the messages
that both Thatcher and Reagan were putting across,
we said that they were using words that would really appeal to a lot of the younger people
and particularly to those who are moving towards self-actualisation.
A lot of our colleagues said that it was ridiculous because Inner Directeds are very socially aware.
"They'll never vote Conservative or they'll never vote for the Republicans."
But we said that if Thatcher and Reagan continue to appeal to them in this way, they really will.
And I envisage leadership
taking government off your backs and turning you loose to do what you can do so well.
Thank you!
That the new self-actualising individuals
would choose a politician from the right, not the left, seemed extraordinary.
To test their prediction, the "Values and Lifestyle" team did a survey of voting intentions
and correlated it with their new psychological categories.
'It was the Inner Directeds who said they'd vote for Thatcher and Reagan.'
And they made the difference in those elections.
And it really surprised our colleagues - even within my own organisation.
'It really showed the power of this approach.
'It's very hard to identify Inner Directeds on the street.
'These people who voted for Thatcher and Reagan,
'these Inner Directeds, came from any walk of life.
'It's really hardly correlated in social class at all.'
If you just look at age, sex, social class, you would never pick them up.
But if you go with a questionnaire that gets at their values,
then you can identify them very easily.
And that was new? Completely new.
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
and millions were unemployed.
But true to his campaign promises,
Reagan said he would not step in to help, as previous governments had.
These United States are confronted with an economic affliction
of great proportions.
We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history.
Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery and personal indignity.
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 the market researchers had identified -
the self-actualising individuals.
They were about to become the motor for what would be called, the "new economy".
If you can be what you want to be!
So, what do you really want?
A tasty product that's good for me. What do you want that for?
One technique is asking the same question over and over.
"What do you want? What do you really want? What do you want that for?
They start to talk about it and they get intimate with what's going on.
'We're unpeeling the onion, if you think of a person as having layers.
'We wanna get to the centre core.'
In the wake of the invention of Values and Lifestyles,
a vast industry of psychological market research grew up.
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 entice people to buy a limited range of mass-produced goods.
Now they were used to explore the inner feelings of lifestyle groups
and invent whole new ranges of products
that would allow those groups to express what, they felt, was their individuality.
Those who'd rebelled against conformity through consumerism,
now embraced it as it helped them to be themselves.
What capitalism managed to do that was brilliant,
was to create products that people like ME would be interested in.
Capitalism developed a whole industry
at developing products that evoked a larger sense of self,
that seemed to agree with us that the self was infinite
and you could be anything you wanted to be.
It took our philosophy and agreed with it
and then, created products that supposedly 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 have furniture like this,
'you use this computer...'
Have you had the regular chains? Gloria Vanderbilt does a lot in denims and silks.
'..You eat in these restaurants.
'They had values there - hipness, coolness...'
This is NOT, I repeat NOT, a marketing scheme!
'..So, the notion that you could buy an identity,'
replaced the original movement notion that you were perfectly free to create an identity
and you were free to change the world.
What I wear is, um...
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 bedevilled corporate America ever since mass production had been invented -
that they would produce too many goods.
With the new self, consumer desire seemed to have no limit.
The concern of companies was always that supply would outstrip demand -
that we were producing too much and that there was not a market for it.
You don't hear that kind of talk any more
because you've gone from a conception of a market of limited needs - 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.'
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'd become increasingly dependent for their identity on business.
Corporations realised it was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals
and then offer ways to express that individuality.
A world in which people felt they were rebelling against conformity
was not a threat to business, but its greatest opportunity.
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 -
only a bunch of individual people making individual choices to promote their own individual wellbeing.
Next week tells the story of how politicians on the left
in both Britain and America,
turned to techniques developed by business in order to regain power.
But what they didn't realise was that what had worked for business,
would undermine the very basis of their political beliefs.
They would be trapped by the greedy desires of the new self.