Cont
Against this backdrop Freud who was suffering from cancer of the jaw retreated yet again to the alps. He wrote a book called Civilization and it's Discontents. It was a powerful attack on the idea that civilization was an expression of human progress. Instead Freud argued civilization had been constructed to control the dangerous animal forces inside human beings. What was implicit in Freud's argument was that the ideal of individual freedom which was at the heart of democracy was impossible.
...In March 1933 the National Socialists were elected to power in Germany and they set out to create a society that would control human beings in a different way. One of their first acts was to take control of business....Goebbels organized huge rallies whose function he said was to forge the mind of the nation into a unity of thinking feeling and desire. One of his inspirations he told an American journalist was the writings of Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays....
And in America ... in 1932 a new President was elected who was also going to use the power of the state to control the free market. But his aim was not to destroy democracy but to strengthen it. And to do this he was going to develop a new way of dealing with the masses. President Roosevelt's in his inauguration speech: "...I shall ask the congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis - broad executive power."
It was the start of what would become known as The New Deal. Roosevelt assembled a group of young technocrats and planners in Washington. He told them that their job was to plan and run giant new industrial projects for the good of the nation. Roosevelt was convinced the stock market crash had shown that laissez faire capitalism could no longer run modern industrial economies. This had become the job of government. (then he talks about Roosevelt versus big business where Roosevelt used Gallup's polling data for his version of socialism but big business reverted to Bernays' ideas of instict-driven mindless consumerism)
Transcript continues: The second world war would utterly transform the way government saw democracy and the people they governed. Next week's program will show how the American government as a result of the war became convinced there were savage dangerous forces inside all human beings. Forces that needed to be controlled. The terrible evidence from the death camps seemed to show what happened when these forces were unleashed. And politicians and planners in post war America would come to believe that hidden under the surface of their own population were the same dangerous forces. And they would turn to the Freud family to help control this enemy within. And ever adaptable Edward Bernays would work not just for the American government but the CIA and Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna would also become powerful in the United States because she believed that people could be taught to control the irrational forces within them. Out of this would come vast government programs to manage the inner psychological life of the masses.