CENTURY OF THE SELF

In short, this four-part BBC documentary from 2002 tells how psychology took over everything for the purposes of manipulating and controlling people.

In four episodes, Adam Curtis traces the ideas of Sigmund Freud and others and shows how they were applied to various aspects of society, with a focus on advertising and self-centredness, over the past 100 years.

Here is how I would sum up each episode:

- 1. Curtis traces the birth of modern advertising and shows how we went from a society which purchased according to its needs to a consumer culture driven by its most instinctual desires.

- 2.: Curtis reveals that the conformity mindset of the fifties was driven by psychoanalysts based on theories these professionals came up with out of their experiences of treating shell shocked soldiers during World War II.

- 3.: Curtis shows how the rebellion against this conformity was used by a different school of psychologists to create the self-actualization movement, more popularly known today as the self-help movement and how modern man's new focus on individuality after the cultural revolution of the sixties was exploited by advertisers to sell the public a wider variety of goods.

- 4.: Curtis shows how these techniques have come to dominate politics. 

The major drawback of this series is that it never delves  into the spiritual aspect of all this. A society that was rapidly eliminating God from the equation of things was ripe to be taken over in this way.

Also, the film does have a quite unabashed left-wing bias.

Having given those twain complaints, "Century of the Self" is still definitely worth watching. I'd especially recommend it for any teenager whose got even a passing curiosity about any of these subjects.

Watch it here.