Everything Is F*cked

The Feelings Economy
In the 1920s, women didn’t smoke—or, if they did, they were severely judged
for  it.  It  was  taboo.  Like  graduating  from  college  or  getting  elected  to
Congress,  smoking,  people  believed  back  then,  should  be  left  to  the  men.
“Honey,  you  might  hurt  yourself.  Or  worse,  you  might  burn  your  beautiful
hair.”
This posed a problem for the tobacco industry. Here you had 50 percent of
the  population  not  smoking  their  cigarettes  for  no  other  reason  than  it  was
unfashionable or seen as impolite. This wouldn’t do. As George Washington
Hill,  president  of  the  American  Tobacco  Company,  said  at  the  time,  “It’s  a
gold mine right in our front yard.” The industry tried multiple times to market
cigarettes to women, but nothing ever seemed to work. The cultural prejudice
against it was simply too ingrained, too deep.
Then, in 1928, the American Tobacco Company hired Edward Bernays, a
young  hotshot  marketer  with  wild  ideas  and  even  wilder  marketing
campaigns.
1
 Bernays’s  marketing  tactics  at  the  time  were  unlike  anybody
else’s in the advertising industry.
Back  in  the  early  nineteenth  century,  marketing  was  seen  simply  as  a
means  of  communicating  the  tangible,  real  benefits  of  a  product  in  the
simplest  and  most  concise  form  possible.  It  was  believed  at  the  time  that
people bought products based on facts and information. If someone wanted to
buy  cheese,  then  you  had  to  communicate  to  them  the  facts  of  why  your
cheese was superior (“Freshest French goat milk, cured twelve days, shipped
refrigerated!”).  People  were  seen  as  rational  actors  making  rational
purchasing  decisions  for  themselves.  It  was  the  Classic  Assumption:  the
Thinking Brain was in charge.
But  Bernays  was  unconventional.  He  didn’t  believe  that  people  made
rational decisions most of the time. He believed the opposite. He believed that
people were emotional and impulsive and just hid it really well. He believed
the Feeling Brain was in charge and nobody had quite realized it.
Whereas the tobacco industry had been focused on persuading individual

---

women to buy and smoke cigarettes through logical arguments, Bernays saw
it as an emotional and cultural issue. If he wanted women to smoke, then he
had to appeal not to their thoughts but to their values. He needed to appeal to
women’s identities.
To  accomplish  this,  Bernays  hired  a  group  of  women  and  got  them  into
the  Easter  Sunday  Parade  in  New  York  City.  Today,  big  holiday  parades  are
cheesy things you let drone on over the television while you fall asleep on the
couch. But back in those days, parades were big social events, kind of like the
Super Bowl or something.
As Bernays planned it, at the appropriate moment, these women would all
stop and light up cigarettes at the same time. He hired photographers to take
flattering photos of the smoking women, which he then passed out to all the
major  national  newspapers.  He  told  the  reporters  that  these  ladies  were  not
just  lighting  cigarettes,  they  were  lighting  “torches  of  freedom,”
demonstrating  their  ability  to  assert  their  independence  and  be  their  own
women.
It  was  all  #FakeNews,  of  course,  but  Bernays  staged  it  as  a  political
protest. He knew this would trigger the appropriate emotions in women across
the  country.  Feminists  had  won  women  the  right  to  vote  only  nine  years
earlier.  Women  were  now  working  outside  the  home  and  becoming  more
integral  to  the  country’s  economic  life.  They  were  asserting  themselves  by
cutting their hair short and wearing racier clothing. This generation of women
saw  themselves  as  the  first  generation  that  could  behave  independently  of  a
man.  And  many  of  them  felt  very  strongly  about  this.  If  Bernays  could  just
hitch  his  “smoking  equals  freedom”  message  onto  the  women’s  liberation
movement . . . well, tobacco sales would double and he’d be a rich man.
It  worked.  Women  started  smoking,  and  ever  since,  we’ve  had  equal-
opportunity lung cancer.
Bernays  went  on  to  pull  off  these  kinds  of  cultural  coups  regularly
throughout  the  1920s,  ’30s,  and  ’40s.  He  completely  revolutionized  the
marketing  industry  and  invented  the  field  of  public  relations  in  the  process.
Paying  sexy  celebrities  to  use  your  product?  That  was  Bernays’s  idea.
Creating  fake  news  articles  that  are  actually  subtle  advertisements  for  a
company?  All  him.  Staging  controversial  public  events  as  a  means  to  draw
attention  and  notoriety  for  a  client?  Bernays.  Pretty  much  every  form  of
marketing and publicity we’re subjected to today began with Bernays.
But  here’s  something  else  interesting  about  Bernays:  he  was  Sigmund
Freud’s nephew.
Freud was infamous because he was the first modern thinker to argue that

---

it was the Feeling Brain that was really driving the Consciousness Car. Freud
believed  that  people’s  insecurities  and  shame  drove  them  to  make  bad
decisions,  to  overindulge  or  to  compensate  for  what  they  felt  they  lacked.
Freud  was  the  one  who  realized  that  we  have  cohesive  identities,  stories  in
our minds that we tell about ourselves, and that we are emotionally attached
to those stories and will fight to maintain them.
2
Freud argued that, at the end
of the day, we are animals: impulsive and selfish and emotional.
Freud  spent  most  of  his  life  broke.  He  was  the  quintessential  European
intellectual:  isolated,  erudite,  deeply  philosophical.  But  Bernays  was  an
American. He was practical. He was driven. Fuck philosophy! He wanted to
be rich. And boy, did Freud’s ideas—translated through the lens of marketing
—deliver  in  a  big  way.
3
 Through  Freud,  Bernays  understood  something
nobody  else  in  business  had  understood  before  him:  that  if  you  can  tap  into
people’s insecurities, they will buy just about any damn thing you tell them to.
Trucks  are  marketed  to  men  as  ways  to  assert  strength  and  reliability.
Makeup  is  marketed  to  women  as  a  way  to  be  more  loved  and  garner  more
attention. Beer is marketed as a way to have fun and be the center of attention
at a party.
This is all Marketing 101, of course. And today it’s celebrated as business
as usual. One of the first things you learn when you study marketing is how to
find customers’ “pain points” . . . and then subtly make them feel worse. The
idea is that you needle at people’s shame and insecurity and then turn around
and  tell  them  your  product  will  resolve  that  shame  and  rid  them  of  that
insecurity.  Put  another  way,  marketing  specifically  identifies  or  accentuates
the customer’s moral gaps and then offers a way to fill them.
On the one hand, this has helped produce all the economic diversity and
wealth  we  experience  today.  On  the  other  hand,  when  marketing  messages
designed  to  induce  feelings  of  inadequacy  are  scaled  up  to  thousands  of
advertising messages hitting every single person, every single day, there have
to be psychological repercussions to that. And they can’t be good.