The post-holiday season is a good time to reflect on how society prioritizes the satisfaction of individual feelings and desires at the expense of wider social concerns. For instance, Christmas is a time of immense consumption. Unnecessary goods (produced in factories where laborers work in horrible conditions) are transported from afar (destroying our environment), arrive in our homes, soon to be discarded. New Year’s resolutions are full of affirmations to obtain further goods over the next 365 days, as our planet rotates around the sun again.

At the same time, the material condition of billions of people around the world worsens, and inequality rises in developed countries and developing countries alike. The world’s leading climate scientists and UN agencies warn that our planet is heading towards destruction, as the impact of the irreversible climate change we (and our recent ancestors) have caused begins to rear its ugly head (UN Report).

Edward Bernays — nephew to psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund Freud, but father of “public relations” (more honestly known as “propaganda” during his time) — understood the link between fostering desire for consumer goods among citizens and maintaining a docile public that could easily be “managed” by those in power. He understood that in being consumed by material objects — and / or fear — the U.S. public could be easily manipulated. He was transparent about the “need” to “engineer the truth” enabling economic and political elites to maintain control, while maintaining the facade of democracy.

At the 1929 Easter Sunday Parade in New York City, Bernays paid young débutantes to light cigarettes as “torches of freedom” in front of country’s leading press. Before the twentieth century smoking was seen as an inappropriate habit for women. In connecting cigarettes with an intangible value — freedom — Bernays (at the behest of cigarette companies) opened up the female market for cigarettes. Bernays became a leading advisor for U.S. corporations, promoting the idea of consumption as freedom.

Bernays was happy to reject the concept of democracy if it harmed North American consumerism, and the interests of his clients. Bernays played a role in the June 1954 ouster of democratically elected president of Guatemala, Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzman. President Árbenz sought to improve the lives of Guatemalan people by challenging U.S. company, United Fruit’s, historic domination of previous corrupt governments in Guatemala and other Central American countries. President Árbenz rejected the prevailing ideology which said that Guatemala — its natural and human resources — should be exploited and serve as a “banana republic” for the benefit of companies (and their wealthy shareholders) and consumers in the global North.

Bernays worked with United Fruit and the CIA to foment public sentiment around the world against President Árbenz laying the ground work for a military coup against him. Bernays did this by exploiting the anti-communist sentiment gripping the U.S. at the time. In what was one of the early media wars, Bernays paid for selected U.S. journalists to visit Guatemala; arranged for them to speak to selected Guatemalan politicians who all told the journalists that President Árbenz was a Communist with links to Moscow; organizing an anti Árbenz protest while the journalists were visiting; and creating an “independent” news agency in the U.S., called the “Middle American Information Bureau.” This bureau bombarded the U.S. media with press releases saying that Moscow was planning to use Guatemala as a beach-head to attack the U.S. Bernays employed a similar propaganda war against U.S. President Roosevelt’s New Deal. U.S. media continues to use similar strategies against democratically elected governments that challenge the hegemony of consumerism and corporate interests, and against policies which may improves the lives of people (at the expense of corporations).

The therapeutic value of self-gratification was celebrated through the 1950’s and 60’s and sought to permeate everything. However, peace activists and students took to the streets, rejecting consumerism, capitalism and war. Business responded. Some company executives were transparent about the need to “listen to the music of Bob Dylan” and sell to those that did not want to be sold anything.

Business arrived at the understanding that activists would in fact buy products if they thought that the products could help them realize themselves. Rather than being threats to business, activists presented profitable marketing opportunities. This was the perfect ending point of a philosophy which promoted the idea that there was no society, only individuals seeking self-actualization as the highest end. The journey from Bernays to psychotherapy and positive thinking is intriguingly charted in the three part 2002 BBC documentary, Century of the Self.

The belief that the satisfaction of individual feelings and desires is our highest priority has come to dominate our society. It is seen clearly during the holiday season but also in the consumption patterns and desires in everyday life. It produces overriding blindness to the pain and suffering that others may feel as a consequence of our superfluous demands for production and our “needs” to consume. What about the freedom to live in a healthy environment, without fear of eviction, without fear of hunger, rape, extrajudicial execution by police?

It provides fertile ground for the promotion of ideas that we can — as individuals — impact our external environment by sending out positive thoughts to the universe. Such ideas are promoted by individuals such as Rhonda Byrne (author of The Secret) who callously suggested that the 2006 tsunami victims (and victims of any natural disasters, or victims of cancers, other diseases or painful events) could spare themselves by not operating “on the same frequency as the event.” So those who don’t send out positive energy are responsible for their own misery. Byrne and others promote the idea of will-full ignorance and self-delusion, suggesting that we must meticulously monitor our own thoughts so that we are positive 100% of the time. Such ideas were brilliantly refuted by Barbara Ehrenreich in her outstanding 2009 book Smile Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. Ehrenreich highlights the ways in which positive thinking deluded investment bankers and financial advisors into believing the market would continue to grow exponentially, so that they did not heed warning signs of a financial crash.

In putting forth the idea that positive thoughts alone can beat cancer, or negative thoughts cause unemployment, individualism wins. There is no society. This philosophy brilliantly continues in the legacy of Bernays. Rather than identify political and economic elites as the makers of our external environment, we each become responsible — responsible to think positively. Think peace and peace will come into existence. The (highly popular) positive thinking theory actively dissuades its followers from becoming aware of — and deeply understanding — the state of the world by watching the depressing (negative) news.

While empowering its followers, it also profits from promoting ignorance and delusion. Only by becoming aware of the real forces of neo-liberal ideology, consumption, racism, patriarchy, authoritarian states, for example, can transcend the realm of manufactured needs and desires and open up the possibility of self-consciously reclaiming and re-building our communities to fight for a more egalitarian and honest world that our children and grandchildren can breathe in. A world that is not struggling with inequality, droughts and water wars. True autonomy, or self-actualization — and freedom, is only possible with the collective liberation of us all.