JR’s photographs of people who have suffered injustice are massively enlarged and thus inevitably integrated into society, ensuring that these individuals and their problems are heard.

Nick Cave’s intriguing soundsuits, the dance, the rhythmic beats. The effect—much like that of traditional ritual dance—is hypnotic and immersive, forging the group into a amazing unified whole.

Feynman ended his speech in 1974 with:

I Have just one wish for you, the good luck to be somewhere you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organisation or financial support or so on to lose your integrity.

May you have that freedom.

The Century of the Self

Documentary

About how to run a mass democracy, by playing on fears and desires present in the human subconscious and use that to make people believe that they have an opinion about something without having really thought about it themselves, or that they think they need something that is totally unnecessary or unhealthy for them .

The documentary is about the story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.

His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods.

It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world.

Originally broadcast on 29th April 2002.