The Forces Behind Modern-Day Advertising

Advertising as we now know it started not on Madison Avenue but in another city: Berlin. With another group of power brokers: the Nazis. They took the ideas of an Austrian psychotherapist named Freud, then unknown in America, and used them to manipulate the masses. Freud was one of the first modern thinkers to point out that human beings aren’t nearly as rational or autonomous as we like to think.

We constantly make irrational decisions based on what he called our “unconscious drives” (similar to what the New Testament calls “the flesh”). We are far more emotionally tricked and desire…