This documentary is on that exact topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

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The Century of the Self is a 2002 British television documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis. It focuses on the work of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud, and PR consultant Edward Bernays.[1] In episode one, Curtis says, "This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy."

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, changed our perception of the mind and its workings. The documentary explores the various ways that governments and corporations have used Freud's theories. Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays, who was the first to use psychological techniques in public relations, are discussed in part one. His daughter Anna Freud, a pioneer of child psychology, is mentioned in part two. Wilhelm Reich, an opponent of Freud's theories, is discussed in part three.

Along these lines, The Century of the Self asks deeper questions about the roots and methods of consumerism and commodification and their implications. It also questions the modern way people see themselves, the attitudes to fashion, and superficiality.

The business and political worlds use psychological techniques to read, create and fulfill the desires of the public, and to make their products and speeches as pleasing as possible to consumers and voters. Curtis questions the intentions and origins of this relatively new approach to engaging the public.

Where once the political process was about engaging people's rational, conscious minds, as well as facilitating their needs as a group, Stuart Ewen, a historian of public relations, argues that politicians now appeal to primitive impulses that have little bearing on issues outside the narrow self-interests of a consumer society.

The words of Paul Mazur, a leading Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in 1927, are cited: "We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man's desires must overshadow his needs."[7]

In part four the main subjects are Philip Gould, a political strategist, and Matthew Freud, a PR consultant and the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud. In the 1990s, they were instrumental to bringing the Democratic Party in the US and New Labour in the United Kingdom back into power through use of the focus group, originally invented by psychoanalysts employed by US corporations to allow consumers to express their feelings and needs, just as patients do in psychotherapy.

Curtis ends by saying that, "Although we feel we are free, in reality, we—like the politicians—have become the slaves of our own desires," and compares Britain and America to 'Democracity', an exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair created by Edward Bernays.

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It "seems" like an outlandish thought, but if the claims Curtis makes in this documentary are even partially truthful, might it be that this psychological manipulation of the public is actually still going on, and might it then also explain some of the inexplicable human behavior we see all around us?

I mean...how the hell would a person even guess at what the long term (decades) effects might be of simultaneous, multi-vector psychological manipulation of people at massive scale? Just look through history at the atrocities that people have been persuaded to commit, motivated by a fundamental belief system that is inconsistent with actual reality? We know these things have happened in the past, is there a logical reason why something similar cannot be happening now? There is no shortage of people (some even here) who believe with absolute sincerity that a significant percentage of Trump supporters are hold beliefs extremely consistent with literal Nazis. Ok, fair enough. But if significant numbers of people can and do believe such obviously outlandish things as this, does it seem all that outlandish that something is causing large numbers of people to believe other things that are literally not true?

In a sense, the specific belief is largely irrelevant - to me, the fundamental question seems like something along that lines of:

> Is it technically possible (or at least plausible) to modify the beliefs of the general public via psychological means, using various communication vectors (distorted / ambiguous/ misleading news broadcasting, TV, talk shows, statistics, internet, radio, podcasts, forum "trolls" (not sure the word) or state of the art bots in internet forums, etc) - and if so, is this happening today, and if so, to what degree.

All things considered, this is one of the more logical explanations I can come up with. "People are just idiots" stopped being believable to me over a year ago. The magnitude of obvious mass delusion (in the literal sense of the word) is just too large. If "people are idiots" is the explanation, one then has to explain why so many people have simultaneously become so increasingly idiotic, and we're right back where we started.

But then, as depressing as that sounds, if this theory actually holds some legitimate truth, therein also lies the solution (partial, at least) to what currently ails society in this regard.