For those of you who saw this documentary (which is kind of a milestone for the PR people), I’m sure this is nothing new. But for those of you who didn’t, this is a beautiful retrospective of the 20th century regarding “how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy” (Adam Curtis – director, writer and producer of this series).
It has 4 episodes, each telling a different part of the last century. From Edward Bernays who invented Public Relations, because “Propaganda” had a bad connotation in the peoples minds (it was aggressively used by the Nazis), to the “Torches of Freedom” – a slogan invented so that women can freely smoke in public (it was a tabu at that time and they discovered that cigarettes are – in fact – a phallic symbol), so they told women – more or less – that they can have their own penis.

I’m not gonna spoil all the fun here, but I strongly recommend this series. It’s a 4 hours time consuming but it’s worth watching!