How Your Insecurity Is Bought and Sold

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Mark Manson


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Meanwhile, Bernays went on to pull off these kinds of cultural coups regularly throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. He completely revolutionized the marketing industry and invented the field of public relations in the process. Paying celebrities to use your product? That was Bernays’ idea. Creating fake news articles that are actually subtle advertisements for a product? Also his idea. Staging controversial public events as a means to draw attention and notoriety for one of his clients? His idea as well. Pretty much every form of marketing or publicity we’re all subjected to today began with Bernays.

But here’s something else surprising about Bernays: he was Sigmund Freud’s nephew.

Freud’s theories were some of the first to argue that most human decision making was primarily unconscious and irrational. Freud was the one who realized that people’s insecurities drove them to excess and overcompensation. Freud was also the one who understood that people are, at heart, animals and are easily manipulated, especially in groups.

Bernays just applied these ideas to selling products and he got rich in the process.

Through Freud, Bernays understood something nobody else in business ever understood before him: that if you can tap into people’s insecurities — if you can needle at their deepest feelings of inadequacy — then they will buy just about any damn thing you tell them to.

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When I first studied marketing when I started my first business, I was told to find people’s “pain points” and then subtly make them feel worse. Then turn around and tell them my product will make them feel better.

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In our culture today, marketing often is the message. The vast majority of information that we’re exposed to is some form of marketing. And so if the marketing is always trying to make you feel like shit to get you to buy something, then we’re essentially existing in a culture designed to make us feel like shit and we’ll always want to overcompensate in some way.

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