This post has been brewing for (at least) a couple days -- these things take time, sportsfans -- and as it has developed, all sorts of odd synchronistic events and linkages have come to shape what will be, if I'm lucky and industrious, its eventual posting today. Lost you already, have I? Well then, let the longwinded explanation begin...

In yesterday's snail mail I received a package inside of which was, to my initial bewilderment, one of those 365-day desk calendar things, this one's pages consisting of quotes from that dastardly bastion of bestselling business books, Who Moved My Cheese?

"What the deuce?!" I exclaimed to myself, this book having caused me more heartburn than a six-pack of middling beer heedlessly sloshed over a lasagna dinner wolfed down in some Friday night greasy spoon. You get the general idea. I do not like it.

The mystery was soon solved, however, by the accompanying note:

page 1: Merry F***ing Christmas, you heathen.

[nicely scrawled sketch of a little pine tree]

page 2: I bought this before Christmas but haven't gotten to the Post office until now. Sorry for the delay.

Love, David Weinberger

Now, David and I go way back, much further back than The Cluetrain Manifesto, which we wrote with Doc Searls and Rick Levine. And much much further back than his own Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web.

Put it this way, despite the "love" in his signoff, David knows full well my feelings re the Cheese book. So its arrival represented another snarky mind bomb in a long series of snarky mind bombs stretching back into the dim reaches of time. And this back-and-forth mindbombing has continued, has indeed become something of a tradition over the years. Which is why, as I was preparing this post on a seemingly  unrelated theme (nothing is wholly unrelated in this medium; meaning language, not just the web), I was unsurprised to find this bit I'd written elsewhere, titled One for Weinberger.

But don't click that link! For three reasons:

1. it contains language unsuited to serious businesslike pursuits
2. it covers much abstruse intellectual history of the late 20th century, and
3. it may throw you off what I was intending to write about here -- though it is germane.

You see, I found that One for Weinberger page searching for what I was intending  to write about here, but seem to be having trouble getting to: i.e., the American behavioral psychologist J.B. Watson. The Encyclopedia Britannica article on whom says:

In 1920, in the wake of sensational publicity surrounding his divorce from his first wife, Watson resigned from Johns Hopkins. He entered the advertising business in 1921.

Evidently, Watson got kicked out of the academy after a string of sexual peccadilloes that were finally too much for the admisitriviasts of the day. But It's that final bit that interests me. Last year I began reading a biography of Abraham Maslow called The Right to Be Human by Edward Hoffman. However, I soon got sidetracked by Hoffman's tale of Watson and where he ended up making a lot  of money: the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency.

[Watson] found gainful employment with the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency where, using techniques from his behavioural psychology, he showed that people's preferences between rival products were not based on their sensory qualities but on their associations. He went on to develop the selling of products like Maxwell House Coffee, Pond's Cold Cream, Johnson's Baby Powder and Odorono (one of the first deodorants). By 1924 he was on of the four vice-presidents of this very successful agency.

the above is from
The History of Instructional Design:
J.B.Watson and Comparative Psychology

So here we have J.B. Watson, father of American behaviorism, packing up all he knows about eliciting the Pavlovian slobber reaction, and wholesaling it to Madison Avenue. In 1921! Here's some background on the weapons of mass distraction he delivered to the enemy...

behaviorism: school of psychology which seeks to explain animal and human behavior entirely in terms of observable and measurable responses to environmental stimuli. Behaviorism was introduced (1913) by the American psychologist John B. Watson, who insisted that behavior is a physiological reaction to environmental stimuli. He rejected the exploration of mental processes as unscientific. The conditioned-reflex experiments of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov and the American psychologist Edward Thorndike were central to the development of behaviorism.

from: behaviorism
source: The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Ed., 2004
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2004 Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition

I've linked Edward Thorndike, above, because he was a) an early 20th century eugenicist, and b) a profound influence on Abraham Maslow. These notes are more for my mythical book than for current explication, so must remain mere hints of things to come. Instead of unpacking those connections here, let's move on to another case that parallels that of J.B. Watson, the psychologist, and J. Walter Thompson, the ad agency.

Edward Bernays coined the term "public relations." His book, Propaganda, jump-started the PR engine in 1928. It begins...

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ... We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

- quote taken from the Wikipedia article on
Edward Bernays

Note the date of the following article and the fragment I've bolded.

To hear the flacks talk, they're hot not just because companies are more than ever in the public eye but because public relations firms in the last decade have acquired a whole new arsenal of scientific techniques and high-tech gadgets to help them pitch and plant clients' stories. Videotape "press releases," national public opinion polls, lobbying offices in capitals around the world -- all are part of flackery's bold new superhype. The pitch gets heard because the media are multiplying, particularly electronic media like broadcast and cable TV and radio, which devour information and constantly clamor for more.

Much of the PR game may be new, but is any of it really different? For all the newfangled jargon of "awareness quotients" and "crisis containment," has anything really changed? FORBES figured no one should know better than Edward Bernays, at 93 the oldest living (and still practicing) PR agent in the game. A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays has numbered among his clients Thomas Edison, the Procter & Gamble Co. and even Diaghilev's Ballet Russe.

from: Beyond ballyhoo - interview with PR doyen Edward Bernays
by Lisa Gubernick
source: Forbes, 23 September 1985
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 1985 Forbes, Inc.

And finally, here's a review of a BBC special that underscores the Freud-Bernays connection...

The first part of The Century of the Self was indeed a wonderful programme... The premise goes something like this: those Freuds have got a hell of lot to answer for. The first part started off with Sigmund, then moved smartly on to his nephew, Edward Bernays, the man who coined the phrase "public relations". ...his influence has proved to be as great -- and even more pernicious -- than his uncle's. It was Bernays who realised that there could be a commercial angle to Uncle Siggy's theories. The trick here was to convince people to buy stuff they desired, rather than simply needed.

from: The man who cashed in on Freud Television by John Preston
source: The Sunday Telegraph, 24 March 2002
via: HighBeam Research

From these two unconnected cases, it appears obvious that early 20th century psychology put itself fully at the service of advertising and PR. To what other questionable causes and coffers are today's psychologists lending their considerable clout? Now that, gentle readers, is a question that bears deep pondering...