Power

Wherever power gathers into a single pair of hands, a figure in motley appears beside it and begins to laugh. He is permitted what no one else is permitted: to mock the crowned head from arm’s length, to say over dinner what would cost a minister his own. We file the court jester under quaint medieval décor, somewhere between the falconry and the tapestry. He is nothing of the kind. He is a structural organ that grows wherever power concentrates — the way a callus grows where a tool keeps rubbing the hand — and he grows back long after we are sure we have abolished him. …

In the early twentieth century, advertising made a simple claim: This product performs this function. A soap cleaned; a car transported; a cigarette was tobacco rolled in paper. The transaction was rational, almost mechanical. You paid for utility. Then came Edward Bernays, and everything changed. Bernays was a Viennese emigrant, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and he arrived in America bearing a dangerous insight from his uncle’s work: humans are not rational actors deciding between utilities. We are vessels of irrational impulse—unconscious desire, hidden fear, unexamined shame. We are, in a sense, predictable in our very irrationality. …

Benedict Anderson made a simple observation that took a century to reach mainstream consciousness: the nation — the thing we paint on our faces at sporting events, the cause we die for, the imagined container of culture and identity — is a social construct. Not in the soft postmodern sense where everything dissolves into relativity. In the precise engineering sense: it is a machine that someone built, for reasons, and the reasons printed on the package are not the actual reasons. …