The Trance of the Golden Idol
A family is sent to a psychiatrist because they are having serious problems with their son. They had two sons, but, tragically, one of them has committed suicide. So what did these parents do the Christmas after his death? For their remaining son, they carefully wrapped and gave him as a special gift the gun that his brother had used to kill himself. The psychiatrist was M. Scott Peck and this story is found in his important book, The People of the Lie. What was wrong with those parents? They were intelligent and sophisticated, yet they saw no problem with what they had done. Peck could not help them. As he faced more and more people just like them, he came to a shocking conclusion. He couldn’t help them because they weren’t having psychological problems. Unburdened by any sense of guilt, they saw no need for help. Their problem was that they were evil. And this kind of evil has swept the world.
For a century, we have been enslaved by a single, overwhelming delusion that is destroying us. To understand what it is and where it came from we need to go back a hundred years and meet a man named Edward Bernays. Probably you’ve never heard of him, but he has had the deepest impact on your life. He taught the world how to worship a Great Golden Idol. And so began a great tragedy.
Born in Europe in 1891, Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. His family came to America when he was a child. As a young man during WWI, he was a press agent who worked for the government of Woodrow Wilson. At the end of the war, Bernays traveled with Wilson to Paris for the signing of the infamous Treaty of Versailles. In Paris he saw the power of war-time propaganda to sway the minds of millions. He saw how irrational slogans tapped into irrational desires. “The war to end all wars.” “Woodrow Wilson, the great peacemaker.” Bernays asked himself whether this power might be harnessed during peacetime for other purposes. Sigmund Freud’s work was just beginning to be known in the U.S. It was Freud’s idea that in every one of us there is a subconscious filled with a roiling mass of primitive urges, desires and emotions. This meshed with Bernays’ wartime experience. Was there a way to direct all of those urges and desires to make money? Bernays set up a little office in Manhattan, but he faced a dilemma. How should he describe what he did? The word “propaganda” was viewed negatively, so he coined a new term, “public relations”.
One of his first clients was the American Tobacco Company. In the early 1920’s cigarette manufacturers had a serious problem. It was considered taboo for women to smoke. The president of American Tobacco came to Bernays and said, “We’re losing half our market. Can you help us?” He gave this new PR specialist a lot of money to come up with a plan to make it acceptable for women to smoke. Bernays went to a leading psychoanalyst in New York named A. A. Brill and asked, “How can Freudian psychology help us here?” It was the day of the suffragette movement. Women’s liberation was picking up speed.
Brill said, “Well, here is the problem of all women. They lack penises and because of this they envy men. If you can convince women that smoking cigarettes will be like giving them a penis you can’t lose.” With dark creativity, Bernays formulated a plan. Every year there was a big Easter parade in Manhattan. He gathered a group of young, fashionable debutantes and asked them to hide cigarettes and matches in their clothing. As they marched in the parade, at a certain moment he would give a signal. They were to stop, take out the cigarettes and smoke them. Of course, he had a gaggle of photographers and reporters waiting. His plan was an amazing success. The debutantes lighted up and the story flashed across the country. Bernays called cigarettes “torches of freedom.” By smoking them, women were standing for freedom just like the new Statue of Liberty. The lie was sucked down like delicious poison. From that moment across the U.S., smoking became acceptable for women.
It was Edward Bernays who created and promoted the idea that products weren’t just objects to be used. They were symbols of how you want others to see you. A car wasn’t just to get you across town. It was an expression of the Self. Clothes weren’t just to keep you warm and cover the body. They tell people who you really are inside. Bernays sent celebrities across America to instruct the public in how to think about clothes. He told us that our lives were empty, then convinced us that we would feel better about ourselves if we bought a particular product or service. American business flocked to this perverse genius. The president of Lehman Brothers is quoted as saying that the masses needed to be taught to make decisions not on the basis of need, but desire. They had to be made to want the new even before the old was consumed. The desires of Self must overshadow all else.
Bernays was deeply involved with Hollywood. He was the first to put stars under PR contracts and have them sell products created by companies also under his contract. He was the first to do product placement in film. At premiers he would drape stars with clothes from his manufacturers. He was the first to hire psychologists to do studies that said products were good for us. Then he would claim that the studies were independent. He was the first to use focus groups and on and on.
Seeing Bernays’ success, politicians and demagogues of every stripe around the world rushed to use his techniques. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the Third Reich, studied Bernays’ work and spoke of his great respect for it. The Third Reich was built on a Bernays principle, tell a big enough lie and everyone will believe it. Bernays worked for U.S. Presidents and political parties. And the lies just kept growing.
Edward Bernays became a wealthy and powerful man. Though he is almost unknown today, he transformed America and America has transformed the world. Bernays taught us that individuals have no value except as consumers or voters. He taught powerful people how to harness fear and desire to manipulate us. What was the core of Bernays’ philosophy? Create a delusion that sells enslavement as freedom by teaching us to worship a Great Golden Idol. And that idol is the Self. Worship of that idol has opened the door to all the horrors that have come upon us. Bernays’ delusion has been so effective that we think Self Worship is a positive goal.
Bernays is the godfather of the puerile “influencers” who guide the minds and choices of young people today. He is the godfather of Hollywood, an industry I know intimately because I spent my career there as a writer and executive producer in network television. I love the people of Hollywood, but the industry is a world center of Self worship. So often I have observed that those who find the greatest success in Hollywood are the most destructive both to themselves and others. Hollywood creates and feeds our addictions, locking us in childish fantasies. We are trained to worship celebrities, rock stars and athletes, no matter how destructive they may be, because that kind of worship makes money. The Internet skin trade enslaves millions with porn. 2.5 billion dollars per year are sucked from human souls by that cancerous industry. As Edward Bernays taught so well, all that matters is profit even if it sends a billion souls to hell. Bernays is the godfather of rancid politicians who live on anger and fear, spewing false promises to keep their worshipers locked in political servitude.
Self-worship is the worship of slaves. Did Edward Bernays create self-worship? Of course not. That started in the Garden of Eden when two people believed the lie that if they disobeyed God they could be gods themselves. What do false gods desire most? Worship through sacrifice. It was at that moment in the Garden of Eden that humans were split in half. I believe that was the moment when the so-called subconscious arose with all of its surging emptiness and hunger, a lost and powerful force within us that is so susceptible to trance and delusion. Guided by the Powers of Darkness, Bernays simply put it into a business plan.
Humans are made to worship. We cannot escape it. Look at the history of religion and the endless pantheons of twisted, rapacious gods. Worship always demands sacrifice. Which means suffering, pain and loss to human worshipers desperate to appease their bloodthirsty deities. Too often, this has included human sacrifice, sometimes on a stupefying scale. A few years ago, my family and I visited Chichen Itza in the Yucatan and stood below the long temple staircase that once was drenched with the blood of thousands. A temple dedicated to the flying serpent god. Now these evil beings have been replaced by a single Golden Idol. You.
As your own little god, you make human sacrifices too. To satisfy your Self, you sacrifice the people around you, slashing straight into their hearts. The delusion of self-worship may keep you from committing to marriage because you’re afraid you won’t be fulfilled by just one person. But you will break hearts because your little god thirsts for love. Or you may marry, but your marriage becomes a bloody sacrifice because your little god drowns in self-pity and rages when your partner doesn’t fulfill your “needs”. There are millions of ways for self-worship to destroy us. What we call narcissism is just another form of idolatry that doesn’t need stone altars and carved images to be drenched with the blood of victims. We pour people, products and experiences into the God sized holes in our souls. Because that is what we are trying to fill, the infinite hole that is left when a loving God has been rejected, the only One who truly deserves our worship.
And what of the so-called Christian church in America? The Worship of Self has destroyed its life and witness, a church that should be taking God’s love to the poor and needy, presenting the love of Jesus to a lost world. Instead, it drowns in delusion. Edward Bernays is the spiritual father of the delusion called the “Prosperity Gospel”. Prosperity TV wolves rant to millions that God will give them exactly what they demand if only they have enough faith and say the right words. As proof of that faith they must pour money into the vile coffers of these hell hounds. Spiritualized self-worship has caused Christian leaders and their followers to believe that financial success and large crowds mean spiritual success. The worship of self causes millions of fake Christians to worship corrupt political leaders, masters of the Golden Idol, who boast of their great wealth. The fact that they gained that wealth through the vilest means does not matter.
What is the heart of this Darkness? When we worship the Self we are worshiping Satan and the powers of Darkness that constructed and sold us this terrible lie. These beings have always hated humans. That’s why whenever possible, they demand actual human sacrifice. Most of all, they love the blood of children. And the altars of America are drenched with that blood. Over 63 million unborn children have been destroyed through abortion. These are human sacrifices to a god of fear who whispers to the Self that this killing is necessary. And who profits? Through all sources of revenue the abortion industry sucks in over one billion dollars a year. Just as horrible, when children are born into poverty and danger, millions who decry abortion care nothing about them. What will be the end of this avalanche of horror? Here is another Pattern of Supernatural Phenomena. Those nations that worship the golden idol are vulnerable to violence in every form, including evil supernatural manifestations. All of it will grow. And desperation will lead to tyranny.
Before he came to power, Adolph Hitler wrote these words: “Anyone who interprets National Socialism merely as a political movement knows almost nothing about it. It is more than religion; it is the determination to create a new man.” For Hitler that new man was a fantasy Aryan race that would rule the world under his fatherhood. In their self-worship, millions, including millions of deluded people who claimed to be Christians, accepted Hitler as their Father. The avalanche of death that raged through his camps were human sacrifices to an Aryan satan that promised to heal the wounds of Germany…and make her great again. Shortly before she died at age 101, Leni Riefenstahl, the brilliant filmmaker who directed the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, said these words in a BBC interview. “I was one of millions who thought Hitler had all the answers. We saw only the good things. We didn’t know bad things were to come.” After waking from the hellish delusion, she viewed meeting Hitler and believing in him to have been the greatest catastrophe of her life. But for those not blinded by his trance, the bad things were visible from the start.
How do we get free from the hellish delusion of self-worship? In all the history of the human race, there is only one God who said, “I love you so much that I will sacrifice Myself for you, so that never again will you have to be enslaved to gods of fear, hate and rage, especially the monstrous idol of Self. I offer eternal forgiveness as a free gift. But you must give up your false deity.” The message of Jesus Christ, who gave His life for you and me, stands in direct opposition to the lying delusions of Edward Bernays and all those who have come after him. There is only way to freedom. What did Jesus say about self? These are His words in Luke 9:23: “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.”
What does it mean to “deny” yourself? First, it means humbling yourself before God, repenting of your sins and giving up your right to be your own little idol. You give up control of your life to Him, wanting His will more than you want your own, asking Him to guide your choices. Second, you consciously choose to be His servant rather than serving yourself. He leads and empowers us to serve others in His Name and that can take many forms. Your life becomes the broken bread and poured out wine of forgiveness for those around you. It means that you measure all your fears and desires against God’s Word the Bible. Then you take up your cross. Every person who follows Jesus has one. It may be the rejection of friends and the people you love. It may be physical infirmity. It may mean the loss of wealth and success. Whatever it is, Jesus gives the strength to carry it and leads us on with joy. This is the only way to be free from the tyranny and destruction of the Golden Idol.
Because it is a world center of Self Worship, without national repentance the future of America, a land that I deeply love, is very dark. When tyranny comes it will be welcomed by millions who will believe the delusion that it’s the answer to all their hungers and fears. No matter the cost, the followers of Jesus Christ are called to live and speak His Truth. Our message must be clear. Repent from your sins because the Kingdom of God is at hand and the King is coming. He is the righteous judge of every person who has ever lived. That message is for a world, including a church, enslaved by the delusion of Self worship, addicted to entertainment as spiritual reality. Never forget that those who follow Jesus are citizens of a different Kingdom. The one we are living in is passing away. If you are a follower of the King, pray deeply and daily. Study the Bible. Know God’s Word. Join in fellowship with other believers. Stop listening and believing the enslaving voices of our world no matter how sweet they may sound.
And I have one last thought for you. You know, we are all children of our culture. All of us have grown up deeply influenced by the worship of Self. My friend, if you are not a believer in Jesus I strongly urge you to think through everything I’ve said. What is the state of your life right now? How much are you enslaved and you don’t realize it? No matter who you are, there is freedom, joy and life purpose for you. Confess your sins, believe in Jesus and the sacrifice of His life that He made on the Cross to save your life forever. Place your life in His hands. It’s the only way to face the days ahead. You know, I am not a religious professional. I am an old Hollywood writer and showrunner. I tell you these things because I have proved them true for many years.
If you would like to learn more about Edward Bernays, I recommend a documentary called The Century of the Self.
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