Curtis certainly makes a plausible case for the dominance of Freudian psychoanalysis and concepts as having had a huge influence on the thinking of governments and business without considering whether Freud’s theories happened to have come along at the right time when they did to be seized on by these and other agencies to legitimise their own agendas for controlling people. In other words, if Freud had not offered psychoanalysis to the world, something similiar would have had to be invented. Curtis also does not consider other possible influences on the thinking of both political conservatives and social democrats. The peculiar social, political, economic and cultural conditions in Europe and North America following World War I and continuing up to the present day, with the rise of the United States and its particular set of expansionist values and fantasies together with the collapse of European empires and their values, are ignored as an influential backdrop on the thinking of political and social elites and how they viewed the general public. It could be argued though that elites have always viewed everyone else as something less than human in order to justify their own elevated position to themselves, to make the Great Unwashed believe they are undeserving of democracy and control over their lives, and therefore to secure and maintain the elites’ psychological and physical hold over their serfs. Freudian psychoanalysis, Skinnerian behaviourism, Taylorist scientific management and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism are just some of the tools the elites have used time and again in various bizarre combinations to fine-tune, tweak and oil the joints in our social, economic and political hierarchies.