1,890 words

When the subject awoke from the state of somnambulism, he seemed to have lost all memory of what had happened while he was in that state. — Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study 

That’s like hypnotizing chickens. — Iggy Pop, “Lust for Life”

Why is it so easy to control the masses? I’m sure you have seen the phenomenon in which one person in a crowd of people suddenly looks up and stares at the sky, followed by the people around him, followed by the people around them and so on until everyone is gazing upwards at nothing. It’s a natural response; there is nothing foolish or sheep-like about it. But everyone still looks up. What explains the mechanism of mass influence?

We know about advertising, which is designed to influence our choices mostly in the retail sector. Vance Packard, in a seminal book on advertising called The Hidden Persuaders that was published in 1957, writes;

At one of the largest advertising agencies in America psychologists on the staff are probing sample humans in an attempt to find out how to identify, and beam messages to, people of high anxiety, body consciousness, hostility, passiveness and so on.

Now, the same psychology once deployed to sell you bread or motor cars is being recalibrated to sell you something else: compliance.

We also know about propaganda: Plato’s “noble myth,” Goebbels, Pravda, the Big Lie, the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, any Communist regime, the BBC, and so on and so forth. But this is propaganda considered simply as message, and no message can be effective without a recipient. And so the propagandist must not simply prepare the message and the medium, but also manipulate the recipient class and make them ready to receive. The British government — and many more globally — are not merely managing information, they have taken to micromanaging those who are informed and the way in which they react to information.

In Britain in 2010, members of the Institute for Government (IG) were commissioned to produce a report examining the application of techniques drawn from behavioral science to the general public. (One of their academic partners was the notorious hotbed of Leftism, the London School of Economics.) It is a thoroughly technocratic document, but its deep agenda is occasionally exposed:

Tools such as incentives and information are intended to change behavior by “changing minds”. If we provide the carrots and sticks, alongside accurate information, people will weigh up the revised costs and benefits of their actions and respond accordingly. Unfortunately, evidence suggests that people do not always respond in this ‘perfectly rational’ way. [Italics added]

Despite the carrot-and-stick metaphor rather betraying the opinion this technocratic panel have of their fellow citizens, the report, MINDSPACE: Influencing Behaviour through Public Policy, was a great success, prompting the government to build on its foundations and establish the so-called “nudge unit.”

The “nudge unit” is actually called the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), and was set up under British Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010 (at the outset of what is so far 13 years of calamitous Tory rule). The “nudge” theory got its title from a book by the American economist Richard Thaler. The fact that he pitched the title Libertarian Paternalism Is Not an Oxymoron before a potential publisher suggested the odd little English word “nudge,” suggesting that the publisher may have previously worked in advertising. The subtitle had all the confident ring of a self-help book — Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness — and it greatly influenced David Halpern, CEO of the BIT.

Pre-COVID — and the pandemic was when the BIT really came into its own — the unit had a list of achievements which appeared laudable and actually seemed aimed at helping the public. These included “prompting people to pay their tax on time, turn up in court, [and] work with JobCentres to improve outcomes and increasing organ donations.” Ronald Reagan’s famous and ominous nine words — “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” — seemed refuted. Until, that is, the helpers stop being the government.

At almost exactly the same time as the BIT was being set up, an organization then called NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, and today called Nesta) changed its status — or had it changed — from that of a non-departmental public body to a new body with charitable status (meaning it doesn’t have to pay tax in the United Kingdom). The BIT was then part-privatized in association with NESTA. Given that NESTA was set up using cash from the National Lottery — which the public pay for, if they choose to play — and was now being publicly part-privatized, it seems that the UK government effectively sold off something that had been set up using public funds. NESTA made 1.8 million pounds, tax free, in its first year of trading. I don’t imagine this money found its way back to the public weal.

Nesta have an agenda which is subtly different from helping people pay their taxes and get out of bed for their court appointment. They work for the United Nations on intelligence design projects via their Centre for Collective Intelligence Design, and familiar terms begin to appear in their policy framework:

We help diverse voices to be heard, and for people with different interests and preferences to find common goals. Our approach helps to build community awareness and collective action on issues that matter — from tackling the climate crisis to living healthy lives.

Nesta has an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion policy — you bet it does. Amid the usual disguised blather which translates to hiring more black people and fewer whites, they also get George Floyd in there, assuring us that “. . . the Black Lives Matter movement’s powerful response drove us to look even harder at ourselves and our role in preventing, or perpetuating, injustice within our workplace and in the work we do.”

I am often surprised that these “woke” choristers have any time left for social justice once they have finished all the guilty introspection and the self-flagellation. Nesta, now part-owners of the BIT, make themselves — and their priorities — clear in a two-minute introductory video, “Nesta in 2 minutes,” on their homepage: “The UK faces major challenges: Climate change, inequality, ill health.”

The video is steeped in equity and global warming, a cheerful girl’s voice narrating thinly-disguised social engineering as a wonderful new boon we have been missing all these years. Nesta describe themselves as a “UK innovation agency for social good.” So, that’s settled.

Changing behavior is a generic concept; what of the specifics of this modification? It seems that applying behavioral science to influence natural public responses has many uses. Fast-forward seven years to 2017, and the Islamist attacks at London Bridge, England, which killed eight people. Controlling public response had been honed during the Arab Spring (which apparently terrified then-Prime Minister Theresa May, a Conservative) and the London Olympics, and by the time of the atrocity had perfected its social psyops. These tactics, incidentally, are as covert as they can be in these times of a sprawling and global media network, the British mainstream media avoiding mention of the application of behavioral manipulation by a government of which it secretly approves. As is often the case, a foreign source picks up the story, here at the Middle-Eastern Eye:

The British government has prepared for terrorist incidents by pre-planning social media campaigns which are designed to appear to be a spontaneous public response to attacks . . .

Hashtags are carefully tested before attacks happen, Instagram images selected, and “impromptu” street posters are printed.

In operations that contingency planners term “controlled spontaneity”, politicians’ statements, vigils and inter-faith events are also negotiated and planned in readiness for any terrorist attack.

This is umbilically linked to Thaler’s “nudge” theory that we saw with the BIT and Nesta. An environment is created in which individuals are persuaded by subtle coercion to react in a certain way:

Effective ‘nudges’ are the result of what Thaler calls ‘choice architectures’: Instances in which people actively design menus, store layouts and other environments in which people make decisions, such that design attributes ‘nudge’ users’ decisions in certain directions.

The globalists are far more open about the uses they might have, and they don’t involve helping you enroll into a pension scheme. Larry Fink, CEO of notorious world-eaters BlackRock, talks openly about behaviors “having” to change, and the employment of “forced behavior.”

Two main questions arise concerning the application of techniques of behavioral psychology to the mass of people. Firstly, “controlled spontaneity” is an oxymoron, and it is linked to the metaphorical construction of Professor Thaler’s choice architectures. This phrase is ambivalent. The word “architecture” invokes a grand, stately home, with all the sumptuous rooms available for inspection. But a prison cell is also architectural.

It doesn’t matter how much it is pared down and cosmeticized, “nudge” theory revolves around and relies on coercion. Among all the benefits of this ad hoc social engineering, nothing is said of the legislation quietly being put in place — in the European Union, Britain, and most aggressively in Ireland — which will effectively put up a tough border fence as your architectural choice, indicating where your spontaneity must end when it comes to commenting on immigration, blacks, Islam, LGBTQ or any of the other protected brand names.

Secondly, like a lab leak, what happens when the alchemy of behavioral science is out of the hands of sociology boffins at the BIT and into the grasp of power-crazed, pathologically egotistical politicians? I wrote here at Counter-Currents about Matt Hancock, British Health Secretary at the time of the pandemic, and how he relished lording it over the monkeys with lockdowns, masks, and clinically untested vaccinations.

As with so much disguised governmental malevolence in the West, this manipulation comes cloaked in the healing garb of science. Technocrats require the imprimatur of the methodical empirical discovery to which the social sciences pretend, and that should be good enough for the likes of us. If behavior modification is a scientific procedure, and it is allied to the “good innovation” which is Nesta’s emblem, how can ordinary folk presume to object to it?

Perhaps the carrot-and-stick metaphor from the IG’s MINDSPACE report of 2010 is worth revisiting. This is often misinterpreted as the donkey or ass either being given a carrot or beaten with a stick to get it to move, but it is more complex than this simple system of reward or punishment. The apocryphal farmer, faced with an animal refusing to budge, lashes up a contraption which he ties to the creature’s head. A stick protrudes in front of the animal, and from it dangles a carrot. The donkey moves forward in an attempt to grab the vegetable, but of course it is still at the same distance away, like the horizon at sea. This gives a better picture of behavioral psychology, of controlled spontaneity and choice architectures. The benefit for the masses — for us — can clearly be seen and pursued, and we must move in a certain direction to try to get at it, but the nature of the system by which it is visible means that this can never be.

Possibly the whole exercise is designed to save money on surveillance. After all, why watch us if you have already told us what we will be doing?

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