Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions. Eliane Glaser
informative labels on processed foods is the deliberate withholding of information. In 2010 Britain’s Food Standards Agency, a governmental regulatory body equipped with scientific experts working in the public interest, had its powers stripped and replaced with a set of ‘responsibility deal networks’ shifting the emphasis from ‘top-down lectures’ to ‘voluntary codes’ and ‘personal responsibility’ (there’s a fascinating slippage here between companies and individuals). Regulation of business has to be ‘light touch’ in order not to ‘patronise’ consumers, leaving those businesses free to manipulate the bundles of irrational drives they assume consumers to be. The Behaviour Change Network working on public health was to operate with the new ‘nudge unit’, bringing together ‘experts in behavioural science with those from businesses’. And there we have it: we are not being nudged towards ‘wellbeing’, but towards being compliant and serviceable consumers.
All this hype about consumer savviness is a smokescreen designed to conceal the fact that we’re being nudged. We’ve forgotten how to deploy the vital analysis of covert ideology, because of the modern belief that we are rational, conscious individuals, free to make choices about the lives we lead. Because even though those popular-science books keep telling us we’re irrational, I believe that their real message is the opposite. They are actually telling us that unlike the unruly Freudian unconscious, we now have the chance, thanks to cutting-edge science, to master the mysteries of the human mind. Oh, except that this mastery is in the hands of a select few.
False consciousness has become taboo at the precise moment that it’s being used to consolidate elite power. It’s not just that there’s a continuity in the subconscious techniques used by politicians and marketers in the early twentieth century and now. It’s that – especially with the spotlight on neuroscience – they are now being applied subconsciously. We have false consciousness about false consciousness. While we’re getting up in arms about being patronising or patronised, elites are quietly exploiting those paradoxes in order to shore up their status. We need to detect these manipulations. But we also need to face up to the fact that we are not always in conscious control, and not just about what we buy at the supermarket; but about persuasion and freedom, politics and power. In a sense the whole of our culture is structured like a Freudian human mind. There’s an obvious, face-value level, and then a subtext that you need to decode. It’s only modern consumerist Freud-hating culture that denies there’s a deeper level. But it’s that very culture – with its unprecedented deceptions – that has made the subtext even deeper.
Freud himself thought it was impossible to do away completely with covert ideology, delusions, false consciousness, whatever you want to call it, because it’s part of being human in a civilised society. Marx was more revolutionary: he looked forward to the brave new Communist world when there would be no illusions, no subtext, and everyone would be master of their own destiny. Communism didn’t turn out quite like that, as we know. But Freud believed in a more realistic kind of progress. Psychoanalysis is not about the elimination of the unconscious. It’s about the resolution of a problematic relationship between our conscious and unconscious minds. It’s about moving from a state of being ‘neurotically unhappy’, to paraphrase Uncle Siggy, to being ‘normally unhappy’. We can’t strip away covert ideology completely, as Marx had hoped. But we can be inspired by his incisive analysis to expose its cracks and flaws, and that’s essential if we really want to tell the truth about power. As the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued, the opposite of ideology is not truth, but emancipatory critique. That critique can enable us to become self-aware, self-determining and idealistic once more.
I’m optimistic that we can become more aware and more rational if we try: that we have the capacity as well as the right to decide what kind of society we want to live in. Unlike the nudgers, I don’t believe that false consciousness is an unchanging fact of life, an inevitable consequence of cognitive hard-wiring; and I don’t believe it’s an excuse for governments and corporations to become our ‘surrogate willpower’. In an age when PR has taken over politics, let’s bring the credo back into style. Now that psychological techniques are more prevalent than ever, let’s fight back with Freud. In a virtual, airbrushed world saturated with PR and marketing, let’s recognise ‘authenticity’ – those false calls to ‘get real’ – as the smartest ruse of all. We can be sceptical and optimistic at the same time; critique the world but also change it. We can be less credulous about the covert ideology that is distorting our world, and believe once more in the overt ideology that’s the first step to transforming it. It’s time to see through modern illusions and restore our ideals.
TWO
Soft Power
We’re all familiar with the scourge of political spin. They’re all corrupt, they’re all the same, they’re all lying through their teeth. Yes Minister, The West Wing, Spin City and The Thick of It dramatise politicians’ two-faced machinations. One 2009 study found that politicians – along with estate agents – are trusted least out of all professions in Britain, behind bankers, journalists and lawyers. But what if authenticity were even scourgier? What if the politicians you really had to watch out for were the ones who rolled up their sleeves, bared their souls and spoke from the heart? What if the rotten core of contemporary politics wasn’t rhetoric, persuasion, or the copious use of spin doctors, but candour, sincerity, acting on genuine conviction? And conviction politics is what we have today. Of course, conviction is itself a product of spin – but it appears to have nothing to do with it.
I first noticed conviction politics in action on 28 March 1992, on a pedestrianised shopping street in Luton. Things were not going well for Prime Minister John Major. It was less than two weeks before the general election, and the Conservative Party were facing almost certain defeat. Major was being jostled and heckled by angry Labour voters. Suddenly, he appeared to be gripped by a spur-of-the-moment inspiration. Climbing onto a soapbox, he picked up an old-fashioned megaphone, and began to argue back. But the soapbox was not actually a soapbox at all: it was a Central Office document box, apparently tested by Special Branch to make sure it would not collapse when ‘Honest John’ stepped up onto it.
David Cameron had his own soapbox moment just before the 2010 general election. He was being heckled by apprentices at a further education college in south London. Dressed in a plain white shirt, with the sleeves rolled up and – of course – no tie, Cameron seemed suited down to the ground by the apparent unruliness of the moment. ‘This is what politics should be like,’ he said. ‘This is what you are going to get from me at this election: not a script, not a lectern, not surrounded by a bunch of hand-picked people. But proper, live public meetings where actually you can argue about the future of our country and then together we can decide. Right?’ Putting his PR training to good use, Cameron spun audience hostility and his resulting wobble into the gold of authenticity. After all, in 2007, amid speculation that Gordon Brown was about to call a snap general election, Cameron had given an hour-and-a-half-long speech to the Tory party conference without autocue; a speech ‘from the heart’. ‘It might be a bit messy,’ he’d warned his audience, ‘but it will be me.’
Contemporary politics is like a shabby-chic wardrobe, or a pair of distressed jeans. It’s not that cracks don’t appear. It’s that they are recruited to the task of making the surface of modern politics even smoother. Critique is incorporated into the edgy mix. It’s Walter Wolfgang, the septuagenarian socialist peace activist ejected from the 2005 Labour Party conference for heckling Jack Straw, converted into the conference mascot. It’s Peter Mandelson turning Gordon Brown’s woodenness in front of the cameras into an asset: ‘Look, you know he’s not a sort of TV personality. He’s not sort of Terry Wogan or Des O’Connor.’ It’s Tony Blair’s sincerity over Iraq; Michelle Obama’s mirthful revelations about her husband’s dirty socks; the Tea Party town-hall meetings; Sarah Palin as hockey mom. Over the last two decades, this fake authenticity has taken over political discourse, and we have come to believe in proclamations of a new politics, people power, and grassroots revolution. I’m not saying people aren’t wise to a lot of this: the leaders’ wives’ disclosures about their husbands’ domestic habits were dubbed the ‘my imperfect hero’ strategy. And I’m not saying that all politics and all protest is the product of PR. But authenticity and political activism have