Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions. Eliane Glaser
is king, that we are savvy, self-aware and self-determining as never before. The notion that we may be duped and self-deluded, that we may be in the grip of false consciousness, is nowadays deeply taboo. But as I’ll be arguing in this book, that just leaves us even more vulnerable to deception, ‘nudge’ politics and soft power, forms of manipulation that are on the rise and do not necessarily have our best interests at heart. We’re caught in a trap, as the King would have it. And we need suspicious minds.
And there’s another factor at play. With the melting away of conflicts between East and West in the Cold War and Right and Left in our politics, the big ideologies have been consigned to history. The influential political scientist Francis Fukuyama hailed ‘the end of history’ and the triumph of capitalist democracy. But this book argues that agendas never really disappeared. They just began to operate undercover, leaving us with a looking-glass world in which reality is spun and vested interests appear in disguise. Politicians now regard the word ‘ideology’ as an insult, but they are driven by ideology nonetheless. It’s now a covert form of ideology that’s at work, and that we ignore at our peril. This book puts ideology back at the heart of the problem, but also of the potential solution.
Because if we want to improve our world – indeed, with the environmental challenges we face, to save it – we need not only to identify hidden agendas, but also to have explicit aspirations. We need not to be afraid to say what we mean and what we mean to do. If we’re too credulous in some ways, we also don’t believe in enough. We need to debunk delusions and reclaim ideology as positive idealism, otherwise people power and revolution will remain empty ciphers that serve to obscure the lack of real agency and real change.
There are some who might find the claim that we live our lives under the spell of pervasive and self-defeating delusions somewhat paranoid. Are we in fact perfectly clear-sighted, yet impotent? Or just comfortably apathetic? So what if technological innovation doesn’t solve world poverty, but allows us to have a bit of fun? Is it so wrong to download an app onto your mobile phone which causes it, when moved on a flat surface, to fart? Some of the illusions we live by are helpful, even pleasant; they help us get out of bed on a Monday morning, and allow us to indulge in a little couch-potato escapism. Sometimes – I will admit it – I feel a bit like a crazed conspiracy theorist. But then I read that David Cameron has welcomed Simon Cowell’s idea for a ‘political X Factor’ in which hot topics are debated and voted on by the British public, and has launched a competition to ‘develop an online platform that enables us to tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges’, and an amended version of that famous aphorism pops into my head: Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to con you.
The delusions I’ll be talking about in this book are sustained by a seamless blurring of deception and collusion. When people talk about conspiracy theories, the assumption is that there are evil agents doing the conspiring. But the conspiracies I’m interested in are really diffuse. We are both agents and victims, and our compliance with soft power comes about through unconscious creeping cooperation. It’s in the drinking water.
I am, however, passionately committed to the idea that decoding delusions can help us to loosen their limiting grip on our lives, and take action to improve our world for real. Because it’s these whitewashed problems and illusory solutions that are responsible for our curious sense of paralysis. But we can see through them if we look hard enough.
I’ll start, in the first chapter, with the story of how ideologies went underground. Then in the chapters that follow, I’ll take a polemical pop at how hidden agendas and topsy-turvy illusions operate today: in relation to politics, equality, new technology, the media, work, freedom, science, food, and the environment. In each chapter, I’ll highlight one rule of covert ideology’s lying game: a trick of the trade for you to recognise when you’re going about your illusion-spotting day. The idea is that bit by bit, the powerful elites in our societies that thrive on deception will be forced to play their hand. Game on.
ONE
Ideology’s Second Life
Ideology is dead
I sometimes feel as if I was born in the wrong era. I’d like to have been a socialist cabaret queen in Weimar Germany, or an anarchist squatter in 1970s New York, or at least to have been around at a time when having an ideology was cool. Back in the sixties, seventies and even eighties, students wore their isms like the badges on their secondhand tweed coats. But in the early nineties, ideology fell out of fashion. The generation that has grown up since the resignation in 1990 of Margaret Thatcher, the last British prime minister not to be embarrassed about her political allegiance, thinks that Left and Right are so, like, over. And thus it is that today’s politicians, ever keen to get with the programme, would never commit the uncool style crime of actually having political beliefs.
In a speech to the Chicago Economic Club in 1999, Tony Blair declared that ‘The political debates of the twentieth century – the massive ideological battleground between left and right – are over.’ Along with his transatlantic counterpart Bill Clinton, Blair pioneered the very un-ideological Third Way. David Cameron, likewise, declared in 2009 that he ‘will not be the prisoner of an ideological past’, and that he doesn’t do ‘isms’. This is the era of oxymoronic cross-party combos like ‘Red Toryism’ (espoused by the writer and commentator Phillip Blond), ‘Blue Labour’ (advanced by the academic Maurice Glasman) and ‘progressive conservatism’ (developed by the Demos think tank). In a 2005 article for The Economist, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, wrote that Europe was now focusing less on ‘ideology’ and more on ‘results’. And in a speech in Philadelphia in 2009, Barack Obama proclaimed that ‘What is required is a new declaration of independence … from ideology.’
To call a policy ideological now is the most damning of criticisms. You hear it levelled at politicians on all sides. While in opposition, the then shadow education secretary David Willetts advised education minister Alan Johnson to break free from his party’s ‘ideological arguments’. The shadow business secretary John Denham accused the government’s plans to treble tuition fees of being ‘not financial, but ideological’. Republican protesters against Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms cast them in extreme ideological terms, as ‘socialist’, ‘totalitarian’ and ‘fascist’. One man at a Pennsylvania town hall meeting yelled, ‘I don’t want this country turning into Russia, turning into a socialised [sic] country.’ To subscribe to an ideology these days is denounced as either naïve or sinister: like getting too involved in student union politics, or joining the Hitler Youth.
And along with ‘ideology’, ‘divisive’ is another new dirty word. This turn of events is most peculiar. Since when is it a bad thing for politicians to have political principles that are different from those of other politicians? To be, in short, idealistic? But according to this way of thinking, we now live in a virtuous, non-divisive, post-political age in which our leaders pursue a pragmatic agenda of cooperative consensus; of ‘getting the job done’. Politicians around the world, from Angela Merkel to Nick Clegg, Barack Obama to Joe Lieberman, have embraced the non-partisan, cross-party centre ground. If they come up with any policies at all, they are the result of consulting you, dear voter.
There’s another kind of enemy that’s now condemned with the label of ideology: ‘Islamist terrorists’. Since September 2001, Muslim people who attempt to blow up planes or trains or passers-by are assumed to have been driven by a coherent set of ideas, to have been ‘radicalised’. The possibility that they might be some lone nut, or have particular, individual reasons for doing what they do is not considered. A week after the planes struck on 9/11, George Bush declared that the enemy in the war on terror was ‘heir to all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century … follow[ing] in the path of Fascism, and Nazism, and Totalitarianism’. Christopher Hitchens started using the term ‘Islamo-fascism’. What Islamists share with Nazis and Communists, it’s suggested, is a hatred of ‘freedom’. As with the Western attitude to Communism, it’s the other side who are brainwashed by ideas, not us. Freedom is not an ideology, we are told; it is a value.
But claims that ideology is either dead or evil are themselves supremely ideological.