Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions. Eliane Glaser
their advantage. The Indian writer Arundhati Roy is right to ask: ‘Isn’t there a flaw in the logic of that phrase – speak truth to power? It assumes that power doesn’t know the truth. But power knows the truth just as well, if not better, than the powerless know the truth.’ I think it’s right to question why it is that the poor in our societies are not demonstrably angrier than the rich. If you’ve got less money and power, if you’re being screwed over, then surely you have more of a stake in kicking up a stink. It’s difficult not to conclude that those at the lower end of the socio-economic scale are often complicit in their subjection, that they believe in the elites that ventriloquise the voices of ordinary people. We might be happy to say that the Zimbabweans who vote for Robert Mugabe do so because they are traumatised by the effects of colonial rule, but what about the working-class Italians who adore Silvio Berlusconi?
Over the last twenty years, the language of equality of opportunity has created a bizarre marriage of get-on-your-bike Thatcherism and political correctness by pretending that people are fully in control of their fate and not constrained by their circumstances. In their desire not to patronise the working classes, many liberals deny the pervasive influence of power.
But at the same time, the problem of false consciousness affects the affluent as well as the poor. The G20 leaders and the directors of Google are not free agents, self-consciously exercising absolute power. A highly-paid barrister might be more in thrall to the seductive ideology of work than a pub landlord, and a government minister more under the sway of myths about society than a retail assistant. Even the demonised bankers spend their days – I’m sure of it – in thrall to competitive self-doubt, exhaustion and a creeping sense that their lives are defined by the phrase ‘Money can’t buy you love.’ A confident sense of enlightenment can leave you vulnerable to self-delusion.
Ultimately, ideology and false consciousness affect different people in different ways: for some, it’s a matter of material gain; for others, quality of life. To the question of whether I count myself among the ranks of the duped, I would answer a resounding Yes. But if ideology-spotting abilities are not determined by status or money, they can be improved by developing greater awareness. At least I am having a go. And I believe that everyone else can too. That is not to deny that these are complex and knotty questions which are not easy to answer. They cut to the heart of our attitudes towards class, control, education, democracy, the media, and the very issue of consciousness itself. And as a society, we have stopped asking them.
When the British government recently caved in to the demands of commercial broadcasters to allow product placement in TV programmes, the only concerns raised were about children buying more sweets and crisps. Why? Because we imagine ourselves to be media-literate and discerning, consciously in control of our perceptions and our lives. To admit that we are duped and deluded, that our lives are shaped by illusions that we are scarcely aware of, let alone able to control, is nowadays highly controversial.
Debates about false consciousness just aren’t being had any more, and the phrase has become verboten. It’s a taboo that unites the grad-student table-dancers who protest that what they are doing is empowering and the Americans without health insurance who lobbied hard against the provision of a state safety net. Thomas Frank is one of the few contemporary commentators who has mentioned it: as he puts it in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, ‘it’s like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy’. To utter the words ‘turkeys’, ‘voting’ and ‘Christmas’ in the same sentence tends to produce outrage across the board. No one is allowed to suggest that people don’t always know what’s best for them. But who of us can really say we do, all of the time? And as we’re about to see, our reluctance to face false consciousness results in rich rewards at the top.
Nudge back
The notion of false consciousness might be a massive public blind spot, but to the elites in our society, it’s a perfectly obvious reality. In 1957, Vance Packard quoted Advertising Age declaring that ‘In very few instances do people really know what they want, even when they say they do.’ And in 2005, the late Steve Jobs said: ‘You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.’ In a direct contrast to all the rhetoric about consumer savvy, the modern corporate world is built on this assumption of false consciousness; and so is modern politics. In the nineties under New Labour, it was known as focus-grouping. In the twenty-first century, it’s known as ‘nudge’. The 2008 book Nudge by the economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein was given a rapturous reception by Barack Obama, David Cameron and policy wonks around the world. Cameron set up a Behavioural Insight Team, dubbed the ‘nudge unit’, run by Tony Blair’s former strategy adviser David Halpern. Halpern was the co-author of a Cabinet Office Paper entitled Mindspace: Influencing Behaviour Through Public Policy. The nudge unit has reported to a high-level team including Steve Hilton, the PR man turned director of strategy for Cameron. Britain’s Department of Health is issuing ‘guidance on the most effective behaviour change techniques’. The Royal Society has launched a ‘Brain Waves’ project to investigate neuroscience’s implications for politics and society. And the French government has established a Centre for Neuroscience, Behavioural Research and Policy in its Centre for Strategic Analysis.
What’s the link with brain science? Well, nudge politics was spawned from research in neuroscience and behavioural economics. This research goes hand in hand with the rejection of Freudian psychoanalysis. Its proponents argue that it is the wiring and firing of our brains, rather than our superegos and ids, that really make us who we are. Now it does seem at first sight that these new ways of thinking share with psychoanalysis a belief that human beings are driven by irrational forces beyond their control. Buzzy new popular science and politics books – from Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence to David Brooks’s The Social Animal to Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational – argue that we’re not as rational as we think we are. Thaler and Sunstein challenge traditional economics’ naïve belief in the rational individual, arguing that we don’t always act according to our best interests. We put off paying into pension plans and eat chicken nuggets.
But nudge politics has no interest in encouraging people to be more rational. Its interest lies in allowing an elite group of scientists, politicians and corporations to spot patterns in our irrational behaviour and steer our choices accordingly. Thaler and Sunstein would protest that nudging preserves free will intact, because the range of choices is still there. But that doesn’t wash, because free will is trumped by the art of persuasion. The one big factor that is left out in all this is power: the fact that some people are in a better position to make advantageous decisions than others, and the fact that nudging allows some people to manipulate others. ‘We are not exactly lemmings,’ Thaler and Sunstein write, ‘but we are easily influenced by the statements and deeds of others.’ Too right. But they regard this as a creepy opportunity rather than a prompt for critique. I find it amazing that there’s not more condemnation of nudge politics; but that’s because we don’t see it as shot through with power dynamics. And in its weird validation of irrationality, it legitimates the reality deficit that pervades modern life. Instead of enabling policy-makers to exploit the fact that people’s lives are shaped by covert ideology, I want you and me, dear reader, to identify the multiple ways in which covert ideology stops us being free.
Like focus-group politics, the politics of nudge is another step away from offering explicit priorities for people to choose between; away from overt ideology and the democratic tussle to achieve the good society. This kind of politics appeals to subconscious drives rather than conscious minds. According to David Halpern’s Mindspace report, much of our behaviour takes place ‘outside conscious awareness’; so ‘providing information per se often has surprisingly modest and sometimes unintended impacts’ (unintended for whom, I wonder). Government should, therefore, ‘shift the focus of attention away from facts and information’, and towards ‘automatic processes’ and ‘altering the context in which people act’. It should become, in fact, a ‘surrogate willpower’. How ironic that in this technological ‘information age’ people should no longer be making informed, rational decisions; that instead they should be subliminally corralled into behaving in a way that is ‘best for them’. And who decides what