Imagine a book which sums up human behaviour with powerful and completely unmistakable accuracy. Almost everyone who reads it sees its power after only a few pages. Almost every reader is entranced forever by what they read. It tells us why we act as we do, how our actions and even our thoughts arise and how they may be steered towards social objectives.
There are of course a huge number of books making this kind of claim or lesser variants of it, but what if a universally compelling book of insights into human behaviour were to be published? The Book we could call it.
It does not require much imagination to foresee that governments and other powerful vested interests might wish to suppress the Book and keep its insights to themselves. They would wish to use its behavioural insights without those same insights being used on them.
There are many ways by which censoring the Book could be achieved, but the most effective could be the nature of the Book itself - most people simply refuse to see themselves as predictable automata. The Book impresses almost all of its readers, but a vastly greater number do not even read it. The Book might not be earth-shaking and overt censorship may not be necessary.
Clearly, if it were to become widely read, the Book could endanger governing elites by opening up their behaviour to accurate analysis and criticism. Governments, NGOs, media, charities and big business don’t want this. They all have a common if covert aim, to maintain a situation where the broad mass of people are naïve when it comes to their own behaviour.
Naïve is simple and amenable to comforting myths, yet the Book could scatter those myths to the winds of fundamental change, social and political. Unfortunately for governing elites, we now have the internet which offers vast amounts of information and the corollary of that is that we realise how much we don’t know. Even worse, we realise that neither does anyone else, including the elites who control our lives.
The vast scale of the internet may even be a threat to naivety itself, especially the political naivety ruling elites depend on. Not an immediate killer threat, but a slowly evolving threat. People might even want to read the Book but fortunately for elites it doesn’t exist.
Or does it? Is the internet the Book?
5 comments:
It could well be the book
Of course it also contains pages and pages of utter bollocks. You'd have to be a bit savvy when reading the book, so you could filter the truth from the codswallop
Also, porn...
I don't think we need to sum up human behaviour. All we need is an accurate record of what people said and did, so that we can see whether they are liars, inconsistent, or just plain stupid. Just imagine how Boris would change in the public eye if we could read his undergraduate essays, or how Starmer would be revealed in Shadow Cabinet minutes.
The internet can give us these, up to a point. Sure, as Bucko points out, it's all mixed up with a lot of rubbish. But there are some good people out there, working to follow threads and show us what politicians are like in the round. And the early evidence is that none of them are all that impressive.
Ever since the world wide web came into being back in 1994, I've looked at the Internet partly as a badly indexed library with no clear division between fiction and non-fiction and also as a massive cabinet of curiosities.
As Bucko says, it may be full of utter bollocks, but then, so are many libraries.
I can imagine such a book... but the better such a book was the more violent the rejection from people who have other agendas.
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and that it is a better predictor of many personal outcomes, including financial income, job performance, birth out of wedlock, and involvement in crime than are an individual's parental socioeconomic status. It received a lot of criticism.
E.O.Wilson was roundly criticised over Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, 1975 - The theory established a scientific argument for rejecting the common doctrine of tabula rasa, which holds that human beings are born without any innate mental content and that culture functions to increase human knowledge and aid in survival and success.
Earlier Charles Darwin was fiercely criticised over his early explanation of the Theory of Evolution.
These are just the famous books whose common thread was to show that all animal behaviour, including that of humans, is the product of heredity, environmental stimuli, and past experiences, and that free will is an illusion. The logical corollary is that 'man' is not perfectible and that is anathema to many left wing people who have a desire for (their particular) Utopia at any cost.
Bucko - I agree, but the good stuff is there and quite easy to spot. One problem is that there is so much of it. And the porn.
Sam - "But there are some good people out there, working to follow threads" maybe that's the Book being written. There are already summaries based on what we probably would never have known in the past.
Bill - that was always the problem with libraries, so many books but so few that were worth reading. Reminds me of chained libraries - how many of those chained books were worth reading?
DJ - Thomas Sowell wrote a good book on two competing visions, one that people and societies are perfectible and one that life is about trade-offs. Unconstrained and constrained visions he called the two viewpoints.
Post a Comment