An engineered assumption

Andy Burnham reveals tax plan to save pubs and high streets

Andy Burnham has signalled that he will introduce a so-called “Amazon tax” with a massive reform of business rates in a bid to save Britain’s high streets.


The engineered assumption behind Burnham’s bit of theatre is a familiar one - assume government is akin to a household balancing its budget against a limited income. It's a perspective which can be useful, but the background assumption in Burnham's version is that disaster will ensue if that limited income is ever decreased. 

The obvious catch is ignoring the absurdly wasteful, spendthrift nature of modern government, the swamp of waste, fraud, incompetence, malinvestment, patronage networks, worthless quangos and NGOs, costly political favours, disastrously expensive energy policies, the wasteful expansion of university courses and so on.

Obvious of course, but engineered assumptions such as this do limit political narratives and discussions. Too many voters seem to vote within those assumptions, too many seem to believe they believe them.

Using our own innate nature as humans against our interests

As some may have noticed from the left hand side bar, AI data centres seem to have been scanning one of my 2021 posts caller Snugglers II. 

After reading the post and comments again, I've used Sam Vega's comment about the "bandwagon effect" for this post as it seems to be one of those permanently relevant observations about social and political matters. 

There are some interesting insights to be had in reading around the "bandwagon effect" and "social compliance" in Social Psychology. I get the sense that we are being gently manipulated by people who have studied this stuff in detail; in effect, using our own innate nature as humans against our interests. It makes me more inclined to value those oddballs who do not conform. That weird old boy who endlessly cycles around our nearest town with a big trailer full of dogs...that woman who carries old newspapers clutched to her bosom...the kid who talks to himself in public in a loud monotone. These people might become more important, and might even become valuable to us as the ratchet tightens.

The bandwagon effect is a cognitive bias characterized by the tendency of individuals to adopt particular opinions, behaviors, or attitudes primarily because they observe others, especially a perceived majority, doing the same, often irrespective of the intrinsic merits of the choice.

A cage entirely of our own making

David Shipley has a very useful Critic piece on the self-imposed nature of Britain’s governing crisis. It's the weird aspect of our political problems, that they are so obvious and suitable legislative remedies are not obscure. 


The broken state of Britain

Britain’s governing crisis is not imposed from outside – it is chosen

In the UK there are signs of state failure everywhere for those with eyes to see. Dominic Cummings says that “the whole wider Whitehall system is fundamentally broken”. He isn’t alone. More than half of MPs polled think Whitehall is working “badly”, and even our machine-man Prime Minister has observed that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”. Even the “delight” with which ministers welcomed Alaa Abd El-Fattah to Britain has been blamed on “the supremacy of the Stakeholder State” by Starmer’s former Director of Strategy, Paul Ovenden.

The British people know their state is broken. In the 2024 British Social Attitudes survey 79% of us said that our system of governing “could be improved a lot/a great deal”. In truth this is unsurprising. We live under a regime which hasn’t built a reservoir since 1992, hasn’t brought a nuclear power plant online since 1995, which struggles to complete a high speed rail link between two cities a mere 130 miles apart, in which GDP per capita has barely grown in almost 20 years, in which energy costs are ruinously high, youth unemployment is rising and which is unable to defend its own borders, or keep its citizens safe from a wave of serious crime committed by recent migrants.


The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder that Mr Shipley is right, the mess we're in is obvious and could be remedied by appropriate acts of Parliament. As he says, our cage could be shattered with a word. 

Yet when we consider the issue in terms of a cage, we enter the murky world of human behaviour, conditioning, comfort zones and ambitious charlatans. 


Those who govern us seem unable to imagine a society which doesn’t function (or rather fails to function) pretty much like the UK today. The legal and conceptual framework we exist within is treated as though it’s geography, or weather — something to be accepted, or adapted to. The reality is that all these limitations are tools of our own making. They are tools which have long since ceased to work.

Despite this, almost our entire political and media class seem unable to imagine a world without those broken tools. And so our nation remains bound in a cage entirely of our own making, which we could shatter with a word.

Boredom as a phone antidote

There's a personal aspect to this video - it's all about a problem I don't have but I see it in others, particularly younger folk. 

Maybe that's because I'm an oldie, I'm not addicted to my phone, I'm familiar with quiet moments, with putting the book aside to allow my thoughts to drift, with gazing out of the window...

Let it pass through

Xandra H has an interesting FSB piece on how uncertainty is used to implant certain narratives while avoiding further enquiry. A familiar but broadly effective 'Nudge Unit' type of technique, as the National Lottery example illustrates.

You have to be in it to win it!

This used to be the rallying cry for getting people to participate in the National Lottery. There is a certain logic to that statement, because, taken at face value, it is undeniably true. However, the odds of you actually winning, along with the extremely disruptive effect it will have on your life, seldom influence anyone’s decision about whether to buy a ticket or not. That one phrase instantly conjures up a narrative that imagines the winner will finally be without a care in the world and no financial worries for the rest of their lives, striding said world like a colossus.

It also feeds into the group identity idea. All over the country, people just like me are also risking their money for the grand prize, and we are all in it together. The lucky winner will be instantly elevated above the common herd and be given a free pass out of the garden of earthly woes. What’s not to like?

Why am I talking about the National Lottery? Because, having talked quite a lot about psyops, I have often been asked about how to mitigate the effects. It isn’t easy, but it is possible. The above example shows that the purpose of such phrases is to get the receiver to create the narrative that the sender wishes them to have; thus, compelling them to act on that narrative without further enquiry. In the above case, yearning to make happen what they have just imagined compels them to buy a ticket. After all, you have to be in it to win it! I rest my case.


Or You have to be with us or a denier. 

Or You have to be with us or far right. 

Or... 

The whole piece is well worth reading, even though anyone paying attention will already understand the issue well enough as it is certainly not new. The examples given are worth revisiting though, even for those who are relatively immune, because the technique is so widely used. 

Ed Miliband uses it all the time, not that he has anything better available, given his firm rejection of science, engineering, economics, integrity, veracity and sanity.

When someone makes a statement or suggestion that triggers a narrative based on evoking strong emotions, try letting it pass through with as little attention as you can manage. Then, when you are ready, think about the topic raised and how it would or wouldn’t fit into your own pattern-matrix. Your instincts, if you are in a legal frame of mind, will protect you from immediate damage if there is no actual threat. This is only one of many ways of protecting yourself from psychological threat and damage in the “new world”.

Words and Feelings

A few days ago I was chatting with our son about internal dialogues. We were discussing the differences between people who seem to debate within themselves when issues have to be resolved compared to people who apparently don’t do that. Our son found that ChatGPT gave him a good summary of the idea, so I asked Copilot AI this question –

"What are the differences between people with strong and weak internal dialogue?"

That’s a fascinating question—our inner voice (or lack thereof) can shape how we think, feel, and navigate the world in ways most of us don’t even notice.

People with strong internal dialogue often:

• Think in words: They narrate their thoughts, reflect deeply, and sometimes even “talk themselves through” decisions or emotions.
• Have rich self-awareness: They may be more introspective and analytical, able to reason through complex situations internally.
• Experience inner debates: Pros and cons play out like a conversation in their minds.
• Rely on verbal memory: They might recall things better through spoken or written words than images.

Meanwhile, people with weak or absent internal dialogue might:

• Think in images, sensations, or abstract impressions: Their thought process could be more visual or conceptual.
• Experience quieter minds: This doesn’t mean shallow thought—it could be more intuitive or emotionally guided rather than verbalized.
• Struggle to “talk through” problems internally: They might prefer journaling, discussing aloud, or physically acting something out.
• Excel in non-verbal problem solving: Spatial reasoning, creativity, or hands-on learning might come more naturally.

Neither style is better—just different cognitive tools for different people. Some people even shift styles depending on the situation.


It's an interesting aspect of psychology because some obvious questions arise such as –

Who should be making decisions about Net Zero? 

Which type of person do we vote for? 

Which type of person must major political parties cater for?

The AI system also added -

According to psychologist Russell Hurlburt, about 30–50% of people regularly experience internal monologues. These individuals often use their inner voice for planning, self-reflection, and emotional regulation.

In which case, about 50-70% of people don't do that.

Under a therapeutic disguise

Ken McLaughlin has an interesting CAPX post on the dangers of viewing the world through a psychological lens. Obvious dangers, but they don't go away.


Over-diagnosed Britain has forgotten about freedom

• Being sick, once seen as unusual and temporary, has become a badge of identity
• Today's mental health debate promotes the notion that we are all perpetually vulnerable
• Being forced to view the world through a psychological lens is a threat to our freedom

In 2004, I was asked to contribute to the Academy of Ideas Letters on Liberty series on the subject of mental health. Somewhat paradoxically, my argument was that while we must always err on the side of liberty, there are times when, due to mental disorder or incapacity, restricting someone’s freedom can be justified even if they have not committed a crime.

However, we must always be aware that the interplay between psychiatry and society often reveals the social and political prejudices of the time. For example, in 1851, Samuel Cartwright detailed a ‘mental disorder’ he named drapetomania, which was said to afflict black slaves who fled captivity. Cartwright’s theory was widely mocked by some but embraced by others as an explanation as to why slaves wanted their freedom. They couldn’t consider that they wanted to be free, so it must have been a disease causing them to abscond.

In the former Soviet Union, political dissidents were often labelled mentally ill – with one dissident being told ‘your disease is dissent’. It was not until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association voted to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder. It was 1992 before the WHO followed suit and removed it from the tenth edition of its International Classification of Diseases.

These examples, and there are many more, illustrate the societal prejudices of their time around race, political ideology and sexuality. For example, the dropping of homosexuality was less due to advances within psychiatry and more to do with the changing social and cultural climate and the work of gay activists.


The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder that failure to err on the side of liberty is not a new problem. Here's what D.H. Lawrence wrote about a fashion of his time - psychoanalysis.

First and foremost the issue is a moral issue. It is not here a matter of reform, new moral values. It is the life or death of all morality. The leaders among the psychoanalysts know what they have in hand. Probably most of their followers are ignorant, and therefore pseudo-innocent. But it all amounts to the same thing. Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man. Let us fling the challenge, and then we can take sides in all fairness.

D.H. Lawrence - Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921)

Whatever could it be?

Inspired by an online chat with our son –

Many prominent politicians and famous celebrities often seem to have something in common. Whatever could it be? According to Bing AI –

Common signs of narcissism can vary, but here are some traits often associated with narcissistic behavior:

 

1. Grandiosity: An exaggerated sense of self-importance and superiority. This can include boasting about achievements and expecting to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements.
2. Need for Admiration: A constant need for excessive admiration and validation from others. Narcissists often seek out praise and may become upset if they don’t receive it.
3. Lack of Empathy: Difficulty recognizing or caring about the feelings and needs of others. This can lead to manipulative or exploitative behavior.
4. Entitlement: Believing they deserve special treatment and expecting others to comply with their demands. They may feel that rules don’t apply to them.
5. Envy: Often feeling envious of others or believing that others are envious of them. This can lead to resentment and competitive behavior.
6. Arrogance: Displaying haughty behaviors or attitudes. They may look down on others and act with a sense of superiority.
7. Interpersonal Exploitation: Taking advantage of others to achieve their own goals. This can include using people for personal gain without considering the impact on them.

These traits can manifest in various ways and to different degrees. It’s important to note that having some narcissistic traits doesn’t necessarily mean someone has Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

Ignominious

For some reason I woke up this morning thinking what an ignominious thing it now is for Joe Biden to be Joe Biden.

Also ignominious to be Jill Biden and all the entourage of a modern state which has to protect him from his immediate public inadequacies. Plus those who have to pretend that he is the US president and having him sign this and that is all part of the job. All while the rest of the world laughs.

Then seconds later is struck me that it isn’t a good idea to think along those lines and I probably wouldn’t have done so if the thought hadn’t nipped into that strange, ephemeral world of waking consciousness.

Because of course, if we follow that thread it’s an ignominious thing for millions that they voted for old Joe and for that matter it’s ignominious to be intent on voting for any of the mainstream rabble in the UK general election.

In other words it may be better to forget those transient threads of consciousness because we have to live in the world as it is.

The Joe Biden business is still ignominious though.

None of it is mysterious

Does Keir Starmer know what his political motives are?

Suppose he describes his motives to an interviewer, then on another occasion he describes his political motives to a different interviewer after major national and international events have coloured general political discourse.

It would not be unusual if Starmer’s two accounts of his political motives differ significantly as they were given on two different occasions under different political circumstances.

In which case, what are Starmer’s true political motives?

Suppose two different people each with a different political outlook examine his career to date, but reach significantly different conclusions. Suppose we contrast those two accounts with the accounts Starmer gave to his two interviewers then add two more accounts recently written by two biographers. That would be a total of six versions of Keir Starmer’s political motives, all different.

Again, not particularly remarkable, but what are Starmer’s true political motives? Perhaps it’s an impossible question because he doesn’t have true political motives, his own account of his motives would be coloured by his audience and his need to maintain the personality he finds internally coherent. His account will be coloured by his audience even if he is the audience. It will be no more objective than any of the other accounts.

There is no deeper account of Starmer’s political motives. It’s all there on the surface, the six accounts plus Starmer’s own account. None of them is a true account. There is no true account. What cannot be left out is what we see - the dishonesty, vacillation, pandering to political fashions, going with what is currently mainstream within his social and political peers and the socialist political outlook he grew up with. None of it is mysterious.

This does not imply that we can predict Starmer’s future behaviour as Prime Minister. It does imply that we will probably be able to make sense of it. Those who would like to see a more rational and pragmatic political leader already know he won’t be that. He may not know it but others do. It's there for anyone to see.

Starmer’s political motives aren’t mysteriously deep, they are there on the surface, visible to all who look. He relies entirely on voters who don’t look.

Control and Controllers

As we’ve known for years, the UK Nudge Unit was set up to make government psychological control respectable. Government has always been about control, so why not make it respectable and nicer? Crude, but it does seem to have been the rationale.

This seems to be one reason why the main UK political parties make little difference to political direction. Politically diverse nudging by government wouldn't work, so the role of the political class is to evade countercontrol on behalf of the controllers.

The great problem is to arrange effective countercontrol and hence to bring some important consequences to bear on the behavior of the controller. Some classical examples of a lack of balance between control and countercontrol arise when control is delegated and countercontrol then becomes ineffective. Hospitals for psychotics and homes for retardates, orphans, and old people are noted for weak countercontrol, because those who are concerned for the welfare of such people often do not know what is happening.

B. F. Skinner - Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)

Here’s what you think about things

MP who defected to Tories likens SNP to ‘cult’

Lisa Cameron announced this week she would cross the floor, claiming there was a “toxic” culture within the SNP group at Westminster...

In an interview with the Scottish Daily Mail, Dr Cameron said she regretted not leaving sooner than Thursday, when she was just hours away from hearing the outcome of a selection contest in her East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow seat against SNP staffer Grant Costello.

Dr Cameron told the paper: “It is almost like, with the SNP, you sort of get indoctrinated a bit, I feel in an unhealthy way, and your identity gets merged with the doctrine. It’s like, ‘Here’s what you think about things’.


It's odd that a consultant clinical psychologist had to join the party, be selected as a parliamentary candidate and become an MP before she made this unsurprising discovery. Many people who aren't consultant clinical psychologists managed to work it out without going through all that.

Not Zero

New Zealand delays plan to tax cow and sheep burps ahead of October election

The government says the plan would offer New Zealand meat a competitive advantage, but farmers argue the sector is already reducing emissions.

The Labour government, lagging in the polls, on Friday pushed back the start date of its climate plan to price the greenhouse gases that come from agriculture.


It is always interesting when polls fail to respond rationally to political extremes. In a rational world the New Zealand Labour government would not only be lagging in the polls, its level of support would have dropped to zero. Not because taxing cow and sheep burps is stupid, but because it is so transparently stupid that no rational person could miss it. 

Yet we have to conclude that large numbers of people don't see it and that's interesting. Depressing, but interesting too. Mass conditioning is real and people can be induced to act against their own interests even if those interests are rational.

Latent Confusion

Suppose a person accepts the standard BBC climate narrative without analysing it in any detail. A far from uncommon situation, but it is worth asking what such a person has accepted. Scientifically the BBC narrative is confused as to what in principle would falsify it. The covert answer is “nothing” but that cannot be admitted because it is too unscientific even for the BBC.

Baruch Spinoza classified confused ideas as disconnected from reality which leads us to a state of affairs governments often promote. They don’t want too much connection with reality – reality is the ultimate umpire. To counteract this possibility, governments sow a kind of latent confusion embedded in their narratives. Easy to accept but don’t look inside. Question the narrative and the confusion emerges.

Susceptible people certainly do accept official narratives even though the slightest challenge would expose their confusion about terms and meanings. Yet in an important sense they are not confused until challenged – the confusion is latent.

For governments, latent confusion has powerful advantages. It allows debates to be conducted on two levels, public and official, confused and analytical. It also increases the effort required to oppose a deliberately misleading narrative.

Latent confusion makes official answers more difficult to dislodge. In general, people have a powerful aversion to even a limited public display of confusion.

“I don’t want to know. Talk about something else.”

Professions and Psychopaths

 

To be taken with a large pinch of salt, but number eight is interesting.

Who nudges the nudgers?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? When governments try to influence mass behaviour via psychological nudging, we could add an entirely obvious version of Juvenal's phrase - "Who nudges the nudgers?" Frances An has a CAPX piece on the dubious effectiveness of this kind of manipulation.


Nudge, nudge – who’s there?

Ever since Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein published Nudge in 2008, the theory that bears the same name has been all the rage.

Briefly put, ‘nudge theory’ is the idea that small adjustments in the environment (‘nudges’) can influence people’s behaviour, often beyond conscious awareness. A simple example Thaler gives is putting healthy foods in a more prominent position in a supermarket to encourage better diet choices.

Thaler and Sunstein call the ideology that underpins their theory ‘libertarian paternalism’, a somewhat oxymoronic label that denotes ‘an approach that preserves freedom of choice but that authorises both private and public institutions to steer people in directions that will promote their welfare’.

The piece suggests that evidence for the effectiveness of this idea is pretty thin. Not a surprise, but the piece is worth reading as another reminder that governments are particularly poor at digesting evidence they don't like.

But whether we call it nudge theory or subliminal influence, the evidence that manipulating people through subconsciously targeted gimmicks remains weak. University of Cambridge researcher Magda Osman eloquently set out some of the problems with nudging in this recent piece.

‘…scientists overly rely on certain types of experiments. And they often don’t consider the benefits relative to the actual costs of using nudges, or work out whether nudges are in fact the actual reason for positive effects on behaviour.’

In America, a July 2022 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that once ‘publication bias’ towards positive results is removed ‘no evidence for the effectiveness of nudges remains’. As Osman writes, this doesn’t mean we should abandon the study of nudge-type interventions, but it does suggest there should be a good deal more caution when it comes to outsized claims for what nudging can or can’t do.

Frugal with the therms

For late November it’s a fairly mild day here in our bit of Derbyshire. Dull and cloudy, but mild. Our central heating is set to what we consider to be background heating during the day and today, this temperature is being maintained with hardly any warmth from the radiators.

For the time of year, the house does not feel cold, yet the temperature is what it would be if I could see horizontal sleet outside. The central heating thermostat would see to that.

As we already know, feeling adequately warm is partly psychological, but it isn’t easy to tell how significant that is. If I light the wood burner this evening, the room will begin to feel warmer as soon as the kindling begins to burn - well before the room temperature has changed significantly. The psychological effect of a real fire is something central heating systems cannot reproduce.

Clearly, we can become used to higher indoor temperatures. Those of us who grew up in houses with no central heating are well aware of it. There is even a certain satisfaction to be gained from being frugal with the therms.

On the tip of my tongue

Memory isn’t a concrete thing. There’s no seat of memory in the brain that’s known to surgeons or research workers. Memory is more like a chain reaction, or a wave movement: break a link in the chain, disrupt the wave—and it goes. And when it returns, it’s often activated by some apparently extraneous cause. You forget a name, a word, a face—and something can recall them, some association, not in itself relevant.

E. C. R. Lorac - Shroud of Darkness (1954)

A quote  taken from recent holiday reading on the strangely elusive nature of memory. What was the book about? It was a detective story about... no I've already forgotten.

Memories are called up by the moment and the history of what we are, but when the moment has gone some memories are no longer needed. As other moments arrive, these memories fade away like ripples on a pond, to be replaced by other ripples.

As the quote implies, we have limited control over our memories, when they come to the fore and when they disappear. We are able to manipulate the reminders which bring them to the fore, an obvious example being the perusal of old photographs. Yet dredging up a specific memory can be frustratingly difficult as we cast around for a suitable reminder.

Of course the quote itself is a reminder. It stimulates a generalised memory of the problems we have with elusive memories. Those familiar instances where we struggled to recall something which should have been familiar. A name, incident or something we know but can’t quite call to mind when needed.

As an unimaginably vast stimulus, the internet stimulates many memories and also acts as a handy aid to the imperfect nature of memory. We look things up, take them further, look for alternatives and so on.

Of course if a suitable reminder is obscure and not readily found via search engines, then the internet could bury certain memories too. An engine to promote forgetting as we give up and move on. As Lewis Lapham once said before the internet really took off - some organisations are large enough to sustain their own theory of reality.

You know, we tend to forget too often that there were fascists in England in the 30’s.

E. C. R. Lorac - Shroud of Darkness (1954)

After the holiday

A few days ago, Mrs H and I were discussing various holiday photos and how the holidays seem more enjoyable in retrospect than they did at the time. Presumably this is the fading affect bias (FAB) or rose-tinted spectacles as it used to be called.

Minor annoyances, weather not quite as good as it could have been, midges, not enough wardrobe space in the bedroom, the substandard café and traffic jams fade while the good bits do not.

It’s happening already with pandemic lockdown memories. The ludicrous maniacs who imposed it, the absurd restrictions, social distancing, masks, gargantuan quantities of money flushed down the toilet, GP services going into hibernation, pointless school closures, bizarre TV lectures, police informers – much of it is fading away.

Now I recall the local walks, the ease and convenience of supermarket delivery, the remarkable number of DIY jobs I managed to do around the house, coffee in the park at Matlock as restrictions eased and so on and so on.

Politically it’s not good though. We need to remember the bungling, undemocratic nonsense for what it was. We need an FAB vaccine. Perhaps in one sense that's what we had.

Are crowds smart or dumb?

Rob Henderson has an interesting book review in Quillette.

Are crowds smart or dumb? You may have heard the terms “wisdom of the crowds” and the “madness of crowds.” The former idea is that the collective opinion of a group of people is often more accurate than any individual person, and that gathering input from many individuals averages out the errors of each person and produces a more accurate answer. In contrast, the “madness of crowds” captures the idea that, relative to a single individual, large numbers of people are more likely to indulge their passions and get carried away by impulsive or destructive behaviors. So, which concept more accurately reflects reality?

Noise: A Flaw in Human Nature by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein provides the answer. The authors share research indicating that “independence is a prerequisite for the wisdom of crowds.” That is, if you want to use crowdsourcing to produce accurate information, you have to ensure that people make their judgments in private. If people provide their answers in a public setting where they can see everyone else’s answers, then the crowd can transform wisdom into madness.

Fairly long and it contains nothing startling, but it is still well worth reading the whole review because there are quite a few insights which modern life tends to obscure. This for example -

In 2011, the educated class generally favored meritocratic and objective measures for judgment and decision-making. They found the message that we should challenge the role of bias in our everyday judgments appealing, and believed that we should rid ourselves of habits that lead us to judge other people or situations unfairly. Today, however, much of intellectual culture has changed. Now that luxury beliefs are ascendent, relying on objective measures is no longer fashionable.