The subliminal world of political campaigning

In 1973, a new episode of Columbo hit the NBC screens. Robert Culp made another appearance, this time as a devious advertising specialist who used his ability to influence the viewers of his advertising videos to commit a murder. The particular method was to place subliminal stimuli into the videos which prompted one person in a selected audience to feel thirsty and leave the auditorium to seek some relief at a public fountain in the foyer. That's where the murderer struck.

The use of subliminal messages for manipulation is well known since the 1970s. However has obtained new resonance in our times of fake news and political campaigns using targeted messages.

Subliminal cues work by inducing brain processes below a threshold of objective awareness. In other words, they are stimuli which we are subjected to without being conscious of. There is some debate as to their effectiveness. Some research indicates that they are less effective than stimuli above the awareness threshold (those we can perceive as such). But all agree that they are basically a form of manipulation.

Never quite what it seems - Robert Culp in 'Double Exposure' NBC

There is also a clear consensus about what is wrong manipulating people. Manipulating people is not based on the selection of preferences based on human volition and deliberation. Manipulation is in essence a mechanism to avoid what we do when we need to chose, that is to think which options are preferable to us and why. As Hannah Arendt noted, giving reasons for our actions is part of the human condition. Whilst it is a fundamentally flawed process, it is also one that allows others to challenge us and enter into a discussion about the merits and disadvantages of our choices. It is the process by which we relate to each other in mutual respect and recognition of our ability to decide freely in matters concerning the body politic.

Arendt was clear about the fact that our public and private deliberations were often flawed, conditioned by a lack of knowledge, poor information, and the like. Yet, she contended, there was little else. Beyond the free and fair exchange of ideas in the public arena was only the realm of manipulation and distrust inevitably undermining the political institutions of democracy and civic liberties.

This is where targeted campaigning and subliminal messaging in advertising meet. As the Leave.EU donor Aaron Banks admitted to the Select Committee of the House of Commons, their campaign 'led people up the garden path' (one of those pretty English euphemisms for something loathsome, namely lying).

Combined with targeted political advertising, political choices may have become based less on what we know but what others want us to (not) know, a perversion of the notion of choice which is based on voluntary selection of preferences underpinned by an awareness of options and their consequences. As Arendt sees it, it is public civility and respect versus manipulation of behaviour.

Manipulating voters in political campaigns is similar to placing subliminal cues in product advertising. Voters do not quite know what they are being told. Where campaigners feel no commitment to be truthful, a basic consensus about our democratic decision making falls apart: that within the boundaries of the competition of ideas, falsehoods should not be part of the arsenal of weapons to defeat your opponent. All electoral laws in the Western world accept this basic principle; there are strict sanctions for those who disseminate lies deliberately in the public domain during a political domain.

Targeted political ads however are not illegal and we may want to ask whether our current electoral legal framework is sufficiently robust for the times of facebook, insta and rogue 'news' outlets.

In case you wondered, subliminal messaging is illegal in the UK. The BCAP Code defines it as 'misleading advertising'.And yes, Columbo did get his guy in the end.

To name and shame?

For any liberal-minded citizen there is hardly anything more galling than the discrepancy between the way we first react to reports of injustice and our willingness to concede the possibility of redemption. Hearing about a callous murder, we think about the death sentence. Reading about a brutal rape, nothing less than capital punishment will do.

As the initial rage cools and emotional distance exerts its inevitability, we are often left with a sense of two irreconcilable reactions to the same deed, one that is animated by our immediate feelings and another one that speaks to our exercise of rationality. New forms of justice may just bridge this yawning gap.

In the US, some judges have for some time now imposed 'name and shame' sentences on criminals. Instead of incarceration, they require criminals to put up signs in their front garden, announcing publicly either the nature of their sentence or, alternatively, warning the public of the presumed nature of the person himself. The practice of naming and shaming has also won more supporters in the UK over the last couple of years and the media have (within the rules of the justice system) adopted similar tactics.

You are the executioner... enforcing sentences in Florida in 2013

The arguments against naming and shaming appear feeble. Why not do it if it prevents future crimes? The practice also appears to go hand in hand with a growing willingness to 'self-confess' and voluntary public exposure, exemplified by shows such as Jeremy Kyle and others.

Yet, I would argue that we should be careful about the effects of 'name and shame'. The first argument against it comes from our lack of knowledge about what motivates and regulates human behaviour. Naming and shaming may have a temporary deterrent effect but we do not know whether, in the long run, it may only lower the threshold of acceptability for everyone. People learn to live with all sorts of situations and adapt quickly. Our fabric of social norms may just be too flexible to make 'naming and shaming' an effective tool for crime prevention.

The other, more powerful, argument is more philosophical. It was made many years ago by Michael Pawlik (FAZ, 17.November 2004, p35). Pawlik argued that 'name and shame' would alter the role of the public in the justice system. Whilst court cases are open to public scrutiny, the role of the public in this context is not to pass judgement itself, but to validate the correctness of the judicial proceedings, a point to whose importance anybody living in a country without proper and independent judiciary can attest to. In effect, the gazing public in the court is scrutinising the procedure, not passing judgement itself. That is the fundamental meaning of court proceedings 'open to the public'.

The case is different for naming and shaming. It only works if the public adopts the role of judge and executioner at the same time, reinforcing public condemnation of the crime committed by marginalising the criminal within the public sphere. In this scenario, the public plays a different role. It undercuts the separation of powers that is ingrained in the justice system between judgement and executing the sentence.

Pawlik is sceptical about the ability of modern societies to resist naming and shaming. He points out that, in the long run, justice systems are likely to approximate prevalent sensibilities (or lack thereof) about what constitutes good and proper punishment. If he is right, we have one more reason to mistrust our initial feelings when we hear about abhorrent crimes. We may not be the best judges of either the deed or the most reliable enforcer of any future sentence.

The chimera of the powerless individual

A specter is going round in the political debate, the specter of the multi-national company that buries all people under its relentless drive for profit. The conventional trope is one of an overbearing multinational conglomerate that sweeps everything and everyone before it, squashing the powerless and helpless and forcing them to submit to its will.

But is our age really characterised by a lack of power for individuals? Has the domain of individual freedom really shrunk since globalisation has arrived on our shores? There is clearly a significant and worrying asymmetry between the power of the multinational companies and governments that are trying to extract taxes out of their profits. The demise of state power however has much to do with the geographical boundaries of governments and the ability of multinationals to transcend those boundaries. Much of the blame (if this is a case for blame) can be laid at the doorstep of those very governments that have tried to lift governmental controls through free trade agreements. So, there should be little surprise that capital flows freely where it is told to do so.

Yet, the fact that governments stand largely impotent before the behemoth of multinational capital does not necessarily mean that the individual suffers likewise. You can only think so if you believe that governments are the sole guardians of human beings. There is some truth in it (think of security), yet the larger picture seems to be one of increasing freedom for individuals rather than one of its diminishment.

What constrains individuals in modern societies are not multi-national companies through the free flow of capital. Companies and the economies globalisation has created appear to enable freedom rather than  squash it. What traditionally and historically restricts the freedom of individual human beings are state boundaries and social expectations of conduct underpinned by collective notions of morality and law. But we do not have to ascribe to a mechanistic conception of liberty to see globalisation as the main agent in the increase of human freedom. Marxists can take comfort in the fact that even in their traditional domain of positive liberty, the big barriers to individual freedom have been knocked back. Access to education is universal in most countries now and states have made huge strides towards health care provision for all.

Whether you live in Costa Rica, Nigeria or Slovenia, geographical mobility is at unprecedented high levels which demonstrates that individuals all over the globe do not perceive themselves as powerless in the face of economic forces but more than ever, see this world as their oyster. And my suspicion is that the leveling forces of global economic integration are a big part of this story of empowerment.

On community spirits and Thatcher's legacy

With the funeral of Baroness Thatcher getting closer, the country seems to hark back to the times of division and hatred. I wont wade into the debate whether Thatcher did more good than bad (or vice versa) but instead would like to impart a brief observation. Reading the obituaries (reverent and irreverent ones) I noticed that some attributed the loss of community spirit to her policies. 

This reminded me of the nostalgia for socialism and its ‘collective spirits’ shared by many in the former communist countries where democracy and freedom have allegedly brought about the demise of the feelings of friendship and mutual support. However, I cant help but wonder about the conspicuous lack of strength in those communities if they only existed in the good times. If Thatcher wrought so much misery on these communities, wouldn’t her time in government increase the strength of those community spirits, rather than bring about their decline? 

Happy times?

It seems that, after all, those communities were not so much cultivating the spirits of mutual support, but fostering a sense of exclusivity, where individuals had to submit to the rule of the collective. In this sense, perhaps the decline of the community spirits heralded the inevitable rise of individuality and personal freedom. Clearly, as some ‘communities’ imploded under Thatcher, people had to re-forge the foundations of society anew, a laborious and challenging process. Yet the product was not atomism, as some commentators have written. It was individual liberty realised, as Hegel would have said.

The unsavoury coalition to gag the press

The Prime Minister has now withdrawn from the cross-party negotiations on new regulations for the press. His argument is simple: the other parties want to muzzle the press and although there certainly have been infringements of the rights of innocent people over the last decade, the press has now accepted that a strong regulatory system needs to be put in place. Labour and the LibDem want a licensing system where journalists have to apply for to a statutory body to be able to work in a media outlet. The Prime Minister has rejected this.

There are two main reasons why I believe Cameron is right on this issue. First, with all due respect to victims of press intrusion, I don't think the victims of injustices have an overriding privilege to write legislation. The Hacked Off campaign director Brian Cathcart has already said that he does not 'want to know anything about' the freedom of the press. That does not bode well for free and responsible media.

The second reason Cameron may have called an end to the cross party charade is that the people ganging up on the press have less than honorable motifs. The motley crew of those who want to gag the press consists mainly of politicians who have misbehaved in public and faced the fallout of their misdemeanours in the press. They now think it is pay back time. Amongst others, there is Labour MP Chris Bryant who placed pictures of himself in a semi-naked state on the internet which were then published (I spare you the visual evidence). No wonder he would like to gag the press. On Wednesday, he (decently dressed this time) argued that the press should be regulated by the government through statutory law. That would put Britain on a par with Russia and China.

There is no doubt that the press needs a strong regulatory framework to operate in. What we don't need is to end 300 years of media freedom. The best thing Labour can do to reform press behaviour in this country is to come off the fence and support the libel reform law that they are trying to scupper in the upper house.

Assange's problem with press freedom

An extract of an ill-tempered interview between Julien Assange and the BBC journalist Zeinab Badawi has turned on the BBC website. Assange is still holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy because he skipped bail. He was to be extradited to Sweden for charges on sexual assault but refuses to face his accusers. 

In the interview he accused BBC journalist Badawi of supporting torture, amongst other non-sensical accusations. His outburst is a window into his thinking and the fact that he has a very rudimentary understanding of journalism itself. Following accusations of Assange that Bradley Manning had been tortured and was not allowed to see a lawyer, Badawi attempted to mention that this interpretation is contested by the US government and that Manning’s lawyer has in fact confirmed that he has visited him repeatedly. At that point Assange exploded in sheer rage and accused the BBC of bias for not supporting his view. 

This is instructive. For Assange, journalists are only fair and impartial if they agree with his point of view. Any other view is illegitimate and demonstrates tendentiousness. It is final proof of what many have suspected for a long time. Assange has a very limited understanding of good journalism and he often struggles to tolerate other views. This somehow neatly lines up with his political belief that America is evil incarnate. By now, Assange is on the payroll of the Russian state TV and perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that this is where Wikileaks ended up. A famous Communist once said that freedom is always the freedom of those thinking different. Assange may never accept that. 

The blind spot in Marx's notion of capitalism

The most fascinating aspect of the current debate about capitalism is the general lack of ideas about any alternative. I have previously in this blog talked about why this may be the case. However, one interesting detail of the debate has so far escaped my attention. It is the view that, as Tristam Hunt pointed out in a Newsnight debate, 'capitalism can never be moral'. 

There is no doubt that this a widespread view amongst socialists. Capitalism, they maintain, is all about the generation of profit. Whether this happens within a tightly regulated environment and whether or not tax revenue from profits are used to alleviate some of the ills of capitalism, does not alter the fundamentally amoral quality of the capitalist market system, so the story goes. 

Although we often speak of the failure of the vision of Marxism, the paradox is that this opinion, that capitalism is fundamentally amoral, echoes Marx' view. In a sense then, even those who defend capitalism yet concur that capitalism is amoral express nothing less than a Marxian view. 

The curious result is that the debate about capitalism is actually fought on a premise that is profoundly Marxist, and, so I would say, profoundly false. 

How did Marx arrive at the thesis that capitalism is amoral? Famously, he turned Hegel upside down, or, as he said himself, 'turned Hegel's view from standing on its head back to its feet again'. What did he do? 

Marx argued that there is a clear distinction between the economic sphere (the substructure of society) and its social and political dimensions (the superstructure). The former, so he maintained, determined the nature of the latter. He endorsed nothing short of economic determinism. The separation between these two spheres allowed him to extricate the questions of morality and ethics from the actual moral constitution of societies. In essence, he superimposed on his economic and political analysis a simplistic moral framework that rested on the notions of exploitation (immoral) and equality (moral). How did this represent a change to Hegel's notion of society? 

Hegel's notion of society offered a far more complex and sophisticated account than Marx's. For Hegel, morality was an aspect of human interaction which manifested itself in the development of human freedom. One critical aspect of personal freedom, according to Hegel, was to engage in economic exchanges, or what he called 'civil society'. 

So, in contrast to Marx, entering an economic relationship with somebody to exchange goods represents a fundamental aspect of being free. Today we would say, the market therefore presents people with the opportunity to realise their personal freedom in society. Capitalism hence is an essential expression of personal freedom. As we engage with others in economic activities, we not only manifest the extent of our personal freedom, but also establish the ethical quality of society. Capitalism is moral, as long as it permits us to engage freely in economic exchanges. 

This demonstrates how much we have accepted an arguably skewed picture of capitalism that originates in Marx's analysis, rather than in Hegel's liberalism. We should always bear in mind, that Marx never accepted the economy as an arena of personal freedom. How wrong he was.