Nudge, nudge, wank, wank

Brendan O'Neill, may his tribe increase, waxes wroth in Spiked about a 'Behavioural Insight Team' that Cameron has installed in 10 Downing Street.

The existence of a team which, in the words of a Cabinet Office paper, believes that "people are sometimes seemingly irrational" and therefore the state must "influence behaviour through public policy", has been shrugged off or given the nod. The Guardian casually reported that "deputy PM Nick Clegg said he believed the team could change the way citizens think". Criticism of the "Nudge Unit" (as it is known) has focused on whether it will really follow through on its promise to clean up citizen’s muddled minds.

The hilarity lies in the fact that these mutual masturbators believe they are immune to human irrationality. It's just a restatement of the tired old Platonic/Hegelian/Marxist ideal of the perfect state where the maximum benefit of the citizen and the maximum benefit of the state are one and the same, so of course the Guardianistas cannot find fault with it.

Citizens, said Plato, should be brought to see this indisputable truth by subtly paternalistic manipulation, because they can only find true fulfillment, and the state can only function for the good of all, when everybody does the "right" thing believing it to be from personal conviction. Or, as the Nudge Unit puts it:

The team’s aim is to find subtle ways to change our behaviour, not through the old, Blair-style bossy approach of telling us what to do, but by offering incentives, by "priming" us with subliminal messaging, by changing the "choice architecture" of our daily lives so that we are influenced, sometimes unconsciously, to behave in what the government considers to be the right way.

Or as George Orwell's Winston Smith finally realized in Nineteen Eighty-Four, true happiness can only come from winning a victory over ourselves and learning to love Big Brother.