Government Wants to Change Your Mind

I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories. For instance, I do not believe Prince Philip and his friends the lizard people ordered MI5 to assassinate Lady Diana; Nor do I believe that the world is ruled from a hotel called Bilderberg near Arnhem; Nor that the vaults of Area 51 are filled with UFOs that somehow keep hitting the earth without anyone noticing. So as a sceptically inclined person I scoffed at the suggestions made by Brendan O'Neill in a blog post he wrote for the Telegraph. In the post he argued that a Whitehall taskforce is trying to influence the way people behave by 'nudging' them into certain modes of behaviour. He gives three examples:

'for example, by offering less well-off shoppers health vouchers to encourage them to buy Hellman’s Light Mayonnaise rather than a King Sized Mars Bar; or by changing our local community infrastructure to make it harder to drive a car and easier to ride a bike; or by having cashpoint machines ask us: “Would you like to make a donation to a charity?”'

 O'Neill continues by invoking the terrible, nightmarish government practices of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and saying that 'the whole nudge thing is spectacularly Orwellian'.

But while I dismissed at first the entire idea as a rather simple project of subisdies by a coalition government inept at marketing its proposals properly, it was O'Neill's last paragraph that got me thinking:

'A Cabinet Office document says that because the masses make decisions “outside of conscious awareness” (ie. we’re a bit thick), the government should aim to become our “surrogate willpower”, making decisions on our behalf. In short, the authorities should colonise our minds and do our thinking for us. It is pure Big Brother. The state-approved lifestyle is no life at all.'

You see, I rather like the ability to think for myself and resent anyone, whether he be prime minister or professor or bin man, to assume that he can do manipulate the cogs and wheels inside my head. But then, as those same cogs and wheels started doing their thing, I remembered that the Lib-Dems are part of this government. And the Lib-Dems, as we all know, have no clue what to do if someone actually gives them power to do anything. So I'm not too worried about Big Brothers Cameron and Clegg puppet-mastering my every move.

What's more, governments have been doing this for ages. The last Labour government was especially prone to just throw money at a problem hoping that the mere sight of the Queen's head on a piece of paper would change peoples' minds. And if Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson didn't manage to take away our free will then I doubt this government will pull it off. What I think worries O'Neill most of all is that he assumed that a Tory government would be above such practices. But a government is inclined to try to use its power to control anything and everything. Maybe we should attempt to collectively counter-'nudge' Cameron and Clegg to stop bothering us with this transparent trickery and get on with doing something useful for a change.