The primary group behind all this is the Behavioural Insights Team. In essence, a bunch of Oxbridge types got together and formed a Ministry of Choice to decide the deciding for us plebs; these self-styled behavioural architects took it upon themselves to liberate us from the effort and risk inherent in making our own choices. With our decision-making outsourced, we can now all relax into our Netflix, Deliveroo and PornHub, and leave it to the state to do all that hard thinking stuff for us (phew).
The team is informally known as the Nudge Unit – and in fact, calling this practice “nudging” is itself a nudge. Framing is where something is made more attractive by focusing on the positives rather than the negatives – for example, sales are higher for beef labelled “80% lean” than “20% fat” – and people are more open to being nudged than they are to being subconsciously manipulated.
Similarly, while the team views its work as “libertarian paternalism” – as if it were kindly old Santa Claus himself, chiding us to be good boys and girls with lumps of coal – the reality seems to be the inverse: authoritarian maternalism, which has hitherto been known as the Nanny State and recently reinvented as a sort of Hugbox Bolshevism. This is the ideology that tells you to be #bekind and #staysafe – or else! It is the ideology that will put an entire nation under crippling house arrest for its own good; it has turned the world into a safe space, by threat of force.
In this way, the establishment has become Jung’s devouring mother archetype, infantilising the populace so that we will be forever dependent. Boris Johnson is Agnes Skinner, Norma Bates, and Dee Dee Blanchard. The average citizen, meanwhile, has become the smothered child, who, said Jung, “hopes to be caught, sucked in, enveloped, and devoured. He seeks, as it were, the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle of the mother, the condition of the infant released from every care”....<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...
