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Ideology is dead

I sometimes feel as if I was born in the wrong era. I’d like to have been a socialist cabaret queen in Weimar Germany, or an anarchist squatter in 1970s New York, or at least to have been around at a time when having an ideology was cool. Back in the sixties, seventies and even eighties, students wore their isms like the badges on their secondhand tweed coats. But in the early nineties, ideology fell out of fashion. The generation that has grown up since the resignation in 1990 of Margaret Thatcher, the last British prime minister not to be embarrassed about her political allegiance, thinks that Left and Right are so, like, over. And thus it is that today’s politicians, ever keen to get with the programme, would never commit the uncool style crime of actually having political beliefs.

In a speech to the Chicago Economic Club in 1999, Tony Blair declared that ‘The political debates of the twentieth century – the massive ideological battleground between left and right – are over.’ Along with his transatlantic counterpart Bill Clinton, Blair pioneered the very un-ideological Third Way. David Cameron, likewise, declared in 2009 that he ‘will not be the prisoner of an ideological past’, and that he doesn’t do ‘isms’. This is the era of oxymoronic cross-party combos like ‘Red Toryism’ (espoused by the writer and commentator Phillip Blond), ‘Blue Labour’ (advanced by the academic Maurice Glasman) and ‘progressive conservatism’ (developed by the Demos think tank). In a 2005 article for The Economist, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, wrote that Europe was now focusing less on ‘ideology’ and more on ‘results’. And in a speech in Philadelphia in 2009, Barack Obama proclaimed that ‘What is required is a new declaration of independence … from ideology.’

To call a policy ideological now is the most damning of criticisms. You hear it levelled at politicians on all sides. While in opposition, the then shadow education secretary David Willetts advised education minister Alan Johnson to break free from his party’s ‘ideological arguments’. The shadow business secretary John Denham accused the government’s plans to treble tuition fees of being ‘not financial, but ideological’. Republican protesters against Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms cast them in extreme ideological terms, as ‘socialist’, ‘totalitarian’ and ‘fascist’. One man at a Pennsylvania town hall meeting yelled, ‘I don’t want this country turning into Russia, turning into a socialised [sic] country.’ To subscribe to an ideology these days is denounced as either naïve or sinister: like getting too involved in student union politics, or joining the Hitler Youth.

And along with ‘ideology’, ‘divisive’ is another new dirty word. This turn of events is most peculiar. Since when is it a bad thing for politicians to have political principles that are different from those of other politicians? To be, in short, idealistic? But according to this way of thinking, we now live in a virtuous, non-divisive, post-political age in which our leaders pursue a pragmatic agenda of cooperative consensus; of ‘getting the job done’. Politicians around the world, from Angela Merkel to Nick Clegg, Barack Obama to Joe Lieberman, have embraced the non-partisan, cross-party centre ground. If they come up with any policies at all, they are the result of consulting you, dear voter.

There’s another kind of enemy that’s now condemned with the label of ideology: ‘Islamist terrorists’. Since September 2001, Muslim people who attempt to blow up planes or trains or passers-by are assumed to have been driven by a coherent set of ideas, to have been ‘radicalised’. The possibility that they might be some lone nut, or have particular, individual reasons for doing what they do is not considered. A week after the planes struck on 9/11, George Bush declared that the enemy in the war on terror was ‘heir to all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century … follow[ing] in the path of Fascism, and Nazism, and Totalitarianism’. Christopher Hitchens started using the term ‘Islamo-fascism’. What Islamists share with Nazis and Communists, it’s suggested, is a hatred of ‘freedom’. As with the Western attitude to Communism, it’s the other side who are brainwashed by ideas, not us. Freedom is not an ideology, we are told; it is a value.

But claims that ideology is either dead or evil are themselves supremely ideological. Those who purport to be free from bias; who claim the absence of any tendentious motive; who talk about politics, in short, as if it were like plumbing, are disguising their political goals in order to evade critique. It’s the enemy that is driven by partisan intentions, they say. We are simply doing what works. This is not only a strategy, it’s a concealed strategy, and much more effective as a result. It’s politics – and big ideas – in hiding. I promised I’d identify the ten rules of ideology’s lying game; and the first rule is to claim to be ideology-free.

So my heart sank when I read that veteran firebrand Shirley Williams congratulating the 2010 coalition government on their pledge to ‘work together in the national interest’. ‘The generation I belong to, steeped in ideology and partisan commitment, is passing away,’ she wrote. ‘My own vision was one of equality and social justice advanced by state action. The new politics is pragmatic, innovative, suspicious of state power, and holds to values rather than dogmas.’ Williams commended a new spirit of ‘cooperation’ over ‘the safe, long-established confrontation’. I thought, come on Shirley, stick to your guns! Don’t dismiss political principle and party loyalty as aggressive tribalism; it’s what democracy is all about. Sure, we can all love each other and agree all the time, but that’s called totalitarianism. I want my politicians to make a case, to argue their position, to try to persuade me that their vision is best. I want frank and passionate argument, sharply divided debate, and clearly delineated alternatives. Post-ideological politics is being sold as ‘the new politics’, but I think it’s an empty scam.

Broadsheet think-pieces and intelligent magazines keep telling me that this is an age of big ideas – whether about new forms of political agency or technological revolution. In fact, those are empty rhetorical gestures, and big ideas are the great taboo of our times. This helps to explain why the initial optimism of the Arab Spring protests evaporated so quickly: in each country the overthrow of the existing order provided a genuinely exciting sense of freedom, but there was no clear vision of what kind of society the protesters wanted to put in its place. It also helps to explain the apparently nihilistic character of the English riots in August 2011, and the baffled attempts to understand them. The riots were political all right, even though it was branches of Foot Locker rather than town halls that were being attacked. They were about racism, economic inequality and the mismatch between austerity and consumerism. But overt ideology was absent from both the riots and the commentary, leaving everyone dissatisfied. There was a ‘March for the Alternative’ against public-spending cuts in Britain earlier that year, but what the alternative actually consisted of was not spelled out. Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis, which linked the fall of Communism with the solution of all the world’s problems, was rightly derided as cartoonish. But his claim that the triumph of liberal democracy signalled the end of the world’s big ideological battles has become the mainstream view.

Take a look beneath the hype, though, and it’s clear that it’s not just me who longs for good old-fashioned idealism. Just look at the Martin Luther King-esque rhetoric, the Che Guevara T-shirts and the shouts of ‘Yes we can’ that accompanied the election of Barack Obama in 2008. That political enthusiasm was touted as a sign of a new era, but it was actually really retro. And that’s why Obama has so far proved to be such a disappointment. Because while his campaign evoked a time when ideology was alive and well, his tenure has been pragmatic, centrist, anti-ideological. Progressive proposals – from closing Guantánamo to providing commitments on climate change – have been weakened or quietly shelved. The healthcare reforms in which liberals invested so much hope were watered down in the face of opposition from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Laissez-faire economics still rules Wall Street. This is not just about political compromise: it’s about moving beyond politics altogether. Left-wing critics lament Obama’s inaction; but his inaction, or rather his lack of a political project, is precisely his selling point. The psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow wrote in The Huffington Post in 2009 that it is ‘reassuring that President Obama is … for the most part capable of resisting the coercive grip of ideology … he has shown himself to be able to transcend the false dichotomies and polarities … that have traditionally divided us’. Obama has been described admiringly by an aide as a ‘devout non-ideologue’. But to me that’s not only a contradiction in terms, it’s a sign of a deep malaise.

When politicians are asked to explain why young people are so uninterested in politics these days, they invariably give the same answer. We are ‘out of touch’ with the new generation, they say. We need to ‘re-engage’. But re-engage how? Young people are a mystery, politicians think, with their masonic Facebook habits and specialised footwear. We must learn their strange ways. So time and again, this re-engagement is imagined in the form of X Factor-style face-offs, appearances on YouTube, and votes via text message. But the real reason why young people don’t turn out to vote is not that they have transformed themselves into an opaque new species. It’s perfectly straightforward and rational: now that there’s no difference between political parties, why on earth should they bother?

Our attitude to politics is in a muddle. Since we regard political division as something to be avoided, we do not identify the absence of political choice as a factor in voters’ disaffection. ‘They’re all the same’ is the refrain of bored non-voters; and yet we want sameness in the form of non-ideological politics. Although I’m always reading commentators hailing the return of ‘big ideas’ in politics, that isn’t going to happen if any real big ideas are dismissed as either hopelessly romantic or as dogma. You’re not supposed to believe in a politician who believes in anything. There isn’t much idealism in this Massachusetts senatorial address: ‘I’m Scott Brown. I’m from Wrentham. I drive a truck.’

From the bland, managerial prime ministership of John Major in the 1990s to New Labour’s triangulations, from the hair-splitting policy distinctions of the 2004 Bush–Kerry election to Angela Merkel’s explicit desire to transcend party politics and be a ‘mother to the nation’, political principles have been abandoned in favour of a rush to the electoral centre. As if that mythical place exists anyway. Politicians, stop sniffing around, trying to second-guess the middle ground: lead us to your own promised land! Just look at how Israel’s political centre has shifted to the right in recent years. The political mood is up for grabs, so get off the fence! But – yawn – it’s cross-party cooperation that’s now applauded, with initiatives such as the Transpartisan Alliance and the Liberty Coalition springing up in the US. Senator Joe Lieberman wears his independence as a badge of honour, which is easy to do as independents are the fastest-growing group of voters in America. And since the expenses crisis in the UK a new generation of independent MPs has followed white-suited Martin Bell’s 1997 example. Party membership and loyalty are collapsing in ‘democracies’ around the world.

And people, if cooperation in politics is really overrated, not to mention dangerous, so too is pragmatism. In the UK there are more and more calls for MPs to spend time ‘on the ground’ in their constituencies, resolving boundary-wall disputes and getting zebra crossings repainted. That’s no way to start a revolution. And with the rise and rise of economics, the ultimate politics of pragmatism has evolved: politics as budget management. Policy decisions have been reframed as fiscal decisions, and everything is now given a monetary value in order to be deemed important, or even to exist at all: from the cost of prisoner reoffending to the economy, to the ‘bio-credits’ system which assigns financial value to endangered species (we can’t just save them for their own sake). I’m all for not wasting money, but it’s getting to the point where nothing in our public or private lives escapes monetary analysis: you can see this tendency in popular economics books like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics or Eduardo Porter’s The Price of Everything. Even the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was at times, surreally, assessed via the fluctuations in BP’s share price. In the absence of political projects, the only way we have of articulating value is through price. What the writer and theorist Mark Fisher astutely refers to as ‘capitalist realism’ now stands in for political idealism. Politicians’ speeches are judged by the reaction of the markets, the hard-headed bottom line, imposing ‘realistic’ limits on politics as the art of the possible. But what could be more skittish or fantastical than the derivative-driven dreamworld of Wall Street and London’s Square Mile? And in a beautiful irony, despite politicians’ apparently down-to-earth references to ‘the public purse’, the use of audit to make the intangible real just spawns another, virtual reality: public servants routinely spend as much time representing their work – through box-ticking and report-writing rituals – as doing the work itself. This is government as trusty housekeeper, as technocratic bank manager. Reducing politics to ways of spending money is the perfect way of draining it of ideas.

That doesn’t mean those ideas have actually disappeared. Politicians often talk about what they can ‘afford’. But that’s whitewash: it’s all about political choices. They can cut their fiscal cake as they wish, apportioning more funds to defence or education. And they can make their cake bigger by raising more taxes. The new realism in politics is just another way to portray subjective intentions as objectively inevitable. When the coalition government announced massive public-spending cuts to reduce Britain’s budget deficit, the Institute for Fiscal Studies analysed the proposals and showed that they would disproportionately affect the poor. I love these tell-tale glimpses of ideology that shine through the haze of rhetoric when the numbers are actually crunched. Economics is useful when it’s politically revealing.

Sure, there is a mash-up element to modern politics: it is possible to be both green and Tory. But no matter how many times I hear that Right and Left are over, I still have a clear sense of what they mean. The Right is about tradition, nationalism, free trade, a small state, individualism, family values, support for employers, and liberty over equality. The Left is about society, taxation, a big state, human rights, multiculturalism, support for workers, and equality over freedom.

But governments no longer articulate their project, and sweeping changes of national importance slip by while the media pick over minutiae, isolated incidents, fringe policy details. The public no longer joins the dots. Politics is fragmenting into ‘culture wars’, single-issue interest groups and identity allegiance. And although both Right and Left are in the ideological closet, one side is more frequently outed than the other. It’s the Right that has in recent years been identified as ideology-free. Conservatives criticise the progressive world view, but progressives nit-pick over technicalities. The Right is regarded as pragmatic and the Left as a dreamy luxury we can’t afford. But why isn’t the Right just as much of a luxury as the Left? Cutting rich people’s taxes is after all rather expensive.

What about capitalism, you may be thinking. Isn’t that the dominant ideology now? If so, what effect did the financial crash have on its pre-eminent status? Well, you might think that because it’s got an ‘ism’ on the end, capitalism would be regarded as a particular belief system. And it’s true that for an extraordinary moment in 2008, the financial system was indeed thrown into relief as a belief system, and a pretty eccentric one at that. Old-school ideology seemed to be making a comeback. Marx was cool again, and commentators dusted off their Keynes. For the first time in ages, there seemed to be alternatives, different isms to pitch, one against the other. But despite the fact that the entire world economy was on the brink of total meltdown, that window of ideas was only open for about three weeks. Then it was business as usual, the capitalist show was back on the road, and British bankers paid themselves £50 billion in bonuses in January 2010. Nobody came up with any viable alternative to free-market capitalism. In fact, it was more enthusiastically applied.

The reason why the crash came as such a shock to the Right, and why the Left still can’t come up with a different way of doing things, is that aside from that brief moment of crisis, capitalism succeeds in presenting itself as not a belief system at all. Even just uttering the word ‘capitalism’ marks you out as not only anti-capitalist, but also as living in a dream world. As with contemporary politics, capitalism is an ideology of no ideology. It purports to be about hard facts rather than belief. During a speech at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2008, News Corporation’s James Murdoch compared free-market economics to Darwinian evolution. The analogy pointed to an assumption that is everywhere. Capitalism is regarded, by its critics as much as by its proponents, as being as transparent and inevitable as a force of nature. So it’s become impossible to imagine any alternatives, because that would seem like finding an alternative to gravity. The crash was initially represented as a mortal blow to capitalism. But very quickly, influential commentators like Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, started presenting it as simply the latest in a series of periodic collapses: part of capitalism’s natural, intrinsic fabric. Critique was contained. That explains why all the ‘lessons’ of the crash have been calls for more regulation: we cannot imagine different forces of nature, so all we can do is attempt to control their worst excesses. But the notion that free-market capitalism is a force of nature is a myth. It’s a system that is consciously chosen and artificially maintained. And we need to remember that in order to have any chance of imagining different ways of organising society.

How convenient for politicians, and political power in general, to avoid the messy business of laying oneself open to explicit discussion and democratic challenge. The refusal to take a position in today’s political culture – centrism, cross-party cooperation, the embrace of pragmatism, politics as economics, and the culture wars – all these developments provide fertile conditions for agendas to advance in secret. And this matters not only because elites are allowed to privately get their way, and not only because political culture is impoverished. It matters because the rejection of ideology is the rejection of idealism, of visions to improve our world.

I want the ideas that overtly set out the kind of world we’d like to live in to be regarded not as naïve and unworldly, but as the object of genuine choice and aspiration. My own ideological position, as you’ve probably gathered by now, is to the left of the main political parties. And it’s true that in the remainder of this book I will spend a fair amount of time targeting the illusions that deny and sustain inequality. But at the same time, I would love to see a world in which modern Conservatives and Republicans didn’t feel the need to be mealy-mouthed about their allegiance to proper, right-wing ideology. If the Left has given up on grand narratives, the Right has lost its nerve. It would be great if they ditched the tedious new waffle about ‘ethical’, ‘responsible’ or ‘philanthropic’ capitalism, ‘the green economy’, ‘social entrepreneurship’ and so on; if they dispensed with the Converse trainers and baseball caps and came out proud in their belief in capitalism with claws. To spend my time bashing the right-wing establishment would be to miss a trick, in any case. The illusions that shape our lives, after all, don’t only come from the neoliberal economics of the Chicago School; or from Enron, Halliburton and McDonald’s. They also come from the groovy, liberal world of Google, Apple and Whole Foods.

Long live ideology!

Go into a dark room on a bright day, cover a window with sheets of paper, and make a small hole in one of the sheets. Then turn around. On the opposite wall you will see a perfect image of the world outside – in full colour and movement – but upside down. That is the magical effect produced by the camera obscura, a device which was employed by the astronomer Johannes Kepler and the painters Vermeer and Canaletto, and which became a popular seaside tourist attraction in Victorian Britain. In 1845, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the device as a metaphor in a rather different context. They wrote that ‘In all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura.’ Most people, when asked, would say that the word ‘ideology’ means a set of overt political beliefs, like Communism, Marxism, or free-market economics. But here we’re starting to see a meaning of the word which is the very opposite of that: something much more contradictory, subtle, and even unconscious. Marx and Engels turned the meaning of the word on its head. What they were describing is the curious effect that this form of ideology produces, where reality is the opposite of what it appears to be. In this upside-down world, powerful elites project an inverted version of reality which serves to uphold their own interests: that success is always the product of hard work, for example, or that the American dream is within everyone’s reach. According to this alternative definition, ideology means saying one thing, and meaning the exact opposite. Producing the appearance of action, while doing nothing at all. Creating the cosmetic impression that everything is fine, when it is not. And pretending that partisan arguments are actually universal facts.

You don’t hear this meaning of the word ideology very often nowadays. But my claim is that it’s this version of ideology that now defines our age. At the end of the Cold War, politicians rejected big ideas, and as the new millennium approached, they were driven underground. We began to deny that our lives were shaped by these big ideas, and as a result we failed to recognise that we live in an age in which our agency is being discreetly stripped away. Only by recognising how the world is distorted can we see how to put it right. We live according to delusions, covert assumptions, norms of behaviour and shaping forces that pass under the radar precisely because we deny their existence. And they don’t just govern the world of politics: they permeate every corner of our everyday lives, from work to leisure, from food to sex.

If we’re to understand contemporary politics and culture, we need to restore the lost world of Marx and Engels’ camera obscura: the secret life of ideology which produces a distorted image of society in which inequality is downplayed and social harmony prevails. It’s a fascinatingly paradoxical and mercurial concept which we have lost sight of today at a cost: because it describes the world we live in even better than the one in which it was first developed. Improving our world begins with rediscovering overt ideology’s lost value; but analysing our predicament begins with rediscovering covert ideology’s lost meaning.

When I was a teenager, I had a brief flirtation with Orthodox Judaism. I went to study the Bible at a yeshiva in Jerusalem. At the yeshiva, I asked the rabbi why it was that women were not expected to take part in religious rituals like going to the synagogue and reciting morning prayers, especially since those rituals were so important and prestigious in the community. The rabbi told me that women didn’t need to take part, because women were so much more holy than men. It was a textbook ideological manoeuvre: portraying power relations as the opposite of what they are in reality in order to keep the status quo in place. My flirtation slightly cooled after that.

For Marx and Engels, ideology was not just an intellectual concept, a set of abstract ideas. Capitalist exploitation meant that people were actually living a lie. In order to maintain their privilege, the ruling classes had pulled off a cunning trick. They had got the workers to internalise the upside-down belief that they weren’t really being exploited at all. The interests of the powerful were legitimated at the expense of ordinary people, but with ordinary people’s consent. We tend to think of Marxism nowadays as having about as much subtlety as a Five-Year Plan. But Marx and Engels’ ideas were complex and elegant: this was no cartoon battle between virtuous labour and evil capital. They argued that the dissemination of ideology was not just about deliberate manipulation by the ruling classes; it also involved unconscious self-deception on the part of the workers, who came to regard the dominant ideology as their own. Ideology is not simply the work of PR men: it’s also made up of diffuse information that cannot be traced to a specific source. It’s unspoken cultural norms, ‘the way things are’, the social equivalent of an odourless gas.

Marx and Engels’ theory of ideology as a wily, dissembling force was developed by a series of subsequent thinkers, from the French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu’s colourful analysis of polite and civilised behaviours (such as knowing which cutlery to use for each course) as forms of ideology which alienate the uninitiated, to the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s notion of ideology as ‘hegemony’: the cultural tricks which the ruling classes use to persuade everyone else to accept their subordinate status. Gramsci described the subtle and pervasive ways in which power relations are diffused through the habits of everyday life, woven into the fabric of culture and normalised as social rituals: from school to work to weddings. Gramsci showed how power and control are achieved not only through brute force but also through consent and the evolution of shared ‘common sense’.

Covert ideology is also at work in that defining characteristic of modern authority, soft power. The phrase was coined by the international-relations guru Joseph Nye (who is also credited with inventing neoliberalism). He defined soft power as co-option rather than coercion. You get what you want not through the imposition of force, but by cultivating a sense of legitimacy around your project. America is a global empire not because it has the most bombs, but because it promotes enlightened democratic values around the world. If Joseph Nye was down with this kind of thing, the psychologist and social theorist Erich Fromm was more critical. He contrasted overt authority, which is strict but upfront, with anonymous authority, which pretends that it is not exerting force, that everything is being done with the individual’s consent. ‘While the teacher of the past said to Johnny, “You must do this. If you don’t, I’ll punish you,”’ Fromm explains, ‘today’s teacher says, “I’m sure you’ll like to do this.” Here, the sanction for disobedience is not corporal punishment, but the suffering face of the parent, or what is worse, conveying the feeling of not being “adjusted”, of not acting as the crowd acts. Overt authority used physical force; anonymous authority employs psychic manipulation.’ Now, I know caning is brutal, but at least it’s an exercise of power without the pretence of benign liberalism.

To see the two meanings of overt and covert ideology in action, take the example of David Cameron’s 2011 public-spending cuts. They were frequently denounced by critics as motivated by ideology. This is the first, overt meaning of the word. But in a key speech to defend the cuts, Cameron said, ‘We are not doing this because we want to, driven by theory or ideology. We are doing this because we have to.’ Here we can see ideology at work in its other, covert form. The cuts were indeed driven by a right-wing ideological intent: you could see that in the enthusiasm with which cheering Tory back-benchers waved their order papers as each set of ‘austerity measures’ was unveiled. But claiming that the move was simply a matter of necessity ensured that this intent remained largely hidden. One Conservative politician commented: ‘Voters know there have to be cuts, it’s the realism of working people.’ What a great way to advance iniquitous policies under the cover of expediency, and with the apparent blessing of the people who will be hurt the most. These appeals to necessity and realism enable elites to do what they want. But they also leave us with a lack of agency, a curious sense of paralysis. Without a clear sense of what leaders stand for, what their principles are, what direction they want to take the country in, we’re faced with the sense that we just have to accept what happens, because it’s the plain truth, a matter of unavoidable fact.

I find it fascinating that ideology is a word with two meanings, one directly opposed to the other. Like propaganda, it means something obvious and something underhand at the same time. Covert ideology is not about labels or badges or isms. It’s about ruses, hidden agendas and delusions. It’s into this shady underworld that I’d now like to delve.

The fake’s progress

In the new world of covert ideology, subliminal deception has taken over from explicit argument and overt persuasion. So I don’t think it’s a surprise that we’ve forgotten ideology’s covert meaning, because that enables the deception to pass unnoticed. The twentieth century saw the evolution of myriad beguiling techniques in advertising, marketing and PR. And gradually, those techniques were applied to all areas of our public and private lives: from political campaigns to adverts for condoms.

Wasn’t it ever thus, you might ask. How new is this covert form of ideology, and where in the world is it most powerful? To attempt some kind of answer, let’s go back to 1948 and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel which seems – on the face of it – to be relevant to our age. George W. Bush’s Clear Skies Act of 2003 actually relaxed the rules on air pollution, rather like Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Ministry of Peace, which keeps Oceania in a state of perpetual war. But Orwell retained a powerful faith in the impervious soul of human beings. The state ideology of Nineteen Eighty-Four may be clever, and it may be powerful, but it ‘can’t get inside you’. Fast forward to Western liberal democracies in the early twenty-first century and quite a lot has changed. Today’s consumer-citizens are focus-grouped, market-researched and second-guessed; and policies and product-desire are designed to slip undetected into our minds and homes without awakening hostile antibodies. Who needs Big Brother when we’re complicit in our own subjection? Orwell did not predict the subtle ideology of democratic, rather than totalitarian, states. He did not predict this age of consent.

While there were elements of covert ideology in the historical past, the virus has mutated into a more insidious strain. That’s why the focus of this book is on the developed world, primarily the UK and the US, from the 1990s onwards. Contemporary Burma – or any regime which uses violence to impose its policies on its population – is, like Stalinist Russia, heavily ideological. But those regimes are ideological in a brutally overt sense of the word: they employ external force to implement their ideas. There’s a paradox, a trap here. The more developed and mature the democracy, the more susceptible its citizens are to thinking that everything is fine, and to willingly internalising covert forms of ideology which may not be in their best interests. Of course, it’s important to try to improve society and politics. But it’s also important to watch out for the corollary of that improvement: the perils of resting on one’s developed-world democratic laurels.

So how has this First World fakery evolved? Take for example the father of public relations, Edward Bernays. Bernays was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, and he applied his uncle’s insights into individual psychology to the mass marketing of consumer goods. ‘We are governed, our minds moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of,’ he wrote in his frankly titled book Propaganda, published in 1928. ‘In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.’ For Bernays, this kind of control wasn’t a bad thing. He had lived through war and revolution, and he shared his uncle’s unease about the chaotic and aggressive human impulses that civilisation held in check. He fretted about the huge social changes brought about by urbanisation and universal suffrage, which had left traditional hierarchies in disarray: ‘The steam engine, the multiple press, and the public school, that trio of the Industrial Revolution, have taken the power away from kings and given it to the people.’ As Stuart Ewen notes in his excellent PR!: A Social History of Spin, and film-maker Adam Curtis in his seminal documentary series The Century of the Self, the role of PR was therefore to persuade people not only to buy things they needed, but also things they could be made to want. Consumer dissatisfaction was a great new way to control the unruly herd. ‘If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind,’ Bernays wrote, ‘is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?’ For Bernays, commercial manipulation was the best way to manage that dangerous devil, democracy.

Or take the example of another early PR man, Ivy Lee, who fretted that ‘The crowd is now in the saddle. The people now rule. We have substituted for the divine right of kings, the divine right of the multitude.’ Business had to control the masses, but by stealth, by worshipping them on the false pedestal of the enlightened consumer. ‘Courtiers’ were required to ‘flatter and caress’ the ‘enthroned’ crowd (Vodafone’s ‘Power to You’ slogan comes to mind). And for the journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann, it was essential that ‘the public be put in its place’, so that ‘each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd’. In his 1922 book Public Opinion, Lippmann made a case for ‘the manufacture of consent’, anticipating Bernays’s 1947 pamphlet ‘The Engineering of Consent’ (as well as Noam Chomsky’s 1988 critique, Manufacturing Consent). Since public opinion was an ‘irrational force’, Lippmann rejected what he called the ‘original dogma of democracy’ as a mistaken Enlightenment belief in human rationality. He looked to Hollywood, what he called the ‘dream factory’, to create ‘pseudo-environments’ that would shape the public will by deploying powerful symbols that appealed to their unconscious. ‘We must breathe into the allegory the breath of life,’ he wrote. ‘We have to merge the public’s fantasy life with the sense of what is possible.’ It was a way of replacing overt ideology – ‘the sense of what is possible’ – with covert ideology – ‘the public’s fantasy life’.

Or take the ‘depth boys’, a group of advertisers in the mid-twentieth century who also borrowed insights from Freudian psychoanalysis. The depth boys pioneered the use of ‘motivational research’ to understand not just what we buy but why we buy it: how consumer behaviour is swayed by the deeply buried drives of the unconscious. Instead of making an explicit case for why customers should buy this deodorant over that one, the depth boys designed deodorant bottles that looked like penises. It was motivational research that spawned that darling of the modern commercial and political world, the focus group. Like motivational research, focus grouping pushed selling underground. This wasn’t about asking consumers (or indeed voters) what they wanted. This was about asking them about their hopes, their dreams, their fears; and then pushing those buttons. The modern consumer (and as we’ll see later on, the modern voter) was a product not of conscious choice but of subconscious manipulation.

Focus-grouping was pioneered by the psychologist and marketing expert Ernest Dichter, whose book The Strategy of Desire appeared in 1960. Dichter was famous for focus-grouping housewives to work out how to sell them guilt-free instant cake mixes (his solution: ‘add an egg’). These underhand psychological techniques are still very much in use: when The Strategy of Desire was reissued in 2002, one reviewer noted that ‘It is astonishing that so much of what Dichter explored as early as the late 1930s has come back into vogue.’ And it’s these techniques that have created so much of the curiously topsy-turvy, oppositional culture we inhabit today.

Take the example, if you will, of Femfresh ‘natural balance’ feminine wipes. I was always told that the problem with feminine hygiene products is that they wreak havoc with one’s natural balance. They kill off the benign bacteria that maintain a healthy ecosystem. That would mean that the name of the product is the name of the thing the product destroys. This is not about simple deception: I’m sure Femfresh products have been properly tested. There’s something more subtle and profound going on. The idea of good bacteria is already counterintuitive. And the marketing of Femfresh taps right into our psychology through its play on the close association between solution and problem. Sigmund Freud wrote that the human subject, the ego, is acted on by the superego and the id. When we enter civilisation and become a member of society, we repress our id, our desires. Through that act of repression, those desires are sublimated into the superego: the internalised demands of the outside world that make us conform to social expectations. We tend to think that our desires and our self-control are diametrically opposed; but they’re not. The superego and the id are intimately connected. That’s why when you’re on a diet all you can think about is cake, why strippergrams often dress up in police uniform, and why pious tabloids are so obsessed with scandal. The problem, the desire, is bound up with the solution, the repression.

The kind of ideological culture we’ve developed today is all about authenticity, transparency and participation. As the writer and cultural commentator Thomas Frank describes in The Conquest of Cool, advertising has adapted to anti-corporate critique by incorporating the symbols of that critique into its own lexicon. Problem and solution have become inextricably entwined. Just as mass-market consumerism co-opts countercultural individuality, advertising has become anti-advertising. This helps to explain why we now live in a world that seems on the one hand to be full of lightning innovation and the latest underground trends, but on the other to be curiously static and paralysed: any potential challenge is seamlessly absorbed. You can see this kind of thing in action in Saatchi & Saatchi’s ‘viral’ advertising campaign for T-Mobile, featuring an apparently spontaneous ‘flashmob’ dance-a-thon in Liverpool Street Station and a public ‘singalong’ in Trafalgar Square. Crowds of ecstatic participants film the spectacle on their mobile phones, either unaware of or unbothered by the fact that the event is being orchestrated by a company. The ads are truly an image for our times: a corporate simulacrum of ‘alternative’ festival fun. And a million suckers (me included, but for research purposes, obviously) have watched them on YouTube, happy to collude in the creation of a mass internet sensation.

Even if you’re not into DIY you’re probably familiar with the slogan for the wood preservative Ronseal: ‘It does exactly what it says on the tin.’ In a way, it’s the opposite of Femfresh’s ‘natural balance’: it celebrates plain speaking. And Ronseal wood preservative does do what it says on the tin. But the slogan encapsulates a kind of ‘honest guv’ realism that is now rife in our culture. An appeal to realism, what you might call the Ronseal effect, is the best card in the pack. You can see it everywhere, from John Major’s ‘back to basics’ politics to the justification of market capitalism as a force of nature to evolutionary explanations for male dominance. It’s why a senior aide accounted for one of ex-PR man and arch smoothie David Cameron’s diplomatic gaffes by saying, ‘What you see with David is what you get. He has always spoken his mind and told it exactly as it is.’ And it’s why Nick Clegg introduced his ingenious redefinition of the word ‘fairness’, when the coalition’s public-spending cuts were revealed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies as having a disproportionate impact on the poor, by saying, ‘I think you have to call a spade a spade.’ (Clegg went on to elaborate in a very obscure and unspade-like manner about fairness being about public-service use as well as tax and benefits.) These new realist ruses are a kind of ‘veil of obviousness’, to borrow a phrase from the Austrian-American psychologist Fritz Heider. I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear someone say ‘To be honest,’ I instantly start to mistrust what they’re saying. The Ronseal effect is to disguise illusions as apparent down-to-earth reality, while dismissing idealism and overt ideologies as illusions.

In 2006, the PR maestro Harold Burson admitted in an interview for Der Spiegel that ‘Most of the things we do today were identified by Bernays eighty years ago.’ But today those tactics are disguised by a collective delusion of egalitarian empowerment and corporate candidness. ‘The bedrock of effective PR’, writes Amanda Barry in PR Power: Inside Secrets from the World of Spin (2002), is ‘honesty and trustworthiness’. ‘It is never OK to step beyond the line of reality,’ she says. ‘People want participation, not propaganda,’ writes David Meerman Scott in his book The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly (2007). ‘People want authenticity, not spin.’ PR today is all about a ‘conversation’ with active consumers and corporate social responsibility. Unlike advertising, PR isn’t salesmanship: it’s ‘information’. If you can see its work, it’s failed.

In her anti-corporate bible No Logo, Naomi Klein describes how – particularly during the nineties – companies turned their attention from producing products to producing brands. It was part of a general trend in modern life for everything solid to melt into air: for political organisations to become front groups, governments to become contractors of outsourced services, and money to become futures and derivatives. But for companies as well as for humans, this created a problem. Since brands were confections, spun out of nothing, they were vulnerable to unfavourable associations, like the allegations of child labour that tainted Nike’s former superbrand during the 1990s. Klein quotes David D’Alessandro, president of John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance, complaining in 1999: ‘It can take a hundred years to build up a good brand and thirty days to knock it down.’ Marketers were flummoxed. They described consumers as ‘paradoxical’, ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘unpredictable’. Just like the fickle modern voter, consumers had become impossible to read. But this wasn’t a mystery at all: it was simply that brands, like modern political parties, no longer had any distinguishable substance. Faced with the radical choice of Coke v. Pepsi, it was no surprise that loyalties could shift so easily.

The solution, as the French journalist Christian Salmon describes in Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind, appeared in the form of good old-fashioned stories. From around the turn of the millennium, marketing departments started to fill out the empty ciphers of their brands with compelling, made-up narratives. Like that of Aleksandr Orlov, meerkat star of comparethemarket.com’s viral campaign. Aleksandr currently has over 750,000 Facebook fans and over 40,000 followers on Twitter, and his memoir – a tale of love, heroism, immigration and entrepreneurship – has become a huge bestseller, outselling Tony Blair’s A Journey. The hip new ad world of ‘immersive’ guerrilla marketing, word-of-mouth and online buzz seems a world away from 1920s German psychology professors; but it’s a more insidious form of the same sleight of hand. Because this time it’s supposedly ironic and tongue-in-cheek, engaging with active and knowing customers. The vision of the enthroned crowd has become a widely shared delusion. We’ve become pretty familiar with the empty con of brands: it’s the mock authenticity of participatory marketing narratives we need to watch out for now.

Modern focus-group politics, too, is about selling an enthralling story to voters. As Salmon puts it, ‘politics, as currently practised, is no longer the art of the possible, but the art of the fictive. Its aim is not to change the world as it exists, but to affect the way it is perceived.’ In a 2006 report entitled ‘Reconnecting the Prime Minister’, a focus-group company called Promise Corp recounted their work with Tony Blair in the run-up to the 2005 general election. New Labour had shifted from being a ‘Product-Oriented Party’, ‘which argues for what it stands for and believes in’, to a ‘Sales-Oriented Party’, employing ‘the latest advertising and communication techniques to persuade voters that it is right’, and finally to ‘a Market-Oriented Party’, ‘driven by frequent and intimate contact with voters, the party’s customers’. ‘A market-oriented party designs its behaviour to provide voter satisfaction,’ the report explained. ‘It uses market intelligence to identify voter demands and then designs its product to suit them.’ The same shift, in other words, from overt to covert ideology; but disguised with the rhetoric of ‘intimate contact’ with voters, with the myth of participation and engagement.

The report outlined the problem for New Labour: that it was perceived by the public as a ‘premium’, ‘high cost, high service’ brand like British Airways or Mercedes, whereas the Conservatives were regarded as a ‘value for money’ brand like Tesco or Ryanair. Under the heading ‘Analysis – Freud, Klein and the Mechanism of Splitting’, it went on to describe how Promise Corp deployed focus-group exercises that ‘allow as many unconscious motivations as we can invite into the group’s work’. Melanie Klein’s theory of the ‘good and bad breast’, corresponding to the nurturing or the withholding mother, was invoked to throw light on the focus groups’ perceptions of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Tony Blair. I would like to have seen Blair’s reaction when presented with that aspect of the research.

The problem with the focus group is that although it purports to listen carefully to what voters say, it doesn’t actually listen at all. Like a kind of patronising counsellor, it assumes people are essentially irrational, so it tries to read between the lines. ‘Most pollsters know what voters think,’ said an article in a 1994 edition of the trade magazine The Polling Report. ‘But too few understand how voters feel.’ The goal of a focus group was ‘to gain access to private, non-communicable, unconscious feelings and emotions’. An effective focus group will ‘draw out the “motivational factors” behind the “top of mind” opinions – which is critical to understanding what is driving public opinion’. Personally, I would rather be asked for my views. But most of all, I’d like my politicians to do their job: to come up with ideas of what they would like to do. Focus-grouping voters is not about asking people what they want and then putting it into action. It’s about getting under their skin in order to get more power. For example, focus-grouped voters often say they feel scared of violent crime. That fear is usually not the result of experience, but rather of reading tabloid newspapers. Politicians respond by promising tougher sentencing. But in fact, violent crime has fallen in recent years. Appealing to emotions rather than conscious views turns the world upside down.

Just as new-generation advertisers get modern online consumers to do their work for them in the name of empowered participation, focus-grouping is a way for voters to actively collude in their own manipulation. The focus-group politics that emerged under Clinton and Blair was couched in terms of listening, of responding, of authenticity; but although spin and consulting voters were presented as opposites, they are actually the same thing. What would be genuinely different is taking the lead, taking a position, making difficult decisions, prioritising competing concerns. But oh no, that’s old, ‘tribal’ politics, and we don’t want to go back there.

Well, why not? We drink out of mugs saying ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, our politicians call for a revival of traditional community values, old-fashioned church weddings are back in vogue, influential New York Times political commentator David Brooks resurrects David Hume, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith as policy guides for today, and soul singer Duffy looks and sounds straight out of the sixties. We’re more than happy to use elements of the past when it suits us: the point is, it’s a choice. The modernising ‘imperative’ is once again a way of disguising particular ideological agendas.

Delusion in denial

‘The vast majority of advertisers are truthful and honest,’ according to the Advertising Standards Authority in Britain. And consumers, for their part, are ‘savvy and enthusiastic recipients of advertising, who enjoy its entertainment value and make use of the information it provides … self and co-regulation continues to be the best and most effective way to secure high standards in advertising’. How reassuring that the body that’s supposed to regulate advertising is leaving it up to corporations themselves. But of course that’s fine, if we consumers are now wise to the tricks of the trade. According to the Australian marketing company Orangehammer, today’s consumers are ‘more intelligent, more sophisticated, more media savvy, more brand aware, and more aware of the ploys of marketing communication’. ‘The Indian consumer is more sophisticated, discerning and … more demanding,’ says India’s Economic Times, and Chinese consumers are getting more ‘savvy and sophisticated’, says the European Business Review. My favourite little example comes from a report by Allegra Strategies, the corporate-strategy consultants working with those coffee chains currently homogenising our high streets. ‘The rise of artisanal independents and the new “Third Wave” of coffee culture is having a significant impact on what the major branded chains are doing in their businesses to create the necessary authenticity required by today’s more sophisticated and savvy consumers,’ they say. ‘We will see much better “crafted” coffee emerging as a result.’ I love this reasoning. Initiatives like those ‘local community’ Starbucks cafés are an attempt to fool increasingly sophisticated and savvy consumers with fake authenticity. But that’s OK, because consumers are increasingly sophisticated and savvy.

This mantra of the rational, discerning consumer is accompanied not only by psychological manipulation, but also by a lack of general awareness that psychological manipulation is still rife. And that’s because our faith in consumer sophistication is accompanied by a rejection of Freudian psychoanalysis. A Time magazine cover in 1993 asked ‘Is Freud Dead?’. A Channel 4 film screened in the same year was entitled Bad Ideas of the 20th Century: Freudism. A slew of books shunning Freud’s legacy was published in the nineties, including Seductive Mirage by Allen Esterson and Why Freud was Wrong by Richard Webster. That decade also saw the rise of cognitive neuroscience and an increase in the use of drug treatments for mental illness.

At the same time that psychological marketing is enjoying an undercover revival, there’s little public discussion of these techniques. Marketers have become publicly coy about their manipulative techniques, and the public has lost its radar. We believe that Freud has been proved wrong, so we don’t realise that psychological techniques are still very much in use. We’ve ceded psychoanalysis to advertisers and PR strategists who use it against us, and we no longer have the means to critique what’s going on. Fascinatingly, Bernays helped to arrange the publication of his uncle’s books in America. He did the PR on Freud, creating the popular persona of ‘Uncle Siggy’. It meant that the antidote was released alongside the poison. But now, although it’s commonplace to acknowledge how influential Freud has been, we’re actually intensely hostile to psychoanalytic interpretations. We have swallowed the corporate line that we are in fully conscious control: that the consumer is king. When in fact the savviness rhetoric is a cover for the deception. We can be savvy, but that means spotting the subtext, what’s really going on.

In 1957, an American journalist called Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders, an exposé of motivational research and other insidious advertising techniques. It explored ‘a world of psychology professors turned merchandisers’, and revealed ‘what makes us buy, believe – and even vote – the way we do’, ‘why men think of a mistress when they see a convertible in a shop window’, and ‘why your children like cereals that crackle and crunch’. The Hidden Persuaders stayed at the top of the US bestseller list for a year, was translated into twelve languages, and by 1975 had sold three million copies. But where are the Vance Packards of the twenty-first century?

When I studied English at university in the early nineties, I was introduced to the work of a sexy group of cultural critics who analysed the world in smart and surprising ways, from Jacques Derrida to Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser to Theodor Adorno. Don’t take the world at face value, they argued; it’s full of traps and tricks. But the influence of that way of thinking was soon on the wane. There was a turn away from the world and into the dusty archive, and big ideas seemed to give way to micro-history and byzantine identity politics. The study of covert ideology faltered just as the phenomenon itself really began to take hold in ways that these academics could only dream of.

Part of the reason the cultural critics turned away was because, like the good post-modernists they were, they denied the existence of an objective, concrete reality that ideology could obscure. Everything was, to some extent, an illusion. I think it’s wrong to stereotype post-modernists as cartoonish relativists who say that white is black and black white. But I do subscribe to the common-sense observation that of course there is a reality, and in the dream factories of contemporary culture it is increasingly mis-sold. Those cultural critics would have their work cut out in the era of Facebook, Twitter, 3D TV and augmented-reality computer games; of ever more sophisticated spin, PR and viral advertising campaigns; of image and spectacle and confected sincerity. But where are they now, when we really need them?

We are in the grip of a very modern pincer movement. Just at the moment when we’re most reluctant to acknowledge our own credulousness, more resources than ever before are being poured into the business of deceiving us. And the ruse-mongers are making full use of this denial, in their faux-egalitarian flattery that the people know best. But how could we, when everything means the opposite of what it says on the tin? I’m not saying people have become more stupid – quite the opposite. The illusion-spotting abilities of the average citizen have been sharpened to a fine point through living in a world of surfaces. But illusion-mongering is super-well-organised, and its practitioners are really smart.

I went out the other day to buy a winter coat, and found myself in the grip of something called false consciousness. The same thing happens every October. As soon as there’s a nip in the air, I take one look at last year’s winter coat and feel compelled to replace it – despite the fact that the price of winter coats puts them in the once-every-three-years garment category. There was nothing really wrong with last year’s coat – it was just a bit bobbly and not on trend. But although I knew that rationally, it didn’t stop me looking for a new one. And down in the ear-splitting, nerve-jangling basement of Topshop, this unnecessary raid on my bank account wasn’t even fun. What I thought was good for me wasn’t good at all.

Although Freud never wrote explicitly about ideology and false consciousness, his ideas help to explain how it works. Psychoanalysis solves the problem of how on the one hand we can be sentient beings, consciously perceiving the world, and on the other hand be utterly in the grip of delusions, often at moments – such as in our own age – when we feel most in control. Freud explains that we are not coherent, unified beings straightforwardly encountering the world around us. Instead, my ego is undercut by the unruly desires of my id, wanting to escape down the pub when I’ve got loads of work to do. But my internalised superego is also my own worst enemy, niggling me about a non-urgent task when I’m trying to relax on a Sunday.

Freud’s insights account for how covert ideology can exist as an underground, unconscious phenomenon; and how it involves self-deception, not just getting the world wrong. Once we get our heads around the fact that we internalise the demands and expectations of society, and that these get bound up with our innermost desires, we can start to see how psychoanalysis gets us beyond the false opposition between coercion and consent. We are constrained by delusions, but we are also oddly attached to deluding ourselves. Call it political emancipation or call it therapy: Freud can still help us to unpick ideology’s tight grip.

It was Marx and Engels who developed the idea of false consciousness as a political phenomenon. They wrote about how capitalism leads the working classes unwittingly to conspire in their own subjection by adopting one of two bogus beliefs: either that this is an inevitable state of affairs, or that they have a realistic shot at upward mobility. For the next hundred years or so after Marx, philosophers and political theorists had fierce debates about false consciousness. If the working classes were being oppressed, why didn’t they join forces and overthrow their rulers? Why did they seem content to remain downtrodden, even regarding their ‘betters’ (royal weddings come to mind) with admiration?

But towards the end of the twentieth century, an acute squeamishness set in about the entire relationship between ideology and social hierarchy. Who is doing the duping, and are some people more duped than others? As the pernicious rhetoric about ‘people power’ illustrates, ideology serves to benefit the rich and powerful. But does this mean that those at the top of the tree are consciously and deliberately duping those at the bottom? And are those at the bottom more gullible than those at the top? So powerless and downtrodden, in fact, that they’ve become blind to their own situation? Is it patronising to expect these people to think and act in a certain way – isn’t it up to them to decide if they are downtrodden or not?

It’s true that political and corporate leaders have more resources at their disposal. They can pay the PR man to disseminate messages that consolidate their advantage. The Indian writer Arundhati Roy is right to ask: ‘Isn’t there a flaw in the logic of that phrase – speak truth to power? It assumes that power doesn’t know the truth. But power knows the truth just as well, if not better, than the powerless know the truth.’ I think it’s right to question why it is that the poor in our societies are not demonstrably angrier than the rich. If you’ve got less money and power, if you’re being screwed over, then surely you have more of a stake in kicking up a stink. It’s difficult not to conclude that those at the lower end of the socio-economic scale are often complicit in their subjection, that they believe in the elites that ventriloquise the voices of ordinary people. We might be happy to say that the Zimbabweans who vote for Robert Mugabe do so because they are traumatised by the effects of colonial rule, but what about the working-class Italians who adore Silvio Berlusconi?

Over the last twenty years, the language of equality of opportunity has created a bizarre marriage of get-on-your-bike Thatcherism and political correctness by pretending that people are fully in control of their fate and not constrained by their circumstances. In their desire not to patronise the working classes, many liberals deny the pervasive influence of power.

But at the same time, the problem of false consciousness affects the affluent as well as the poor. The G20 leaders and the directors of Google are not free agents, self-consciously exercising absolute power. A highly-paid barrister might be more in thrall to the seductive ideology of work than a pub landlord, and a government minister more under the sway of myths about society than a retail assistant. Even the demonised bankers spend their days – I’m sure of it – in thrall to competitive self-doubt, exhaustion and a creeping sense that their lives are defined by the phrase ‘Money can’t buy you love.’ A confident sense of enlightenment can leave you vulnerable to self-delusion.

Ultimately, ideology and false consciousness affect different people in different ways: for some, it’s a matter of material gain; for others, quality of life. To the question of whether I count myself among the ranks of the duped, I would answer a resounding Yes. But if ideology-spotting abilities are not determined by status or money, they can be improved by developing greater awareness. At least I am having a go. And I believe that everyone else can too. That is not to deny that these are complex and knotty questions which are not easy to answer. They cut to the heart of our attitudes towards class, control, education, democracy, the media, and the very issue of consciousness itself. And as a society, we have stopped asking them.

When the British government recently caved in to the demands of commercial broadcasters to allow product placement in TV programmes, the only concerns raised were about children buying more sweets and crisps. Why? Because we imagine ourselves to be media-literate and discerning, consciously in control of our perceptions and our lives. To admit that we are duped and deluded, that our lives are shaped by illusions that we are scarcely aware of, let alone able to control, is nowadays highly controversial.

Debates about false consciousness just aren’t being had any more, and the phrase has become verboten. It’s a taboo that unites the grad-student table-dancers who protest that what they are doing is empowering and the Americans without health insurance who lobbied hard against the provision of a state safety net. Thomas Frank is one of the few contemporary commentators who has mentioned it: as he puts it in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, ‘it’s like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy’. To utter the words ‘turkeys’, ‘voting’ and ‘Christmas’ in the same sentence tends to produce outrage across the board. No one is allowed to suggest that people don’t always know what’s best for them. But who of us can really say we do, all of the time? And as we’re about to see, our reluctance to face false consciousness results in rich rewards at the top.

Nudge back

The notion of false consciousness might be a massive public blind spot, but to the elites in our society, it’s a perfectly obvious reality. In 1957, Vance Packard quoted Advertising Age declaring that ‘In very few instances do people really know what they want, even when they say they do.’ And in 2005, the late Steve Jobs said: ‘You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.’ In a direct contrast to all the rhetoric about consumer savvy, the modern corporate world is built on this assumption of false consciousness; and so is modern politics. In the nineties under New Labour, it was known as focus-grouping. In the twenty-first century, it’s known as ‘nudge’. The 2008 book Nudge by the economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein was given a rapturous reception by Barack Obama, David Cameron and policy wonks around the world. Cameron set up a Behavioural Insight Team, dubbed the ‘nudge unit’, run by Tony Blair’s former strategy adviser David Halpern. Halpern was the co-author of a Cabinet Office Paper entitled Mindspace: Influencing Behaviour Through Public Policy. The nudge unit has reported to a high-level team including Steve Hilton, the PR man turned director of strategy for Cameron. Britain’s Department of Health is issuing ‘guidance on the most effective behaviour change techniques’. The Royal Society has launched a ‘Brain Waves’ project to investigate neuroscience’s implications for politics and society. And the French government has established a Centre for Neuroscience, Behavioural Research and Policy in its Centre for Strategic Analysis.

What’s the link with brain science? Well, nudge politics was spawned from research in neuroscience and behavioural economics. This research goes hand in hand with the rejection of Freudian psychoanalysis. Its proponents argue that it is the wiring and firing of our brains, rather than our superegos and ids, that really make us who we are. Now it does seem at first sight that these new ways of thinking share with psychoanalysis a belief that human beings are driven by irrational forces beyond their control. Buzzy new popular science and politics books – from Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence to David Brooks’s The Social Animal to Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational – argue that we’re not as rational as we think we are. Thaler and Sunstein challenge traditional economics’ naïve belief in the rational individual, arguing that we don’t always act according to our best interests. We put off paying into pension plans and eat chicken nuggets.

But nudge politics has no interest in encouraging people to be more rational. Its interest lies in allowing an elite group of scientists, politicians and corporations to spot patterns in our irrational behaviour and steer our choices accordingly. Thaler and Sunstein would protest that nudging preserves free will intact, because the range of choices is still there. But that doesn’t wash, because free will is trumped by the art of persuasion. The one big factor that is left out in all this is power: the fact that some people are in a better position to make advantageous decisions than others, and the fact that nudging allows some people to manipulate others. ‘We are not exactly lemmings,’ Thaler and Sunstein write, ‘but we are easily influenced by the statements and deeds of others.’ Too right. But they regard this as a creepy opportunity rather than a prompt for critique. I find it amazing that there’s not more condemnation of nudge politics; but that’s because we don’t see it as shot through with power dynamics. And in its weird validation of irrationality, it legitimates the reality deficit that pervades modern life. Instead of enabling policy-makers to exploit the fact that people’s lives are shaped by covert ideology, I want you and me, dear reader, to identify the multiple ways in which covert ideology stops us being free.

Like focus-group politics, the politics of nudge is another step away from offering explicit priorities for people to choose between; away from overt ideology and the democratic tussle to achieve the good society. This kind of politics appeals to subconscious drives rather than conscious minds. According to David Halpern’s Mindspace report, much of our behaviour takes place ‘outside conscious awareness’; so ‘providing information per se often has surprisingly modest and sometimes unintended impacts’ (unintended for whom, I wonder). Government should, therefore, ‘shift the focus of attention away from facts and information’, and towards ‘automatic processes’ and ‘altering the context in which people act’. It should become, in fact, a ‘surrogate willpower’. How ironic that in this technological ‘information age’ people should no longer be making informed, rational decisions; that instead they should be subliminally corralled into behaving in a way that is ‘best for them’. And who decides what is best for them? Political and corporate elites. So ‘best for them’ actually means ‘best for elites’.

As we’ll see later, in the chapter on food, corporate lobbying against informative labels on processed foods is the deliberate withholding of information. In 2010 Britain’s Food Standards Agency, a governmental regulatory body equipped with scientific experts working in the public interest, had its powers stripped and replaced with a set of ‘responsibility deal networks’ shifting the emphasis from ‘top-down lectures’ to ‘voluntary codes’ and ‘personal responsibility’ (there’s a fascinating slippage here between companies and individuals). Regulation of business has to be ‘light touch’ in order not to ‘patronise’ consumers, leaving those businesses free to manipulate the bundles of irrational drives they assume consumers to be. The Behaviour Change Network working on public health was to operate with the new ‘nudge unit’, bringing together ‘experts in behavioural science with those from businesses’. And there we have it: we are not being nudged towards ‘wellbeing’, but towards being compliant and serviceable consumers.

All this hype about consumer savviness is a smokescreen designed to conceal the fact that we’re being nudged. We’ve forgotten how to deploy the vital analysis of covert ideology, because of the modern belief that we are rational, conscious individuals, free to make choices about the lives we lead. Because even though those popular-science books keep telling us we’re irrational, I believe that their real message is the opposite. They are actually telling us that unlike the unruly Freudian unconscious, we now have the chance, thanks to cutting-edge science, to master the mysteries of the human mind. Oh, except that this mastery is in the hands of a select few.

False consciousness has become taboo at the precise moment that it’s being used to consolidate elite power. It’s not just that there’s a continuity in the subconscious techniques used by politicians and marketers in the early twentieth century and now. It’s that – especially with the spotlight on neuroscience – they are now being applied subconsciously. We have false consciousness about false consciousness. While we’re getting up in arms about being patronising or patronised, elites are quietly exploiting those paradoxes in order to shore up their status. We need to detect these manipulations. But we also need to face up to the fact that we are not always in conscious control, and not just about what we buy at the supermarket; but about persuasion and freedom, politics and power. In a sense the whole of our culture is structured like a Freudian human mind. There’s an obvious, face-value level, and then a subtext that you need to decode. It’s only modern consumerist Freud-hating culture that denies there’s a deeper level. But it’s that very culture – with its unprecedented deceptions – that has made the subtext even deeper.

Freud himself thought it was impossible to do away completely with covert ideology, delusions, false consciousness, whatever you want to call it, because it’s part of being human in a civilised society. Marx was more revolutionary: he looked forward to the brave new Communist world when there would be no illusions, no subtext, and everyone would be master of their own destiny. Communism didn’t turn out quite like that, as we know. But Freud believed in a more realistic kind of progress. Psychoanalysis is not about the elimination of the unconscious. It’s about the resolution of a problematic relationship between our conscious and unconscious minds. It’s about moving from a state of being ‘neurotically unhappy’, to paraphrase Uncle Siggy, to being ‘normally unhappy’. We can’t strip away covert ideology completely, as Marx had hoped. But we can be inspired by his incisive analysis to expose its cracks and flaws, and that’s essential if we really want to tell the truth about power. As the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued, the opposite of ideology is not truth, but emancipatory critique. That critique can enable us to become self-aware, self-determining and idealistic once more.

I’m optimistic that we can become more aware and more rational if we try: that we have the capacity as well as the right to decide what kind of society we want to live in. Unlike the nudgers, I don’t believe that false consciousness is an unchanging fact of life, an inevitable consequence of cognitive hard-wiring; and I don’t believe it’s an excuse for governments and corporations to become our ‘surrogate willpower’. In an age when PR has taken over politics, let’s bring the credo back into style. Now that psychological techniques are more prevalent than ever, let’s fight back with Freud. In a virtual, airbrushed world saturated with PR and marketing, let’s recognise ‘authenticity’ – those false calls to ‘get real’ – as the smartest ruse of all. We can be sceptical and optimistic at the same time; critique the world but also change it. We can be less credulous about the covert ideology that is distorting our world, and believe once more in the overt ideology that’s the first step to transforming it. It’s time to see through modern illusions and restore our ideals.