Tag: 1984
Obama Issues Orwellian Executive Order
Will this nightmare ever end?
Welcome to President Obama’s brave new world.
Federal agencies have been directed to hire psychologists to experiment and find ways to better manipulate the American people to the federal government’s will.
“A growing body of evidence demonstrates that behavioral science insights – research findings from fields such as behavioral economics and psychology about how people make decisions and act on them – can be used to design government policies to better serve the American people,” Obama wrote in an executive order released Tuesday on WhiteHouse.gov. The origin of the order can be traced back to a 2013 policy proposal entertained by the White House called “Strengthening Federal Capacity for Behavioral Insights.”
The president’s new order said streamlined applications for federal financial aid and automatic retirement payments are two examples where behavioral-science lessons applied to government programs have been effective.
“[T]o more fully realize the benefits of behavioral insights and deliver better results at a lower cost for the American people, the federal government should design its policies and programs to reflect our best understanding of how people engage with, participate in, use, and respond to those policies and programs,” Obama wrote, the Washington Examiner reported.
Obama has not hidden his interest in using federal resources to employ behavioral science techniques on the public. The White House launched a Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, or SBST, in February 2014 and then celebrated its one-year anniversary on the White House blog.
“SBST had a successful first year, launching a wide variety of evidence-based pilots with objectives ranging from connecting veterans with employment and educational counseling benefits to helping struggling student borrowers understand their loan repayment options,” the Obama administration wrote Feb. 9, 2015.
SBST will now move forward to identify programs that will “most effectively promote public welfare, as appropriate, giving particular consideration to the selection and setting of default options.” The team’s work is done under the purview of the National Science and Technology Council.
Two figures whose research played a key role in bringing the new initiative to fruition were Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein (once deemed Obama’s regulatory czar), and Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago economist, the Daily Beast reported Tuesday.
“The two behavioral scientists argued in their 2008 book ‘Nudge’ that government policies can be designed in a way that ‘nudges’ citizens toward certain behaviors and choices,” the Daily Beast reported.
Obama’s executive order requires SBST to issue guidance to federal agencies on how to implement his policy directive within the next 45 days.
SBST will also consider different ways of labeling “benefits, taxes, subsidies, and other incentives” to “more effectively and efficiently promote” the president’s policy goal.
The New Totalitarians Are Here
A great piece by Tom Nichols. Have you seen examples of this in your everyday life?
There’s a basic difference in the traditions of political science between “authoritarians” and “totalitaritarians.” People throw both of these words around, but as is so often the case, they’re using words they may not always understand. They have real meaning, however, and the difference between them is important.
Simply put, authoritarians merely want obedience, while totalitarians, whose rule is rooted in an ideology, want obedience and conversion. Authoritarians are a dime a dozen; totalitarians are rare. The authoritarians are the guys in charge who want to stay in charge, and don’t much care about you, or what you’re doing, so long as you stay out of their way. They are the jefe and his thugs in a brutal regime that want you to shut up, go to work, and look the other way when your loudmouthed neighbor gets his lights punched out by goons in black jackets. Live or die. It’s all the same to the regime.
Totalitarians are a different breed. These are the people who have a plan, who think they see the future more clearly than you or who are convinced they grasp reality in a way that you do not. They don’t serve themselves—or, they don’t serve themselves exclusively—they serve History, or The People, or The Idea, or some other ideological totem that justifies their actions.
They want obedience, of course. But even more, they want their rule, and their belief system, to be accepted and self-sustaining. And the only way to achieve that is to create a new society of people who share those beliefs, even if it means bludgeoning every last citizen into enlightenment. That’s what makes totalitarians different and more dangerous: they are “totalistic” in the sense that they demand a complete reorientation of the individual to the State and its ideological ends. Every person who harbors a secret objection, or even so much as a doubt, is a danger to the future of the whole project, and so the regime compels its subjects not only to obey but to believe.
This is what George Orwell understood so well in his landmark novel “1984.” His dystopian state doesn’t really care about quotidian obedience; it already knows how to get that. What it demands, and will get by any means, is a belief in the Party’s rectitude and in its leader, Big Brother. If torturing the daylights out of people until they denounce even their loved ones is what it takes, so be it. That’s why the ending of the novel is so terrifying: after the two rebellious lovers of the story are broken and made to turn on each other, the wrecks left by the State are left to sit before the Leader’s face on a screen with only one emotion still alive in the husks of their bodies: they finally, truly love Big Brother.
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