But I do. There are flocks of us who started in mathematics and mentally reverse the sign, or ask what would happen if there were 50,000 geese on the island instead of 5. As Readers of Chesterton and Lewis are familiar with this – Lewis noted in his Introduction to the Psalms that the harder questions are more likely to be bush the game is hiding behind. Engineers find advantages to thinking this way, as do attorneys, and likely a dozen other professions.
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We read constantly about how forces we do not suspect are making our decisions for us. Here’s a fun list. Upbeat music or the smell of lemon makes us work harder, for example. Supermarkets arrange their goods so that we buy more stuff, and more expensive stuff. We had discussion here a month ago about the phenomenon of “game,” of men who believe that can artificially push certain buttons to get women to have sex with them. Accusation and counter-accusation is made throughout politics that voters are being manipulated into believing something is true or some candidate is competent. We keep track of religious groups for evidence of cultlike behavior, manipulating people who have vulnerabilities via methods that bypass their judgement and reason. Even in milder form, we are are suspicious of emotional appeals to religion as unfair somehow (I understand that feeling, but have concluded over the years that people who make unemotional appeals to religion – folks like me – are perhaps farther from reality and subtly more dangerous). One of the main themes of this blog – it was a favorite topic of CS Lewis - has been the social pressures that get us to adopt entire philosophies. Advertisers – those sneaky unscrupulous advertisers – well my goodness, they talk us into just everything! They make us buy cars we don’t need, they make kids fat, make us go into debt…and don’t even get me started on puppies, kitties, and big-eyed children.
We believe we think, but may only react.
Hold on a minute, here. Step back from the ledge a moment. Advertisers may spend millions trying to sway us from Coke to Pepsi, but if they spent that much flogging Dr. Pepper, would it be a serious competitor? Store brands of cola, whose only advertising is lower price, also get sold. If you don’t have a product that people want, all the advertising in the world won’t get sales for you.
It used to be rather a joke that the “Best TV Commercial” of every year often didn’t increase sales. Advertising does not make us do things, it only influences us. Changing the lighting or the temperature of the room may increase our productivity, our sales, or our chances for having sex in the next hour, but in none of these cases will it make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
One could define all art as manipulation if we wanted to take that attitude – even elegant, high cultural art. Does opera not rely on musical tricks of timing and tone, tricks for the eye to point our emotions in a set direction, tricks of plot that artificially create tension and resolution to sell us an idea? Or might we just call that “good writing” instead? We could define all sales as manipulation if we wished – and where does “sales” leave off and “producing food” pick up, really - or we could call it wealth increase, as both parties ended up with something they wanted more. Is raising children a manipulation? We could make it appear so, by highlighting certain features and suppressing others. Is perfume a manipulation? Is cleanliness?
One of our survival skills for the last 10,000 (or perhaps 100,000) years is to avoid being taken in, so we are ever-alert for those who we think are pulling a fast one on us. We repeat those stories throughout the hive, our antennae are up, we pride ourselves on being the first to recognise that ant is an invader…there’s something wrong with that mash.
Most humans have lived in situations of high competition for scarce resources, where small advantages and disadvantages can have life-or-death consequences. We naturally live in a mentality that overreacts to the discovery of trickery. 5% manipulation, once discovered, feels like 50% to us. But try and decide who is manipulating who in a strip joint, or a graduate school admission interview – or in a worship service. In all cases there are not only the direct participants, but many others who are not present, yet might have been, who have “manipulated” the behavior of those in the room in some sense. If you want to you can see all of existence this way, down to the tricking of your own body by how you feed it and shelter it.
Intentional repeat: I am going at the easy cases of free will at first, because I think they are ultimately more powerful in our imagination than the philosophical arguments. Our worrying starts at these perceived threats to our free will, because we jump quickly to deeper worries that all our decisions might be suspect. We do not quite think “If advertising can make me buy a $200 camera I didn’t need, can it be that I have been a libertarian or a Presbyterian* all these years for reasons that are little better?” Yet such worries rumble around in our brains unspoken or unacknowledged. And as we encounter these small assaults on our impression of free choice far more frequently, I think they have the greater cumulative effect. We keep getting reminded that our wills are not entirely free. We fear if we dig to the bottom we will discover that none of it is. So we don’t go at all.
*I will note in passing that I did not include atheists in that list because it’s just useless. There is at least a subset of them which believes they are the only group that this doesn’t apply to, because they have found the one place of no assumptions, and it’s all the rest of us who have to be alert. I will come back to this in a later discussion of whether certain creeds encourage this lack of insight, or whether it is just personality factors, distributed randomly across the creeds. I’m going to answer “both” to that, but atheism isn’t the only group I’m going to try and pin that tail on.
Your initial post prompted a thought that consiousness can be thought of as a self-checking/self-healing system, and what various psychotics lack is the 'parity check' (reality check?) module that could tell them something is not quite right with their thought patterns. The thing that scares us is recognizing that in various areas we all lack the output of that module (or more likely just ignore it). For most of us the pattern doesn't have much impact on our lives since we keep it isolated to things like the brand of soda we buy or sports team we root for. Since we are conscious of it's output in some areas the niggling fear is always there that we might be ignoring it in more important areas and choosing not to recognize it.
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