State Lies: 'Active Norm Management'

Extracts from a paper by the American Institute of Biological Sciences entitled 'Social Norms and Global Environmental Challenges' (available ahead of print edition of BioScience in March 2013), my emboldening:

Some have argued that progress on these problems can be made only through a concerted effort to change personal and social norms. They contend that we must, through education and persuasion, ensure that certain behaviors become ingrained as a matter of personal ethics....Substantial numbers of people will have to alter their existing behaviors to address this new class of global environmental problems. Alternative approaches are needed when education and persuasion alone are insufficient. Policy instruments such as penalties, regulations, and incentives may therefore be required to achieve significant behavior modification.

[Scientists have the tools to have a hand in] government policies intended to alter choices and behaviors [such as] active norm management, changing the conditions influencing behaviors, financial interventions, and regulatory measures. Each of these policy instruments potentially influences personal and social norms in different ways and through different mechanisms. Each also carries the danger of backfiring, which is often called a boomerang effect in the literature—eroding compliance and reducing the prevalence of the desired behaviors and the social norms that support those behaviors....Some have argued that regulations are inherently coercive and cannot or should not exceed implied levels of public permission for such regulations. An alternative viewpoint is that governments can and even should move beyond existent levels of public permission in order to shift norms, allowing public sentiment to later catch up with the regulation.

Fines can be an effective way to alter behavior, in part because they signal the seriousness with which society treats the issue....A carbon tax might...prove effective even in the face of near-term opposition. What needs to be assessed is the possibility that behaviors and values would coevolve in such a way that a carbon tax - or other policy instrument that raises prices, such as a cap-and-trade system - ultimately comes to be seen as worthy, which would therefore allow for its long-term effectiveness.

Goya, Los Caprichos No. 23

Each of the government interventions can influence both personal and social norms, although they do so through different mechanisms. Only social norm management directly targets norms. Choice architecture, financial instruments, and regulations can all alter social norms by causing people to first change their behaviors and then shift their beliefs to conform to those behaviors.”

Subtext: the scientists propose arousing the concept of cognitive dissonance in the minds of people in order to guide the herd towards 'pro-environmental' conformist behaviours, employing what they regard as 'universal' 'norms of conformity and cooperation' to manufacture compliance with a political project. And, for the purposes of this argument, any 'issue' or behaviour can substitute for pro-environmentalist conformity.

The group of scientists involved in this publication include two Nobel Prize winners, economist Kenneth Arrow and political scientist Elinor Ostrom, as well as behavioural scientists, mathematicians, biologists, and population scientists, the most well-known of whom are Paul Ehrlich and Gretchen C. Daily, so these are not nonentites. Alongside the debasing of honest science, which cannot survive any alignment with the ambitions of the state, this is a honey-worded urging towards the hastening of acceptance of increased governmental control of the contents of the minds of the masses. This collection of prominent scientists asserts that 'government is uniquely obligated to locate the common good and formulate its policies accordingly', while expressing confidence that their recommendations 'can be carried out in a way that abides by the principles of representative democracy, including transparency, fairness, and accountability'.

Ostensibly intelligent people really ought to know better. Not once in the entire report does it occur to them that moving beyond public consent, with the full weight of the state behind that move, might result in something a little uglier, a little more punitive, when the outliers of state-sanctioned belief systems kick back and cling to their heresies.