It’s a sunny Sunday morning and I’m popping out to the corner shop with my little son in his pushchair. We are both in a carefree mood. But then I pass a BP petrol station, and I can’t help noticing that it’s bright green. How strange, I think to myself, to see a purveyor of pollution decked out in such an eco-friendly shade. Once inside the shop, I scan the shelves for a nice healthy treat. I’m tempted by tubs of Rachel’s Organic yoghurt, but then remember that they’re made by Dean Foods, the largest dairy company in America; and by Seeds of Change chocolate bars, inconveniently owned by Mars. You’d never know that, I note rather irritably, from the naturalistic, folksy packaging. And as I look for a newspaper to buy I see that the Times front page is sporting the headline ‘Cameron to Give Power to the People’. Is he now, I say to my slightly startled son. That’s a strange way to dress up public-spending cuts. My son’s eyes widen. He’s not yet used to my impromptu political rants. But I have always looked at the world like this. And I’ve always felt a bit critical, as though I was giving the world too much of a hard time. But the way things are going now I feel worryingly justified.

The world I see around me is one in which oil giants advertise their environmental credentials, mass-produced brands are marketed as artisanal and ethical, and a multi-millionaire Old Etonian proclaims the Conservatives the party of the poor. A world in which TV talent shows stage spectacles of against-the-odds success while rates of social mobility drop to pre-1970s depths, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall catches wild sea bass while sales of ready meals reach an all-time high, and plus-size models are celebrated by the world’s media while rates of anorexia soar. We have sleepwalked into a world where nothing is as it seems; where reality, in fact, is the very opposite of appearance.

I keep hearing proclamations that we have entered a revolutionary era: of grassroots people power, a new politics, transparency and technological transformation. And of course, in some ways, our world has changed for the better in recent years. There are plenty of grounds for optimism. Across the Arab world, people of all ages and backgrounds have taken to the streets to fight oppressive regimes. WikiLeaks has exposed the machinations of global political elites. Phone-hacking revelations have put a media multinational on the back foot. And yet at the same time, those brave new world fanfares simply do not ring true.

Is it just me, or does it seem as if new remedies are everywhere, but they’re often symptoms of a deeper malady? That despite our obsession with reality, we’re also in the grip of a massive sleight of hand? That we know there is something wrong, but we seem to have lost the intellectual language we need in order to articulate what’s happening?

So many game-changing moments turn out to be fleeting or merely symbolic. Just as people are challenging the power of elites, those elites are speaking the language of people power in order to make even greater advances. World-altering progress is becoming increasingly hard to distinguish from the rhetoric of marketing. Like the Vodafone ad ‘Our Power’, that claimed credit for the Arab Spring, when in fact the company had caved in to Egyptian government demands to shut down its network during the protests there. Vodafone was roundly criticised and denied it had commissioned the ad; but this kind of thing goes unremarked all the time.

I was checking my email recently when Windows Explorer popped up. There was the familiar list of my directories and programs, but several of them were flashing up with those dreaded red crosses. My computer was infected with a virus. The screen was instructing me to download a virus protection program that would solve the problem. But when I Googled the name of the program, I found that it was itself a virus, something called spyware. It had snuck into my computer and replicated my Windows Explorer page; and downloading the program would make things even worse. I went searching on the internet for a genuine anti-spyware program, but how could I be sure that any of those weren’t themselves viruses? Since nobody knows how computers work any more, none of my friends could help. It was like being in a hall of mirrors from which there was no escape: the solution had turned out to be the problem in disguise. I recognised this sensation from somewhere, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Until I realised that I recognised it from the whole of modern life.

Right now the potential for change seems overwhelming, and yet real change has also never felt less possible. At a time of such trumpeted progress, it feels as if genuine advances have slipped out of our grasp. Despite all the momentous events of recent years – the rise of the internet, the near-collapse of finance capitalism, the Arab Spring – I do not have a sense of radical empowerment. In fact, I am puzzled, and increasingly angry; not just at the injustice of it all, but at the sense that something huge is being swept under the carpet. Liberal commentators are cheerleading the new revolution. But where I’m standing that revolution, as Gavin and Stacey would have it, is not occurring. We seem to be living our lives under the spell of a mass cognitive dissonance, and everyday existence has taken on a frustratingly unreal texture. We need to get real. And that is what made me want to write this book.

I aim to provide a spotter’s guide to the delusions we live by – from L’Oréal advertisements to the Obama effect; from the natural childbirth movement to iPhone apps. As the philosopher John Gray has noted, ‘There are very few books that really help us understand the present.’ This book is an attempt to do just that. I believe that it’s time to hold up for scrutiny the increasing gap between the appearance and the reality of our lives, and to demonstrate why it really matters, right now. I believe that we can be optimistic about progress in the world, but for me that optimism lies in critique. Because how can we solve problems if we deny their existence; if we disguise them by highlighting sparkly exceptions? How can we improve the world if we’re constantly buying into fake solutions, confected by the marketing operations of powerful elites, determined to preserve their status? Our assumptions of choice, opportunity and accessible information lead us to consent, over and over again, to the illusions we are sold. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

So what has turned our world upside down, replacing reality with topsy-turvy mirage? In part I blame the spin, PR, marketing and rhetoric that has found its way into every nook and cranny of our lives. But we are familiar with that story, and in a sense it hides an even deeper deception. Because this is an age of apparent authenticity and realism, embedded reporters and user-generated content, HD, 3D and unbranded ‘community personality’ Starbucks cafés. Fake authenticity makes delusions doubly difficult to spot. And this is also an age in which we have swallowed the corporate line that the consumer is king, that we are savvy, self-aware and self-determining as never before. The notion that we may be duped and self-deluded, that we may be in the grip of false consciousness, is nowadays deeply taboo. But as I’ll be arguing in this book, that just leaves us even more vulnerable to deception, ‘nudge’ politics and soft power, forms of manipulation that are on the rise and do not necessarily have our best interests at heart. We’re caught in a trap, as the King would have it. And we need suspicious minds.

And there’s another factor at play. With the melting away of conflicts between East and West in the Cold War and Right and Left in our politics, the big ideologies have been consigned to history. The influential political scientist Francis Fukuyama hailed ‘the end of history’ and the triumph of capitalist democracy. But this book argues that agendas never really disappeared. They just began to operate undercover, leaving us with a looking-glass world in which reality is spun and vested interests appear in disguise. Politicians now regard the word ‘ideology’ as an insult, but they are driven by ideology nonetheless. It’s now a covert form of ideology that’s at work, and that we ignore at our peril. This book puts ideology back at the heart of the problem, but also of the potential solution.

Because if we want to improve our world – indeed, with the environmental challenges we face, to save it – we need not only to identify hidden agendas, but also to have explicit aspirations. We need not to be afraid to say what we mean and what we mean to do. If we’re too credulous in some ways, we also don’t believe in enough. We need to debunk delusions and reclaim ideology as positive idealism, otherwise people power and revolution will remain empty ciphers that serve to obscure the lack of real agency and real change.

There are some who might find the claim that we live our lives under the spell of pervasive and self-defeating delusions somewhat paranoid. Are we in fact perfectly clear-sighted, yet impotent? Or just comfortably apathetic? So what if technological innovation doesn’t solve world poverty, but allows us to have a bit of fun? Is it so wrong to download an app onto your mobile phone which causes it, when moved on a flat surface, to fart? Some of the illusions we live by are helpful, even pleasant; they help us get out of bed on a Monday morning, and allow us to indulge in a little couch-potato escapism. Sometimes – I will admit it – I feel a bit like a crazed conspiracy theorist. But then I read that David Cameron has welcomed Simon Cowell’s idea for a ‘political X Factor’ in which hot topics are debated and voted on by the British public, and has launched a competition to ‘develop an online platform that enables us to tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges’, and an amended version of that famous aphorism pops into my head: Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to con you.

The delusions I’ll be talking about in this book are sustained by a seamless blurring of deception and collusion. When people talk about conspiracy theories, the assumption is that there are evil agents doing the conspiring. But the conspiracies I’m interested in are really diffuse. We are both agents and victims, and our compliance with soft power comes about through unconscious creeping cooperation. It’s in the drinking water.

I am, however, passionately committed to the idea that decoding delusions can help us to loosen their limiting grip on our lives, and take action to improve our world for real. Because it’s these whitewashed problems and illusory solutions that are responsible for our curious sense of paralysis. But we can see through them if we look hard enough.

I’ll start, in the first chapter, with the story of how ideologies went underground. Then in the chapters that follow, I’ll take a polemical pop at how hidden agendas and topsy-turvy illusions operate today: in relation to politics, equality, new technology, the media, work, freedom, science, food, and the environment. In each chapter, I’ll highlight one rule of covert ideology’s lying game: a trick of the trade for you to recognise when you’re going about your illusion-spotting day. The idea is that bit by bit, the powerful elites in our societies that thrive on deception will be forced to play their hand. Game on.

ONE
Ideology’s Second Life

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.

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Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions

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Eliane GlaserGet RealHow to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions

Dedication

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ONEIdeology’s Second Life

Eliane Glaser
Get Real
How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions

ONE
Ideology’s Second Life