A Finger of Nudge is Just Enough . . .

I’d best explain the context here. Back in 1979, Cadbury’s in the UK launched a TV ad for their “Fudge” chocolate bar

The horribly catchy tune used in the ad had the immortal lyric

A finger of Fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat

I will leave it to your own imaginations how that played out in the minds and gutter humour of teenaged schoolkids. To this day I’m not quite sure exactly who this ad was aimed at.

Throughout this pandemic, certainly in the UK and it would seem also in most other places, we’ve been treated to an advertising campaign. It has been a campaign of epic proportions - designed by professional psychologists whose job it was (and is) to “nudge” the population into certain ways of thinking and certain ways of behaving. In the UK this team of arch-manipulators is known informally as the “Nudge Unit”.

Laura Dodsworth’s excellent book, A State of Fear, goes into this in much more detail and the picture she paints is quite horrifying.

Two of the primary tools used in this nudge campaign were fear and guilt. The population was steered into thinking this was a deadly pandemic, unprecedented even, something novel, and one that required an extraordinary response. They were nudged into feeling guilty if they didn’t comply with the “necessary” measures taken.

If you take a step back and look at the various psychological techniques used, you have to admit (albeit extremely grudgingly) it has been a masterclass in manipulation. No cock-up here - just a cold, calculated, and ruthless manipulation. It has been spectacularly successful. They manipulated (and amplified) our fear and they manipulated our basic goodness not to harm others. They turned our own morality and decency against us.

With the usual caveats about drawing society-wide conclusions from an unrepresentative sample such as Twitter, I do think some of the tweets reveal how effective all this nudging has been for many. I’ve just picked out 4 tweets here from a recent thread asking whether Canadians would be much worse off without the vaccines

Terry here thinks that older folk would probably all be dead by now. Yes, it’s more lethal the older you get, but even at the oldest ranges my own calculations of risk (based on official ONS data in England & Wales which gives me an overestimate of risk) show that Terry is out by an order of magnitude. The over 90’s are looking at a mortality risk, if infected, of between 5% and 10%.

Terry has been manipulated into believing this virus is much more deadly than it actually is.

Anna has fallen for the “it would have been so much worse” manipulation that has been consistently employed. I don’t want to diss Anna too much, but it appears that someone who has had three vaccines and still gets covid (but survives) is proof for Anna that the vaccines are working. For Anna, things would have so much worse for her friend if they hadn’t been vaccinated.

Chevy has fallen for a more subtle form of manipulation. It’s a kind of manipulation that allows you to other someone else whilst appearing to be compassionate and caring. Saying that choices have consequences is like saying that water is wet. Of course they do. So what? Every choice we make has a consequence. The state of the universe pre and post choice is different. Those consequences may be extraordinarily subtle, but they are there nevertheless.

Chevy’s position can be summed up : “We really want you to do this. If you don’t do this, regrettably, there will be bad consequences for you. But it’s your choice”. This is not an argument. It’s extortion.

If we applied this to something like sexual harassment, rather than covid vaccines, we’d be saying things like “if you don’t sleep with your boss, regrettably, you will be fired. But it’s your choice”. The logical construction here is that if you don’t do X there will be bad consequences Y. What do we do with that? It’s a statement, not an argument. What makes Y morally right? Rather depends on X and Y doesn’t it?

Chevy doesn’t want to be seen to be supporting something immoral so he puts the onus onto the unvaccinated. They brought it upon themselves. Like Pontius Pilate he can wash his hands of any guilt. He has been manipulated to think of the unvaccinated as “guilty”.

Lawry makes a reasonable case. It’s definitely not a good idea to have your health services overwhelmed. The fear here is that without the vaccines our health services would collapse. This argument, initially used to justify lockdown, has been resurrected to justify mandatory vaccination.

It never happened - even without the vaccines. In the UK, before vaccination, some hospitals were stretched to the limit. Some weren’t. Lawry has been manipulated to believe that it is a permanent consequence of covid that our health services are in constant danger of being overrun.

You may also notice the subtle hand of the manipulation of guilt here. If you don’t get vaccinated YOU are going to be responsible for the collapse of our health services.

I’ve only touched on a few examples here, but this manipulation is everywhere - and it’s not always easy to spot. Every single government message, at least in the UK, has used these manipulation techniques. We’re in this together, they said. Look at how wonderful this particular piece of manipulation is. It paints a picture of community, of virtue, of caring for others - of heroic sacrifice made for the benefit of others. It feels good to be part of Team Together™ doesn’t it?

Those horrible, nasty, selfish, immoral and dangerous people who aren’t on our team? How do we tolerate these people? as Canada’s popinjay premiere bemoaned recently. It was a question asked many years ago in Germany by another premiere about another group of people.

One thing you might notice is that these nudges only work because they have been applied with more than a finger of fudge. Nudges require fudges. They work by preying on our fears, our guilt, and our emotions - but they can only do that by fudging the data. The data is fudged to make things appear worse than they actually are when it comes to covid risk. The data is fudged to make the vaccines appear better than they are.

In the ‘pandemic’ a finger of fudge has certainly been more than enough.

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