Of course I don't know what's good for me
Does thinking you know what’s best for yourself in every instance make you more submissive? I think yes.
How do you tell people they don’t know what’s best for them? Seriously, this is something that I’m noticing has begun to spring up often. Just now, I was reading up about The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a ‘non-profit’ organization that advocates the rights of consumers (a.k.a. the rights of the restaurant and food industry.). In their own words, “Defending enjoyment is what we're all about!” They fight the good fight against all those “terrorist” militant activists and “big brother” bureaucrats. What’s their normative claim? “We believe that only you know what's best for you.”(For another example of this ideolgy at play that is getting my beef these days, see here.) But people don’t know what is best for them – how the hell could they? The world is a complicated place and becoming increasingly more specialized in every respect. It’s one thing to know what is best for yourself in some respects but it’s foolish to think you do in all; I’ll be the first to admit that I have know idea how to eat properly – or even cook in general. But if I meet someone that does, I’m not going dismiss him or her as a ‘blue east-coast liberal-intellectual.’ But maybe that’s because I am a blue east-coast liberal-intellectual (of the Canuck variety), and maybe that’s what separates the cats from the dogs – a willingness to think you might not know everything, a kind of open-mindedness if you will. That said I think there’s more at play here. There is definitely a power game going on when big money is involved. Does thinking you know what’s best for yourself in every instance make you more submissive? I think yes. I’m going to treat it in the context of cognitive dissonance – a social psych theory I learned about this term. If you think you know everything, and somebody with the upper hand makes you do something that is against your own interest, you have to justify this to yourself somehow. Someone that knows everything can’t be tricked into doing things against their interest. So you convince yourself it was a good thing your first-born son was gunned down in Baghdad. Ironic isn’t it, that radical individualism can induce conformity in such a radical way. Such is my amateurish attempt at micro theorizing the dialect between hegemony and radical-individualism.
How do you tell people they don’t know what’s best for them? Seriously, this is something that I’m noticing has begun to spring up often. Just now, I was reading up about The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a ‘non-profit’ organization that advocates the rights of consumers (a.k.a. the rights of the restaurant and food industry.). In their own words, “Defending enjoyment is what we're all about!” They fight the good fight against all those “terrorist” militant activists and “big brother” bureaucrats. What’s their normative claim? “We believe that only you know what's best for you.”(For another example of this ideolgy at play that is getting my beef these days, see here.) But people don’t know what is best for them – how the hell could they? The world is a complicated place and becoming increasingly more specialized in every respect. It’s one thing to know what is best for yourself in some respects but it’s foolish to think you do in all; I’ll be the first to admit that I have know idea how to eat properly – or even cook in general. But if I meet someone that does, I’m not going dismiss him or her as a ‘blue east-coast liberal-intellectual.’ But maybe that’s because I am a blue east-coast liberal-intellectual (of the Canuck variety), and maybe that’s what separates the cats from the dogs – a willingness to think you might not know everything, a kind of open-mindedness if you will. That said I think there’s more at play here. There is definitely a power game going on when big money is involved. Does thinking you know what’s best for yourself in every instance make you more submissive? I think yes. I’m going to treat it in the context of cognitive dissonance – a social psych theory I learned about this term. If you think you know everything, and somebody with the upper hand makes you do something that is against your own interest, you have to justify this to yourself somehow. Someone that knows everything can’t be tricked into doing things against their interest. So you convince yourself it was a good thing your first-born son was gunned down in Baghdad. Ironic isn’t it, that radical individualism can induce conformity in such a radical way. Such is my amateurish attempt at micro theorizing the dialect between hegemony and radical-individualism.
posted by Nicholas @ 12.12.05
4 Comments:
Charles,
As both a Conservative and Psychology student, I feel a particular need to reply.
The Conservative anti-government/pro-freedom view is not that the individual/consumer knows the best course of action, they couldn't possibly. There's two points to make here.
First, the government cannot possibly know the best course of action either, for there is no "one-size-fits-all", not in anything. There is wide individuality, human diversity, in just about anything you choose to measure.
Secondly, more importantly is to clarify the Conservative idea, which I reiterate is not to propose we know it all. Rather the idea is that as a free individual, you should be able to pursue whichever course of action you deem best for your own life. If that means that you WANT to eat a cheeseburger, then go ahead. It should not be the stand of government to say to you that you MAY NOT because it is not a healthy action. Could you imagine if Government had the power to enforce all the 'generally best' rules of action. You would have no freedom whatsoever, your meals/actions/hobbies/jobs would all be prescribed to you, in an exact amount, as some specialist sees fit.
Further, to use a Psychological concept of my own, people live much healthier & happier lives when given the freedom to choose their fate/future. It gives a sense of self-efficacy and independence that is counter-active to hopelessness/depression. These emotions are crucially important in both health and general quality-of-life.
As for your cognitive dissonance argument, you are using the ends to justify the original action. If you have freedom to choose (A) then that preceds the outcome (B). You cannot say that because of outcome (B) [Son died in Iraq], your rationalization caused you to choose/purchase (A) [Sign them up for the war]. Your directionality is backwards. The cognitive-dissonance is a retrospective effect. The original choice was still yours to make, without knowledge of the outcome.
WF
Thanks for the excellent comment!
Sometimes i just spout stuff off in the hopes of touching on something that'll inspire someone to reply, and maybe even teach me something.
"The Conservative anti-government/pro-freedom view is not that the individual/consumer knows the best course of action, they couldn't possibly." Thanks for clarifying that, cause i was seriously beginning to wonder how they could think this. i agree with you, i doubt conservatives actually think people know what's best for them - this doesn't seem to prevent them from phrasing it that way though.
As for your first point - you're right. Your second point is correct too - i doubt any bleeding heart like myself would disagree with these points. But you'll probably also agree with me in saying that we need a degree of state to insure these freedoms ( ie. to enforce human rights, and to provide a minimum level of social services.). We probably disagree on the degree. (I should have clarified in more detail why I think eating meat may be wrong. It has a lot to do with agri-industry and globalization, so I think there are social implications.)
I'm a little embarrassed, my cognitive dissonance argument, at least as it was presented, was pretty pathetic. Nonetheless, i'm going to give it another shot while keeping your comments in mind. I didn’t mean that you decided to support your sons going off to war because your son died. I’m saying maybe, you did or maybe you didn’t support the war – you may or may not have thought about it very much - then your son is killed. If you didn’t have an opinion before, you probably do now. The circumstances may swing you either way. What I’m saying is that if you’re the kind of person that earnestly believes in your own infallibility, you have to accept whatever consequences are incurred and re-justify them, in order to maintain your ‘self.’ Your right, you are justifying a previous state by things that have occurred later, and this is irrational, but it doesn’t mean people don’t do this. Furthermore in future instances, having this further justification (my son died, and I wouldn’t let him die for a lame cause, so this cause must be a good one), you may support the war even more vigorously. (The previous is a rather extreme example. Here’s another: if you think you voted right, you may support anything in order to justify your vote.)
Finally I’d like to return to the earlier issue. You’re absolutely right; this isn’t so much an issue of conservatives thinking people know what’s best for themselves. I meant to imply, that one could pacify the masses by making them think they are in control, whether or not they actually are. Individualism, at least as an ideology, (and in our society it is) is a double-edged sword.
I hope I’ve clarified myself.
Ranting is easy to pick apart, that's the nature of it, but your clarifications make for much more interesting discussion.
-Yes, Conservatives often do (misleadingly) phrase the philosophy as, "Individual Knows Best", but that's a consequence of making easily digestible concepts for the masses. Every mainstream political idea/party does it. Take for example either side of the Abortion debate -"ProLife" well certain kinds of life at certain times ; -"ProChoice" well not the ability to choose anything, but a right to a woman's own body.
-Yes, I absolutely agree that a certain level of government is necessary for the protection of human rights and in order to protect the quality of life for many of the less fortunate. It's funny that'd you'd hit so quickly on "We probably disagree on the degree" - I find that to be the single largest factor that seperates my moderate right-wing from many of the left-wing people I debate politics with. How much government is too much? Do we need MORE funding? How much is too much taxes? I'd argue that there is far too much Canadian government, which is painfully overfunded with excessive taxes. It's mostly a matter of efficiency - Government is terrible at spending money - they have few to no free market incentives to drive innovation and improvement.
-Okay, so let's get back to the main topic - 'Cognitive Dissonance, Psychological Phenomena and True Consumerism in America' (How's that for a title of a term paper?). Clearly, cognitive dissonance is at play (and unfortunately encouraged with propaganda) over the death of soldiers in war. There is no doubt that many family of the fallen do become rigorously pro-war in order to justify the loss, in order to "not have died in vain - for nothing". But I still think the effect is too backwards in order to say that it makes you a submissive consumer. A consumer is forward looking - deciding whether or not you will purchase a futher item. You may use cognitive dissonance after the fact to justify the expense (or actually more likely suffer from Buyer's Regret, but we'll ignore that for now), but I don't believe that justification will make you more likely to purchase again in the future. There's no connection to say that the justifcation of a previous purchase will cause you to purchase more - you'd have to run some sort of experiment and I doubt you'd see the outcome you are hypothesing.
On a thin tangent, I bet you would be compelled (as I was) by a working theory of a friend of a friend, who is doing a Masters in Ethics here at UBC. His proposition, in short, is that we are environmentally triggered and raised to be consumers, that we cannot NOT be consumers, that we fall into the line of the popular culture that is consumerism. You go to restaurants because that's what society does, you buy an iPod because that's what people do. Therefore, you are not truly in control of your consumer nature, but rather it is programmed into you. He gathers some further evidence that there are cultures, albeit namely non-industrialized, who do not live the seeit/needit/wantit. Then he mixes in some Philosophical goo on the nature of man. If he ever gets around to formalizing it all into a paper, I'll see if I can get my hands on a copy.
-As for your final point on Individualism being a double-edged sword, all I will do is use a quote which I think works as a suiting analogy/comparison.
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time." ~Winston Churchill
I've always loved that Winston Churchill quote; it's so pomo - so open to possibility. I read a wonderful Adorno quote recently: "Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed." What blows my mind is that there was seriously a time when people – philosophers at least - thought that they had everything figured out! This was the case in Churchill’s time, and i tend to interpret that quote as saying that we may not necessarily have everything accomplished just yet.(I think we’ll always miss that time Adorno speaks of, and our methods and ideologies have to account for this.)
Your friends research sounds fantastic, i think he’s on the right track, and i would be very interested in hearing more.
You speak very positively about the 'consumer.' I guess i would definitely side with your friend in asking 'how does a consumer become a consumer'? Maybe we might even ask what a consumer is. Again, i would be curious to hear what your friend would classify a consumer as (this would probably have to be the first step in his research). I do however think that the justifying of past purchases will have an impact on the likelihood of future purchases. I think that if we are going to change our behaviour in any regard, we have to begin by thinking critically about it. Keep in mind that earlier acts were necessarily imbedded with their own justifications (acts don't occur in a vacuum).
Finally, i've posted our debate on government as a new post and a new discussion - because i think it takes us in another, and totally fascinating, direction.
Thanks for commenting Wayne, i think th past couple of days have certainly been among the most productive this blog has ever had :)
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