Clever Hans

This is Bali, a three-year old mustang mare we adopted in 2016 from the Bureau of Land Management, trained by daughter #3, Haven.

Vast herds of wild horses still roam out West on federal land. Officially categorized as an invasive species, many of these herds suffer terrible depradation from overpopulation and limited resources. In response, the BLM has captured more than 40,000 mustangs and moved them to long-term holding pens back East. Check out the inspiring 2011 film “Wild Horse, Wild Ride” to learn more about the controversial BLM program and efforts to encourage adoption of these magnificent creatures.

Mustangs have to be “broken” to accept a human’s touch and control, a word that conjures up images of bucking broncos and the forcible crushing of an animal’s spirit. But that’s not how it works.

The most effective way to break a horse is “negging”, a word familiar to high schoolers but not to me. Negging is negative attention. In the YA social scene, it’s small insults to supposedly pique your target’s attention and interest, like “You’d be pretty if you cut your hair.” In the horse training scene, it’s sitting in the paddock and turning your back on the mustang, ignoring her entirely. The horse gets curious and comes to check out this strange creature sitting on her turf, albeit keeping a healthy distance. The trainer continues to studiously ignore the horse. This goes on for quite a while, maybe a couple of days, but each time the mustang approaches she gets a little closer, until ultimately she makes the first physical contact and allows the human to start controlling her.

It’s really pretty amazing. This highly intelligent animal is so desperate to have a social interaction, so frustrated at being ignored, that it willingly surrenders its autonomy. Sound familiar?

This is Dick Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics a few weeks ago. He’s best known for the ideas presented with Cass Sunstein in the book Nudge, where they describe a system of “libertarian paternalism” in which a State-directed “choice architecture” improves public policy outcomes by influencing our behavior through clever framing techniques.

So if you want more organ donors, you require an opt-out choice rather than an opt-in choice on your driver’s registration. If you want more diversified 401k allocations, you make a predetermined mutual fund the default choice for your employees. If you want to preserve a law forcing citizens to buy health insurance from a government-approved list, you characterize any restoration of the freedom to say no as a “heartless cut” in the number of insured, by counting as cuts your estimate of the people you will no longer be able to force into buying insurance.

By treating citizens as manipulable objects, the Nudging State can get them to give more, save more, and insure more, all on their own volition. What possible objection could anyone have to that?

This is Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias, aka The World’s Smartest Man, from the classic Alan Moore comic series Watchmen. The central plot of Watchmen is that the world’s smartest man saves humanity from itelf by tricking us into choosing a peaceful set of behaviors. This is the pure expression of Nudge. This is the pure expression of smiley-face authoritarianism. By the way, Adrian Veidt is also the world’s richest man.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. … The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right.

– George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

Jackbooted thugs are so passé. Unless you live in Barcelona, I suppose. Or Berkeley. It’s just so messy to stomp on someone’s face when you can cleanly accomplish the same ends with “choice architecture” and “libertarian paternalism”. If Orwell were writing today, a Ministry of Liberty would figure prominently, right alongside the Ministries of Peace, Love and Truth.