There is a war on for your mind. You may not notice, but you are surrounded by manipulators: advertisers, politicians, Big Tech – even the humble waiter who asks, “still or sparkling?” We are awash with attempts to change how we think and what we do. The human brain is bombarded by thousands of pieces of information every day, the equivalent of 174 newspapers every day.
Psychology used to be about diagnosing and fixing people, but now it is as much about predicting and manipulating you, thanks to adoption of behavioural science by governments and corporations. Human beings are subject to biases which are used against us, mercilessly, such as our conformity and authority biases.
The need to reclaim sovereignty of your mind has never been so timely, because the combination of sophisticated behavioural psychology with Big Tech and AI means we will be more vulnerable than at any other point in history.
Free minds have never been so under threat from the fact-checkers, the nudgers, shadowy Government units surveilling and censoring us, highly personalised online environments and the multiple distractions of a screen-based life.
The human mind is a wondrous thing which demands ingenuity and truth. We believe your mind should be free. Fortunately, there is a field manual for winning in this information a battlefield: here are six rules from our new book Free Your Mind to live by.
Hack your phone with boosts
Eighty-three percent of the world’s population owns a smart phone, and we pick them up between 49 and 80 times a day. Multiple studies prove they affect our cognitive abilities, while social media platforms are deliberately designed to be sticky and to manipulate our emotions, so we need to practise social media distancing.
We might bristle at the idea of being ‘nudged’ by outside forces. But what if we could ‘nudge’ ourselves? This is a fairly new idea that psychologists call ‘boosting’. There are several boosts that you can selectively apply to hack your phone – and your own mind – and make you more resilient to said outside forces. Some of these you might know, such as switching off notifications and setting screen time limits, or even taking a temporary digital detox. But there are more subtle and effective boosts. For example, setting your phone to grayscale rather than full colour has been shown to reduce screen time by about 30 minutes a day; and moving addictive apps away from the home screen reduced the number of phone pick-ups in a week by 6%.
Get it in writing
British teenagers’ top three news sources are Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, according to an Ofcom report. The world is becoming more and more visual – and that’s before we’ve even started to immerse ourselves in the Metaverse and Apple’s Vision Pro headsets. The trouble is, we’re far more likely to be manipulated by images than we are by words. Human beings have had writing for 4,000 years, but we’ve had eyes for 543 million years. What we see is more emotional and automatic than what we read. Psychologists call it the picture superiority effect: images are more attention-grabbing, memorable and persuasive. For example, newspaper stories with images are more likely to influence you, and video reports even more so. On the other hand, reading flexes the brain’s muscles and gives it time to breathe. Whenever there’s a chance of persuasion – in the news, at the supermarket, or at work – try to get the information in writing before making a big decision.
Move from a hot to a cold state
Modern life is a chaotic whirligig of confusion. We are endlessly assaulted by the equivalent of 174 newspapers of information everyday – or at least we were all the way back in 2007, when the study was conducted. Goodness only knows how much we are bombarded with now, now Tweets compete with Fleet street. Unfortunately, you are more vulnerable to persuasion when you are going through a kind of ‘blip’ of uncertainty and confusion. On a small scale, it could be that you buy those trinkets and sweets when you get to the checkout in Primark, stressed and exhausted. On a larger scale, it could be that you join a multi-level marketing scheme when you’ve been through a divorce and moved across the country. And on the largest scale, a country could be more pliable when it’s going through Brexit, a pandemic or a recession. When making important decisions, it’s crucial to step out of a ‘hot’ – emotional or overwhelmed – state and into a cold one. Take some time to make the decision in private.
Meditate
When you are manipulated, half of the problem is the messaging itself, but half of the problem is you. Sometimes natural human foibles are being weaponised against you, and sometimes it’s your own unique emotional landmines. It’s the work of a lifetime to understand ourselves and stop self-haunting – meditation offers an important solution.
Sometimes we tend to think so hard, we lose our gut instinct and fall prey to our biases. You can debias the mind during any form of mindful meditation, by improving ‘interoceptive awareness’. Just one 15-minute mindfulness session can reduce the incidence of a particular cognitive bias by 34%. Counter-intuitively, to free your mind, don’t overthink it.
Analytic meditation is a more advanced form of meditation practised by Buddhists, including the Dalai Lama. It teaches you to research and know your mind. Pondering the thoughts that influence your behaviour and attitudes, which can bring about inner change, a more positive state of mind and psychological awareness.
Consume media that make you happy
While the goal is to free your mind, the universe is infinitely big, and our brains are minuscule by comparison, so we can each only see a tiny slice of reality. Much of what we sense as reality is actually an illusion. However, we can use that fact to our advantage, and each choose the perceived world we want to live in.
Forty-six percent of people actively avoid news every day because it makes them miserable and trust in media is low. Thrashing out debates online doesn’t seem to be bringing forth happiness or peace. On the other hand, studies show that reading poetry improves well-being and positive affirmations are self-fulfilling prophecies.
If, to an extent, we must live in an illusion, we have the power to choose one we like. Instead of doom-scrolling on social media you can focus on films, books, theatre, podcasts and artworks that elevate your mind and mood.
Develop of a set of principles and plan in advance
Today, people searching for meaning shift seamlessly from one ‘current thing’ to another. You can see it play out on social media accounts, when emojis get swapped out for one temporary crusade after another. Crucially, nature abhors a vacuum and we are more susceptible to cults and mass movements if we don’t know what we stand for. If people are empty inside, if they do not have some kind of guiding principles, then they risk being filled up by another ideology. As G. K. Chesterton said, “Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion.” We must all decide what we stand for if we don’t want to fall for anything .
Finding an authentic purpose in life is one of the most important guardrails against undue influence. This is intrinsic to the world’s religions. For the agnostic or atheist, you can find also purpose by self-individuating (as Jung called it) through meaningful work, family and community.
Develop a plan (even a quick mental one) and set of principles for any situations where you are liable to be psychologically influenced, whether it’s shopping, dating or politics. And determine your principles and beliefs on your own through reflection and writing, before the next wave of emoji activism hits.
If you liked these six rules, we have 375 pages of ground-breaking, smart-thinking advice for you, in our new book Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it, out today. We hope you like it! And, if you so, please leave a review on Amazon or the bookstore of your choice.
Laura Dodsworth is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller A State of Fear: how the U.K. Government weaponised fear during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can subscribe to her Substack page here.
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I think this article is called damming with faint praise.
The praise seems to me real, and to have admiration in it. If anything, I felt it was the criticism that failed to go home
The British constitution will not matter a jot because Britain will cease to exist once white British people are in a minority.
But would it matter if changes to it had helped to make that possible?
Yes, that’s a good point.
I am not sure when the rot really set in.
My impression is that people in former times were generally happy to make observations about race that would now be considered “racist”. At some point that started to change and now people are afraid, even to admit to themselves, that they might hold “racist” views. Certainly since non-white immigration into the UK started in earnest, “anti-racism” has been drummed into us. Maybe it started with the drive to abolish the slave trade. I am not saying that the slave trade was right or that we should not have abolished it or that we should go back to it – but we seem to confuse quite rightly not treating people as property with the perfectly natural preference for your own tribe.
Yes, terrible confusion,
Both the author and David Starkey seem to take the view that the post-Restoration constitutional settlement was a universally good thing, only to be broken later by the likes of Blair and co.
This is a fairly conventional view, and carries with it a whiff of the Whig interpretation of history, which holds that the political evolution of this country has been one of progress whereby power has been gradually transferred from an abolutist monarchy to our present representative democracy.
If only.
This view also informs much of what’s taught in schools as history, from what I can gather.
It was only when I read Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) that I started to see things a bit differently.
Although it’s a novel rather than a political tract, it does mark the origin of One Nation Conservatism, which is still a view much in play even today.
Put simply, Disraeli’s view was that the post-Restoration political settlement had put too much power in the hands of Parliament, and by sidelining the role of the monarch, had left no voice to defend the interests of the common people of this country.
Then as now, Parliament was stuffed with vested interests.
The results at the time had become very evident. The common people, pushed off the land by parliamentary acts of enclosure, had in many cases become desperate wage slaves often living in shockingly bad conditions.
Disraeli correctly identified this, and tried to re-invent the Conservatives into the party which would balance the interests of the common people and the capitalists who had brought about such material and technological progress, thereby assuming the role which in previous times had been enshrined in the monarch.
With the rise of the Labour movement to power or a share of it in the early 20th century, maybe it was considered that Parliament had finally reached a balanced and fair representation of interests, and that at last the common people had proper advocacy in the seat of power.
In retrospect, we can now see that this was probably a high point and that things have gone downhill very badly since, with vested interests very much back in charge.
The Labour Party has morphed into a bizarre embodiment of bad ideas who only cultivate their client class of state functionaries and poorly-educated graduates. They certainly don’t represent what we might call the traditional Working Class. The Conservatives reject any kind of ideology so just go along with the drift, becoming the Socialism Lite party, continuation One-Nationers, whose aspirations never rise above a bit of managerialist tinkering.
Once again, the interests of the common people have been sidelined.
This vacuum is what has allowed our rulers to impose mass immigration on our society, something that the people were never consulted on and which had damaged and undermined our shared cultural identity.
We know who the beneficiaries of this are, and it’s not the common people.
The summer riots were a manifestation of this. Others may follow.
To counterbalance parliament as representation of the factional interest of society, something representing its shared interests is needed. This used to be (at least in Germany) a monarchial government existing above and besides parliamentary strife of the parties. This suggests that the problem we’re facing is how to strip parliament of its status as dictatorial institution of power with no regard for anything but itself to put it back into its bottle, force it to accept the existence of legitimate, extraparliamentrial institution of power it didn’t create itself, ie, not His Most Toniest Blairness’ quango straightjacket supposed to guarantee New Labour government even in absence of a New Labour government.
Even the US model of an elected head of government with real power who’s not part of the parliamentary machinery might be suitable for that. OTOH, the traditional model worked fine. It took the parliamentarists to major European landwars to abolish it.
Maybe the only answer is Swiss-style direct government through regular referenda.
Whether that would work in the UK is moot, given that we’re a bigger and more diverse country with a very different history.
It would also require a vigorous and free press and media, something under continual attack.
This essay is puzzling. Professor Alexander very obviously admires Starkey; his essay is full of praise of him. But the title promises, also, to tell us where he is wrong. As someone who also admires Starkey, I was keen to learn where he is wrong but, search as I may, I can’t find it, not much anyway, and nothing developed. It might be expected to follow the heading, “Now for the criticisms”. But it doesn’t, not distinctly.
To begin with, it contains more praise: “[I am] someone who agrees with Starkey that we should read more history … Starkey’s remarkable history of England, and the Union … About the modern time, I, again, find most of the picture persuasive … a great deal to be said for Starkey’s particular history … to say something about the past that enables him to make a copious criticism of the present … almost no sound voices from history [apart from his] … the only historian who has managed to turn history into prophecy in a powerful way. Everyone has something to learn from his recent lectures.”
Alexander is plainly struggling to find anything much wrong. He begins by lighting a damp squib: “His suggestion that we should study history for the sake of the present is [not wrong but] badly formulated” and not all that badly either evidently, for, although “most historical comparisons are naive. In fact Starkey mostly avoids this naive sort of comparison … What he does instead is something subtler … to use the past to explain the present (not to explain what to do in the present, but to explain how we got where we are.”)
He does go on, “But there is a problem even with this. For we cannot restore anything by studying history.” But he has already admitted that Starkey doesn’t offer to use history to explain what to do in the present only to explain how we got where we are. So Alexander not only has not yet shown anything wrong, he hasn’t even shown us what the ‘problem’ is in what Starkey has to say.
There is, in fact, only one place where Alexander finds something wrong with Starkey that he doesn’t qualify out of existence and, even then, he introduces and closes it in a muted sort of a way: “Starkey is rather too admiring of Thatcher. As I said in an earlier piece, Thatcher only understood one of Enoch Powell’s concerns: the managed economy. She did not understand the problem of Europe until very late on, and never understood the problem of immigration, which remains a taboo subject. Starkey, as a humorous atheist, is unwilling to extend his political and constitutional analysis to include religion.”
And then this: “I suppose I dislike some of the cartoonish, or naïve, analogies, such as the comparison of Christian Europe to the European Union. … [The former] appealed to belief, and depended on faith or truth. No one has ever claimed the EU depends on truth or belief. Indeed, it entirely lacks either. … It is a confection, an arbitrary construction, a sort of Heath Robinson conspiracy whereby secular rational universalists – who are influenced by, alas, those English or Scottish habits of universal trade and profit-arousing and rent-seeking as well as by French and German habits of control and planning – attempt to break down all national significance, and, worse, all independent political significance.” And, even that he sums up as, “The story is a bit more dialectical than I think Starkey could admit without damaging his story.”
I don’t think Alexander has himself got a story about Starkey. Except for Starkey’s blankness about religion (which, filled up, might show an unintelligent hostility), Alexander is (not unreasonably) a straightforward admirer. And the title of his essay is seriously misleading.