Book Review: Year of Consent–Rerun with Additional Commentary

I reviewed this book in 2021.  Published in 1954, it is set in the then-future year of 1990–a time when though the United States is still nominally a democracy, the real power lies with the social engineers…sophisticated advertising & PR men…who use psychological methods to persuade people that they really want what they are supposed to want.  Events in the two years since I posted that review have even more strongly demonstrated the almost overwhelming political power that is exercised by the communications industry–traditional media, social media, also academia–and I think the review is about due for a rerun.  I’ll add some additional thoughts at the end.

The social engineers who are the true masters of the country are aided in their tasks by a giant computer called Sociac (500,000 vacuum tubes! 860,000 relays!) and colloquially known as ‘Herbie.’   The political system now in place is called Democratic Rule by Consent.   While the US still has a President, he is a figurehead and the administration of the country is actually done by the General Manager of the United States, who himself serves at the pleasure of the social engineers.  The social engineers work in a department called  ‘Communications’, which most people believe is limited to such benign tasks as keeping the telephones and the television stations in operation.  Actually, its main function is conducting influence operations.

One approach involves the publishing of novels which are fictional, but carry implicit social and/or political messages, via, for example, the beliefs and affiliations of the bad guys versus the good guys. Even the structure of novels is managed for messaging reasons: romance-story plots should not be boy gets girl loses girl gets girl back, but rather boy gets girl, loses girl, gets different girl who is really right for him.

Some methods are more direct, although their real objectives are not stated. One such objective is population control: If the fertility rate is running a little low, advertising is ramped up for a pill called Glamorenes, which are said to create the ’rounded, glamorous figure of a TV star…remember–it’s Glamorenes for glamor. Actually, the real function of Glamorenes, which is top secret, is to increase a woman’s sex drive and expand the fertility window.  On the other hand, if the birth rate is running too high, the ad emphasis switches to Slimettes for women and Vigorone for men, both of which have a contraceptive effect.  The book’s protagonist, Gerald Leeds, is one of the few who is in on the secret, and when he hears a Glamorenes ad, he realizes that this is the real reason why his girlfriend, Nancy, has been acting especially affectionate lately.

Few people, even at the highest levels of government, realize just how powerful the Communications Department really is.  “Even the biggest wheels only know part of it.  They think the Communications Administrative Department exists to help them–and not the other way around.”

The computer known as Sociac (‘Herbie’) accumulates vast amounts of data on individuals, including such things as shopping, dining, and vacation preferences. Thus, when the administration wanted to make a new move, they knew exactly how to condition the people so that it would be backed. Or they knew exactly what sort of man to put up to win a popular election.  Telephone calls are tapped, but are rarely listened to directly by government agents; rather, they are fed directly to a ‘calculator’ (perhaps a front-end to Herbie) and added to the huge stock of intimate knowledge about the people.

Rodeo Songs

Earlier this month, I linked some coal mining songs.   Another prolific source of American music has been the rodeo.   Here are a few songs on that theme that I like.

Bucking Horse Moon, Tom Russell

All This Way for the Short Ride, Tom Russell

Everything That Glitters is Not Gold,   Dan Seals

Someday Soon, Suzy Bogguss

Also Someday Soon, Ian Tyson

Saddle Bronc Girl, Ian Tyson

And this one isn’t about the rodeo, but about a young cowboy and his first cattle drive:

Banks of the Musselshell, Tom Russell

…and the same song by Ian Tyson

Others?

What Happened in 2012?

From cdrsalamander at Twitter, based on an analysis of Monitoring the Future survey data by Jean Twenge.

Thoughts?

Retrotech: Making a Tunic, 1700 Years Ago

The tunic was found in the Norwegian mountains.   Textile historians recreated it using the technologies current when it was made–pulling the wool naturally rather than shearing, spinning it into thread (with no spinning wheel), and weaving it into cloth. The labor required was estimated by having skilled people do a sample amount of each task required and extrapolating to the complete garment.

Total labor requirement was 780 hours.   The linked post estimates the cost at almost $38000, apparently assuming Norwegian labor rates.

I don’t think anyone would produce such garments using such expensive labor, though (unless it was for some very affluent niche market) but would use cheaper Asian or South American or even American labor.   Maybe a reasonable number including overhead and supervision would be something like $5/hour. Which still gives a cost of $3800.

And if someone made it for their own use, or that of someone in their family, that 780 hours would represent a pretty large piece of their work capacity for the entire year.

As Paul Graham noted, clothing was very expensive right up to the Industrial Revolution.

Worth Pondering

Like all intelligent men who are not in any way creative, Sir Robert Peel was dangerously sympathetic towards the creations of others. Incapable of formulating a system, he threw himself voraciously on those he came across, and applied them more vigorously than would their inventors.

–Andre Maurois

I don’t know enough about Sir Robert to have an opinion about whether this was a fair assessment of him, but I think it’s a valid and important point in general.   “Intelligent but not creative” describes a high percentage of people in academia, ‘nonprofits’, and the media (as long as you don’t set bar for ‘intelligent’ too high, especially in the case of the media)…and I think this has a lot to do with their eager adoption of theoretical frameworks such as critical race theory, cultural Marxism, and various types of gender theorizing…and the special and often weird vocabularies that tend to go with such things.

The need to conform, the desire to promote oneself and to feel superior, and the search for meaning also play a part, of course.

See Lead and Gold, which is why I discovered the Maurois quote in the first place. As LG notes, the voracious-framework-adoption phenomenon is also found in business, though at a somewhat lesser level than in academia, media, and nonprofits, I think, due to the exigencies of competition and the need to deal with reality sufficiently well to actually produce products and services.

See also my post Professors and the Pornography of Power, which cites Jonathan Haidt on what he calls the single-lens approach.

Previous Worth Pondering post.