I began this blog in 2018, and have developed theses on the fundamental importance of informed individual consent. I have been led by what I have learned in cited works. Now, seven years on, I realize that few readers are likely to look back to my earlier works to get the whole of my thesis (there are some side-trips). So it is time to extract from the earlier posts the portions of my thesis which have developed atop each other over the seven years, and perhaps to update them (reconsidering, eh?). As I do this, I will footnote the post from which I have extracted material, so that today’s reader will be able to see the entirety of a particular essay, along with all the resources.
In July of 2018, I began with this:
Apparently in a time when we in democracies need most to be able to think for ourselves, take in information, and analyze complex matters, we are to believe that most of us, if not all, are inherently unable to do so. But we who do have individual thoughts may be able to influence those others, not because we are authoritative nor perhaps persuasive in any way, but simply because we are heard by people near us. The task is to influence others more than they influence us on a certain matter.
Why? What problems does this influence by others known and unknown, present?
The first is that politicians and/or representatives of the State, and business, can exercise power over us without our knowledge, let alone consent. As people are influenced by false information, the amazing power of electronic communication over our brains and our susceptibility to chemical pleasure through impulses caused by a smart phone, we could be manipulated into acceptance or disregard of measures that are bad for us and for others. Or we could be coopted simply into whatever a particular crowd of people want to do at the moment, with or without explicit reason for the action. Safety from harm, the privilege and right of individual thought, freedom and wherewithal to plan a good future for ourselves and others, opportunity to understand what is happening around us and to us, these are all important things.
We must, essentially, distrust others until we find reason to have confidence in them, before we base our sense of informed consent on what we learn from them. That is, we must not automatically allow others near us to influence us to the point at which we forfeit giving our informed consent. This is true in our everyday concerns; it is true in politics and other activities involved in keeping democracy working.
This is why individual informed consent is important for our democracy.1
This analysis has held well. My new remarks here should be considered in the light of it, and vice-versa.
Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness), social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business, asserts that our children have been deliberately neurologically conditioned by smart phone technology to exhibit certain repetitive, reward-seeking behaviours, and thereby forfeit more self-assertive, independent, thoughtful behaviour. He illustrates the cause and effect by citing a successful experiment in training a cat: “’The one impulse, out of many accidental ones, which leads to pleasure, becomes strengthened, and stamped in.’” It is learning that is “’the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness.’”
He writes “Keep that phrase in mind whenever you see anyone (including yourself) making repetitive motions on a touch screen, as if in a trance: ‘the wearing smooth of a path in the brain.’” He calls this The Great Rewiring: the transition from flip- and other basic phones, to smart phones, together with faster internet service and more apps that perform tasks for you, and help organize you, It created many new pathways for Gen Z, and atrophied others. Haidt identifies four foundational harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. These have encouraged habits which are directly contrary to the accumulated wisdom of the world’s religious and philosophical traditions (Haidt is atheist. He writes “…but I find that I sometimes need words and concepts from religion to understand the experience of life as a human being. This is one of those times.”).
He quotes a Facebook and Instagram developer, who wrote that the goal was to create a “social-validation feedback loop…exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” In other words, the developers of these media and phones seek to manipulate their users. Gen Z is trained – not by the previously normal in-person, peer experiences within which to discern their place, level of prestige, likability, and success at getting along pleasantly; but by adult manipulation of their remote experiences which cast them into adult values (or absence of values), and ways of expressing things genuinely or falsely. For these, the young people have no natural defenses. Gen Z was the first to go through the confusion of puberty in the age of the smart phone.
Haidt explains that in every society, there are three “social axes.” The horizontal one measures our closeness to other people; the vertical one measures the importance or power of other people. The third proceeds three-dimensionally “up” toward what elevates us: virtue, moral elevation, or the divine. He asks whether the phone-based life pulls this upward or downward on this axis. If downward, then it has a spiritual cost, which, if affecting many in society, damages others (even non-users) as well, even if everyone feels their mental health is OK. Drawing from wisdom of ancient traditions and modern psychology, he claims that phone-based life affects people spiritually by blocking or counteracting six spiritual practices: shared sacredness; embodiment; stillness, silence, and focus or transcendence; being slow to anger and quick to forgive; and finding awe in nature.
Communities are strengthened when groups participate in healthy spiritual practices in person, at the same time, in the same physical place.
The disembodied asynchronous affiliations do not provide this elevated experience, heading down instead. “…there is no consensual construction of time, space, or objects around which people can use their ancient programming for sacredness….Living in a world of unstructured anomie leaves adolescents more vulnerable to on-line recruitment into radical political movements that offer moral clarity and a moral community, thereby pulling them away from their in-person communities.”
Most young people become heavy users of social media during the sensitive period for cultural learning, roughly between ages 9 and 15. Haidt has established a program through his blog After Babel, which offers strategies for parents and schools to deal with this problem. The recent efforts to limit smart phone use in schools is one of the results. His blog also provides other background information, for example “From Anxiety to Animosity: How Social Media Damages Relationships.”
I would add that we are not to suppose that people automatically grow out of this addiction as they age. They are caught. This, I think, forms a weak foundation for individual informed consent. The foundation is not strong enough to support democracy.
There is other evidence that the phone-based life may diminish our ability to thrive as mature adults, for example a recent article in the “Financial Times” https://www.ft.com/content/43e2b4f6-5ab7-4c47-b9fd-d611c36dad74https://www.ft.com/content/43e2b4f6-5ab7-4c47-b9fd-d611c36dad74 about the decline of coupledom, i.e., not just decline in marriages, but decline in getting together in person, which the authors ascribe partially to the rise of on-line living.
We are the targets of malignant purposes for the sake of profit and control of the customer, aside from ideological or political pursuits, paired now with malignant political pursuits.
The prime early example is Christopher Wylie’s Mindf*ck, Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America, published in 2018. He records that Russians were sent to California to learn about different cultures there. After several months, they built programs which categorized the social values of different groups, and then used social media to sway those groups in particular directions. It worked and continues to work, and not only with Gen Z. Young and old are susceptible to these methods.
It’s not only phone culture and social media which diminish and impair individual informed consent. Oral persuasion in person can be incredibly powerful. I discussed this last year:
I turn to the nature of truth as described by Robin Reames (The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: the Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times). She writes that in Plato’s time the written word was not yet common. Argument, reasoning in public debate or during instruction or conversation, were conducted orally. The force of a presentation through clever rhetoric and persuasion, emotionally evocative words especially in metaphor, and emotional presentation, won over the audience. Counter-arguments were cast in the same molds. Truth was found in the winning argument. There was not the opportunity to examine the line of thought and the meaning of the words after a speech before coming to a conclusion about the matter, because it was not written. It was not facts, but strength of oral presentation, which established truth. Reames says that as writing became more common it was possible for some to consider the argument more carefully, especially the facts.
Knowing what was true then, was a matter of either having one’s own possession of facts and/or being persuaded. I would suggest that being persuaded by something in writing is a surer source of knowledge than hearing an oration. If the orator has an established reputation for truth and honesty as demonstrated by the texts of speeches, then one can sit back and enjoy the entertainment of good oratory and rhetoric (very rare, indeed). Nonetheless, the dangers of effective rhetoric are real, as illustrated by her book and others.2
So, we are in an environment which influences many of us, overwhelming our ability for individual informed consent to what is happening around us. The steps to resist this successfully are easy for some, but apparently not as easy as submitting is for many.
- Get it in writing. Never trust oral material as your sole source of information. Written argument also can be morally and emotionally persuasive, but there is the time and the wherewithal to carefully and slowly examine the words, their flow, and the technique used to persuade. This is the opportunity to give or withhold informed consent
- Vet the sources for accuracy and biases (difficult if you don’t have much time, or don’t know how to find other sources against which to compare the first).
- Seek other views, particularly from other informed people in person. (Same caveat as 2 above, but this may actually help solve the problem in number 2).
- Get to know people of differing viewpoints, and talk with them often. Be sure to share you viewpoint; don’t simply listen to theirs. (Same caveat).
- If you don’t have time for this, then be sure not to have time to listen to advocates for causes, and don’t read their social media. Avoid influencers. Just stay away from everyone’s influence. But try, try to meet with trustworthy people with whom to exchange viewpoints.
It is a commonplace now (so much so that I need not cite publications) that tribalism is part of all this. There is a tendency for people to be dedicated to the social assumptions or values of that group where they want to fit in. So strong is this need to be accepted in the group that they will resist other values, even contradictory information and facts, and will sometimes even oppose and think badly of people holding those other values and facts. Those groups may exist primarily virtually or in person. This tribalism is very powerful. An individual’s participation in this group may be determined and perpetuated without informed consent, as may their belief in the group’s values. They are tucked in with the group, and their individual informed consent is buried.
Such an individual is lost to freedom and democracy.
Personal informed consent is essential to healthy democracy. You won’t keep your freedom without it. I hope you will give this due consideration, and share it with others.
Upon reconsidering... 
Good points. We’re, sadly, seeing compelling evidence of these destructive trends in today’s politics and culture wars.