The Soft Totalitarianism of Nudging

By Mark Tapson The Left’s new social engineering tool to steer Americans toward making the “correct” choices.

In his op-ed column “The Nudge Debate” in last Thursday’s New York Times, David Brooks promotes a concept that is gathering momentum among the leftist elites in, and connected to, the White House: “nudging,” a seemingly innocuous form of social engineering designed to steer us lazy, infantile Americans subtly toward making the “correct” choices in our personal and social lives. He calls it “social paternalism”; think of it as a kinder, gentler totalitarianism.
Nudging first appeared on the scene in 2009 with a book by Richard Thaler and Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein called Nudge, on “how government and other organizations could induce people to avoid common errors.” As Brooks explains it, those errors result from the fact that “people are pretty bad at sacrificing short-term pleasure for long-term benefit. We’re bad at calculating risk. We’re mentally lazy.” We make bad decisions unless “we’re forced to put in a little more mental effort.” In other words, we all have “a little Homer Simpson in us,” says Sunstein, and once people realize that, “then there’s a lot that can be done to manipulate them” – to nudge them.