Of the Free Market, Politics, and Buzzwords

A quote about neuromarketing stood out to me in a recent book written by Kathleen Stein titled The Genius Engine:

What's troubling is that neuromarketers may be able to bypass conscious thought to tap directly into, say, liking and desiring systems to incite us to press the buy button. (pg 160)

This is not precisely a new idea--that marketing attempts to subconsciously motivate people to buy a product--but it is imperative to understand this in the context of a politicking and consumer-market driven society such as America. I should make it clear that I do not find all sources of pleasure or desire to be hedonistic or sadistic, but given a sufficient emotional 'critical mass', it absolutely is just that.

To give background on what I shall specifically refer to, it is important to note that these areas of the brain play a preeminent, superordinate role in their respective arenas:

Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (dlPFC): Cognitive, analytical deliberation predicated on reason

Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (vmPFC): Emotional awareness and direct modulation, though influenced by the dlPFC.

Orbitofrontal Cortex (OFC): Involved in reward-based learning and expectation; the vmPFC is subsumed by the OFC in some definitions

Subcortical Reward Circuitry: primitive circuitry that responds to what is liked or wanted by releasing opioids and dopamine respectively.

Now back to the idea of neuromarketing and the 'free market' we so espouse today. As Stein points out, it is clear that a consumer-driven market's goal is to activate the subcortical and primitive regions of the brain that drive an individual to desire and obtain products. It is interesting to think that our society believes a free market system is indeed just that, free, when in fact it is precisely a result of hijacking the subcortical system of the brain that entails the majority of consumption in America's society today. Is this effectively different from heroin or cocaine? Yes and no. Both utilize the reward circuitry of the brain to hijack the behavior of a person, but a consumer-driven stimulus in a commercial society will not have the same strength, obviously, as heroin or cocaine. We can choose not to act on every desirable thing we see (some people better than others), but given sufficient critical mass generated by learned consumerism--resulting from changes to the OFC which incorporate the lessons 'learned' from registering reward-circuitry activity--is it not the case that this ability to choose is selectively pressured against, mitigated, in a sense?

Furthermore, a consumer-driven economy that is predicated on novel pleasure rather than a functional improvement of one's life can be directly in conflict with a person's health in the same way (albeit less overt) that addiction operates in the brain. Examples? The preference of a cheeseburger over a salad. Buying a new car that gets 16 miles to the gallon, siphoning funds from other areas of one's life and unnecessarily polluting the environment. The desire to eat sugar until one's pancreas explodes (hyperbole) from developing Type II Diabetes. Buying a new Blu-Ray DVD instead of donating to a fund for the treatment of disease that one will inevitably develop as a consequence of the natural process of aging. It is easy to see, given the way a "free" market system operates--by subcortically driving our behavior toward short-term pleasure--that it is not as free as we'd like to think, either in terms of being free from strings attached or in terms of allowing us to freely analyze the positives and negatives based on rational thought (that we mistakenly presume to be a unique feature of humankind; we are not, in fact, driven by objective reason alone, and evidently not even predominantly so).

It stands to reason from this line of thought that a market free to run roughshod should not be given quite the subversive power it has accrued from government deregulation that allows it to subjugate our long-term interests. Given the direction of our nation comparatively to other nations in life expectancy, education, and mental health rates and indices, this is tantamount to a neural Pyrrhic Victory. I am not stupid to believe that a managed market will ultimately be a standalone solution to this, but a radical redistribution of wealth through taxation for the purpose of funding university-level programs dedicated specifically to long-term interests--such as health, education, science--is precisely what is requisite to curtail such a tacit enslavement.

To the issue of politics and buzzwords, it is first important to outline the role the vmPFC plays in monitoring & modulating more primitive limbic (emotional) areas of the brain. As Sam Harris, Joshua Greene, and to a lesser extent Vinod Goel have demonstrated, when it comes to decision-making, emotions and beliefs play a large role in dictating the appropriate course of action. While it is the case that the dlPFC also plays a role in decision-making, the course of action is dictated by the emotional salience of a stimulus. In other words, given sufficient critical emotional mass, rational thought will be subordinate to emotionally-driven beliefs that decide what is right and wrong in actions/beliefs.

How precisely does this relate to Buzzwords? Politics in the last 10 years has seen an exponential increase in terms that are based on manipulating feelings to a point that influences one's opinion to a politician's advantage. This is not news either, but is important to know that this is analogous to the supposed "free market" model we so adore. If an individual is asked if they would mind if the government has the immune right to tamper with their private lives without requiring evidence to support the effectiveness of this putative government right, almost universally people will say "no." However, if you label it the Protect American Act, the emotional tide turns and people most certainly will be enraged by any effort not to protect America, thus giving the emotional critical mass necessary to override cognitive, rational thought generated in the analysis of the actual plan itself. Isn't it ironic that "free" market itself is simply ostensible, a buzzword to generate emotional dissonance toward government management?

In summation, it is precisely due to a wildly consumerized pandering to the evolutionarily lowest common denominator of the subcortical and emotionally-laden circuitry of the brain that society digests things that otherwise may not be good for them, that come at the cost of the long-term interest of the species, and effecitvely reduce one's ability to cognitively predicate 'opinion' on empirical evidence. It is precisely why today we continue to slide in our cultural dedication to education, science, physical health, and mental health, and that unless we change the way we perceive the world, our nation will be diminished. Based on the tenets of what is neuroscientifically understood to drive human behavior, one must not--as Republicans suggest inaccurately--implicitly trust a lay individual engulfed in such a society to *necessarily be* an authority on how money ought to be used, that somehow the individual outweighs the whole. Inextricable to health and self-interest is, in fact, a necessary mitigation of self-indulgence that is exacerbated by the Republican "free" market culture.

From Goel and [others'] work, it is certainly apparent how influential and deeply embedded in logical thinking are irrational, emotion-dominant belief systems. These subterranean affective wellsprings undoubtedly can be tapped and harnessed to incalculable coercive control and profit. "People make tons of decisions and often they don't know why," [Marco Iacoboni of UCLA] said. (pg 162.)

These are the reasons FDR was right.

The Guile of Wickedness

It is imperative that I say, of course, the usual pleasantries that are egocentrically satisfying: "Of course things are getting better. Consider the systematic mitigation of disease, warfare, and general atrocities of mankind." I genuinely do believe this, but on a provisional basis in the same way creationists believe "the jury is still out" on Evolution. This is to say that while change has no inherent valence, given our stronger interpersonal interconnections stemming from a global economy and cultural exchange, the future does look bright when juxtaposed with the repugnant prevalence of ethnocentrism merely 50 years ago.

While a burgeoning population does run risk of destroying itself through blatant disregard for its environment, as strongly and accurately argued by leading Anthropologist Jared Diamond along with many climatologists who provide evidence of global warming, it is important to make the point that our morality as a whole improves as technology and nutrition improves. Acute disease reduces as a result of a general improvement in nutrition, which augments our intellectual standing as a society as well. I've too much to add to the issue, but suffice it to say the link above outlines exactly how 'more modernized' societies are more consequentialist in their decision making. This is to say that the results dictate action, rather than deontological dictation, which is essentially a punitive, retributivist form of reciprocity.

Be that as it may, the guile of wickedness is simply put, the reduction of what is acute into what is chronic. It is tantamount to the famous Boiling Frog Syndrome, but shall I tweak the analogy for purposes of acumen. As Joshua Greene (link above) points out, emotions play a predominant role in decision-making, and there appears to be a subjective threshold as to when emotional stimuli saliently incur an overriding effect on decision-making, which is largely predicted upon direct personal involvement or agency. This threshold differs from person to person, but it is essentially relative to the prefrontal cortex's capacity to successfully curtail the emotional activity in the limbic lobe, and whether or not sufficient environmental stimuli are present to activate emotional circuitry in the first place. To zoom the picture out, this is to say, simply, cognition may have the capacity to curtail emotions, but emotions inevitably guide our decisions (given sufficient stimulation), and in an unreliable manner.

Now to the Boiling Frog Syndrome. Simply put, if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out. However, if you pot the frog into the put, then slowly increase the heat to the point where it is boiling, the frog will inevitably boil to death. To me, this is not dissimilar to the use of atomic bombs vs. carpet bombing in World War II. The United States carpetbombing campaign in Japan (and Europe) sufficiently leveled many cities, but unfortunately did not carry the emotional 'critical mass', if you will, that was necessary to override the zealotry of the Japanese at the time. However, once the atomic bomb was implemented (or twice, to be exact, given that the Japanese were mostly unaware of the first bomb), emotional critical mass was sufficiently met to cause a cessation in fighting. This works both ways of course, in that emotional critical mass can create war just as much as end war. The point is that it induces people to act in search of a resolution, or put another way, forces them out of complacency.

This pattern has similarly repeated itself in a cyclical manner throughout history, where atrocities meet a certain critical mass of emotional salience (normally that which is local or familiar enough to us to cause up roar), causing people to spring into action in an inevitable attempt to seek a resolution. The Boston Massacre. Archduke Ferdinand's Assassination. The World Trade Center bombing. The blitzkrieg of ally Poland. The personal attack at Pearl Harbor. None of the above are truly similar to the atomic bombing of Hiroshoma & Nagasaki, but in effect they are, insofar as they represented a dramatic spike in the emotional salience of the environment at that time. Peace + 9/11 = punctuation of emotions not dissimilar to atomic bombings during war time. Essentially, people need an emotional critical mass to act, and as such, a Machiavellian adaptation to such a critical mass would be by not throwing people into a boiling pot, but rather just ratcheting up the heat a degree or two per hour, creating a slower yet equally disastrous resultof death.

By relegating the wickedness of certain selfish actions that once sufficiently caused traumatic emotional stress (and summarily an unintended reaction against the wickedness) into that which keeps people below critical emotional mass, by essentially disseminating suffering temporally into a chronic illness, individuals who control far more lives than they ought to have successfully navigated the stormy weathers of human emotion. I find it imperative that we look at this through a cognitive lens, rather than emotional, as the effects of chronic illness in America are truly more salient than any terror attack in the history of mankind, but do not in any measurable form cross the threshold that evolutionarily has spurred man into action. As a society, we have had the wool pulled over our emotions by increased economic, political, and social stratification that causes immeasurable suffering that the majority are born into. We must be aware, and cognitively understand that death is death, and the ripping of ones innards is serious, but not as serious, mathematically, as the diabetic neuropathic destruction of the lives of two people.

Math matters.