Eliane Glaser - Get Real - How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions

And there’s another factor at play. With the melting away of conflicts between East and West in the Cold War and Right and Left in our politics, the big ideologies have been consigned to history. The influential political scientist Francis Fukuyama hailed ‘the end of history’ and the triumph of capitalist democracy. But this book argues that agendas never really disappeared. They just began to operate undercover, leaving us with a looking-glass world in which reality is spun and vested interests appear in disguise. Politicians now regard the word ‘ideology’ as an insult, but they are driven by ideology nonetheless. It’s now a covert form of ideology that’s at work, and that we ignore at our peril. This book puts ideology back at the heart of the problem, but also of the potential solution.

Because if we want to improve our world – indeed, with the environmental challenges we face, to save it – we need not only to identify hidden agendas, but also to have explicit aspirations. We need not to be afraid to say what we mean and what we mean to do. If we’re too credulous in some ways, we also don’t believe in enough. We need to debunk delusions and reclaim ideology as positive idealism, otherwise people power and revolution will remain empty ciphers that serve to obscure the lack of real agency and real change.

There are some who might find the claim that we live our lives under the spell of pervasive and self-defeating delusions somewhat paranoid. Are we in fact perfectly clear-sighted, yet impotent? Or just comfortably apathetic? So what if technological innovation doesn’t solve world poverty, but allows us to have a bit of fun? Is it so wrong to download an app onto your mobile phone which causes it, when moved on a flat surface, to fart? Some of the illusions we live by are helpful, even pleasant; they help us get out of bed on a Monday morning, and allow us to indulge in a little couch-potato escapism. Sometimes – I will admit it – I feel a bit like a crazed conspiracy theorist. But then I read that David Cameron has welcomed Simon Cowell’s idea for a ‘political X Factor’ in which hot topics are debated and voted on by the British public, and has launched a competition to ‘develop an online platform that enables us to tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges’, and an amended version of that famous aphorism pops into my head: Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to con you.

The delusions I’ll be talking about in this book are sustained by a seamless blurring of deception and collusion. When people talk about conspiracy theories, the assumption is that there are evil agents doing the conspiring. But the conspiracies I’m interested in are really diffuse. We are both agents and victims, and our compliance with soft power comes about through unconscious creeping cooperation. It’s in the drinking water.

I am, however, passionately committed to the idea that decoding delusions can help us to loosen their limiting grip on our lives, and take action to improve our world for real. Because it’s these whitewashed problems and illusory solutions that are responsible for our curious sense of paralysis. But we can see through them if we look hard enough.

I’ll start, in the first chapter, with the story of how ideologies went underground. Then in the chapters that follow, I’ll take a polemical pop at how hidden agendas and topsy-turvy illusions operate today: in relation to politics, equality, new technology, the media, work, freedom, science, food, and the environment. In each chapter, I’ll highlight one rule of covert ideology’s lying game: a trick of the trade for you to recognise when you’re going about your illusion-spotting day. The idea is that bit by bit, the powerful elites in our societies that thrive on deception will be forced to play their hand. Game on.

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