Think Tanks 2 - The Enterprise Strikes Back
Let me start with what I believe will be the ending of this article.?
We have successfully created a world where the power of the few outweighs the voices of the many. Power has become completely asymmetric.?
Why and how this happened is the story of the why and how of institutions we today call Think Tanks, people we call Lobbyists and the role of this amorphous phenomenon the modern world called the Media.?
But I should start the story with something personal that I never questioned until recently when I realized that exactly that which I had inherited as a belief from my ancestors, something they said could not happen, has actually happened.
Both my mother-in-law and my mother said the same thing in different ways. “Educate yourself” my mother-in-law kept saying. She came from a very challenging and difficult history pre and post WW2. When she finally came to a place of peace, she decided to acquire the one thing she insisted no one could take from her (she had lost everything prior to this), an education, knowledge, and the ability to discern the world. She studied and got as far as she could with a Ph D from a prestigious university. And she then proceeded to put this knowledge to use in doing something good for the world.?
My mother’s history was almost the opposite. She came from a very comfortable history but was convinced that in education lay the key to a good society. Only education, she believed, could help a people out of poverty and protect it from powers with malicious intent. She spent her entire life teaching children of all walks of life and the older she got the poorer were the children she kept teaching. Her last classroom was in the guardhouse at the entry to a cemetery.?
Both ladies finally left this good earth somewhat disillusioned. Not because they no longer believed that education was key but because they sensed that something had happened to blunt the effects of education on people. The humanity, discernment, and capacity for thoughtfulness that they had hoped would come from education seemed to have drowned in some peculiar form of anti-intellectualism. The voices of the people did not seem to matter anymore. The powers that be seemed to live on a different planet.?
What the two ladies did not know was that this was a not a happenchance of history but instead a carefully orchestrated outcome.?
And that brings me finally to the Think Tanks.?
Reports say that there are more than 11,000 of these institution in world today.??The USA is reported to have more than 1800 of them followed by China, the UK, India, and Germany as having the next largest numbers in that order. Sweden is reported to have upwards of 30 such institutions.?
Some are large some small but a majority of them have some characteristics in common.?
Almost all or a majority of their funding comes from industry. The amounts and the donors remain opaque at best.?
Their memberships are closely controlled and guarded. John Q Citizen on the way home from his shift at the local factory is not likely to be welcomed in for stimulating conversation and a refreshing pint at such a place.
The products they produce, reports, seminars, research, are expensive and not exactly available for general sale and consumption. And, are mostly targeted at governmental bodies where policy is made.
Despite being funded and staffed primarily by industry their main area of focus appears to be regulation and policy rather than industrial technological or scientific research. Which is a rather curious characteristic.?
And finally, they are curiously described often as places where research is done outside of traditional universities or as universities without students.?
This strange marriage between think tanks and policy / law makers where the latter are often described as having an “extraordinary dependence” on the former raises some very interesting and, in my mind, disturbing questions.?
Given the number of such institutions and their shifting memberships and participants and their private nature there must be some very interesting and profound thinking going on that is not deemed acceptable for distribution among a general educated citizenry. Why?
Why is thinking (Research, debate) outsourced to some private sphere?
Why is policy / legislation of such concern to Industry and the Military??
What is their goal in funding and participating in this cloistered enterprise of thinking?
Prior to the 70s Think Tanks tried to maintain a distance between their work and government policy making but in 1973 there was a sea change in their direction and approach.?
“Paul Weyrich, then a Senate staffer, asked AEI’s president why the study had not been released in time to influence the vote, and received the reply that AEI did not want to intervene and “affect the outcome of the vote.” In Weyrich’s view, think tank studies of this kind ought to influence such votes, and AEI’s avoidance of influencing legislation was self- defeating.?In 1973 he helped found the Heritage Foundation, the first US think tank to explicitly work to achieve specific political outcomes on Capitol Hill. The Foundation’s stated mission is to “formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.”?
By making this commitment, Heritage inaugurated two trends that continue to this day: one is that think tanks since the 1970s have increasingly expanded their activities to include advocating policies and broader political agendas; the second is the preponderance of conservative (right of center) influence in explicitly partisan or ideological organizations.” (ref.?here.)
These two trends did not remain confined to the US. Most of the expansion in think tanks globally has happened post 1970s and they have very clearly followed these two templates from the Heritage Foundation.?
The result appears to be that privatized “thinking” has been weaponized to change the playing field of policy and legislation such that the goals and wishes of the few have far greater influence than the voices of the many.?
As proof – tens of thousands of voices from the young the world over today, galvanized by the leadership of people like Greta Thunberg and her comrades internationally pleading for action on the changing climate and collapsing biosphere are ignored with impunity. Not a single government today has any priority or meaningful action on these issues. Industry dominates and usurps the few attempts (e.g. COPs) using their “experts” that think tanks provide to sow enough doubt that the voices of the people and their own “experts” (scientists from all over the world from Universities and other independent research groups) have no impact and are rendered impotent in the discourse.?
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The final questions that bubble up in the wake of all this are the following:?
Why do industries and the military complex need a skewed and manipulated playing field in policy and legislation??
Are they aware of some inherent weakness in their position and claim for existence that forces them to manipulate the world, as without such distortion they would have no justification to exist as they do??
Are they scared that without such corrupted / biased “thinking” they would be seen by the eyes of the many as being the emperor with no clothes? Or even worse, as the emperor who wished their people ill??
Another way to ask the same question would be: Are conservatives and the free enterprise system so bankrupt in themselves that without a captive policy / legislative environment and a hijacked educational / intellectual landscape they would not survive? If that is the case perhaps, they should not.
This article cannot have the scope of investigating and exposing in detail what many Think Tanks do and how they operate. My objective has been to raise some fundamental questions about their existence, purpose, and impact on the modern world. They have evolved prewar, postwar and in recent times from being institutions guided by overarching global concerns of a modern age to becoming much more “activist” as it were in an ideological and partisan enterprise. Unspoken and yet inherent and embedded in their charter has become the unquestioned faith in what Judge Powell believed was under attack and needed to be protected at all costs – the American free enterprise system and its concomitant conservative socio-politics.
So let me start concluding it by offering from the same reference as above the following?
“According to some accounts, sometimes think tank policy work can be remarkably influential. When Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, the Heritage Foundation drafted a comprehensive plan for his presidency that contained more than 2000 policy initiatives. The work, entitled,?Mandate for Leadership?was referred to as the “bible” of the Reagan administration. By the time he left the White House, Reagan had implemented 60% of these proposals.”??
I naively thought that what administrations were supposed to do through Congress, The Executive branch and courts was to fulfill the wishes of the millions of people who voted them to power and not execute the plans laid out by a biased and partisan think tank.?
Since then, Think Tanks and Lobbyists worldwide have become more blatant, normalized and arrogant about their work and influence.?
Timbro?in Sweden does not attempt to hide its ambitions in any euphemistic language. They share the same ambitions as Heritage. And Think Tanks no longer work in isolation. There are networks of networks where Think Tanks participate, share, and coordinate their efforts globally to achieve their stated ends. Think of organizations like?Atlas?or?Epicenter?or?ALEC?(also see?here) and what, how and why they collaborate and coordinate the efforts of many national and international think tanks.?
And Timbro in Sweden, a nation where education at all levels is state supported and / or free has despite that created a parallel educational institute?Campus Timbro?presumably to educate people in their own image rather than trust the education from an independent university. Judge Powell’s ideas and reach have indeed been wide, long lasting, and powerful.?
Through human history, thinking evolved as a result of our socialization, education and living experience. High or low, profound or lay, thinking was something everyone was deemed capable of. Earlier societies, monarchic, feudal, or colonial etc. differentiated thinking based on qualities other than competence and capability. The birth of the era of universal franchise and rule of law brought with it also the concept of democratic education. The right to free speech and all that it assumed and implied was made sacrosanct in modern societies. The think tank as a concept subverts this foundation stone of modern democracies by privatizing the playing field of thought and making the tendentious thoughts of the powerful few invested with more rights in society than the thoughts of the many. In this way the humanistic enterprise that lies at the heart of modern democracy is corroded and universal franchise is turned into a fa?ade behind which the power elite shape the world in their own image to serve their own purposes.?
Education and knowledge can indeed be taken away. It is simple. One simply debases education to the point where nothing is left except words leeched of all substantive meaning. One can then fill those words with whatever meaning is required for the day.?
A prime example of such a word today is Freedom. What once inspired a people to throw off the yoke of imperial slavery is today presented as an existential choice of which brand of white industrial bread one should choose in a store full of white industrial bread.
I will end this article in the same way as I started it by sharing something personal. One day I asked my two children why they rarely asked questions. They protested and said, “of course we do”. But I persisted and pointed out how on many occasions they had a chance to ask questions, but they didn’t and if they did it was mostly just about practical things. At which point my oldest sat up in the sofa and said something to the effect that maybe I was right. It seems they were not really encouraged to ask many questions in school. A high school in one of the better school districts in the US. A school district praised for its quality and achievements. They could ask about how, when, where, what but were ACTIVELY DISCOURAGED FROM ASKING WHY.?
Why?
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Selected References and reading materials.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/us/politics/think-tanks-research-and-corporate-lobbying.html????(This is behind a paywall.)