Social engineering

Social engineering is a discipline in the social sciences that refers to efforts to influence popular attitudes, social behaviors, and resource management on a large scale. Social Engineering is the application of the scientific method for social concern. Social Engineers use the methods of science to analyze and understand social systems, so as to arrive at appropriate decisions as scientists, and not as politicians. The major difference between politicians and social engineers is that scientists base decisions on careful evaluations and objectivity without differential advantage. In the political arena, the counterpart of social engineering is political engineering.

Decision-making can affect the safety and survival of literally billions of people. As expressed by German Sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in his study The Present Problems of Social Structure,^[1] society can no longer operate successfully using outmoded methods of social management. To achieve the best outcomes, all conclusions and decisions must use the most advanced techniques and include reliable statistical data, which can be applied to a social system.^{[citation needed]} In other words, Social Engineering is a data-based scientific system used to develop a sustainable design so as to achieve the intelligent management of Earth’s resources with the highest levels of freedom, prosperity, and happiness within a population.

History

Social Engineers must have reliable information about society and access to effective tools. Both of these only became available relatively recently - roughly within the past one hundred years. The development of the social sciences made it possible to gather and analyze information about social attitudes and trends, which is necessary in order to judge the initial state of a society. At the same time, the development of modern communications technology and the media provided the tools through which social engineering could be carried out.

While social engineering can be carried out by any organization - whether large or small, public or private - the most comprehensive (and often the most effective) campaigns of social engineering are those initiated by powerful central governments.

Extremely intensive social engineering campaigns occurred in countries with authoritarian governments. In the 1920s, the government of the Soviet Union embarked on a campaign to fundamentally alter the behavior and ideals of Soviet citizens, to replace the old social frameworks of Tsarist Russia with a new Soviet culture, to create the New Soviet man. The Soviets used newspapers, books, film, mass relocations, and even architectural design tactics to serve as "social condenser" and change personal values and private relationships. Similar examples are the Chinese "Great Leap Forward" and "Cultural Revolution" program and the Khmer Rouge's plan of deurbanization of Cambodia. In Singapore, the government's housing policies attempt to promote a mix of all races within each subsidized housing district in order to foster social cohesion and national loyalty while providing the citizens with affordable housing.^{[citation needed]}

Non-authoritarian regimes tend to rely on more sustained social engineering campaigns that create more gradual, but ultimately as far-reaching, change. Examples include the "War on Drugs" in the United States, the increasing reach of intellectual property rights and copyright, and the promotion of elections as a political tool. The campaign for promoting elections, which is by far the most successful of the three examples, has been in place for over two centuries. Social theorists of the Frankfurt School in Weimar Germany like Theodor Adorno had also observed the new phenomenon of mass culture and commented on its new manipulative power, when the rise of the Nazis drove them out of the country around 1930 (many of them became connected with the Institute for Social Research in the United States). The Nazis themselves were no strangers to the idea of influencing political attitudes and re-defining personal relationships. The Nazi propaganda machine under Joseph Goebbels was a synchronized, sophisticated and effective tool for creating public opinion.

In a similar vein the Greek military junta of 1967-1974 attempted to steer Greek public opinion not only by propaganda but also by inventing new words and slogans such as: palaiokommatismos (translated as old-partyism), Ellas Ellinon Christianon translated as: Greece of Christian Greeks, Ethnosotirios Epanastasis translated as Nation-saving Revolution meaning coup d'état etc.

Social engineering can be used as a means to achieve a wide variety of different results, as illustrated by the different governments and other organizations that have employed it. The discussion of the possibilities for such manipulation became especially active following World War II, with the advent of television, and continuing discussion of techniques of social engineering - particularly in advertising - is still quite pertinent in the western model of consumer capitalism.

Literature

George Orwell

A popular novel taught in most high schools is the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the known world is controlled by three perpetually warring superpowers. The story takes place in a brutal dystopia that bombards its population with propaganda, constantly monitoring every citizen with ubiquitous TV cameras and police patrols.

Karl Popper

In his classic political science book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, volume I, The Spell of Plato, Karl Popper examined the application of the critical and rational methods of science to the problems of the open society. In this respect, he made a crucial distinction between the principles of democratic social reconstruction (called 'piecemeal social engineering') and 'Utopian social engineering'

Popper wrote:^[2]

"the piecemeal engineer will adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evil of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good."

According to Popper, the difference between 'piecemeal social engineering' and 'Utopian social engineering' is

"the difference between a reasonable method of improving the lot of man, and a method which, if really tried, may easily lead to an intolerable increase in human suffering. It is the difference between a method which can be applied at any moment, and a method whose advocacy may easily become a means of continually postponing action until a later date, when conditions are more favorable. And it is also the difference between the only method of improving matters which has so far been really successful, at any time, and in any place, and a method which, wherever it has been tried, has led only to the use of violence in place of reason, and if not to its own abandonment, at any rate to that of its original blueprint."

See also

• Edward Bernays
• The Venus Project
• Paternalism
• Propaganda / Public relations
• Psychological warfare
• Social constructionism
• Social control
• Total institution
• Framing (social sciences)
• Social engineer
• Engineers of the human soul

References

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (August 2008)

• Charles Arthur Willard Liberalism and the Social Grounds of Knowledge Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Further reading

• "The Best That Money Can’t Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty, and War", Jacque Fresco, 2002.
• Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Noam Chomsky, 1998.
• Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott, 1999.
• Social Engineering, Adam Podgórecki, 1996.