I wonder how Sinkers would go in the age of compulsory wokeness, cancel culture and social media pile-ons.

Well, there is now a new, turbo-charged version of Sinkers’ Law. It is the practised art of the double down.

DISSIDENTS

When something you do fails, even spectacularly, especially in politics, you don’t simply ignore the evidence of failure – though you definitely do that, of course – nor do you just silence or ridicule opponents and dissidents.

Yes, you do that as well, and the tools now available for canceling opposing views are plentiful and, mostly, effective.

Above all, what you now do is to double down on your original, failed policy agenda. You go harder. This is next level Ian Sinclair.

The emergence of this new mode of politics has a lot to do with two, not unconnected, developments in Western culture over the past half century – the post-modernist long march and the advent of life-as-marketing.

When there is no such thing as “truth”, society and politics reduce to a Hobbesian war of competing “narratives”, or, as they say in the better sociology departments, “discourses”.

As a result, there is no longer a premium on rational argument. You no longer have to prove your case.

The practice of government becomes less and less about evidence and more about presentation, about having your version of events prevail over that of competitors, and become embedded in the thinking of voters.

Many on the Right see the triumph of post-modernism and “anything goes” as reducing all social relations to those of power. True enough.

Another outcome, equally consequential and problematic, is that all politics are reduced to marketing. And not just good, old-fashioned marketing, but marketing evolved to serve ideology.

You are, suddenly, not in a battle of ideas but of public relations. Your primary text is no longer Machiavellli’s The Prince but rather Edward Bernays’ Propaganda or Robert Cialdini’s Influence, marketing classics both.

In the age of PR, it is all about the “optics”, the selling of images. With apologies to our recently departed prime minister, we are all Scotties from Marketing now. In politics. In the academy, sadly including the sciences. Climate botherers. Corporatist sport. The legacy media. Woke companies especially.

HYPNOTISM

And the tools of the trade are those of persuasion, by whatever it takes, including propaganda, lies, hypnotism, distortion, false binaries (like vaccines versus lockdowns, droughts and floods versus action on climate change), the creation of fear and the use of euphemism to disguise ugly realities.

All these tools appeal to the human psyche, often through what the American scholar George Lakoff termed “conceptual metaphors”.

It is all about narrative construction with deep appeal, the building of emotional attachments.

Thomas Harrington of the Brownstone Institute calls this “rhetorical framing”. The “frame game” requires the relentless curation of messaging, and endless narrative maintenance.

Some examples. Euthanasia becomes “voluntary assisted dying”. Same sex marriage is “all about the love”, nothing else.

COVID fascism becomes ensuring “COVID safety”. Killing the unborn is “reproductive health”. Every last one of these is a marketing campaign.

Harrington notes “the tendency of the human brain to subordinate the careful analysis of empirically proven details to the embrace of an overarching cognitive metaphor that appeals to their deeper, if often unstated, cultural and emotional values”. Just think of triggering.

The best example of what Harrington terms “elite information management” and its most brazen form, the strategic double down, has to be the COVID vaccine and booster rollout.

The vaccine is simply too big to fail. (The whole COVID narrative is too big to fail).

Too many careers of the political class depend on it. The truth about the effectiveness, the need and the safety of the COVID jab is literally neither here nor there.

No matter what new peer reviewed study emerges showing waning efficacy after a month or two, no matter what the adverse reactions reporting regimes show in any number of jurisdictions, no matter how many athletes and others die of the newly emerged, still unexplained “SADS” (Sudden Adult Death Syndrome), no matter that Australian hospitals and Intensive Care Units are now chock full of the vaccinated and boostered, the mandates roll on.

Tens of thousands of unjabbed unemployed remain on the dole and the shameless advertisements for the useless third and fourth jabs still clog the airways.

We have, simultaneously, a pandemic of the vaccinated, yawning non-interest from the public in all things COVID and a ramped-up government-driven booster program. Double down. Of course, even calling the COVID jab a vaccine is, itself, an act of marketing.

The double down is also the default strategy of climate alarmists.

It has been a strategic error of all those brave and innocent souls (like the great Peter Ridd) who keep on chipping away at the falsity of climate alarmism ever to have assumed that the truth would eventually win out.

RETHINK

The weight of evidence, just like with the vaccines, would demand a rethink, surely. Not in this game.

Not when serious newspapers – well, The Guardian – can refer to the poor souls of Lismore as being “on the frontline of the climate emergency”.

When the argument is made, with a straight face, that driving electric cars will prevent floods. That the snow will stop falling (as Perisher and Mt Buller are currently drowning in the stuff). That the dams will no longer fill.

The irrepressible film producer Robin Monotti recently stated that, in the age of “fact checkers”, “science had been reduced to marketing”.

There is no longer a semblance of accountability in the sciences, nor in politics, nor in the media. Seeking truth is no longer the game.

A classic double down occurred this week when The Sydney Morning Herald breathlessly reported, “Energy crisis boosts case for renewables, top policy adviser says”.

This would be Anne Collyer, Chair of the unfortunately named Energy Security Board, who executed a neat double down when she claimed that “the pressure on the electricity grid highlighted the need for reform to move ‘beyond the crisis’ by continuing the long-term shift to solar, wind, hydro and other renewable power”.

Collyer’s predecessor joined in the chorus, with a headline from the renewables campaigner-journalist, Ticky Fullerton, stating “Reality check for energy: coal-fired generators just not reliable, says Kerry Schott”. Coal just not reliable?

A letter to the editor of one Sydney newspaper last week blamed the coming blackouts on a decade of “inaction” on renewables.

For Zoe Daniel, “journalist, politician, columnist and broadcaster”, climate science denialism caused the energy crisis. Really?

I fear Zoe wouldn’t know a testable hypothesis from her elbow. I prefer the Sky News narrative that sees Australia as a global laughing stock.

BAKED-IN

Such thinking as that of Collyer and Schott defies scientific method and beggars belief. But it is supported by the all-important, baked-in narrative of net-zero, of “sustainability”.

This bogus narrative can be compelling, so long as the marketing is up to scratch.

Marketing used to be about persuading customers (or voters) of the excellence of your offering. That version assumed a rational consumer choice. That model no longer exists.

Now, on the face of it, customers and shareholders are less interested in the quality of your product or service than in whether you have the right attitude to indigenous people, homosexuals, whales, trees, climate and vaccines.

And Kool-Aid imbibing consumers of dodgy narratives now simply give the thumbs-up to the latest virtue to be signalled.

Referring to the “frame game”, Harrington notes that “unfortunately, most citizens are still not clued in to how it operates in their lives.”