Social engineering (often in the form of outright propaganda) has always been a thing, for as long as human societies have existed. However, it wasn't until the advent of world-wide television that social engineering became a global thing. The era of the internet boosted the possibilities a thousand-fold.
Sometimes social engineering campaigns have achieved positive things. For example smoking has been on a steady decline over the past 30-40 years thanks to a massive world-wide anti-smoking social engineering campaign. (While it has never gone completely away, the trend is positive.)
Not all social engineering campaigns have been that good, however. Some have caused a devastating amount of damage, to society, to people's health, or to the environment.
The result of some social engineering campaigns, however, are much harder to ascertain (and prove) whether they have been positive or negative, and the effects may be much, much subtler and hard to accurately measure.
I would like to present one example of what I believe has been a social engineering campaign with a largely negative outcome.
Some decades ago, especially in the United States (and then, of course, spreading from there), there was introduced this idea and concept of "personal space" (and many other similar variants of the same idea). You shouldn't touch people without permission, especially strangers. In fact, you shouldn't even go unnecessarily close to other people, especially strangers, without permission. Keep your distance. Respect their "personal space". After all, some people get anxious and nervous if people are pushy and get too close, not to talk about touching without consent! Heck, in the modern world if you touch someone without permission you could be accused of sexual harassment!
This campaign has been so effective that not only has the amount of physical touching decreased significantly, especially in the western world, but the idea has been successfully inculcated deep into the brains of most people. Most people will instinctively defend the concept if the question arises.
We now know, however, how important human touch is to one's health (or, perhaps more precisely, how detrimental a chronically and significantly diminished amount of human touch is to one's health). The "respect people's personal space" campaign has become so successful, and has turned out to be so detrimental, that medicine has even coined the term "touch starvation" to describe the effect. As the webmd site states:
"When you don’t get enough physical touch, you can become stressed, anxious, or depressed. As a response to stress, your body makes a hormone called cortisol. This can cause your heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension, and breathing rate to go up, with bad effects for your immune and digestive systems.
These things can lead to worse quality of sleep and a higher risk of infections. Other medical conditions, including diabetes, asthma, and high blood pressure, may get worse.
Long-term touch starvation could even trigger post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)."
And the thing is, like with so many other successful social engineering campaigns, the notion has been inculcated so deeply into people's minds that it's not going anywhere, even though we now know how detrimental it is. People are still wary of touching or even getting close to other people, and will still defend the idea (and try to restrict it to romantic partners and, perhaps, "close friends", if even them), even when fully knowing the above.
Yet another road to hell paved with good intentions.
Comments
Post a Comment