This is such a wonderful question. I realize I didn't have time this morning to share this with you, but it's in my written statement.
There's a fascinating story here about a U.S. Senate subcommittee that was convened in 1971, chaired by a famous senator, Sam Ervin, who was one of the Watergate senators who defended democracy in that crisis. It was a bipartisan committee, with everyone from arch-conservative Strom Thurmond to Ted Kennedy. It was convened around the subject of behavioural modification, because behavioural modification had been imported from the Cold War into civil society and was now being used in schools, hospitals, prisons and all kinds of institutions of captive populations. Sam Ervin wrote the conclusion for this committee. He said that behavioural modification fundamentally undermines individual sovereignty and robs people of autonomy, and without individual sovereignty and without autonomy there can be no freedom, and without freedom there can be no democracy.
The outcome of four years of deliberation on that subcommittee was to eliminate all federal funding for behavioural modification programs. That was in the 1970s. I think of the 1970s as five minutes ago. Those were some of the best years of my life. It wasn't that long ago. They were talking about aiming this at these institutions, bounded organizations. Here we are in 2019 and we have global architectures of behavioural modification backed by trillions of dollars of capital. Where is the outrage? Where is the moral compass? Where is the response within us, as you say, that says, “This cannot stand.” This is inimical to everything that our societies are founded on.
I agree with you. Part of our challenge now is to get over the ideologies of the last four decades that have belittled government, that have belittled the state and that have denied regulation as an assault on freedom. The challenge is to understand, as I said before, that these companies know too much to qualify for freedom. We need to “only” democracy. Survey everything on the horizon. Only democracy means only you have the power and the capability and the tools to intervene on this process before it is too late.
I have just one tiny little comment about something that was said earlier. It won't be done in a year. I think you brought this up, Mr. Kent: the time frame. This kind of change, this kind of structural transformation, is not the work of a day or a month or a year, but it can be done in five years. Maybe in five years—certainly in the next decade—we have a horizon to shift the Titanic. We have the time and the capabilities to do that. What we need, as you've just said, is to get in touch again with our moral bearings. They are there and we should not be intimidated.