The Art of the Political Con

 

The sad thing about watching contemporary politics is that it is full of so many con artists in front of a willing public who falls for what’s on sale hook, line and sinker. But con artistry is not all equal, and here I’ll explain the distinctions I observe. First, let me establish a long-standing truth in psychology about the typical con artist: a good con artist doesn’t pressure you into doing something; they compel you to be a willing agent in your own downfall. But this is predicated on their success in knowing the true picture and veiling it from their subject(s).

Now, socio-politics is full of all kinds of con artist - differing widely in age, character, belief and presentation. But unlike the classic psychological description of the con artist I outlined, these are of a different breed. They qualify by successfully getting large swathes of the public to fall for their con, hook, line and sinker – examples of which are Jeremy Corbyn, Greta Thunberg, Owen Jones, Sadiq Khan, Nicola Sturgeon, Dianne Abbott, Ed Miliband, Ash Sakar, Paul Mason, Zack Polanski, to name but a few. But their distinction is that their con is not based on knowing the true picture and veiling it from their subjects (although there is, of course, a lot of concealing going on) – it is a kind of con of incompetence, where most of what they believe is so absurdly incorrect or miscalculated, yet tribalistically persuasive enough to compel people to be a willing agents in their own downfall.

You may be on the left reading this, thinking “Hang on, what about those on the right - the likes of Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox, et al – playing a similar game?” Something different is going on there – it’s equally to do with psychological leverage, but it operates on almost the opposite mechanism. Because if you’re paying attention, the left tends to obtain its cognitive leverage by creating illusions, and the populist right by breaking illusions (see my blog on Hyperbolstering). They prick the balloon of the left’s illusions, and that’s why the vitriol coming from the left is more like the hate and rage that comes from being found out and exposed, alongside the inner malice many of them feel towards people who are more successful than them or have more status. The left deceives by pretending to be more competent than they are; the right attempts to expose what the establishment wants to remain concealed.

That’s also why the left’s cognitive leverage will always rest on a suite of well‑documented cognitive mechanisms that operate beneath the surface of rational enquiry. And as highly prominent figures like Greta Thunberg, Jeremy Corbyn and Zack Polanski are showing – you can be an utter simpleton and still cast in your net the willing acolytes of identity‑protective cognition, because the tendency for people to defend beliefs that signal loyalty to their tribe, and provide emotional reassurance and moral self-congratulation, even when those beliefs are demonstrably false, miscalculated or self‑defeating, is as old as the hills.

And for those like me who’ve always been interested in human behaviour, you might also see that the most striking feature of this phenomenon is that many of these political influencers are not deliberate manipulators in the classic sense. They are not con artists who know the truth and hide it; they are participants in the very illusions they propagate.

Most con artists manipulate by knowing they are above the manipulation. Yet most political con artistry is of a more peculiar dynamic: manipulation while not knowing they are part of the manipulation.

Prediction: Burnham Will Be The Worst Prime Minister We've Ever Had

Oh dear. As much as I disliked Keir Starmer’s Labour - and I reeeaaally did dislike them - from what I’ve heard from Burnham’s Labour Party so far, I predict things will be even worse under Burnham. In fact, I’m going to make a bolder prediction: by the time of the next General Election, there is going to be widespread consensus from the right, centre and left (well, as much as there ever can be) that Burnham’s term in office has been the worst this country has ever seen.

Starting with today’s cavalcade of economic illiteracy, that most bus fares in England will be capped at £2 from the start of next year, and the clearly economically sub-literate new Chancellor John Healey’s claim that this policy will cause "no burden to British taxpayers". I’m not writing this post because I think this £2 price ceiling is going to be one of the worst things about the Burnham premiership – I’m writing it mainly for illustrative purposes to show that, in Burnham, we have a leader who has never shown even a passing intention to appear like he knows what he’s doing on anything to do with the politics and economics of our country – and that this one policy is illustrative of what a disaster his whole reign will be.

Ok, let’s be candid on this particular showboating policy: a £2 fare cap is not clever, not helpful, and certainly not free. This is not even complex – it’s GCSE-level economics: price fixes always have to be paid for by someone. So, who really pays? Well, contra Healey, if a bus journey costs, say, £3.50 to provide, and the government forces operators to charge £2, the remaining £1.50 doesn’t vanish into the ether. The Treasury must reimburse operators for the shortfall. That’s going to cost hundreds of millions in ongoing subsidy. That is a burden on taxpayers, no matter how many times Healey insists otherwise. Moreover, if there is any underfunding of the scheme, councils will be forced to top up subsidies or cut other services. A national fare cap simply shifts the pressure downward.

Also, bus operators ultimately pay too, and they might even cut services in doing so. If subsidies don’t fully cover the gap, operators absorb losses. And when operators absorb losses, they respond in the only way they can: by cutting routes or reducing frequency, and maybe even shedding staff. If subsidies don’t keep pace with rising costs, operators will be forced to cut routes and staff – it’s basic arithmetic.

A sensible politician would never force a business to sell below cost. It distorts prices and hides true costs. Artificially cheap prices encourage overuse and discourage efficiency. Furthermore, an economy in which operators become reliant on government reimbursement rather than private revenue makes everything less secure, not more.

Policies like this badly misallocate resources too. A universal fare cap subsidises everyone - including people who can easily afford full fares, and penalises the many who never use buses but are already taxed to the hilt.

No, this is everything we can come to expect from a Burnham government – it’s a political slogan; a bribe; a faux-compassionate headline‑grabber, not a serious policy or strategy. Expect Burnham’s government to be a shambles – and we can revisit this prediction in a few years’ time.

Hume's Greatest Contribution To Philosophy

 

Let’s begin with a statement that is both provocative and unsettling: we never truly predict anything entirely new. By ‘entirely new,’ I mean empirical facts that cannot be anticipated through extension or rearrangement of prior experiential patterns. This might sound counterintuitive - after all, science seems full of predictions. Sure, but as we’ll see, from a broadly Humean perspective, what we call predictions are better understood as extrapolations from prior experience. They are reasoned extensions of patterns we have already observed.

Our knowledge of the world is deeply grounded in experience, in that sensory perception, emotional learning, and many of our expectations about how the world behaves arise from accumulated interactions with reality - whether first-hand or socially transmitted. On this view, reasoning alone is insufficient to generate entirely new facts without experiential content to work upon.

David Hume - probably the most influential empiricist philosopher (and definitely the best empiricist writer) - argued that much of what we know about the world derives from experience, and that our impressions of reality are shaped within the limitations of human perception. Without experiential input, our capacity to form expectations about the world would be drastically constrained. (Hume himself distinguished between “relations of ideas,” such as mathematics and logic, and “matters of fact,” which concern the empirical world - and it is primarily the latter that concern us here.)

To illustrate this, imagine a philosophical thought experiment: a child - let’s call him Henry - is born and raised in conditions of complete sensory deprivation. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Henry survives physically but receives no sensory data at all. Philosophers have long used similar abstractions to probe the origins of knowledge. In such an extreme scenario, Henry would likely lack language, learned concepts, and expectations about how objects behave. His mental life, at least with respect to empirical knowledge, would be profoundly impoverished.

Of course, modern philosophy and science have strongly indicated that Hume over-stated his assertion – we now know that the human mind possesses innate structures that organise experience, and that infants are not entirely blank slates. Still, Hume’s insight remains one of the great contributions to philosophy.

You still might feel like objecting: but James, don’t we predict new things all the time? In fields like evolutionary biology or physics, scientists often forecast outcomes not yet observed. Even everyday expectations - like “the sun will rise tomorrow” - feel like predictions. But there’s an important distinction to draw here. From a Humean perspective, many such predictions are rearrangements or extensions of existing knowledge rather than anticipations of conceptually independent novelty. What we call “new” often remains anchored in prior patterns and expectations.

Hume also famously argued that while we observe regularities in nature - patterns that lead us to expect one event to follow another - we never directly perceive a necessary connection binding cause and effect. Building on Hume’s insight, in my books I tend to use a working distinction (not a standard Humean term) between “causality,” meaning observed regular patterns, and “causation,” meaning the deeper necessity we often assume but cannot directly observe. Causality, in this sense, is empirical: it arises from repeated observation. Causation, by contrast, represents the unseen necessity we project onto those patterns. We cannot reason our way to that necessity independently of experience.

For example, we expect that if an apple detaches from a tree it will fall to the ground, or that banging your head on a doorframe will hurt. These expectations are grounded in repeated observation and in learned regularities. However, even these expectations are shaped by the models we construct from experience. Classical physics describes gravity one way; quantum theories offer deeper and sometimes counterintuitive accounts. Without the empirical investigation that revealed the quantum world, its laws would have remained inaccessible to us. Our theoretical understanding grows through experience-informed inquiry rather than purely armchair reasoning.

I wrote a neat illustration in one of my books to convey this. Suppose that as of midnight tonight, a fundamental regularity of nature changes: electricity no longer produces a magnetic field. When you wake up, nothing initially seems different - until your radio falls silent, your doorbell fails, and coils of wire refuse to generate magnetism despite functioning batteries. At first you suspect a mechanical fault. Only after repeated failures across society would you infer that a deeper regularity has shifted. The point is not that such a change is scientifically likely, but that without prior experiential clues, we would struggle to anticipate radically unfamiliar behaviour. Our expectations are tethered to what we have already learned.

Even some of the most celebrated scientific “predictions” can be understood, from a Humean angle, as extensions of existing conceptual frameworks. Neptune’s discovery followed unexplained perturbations in Uranus’s orbit; Dirac’s equations mathematically implied antimatter; Maxwell’s equations pointed toward radio waves. Many philosophers of science would still call these genuine predictions - and rightly so within scientific practice. Yet they were not conjured from conceptual nothingness; they emerged from rearranging established ideas within existing theoretical structures. Theory guided discovery, but it did so on the basis of prior empirical and conceptual foundations.

Let us return to Henry. Suppose at age 18 he is suddenly granted the full range of senses. In front of him are two billiard balls, and an experimenter rolls one toward the other. Hume used a similar image to illustrate his point: without prior experience, Henry would have no basis for expecting what happens when ball 1 strikes ball 2. Will ball 2 move? Shatter? Remain still? Only after repeated observations would he begin to associate events and form expectations about physical interactions. What seems obvious to us - that the second ball will roll - is obvious largely because we have learned the regularities of physical reality through experience.

Don’t get me wrong, we mustn’t over-egg Hume here. Hume’s enduring challenge is not to gainsay reasoning’s utility – it is to frame our understanding of empirical reality as inseparable from experiential learning. Of course, Kant developed this by arguing that the mind contributes structuring categories, and modern Bayesian epistemology in some ways extends Humean ideas, somewhat like how Riemannian geometry extends classical Euclidean models. Yet the central problem of how we justify our expectations about the future when they depend so heavily on past experience remains one of Hume’s most enduring philosophical legacies.

Fantasy Redistribution

Every few days recently, young people who get most of their political theories from Instagram show off their arithmetic by announcing that if Elon Musk “gave away his trillion dollars,” every American would get $2,800 and live happily ever after, presumably in a utopia powered by free Teslas and renewable energy.

But, alas, this misunderstands both the arithmetic and the economics, but mainly the economics. Firstly, Elon Musk does not have a trillion dollars stuffed under his mattress. If he did, the mattress would be visible from space. His wealth consists almost entirely of ownership of productive assets: shares in companies, intellectual property, physical capital, and claims on future profits, and other things you cannot eat, wear, or use to pay for your New Statesman subscription. Redistributing Musk’s wealth does not mean redistributing his personal consumption. It means redistributing ownership of productive assets, which doesn’t magically create new goods.

Redistribution can change who benefits from future production, sure – but it cannot increase the total amount of goods and services available; it merely reallocates purchasing power and ownership. Selling existing assets and distributing the proceeds is a transfer, not an expansion of the money supply. In simple terms, it simply changes who owns the stuff that makes future stuff.

The upshot is, serious debates about wealth demand more than viral arithmetic; they require at least a passing acquaintance with how an economy actually works.

All this feeds into the more serious claim that if we just confiscate the wealth of millionaires and redistribute, we’ll help alleviate world poverty. The reality is, an economy is constrained not by how cleverly we shuffle ownership claims, but by how much real output it can actually produce. You can redistribute wealth, and you may have good reasons to do so, but no transfer of shares or bank balances can radically lift people out of poverty in the long run if farms aren’t growing food or factories aren’t making goods. Redistribution can change who gets the returns from production, but it cannot substitute for production itself. A society that cannot generate enough to meet its needs will not cure hunger by rearranging balance sheets, however dramatically.

Odds, Ends & Stray Musings: Uneven Intuition

 

Suppose an atheist hears two scenarios:

Scenario 1: A man comes to believe Jesus is Lord by seeing a miraculous healing in church

Scenario 2: A man comes to believe Jesus is Lord by a direct, personal impartation from the Holy Spirit.

Both of those scenarios are, in fact, common in the world – but if an atheist were to reject them both as unsatisfying, he’d probably be more unsatisfied at the second than the first.  Yet this is hard to justify, because Scenario 1 and Scenario 2 differ in how the belief is acquired, not in the epistemic status of the belief itself.  That is, given the truth of Christianity and how God does His fundamental imparting of revelation (1 Corinthians 12:3), then unbeknown to him, the atheist’s greater discomfort with Scenario 2 is driven by accidental or psychological features, not by a genuine epistemic asymmetry.