Page 178 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

170 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

dollar figures, the cost of a universal basic income would be about $1.69
4
trillion per year of policy implementation. This would be the yearly cost
imposed for as many years as would be needed to eliminate official
poverty.
These are the economic realities faced by any government seeking to
reach such utopian goals. With the national debt of the United States
standing at about $17 trillion, proponents of this policy could justify it on
the basis that an additional $1.5 trillion in federal spending per year would
not make that much difference in the overall burden to the American peo-
ple, especially considering the huge benefit to all if the plan actually
worked—namely, the elimination of poverty. Social marketing would be
pleased to position itself as a significant resource for steering hybrid sys-
tems of control—medical and legal, but also informal—toward the realiza-
tion of this and other goals of social amelioration. Of course, there are
multiple levels of potential resistance against even the best efforts to con-
vince members of the general public that such measures are consistent
with their economic, social, cultural, or subjective interests. Hence, with
populist concerns over the spread of an unchecked and emboldened
nanny state, social marketing will have to spend more time marketing it-
self in the face of multiple levels and types of resistance, whether in the
form of gatekeepers and senior-level organizational managers (“big dogs”),
apathetic or uninformed citizens (the “hard to reach”), or legislators and
political leaders (the “not policy-friendly”; for an expanded discussion of
these categories of resistance, see Marshall, Bryant, Keller, & Fridinger,
2006).
Contemporary society is the outcome of many years of struggle among
real flesh-and-blood human beings whose concerted efforts led to the tran-
sition from the 18th-century absolute state to the 19th-century noninter-
ventionist state, and then to the total state of the 20th century and beyond
(Schmitt, 1932/2007, p. 23). But notice something peculiar. The “good
society” can never rest on its laurels. The idea of egalitarianism, with which
the responsible state wrestles incessantly, must always lead in the direction
of repairing those instances in which its ideals are subverted or simply out
of reach. This means that the state (or federal government) must intervene,
favoring the cosmopolitan over the local (Gouldner, 1973; Schillmeier,
2009), thereby further trivializing the original notion of self-governance
along with muting the free play of opinion- and will-formation. This colo-
nization of the lifeworld, as Habermas (1987) put it, is the primary project
that social marketing attempts to pacify or, at the very least, portray as the
inevitable workings of liberal governance, the outcomes of which are pre-
sumably fully embraced by the citizenry.