Let's begin with social engineering. It's usually seen as one of the dark arts. For example, Wikipedia describes it as, one, "the psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information." It also describes it as something specific to socialist societies: "In the 1920s the government of the Soviet Union embarked on a campaign to fundamentally alter the behavior and ideals of Soviet citizens..." With the latter, the implication is that Western liberal polities encourage the freest thinking possible. You get to vote for your leaders, the market offers you more choices than your heart desires, you are free to decide which God created you and the entire universe, and so on and so on.
But of course, one has always already been socially engineered—this inescapable condition is also called interpellation. You were not born with the certainty that free markets produce the best social results. You were not born with a Christian soul. All of these feelings and ideas (feelings as concepts) are the result of social engineering. And so it is not a question if it's bad or not. What matters is if it's empowering or disempowering, if it presents feelings that correspond with the real state of affairs or does not. Social engineering's material is human feeling. And what it does with this psycho/physical material, to use the language of the great British cultural theorist Raymond Williams, is structure it. A civil engineer builds bridges. A social engineer builds feelings.
With that in mind, let's turn to this weekend's unusually warm weather. How did Seattle feel about it?
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