Nudge: How the Maru Group was Deployed to Manipulate Canadians into Accepting Imposition of the Emergencies Act - Part One
PART ONE: Choice Architecture: "capturing emotions to overwhelm the human decision making process"
The outline of the ‘Information Operations’ campaign that was going to be deployed against the Truckers became apparent when former Bank of Canada Governor, WEF operative for all-seasons, and “Ottawa resident” Mark Carney published an op-ed in the Globe and Mail on February 7, 2022, titled: It’s time to end the sedition in Ottawa by enforcing the law and following the money, wherein Carney implied, without any evidence, that there was something untoward or illegal about the the Freedom Convoy’s funding.
Note: “Seditious intention” is defined in the Criminal Code of Canada as follows:
one shall be presumed to have a seditious intention who
(a) teaches or advocates, or
(b) publishes or circulates any writing that advocates,
the use, without the authority of law, of force as a means of accomplishing a governmental change within Canada.
The first thing to keep in mind is that Mr. Carney’s allegations were patent nonsense.
The second thing to keep in mind is that information warfare is war. War by other means, but war nonetheless. The object is to win. To defeat your opponent. Information or Influence Operations as it is now called, but known as propaganda earlier, has been around in rudimentary form from the beginning of humanity, evolving over millennia largely by the advancement of technology, political systems and the education of populations.
Proof? An example?
In the words of Barry MacKillop, deputy director of Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center (FinTrac), who spoke on February, 10, 2022, before Canada’s House of Commons finance committee, made it clear that the money the organizers of the Truckers Convoy managed to raise was not only NOT “cash that funded terrorism or was in any way money laundering” – it was simply a way for people living in what they thought was a democratic country, believing it was a safe way of expressing their position on an issue.
These statements give lie to any premise that the Canadian Government had any justification to impose the Emergencies Act (at Mr. Carney’s urging), in response to the Truckers Protest. In fact, in lacking a valid predicate, the imposition of the Emergencies Act by the government was in itself unlawful.
But then why is it that the Government of Canada — composed of the Liberal Party of Canada and its coalition partners in crime the New Democratic Party — was able, by majority vote in Canada’s House of Commons, to declare a draconian state of emergency against peaceful working class protestors, and seize their bank accounts and assets (using stolen/hacked information1), after stealing $12 million in charitable donations from two corporations that do crowdfunding.
How did they do it? How were the Canadian people misled into thinking that the imposition of the Emergencies Act was justified, and who led this effort?
Nudge Theory was deployed in response the Trucker Protest, and at the vanguard of this effort was a shadowy organization known as The Maru Group. Who paid for their efforts is unknown.
“Nudge Theory”, a branch of behavioral economics that provided impetus for the infamous UK “Nudge Unit” documented in Laura Dodsworth book A State of Fear: how the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic (2021), explores human decision making and cognitive biases and, in part, helped governments worldwide to induce most people accepting medical martial law and into taking experimental Covid “Vaccines”.
Who or what is The Maru Group? They appear to be engage in a variety of research and influence operations on behalf of their “clients”. In their own words:
We believe that understanding the intersection between behavior and emotion is critical to establishing the strongest possible customer connections to drive better business results.
— from Maru’s research philosophy: Feel, Behave, Think
The Maru Group is not a technically a polling company, rather it conducts “tactical surveys”, while:
The Group’s in-depth knowledge of industry sectors coupled with its proprietary, state-of-the-art software uniquely equip clients with targeted and applicable insights at speed. It is these insights that help to inform corporate strategies.
The Maru Group provides clients with access to the best minds in research and insight generation across a number of geographies.
A public list of Maru’s survey activities on behalf of its clients “facilitating the real-time analysis of behavioral, transactional and attitudinal information to deliver insights at speed”, can be found in the link below:
https://www.marugroup.net/public-opinion-polls/canada
One of these, a Maru “poll” - was released on February 12, 2022: The truckers and a democracy threatened, two days after the director of FinTrac, a government of Canada agency with mandate is to detect, prevent and deter money laundering and terrorist financing activities while ensuring the protection of personal information, testified that the money donated to the Trucker’s movement was in no way connected to terrorism or money laundering.
Before we dig into the mechanics and data integrity of this Maru "poll”, which immediately preceded and provided justification (and apparent public consent) for the Government of Canada’s unlawful imposition of the Emergencies Act on February 14, 2020, first some background on what the Maru Group is really doing: the active engineering of what is termed by its practitioners choice architecture.
Source: © WikiMedia (Maksim Sokolov (Maxergon))
Choice architecture is the design of different ways in which choices can be presented to consumers (and voters), and the impact of that presentation on consumer decision-making. For example, each of the following:
the number of choices presented
the manner in which attributes are described
the presence of a "default"
Which can in turn influence consumer/voter choice. As a result, advocates of libertarian paternalism and asymmetric paternalism have endorsed the deliberate design of choice architecture to nudge consumers/voters toward personally and socially desirable behaviours. These interventions are often justified in that well-designed choice architectures can compensate for irrational decision-making biases.
These techniques have consequently become popular among policymakers, leading to the formation of the UK's Behavioural Insights Team and the White House "Nudge Unit" for example. While many behavioral scientists stress that there is no neutral choice-architecture and that consumers/voters maintain autonomy and freedom of choice despite manipulations of choice architecture, critics of libertarian paternalism often argue that choice architectures designed to overcome irrational decision biases may impose costs on rational agents, for example by limiting choice or undermining respect for individual human agency and moral autonomy.
Background
The term "choice architecture by "University of Chicago economist and Nobel Laureate Richard H. Thaler and Harvard Law School Professor Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, first published in 2008. In 2021, a revised edition was released, subtitled The Final Edition.
From September 10, 2009 to August 21, 2012, Professor Sunstein was also Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under US President Barack Obama.
Thaler and Sunstein endorsed ‘design of choice architecture’ as a means to improve consumer decision-making by minimizing biases and errors that arise as the result of bounded rationality. The book draws on research in psychology and behavioral economics to defend libertarian paternalism and active engineering of choice architecture. The book also popularised the concept of nudge theory. A nudge, according to Thaler and Sunstein is any form of choice architecture that alters people's behaviour in a predictable way without restricting options or significantly changing their economic incentives.
Behavioural scientists have grouped the elements of choice architecture in different ways. For example, Thaler, Sunstein, and John P. Balz have focused on the following "tools" of choice architecture: defaults, expecting error, understanding mappings (which involves exploring the different ways that information presentation affects option comparisons), giving feedback, structuring complex choices, and creating incentives. Another group of leading behavioral scientists has created a typology of choice architecture elements dividing them into those that structure the choice set and those that describe the choice. Examples of choice set structuring include: the number of alternatives, decision aids, defaults, and choice over time. Describing choice options include: partitioning options and attributes, and designing attributes,
Human behavior
One of the main justifications for Thaler's and Sunstein's endorsement of libertarian paternalism in Nudge draws on certain theories of human nature and psychology. The book is critical of the homo economicus view of human beings "that each of us thinks and chooses unfailingly well, and thus fits within the textbook picture of human beings offered by economists."
They cite examples of research which raise "serious questions about the rationality of many judgments and decisions that people make". They state that, unlike members of homo economicus, members of the species homo sapiens make predictable mistakes because of their use of heuristics, fallacies, and because of the way they are influenced by their social interactions.
Two systems of thinking
The book describes two systems that characterize human thinking, which Sunstein and Thaler refer to as the "Reflective System" and the "Automatic System". These two systems are more thoroughly defined in Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
The Automatic System is "rapid and is or feels instinctive, and it does not involve what we usually associate with the word thinking". Instances of the Automatic System at work include smiling upon seeing a puppy, getting nervous while experiencing air turbulence, and ducking when a ball is thrown at you.
The Reflective System is deliberate and self-conscious. It is the one at work when people decide which college to attend, where to go on trips, and (under most circumstances) whether or not to get married.
Fallacies and biases
Because of these differences and conflicts between these systems, people are often subject to making mistakes that are the result of widely occurring biases, heuristics, and fallacies. These include:
Anchoring A cognitive bias wherein one relies too heavily on one trait or piece of information.
Availability heuristic When people predict the frequency of an event based on how easily an example can be brought to mind. The authors state that this could help explain why people think that homicides occur more than suicides, as examples of homicides are more readily available.
Representativeness heuristic Where people judge the probability or frequency of a hypothesis by considering how much the hypothesis resembles available data. An example would be perceiving meaningful patterns in information that is in fact random.
Status quo bias This is when people are very likely to continue a course of action since it has been traditionally the one pursued, even though this course of action may clearly not be in their best interest.
Herd mentality People are heavily influenced by the actions and purported beliefs of others. Sunstein and Thaler cite a famous study by Solomon Asch where people, due to peer pressure, answer certain questions in a way that was clearly false (such as saying that two lines are the same length when they clearly are not).
In sum, humans are now to be considered lab rats in one big experiment on social and behavioural control. To what ends?
When Aubrey Cottle aka Kirtaner was hired, possibly by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), to hack GiveSendGo and to leak the data of those who had donated to the Canadian truckers’ cause. The Trudeau regime then proceeded to freeze the bank accounts of single moms who had donated $20.