The Russian neurologist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, discovered that you can change the behaviour of animals by changing the circumstances in which that behaviour takes place ('classical conditioning'). So, while dogs generally don't react to bells, he could famously make a dog salivate just at the sound of one by getting it to associate the sound with food.
Governments are well aware that Pavlovian conditioning works quite nicely on people as well. This week saw some textbook examples.
While running a Royal Commission into domestic violence and a $30 million campaign against it, ringing the bell marked 'asylum-seekers are queue jumpers' has allowed successive governments (and the Nauruan government to whom they have partly outsourced their treatment) to abuse alleged rape victims with barely a word of protest from the general public.
Just this week, one woman's name and details were released to the press and she was threatened with being charged with an offence. Another seems to have been spirited out of the country before she could receive counselling and medical care, in an apparent effort to avoid judicial scrutiny.
(She was seeking an abortion here, a fact which raises thorny ethical dilemmas. Nonetheless, failure to provide counselling, an interpreter or medical care — as allegedly happened — would seem harmful to both mother and baby on any reading.)
One has only to think what the reaction would be if this were done to practically anyone else in the care of the Australian government to realise the huge empathy deficit which the country seems to have developed in relation to asylum seekers and refugees.
This deficit exists because successive governments have spent money and effort in cultivating it — conditioning the public to respond with fear and distrust to any mention of refugees and asylum seekers with so-called 'dog-whistle politics'.
By getting the public to (groundlessly) associate refugees with criminality and queue-jumping and tapping into our baser instincts of xenophobia while depriving us of contact with the real people behind the slogans, our senses have slowly been blunted so that we no longer have the ability to empathise.
Insofar as any residual feelings exist, we tell ourselves that any brutality is inflicted 'to stop deaths at sea'. So successful has this (bipartisan) Pavlovian policy been that Australian refugee policy is now the toast of German neo-Nazis.
Another bell to which we have been conditioned to respond is the one marked 'terrorism'. There is no doubt that people use violence