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 to make political statements or engender fear in the population (a form of Pavlovian conditioning itself). The recent tragic killing of Curtis Cheng is one horrific example.
It is, however, hard to see how we do anything other than play into the hands of such conditioning and invite more terror by inflicting our own terror in response. Australia has now (as I mentioned previously) muzzled the media and introduced additional surveillance powers — all with no notable impact on the incidence of terror attacks (which still kill fewer people than road deaths or falls in the bath).
Why is it that we say nothing when police are given the power to impose conditions (regular reporting to the police, wearing a home detention bracelet and non-association), on suspicion and without disclosing evidence, on 14-year-olds? Such sanctions normally require conviction in a criminal court.
All this in the midst of a Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse which has highlighted the dangers of unconstrained and opaque institutional power over children.
Aside from the fact that there is no empirical evidence suggesting that control orders actually prevent attacks, who would not respond with horror if it were their 14-year-old who was forbidden from leaving the home, from seeing friends, from using a computer? Ah, but it is no 14-year-old we know. It is always someone else's child, someone else's problem.
Suspicion of terrorism tends to be translated to guilt in the mind of police and public alike. (As the famously circular prosecutor's logic goes, 'If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.') So it is that those who do commit acts of terror do their dirty work by turning everyone on their neighbours. Meanwhile, governments around the world play into terrorists' rhetoric about the persecution of Muslims by sweeping their terrorism dragnets ever wider.
While the divisive language of Team Australia has been binned, watering down the legal rights of children and mass arrests must achieve much the same purpose. After all, if the population is docile and takes no offence when their neighbours' rights are chipped away, it would be a very principled government which did not take full advantage of their apathy to secure more and more power for itself.
In doing so, they find that manipulating their populations is easy, if you know which bells to ring.
Justin Glyn SJ is studying for the priesthood. Previously he practised law in South Africa and New Zealand and has a PhD in administrative and international law.