Why a real man would NEVER eat chicken

Our minds are no longer our own. People are constantly telling us what to think, what to feel, how to vote, what to buy. Advertisers, politicians, spin doctors, lobbyists, market researchers, public relations ‘professionals’ . . . and let’s not forget journalists . . . they are all trying to get into our heads, and once they’re in, they want to stay there and keep everyone else out. Inside our brains, it’s a war of nerves.

James Garvey is a philosopher. His brain, though enormous, is as under attack as everyone else’s, and he doesn’t like it. So he has written a book about the business of persuasion, for a business it is, maybe the largest and most profitable business the world has ever seen.

In nearly every hour of your waking life, he says, people are trying to change your mind. ‘Estimates vary from several hundred to several thousand persuasive messages encountered by the average adult each day, and almost none of it consists in giving you good reasons in support of a conclusion.’ We think of ourselves as rational beings, who are more than happy to listen to a good argument and make our minds up accordingly.

But we’re wrong. The persuaders aren’t interested in rational argument. They prefer to tap straight into our emotions. So we are very rarely reasoned with, but we are often nudged, prodded, incentivised and sometimes blatantly lied to.

Garvey tells the story of the first Gulf War in 1990, when Saddam Hussein walked into Kuwait, confident that the world would look the other way. And initially it was so. In the u.S., public support for military intervention was weak. People remembered Vietnam and had no desire to go through all that again.

But in autumn 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl stood up before the Congressional Human rights Caucus and gave evidence of atrocities she had seen committed by Iraqi troops. She had been volunteering at a hospital and seen them remove babies from incubators, take the incubators and leave the babies to die on the cold floor.

‘I am glad I am 15, old enough to remember Kuwait before Saddam Hussein destroyed it, and young enough to rebuild it.’

This four-minute deposition, still viewable on YouTube, was shown on the evening news and changed public opinion in the uS. But it was a put-up job. The girl hadn’t used her real name, she said, to protect friends and family back home.

What she neglected to mention was that she was a member of the Kuwaiti royal

family, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S.

The hearing had been organised with the ‘help’ of a PR company working for a Kuwaiti-financed group that was lobbying Congress for military intervention. Much later it emerged that Iraqi soldiers had never taken incubators and allowed babies to die on the floor. You could call it propaganda, you could call it a steaming fat lie, but what does it matter? The story had done its job.

Garvey is excoriating about public relations and lobbying, ‘an industry that’s better at “education” than any university system, and an industry that specialises in ensuring that laws that might harm its clients’ interests never see the light of day’.

Nor is he impressed with advertising, which tirelessly promotes consumer dissatisfaction, even though most of us have enough stuff and don’t need any more. I loved his descriptions of the ‘meanings’ of certain foodstuffs in the advertising world. Butter, he says, represents plenty, and i t must be rich and golden. ‘A strange sense of mystery cloaks cheese — the subtle appreciation of cheese is on a par with the appreciation of art.’

Chicken is less masculine than steak. ‘The act of cutting meat and tearing it with our teeth is more i mportant to us than the meat’s meatiness.’

Not all of Garvey’s arguments are as entertaining or compelling as these. As a philosopher, he is too often drawn to the abstract for my taste. But his central message is fierce and timely. ‘I think the rise of the darker side of public relations and lobbying is more than coincident with the decline of real democracy in the West.’

I think he’s right. It’ll be interesting to see whether he manages to persuade anyone of this, without making use of those dark arts himself.