Whiteboard

One of the most intellectually challenging bloggers in the PR community is Swiss-based Paul Seaman who takes a robust and unsentimental view of the trade. He is a good source on issues that are currently arising from within the community and that may come to have public policy effects.

Last month, he picked up on the inevitable – the attempt by the PR industry to acquire prestige and income from the revolution in neuro-science. Our sister team at TPPR has also been highly suspicious of trends to quantify ‘persuasion’ – in their case, as political analysts, they have directed their sceptical gaze at the potential for excessive claims about the meaning of the data embedded in social networks.

If this was just a case of advisers looking for the latest sales gizmo to restore the battered fortunes of the more traditional parts of the marketing services industry, we might be less concerned but there is a deeper worry here as Governments increasingly detach themselves from the community and seek out tools to quantify their tendencies towards populism.

The public relations industry, as Seaman points out, is heir to the rhetorical tradition of the Ancient World. It derives from the need of all those who have power to retain that power. The satisfaction, all things being equal, of those under the command of elites can be constructed through the creation of a narrative that meets the ends of the rulers. This is not some left wing fantasy, it is the reality to which Machiavelli addressed himself.

A new book on the surprisingly short but ever-fascinating tenure of the National Socialists in Germany (about the same as the current New Labour Government) points out what common sense should have told us but which we have chosen to ignore because it was inconvenient.

The Nazi regime was popular but only because the ruling group was more terrified of the population than the mass of the population was terrified of it and because it delivered some very material (and inflationary) goodies to please it.  Indeed, other than Hitler’s formidable will, a natural motivation for war was that Germany’s economy may well have crumbled if it had failed to expand physically – rather like those old asset-stripping corporations that start to collapse the day they stop doing deals.

Work on Soviet Russia indicates something similar under Stalin where, whatever the scale of the police state, the majority were doing better than they had ever done before in peace time. This determination on mass working class benefits was a deliberate policy done not out of love but necessity.

Public relations people like to draw a distinction between their ‘profession’ and propaganda, largely by adopting the half-baked liberal version of ‘truth’ that also suits the media. This is faux-naive. The liberal media and PR both eschew outright lies but both create narratives that are not designed to educate and inform but to sell and maintain whatever micro-regime (clients or publisher) is central to institutional survival.

In this respect, modern liberal democracy is not ‘truer’ than totalitarian systems but merely cleverer and, in permitting freedom of expression and open political struggle, less sclerotic with many more opportunities to force narratives to line up more naturally with public expectation and the facts on the ground.

It is theoretically possible for dissident opinion to change the nature of elite culture in the West and there are periodic ‘paradigm shifts’ in the Kuhnian sense, but the reality is that elites are generally embedded for a generation or so and group-think is rife. High levels of economic development, the rule of law and social complexity constrain these elites from misbehaving but have no doubt that they would if they could.

We could go further down this route but the concern here is the potential use of new scientific discoveries – in neuroscience, in cognitive psychology and in data-mining from the massive amounts of material appearing on the internet – in developing political and social manipulation strategies that could start to rip the heart out of the liberal democracies that they aim to serve.

Even the notionally libertarian Tories have started to get excited about ‘nudge’ psychologies. The temptation by Government and business to believe that scientists, mediated through a PR industry desperate for the next big thing to sustain its institutional presence in society, can deliver power and sales may mean that the split between hard policy-making, community engagement and political education on the one side and ’spin’, technocracy and populism on the other will become ever wider.

In practice, the Western corporate sector has avoided the excesses of the politicians. Political power is all about seizing and holding power, not regularly going back to the market to sell goods and services, raise capital and hire and motivate good people. Business in the West is now infinitely more accountable than Governments.

The danger is that social manipulation strategies based on half-baked science will be used for short term reasons by Governments, taken up by corporations through the advice of ’big man’ bluff merchants, and then be exposed by the new internet activists in a way that undermines the current liberal capitalist consensus that ensures political stability.

On the one side, the Piracy Party UK has now been launched. On the other, it has been announced that the Metropolitan Police has hired a digital agency allegedly to monitor the web for evidence of crime ‘and conversations about the Met’s policing methods’. Hmmmm!

Privacy and the conduct of an authoritarian State, trying to maintain order in a time of social upheaval, are both going to be big issues in the coming years. The idea that PR is becoming the trade of those determined on controlling the population through scientific means and selling them what they don’t want or need, instead of communicators of reliable if biased narrative, would be a reversal to the years when Vance Packard rightly exposed the ‘hidden persuaders’.

Only this week, naked climate change protesters (we have a sneaking admiration for their chutzpah) invaded Edelman and Guido Fawkes has already declared war on the lobby industry. It will be a battle that the PR industry cannot win in the long run if it goes over the line  that divides its role as barrister for its clients to becoming seen as part of the infrastructure of political and social control, a process that probably started around a decade ago. 

The political class, the traditional media, the state and the marketing services industry can no longer control the commanding heights of the information economy within a truly free society. The question is whether a truly free society is going to be acceptable to them under these conditions.