The Persuaders E-Book

James Garvey

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 436

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

'A work of engaging pop philosophy and accessible social science [and] a boisterous dissection of the forces jellifying our minds' Sunday Times Includes brand new material covering the US election and Brexit Every day, many people will try to change your mind, but they won't reason with you. Instead, you'll be nudged, anchored, incentivised and manipulated in barely noticeable ways. It's a profound shift in the way we interact with one another.  Philosopher James Garvey explores the hidden story of persuasion and the men and women in the business of changing our minds. From the covert PR used to start the first Gulf War to the neuromarketing of products to appeal to our unconscious minds, he reveals the dark arts practised by professional persuaders. How did we end up with a world where beliefs are mass-produced by lobbyists and PR firms? Could Google or Facebook swing elections? Are new kinds of persuasion making us less likely to live happy, decent lives in an open, peaceful world? Is it too late, or can we learn to listen to reason again? The Persuaders is a call to think again about how we think now.

Leseprobe

THE PERSUADERS

Praise for James Garvey’s The Ethics of Climate Change:

‘If you don’t yet know why you should be morally outraged about the present situation, read this book. Calmly, carefully, with well-marshalled facts and sound argument, Garvey shows us just how badly the nations of the industrialized world – and the citizens of those nations – are behaving. He also tells us what we need to do about it.’ Peter Singer, Princeton University

‘Open this book and James Garvey is right there making real sense to you. A new philosopher doing logic in the world. In a necessary conversation, capturing you to the very end.’ Ted Honderich, University College London

‘Essential reading for anyone interested in the urgent moral questions raised by our climate crisis.’ Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

‘It’s an excellent book to think with: Garvey has a delicious style, often very funny, and a trick of ushering the reader right inside his thought experiments.’ Steven Poole, The Guardian

Praise for James Garvey’s The Twenty Greatest Philosophy Books:

‘The competition among philosophy popularisers is getting ever more intense by the minute, and the bad news for the rest of the field is that Garvey seems to understand more deeply, write better and explain more clearly than anyone else.’ Julian Baggini, Times Higher Education

THEPERSUADERS

THE HIDDEN INDUSTRY THAT WANTS TOCHANGE YOUR MIND

JAMES GARVEY

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Contents

Preface

1. The Robin Hood on Butcher Lane

2. The Art of Steering Heads Inside

3. On Second Thoughts

4. When Push Comes to Shove

5. Lost for Words

6. Retail Therapy

7. Left to Our Devices

8. The Lost Art of Argument

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Garvey works for the Royal Institute of Philosophy and edits The Philosophers’ Magazine. He has written and edited books on the history of ideas, philosophy, ethics, consciousness and social and political thought – his books have been translated into ten languages. He also writes for the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman and the Times Higher Education. He lives on a canal boat in London.

‘At the end of reasons comes persuasion.’

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

Preface

‘The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.’

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Before I disappear into the footnotes, it might help if I tell you how this started. Five years ago I had the philosophical equivalent of what recovering alcoholics call ‘a moment of clarity’. I was in a large, crowded lecture hall in London, listening to a talk given by a high-flying Oxford theologian, and I did something I almost never manage to do. During the question and answer session that followed his talk, I got in an absolutely killer objection. A philosopher behind me swore happily when he heard it. Another sitting next to me smiled, leaned over and whispered, ‘You’ve got him! You’ve got him in a regress!’ Indeed I had.1

I won the argument that night, plainly, and to come to the point, it made no difference at all. The speaker didn’t change his mind. He took more questions and just got on with promoting his view. It occurred to me then that maybe arguments aren’t actually very persuasive. Even really good ones. That’s what came to me in my moment of clarity.

This thought was to me a big deal. I’ve spent a lot of a life picking over arguments, surrounded by philosophers and their books and articles – all of us taking arguments very seriously. I thought that arguments are sometimes how you get at the truth and how you persuade others of the truths you have found. A number of people, both inside and outside the academic world, think so too. That’s a large part of what we are all up to in an open society. We present our arguments to one another, sometimes in the public square. We listen, and the side with the strongest reasons is judged right in the end. Those with the best arguments have the assent of all reasonable people, and we move forward together. We’ve had the Enlightenment. We might stumble from time to time, but that’s how things are supposed to go now.

I began to suspect that’s not even remotely how things actually go at all. I don’t want to overcook the point and suggest that arguments are entirely unpersuasive – but we might well overestimate their hold on us. And I’m not simply saying that quite often brawn trumps brains – that’s nearly too obvious to mention. I’m also not being naive, I hope, having only just noticed that human beings are capable of extraordinary irrationality. But I believe there is something newsworthy here, something worrying, over and above all the obvious stuff, something just out of focus, on the corner of our collective vision. Maybe despite how it feels on the inside, good reasons actually have little effect on us, and in fact other forces largely shape what we think. The world we are building together, the lives we are living, the hopes we have and the actions we take – it’s all very much what it is because of something other than good reasons. That possibility menaces me more than a little.

If that Oxford don was anything to go by, philosophers weren’t much moved by arguments, and if they weren’t, I wondered who was.a Was the giving of reasons a waste of time? Was I ever really persuaded by an argument or did I just have thoughts and find good reasons for them afterwards? I did have the experience of hearing an argument in favour of something I didn’t believe, and although I couldn’t find fault in it, I nevertheless didn’t buy it for a second. I thought there must be something wrong with it that I just hadn’t spotted yet. I began to worry, a lot, about the real role of argument in an actual human life. All of this wasn’t exactly life-changing, but if I wasn’t careful I thought I might be in some danger of losing my faith in rationality. I could at least feel it slipping. It was like my worldview had tilted slightly, and now nothing looked quite right.

It did not help as I slouched onto a bus on my way home from that lecture that I found myself thinking of the Marx Brothers’ film Horse Feathers. There’s a musical bit with Groucho playing a professor, cheerfully singing, ‘Your proposition may be good, but let’s have one thing understood. Whatever it is, I’m against it.’ That was the soundtrack in my head that night. ‘And even when you’ve changed it or condensed it, I’m against it.’ I recall feeling slightly ill.

I talked to friends about my experience of winning an argument without persuading my opponent, and they all had similar stories to tell. It happened a lot when talking politics or about a politically charged topic – equally reasonable people with equal access to the facts coming down on opposite sides, unable to see reason in what the other says. I encountered it often when writing and speaking about climate change – what seemed to me to be straightforward, compelling combinations of scientific fact and moral argument seemed to someone else entirely unconvincing, even worthy of ridicule. I knew an environmentalist who was interested in the psychology of climate change denial – so strange was it to him that he thought it must be some kind of pathology. Meanwhile, his green beliefs were likened by those on the other side to a kind of groundless religious fundamentalism. ‘Beating them over the head with the facts doesn’t work’, he said. I imagine those who did not share his view thought he didn’t have his facts right. There are arguments about climate change all over the place, but few people are persuaded by them. Something else is going on.

I started thinking about the genuinely persuasive forces out there. If not arguments, what actually does change our minds? What do we find persuasive? When people with money and power and know-how attempt to persuade us, what do they do? Advertisers, politicians, marketers, lobbyists and public relations professionals all seem to be up to something other than giving us good reasons. Is that because giving reasons doesn’t work very well, or at least not as well as other persuasive tactics?

What are the dark arts practised by the pros and where did they come from? How did we end up with a world where good arguments are so easily ignored? Has it always been that way or is this some new fact about us? Is something taking the place of reason in public life? What is this shift doing to us, to our minds and to the world that we are building all around us? This book is a start on these questions, all of them raised inadvertently by an Oxford don with implausible views. I’m not sure I should thank him.

I am sure I should thank a number of other people. I’m grateful to many authors who have guided me through unfamiliar territory – those who know the literature will recognise my many debts. Some friends and other interested parties were good enough to read and comment on an earlier version of this book, and many others are owed thanks for different kinds of help. I’m especially grateful to Sarah Balmforth, Mango Benson, H. Skott Brill, Quillian Brogan, Catherine Clarke, Davis Cook, comrades at Crisis, Steve Donaghy, A.M. Ferner, Kim Hastilow, Duncan Heath, Hei Matau and crew, Ingrid Honderich, Ted Honderich, Rob Kerr, Ian Lambert, the librarians of Dr Williams’s Library and Senate House Library, Justin Lynas, Anthony O’Hear, Marianne Pearson, Dan Pollendine, Ros Ponder, Sophie Robards, Will Robards, Matt Ryan, Stuart Scott, Rowan Searle, Matthew Shepherd, Heather Sillitoe, Ian Sillitoe, associates at the UCLU Jiu Jitsu Club, Olivia Wood, and Judy Garvey in particular for her unwavering encouragement and support.

This book is for V.

Endnotes

a. I think philosophers are persuaded by arguments in a very narrow range of circumstances – see David Chalmers (2015), ‘Why isn’t there more progress in philosophy?’, Philosophy, 90.01, pp. 3–31 for a good guess as to why and when. There are at any rate famous philosophical arguments that most philosophers find extremely powerful, nothing obviously wrong with them, but that they still don’t find persuasive: Agrippa’s trilemma, Berkeley’s arguments against the existence of matter, Hume’s problem with induction. Even Hume couldn’t talk himself into sticking with some of his own conclusions. What hope do the rest of us have?

1

The Robin Hood on Butcher Lane

‘I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardour of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary’s force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness.’

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

When George III began his slide into insensibility and the American colonies were in open rebellion, the people of London insisted on being completely reasonable with one another. It all started some years earlier, with a small group of men who met in a pub called the Robin Hood on Butcher Lane.1

Up the stairs, out of earshot of the clamour of the labourers, artisans and Strand girls below, they booked a private room on Monday nights. Notoriously finicky about membership – boors need not apply – as many as fifteen of them turned up to smoke, drink and politely beg to differ with each another. They took sides, for or against any question that caught their attention, sometimes choosing an agreeably subversive topic, perhaps objecting to the government’s policy towards France’s expansion, debating whether Scripture might admit of personal interpretation, arguing the merits of popular books recommending reform, and enquiring into whether virtue or vice might afford superior pleasures. They took it in seven-minute turns, the time carefully observed by a vigilant factotum. After about two hours of spirited debate, when everyone had had enough, the chair summarised the arguments and brought the proceedings satisfactorily to a close. Although anyone was entitled to speak, some sat quietly and simply listened, enjoying the splendid sound of points eloquently made.

Perhaps an enterprising publican spotted the quiet ones and thought to open the doors to spectators – for a small admission fee of course. By the 1730s, the Robin Hood Society was a going concern, joined a decade later by the Queen’s Arms Society, and on it quietly but resolutely went, with just three or four groups scheduling regular debates, ranks swelled a little by budding lawyers, politicians and, oddly enough, actors – all keen to gain experience of speaking in public. But in the winter of 1780, something unexpected happened.

It had the shape of an epidemic centred in the heart of the city, with debating societies springing up around the Robin Hood at first, then fanning out all the way to what were then nearly London’s borders. Every neighbourhood succumbed. As far north as Islington, the Summer Lyceum met at Smith’s Tea Rooms. In the south, the Theological Debating Society convened in St George’s Fields. As far east as Rotherhithe, the School of Oratory scheduled regular discussions in China Hall. In the west, the Black Horse Tavern on New Bond Street was home to the Lyceum for the Investigation of Historical, Political, Literary and Theological Subjects. A newspaper editor baulked at the ‘rage for disputation, which has so suddenly spread itself in every part of the metropolis’.2 Another worried that ‘the Disorder is become so epidemical, that we are in Danger of dying a Nation of Orators’.3

Seven clubs met in the autumn of 1779, but in a few short months 35 debating societies, catering to every conceivable intellectual taste, shoehorned hundreds of people into taverns, auction houses and dancing halls each night of the week. People of every rank rubbed shoulders in the debating rooms – at least anyone who could come up with entry fees, sometimes not much less than the cost of a pricey theatre ticket. As a patron described it: ‘After a dirty walk, we were admitted, through the mediation of sixpence, into a spacious room, well lighted up and uncommonly crowded. The group was one of the most whimsical I had ever seen, and the countenances were in general divided into the classical, the supercilious, and the vacant, and the ranks would have been equally distinguishable, but that our introductory sixpence, like death and stage-coaches, had levelled all distinctions, and jostled wits, lawyers, politicians and mechanics, into the confusion of the last day.’4

Every large venue in the city was given over to ‘rational amusements’, and every self-respecting Londoner had views about where to go for a good argument. The Robin Hood could now expect 600 attendees a night – as many as 1,200 wedged themselves in for a big event. The largest brains in the country – the likes of Burke, Boswell and Pitt – weighed in.

Competition for custom was fierce. The societies distinguished themselves however they could, specialising in theological questions, political discussion, even sly takes on otherwise mundane matters to do with everyday life. Love, sex, and the proper relationship between a man and a woman were topics regularly revisited. Which is the more contemptible character: the effeminate man or the masculine woman? Is marriage or celibacy more desirable? Is the love of the intellectual or ‘the personal charms’ of a woman more likely to induce a man to marriage? Is the ‘deliberate seduction of the fair, with an intention to desert, under all circumstances worse than murder’? Can men and women ever truly be ‘platonic friends’? A vote was taken at the end of this debate and the matter decided in the negative.

The Temple of Taste offered music, poetry and acrobatics in the run-up to the main event, while the Female Inquisition attracted attention with the potentially titillating prospect of ‘fair orators’, famous lady speakers whose gifts for argument were matched only by their beauty. Unamused, La Belle Assemblée banned men. Some clubs banned alcohol. Others banned women. One banned women and alcohol.

The better halls were commodious and grandly illuminated by fine chandeliers, with plush sofas and chairs arranged in gradually elevated circles to enable as many as possible to catch sight of all the action. The Lycée François held all its debates in French. For its part, the Carlisle House School of Eloquence encouraged frank debate by permitting speakers to conceal their identities behind masks, sternly warning that ‘if any improper behaviour or expression shall be used under the concealment of a masque, the person offending shall submit, at the injunction of the President, to unmask or retire’.

It’s easy to imagine these rooms as occasionally rowdy places, packed with eighteenth-century Londoners thrilling to verbal fisticuffs, baying for oratorical blood, but in fact it was incredibly civilised. The chair was expected to keep order, which usually wasn’t difficult, as people turned up to hear incisive points made with style and eloquence, not mere knock-about. You can get a feel for it in this letter to the editor of the Gazetteer, gushing about a recent debate in the Queen’s Arms:

I was present on Friday evening last, and much pleased was I to observe so numerous an audience assembled, for the laudable purpose of edifying each other, by a search after truth. The question (which related to the indulgence lately granted by Parliament to the Roman Catholics of this kingdom) was discussed with the greatest candour and ingenuity by several gentlemen, long and well known in the society for their eminent abilities as to sound knowledge and real argument. Some new and juvenile speakers made their first essay, and were received with all that warmth of applause which is so fostering to the budding genius, and for which the society has always been remarkable, from its early institution to the present time.5

Not exactly bear-baiting is it?

But if it’s easy for us to get it wrong when we try to imagine the urbanity of those taking part in London’s grand debates, how unrecognisable would our world seem to them? Teleport the members of the Robin Hood Society to the present day, and subject them to a few of our forums for argument and debate: talk shows, reality television, blog posts and tweets, newspaper opinion pieces, late-night radio, hostile interviews, party political broadcasts, electioneering, and Prime Minister’s Questions. What would they make of what argument has become? Would they see anything more than shouting back and forth, contradiction, accusation, insult, point-scoring, bickering and smearing? Would they find anything to admire in us at all?

In the end, London’s flirtation with rationality did not last long. Largely in fearful reaction to the brewing French Revolution, the debating societies were violently repressed by the government – thugs were hired to break up debates, police constables blocked the doors, landlords were threatened with fines or worse, popular speakers were roughed up, and finally Parliament voted in the Seditious Meetings Act, effectively making public debate a treasonous offence.6

When the Robin Hood held its final meeting before being forced to close its elegant rooms, it was a kind of high-water mark in the history of reasoned discussion in the English-speaking world. No doubt we’re the beneficiaries of progress along all sorts of intellectual lines, but our Georgian forebears would almost certainly wipe the floor with us in an argument. We wouldn’t stand a chance.

What happened to us?

*

As the members of the Robin Hood might have had it, an argument was not merely disagreement. It was two or more people presenting and backing up their positions and then scrutinising one another’s claims. If they were on top of things, they would have considered two fundamental features of argument: the logic of the presentation and the truth of the premises therein. Those arguing were expected to respond to points fairly made and accept them when that was where the argument led. It meant that one might change one’s view in the light of criticism – and one might even do so gladly, because the essence and aim of a decent argument, for them, was largely the discovery of truth. No doubt the debating halls were sometimes filled with people arguing for the fun of it, for prestige, or for practice, but truth was the highest goal that could be shared by both sides. On a good night, they worked towards that goal together, enlightening one another, to the edification and applause of those in attendance.

When we think of an argument today, we mostly imagine something else entirely: entrenched positions, shouting matches, red faces and the butting of heads. There’s rarely give and take, often no conception of one’s interlocutor as a person with views up for consideration, no thought of modifying one’s position in response to a good point. In fact the demonisation of your opponent is now an excellent and effective tactic, as is the deliberate misunderstanding of his or her claims. We appeal to emotion and authority, distract with irrelevancies, stoop to fallacy if it helps, and ignore good points no matter how well made they are. We stick to our guns, and we seek to undermine each other by any means.

Worries about this sort of carry-on are in the air at the moment. In a recent TED Talk the philosopher Michael Sandel put it bluntly: ‘If you think about the arguments we have, most of the time it’s shouting matches on cable television, ideological food fights on the floor of Congress.’7 Much the same point is made, this time with regard to written argument, by Lee Siegel, columnist and editor-at-large for the New York Observer: ‘The name-calling and yelling on cable TV and the Internet have made us forget [the power of the written word]. Polemic seems to have gone the way of the typewriter and the soda fountain. The word was once associated with the best practitioners of the form: Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, George Orwell, Rebecca West. Nowadays, if you say “polemic,” you get strange looks, as if you were referring not to refined argument, especially written argument, but to some sort of purgative.’8

Maybe something has happened to us. Contemporary persuasion is now rarely done through argumentation. It now seems to operate mostly outside of reason.

In nearly every hour of your waking life, a lot of people will try 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. Instead, you’ll experience product placement, infoganda, sock-puppeteering, decoy pricing, viral marketing, astroturfing, crowd manipulation, newsjacking, framing, spinning, propagandising, agenda setting, message carpet-bombing, anchoring and the nudging of your choices – all in an effort to affect your beliefs, desires, values, decisions and actions. You are very rarely reasoned with. Instead, you are nudged, anchored and incentivised.

It may well be a profound shift in the way human beings interact with one another. Even if it is, a glance at history will tell you that the picture is nevertheless complicated. We haven’t always been entirely reasonable or unreasonable – it hasn’t been a slow march out of the darkness and into the light. There have been peaks and troughs – great moments like the days of the grand London debates, and much less reasonable times, perhaps like the ones we’re in now.

At this odd moment, to consider just a corner of it, many of those engaged in debates in America about the budget, gun policy, healthcare, abortion, taxation and so on are barely able to speak to one another without anger. Religious debates between new atheists and believers can sometimes consist only in insult and slur. Objections to war in the Middle East are met with questions about one’s patriotism rather than reasoned argumentation. Compare this to what human beings have been capable of in the past.

As recently as two hundred years or so ago, Americans with considerably different political opinions and agendas were able to sit down together, engage in something approaching dialogue, and ratify the Articles of Confederation. Dominican friars in the Middle Ages thought it their religious duty to converse with unbelievers, calmly and carefully, to help them see the divine light through civilised discussion. In the eighteenth century, while British soldiers were in action in India, a London debating society invited people to enjoy refreshments, listen to music, and then join polite company in addressing the question, ‘Is not the war now carrying on in India disgraceful to this country, injurious to its political interest, and ruinous to the commercial interests of the [East India] Company?’ This kind of thing is all but beyond us now.

In pointing to all of this I don’t mean to suggest that the past was a watercolour of uniformly rosy rationality. When we think about the attack ads and mudslinging of contemporary political campaigning, for example, it’s easy to pine for what we imagine were simpler and better times – bold men holding forth to attentive crowds of modest but reflective townsfolk, running for office on nothing less than the power of their excellent ideas. It’s worth remembering that candidates for the US presidency did not actually engage in campaigning until 1840, when William Henry Harrison was forced to make a personal appearance at rallies to rebut the devastatingly effective but on reflection highly unlikely charge that he was, in actual fact, a ‘caged simpleton’.

So there have been peaks and troughs, but we seem to be in a particularly deep trough at the moment. Why? That’s a good but also hard question, and in trying to answer it, I know I’m setting myself an impossible task. A complete answer would require a long and detailed history of the social, economic, political and psychological forces that have landed us where we are. That kind of thing is beyond me – and anyway it’s not the sort of book I’d want to read, much less write. Some of the larger moments in the explanation of our current malaise, if that’s what it is, are themselves fascinating and enough to satisfy my own curiosity. So I won’t raise the Titanic, but I will dive for pearls.

The topics considered here reflect my own odd path through the tangled history of persuasion. I sometimes used the unimpeachably scientific method of discussing discoveries with friends in the pub, and if an experiment or event or personality got them talking it probably made it into these pages. Someone else with different friends in another pub might have chosen differently. In the end this book contains a mix of history and theory, good stories and large personalities, experimental evidence and ridiculous ideas that somehow managed to catch on. Among many other things, you’ll read about contemporary propaganda, new theories influencing the minds of our leaders and policy-makers (and in turn changing our lives too), the manipulative language of political campaigns, the rise of psychological theorising on Madison Avenue in the 1950s and what that did to our culture, and how an understanding of the human brain and the effects of social media might give some people a powerfully persuasive edge. There are also some worrying possibilities to consider, about what it is that modern persuasion does to human freedom, well-being, mental health, social cohesion, morality, the flow of power, and our prospects for living happy lives in a peaceful, interconnected world. The chapters are largely self-contained, so feel free to skip around if you like. I’ll try to stand back and leave you free to come to your own conclusions, but often I find I can’t help butting in. I will certainly say what I think at the end of chapters and at the end of the book.

A lot of things really must be said, because this shift in persuasion matters more than you might think. As a people, we’re unusually quiet about it, and that has to change. I sometimes wish I had a god’s-eye view of the causal history of my beliefs, a spider’s web of connections I could follow right back to where and when I first came to think what I think. There’s a lot I take to be true, about how the world is and how it should be, a conception of religion, thoughts about politics and the value of science, beliefs about corporations, power, money, and what ultimately matters to me and how I think I ought to live my life. I wonder how much of that is owed to clear-headed reflection and rational choice on my part, and how much is actually the result of persuasive pressure from outside. I feel a clear responsibility to try to uncover the difference, figure out what’s mine and what’s not, otherwise my thoughts aren’t really my own, and there’s something awful about living like that.

I’m reminded of Bertrand Russell’s lines about ‘the man who has no tincture of philosophy’, the unreflective person who just ‘goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason’.9Russell sees in such a life a kind of horror. Just accepting a view of the world that you’ve been handed by someone else, without reflection or deliberation, without argument – it’s not your view of the world at all. It’s not really your life that you’re living if the convictions you live by are not your own.

The persuasive pressure on us, to think and feel and choose a way of life, is enormous. It’s harder now than it was in Russell’s day to make up your mind for yourself, but the stakes are just as high. What we believe shapes us, makes us who we are, and largely determines what we do, who we love, and how we live. So I think we have an obligation, maybe a moral one, to understand what contemporary persuasion does to us. It bothers me, and I hope that now it bothers you too.

2

The Art of Steering Heads Inside

‘The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.’

NOAM CHOMSKY

In the summer of 1990, the Iraqi Republican Guard overwhelmed Kuwait’s armed forces and took control of the country. The fighting lasted just two days. Speculation about the rationale for the invasion has always focused on money and oil. Iraq accused Kuwait of ‘slant drilling’ across the border, into Iraqi reserves. There were complaints by Iraq that high production levels of Kuwaiti oil kept the price too low. Annexing the country was a clear and efficient way to stop both the sideways siphoning of oil and the downwards pressure on price.

Whatever Iraq’s reasons, Americans were initially indifferent to the invasion. Vietnam had not faded from memory, and there was no taste for sending American troops abroad, again, to fight yet more battle-tested soldiers in unfamiliar territory. When Saddam Hussein appeared on the American public’s radar at all, he was regarded as pleasingly hostile to Iran and therefore a kind of accidental ally to the United States. Anyway, most Americans had never even heard of Kuwait. As American military intervention became a live possibility later that year, public opinion was divided, very nearly down the middle. President George H.W. Bush gave Iraqi forces until 15 January to leave Kuwait, and even in the run-up to the deadline, as late as December 1990, a poll indicated that 48 per cent of Americans wanted Bush to wait before taking military action, even if Iraq failed to withdraw in time.1 There was a real and widespread hope that sanctions and diplomacy could end the conflict peacefully.

Just a few months earlier, in the autumn of 1990, a fifteen-year-old girl appeared before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and gave evidence of atrocities committed by Iraqi troops during and following the invasion. She was known only as ‘Nayirah’, apparently afraid to use her real name because doing so would endanger family and friends still trapped back home in Kuwait. You can find her four minutes of testimony online, and it’s still riveting – sometimes fighting back tears, sometimes sobbing, but throughout remarkably self-possessed and bold; her eyes up from her notes more often than not, she speaks directly to the caucus’ chairmen. She says, early on in her testimony, ‘I volunteered at the al-Adan Hospital with twelve other women who wanted to help as well … While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying.’2

She said the Iraqis either destroyed or stole everything of value in her country. They took all the food from the supermarkets and all the medicine from pharmacies. They ransacked private homes. When she and some friends took a stand and distributed flyers condemning what they saw, they were warned by other Kuwaitis that they were risking their lives. People disappeared. Many were killed or tortured. A friend of hers, 22 but now looking ‘like an old man’, was beaten and nearly drowned. Iraqi soldiers ‘pulled out his fingernails and applied electric shocks to sensitive, private parts of his body’. He was lucky to have survived. In the end she struck a note of calm defiance, startling given her young age: ‘I am glad I am fifteen, old enough to remember Kuwait before Saddam Hussein destroyed it, and young enough to rebuild it.’

Those in the room appear spellbound. A woman sitting next to Nayirah wipes away tears. The caucus was chaired by two congressmen, Tom Lantos and John Porter. Following her statement Porter said that in the past eight years, the caucus had held scores of hearings about human rights abuses, but ‘we have never heard, in all this time, in all circumstances, a record of inhumanity, and brutality, and sadism as the one that the witnesses have given us today. I don’t know how the civilised countries of the world can fail to do everything within their power to remove this scourge from the face of our Earth.’ The witnesses who testified before the committee, he said, ‘have done a great service to ours and to all countries of the world, who must join together and take whatever action might be necessary to free the people of Kuwait from this aggression and brutality.’

A video of her statement was picked up by US television and broadcast on the evening news by the major networks to millions and millions of Americans. President Bush repeated the story at least ten times in the run-up to the American invasion. He focused on emotions, not reasons: ‘We’ve all heard of atrocities in Kuwait that would make the strongest of us weep’, he said. ‘It turns your stomach when you listen to the tales of those that have escaped the brutality of Saddam the invader. Mass hangings. Babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor.’3 Major American newspapers ran stories about it, and there was discussion on talk shows. Amnesty International conducted an investigation, concluding that ‘over 300 premature babies were reported to have died after Iraqi soldiers removed them from incubators, which were then looted’.4

The UN held an unusual public forum and discussed the theft of incubators and the murder of babies. They heard testimony from Dr Issah Ibrahim, a surgeon working in Kuwait, who said he had supervised the burial of 120 babies, and had himself buried 40 newborns, all taken from their incubators by Iraqis. Days later the Security Council passed a resolution empowering states to use all necessary means to force Iraq out of Kuwait. Reuters passed stories from Kuwaiti women about newborns taken from incubators on to US and British newspapers.

In January, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution for war in Iraq that then went to the Senate. It was a close-run thing. In the end it passed by just five votes, 52 to 47, the narrowest margin authorising military force in a congressional vote since the War of 1812. During the debate, seven senators who backed the resolution mentioned Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators. Given how close the final vote was, Nayirah’s testimony might well have tipped the balance and put America on course for war.

In a New York Times op-ed piece called ‘Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait?’ published in early 1992, John MacArthur argued that a little investigation into her testimony ‘would have done a great service to the democratic process’.5 It was originally claimed that she didn’t use her real name to protect friends and family back home; but there was a much better reason, he said, for Nayirah to hide her identity. She was actually a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, the daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, who also happened to be the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. He sat in the room as she gave evidence. Why didn’t anyone, particularly the two Congressmen chairing the caucus, check out her story before allowing her to testify?

‘One explanation’, MacArthur wrote, ‘might lie in how Nayirah came to the Congressmen’s attention. Both Congressmen have a close relationship with Hill and Knowlton, the public relations firm hired by Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the Kuwaiti-financed group that lobbied Congress for military intervention. A Hill and Knowlton vice president, Gary Hymel, helped organize the Congressional Human Rights Caucus hearing.’

In six months the Kuwaiti government poured $11.9 million into a front group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, and almost all of it went to Hill and Knowlton, then the largest public relations firm in the world. Mobilising 119 executives and twelve of the company’s offices across the US, they set up press conferences detailing alleged human rights abuses perpetrated by Iraqis, circulated hostage letters, arranged interviews with Kuwaitis for news programmes, organised a National Prayer Day for Kuwait involving churches all over the country, arranged pro-war rallies, and distributed tens of thousands of ‘Free Kuwait’ T-shirts and bumper stickers on college campuses.

Hill and Knowlton got themselves into the news business, videoing the results of pro-war activities in the US and interviews in the Middle East, as well as useful soundbites gathered from hawkish politicians. They bundled all this up into media kits and press releases for US news networks, which passed on their messages as straight reporting. Hill and Knowlton prepared the video of Nayirah’s testimony and ensured it was broadcast as widely as possible.

The New York Times reported that the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, headed by Lantos and Porter, the chairs of the caucus that heard Nayirah’s testimony, actually operated out of Hill and Knowlton offices in Georgetown, which they rented at a much reduced rate.6 Citizens for a Free Kuwait donated $50,000 directly to the Foundation.7 Hill and Knowlton’s political connections went all the way to the top. The man running their Washington office was Craig Fuller, a friend of George H.W. Bush and his chief of staff when he was Vice President. Fuller ran the Kuwait account from the start.8

According to John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, in their exposé on the PR industry, Kuwait quietly funded not just Hill and Knowlton, but as many as twenty public relations, law and lobby firms, all in an effort to tilt US public opinion in favour of war.9 One group received $100,000 a month for media work, another $50,000 a month for lobbying members of Congress – millions more were spent on advertising, preparing TV spots, and coordinating a stable of as many as 50 speakers who could be dispatched at a moment’s notice to rallies and other events to make the case for war.

Hill and Knowlton hired the Wirthlin Group, a research and consulting firm that specialised in monitoring the effectiveness of sales pitches in advertising. Wirthlin equipped members of ‘response groups’ with a device enabling them to indicate whether their reaction to an advertisement was favourable or unfavourable, in real time, as they watched it. The results were aggregated and analysed, so the most effective turns of phrase and images could be easily identified.

They could do the same thing with political speeches and other messages sent out by Citizens for a Free Kuwait. The information was used to find messages that ‘resonate emotionally with the American people’.10 If the Kuwaiti ambassador appeared on television and made 30 points, Wirthlin could tell him which three were the most effective, so he could reinforce them in future appearances. As a spokesman for Wirthlin put it, the question was, ‘what is it that we can do to emotionally motivate people to support action through the UN to drive [the Iraqi army out]? And the emotional things that would do that were the fact that Saddam Hussein was a madman who had committed atrocities, even against his own people, and had tremendous power to do further damage, and he needed to be stopped.’11 Focus groups helped Hill and Knowlton find the most effective buttons, and those buttons were then pressed, repeatedly. The hearings in the human rights caucus and in the UN were, as Wirthlin’s man put it, ‘big events’ in the campaign to persuade the American public to go to war.

The Nayirah testimony and the public relations campaign in which it was embedded shifted public opinion without the need for a single persuasive argument. There was no genuine public debate. Americans were not convinced by good reasons to intervene militarily in Kuwait. Something else swayed public opinion, something having to do with money and an understanding of human motivations.

Following MacArthur’s revelations about the identity of Nayirah, a number of investigations were launched. Amnesty International retracted its earlier claim and said that it could find no evidence that Iraqis killed premature babies. The Kuwaiti government hired Kroll Associates, a private detective firm, to carry out an ‘independent’ investigation, and even it found that Nayirah had never volunteered at al-Adan Hospital.12 When investigators arrived in Kuwait, the story simply evaporated – no one could corroborate it, no evidence could be found. It seems there were no missing incubators.13

Following the publication of a report by Middle East Watch, Andrew Whitley, head of its parent group, Human Rights Watch, said: ‘While it is true that the Iraqis targeted hospitals, there is no truth to the charge which was central to the war propaganda effort that they stole incubators and callously removed babies allowing them to die on the floor. The stories were manufactured from germs of truth by people outside the country who should have known better.’14 Middle East Watch suspected that Dr Issah Ibrahim’s testimony was also arranged by Hill and Knowlton. His real name was Ibrahim Bahbahani, and he was a dentist, not a surgeon.

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Citizens for a Free Kuwait is a particularly egregious, well-known and well-researched example of a ubiquitous feature of modern persuasion: a front group managed by a public relations firm on behalf of a hidden interest. What is PR? According to the Public Relations Society of America – ‘the world’s largest and foremost organization of public relations professionals’ – public relations is ‘a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics’.15 They do this mutually beneficial work, partly, by hiding the real intentions of their clients. Certainly not all public relations firms are engaged in whatever it was that was going on behind the scenes with Citizens for a Free Kuwait – but focusing on the seedier end of the spectrum can sometimes help you see things clearly.

Because the machinations behind PR messages are sometimes intentionally very well hidden, it’s impossible to say with much certainty how many front groups are currently operating or how many covert PR messages you hear from day to day. Most of us are unable to name even one or two public relations firms, but the public relations industry is worth an estimated $11 billion a year in the United States alone. It employs nearly 55,000 public relations professionals in more than 8,000 firms.16 In the United Kingdom, to cast the net a bit more broadly, there are at least 48,000 people working in and around public relations, lobbying, and corporate branding, and the industry is worth more than £6.5 billion each year.17

Its influence on the news is enormous. Public relations professionals now outnumber journalists by three to one, and on average they’re much better financed than their counterparts in the news business.18 They place stories, sometimes kill stories, using everything from press releases and stage-managed ‘events’ to calling in favours and subtle ‘leaks’ – it’s hard to pin down, but by one possibly over-enthusiastic estimate, as much as 80 per cent of the content of the news comes directly from, or is somehow influenced by, lobbyists and public relations firms.19

Large corporations have their own, in-house PR teams and employ external agencies for specialist work. The largest PR firms are global, some with offices in more than 100 countries, coordinating international efforts through lobbying, marketing, research, consulting and advertising divisions. It would be difficult to imagine another profession which is as invisible, as unregulated, as unaccountable, and as influential. Given the amount of money involved and the powerful interests in play, the effect of public relations and lobbying firms on what we think and do must be exceptionally large.

There are books devoted to investigations into front groups pushing the interests of tobacco companies, the food and drink industries, Big Pharma, fossil fuel producers, even the Church of Scientology and foreign governments with an interest in international aid hoping to improve their image abroad. The names chosen for such groups can be awe-inspiring. The Animal Welfare Council represents the interests of rodeo and circus operators. America’s Wetland Foundation is funded by Shell, BP and other oil companies, and it campaigns for taxpayer assistance for the cost of the coastal restoration work required following the damage BP itself has done, in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The Independent Women’s Forum is an anti-feminist organisation sponsored by a collection of conservative foundations. The Non-Smoker Protection Committee attempts to overturn smoking bans in public places that might actually protect non-smokers, with funding from the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse fights to make it more difficult for citizens to bring lawsuits for injuries and illnesses caused by hazardous products. It is funded by Philip Morris, maker of hazardous products.20

Some PR firms specialise in a particular sort of front group method, sometimes called astroturfing, which involves creating the appearance of an upsurge in opinion on a crucial question, perhaps among a representative’s constituents, pushing him or her in the direction of a particular policy and a vote that counts in favour of a hidden interest. The representative won’t feel lobbied, as it will appear to him or her that a real grass-roots movement is growing back home. PR firms do this by targeting opinion leaders and urging them to spread the word on the ground, sometimes for a fee, or simply emailing local people and inviting them to sign petitions or click on links that make their views known – form letters requiring only a little personalisation can be instantly forwarded to the government in the form of an independent email from a concerned citizen. Other firms focus on creating different sorts of shifts in public opinion, disseminating information via front groups that look like concerned neighbours, swaying voters towards a client’s interests in time for anything from a vote to a town hall meeting.

The strategies for sending out positive messages about a client are varied, and they keep pace with changes to technology. Getting a good story into the news is still a viable tactic, but so is making changes to Wikipedia pages. It recently emerged that Bell Pottinger, one of the UK’s largest PR firms, operated at least ten fake Wikipedia accounts, some making edits to more than 100 pages each. The accounts were set up under assumed names, and both the clients and the firm itself were carefully hidden from view. A user called Diginerd84, for example, did not describe himself as a Bell Pottinger employee, but as a ‘50-year-old retired stockbroker in Mayfair with an interest in classic cars – particularly a 1929 Rolls-Royce Phantom II’.21

Understanding Google’s search engine algorithms and manipulating them is another dark art mastered by some in the PR world. In an investigative sting, The Independent recorded Tim Collins, managing director of Bell Pottinger Public Affairs, and David Wilson, chairman, describing the firm’s ability to influence information online, in this case burying Uzbekistan’s record of human rights violations. Collins said: ‘And where we want to get to – and this will take time, this is where David’s team are magical – is you get to the point where even if they type in “Uzbek child labour” or “Uzbek human rights violation”, some of the first results that come up are sites talking about what you guys are doing to address and improve that, not just the critical voices saying how terrible this all is.’22

These examples can be multiplied, and if an online platform could conceivably be useful to someone interested in how a corporation or government is perceived, it is probably being exploited in some way. It’s believed that representatives of the Chinese government manage a ‘50 cent army’, paying as many as 300,000 people to post pro-Chinese government comments on message boards and social media sites worldwide. A Russian ‘troll army’ is thought to coordinate hundreds of accounts that post pro-Putin messages in the comment streams of articles published by The Guardian and The Huffington Post. Bogus Twitter accounts or just paying someone for helpful tweets or vlogs; planted stories on Reddit, ‘click farms’ and sites with subtle names like buyamazonreviews.com that employ people to manage multiple accounts and ‘like’ particular products; sock-puppet commenters hired to criticise rivals and write favourable comments for clients; other commenters paid to fight the opposing corner badly so as to bring it into ill repute; bogus email accounts delivering tips to bloggers who pass messages on as news – a very great deal of what we encounter online is prepared by those in the business of public relations and lobbying. While there has been considerable investigative work on what such firms get up to, there’s very little discussion of what, if anything, is wrong with all of this.

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