The hidden persuaders, and the menace of TV
My favourite secondhand bookshop has once again delivered an unexpected delight – a vintage copy of Vance Packard’s ‘Hidden Persuaders’, one of those books you think you’ve read and haven’t. I remember being repeatedly urged to read it back in the 1960s, when it was already quite old. In fact it’s still very fresh. The advertising and market research techniques that it exposes are still very much in use, though Colour TV has made them infinitely more effective. And we are still not armoured against them.
In fact the continuing success of supermarkets, a sort of mass hypnosis under which we repeatedly buy large piles of things we don’t really need, and which are not as nice as they look, is a tribute to our willingness to be seduced by clever lighting, cunning use of colour and the strange power of large heaps of goods to make us want to buy those goods.
I have a simple technique for dealing with this, much like Ulysses’s neat trick for listening to the lovely music of the Sirens without being lured on the rocks and killed.
Well not that much like, as supermarkets don’t lure you to your death, just into excessive spending. But vaguely like it. I simply make it physically impossible for temptation to work. Ulysses stuffed his crew’s ears with wax and commanded them to lash him to the mast of his ship while they sailed by, so he could hear the beautiful singing and survive. There’s a rather horrible picture of this scene from The Odyssey, in Manchester City Art Gallery. The Sirens, a good deal cheekier and much more lightly clad than most women in Victorian art, sit smirking and carolling amid the decaying corpses of their past victims, while an enraptured Ulysses strives to burst his bonds and his grumpy crew sail on by with their plugged ears, well aware they’re missing a great performance.
But I digress. My infallible device for resisting supermarket attempts to lower my blink rate and soothe me into idiotic lavish buying is this. I go to the supermarket by bicycle. With only a modest basket and a backpack in which to carry my purchases, I am forced to buy only what I really need. I try as hard as I can to buy as much as possible from proper butchers, bakers and greengrocers, buying from supermarkets only those things I can’t get anywhere else. Making a shopping list is also useful – and it is interesting that this old practice was almost entirely killed off by the spread of supermarkets.
I am of the British generation which can remember the days before supermarkets, days of small refrigerators, string bags, parcels and actual grocers with counters. The last one of these I can remember is a pleasant corner grocery in the Coventry suburb of Earlsdon, back in 1976. It had a bacon-slicer and a coffee grinder, and a pleasant aroma. In Oxford in the late 1960s, Sainsbury’s still had a counter, and assistants standing behind it who fetched things from shelves, rather than let you do it yourself. Small grocers, catering to students and little old ladies, would still sell four ounces of butter, cut, weighed and wrapped. Too unhygienic now, of course.
But the relationship between buyer and seller was more direct and, I think, more honest. In still remembea triumphant momentina shop in Swindon where a shopkeeper, assuming rightly that I was a callow recently-graduated student, but assuming wrongly that I'd never done my own housekeeping before, tried to sell me a bag of soft, decayed onions. When I pointed out the problem she swiftly replaced them, and never tried any such tricks on me again. Cunning supermarket packaging (especially of fruit) often prevents you realising your apples have been two years in cold store, and will turn to mush within hours of being taken out of the chill cabinet, until it is too late.
We all know (or knew) about butchers pressing the scales with their thumbs (canny shoppers would sarcastically suggest that if the butcher’s thumb was on the scale, then perhaps he would chop it off and include it in the parcel with the scrag end of neck). And in George Orwell’s ‘Coming Up For Air, there’s the old joke about the Methodist grocer’s bedtime litany :
Grocer: ‘Have you sanded the sugar?’
Wife : ‘Yes’
Grocer : ‘Have you watered the treacle?’
Wife: ‘I have’
Grocer: ‘Then come up to prayers’
But the moderately wily person could cope with all that sort of thing. The thing most of us can’t cope with is marketing men getting inside our heads while we’re not looking, and persuading us to do things we wouldn’t normally do, while imagining we are making our own decisions.
There is a very enjoyable section in ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ on the campaign to rehabilitate the prune, and the ways used to get Americans to buy this unlovely comestible after it had gone out of fashion . I wonder if this would have been possible in Britain – where the infliction of stewed prunes on several disgusted generations, and the grim portrayal of militant and aggressive prunes in the matchless Molesworth books, have surely driven the hated prune from our tables forever.
There are also interesting reflections on silly mistakes which advertisers used to make, before they began to consult market research men and psychologists. You can see here why such semi-sciences as psychology and sociology have become so important in our universities in the last 60 years or so. They have powerful and lucrative commercial and political applications.
Packard’s description of the extraordinarily rapid advanced of these techniques into politics is of course the most crucial part of the book. And his mentions of Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and one of the most significant men of the 20th century, are particularly fascinating. Adam Curtis’s brilliant TV programme (yes, they exist, see below) ‘The Century of the Self’ rightly dwelt on Bernays, the father of propaganda, who invented the expression ‘the engineering of consent’ to describe what PR men do. Implicit in all this is a contempt for the basic ideas of ‘democracy’, i.e. that the people should rule, combined with an outward respect for its forms. Thus the people are manipulated into deciding what the elite wants them to decide anyway. And this is then called the people’s will, and used to legitimise various types of elite government.
They are also made to do things by being tricked into thinking that they are rebelling while they are being manipulated. People love to think of themselves as rebels, especially while they are conforming, which explains both the huge continuing market for denim jeans, and the unending fantasy of left-wing establishment types that their modish, hackneyed ideas are ‘dangerous’ and nonconformist’.
Bernays’s campaign to start women smoking in public by staging a ‘march’ demanding a woman’s ‘right’ to smoke in public was an effective example of this. I wonder how many painful early deaths resulted from this piece of genius. His technique of using more or less bogus ‘surveys’ to create opinion and demand is also still very much in use.
Now to TV. First, there’s no question that some TV programmes, considered in their own right, are good. I hope the ones I’ve been involved in making were good, both in content, nature and purpose. Secondly, as I’ve said elsewhere, a person such as me, who wishes TV had never been invented, is not debarred by that belief from appearing on it now that it *has* been invented. By refusing to do so, I wouldn’t uninvent it. I would simply deprive my cause of a useful platform.
But there are caveats to this. TV-watching is usually habitual. That is to say, once someone has sat down in front of the TV he does not want to get up and start doing something else. Why, he isn’t even required to rise from his seat to change the channel any more. I‘m sometimes surprised that adult nappies aren’t sold to allow people to watch continually without having to take physical needs breaks.
So the ‘wonderful nature programmes’ which are the justification for allowing little Barnaby to plant himself in front of a vast plasma screen with a bowl of ice-cream will usually turn out to be a pretext. Barnaby may start with Polar Bears and David Attenborough. But it won’t be long before he is slumped, slack-jawed and with dilated pupils, in front of the cartoons as his brain turns to grey goo and his imagination shrivels, atrophies and dies. The wonderful cartoon strip ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ has some superb satires on this, as well as on the appalling sugar-crammed cereals that form so much of the childish diet.
If TV could, in practice be treated like (say) alcohol, and kept in a locked cupboard away from the children, then it would be much less harmful. Most of its damage is done in the child’s formative years (I recommend here my chapter on the Telescreen in ‘The Abolition of Britain’, some of it based on Neil Postman’s superb book ‘Entertaining Ourselves to Death’).
But this is most unlikely. TV’s hypnotic, soothing power makes it an immensely tempting child minding tool, the Third Parent in every home, a place where the child can be left transfixed and quiet, safe from physical danger on the traffic-infested street or out in the paedophile-haunted parks and countryside. The trouble is that that the TV is itself so mentally dangerous, at least as mentally dangerous as the outside world is physically dangerous, and more pernicious because its harms aren’t obvious.
And since TV began to be broadcast in colour, even the most appalling dross looks warm and tempting on the screen. It is because its power to do harm cannot be controlled, and because very few humans have the will to resist it, that I wish it had never been invented.
I say this largely to stress to people just how dangerous and damaging TV is. I have no hope that it will be abolished. But I do think there is some hope that a substantial minority will start to resist it, and safeguard their children from it.
Those in doubt might like to read Ray Bradbury’s disturbing satirical novel ‘Fahrenheit 451’ (nothing whatever to do with the awful Michael Moore), and/or watch the film that Francois Truffaut made of it. It is about a society in which books are illegal, and TV (on huge wall-size screens much like those we now have but almost unimaginable when Bradbury was writing in 1953) is virtually compulsory. Robert Redford’s very clever film ‘Quiz Show’ also makes a good job of portraying the corrupting effect of TV on civilised thought and on education. The moment when the TV arrives in the home of the poet Mark van Doren ( beautifully played by Paul Scofield) is heartbreaking. It is the end of a golden age of thought, reading and conversation, and the beginning of a plastic age of trivia and cheating.