Honoured Guests
Some months ago, when PRISA invited me to be the guest speaker at this event, I fully intended for my address to be brief and to the point. But, recent global developments and the concentration of fundamentalist thinking in many parts of the world have impacted on my own sensibilities and sentiments and, therefore, my story has become somewhat longer than I originally intended. I firmly believe, however, that what I have to say to you this evening is of great importance and I respectfully ask you to hear me out.
Let me begin with a little story.
Once upon a time, in a faraway forest, there lived a bunny and a snake. One day, they happened to accidentally bump into each other.
"Oh, my," said the bunny, "I'm so terribly sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you. I've been blind since birth, so, I can't see where I'm going. In fact, since I'm an orphan as well, I don't even know who or what I am."
The snake replied, "I have the same story to tell so let's help each other figure out the riddle of who we are!"
"Oh, wouldn’t that be wonderful!" replied the bunny. So the snake slithered all over the bunny, and said, "Well, you very well may be whatever you think you are and, you may also be what someone else wants you to be, but because I find that you are covered with soft fur; that you have really long ears; that your nose twitches; and that you have a soft cottony tail, I totally and absolutely and in truth and nothing but the truth declare you to be a donkey!"
"Oh, thank you! Thank you," cried the bunny, ecstatic at finally having found a route to its identity.
So, returning the perceived favour, the bunny then felt the snake all over, and remarked, "Well, you're smooth and slippery, and you have a forked tongue, no backbone and no balls. I'd say you must be in Public Relations, Marketing, Advertising, Journalism or Politics.”
The snake replied, angrily: “So what?!” Then coiled itself tighter around the trusting little bunny, squeezing the last of life out of the warm and furry little blind creature and then, swallowed it.
You see, the snake was never blind, never orphaned and very well knew, right from the start, that it was deceiving the bunny. It took advantage of the blind bunny’s trust when they met in that faraway forest. In fact, the snake didn’t even care about its own identity being discovered at that point, for it already had the bunny tightly gripped in its coils.
What I am going to propose to you tonight, is that that little bunny of my story, represents an unsuspecting and random public and, that no qualification in this world will prevent you, the communication professional, from becoming that snake in that faraway forest - unless you are also qualified in and have a real understanding of the meaning of the values that should be driving our direct communication of intent. And these values are: Respect, Responsibility and Truth.
But, let’s pause for a moment and look at the meaning of the word Truth. According to the dictionary it has to do with facts and being faithful, exact, correct, genuine. But, the philosophical consensus is also that truth can never be absolute and that it is many-faceted. Also, the quantum sciences state that no more than a limited amount of the truth can ever be known, for if one attempts to measure reality the very act of observation interferes with the accurate results of the experiment.
Regardless of science and philosophy, I think we all are in agreement that the TRUTH refers to ALL the facts that are known at any given point in time - not just those facts that happen to suit you or your employers or your community or your political party or whatever affiliations or strategic objectives you may have.
Having dealt with Truth, let us now reunite it with Respect and Responsibility. To these, of course, we can add words like accountability, liability, care, concern, trust, conviction - there are so many words for moral and ethical behaviour and, funnily enough, the things they describe follow automatically when Respect, Responsibility and Truth are in place. An even funnier thing is that when you put into practice those three words, together with those they attract, you have an ethical framework from which Reconciliation naturally follows.
Then what is going on in the world now? Why are these qualities absent from the global stage as its actors play out their comedy of errors?
I should like to suggest that the present state of affairs is owing to the fundamentalist way in which we have come to think and which is the reason why we no longer spontaneously include those three important words in our international lexicon. And, while this discussion centers on all forms of fundamentalism, I may as well mention that the communication abuses of fundamentalist capitalism are prime examples of the total abdication of responsibility towards its publics. And, may I also mention that I share the view with people such as George Soros and Prof Noreena Hertz of Cambridge.
Noam Chomsky, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology media theorist and political scientist, has exposed, over his long career, the way in which fundamentalist structures have evolved the science of communication. According to him, these skills are ultimately abused in a process that aims at swaying mass sentiment and manipulating public opinion in a gigantic top-down hierarchy. The “scientific method” employed is to oversimplify issues into single, easy-to-understand messaging.
This approach has nothing to do with the real issues at hand but rather reframes complex issues into headline-length, easy to photograph concepts. Thus, we have the “sound bite” – a strategy of distraction and over-simplification, which carries no real data and no information on which one can make an informed opinion.
This posturing on behalf of fundamentalist ideas, be they religious or business-related, has resulted in numb-and-dumb publics who never say: “I object” or “I don’t believe”. In fact, the public has been lied to so often - and it has been manipulated so thoroughly - that it passively accepts its relegated role of stunned onlooker. Douglas Rushkoff holds that this is exactly the point of the strategy: That citizens and consumers should not be kept informed and should be fed meaningless slogans to rally behind.
Too many communication professionals the world over, rarely question the consequences of their endeavours or even care and they persist in spreading inflated promises, be they the basic premises of fundamentalist religion or the profit-driven aims of fundamentalist economics – and it is the experts who juggle with words, incomplete sentences and inaccurate meanings –and it is they who spread the viruses, the warped values, among unsuspecting and trusting populations. The results are monstrous. One simply has to glance at one’s television screen and the images of fear, and horror and infant corpses to realise that modern-day messaging has very little indeed to do with the experience of reality.
So, why is global communication in a mess? I believe that despite all the fears, the horrors and the atrocities of history, we have learned almost nothing about the importance of accurate and unfettered communication for the smooth functioning of society. Our memories are short and in fact, history as a subject has become quite unfashionable in education. Barely decades after any self-inflicted human cataclysm, greed and opportunism start their spread again because people simply do not know the track record. For every generation there are iterative effects and all because of a lack of insight into the past. The feedback loops feed back upon themselves and, eventually, you have the cacophony of sound we hear today.
May I also propose to you that polite society - and the notion that you should always be pleasant about every issue that bugs you – is at the base of the world’s present inability to communicate directly, respectfully and honestly. We forget that being respectful, responsible and honest does not necessarily mean being impolite or unpleasant or offensive. Wrong assumptions about cooperation, discussion and resolution have given rise to the current fashion for “politically correct” speak and behaviour that each of us is expected slavishly to follow.
In the opinion of the American academic and intellectual, the late Stephen Jay Gould, the custom of acting and speaking PC merits very little commentary because no intellectual argument fuels the fashion. He says that the strategy of, and I quote: “No offence, please, we’re politically correct adopts the fully avoidant tactic of never generating conflict by never talking to each other, or speaking in such muted and meaningless euphemisms that no content or definition can ever emerge.”
Gould continues: “The American culture has actually adopted this unholy contract for many issues that should be generating healthy debate, and surely cannot ever be brought to a fair conclusion if we don’t talk to each other. [We] can only regard such voluntary suppression of discussion as a guarantee that tough be resolvable issues will continue to fester and haunt us, and as a sin against the human mind and heart.”
He asks: “If we have so little confidence in our unique mental abilities, and in our intrinsic goodwill, then what indeed is man (and woman) that anyone should be mindful of us?”
Why, colleagues, is it so wrong to use the terminology: I am unhappy, I feel shit, I am angry, I don’t agree, I protest, I am pissed off, let us solve this problem, let us talk straight. I ask you, has direct and honest language become so questionable in itself, to be minimised and dismissed as pas de rigueur?
It is clear to me that certain communication professionals conveniently and intentionally cause confusion by giving new interpretations to old and trusted meanings. When in doubt refer to a dictionary, but even so, nowadays, I find myself quite unable to reconcile the usage of certain words and concepts with their traditional or standard definitions. That which I read, that which I hear and that which I see, all have been thoroughly impoverished by abusive and careless application.
Like Shakespeare’s depressed and tired-of-life Macbeth, I too declare: “It is the tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Without flying the flag for anyone – least of all Saddam Hussein or, for that matter, Robert Mugabe, or any number of abusive rulers - I am the first to confess – and maybe because I have spotted the PR in the word Propaganda - that I no longer understand differences between words that used to be perfectly clear. I am still amazed how, in recent years, the meaning of the word “liberal” has transfigured into “conservative” and how “conservative” has morphed into “liberal”. We now happily substitute liberation for invasion, terrorism for desperation, democracy for tyranny, partisan for thug, human rights for political expediency. By what demonic process, I ask you, do the persecuted become the persecutors of the persecuted who persecute?
I now also have serious doubts about almost all reports of jubilation, joy, sorrow, life and death. Those who formulate the messages appear to trivialise the importance of either overstating the understatement or understating the overstatement – whichever is the more convenient. Mark Twain’s famous phrase comes to mind: “The report of my death was an exaggeration”.
In this game of perplexed meaning, where do I fit in and who am I? Have I any identity at all? How does the snake see me?
Am I because I think, or am I who I think I am because I don’t think, or am I who I am told to think I am, or am I because I am? Do I think I am because I am told who I am supposed to think I am? This is the mockery of your and my identity. We are subjected to intrusive and obfuscating messages, transmitted by an uncaring and opportunistic communication industry. And that industry comprises you and I - of whom it is said that we are what we think we are not!
And, it is we who bombard others with catchphrases and pay-off lies which now have come to include the superlatives to the superlatives: super super super latest now enzymes; the absolute final and last words in; the most incredible fantastic, amazing; the deepest sweetest weepiest and, in the common experience of the end-user, the saddest and the most bitter and the most irresponsible and the most disrespectful and the halfest of totally and truthfully truest untruths.
That unsuspecting bunny of my story lives under this tyranny of snake tautology. And, as if this humiliation is not enough, communication experts now collaborate with their IT brothers to devise the indignities of computerised abuse. The very technology that should liberate has been turned against the bunny and he is being used for the purposes of manipulation and dehumanisation.
Just recall the frustrations of electronic banking! And, all of us, at one time or another have been victim to the electronic voice, or that ultimate insult, the call centre. The invention of these devices, l suspect, is a strategy for hiding those who take our money and in return give nothing but bad service, bad product and bad attitudes. There is only one thing about these people we can be sure of: The communication of their intent is not honest.
You may say that if conventional protest fails you always have recourse to law. But, even that route is suspect. Party A arrives with its lawyers and PR people carrying an issue under the arm; Party B retaliates by calling in its lawyers and PR people. These tactics result in delays and the buying of time – sometimes decades – and the result is always half-baked and way too late.
I firmly believe that we create our own realities. And, civil disobedience, terrorism and revolt, often, are but the opposite and inverse reactions described by Newton’s laws – expressions of frustration and despair caused by bad communication.
As I see the world, global communication appears to have sacrificed the true values of humanity to attitudes of recklessness and shoddy talk. In the process, all of us may have even lost our sense of humour, our sense of wonderment, and, we may have exchanged compassionate survival for bloodless existence. Have we become magicians abusing our magic for the transposition of meaning rather than the transformation of society?
I am glad to live in a country where I may be at risk of many dangers - but I am not at any risk of indifference as yet. In this country we still express our feelings, speak out on issues and, we do so in a largely respectful way. And, we have much evidence of our successful communication strategies.
First and foremost is the fact, that through good old-fashioned direct talk, and against all the odds, we embarked upon social political and economic reforms which have succeeded beyond expectations and which is an example to the world. We are a kaleidoscope of cultures that live in great harmony when compared with most other countries.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was unique in that it helped explain why bad things happened to good people. Instead of being a tool for Revenge, it was Responsibly designed, Respectfully operated and the Truth, as revealed, finally led to the most amazing Reconciliation in the social and political and economic history of mankind. We confessed to our injustices and everyone could understand what and why happened and who was responsible.
The Reports of the King Commission are cited the world over when people talk about business ethics and corporate governance and appropriate communication with investors and the public. We can hold our heads high for, unlike so many other parts of the world, we have not been tarred with the brush of blatant corporate deceit as yet.
But, now is also the time for South African communicators to proceed with the utmost caution. As we increasingly turn our gaze to the outside world it is easy to fall in line with bad global communication trends. We need to be vigilant, forever on the lookout for the joker in the hand dealt to us from abroad. This joker, the card that can mimic any card in the pack, will bring misfortune and indifference to our communication structures.
On the southern tip of Africa, we experience life and death on a daily and, at times, violent basis. What happens to me and to you and to our compatriots, is integrated into the process of survival and to that reality, no one who lives here can be indifferent. Our population may be largely uneducated and living in the worst conditions of poverty when measured by First World standards, but at least here, for most of us, there still exist the basic values of honesty, respect and responsibility. And - Ubuntu! – we talk straight.
These are the qualities that differentiate us as Africans and which make us so rich. The others - the ones who have sacrificed their true values for the empty objectives of greed and consumerism or religious beliefs – they are the poor ones; they who foolishly defend the indefensible on our television screens.
And do we really care about them? The fact is that we in Africa – and that is true for the major part of this continent – we have been so marginalised by the First World that we may as well congratulate ourselves: Why even bother about their empty values of Brand Loyalty and Brand Recognition? The bottom line of course is, that most of us are too hungry, too sick, too desperate and too isolated to be of any use at all to the snake. We don’t give a damn!
I am truly grateful – irrespective of my and your individual political views – to have a President and a Country who, during the past months, have flown the flag for transparency in the United Nations Security Council. For all our political differences, and for all the unresolved issues we still face, I am confident that the majority of us applaud South Africa’s refusal to prostitute itself to the thinly veiled motives – whether of greed, political expediency or fundamentalist fanaticism – on all sides in this conflict. All of us can today stand up in any gathering in the world and declare, “I am Proudly South African!”
All of humanity stands on the brink of world domination by one victor or another. In the next number of years, it may even be decades yet, irrespective of outcomes of present crises, we are going to be subjected to domination by one or the other world power, one or the other worldview.
And, in the end it will not be the politicians and the businessmen who have envisaged this new world and, it is not they who will ultimately decide the nature of its governance; it will have been you, the Communication Professionals – the advertising executives, the marketers, the PR people, and the journalists – it will be you that would have been responsible for the creation of this new world for all living things. I therefore beg of you that in constructing this world that you will design for us a leader who will ably and accurately calculate humanity’s coordinates and, with vision and clarity, will plot the course of all of life into distant time.
In conclusion, let me remind you that mankind is but one part of an infinity of parts that make up the integrated and remarkably thin layer of life that barely coats the surface of planet Earth. Homo sapiens is also that species which has evolved to a level of intelligence as yet unattained by any other life form on this globe. For all we know it may even be the only intelligent life form in this immense universe of which not one of us can even begin to perceive of its size or its time scales.
And for us in the communication industry, it’s important to realise that nothing stands between our human intellects and our beastly instincts other than the ability to communicate. We, the communicators, share the responsibility to convey intentions directly, honestly and with respect. That is simple common sense and good manners, qualities that are the making of civil society.
It is when this ethical code corrupts – when a forked tongue conveys the message - it is then that we, the communication professionals, stand accused of the worst crimes against humanity. Because when our intent becomes devoid of basic values and our animalistic programming becomes confused with rational intellect – that is when mankind so brilliantly distinguishes itself as the one species that intentionally kills its own.
I congratulate you on your individual achievements and I wish all of you a brilliant career in communication. As a parting shot I shall quote some words by the celebrated Harvard socio-biologist, Edward O. Wilson. In my opinion, this last paragraph from his book, Consilience, is the most brilliant of all brilliant writings and the most inspiring of all visions that have come to us in the last years of the 20th Century.
“I believe that in the process of locating new avenues of creative thought, we [humankind] will also arrive at [a system of] an existential conservatism. It is worth asking repeatedly: Where are our deepest roots? We are, it seems, Old World, catarrhine primates, brilliant emergent animals, defined genetically by our unique origins, blessed by our newfound biological genius, and secure in our homeland if we wish to make it so. What does it all mean? This is what it all means. To the extent that we depend on prosthetic devices to keep ourselves and the biosphere alive, we will render everything fragile. To the extent that we banish the rest of life, we will impoverish our own species for all time. And, if we should surrender our genetic nature to machine-aided ratiocination, and our ethics and art and our very meaning to a habit of careless discursion in the name of progress, imagining ourselves godlike and absolved from our ancient heritage, [then], we will become nothing.
