Neanderthal PR

The Neanderthals had Public Relations (PR). They were pretty good at it.

OK, OK, a lot of people think that I just have it in for PR industry.

Well, I work in this industry. And I think there is good stuff and bad stuff –and that you don’t have to follow Edward Bernays’ idea of “PR”– even if he did invent the phrase, as a substitute for “propaganda”. While Bernays may have given a name to it, “PR” is just one of those things, that people have being doing for aeons but like him fashioned other names for. Like “personal branding” today.

What do you think, the Neanderthal’s cave paintings were? Or course — art, self expression — but also PR. Our supposedly primitive forebears had the Wow Factor too. Yarhhh!! Look at Erg and Ugh and Brog and me killing a the Hairy Mammoth. We’re the Mammoth Men!.Awesome! Incredible. And so is our Tribe, which you can trust us to lead. We’re Cool — We’re the Mammoth Men. Ferocity that you can Trust! Yes, the Neanderthals invented Facebook.

All human communication involves “PR”. All relationship use it.

What do you think a brassiere is? Or lipstick? If Johnny wants to date Jenny, he needs the right image. He digs out his best jacket and a tie that he never wears and looks for some cologne. “PR” at every turn.

In previous times, of course, there was the kind of PR where the King made a speech to his loyal subjects and lopped off the heads of anybody who didn’t look impressed. Today’s advertisers really, really wish they could do that.

On a more equal level — people interacting with other people more or less freely, laterally — communication is direct, multidimensional, and (if you like) makes use of multimedia — with dress, accessories, body language, facial expression, tone of voice, as well as words playing a role all at the same time.

Think of bargaining in a market. Oh yes, it is about buying things cheaply or selling them as expensively as you can. It is utilitarian. It is also a game, a competition. It is work and it is fun. If you do well, you gain status as well as the kumquat you want to buy.

So a lot of PR is spontaneous rather than scripted.. Most important of all, it is dialectical — with immediate feedback — back and forth, immediate response. It is harder to lie.But you do it anyway and mostly everyone knows. They don’t hold it against you because they are doing it too.

Of course, in other situations you might have to be more careful — someone might kill you if they didn’t like your lies and feel cheated.

Most people, as I have said, don’t see their personal communication as “multimedia”. Mostly they see it as technologies, such as such technologies, radio, TV, movies, the web, Twitter, — we are rarely spontaneous — and whose purposes are not obvious but always set up with hidden agendas.

Barack Obama made great, if vacuous speeches.

They carefully written — by at team of writers, of course — and rehearsed.

Every gesture, every expression was scripted. Advisors would use video playback in rehearsal, and afterwards, so the President could hone his pitch. Focus groups would check audience reaction.

The aim of these speech was simple —to make people trust him, believe what were mostly lies, at least lies of omission. “Change you can believe in”, for example, was as big a lie as any history — but people bought it. Once Obama took office, he reneged on almost all his promises.

The medium is the message.

All big companies do this. They pretend to be “just folks” like you when they are really big impersonal corporations run for the enrichment of their owners, institutions with no morality or social purpose other than profit. They lie to get their way.

Ordinary people lie too, in the course of our daily personal PR-mediated interactions. But most of us have a degree of empathy and altruism. Only 2 percent of us are psychopaths. 99% of corporations are psychopathic. Their owners may not be. But to the degree that they are distant from ordinary humanity, they might as well be. They are, at the very least, aliens to us.

Yes, we have to worry about Aliens destroying the earth. But the Aliens are not green or have huge jaws with a lot of teeth, dripping acid that eats through steel. They look like Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, who are at pains to convey the image of “just folks”.

The Neanderthals would have known better and just clubbed them to death.