Can we spot the gorilla?

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

There’s a very funny video up on YouTube that reimagines a trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s classic horror film The Shining as ’Shining’, a cute romantic comedy. You can also watch trailers for Dumb And Dumber as an Oscar contender, Inception as a Christmas holiday movie and Mrs Doubtfire as a horror. Why am I telling you this? Because these clever and brilliantly edited videos represent how the same material can be spun differently, how you can generate a completely different mood with altered presentation, how you make people feel any emotion you wish to, if you’re cunning enough.

Which is what our government has done with its presentation of the threat of the virus.

Any advertising executive knows what's gone on here. In fact, it’s probably day one in their classes at Advertising School. It’s the image that goes along with the product, not really the product itself. Perfume ads are the kings (or queens) of this approach. A beautiful celebrity might be shown standing on a beautiful yacht in beautiful blue seas. What’s that got to do with the perfume? Not a lot. All vodkas taste the same (of virtually nothing). But every vodka bottle looks different, and every ad campaign for every different vodka is different. Lynx deodorant’s old (tongue in cheek) ad campaigns promoted the idea that wearing their product made men more attractive to women. Unlikely, but it was all about the sell.

This virus has always been this virus. Yes, its voracity has varied, but more than anything else, the way you have thought about it is the way you have been told to think about it. You might not realise this, but it is true. You think about supermarket products with degrees of favourability, not because they are necessarily better or worse than one another, but because you have been conditioned to think in this way. You do not fully understand why you do what you do; you are way too complicated to understand yourself; you are guided by signals from your environment. If you think this is untrue, ask yourself why advertising is a multi-billion pound industry.

Remember if you can the degrees of unease and panic you felt at different stages this year. How you felt was dictated by the communication you received from the media and the government. So in late February you were a little intrigued by this virus; in early March your curiosity pricked up; in mid March you were a little perturbed; a few days later you were very uncomfortable; then in late March you were possibly borderline terrified. It could be that you are almost as nervous now as you were then, despite the fact that UK Covid-related deaths number around 20 a day as opposed to 1,000 a day back in February - before you even knew about it (though those deaths were almost certainly exaggerated). I was blissfully playing six-a-side football around the height of mortalities - now we don’t play at all, and won’t for many months, despite deaths from Covid having plummeted since then. 

Imagine for one moment that they hadn't given this a big scary, sci-fi-like name - COVID-19 - instead, it had not been given a name, and just been reported as a nasty sort of flu, and the advice had been take a bit more care, be more hygienic, DON'T go out if you feel unwell etc. It's all about the branding. How many of you even remember the massive death toll from flu in 2000?

The thing is, and I don’t mean to be rude to you, people are sheep. And they’re frequently frightened rabbits. We are sheep-rabbits. We are so easily manipulated. Did you know that the colour red is the only colour that can make your heart beat faster? Advertisers do, government types do, and they know much else besides that makes you their puppet.

Imagine if a government, for whatever reason, suddenly decided to make everyone vegetarian. It could probably do it. It could hold a press conference every day highlighting the risks of eating meat, and flash up in huge red numbers how many had died after doing so, either from choking, or long-term ill-health because of too much meat consumption, or from food poisoning. The Daily Mail would feature on its front page a pretty 17-year-old girl who had died by kebab. The Guardian would picture a couple of black people who had, I dunno, died in a chicken shop fire. Footage of patients in obvious pain and distress might be flashed all over Sky News, with ‘Breaking’ running along the bottom. They could do the same if they wanted to stop all travel by car. You don’t have to look very hard to discover how many people die on the roads of Britain every year; if you had the state machine behind you, you could flash up images of all the gory deaths, all the frightening statistics, all the lovely people’s lives ended by this murderous form of transport.

Of course I’m hypothesising to make a point here, they will never do this in regard to the above two things (yet…) but the point is that they can do it in many areas, and because we are so pliable it will work.

A couple of analogies: you could be driving along a stretch of road at a certain speed, and if you were in the best car on the market, the journey would seem smooth. If you were driving along the same stretch of road at the same speed, but you were in a rickety old rust bucket, the experience would be very different: it would not be smooth, you'd feel like you were going faster and it would not feel that reassuring. Or imagine the rain is falling outside and you're in a conservatory: the rain seems to fall very hard. If you're in the lounge, the sound is nowhere as loud. But it's the same rain outside. Perception is everything.

You will know of the famous perception experiment in which a person in a gorilla suit walks through a group of youths passing a ball between one another, and most people don’t spot the gorilla because they have been instructed to count the number of passes the players make:

 

In 2020, perhaps the virus is the ball and the gorilla is the cataclysmic collateral damage caused by the government’s anti-Covid measures. The media and government have fixed your vision on what they sought to fix it on.

If you are British you simply have no comprehension of how people’s thinking in countries like Sweden, Belarus, Brazil, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania is so incredibly different from yours regarding Covid. The reasons are many, but they include having a less sensationalist media (Sweden), to having known real horrors under communism (Eastern Europe), to wanting to keep living for the day (Brazil). Their minds have not been shaped in the same fashion as ours have been. But people are always bad at seeing things through other’s eyes anyway, at knowing the minds of others. “How can anybody possibly know how I feel?” as Morrissey sang. 

The government could, if it had wished, if it had been composed of mature and sane and wise individuals, have done the following for the public:

• Put daily Covid deaths as percentage of all deaths in the country
• Compared deaths from Covid with deaths from cancer, heart attack, car accident, suicide and so on
• Compared monthly death figures with the death figures of the equivalent period from the previous year (and shown this as a percentage increase, which would have been tiny)
• Following the peak of deaths on 8 April, given the daily decrease in number of deaths
• Stuck with the strong evidence that face masks do little to help stop the spread of the virus, thereby not creating a landscape of fear
• Publicised the many treatments for the virus that had proven efficacy and helped the mortality rate decline

There was also the medical knowledge to say ‘go and get some sunshine - it tops up your vitamin D which helps your immune system!’ Or ‘go and get some fresh air, and unless you’re very close to an infected person for a reasonable amount of time, transmission is vanishingly unlikely!’ But no. We did not hear this sort of thing.

Not a chance. They chose to go full Operation Terror. Project Fear on Steroids, as Toby Young called it. Six months of deliberate dire scaremongering. So we are where we are: a frazzled, nervous, divided, angry, confused nation with a collapsed economy and a horrendous winter ahead.

It could all have been so different. But the power of communication has been abused.

Perception is everything.