Health Warning

Don’t Talk To Strangers

I remember a time when paedophilia was in the headlines and the warning to children «don’t talk to strangers» was widely broadcast. The warning was a bit heavy-handed: as an aging man I felt it inhibited me in any potentially mutually happy and innocuous encounter with a passing child. However, the caution may well have been effective in many cases and, if so, was worth much more than any slight inhibition or inconvenience on my or anybody else’s part.

I’m concerned with a different issue now, one that would come with a warning along the lines of «beware what you believe, what you think you know, becuase you are being manipulated». In this case the danger is not just possible, it is certain. It’s obvious because product advertising is all around us and that is exactly what product advertising seeks to do. However, everyone by now should be conscious of that and the worst outcome is probably that you buy something you don’t really want or need or, more seriously, really can’t afford. Apply that to your view of the world though, your view of other people, your country, the whole planet even, and the question becomes very much more serious.

Let’s be clear; attempts, often very subtle, subliminal and sophisticated, are now being made all the time to manipulate you in these much wider aspects. So how do you warn a population at large that that is happening in a way that they will appreciate, understand and take to heart?

There is an easy but ineffectual answer: the educational system. The answer is ineffectual because most current educational systems fail most people to some extent most of the time. It might be effective if everyone on the planet had a PhD but that is never going to be the case however low governments make standards in order to show superficially better statistics.

I can’t think of an answer at the moment but I have a flight of fancy. Suppose that, just as every cigarette packet (in Europe) now has to carry a health warning, every newspaper and news bulletin had to carry the warning that «while every effort has been made to ensure that the factual content of what you read/see is true, it may not be». And suppose that any divergence from that, in any medium, should be actionable in a court of law.

OK, it’s fanciful and heavy-handed but it addresses the really big question: how can the manipulators on national and global questions be subjected to some control?