杏吧原创

A FUNNY thing happens when you start noticing people who are unmoved by facts and reason: you also start noticing those bashing their heads against the wall trying to get The Facts out there. That could be you, climate scientists, atheists, angry people with Facts.

Oh, the chasm between the people brandishing facts and the people without them (or with 鈥渇acts鈥� that are demonstrably wrong). Is it getting worse? I don鈥檛 know 鈥� let鈥檚 ask those rekindling interest in a flat Earth.

Introducing The Persuaders, philosopher James Garvey describes the event that motivated him to write the book: a panic that seized him after he had bested a public speaker with a killer objection 鈥� and it had made no difference. The speaker had stuck to his views. What price argument and reason? Garvey writes that the idea life turns largely on stuff other than reason 鈥渕enaces me more than a little鈥�.

So what does run the show? After centuries of the ancient Greeks worshipping reason and evidence, after the debating clubs at the peak of the Enlightenment, we are now a world filled with conspiracy theories and optional realities. The rules have changed. Reason and argument are dead. And Garvey, who works at the Royal Institute of Philosophy, thinks he knows what killed them: public relations.

Over the past century, the PR industry has increasingly studied our psychology and identified the chinks in our mental armour. For example, Garvey cites the social psychology of pioneering neurosurgeon Wilfred Trotter, who found that our opinions are shaped not by reason and logic but by our in-group allegiances.

Seizing on such insights, and everything else that came their way, the PR industry designed tools to override critical reasoning: emotional appeals, status anxiety and so on.

It started with simple advertising but soon, realising the extraordinary potential, the PR industry colonised every arena of modern life, from politics to science communication, until there was no more room for reasoned debate. These days everyone has a PR company doing their wicked work, warping our realities to suit their agendas.

Garvey doesn鈥檛 pull any punches. Tracing the rise of PR, the book is a riotous collection of near-libellous assertions and scandalous anecdotes. It鈥檚 hard to stop reading, especially when Garvey finds the industry鈥檚 origin tangled up with the Nazi regime. And he doesn鈥檛 back down, plumbing the depths of the industry鈥檚 uncritical reliance on pop psychology, in which it is decreed, for example, that cake is the most feminine of foods, meat the most masculine, and 鈥渞oast chicken and oranges are bisexual鈥�.

鈥淐ake is the most feminine of foods, meat the most masculine, roast chicken and oranges are bisexual鈥�

To hear Garvey tell it, civilisation was bound to slide into unreason. Once the PR industry discovered our fundamental weaknesses, it wouldn鈥檛 be long before these were exploited. To make this case, the book depends on thinking that has been in the ascendant since psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky introduced us to the dim view behavioural economists take of the human mind.

From them, we learned about a host of cognitive biases that show our minds are infested with irrationality. These include confirmation bias, in which we favour evidence that backs up our existing beliefs, while more or less ignoring alternative possibilities; and availability bias that makes us back options we recall easily over a wider sample that we can鈥檛.

But are we really at the mercy of such biases? If so, how did we make it this far? Is behavioural economics the best measure of our ability to reason, or just another attempt to understand human rationality that will in time be replaced?

Maybe it鈥檚 time to break out of our cognitive bias bubble.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淲hat price reason?鈥�