Learning from evil of cigarette advertising

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank goodness, the era of tobacco advertising is finally coming to an end (Last gasp: the best minds in advertising launch their cigarette campaigns to end all campaigns, 8 February 2003).

However, when Prof. Richard Doll, who first established the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer more than 50 years ago, asks, "why this evil business was allowed to continue for so long", although he may not realise it, he is questioning the very foundations of our social and economic order, our understanding of human nature, and the chances of our civilisation's survival (Richard Doll: 'Why was this evil business allowed to continue for so long?, 8 February 2003).

The simple answer to Prof. Doll's question is that there was such a lot of money to be made from it - not just by the tobacco industry, but also by the advertising agencies, the media, and all those who accepted sponsorship, favours and backhanders - all in all providing an alarming illustration of the extent to which money really does rule the world.

Thus, the question should be, why were economic interests, as important as they are, put before the health of the nation for so long, to the extent that 1000's of lives were sacrificed every year, when a foreign power, if it were to persist for just a few months in killing just 100's of our citizens, would be faced with a declaration of war?

Nothing less than the survival of our civilisation, of our children and coming generations, depends on us recognising the correct answers to this question - sooner rather than later - because the promotion of tobacco products is just one particularly salient example of the detrimental, potentially catastrophic, hold that economic interests can and often do have over the whole of society and the direction in which it is heading.

There are many other, less obvious (mainly because so normal), but in the long-term even more harmful examples all around us.

Take the automobile and air-travel industries, for example, which even at current levels of individual motorisation and air travel are placing a non-sustainable strain on our planet's natural resources and finite carrying capacity. Yet these industries are set to go on expanding indefinitely, providing cars and air travel to an ever increasing proportion of Earth's growing population.

A child (with its unconditioned eyes) can see that this is complete insanity, just as the promotion of smoking is when it is known to be addictive and to kill thousands of people every year (in fact, millions! world-wide, but that is too mind-boggling even to contemplate and perhaps another reason why it has been allowed to continue for so long), but grown-ups are conditioned to accept what is normal. Cigarette advertising, mass motorisation, mass air travel, and a host of other harmful or non-sustainable things, are all perfectly normal - and thus the extent of the dangers they pose (also because they lie in the future and can only be grasped and expressed statistically) go largely unrecognised.

We all tend to think that we see the world with our own, unimpaired vision, but in fact each of us sees it through a unique pair of very strong glasses, the highly complex, distorting lenses of which we have acquired from our parents, peers, books, the media and society at large, and - most importantly - from what we perceive - consciously or subconsciously - as being our personal self-interests.

There is a line in the song, The Boxer, by Simon and Garfunkel, which goes, "A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest" . . . I was also very impressed by a documentary on hypnotism, in which a man was hypnotised not to notice a ball when it was thrown at him - and he didn't. After being woken from the trance, in which the suggestion had been placed in his head, and appearing to be perfectly normal, he simply ignored, and was consciously unaware, of a soft ball that was repeatedly thrown at him. It was a remarkable demonstration of how someone can be "conditioned" to remain unaware of (in this case, physical) stimuli impinging on their senses.

We are naturally conditioned to ignore, discount or play down the importance of information which, if accepted, would conflict with what we perceive - consciously or subconsciously - as our personal self-interests. Thus anyone who gained, either directly or indirectly, from cigarette advertising was, not bound, but more or less strongly predisposed (depending on how much and how immediately they had to gain or lose) to not wanting it banned. Abstract statistics of the health hazard paled into insignificance compared with their immediate self-interest, for which many were prepared to fight. They succeeded in delaying the ban for more than 50 years, during which time a great deal of money was made and millions of people became addicted to a habit which would eventually kill them.

All this, of course, is already widely recognised: that everyone and every company is intent on pursuing their own self-interests. It is what our free market economy is all about and why it works so well. But I don't think it is widely appreciated just how pernicious an effect it has on the development of society in general and the direction in which it is taking us, especially and most importantly in respect to sustainability, without which our civilisation cannot survive for more than a few short decades.

The word sustainability is on many people's lips, but actually achieving it, on a planet with finite resources, limited carrying capacity and a human population soon to reach 8 - 10 billion, is going to necessitate far bigger changes than most people realise, changes that are not just technological, or requiring minor adjustments of course, but major changes to our economy and lifestyles, and - most importantly, but least appreciated of all - to the values, attitudes and aspirations on which they are based and depend.

The resistance produced by what most people, companies, countries, etc. perceive as their self-interests to the necessary changes appears at the moment to be quite insurmountable, which is an obstacle in itself, because then there is a strong tendency to ignore or deny the problem, or to play it down to a level that seems manageable, but which can only produce changes that are hopelessly inadequate (the Kyoto Protocol is a good example).

What to do?

No ONE can change the world, because what each of us does is just a proverbial drop in the ocean. But when enough drops come together . . . .

The situation demands a revolution, i.e. rapid and radical changes. Past attempts at revolution always went horribly wrong, because the "revolutionaries" tried imposing their ideas on others. This revolution, if it is to succeed, which it must if we are to survive, must be voluntary.

An alternative, sustainable society will have to be created within and coexist alongside existing, non-sustainable society, on which we all currently depend. As it grows it will be possible to transfer more and more of our activity and dependency from one to the other (particularly in respect to how we earn, spend and invest our money). Everyone is free, of course, to change at their own pace, notwithstanding the fact that time is running short. Many elements of sustainable society already exist in one more-or-less imperfect form or another (organic farming, some so-called "alternative" businesses, cooperatives, recycling and the use of renewable resources), but so far they account for just a tiny fraction of total economic activity, and lack the framework of a clear and cohesive moral and economic philosophy, something that I'm working on - so far with very limited success - on my website at www.spaceship-earth.org.