Public Relations and the Search for Absolute Truth

To be quite honest, my perception of public relations is largely the product of its portrayal on television and in Hollywood films. Take, for example, the movie Thank You for Smoking, based on a novel by Christopher Buckley.

The film focuses on Nick Naylor, a representative of a tobacco lobby who utilizes the media to inform the public that cigarettes aren't as bad for them as common knowledge suggests. Naylor establishes a relationship with the general public by going on talk shows and speaking before senate committees to ensure that people understand the issues the way the tobacco company wants them understood. It is this kind of sleazy portrayal-accurate or not, a generalization or not-that gives public relations a sometimes less than esteemed reputation.

The funny thing is that, while Naylor may have spun the facts to suit his view of the world, I don't recall that he ever actually lied during any of his myriad speeches and interviews. This reminds me of comments made by Eastern Washington University Professor Steve Blewett in his Introduction to Public Relations Theory class that public relations must be based on documentable, verifiable, defendable facts. It is ethically questionable when someone in PR chooses to reveal only certain verifiable facts while withholding others, or presents defendable facts out of context. Technically they are presenting accurate, factual information, but it is presented in such a way that while they may not technically be lying, they are nevertheless not representing the truth. In essence, the way a PR firm wants the story to be seen is the way they see it.

The end of the poem, "The Campus on the Hill" perfectly illustrates the way that someone can look at a scene and convince themselves they're looking at the whole picture instead of only a part of it:

They look out from their hill and say, / To themselves, "We have nowhere to go but down; / The great destination is to stay." / Surely the nations will be reasonable; / They look at the world-don't they?-the world's way? / The clock just now has nothing more to say.

What causes the people on the hill to say, "We have nowhere to go but down"? In my opinion, it's a matter of perspective. If, instead of looking down, they looked up, they may be motivated to conquer the sky by building skyscrapers or airplanes or spacecraft. But they didn't want to look up; they didn't want to change. Instead of seeing room for improvement, they saw themselves as the golden standard and wallowed in their status quo. After all, arguing that you're perfect is a good way to justify laziness and avoid ambition.

The last line of the poem is interesting: "The clock just now has nothing more to say." Of course, what does a clock have to say except the time? If a clock has nothing more to say, then where does that leave time? Does it mean that time is irrelevant, or that time has ceased to exist?

In fact, it's questionable whether time exists in the first place. Some have speculated that all matter is laid out somewhere, stationary, and that our consciousness merely passes through it, creating the illusion of time. In his book Is There Life After Death?, Anthony Peake illustrates this notion:

. . . consciousness is under the illusion that things 'happen' in the same way that a traveller on a night train sees an illuminated station platform rush past and disappear. To the traveller the station was somewhere in the future, 'happened' and then disappeared into the past. In reality the station was static and has an ongoing and unchanging existence that will be 'perceived' by another train as it travels along its own timeline (pp. 119-120)

If the idea that time is merely an illusion is true, then time itself is also merely a matter of perspective. In Peake's analogy, the passenger only sees one scene out the window at a time. They cannot see where they have been or where they are going. But what about the conductor? They can see where the train is as well as where it's about to be. Does this mean that there really are psychics and prophets that can predict the future? Perhaps. Maybe they have the proper perspective.

In, "Changing Knowledge, Changing Reality," James Burke argues that there are no absolute truths; that reality literally changes based upon how we see it, and (citing Nepali Buddhism) because when we perceive something the observed object and the person observing it both change, everyone's perception is equally valid and there can be no absolute truth.

Burke provides several examples to sustain this argument, but they all fall under the umbrella of scientific progress. Every scientific advance changes the way we look at the world: the discovery that the earth was round literally changed how we pictured our planet; the printing press eliminated the need to exercise our memories; the invention of the steam engine shattered our understanding of how far we could travel in a certain amount of time. Burke used scenes of a Scottish witch trial, in which a suspected witch is burned alive at the stake, to illustrate that the people of the time held a perception very different from those widely held today. Whereas they believed that by burning the witch they were mercifully saving her soul, we believe that that they were despicably damning their own.

Burke asks, "If truth is relative, how can we ever be sure of anything?" But truth isn't relative to begin with.

I have never doubted the existence of absolute truth, only the ability of human beings to perceive it. Because we are all stumbling in the dark, we must be tolerant of each other when our perceptions of the truth differ. But at the same time, we must never discourage another from their journey for the absolute truth by saying that there is no objective truth, that the truth is solely subjective. A subjective truth, a relative truth, is no truth at all. It is a lie; a deviation from what the universe actually is. When our understanding of the world changes, we do, indeed, change. But the world stays the same regardless of our understanding of it. Prior to our enlightenment, it had a certain, exact nature that we misperceived. That nature did not change on account of our misperception. It did not change when our perception grew more accurate. That unchanging nature is "the truth" and our feeble efforts to understand nature represent our unyielding search for a certain, unequivocal perception of reality.

Just because the Scots perceived a woman to be a witch did not make her a witch. Just because people once believed the earth to be flat did not make it flat. There is an unchanging reality that exists independent of the way we perceive it.

Further answering Burke's query, we can never be one hundred percent sure of anything. Philosopher Nick Bostrom has postulated that, if an advanced civilization were able to run billions of simulations of different realities, then it is far more likely that we are living in a simulation of reality than in the one true reality. What, then, if the very nature of the one true reality is totally different from that of the simulation we likely exist in? In such an instance, our problem is again simply one of perception, albeit in this case it is a complete inability to perceive the true nature of reality at all. But just because we cannot perceive that one true reality doesn't mean it isn't there.

So what does all this have to do with public relations?

A PR person's job, as I understand it, is to promote a favorable image of the organization they represent to potential clients or supporters. Promotion means getting information about the organization out in the public consciousness through press releases, interviews, publications, etc. Of course, if the PR person wants to keep their job, they are going to send out only the information that paints their organization in the best light possible. If all the public perceives is this beautiful image that the PR person has painted, then they are receiving a version of the truth, but not the whole truth. A painter can pick and choose which colors to use, which brush to use, or how much pressure to apply to each brushstroke. The resulting image may be a reflection of reality, but it is not the same as reality.

It's all a matter of perspective.