One of the beautiful things about adverts is that each one is a kind of window: into the entire thought process that led to it being produced. The television series Mad Men understood this: although I doubt there was quite so much grief and self-torture behind someone thinking, for instance: “Maybe we could use a guy with a giant head to advertise this online bank.”
I often spend journeys on public transport trying to peep through these windows. For instance, over the past few months, I have been seeing posters that in effect state: “For the love of God, stop bothering the doctors with your minor complaints.” Explicitly, the content is more along the lines of: “Cold? Tummy bug? Nits? Think pharmacy first!” But implicitly, I know what whoever came up with this advert was thinking. “The NHS has no money. We have to find a way to have fewer patients. Please can the less seriously sick people just start taking their medical care into their own hands?” One version of the advert tells patients to “#DoYourBit” and “Don’t just turn up” to A&E.
It’s not just our horribly overstretched and underfunded health service either. For a while now, I’ve been seeing ads on trains that sing to the skies the advantages of printing your ticket off at home rather than forcing the machine at the station, presumably to great company expense, to do it for you. Thus, from CrossCountry: “Do try this at home. Print your own train ticket and avoid the queues at the station.” Please don’t make us pay National Rail for the paper, just spend 15 minutes yelling at the printer you still have in your house for some reason instead.
Adverts don’t just disclose to us something of the mindset of their creators. They also tell us something about our world. When I see adverts like this – broadly, adverts for not using a particular service, or for taking one of the functions one would have historically associated with that service into your own hands – I always think of a wartime poster displayed at train stations that asked passengers to think before travelling, “Is Your Journey Really Necessary? … The railways can run many more urgently wanted goods trains if we all travel only when it is really necessary.”
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, interestingly enough, likened his own philosophical work to this particular poster – but only because he didn’t think the scientists or mathematicians whose practice he was critiquing would pay any mind to what he said. “As if anyone reading that would think, ‘On second thoughts, no,’” he wrote. Presumably, we must imagine someone (Wittgenstein) hiking 40 minutes or so from Trinity College to Cambridge’s conspicuously nowhere-near-the-centre train station, only to be nudged by a poster into trudging the whole way home.
But for all it might have been a bit ineffectually well meaning, at least it was being ineffectually well meaning in the context of the second world war: at least in this instance we were being told to be careful not to overload public services because the country was fighting Hitler. Nowadays, adverts are telling us to be similarly careful – but only so we can try to maintain the delusion that we still have a functioning economy.
One wonders what the endgame might be here. As society continues to collapse, as the public sector continues to retreat, are we going to start seeing posters telling us to think about driving our own household rubbish to the dump; to extract our own infected teeth? Keir Starmer’s Kitchener-esque head pointing a disembodied finger at the viewer: “Britain wants YOU … to arrest and imprison anyone you suspect of petty crime.”
Human beings are social animals, but still: living in a society can be difficult. The whole thing with society is that basically we have to constantly check our behaviour, limit ourselves, to adjust to other people. The trade-off is that, as a result, we are able to flourish in ways that would simply not be imaginable if we didn’t have other people around us; didn’t work towards our good together. The problem with Britain at the moment, though, is that society increasingly doesn’t feel like it’s giving us this at all.
Nothing works, everything’s too expensive: you can’t get a dentist, you can’t get a GP appointment, your train keeps getting cancelled, your combined rent and childcare fees cost more than you’re getting paid to work a full-time job. And even if you want to complain about any of it, you can’t: probably you can only get through to an AI (that has probably, you suspect, been programmed to be incapable of understanding what you’re on about). Maybe you can try writing to your MP, but there doesn’t really seem to be much point doing that unless you happen to collect headed paper with some rote spiel dismissing your concerns printed on it.
Things in this country have been on such a downward trajectory recently that every now and then you’ll hear someone say: “I just don’t know why there aren’t riots.” But maybe, in a way, Britain in 2024 is like a vaguely codependent relationship that has run its course, where there isn’t even enough passion for anyone to argue any more. All we need now is for the kids to figuratively move out, and everyone in the country can go our separate ways.
Tom Whyman is an academic philosopher and a writer
