Richard Pendleton has had a sting of conscience. He is an ex copywriter who used to work for a big advertising agency on the British army account. He points out, in a recent Guardian interview, some of the techniques he used to distort the image of the army, to create a limited world where only positivity could transcend reality – represented on glossy leaflets and professional video ads. In these, smiling soldiers ski, abseil, do water sports, go out clubbing and maintain great family support networks.

‘How real is all this?’, a journalist asks from behind the camera.

‘That’s kind of the wrong question, because it’s not a question of reality.” Pendleton points to an army recruitment booklet, “Everything in here is real. The thing that you want to be thinking about, is the emphasis.’”

This is the advertising industry. It is recognised worldwide for engaging in nefarious activities, notably the art of deception. When the army asks an advertising agency to help them rebrand, they are asking for materials that demonstrate their strengths, all the things that make people think positively – to reach out to certain demographics and pull them in where they might otherwise not have been interested. In this case they sold killing to teenagers by promoting adventure sports.

This does not mean that no soldier has ever had the opportunity to water ski courtesy of the Ministry of Defence. Certainly it is absurd to think the MOD exists so people can play PlayStation and windsail; there are guns too if you fancy it, but the adverts will never show them pointed at anyone. The idea of battle becomes an abstract playground, violence is replaced by a fun and relaxed atmosphere, where soldiers get to arbitrarily fire live rounds into the distance – and even if you’re wounded that’s okay because you’ll still get to waterski.

Understanding the techniques of the advertising industry raises some very tricky questions about how we choose to represent reality, or more importantly what we actually consider ‘reality’ to be. Why is it, for example, that the practices of the advertising industry seem so morally reprehensible? If what they are saying is real, then what is the problem with presenting a selective reality?

This question is probably best answered by those who specialise in constructing narratives, such as Philip K Dick, who was a science fiction writer known for the surreal and often distorted worlds of his books. In his essay ‘How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days After’ he admits to inculcating theological undertones in most of his work. In fact he states this as one of his goals, then points out how circumstance has led him to reproduce stories from the Bible, without even really being aware he was doing it. From this he presents a theory of the reproduction of reality, that presenting reality in a limited scope can actual change the way people interact with the real:

“What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, be passive. And—cooperate. If officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.”

Isolating and emphasising some positive aspects of serving in the military might convince people to join up, maybe even to enjoy serving in the army, to countenance the killing and embrace the illusion of sporadic sporting activities and unshakeable friendships. Soldiers can use this misplaced emphasis as a tool, a way of suppressing their other memories of real experiences of death, warfare and boredom. For some, the stories they tell at home will not reflect all of their experiences, rather those of the selective reality they were sold. The things they weren’t told about are too reprehensible to discuss, they are the route cause of their post-traumatic stress, the ugly but sadly real experiences they should forget.

For soldiers to discuss the undisclosed face of soldiering would be to expose the MOD as a military institution that deals in death with which they have been complicit. In fact, as Milgram showed in 1961, it is often complicity that is one of the key motivating factors for individuals to continue on a prescribed path, even if it is harmful to others. In Milgram’s experiment participants were encouraged by an authoritative figure to deliver fatal doses of electricity to actors in another room. In most cases the participants continued to increase the voltage, regardless of the harrowing screams emanating from next door. They were absolving themselves of any guilt by transferring the responsibility of their actions onto the authoritative figure, only to later be told the process was an experiment and the electric shocks were in fact non-existent. Thus the army hides its true face from its soldiers, revealing only tiny parts of its real dimensions, and soldiers continue to convince themselves of their ‘duty’, ‘pride’, ‘brotherhood’ and ‘great times’, locking away their negative feelings in the deepest recesses of their subconscious, only for these memories to spill out and overflow in their most lucid nightmares.

Even if a returning soldier wants to discuss the negative realities of soldiering, it is unlikely they will be heard without a prolonged fight, equal in resources, power and public reach as the MOD. The reason for this is that, as Aristotle pointed out in his Poetics, narratives are reliant on ‘mimesis’, roughly translated from ancient Greek as imitation. But they are not just imitation of reality, they must equally rely on plausibility to work. If a narrative seems improbable, regardless of it actually being possible in the real world, it will not go down well with its audience. For Aristotle that was the difference between philosophy and narratives. Philosophy attempts to represent the real as closely as possible, factually if you like; whereas narratives seek to mimic reality such that a series of events seem plausible to an audience, regardless of their actual possibility or existence in reality. In this case, if the audience has been convinced of a ‘plausible’ narrative built up of narrow truths, in favour of considering a wider view of the real, they may cast doubt on the plausibility of the returning soldier’s accounts of their experiences.

These ‘plausible narratives’ begin to impact the real world in their own way. A 16 year old, compelled by the nationalistic narratives in computer games and films who reads the army prospectus and learns of the great adventures to be had, will surely be more likely to engage with that military institution. These ‘adventures’ will seems plausible to him/her, since the films and games this individual has previously engaged with glamorise warfare, adding to it a ‘fun’ dimension it otherwise lacks (outside of the minds of psychotic killers who occasionally find their way into an army recruitment centre).

This is why in America, in the guise of computer games such as America’s Army, where players take on the role of U.S Army rangers, or the many feature films whose narratives are screened and altered by the Pentagon, or the TV interviews given by soldiers, closely monitored and scripted by commanding officers surveying nearby, the state tries to control both the factual and narrative stories that emerge from popular culture. There is always some truth in these carefully controlled narratives, but like the best conspiracy theories it is what is omitted that is key to constructing the plausibility they rely upon to be taken seriously.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus summarised this experience:

“If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out and difficult.”

If we do not have certain expectations of something, it is unlikely we will understand it, or even be able to perceive all of its dimensions. Omitting certain truths when we were not previously aware they existed, may lead us to support a cause we would consider abhorrent were we to know of its broader context.

These constructed worlds are created by leaving things out. Most of us can recognise the feeling of deceiving another by omitting some fact that is integral to their decision making. Suppose for example, there is only one apple on a table. If we really want that apple and don’t feel like sharing it, we might search for certain truths and omit others in order to convince someone else to let us have it. “I bit into one last week and there was a maggot in it” – we might say. What we chose to leave out is that the apple we ate yesterday was tasty and neared perfection. We have not lied, but we have certainly manipulated how much of reality we chose to disclose. When we look at it as an intentional manipulation of others by leaving out facets of reality that could otherwise be integral to their decision making process, the act of leaving out the unexpected so that somebody else might not be able to expect it is deceitful and dishonest. This is what Richard Pendelton is describing when he talks about strategies used in advertising– and he has rightfully developed a guilt complex around his career choices.

It is commonly understood that nobody can know everything, but the problem with creating worlds by omitting facets of their reality is that these worlds end up reproducing themselves, and in a sense becoming real. The demarcation of what that object is becomes so specific that the actual reality, with all of its facets and possibilities no longer seems plausible, and then we end up with a situation where people are no longer able to recognise that contradictions can exist side by side. The army can be fun sometimes, but it can also involve killing, PTSD and grave injury or death. By sidelining killing, injury and death from how the army is presented, these processes have only been removed from people’s expectations of army life, not from the reality of it. These things become the unexpected consequences of soldiering, to the extent that the commonly held assumption of service will be that it is an adventure, not an exercise in state sanctioned killing. The death just happens to be there, sidelined and almost besides the point.

Pendleton elaborates on his techniques:

“The divorce between the language and the actuality starts to become a problem when you start thinking about your audience.”

He seems deeply traumatised by the notion he’s spent his career convincing people as young as sixteen to join the army, by omitting to inform them it might be the most traumatic experience of their young lives. Interestingly, it is this divorce between language and reality that can ultimately help us define what is real. When we consider reality to be comprised of a potentially infinite set of possibilities, it can feel like a daunting exercise communicating how we think we know something is real. But for the sake of those who joined the army without appreciating the more negative elements of life as a soldier, I think we should begin by setting the standard as provided by Philip K Dick, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”. Of course, reality is down to the individual, but only by sharing our experiences can others begin to unravel some of the damage advertising and propagandists have done to our perceptions of the real. From the army to social welfare, it is important to be exposed to, and seek to understand experiences that seem somehow alien or unimaginably improbable.