Is there a more chilling statement than this one, earnestly uttered? “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.” It describes the essence of propaganda, which throws reason under the bus, sidelines action, and makes a virtue out of elevating emotion, our most animal state, into a guiding principle. The crafting of the statement is itself a great triumph of the propagandist’s art, as it is invariably quoted approvingly, even motivationally.
Argentina’s Lionel Messi celebrates with the World Cup trophy. Credit:Tom Weller/Getty Images
It explains how Qatar just won the media cycle, using sportswashing to do its dirty laundry in plain sight. The intense emotion of a World Cup full of unexpected triumphs, crowned with the fairytale ending to Argentinian hero Lionel Messi’s football career, has swept away the lingering stench of corruption and human rights abuses that tainted the run-up to Qatar’s $300 billion self-promotion campaign. It cost an eye-watering sum, but Qatar has bought a name for itself and connected it with a positive experience. Long after the 2022 cup has become a legend, Qatar will be remembered as a country with an international focus: willing to do business and determined to become a business hub.
Crucially for Qatar, it has done so without grovelling to Western values. At the start of the cup, many Westerners vowed to boycott the event to protest the disregard for the lives and dignity of the workers who built the stadiums. Qatar’s attitude to women’s rights (firmly in the negative) was considered problematic. Players planned to wear “OneLove” armbands onto the field to draw attention to the ban on homosexuality and the plight of LGBTIQ+ Qataris.
“Death is a natural part of life,” the Qatari World Cup chief executive said coldly when asked about the death of a migrant worker. “We have a successful World Cup. And this is something you want to talk about right now?”
For a while there, it looked like the boiling outrage over these issues would be the lasting impression of Qatar left on the world.
But it has been a long time since nations such as Qatar were public relations amateurs. While the opening ceremony seemed clumsy, the heavy-handed symbolism served a purpose. Black actor Morgan Freeman lectured viewers on cultural understanding before touching hands with Qatari World Cup ambassador Ghanim Al Muftah, a young man born with no legs. FIFA President Gianni Infantino summed up the message of the ceremony on the eve of the cup when he implied that Western nations were hypocrites and Islamophobes for daring to criticise the Arab country.
The theatre around the cup was an exercise in moral relativism, pioneered in the universities of the West and wielded expertly against it. We are all different, Qatar signalled to the world, and we can accept that. It’s just you intolerant Westerners who cannot accept that we do not think like you.
Having made its point, the nation waited for sportswashing to do what sportswashing does. In the excitement of the Socceroos, the upset of Morocco, and the nail-biting final with an exhilarating climax, the indignant emotions became harder to access. It worked – because we have lost the ability to resist a big feeling.
When exactly did that happen? Sometime between the Enlightenment and now. But probably in the past several decades the backlash against the economists’ model of the rational being has catapulted us into a voluptuous embrace of emotive reasoning. And our desire to correct for that with logic and careful thought has atrophied. Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman showed that emotion drives us to make judgments that bypass our slower, computational brain. And because the quicker judgments feel right, we lack the incentive to review them.
In fact, we celebrate our emotionalism by quoting lines like the one I began with. The quote is attributed to author and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, to give it authority. But even its provenance appears to be propaganda. The positive spin on the statement that “people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel” deserves further scrutiny.
Historical murderers would murder to have been able to take shelter beneath a statement like this one.
And we have made room for them. South American revolutionary Che Guevara oversaw the torture and execution of hundreds, maybe thousands of political prisoners, and all we have is a bunch of stupid T-shirts celebrating his dashing visage. The man who purportedly declared that “a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate” has been scrubbed as clean as a Kombi van by counter-culture nostalgia. What do words and deeds matter in the era of emotion?
And what about Greta Thunberg? Oh, the feelings that were had when that wisp of a girl was beamed around the world in her one-child “school strike for climate”. How boomers thrilled when she scolded them for stealing her future. It was an amazing, electric, transformative moment. Except nothing has changed. Because reducing global emissions requires serious, rational thought and planning. It may even require us to deploy technologies and transitional fuels that we feel icky about. It involves facing big, uncomfortable and adult trade-offs, while the emotion Thunberg evoked was whole and perfect in itself. It allowed people to feel vividly without acting.
People might only remember how you made them feel but we all live with the consequences of words and actions. A better motivational statement for the new year would be that history only remembers deeds and their impacts. It is almost always the case that later generations have their own feelings about our feelings.
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