How to complain, feel better ... and get your own way
By Paul Dalgarno

WE are born complaining. Wrinkled and restless, we kick our legs and scream at the world that comes to meet us. Anything less would seem absurd (and medically suspect). When we're dying we might complain in words, if we are able, or with an anxious tug of the catheter if not. Between starting and ending we carp, bitch, moan, whine, backstab and protest. We bellyache and argue; we bruise and we bond. We overthrow governments or smash cups against walls, according to our means and frustrations. Complaint is with us all the way, but is it good for us or bad?

Julian Baggini, philosopher, thinks the former, but with reservations. Essentially it depends what our gripe is, how we complain, and to whom. Get it wrong and no-one will like you. Get it right and you go from mediocre meathead to noble savage.

"All the great social changes in history have started with a complaint," says Baggini. "Someone noticing that things are not as they ought to be and articulating it. Of course, it's important they then do something about it." Otherwise we risk being swept along with the querulous chaff of everyday life: work sucks; I've just been credit crunched; my boss is a dribbling baboon. But in his new book, Complaint, Baggini contends that such minor yaps are not worthless, that they keep our complaint muscles toned until a real problem comes up and make us seem more approachable to others.

"There's been very little academic study on the subject, but most of the time we are not really complaining at all," he says. "In many situations, what we think of as complaining is actually a social lubricant, a way of sending out different signals. Complaining is not a bad thing - it's a really great part of human nature."

Try the opposite, being overly positive, and acquaintances will scatter to the wind. But whereas whingeing comes naturally, constructive complaining has rules. Knowing right from wrong, or thinking you do, is the first step. Identifying the right person to help you is the second. Approaching them, without punching them, is the third. It's a simple enough equation, but the gap between how things are and how they should be can seem insurmountable.

In some situations, it's doubtless best to walk away (when the person you are arguing with is armed, for example, or when the bank manager starts fumbling for the security button beneath his desk). But in others you feel trapped, like a bee in a jar, with some little brat closing in on your wings. Travel is one of the main flashpoints, perhaps because the power to get from A to B is taken from your hands and placed directly in those of someone unreliable. It could be the caravan-pulling driver right in front of you, the drunk man in the cycle lane.

But these are amateurs. The pros are drawn to gatekeeper roles, where they have the ability to stop you and frustrate you just because they feel like it. They work in tandem with hunchbacked lackeys who lose baggage, misquote timetables and damage anything that doesn't belong to them. Train stations and bus depots attract those new to the trade but the real zealots are drawn to airports. The 100ml liquid restriction, the consequence of an alleged but unproven terror plot, is so inane, so lacking in common sense, that we must surely protest. The sight of some poor old pensioner being robbed of their roll-on deodorant and tut-tutted by security staff appears more like an act of terrorism than one designed to prevent it.

But how to effect change? At one airport recently I wanted to complain, my belt in one hand, falling-down jeans in the other. Had my package, a shampoo, been genuinely suspect, surely I should have been taken for questioning and possible arrest. But as it was a shampoo, as it claimed to be, its confiscation by a stone-faced automaton was tantamount to theft. This is what I wanted to say. If I only could have said it. But the anger ...

"There's always a job of persuasion to be done," says Baggini. "One reason to complain in this instance is that there's no evidence that the liquid ban stops terrorism. And if there must be rules on liquids, then the current ones are ridiculously crude and limiting."

But why complain at all? Stoics would argue for indifference. Why not internalise the pain and, who knows, learn to love it? Because that would be dumb, says Baggini. "There's a vaguely new-age feeling going around that any form of inner agitation is bad and that we should all be heading for inner peace," he says. "I think that's morally outrageous. There's something deeply self-centred about aspiring to be the kind of person who's not perturbed by anything."

He singles out Buddhism as "one of those religions which are most explicit in encouraging us not to complain" and, when he does, his argument seems convincing. But this is largely because persuasion plays a a major role in complaining, and Baggini makes his points persuasively. He calls it "selfish" to bask in unflinching serenity when suffering and prejudice are so widespread. Homophobia would go unchallenged; slavery would never have been abolished. But can there really be a people, or religion, that never complains? And would this not run contrary to human nature?

"Buddhism is not about being selfish," says Gelongma Tsultrim Zangmo, a Buddhist nun at the Kagyu Samye Ling monastery in Dumfriesshire. "It is not about resignation but acceptance." The trick, she says, is to discuss the problem at hand without doing so from anger or frustration. But even this, she says, doesn't always work in practice. Myanmar's marching monks made this clear last year with their protests against the country's military regime; Tibet's monks clashed recently with the Chinese authorities in their region. "We still sometimes make a hoo-hah," says Zangmo, "because we are all human beings."

Not that complaining is limited to our species. Stand on a sleeping dog and he'll tell you all about it; borrow a chimpanzee's baby and she'll make her grievance known. But there is, along with our capacity to reason, a far greater scope for humans to complain, to see that things need to change, to push abstract ideas to their conclusions. Cavemen knew it. People in the middle ages knew it. They knew it even more than we do because, according to complaint protocol, everything was better in the past and everything now is shit. Buses. Music. Work. Films. Ideas. Houses. People. The degenerates of the 1960s look like fairies to us now, as the bogeymen of the 1920s must have appeared to them. Grumpy-faced girning has been around since time immemorial, we might conclude, and will outlive every one of us.

Unless Will Bowen, a Unity Church minister from Missouri, gets his way. Bowen launched the Movement Towards a Complaint-Free World on the back of a simple idea: adherents wear a purple "complaint-free" rubber wristband and change it from wrist to wrist each time they grumble. When they achieve three consecutive weeks without a misplaced moan they have made it.

More than five million wristbands have been distributed around the world, and Bowen hopes to have dispensed more than 60 million by 2010. It sounds like a monumental waste of rubber but Bowen is happy. Feedback floods his Kansas City headquarters: failing marriages have been saved, lives transformed and ailments banished. "One man suffered from chronic migraines and would constantly tell his wife how awful they were making him feel," he says. "On a scale of one to 10, the pain was always an eight or nine. But he finally stopped complaining and now gets no headaches at all."

Though seemingly at odds with Baggini's contention that complaining is a perk of life, Bowen's philosophy is not dissimilar. "It's about speaking directly and only to the person who can effect real change," he explains. "Saying This is my stapler, please don't take it' is not a complaint. But if I say Stop taking my stapler, you idiot, you're making me mad and I hate you', that's quite different. It has to do with the energy behind your comments."

Bowen says he believes in divine order, in things being just as they should be, but also in people's right to change their lot if they are unhappy. As long as it doesn't become addictive. "Complaining keeps your mind on the problem at hand rather than letting you dream of solutions," he says. "It drags down morale. People tend to cluster around other people who are like them, and if you've got one complainer it usually prompts others to start complaining too."

Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch illustrates this tendency - one man's recollection of scrimping to afford tea in the past leads, in stages, to another man's memory of 29-hour working days on a meal of cold poison before being murdered by his father every evening. (Conversely, the Dead Parrot sketch, in which John Cleese fights nobly but unfruitfully for his right to a breathing bird, is an instance of constructive complaining gone wrong.) Though cathartic, moaning with others can be like grabbing a friend who is being electrocuted: we get the full force of their negative current and can't let go of the energy coursing through us.

"There's a camaraderie about certain types of complaining, but also a danger it will pull you down," says psychologist Cynthia McVey. We are talking about gripes at the bus stop, for example low-level grumbles about the weather. Say nothing and you're marked out as a troublemaker. Or a pervert. McVey offers a solution: "You could just say Yeah, it's raining, but look how green it is - we wouldn't have such green trees without the rain'." But she acknowledges this approach won't endear you to everyone: "It sounds a bit Pollyanna, and people hate Pollyannas."

McVey rarely makes formal complaints, unless to fight someone else's corner or when her sense of justice has been outraged. In such cases, she suggests any written accusation should be tempered with an acknowledgement that the person you are writing about may have been having a particularly bad day, or could be dealing with personal issues. Rail too much and you may be mistaken for a professional complainer - that rare breed who, at least anecdotally, spend their days complaining to companies for tiny cash settlements and freebies. Anyone who has phoned broadband providers or gas companies will sympathise with this, the most gruelling of occupations.

"It can be enormously frustrating to have to talk to machines and press buttons," says McVey. "And then you get through to somebody in a far and distant land who can't spell Milngavie. In the end you want to complain about the system they have as much as the original problem."

For the people who work in call centres, dealing with grumblers all day and never biting back must be sheer, unmetaphorical torture. "Customers usually lose the rag because they can't articulate themselves properly when things don't go their way," says Martin Gilhooly, a complaints management consultant who trains the people we love to hate. "I always tell the customer representatives to stay calm," he says, "to not take threats and verbal abuse too personally. It's important to remain dispassionate while maintaining a professional attitude."

He thinks our soaring demand for someone to explode at can be put down partly to Watchdog-style programmes on television and the growth of customer-focused websites. Judaeo-Christian restraint has been replaced with the consumerist clamour of an iPod for an iPod, a toothbrush for a toothbrush.

But, as with most things, there are drawbacks to demanding our dues. In her book Making Babies: Is There A Right To Have Children?, the British philosopher Mary Warnock argues that we increasingly see parenthood as a right and not a blessing. The upshot? Baggini says we have fostered a culture of entitlement. "We have gone from a default position of gratitude for the good things we have to a feeling that those good things are ours by right and that not having them is clearly wrong."

Hence a grievance culture where complaining has become "a bit of a game in which people are simply trying to get the most out of each other". Companies and service providers know that apologies can be used in legal disputes as evidence of liability and therefore don't want to apologise for anything. Which explains why you get passed from pillock to post when you have a genuine grievance. As a consequence, says Baggini, we are becoming a nation of angry kids, unwilling to take ownership of the problems we have caused, even when it's obvious that we should. "Without taking responsibility for what one does," he says, "we become morally emasculated."

Blaming the Americans for this may not be entirely unjustified. When 79-year-old Stella Liebeck won damages from McDonalds after scalding herself with a newly-served coffee in 1992, the writing, in terms of our compensation culture, was on the wall. But perhaps Liebeck had the right idea. In researching his book, Baggini conducted an unscientific but revealing survey in which almost 1000 people evaluated the severity with which they complained about issues such as corrupt politicians, cruel fate and the cost of living. Discrepancies between the sexes were dwarfed by the gaping chasm between American and British moaners.

"In Britain, only half as many people as in the US seem to complain to anyone with any power to actually change things," says Baggini. "Maybe Americans believe in the perfectibility of the world and have a great optimism about what humans can achieve. Britain is a former empire that has seen better years. We probably don't expect much will come of our complaints."

But we'll grind it out anyway, I suppose. We'll carry on with our overpriced romantic dinners, with waiters who drop our pizzas; we'll curse airport staff, but surrender our rights without a whimper; we'll say the hot days are too hot and the dark nights a national scandal. We have to, says Baggini, because "he who is tired of complaining is tired of life". On balance, he will take a whinger over a non-whinger every time.

"We have the fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, but The Boy Who Cried Nothing would have been eaten along with the sheep," he says. He could go on, no doubt. As could I. But frankly, this has to end. "We mustn't ever stop complaining," moans Baggini. "We simply must try to do so a little more cleverly."

Complaint, From Minor Moans To Principled Protests by Julian Baggini is published on June 12 by Profile Books.