The Doubter's Companion Read online

  Most deconstructionists are academics. It is remarkable, given their belief in the meaninglessness of language, that they have so little trouble assigning A’s, B’s and C’s to their students.1 Perhaps this is a hint that their whole argument is an insider’s joke. With hindsight, of course, the same can be said of the intellectual arguments used by Hitler and Stalin.

  Note: Deconstructionists tend to insist that the proper term is deconstruction, not deconstructionism. That is, they do not want to be treated as an ism. They hate being deconstructed. See: SCHOLASTICISM.

  DEMOCRACY An existential system in which words are more important than actions. Not a judgemental system.

  Democracy is not intended to be efficient, linear, logical, cheap, the source of absolute truth, manned by angels, saints or virgins, profitable, the justification for any particular economic system, a simple matter of majority rule or for that matter a simple matter of majorities. Nor is it an administrative procedure, patriotic, a reflection of tribalism, a passive servant of either law or regulation, elegant or particularly charming.

  Democracy is the only system capable of reflecting the humanist premise of equilibrium or BALANCE. The key to its secret is the involvement of the citizen. See: REFERENDUM.

  DENIAL Characteristic reflex of a technocrat. Since actions are the result of solutions arrived at by experts there can be no ERROR. Error is replaced by a linear succession of right answers. This requires the systematic denial of error when each preceding answer fails to do its job in spite of being right.

  The contaminated blood scandals of the late 1980s and early 1990s involved a series of errors in several Western countries by various medical authorities who failed to screen properly blood donations for HIV infections. The universal methods of the medical profession (corporation) produced the same initial approach in each country. This involved errors, which in each case were rigorously denied, which led to further damage being done to uninformed patients, which led eventually to public inquiries which ought to have been extremely damaging to the medical corporation and caused them to rethink their general approach to communication and error. Instead, they went into an emergency state of denial and were able to muddy the waters enough to limit the damage to unfocused outrage.

  The denials or lies were exactly the same in Canada, England, France, Germany and the United States. The desperation to be seen to be right in all cases was more important than the lives of patients.

  This mania for denial has marked policies ranging from the economy to defence. It constitutes an assertion that expertise and the corporatist structure are more important than reality. See: DIALECTS.

  DEPRESSION A form of economic disaster common throughout history. In 1973 the word was deleted from all Western languages and replaced by the term recession.

  There are three reasons for this rebaptism:

  FIRST, depressions have been fixed in the public imagination with images drawn from the collapse of 1929–39. Yet the West has been stricken by a series of modern depressions since the mid-eighteenth century. They have all been products of both the industrial revolution and the new financing methods, yet each has looked quite different. There is no reason for them now suddenly to begin looking alike.

  Society’s structures have changed radically since 1929, in an effort to eliminate through regulation the worst of the economic instabilities which had brought on the crisis in the first place. People believed that regulation was necessary because time after time, from the eighteenth century onward, the market-place had proved itself devoid of the characteristic of sensible self-regulation. It could only regulate itself through boom and bust cycles, which led not to a gradual levelling-out, but to recurrent depressions.

  The changes begun in 1932 were also intended to eliminate the extreme social inequities—or rather iniquities—brought on by the crisis. However effective the new regulations, there would always be economic highs and lows. But that didn’t mean children had to be in soup-kitchens. This idea of social reform through regulation was actually a return to the pre-capitalist view of society as a conscious whole. It was no longer acceptable to think of society as no more than an abstract economic mechanism in which some were winners and others losers who might fall as far into despair as the market found useful.

  If the Depression which began in 1973 has appeared far less dramatic than the preceding one, it is thanks to the balancing effect of regulation.

  SECOND, the pseudo-scientific approach to economic reality leads the economists and their more powerful half-brothers, the business school professors, to believe that they are constantly managing real situations. This is a delusion filled with paradoxes. For example, the ideologues of the market-place see themselves as managing detail within the great inevitable flow of competition. The truth about modern economists is that their macro visions are rarely more than inflated versions of their micro science. This isn’t unusual in a society dominated by technocratic systems. Contemporary military strategy, for example, is rarely more than a blow-up of tactics.

  The economy is now seen as a series of details, and the experts believe they can measure their way. They resemble a sailor who sets his course, without a compass or a sea-anchor, from the trough of the waves, by calculating his way up to the next crest.

  THIRD, the themes of contemporary leadership contain a strange combination of mythological optimism (which promises continual progress towards a better world) and virtual inertia brought on by slavery to micro-economic systems.

  Thus, those with power feel obliged to promise big solutions, while in reality they seldom move beyond the obscure briefs of their experts.

  To admit to the existence of anything as uncontrollable as a depression would be to admit failure, which is tantamount to declaring that you have no right to power. As a result the political, administrative and academic élites insist that, since 1973, we have suffered from a series of recessions. Recessions differ from depressions in length and severity, so there is a strong feeling that they can be managed. The word depression is feared because it suggests a profound social imbalance which is beyond management. If a depression were to exist, the élites would have to engage in serious self-criticism. They would have to reconsider how the economic system functions. Our élites are not trained or chosen to think of themselves in those terms. They are sometimes falsely Heroic; but in reality they are themselves a micro phenomenon.

  The Western refusal to respond intelligently to the crisis has been as blatant on the Left as on the Right. At the annual DAVOS gathering in January 1993, the fashionable economist Lester Thurow declared that we are not in the great Depression, but in the great Recession. This left the false impression that our only need is to stimulate the economy. But stagnation is the characteristic of Act II in a depression tragedy. Act I involves crisis and collapse; Act II stagnation; Act III brings regeneration either through a cataclysmic fire or through the discovery of a new approach. That discovery lies inevitably in the root causes of the crisis—Act I.

  Yet we remain stubbornly in Act II. After all, the most important trade good remains an artificial industry—armaments—which continues to dominate the high-tech sector. Public funding, that is TAXATION, remains at an impasse. An abstract, ideological obsession with EFFICIENCY and COMPETITION continues to undermine our social economic structures. The international money markets—a monstrous and unregulated descendant of South Sea Bubble–style speculation—remains so powerful that it can overwhelm any economy, whatever its health or productivity. Western governments are still unwilling to deal with the implications for competition, employment and money flows of the TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS, even though passivity means that national and even multinational policies are meaningless. The profession of economists remains fixated on the virtues of the service industries without bothering to identify the highly contradictory elements which this term contains. And they are unwilling to make sense of the relationship between their technical tinkering and their abstract theories on deb
t and inflation. More to the point, they continue to see economics as a mathematical abstract rather than a manifestation of civilization.

  How can we have solid economic recovery when the dominant economic schools do not begin from the assumption that there are 270 million people in Western Europe and 300 million in North America and that all of these people must somehow be involved in the economy? If ignored, they become expensive, even destructive dead-weights. Such disembodied and abstract theories can only weaken society and incidentally its economy.

  All of these problems could have been focused on before 1973. Yet, no sooner had the crisis begun, then most were abruptly seen as strengths and thus encouraged to become crutches for the ailing system in place. To suggest that now all we need do to ensure recovery is stimulate or educate or single out potential areas of growth is to act as if economies only exist as superficial appearances.

  With a little disinterested common sense it is possible, however, to identify a handful of key phenomena which, if not entirely responsible, account for much of our crisis.

  1. The failure of our managerial ÉLITEs, whether public or private, which throws doubt on our assumptions about organization, leadership and higher education (see: MANAGER).

  2. Our belief that technology has purpose and direction and therefore needs no guidance.

  3. The inability of our élites to examine what will, can and must happen to traditional ideas of GROWTH in an advanced industrial society.

  4. As a result, the conversion of our economics to dependence on inflationary, non-growth activities such as the MONEY MARKETS, ARMAMENTS production, mergers and acquisitions and PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT.

  5. As a further result, an explosion in public and private DEBT accompanied by a simplistic, linear belief that we must strip ourselves naked in order to pay those debts.

  6. The re-opening of the nineteenth-century file on unregulated competition. This was initiated by the transnational corporations who are making use of cheap unprotected labour in the Third World to undermine the STANDARDS OF PRODUCTION inside the developed nations (encouraged by an ideological approach to the practical mechanism of free trade).

  7. And all of this has been worsened by a determination to treat our ills with the symptoms of the disease.

  Depressions do eventually come to an end. Sometimes this takes a decade. It can just as easily take five. Usually they burn themselves out like fires, consuming in the process both the problems that started them and much of society’s fabric. Sometimes this fire takes the form of war, sometimes poverty and ruin. Recovery is then based upon rebuilding and is dependent upon the willpower of the citizenry. The depression of 1973 will end, but so long as we deal with it through abstraction, denial and desperate positivism, the phenomenon will go on mutating, shifting and re-emerging. See: REGULATION and SEVENTY-THREE.

  DEREGULATION The airline industry fought for this privilege. It was a necessary freedom, they said, to strengthen competition, thus strengthening companies, which would lead to the creation of more companies, and that to more flights flying to more places, leading to overall lower prices for the consumer.

  The result has been competitive chaos, leading to continuous bankruptcies, leading to a constantly shrinking number of companies, leading to less real competition and therefore to fewer flights to fewer places at higher prices. Between 1990 and 1993 the American companies alone lost $11 billion.2

  It should be noted that two events in this deregulatory period ought to have guaranteed success for the industry. After two peaks in oil prices, the real cost of fuel has steadily fallen. And the explosion in mass tourism over the last fifteen years has led to a massive increase in the number of passengers.

  The air carriers tried to save themselves from the catastrophic effects of deregulation by concentrating on executive travel. The technocracy was growing, wanted to fly to do business, and had to pay full fare because that is the way large organizations work. The result was an ever-expanding third or middle class of travel called Business or Executive. The increased cost of sending businessmen on this class was assumed by their shareholders and was therefore a dead weight on the general economy.

  The effects of deregulation on personal travel were particularly negative. During the years of regulation, travel had been relatively simple for the passenger. And simplicity is a real form of efficiency. There were two classes; most people, including most corporate employees, used Economy class. There were some bargains, principally aimed at family tourism which was planned well in advance.

  The collapse of real competition under deregulation led to those forms of false competition typical of oligopolies. There was an explosion in the area of special deals, promotions and packages. The result was a travel jungle which continues to waste the traveller’s and the airline company’s time. This has led to a confusion of money-losing promotions aimed at winning the loyalty of customers, who see fewer and fewer reasons to be loyal in a disordered market.

  Free-air-mile plans have been among the most costly aspects of this false competition. Of course, they aren’t free.

  The companies have to cover the costs by charging more per ticket to their paying customers. The principal beneficiaries of this system are the various technocrats—particularly the corporate executives—whose flights are paid for by their companies, a pleasant fact which does nothing for competition or an increased choice of destinations. Quite the contrary. The more the executives get personal free air miles, the more the airlines must charge for the Business-class tickets bought by the corporations. This system doesn’t increase paid-for travel, cuts into the profits of both the airlines and the corporations who use them and involves complex management costs.

  The overall effect of special deals and bonuses has been to reduce competition to the level of the old “free glass at the gas station” routine. But passengers don’t want free glasses, bigger meals, special tags, cards, waiting-rooms or even toothbrushes. What they want is a simple way to fly to the maximum number of places with the maximum choice of flights in acceptable comfort and dignity with minimum fuss at a reasonable price. This is a description of real competition which experience has now demonstrated can only be produced by thoughtful and tough REGULATION.

  DESCARTES, RENÉ Gave credibility to the idea that the mind exists separately from the body, which suggests that he didn’t look down while writing.

  The credible certainties Descartes sought were not of the body, but of method. His obsession with doubt was not to explore the unknown, as Socrates might have put it, but to remove doubt. To answer absolutely.

  In this he and Francis Bacon were on exactly the same track. Bacon’s scientific attitude was a source of power. These two profoundly modern intellectuals both claimed to have escaped the a priori. Each, in his own way, is the inspiration for the modern technocracy whose a priori truths are disguised by theoretically neutral methods. See: GANG OF FIVE.

  DESELECT A passive but transitive verb which indicates that an individual has been RATIONALIZED.

  DESSERT Years ago the wonderful Yvonne of the restaurant Tante Yvonne, rue Notre Dame des Victoires, in Paris, was asked to name the greatest dessert. She replied instantly.

  “Chichis! The second stand on the left coming out of Marseille.”

  Chichis are made of chick-pea flour and water with a little orange-flower extract added for taste. The batter is squeezed out of a large pastry bag into a vat of boiling oil in a great curl resembling a very long sausage. It is then drained, rolled in sugar and cut into four pieces. If you buy four, the leftover tail-piece (the bada) is thrown in. The four chichis are individually wrapped in brown paper cones. The bada is not. Chichis are cooked to order, so on a Sunday afternoon there is a long line-up, particularly at the second stand on the left, which, after the recent arrival of a new stand, is now the third. See: MONARCHS.

  DESTINY The product of mysterious inevitability and human passivity, both presented as unshakeable tenets of something which can’t quite be i
dentified.

  A half-century ago the idea of destiny seemed moribund, except among communists and a dwindling group of religious believers. Now, carried aloft by the natural truths of ECONOMICS and the linear logic of CORPORATISM, destiny once again determines our lives.

  Some 2,500 years ago the joint dictatorship of destiny and divine will was first broken by Athenians like Solon and Socrates. Their specific enemy was the Homeric mythology under which the shape of men’s lives was decided in advance. At best or worst they might be marginally altered if the gods intervened. The great contribution of the Athenians was to argue that humans could, within the limits of a larger reality, continually re-create their own destiny. They couldn’t do this from nothing or in spite of everything or in isolation from the world, but they could act. Their destiny was not sealed from birth. Western civilization begins with that conviction. The idea of the conscious, responsible individual is born with the defeat of fate and passivity.

  Two and a half millennia later, the largest and most sophisticated élite ever to have existed—some 30 per cent of our populations—in possession of more knowledge than the élites of earlier history could have imagined, have convinced themselves and their civilizations that the Athenians were wrong, after all. Most things are inevitable. They were wrong. We were wrong. We’ve wasted 2,500 years.