The Doubter's Companion Page 3

  In manufacturing circles it is widely known that the least advanced area of aeronautics engineering is air treatment. In public, the press officers busily deny there is a problem. The number of formal complaints, they insist, are “statistically insignificant.”2 But then airline industry organizations don’t compile data on these sorts of complaints. In 1993 American government officials investigated the case of a flight attendant with tuberculosis who seemed to have infected twenty-three other crew over a short period of time. TB is spread by airborne bacteria. Uncirculated air was therefore a likely factor. However, the mechanism of general DENIAL kept turning.

  Corporations inquiring whether windows can be made to open in office towers are told by architects and the construction industry that this is impossible, or only for a significant extra charge, plus long-term air-management costs. In spite of thousands of books about management and competitiveness, many of which talk about getting the most out of executives and other employees through leadership, training and encouragement of individual talents, there seems to be no calculus for integrating the costs of sick-leave into those of air-conditioning.

  In truth, the only barrier to airplanes taking in a constant stream of fresh air, cooling it and then expelling it is the absence of pressure from passengers, the airlines’ employees and the airlines. The case of office towers is even simpler. The air-conditioning system is rarely mentioned by companies when they build, buy or rent. Nothing prevents them from demanding air-conditioning systems limited to small areas—less than a floor—and which constantly take in and expel air. Nothing, that is, except the inability of our system to integrate widely recognized medical costs with those of engineering.

  ALLIES See:SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS.

  AMORALITY A quality admired and rewarded in modern organizations, where it is referred to through metaphors such as professionalism and efficiency.

  Amorality is corporatist wisdom. It is one of the terms which highlights the confusion in society between what is officially taught as a value and what is actually rewarded by the structure.

  Immorality is doing wrong of our own volition. Amorality is doing it because a structure or an organization expects us to do it. Amorality is thus worse than immorality because it involves denying our responsibility and therefore our existence as anything more than an animal. See: BLOOD (1) and ETHICS.

  ANGLO-SAXONS A racial group composed mainly of Celts, Chinese, Germans, Italians, Ukrainians, French and other peoples who have been conquered by or immigrated to the English-speaking world. To blame for everything. See: XENOPHOBIA (PASSIVE).

  ANIMISM Religion devoid of abstraction and therefore resistant to use by sophisticated power structures.

  The last few decades have seen animism make a determined comeback, particularly among disaffected members of the rational élites. What their beliefs are has never been clear. Some talk of souls and spirits. Some of popular culture. Jung’s archetypes have been remarkably popular.

  Underlying all of this is a large group of highly educated people reaching for an integrated view of existence. The straightforward hill-tribe beliefs of Southeast Asia probably come as close as any to expressing their idea. Everything has life. Humans are alive, but then so are trees and rocks. We are all part of a single process so we must act in concert with the whole.

  The large intellectual religions have little difficulty understanding each other, whatever their rivalries. They share almost identical ideals as well as their corruption by society. These religions also share a disdain for animism.

  This usually takes the form of an attack on superstition. Some of it is justified. But most animistic superstition consists not of destructive fear but of populist ways to deal with social problems. Dietary rules. Marriage restrictions. The abstract religions do the same, except that their rules on everything from eating pork to fornication are apparently received as direct instructions from God.

  What bothers the intellectual religions about animism is not the idea that everything from rocks to humans contains life, but that humans are therefore no more than a constituent part of a living whole which is the earth. That this view denies special rights and powers to the human is upsetting. That it denies special rights and powers to the structures of society is unacceptable.

  Large organized societies are dependent on the separation of the human race from all the rest. This denial or demotion of the non-abstract frees us to act as if we were not limited by our physical realities. Without this liberation much of our PROGRESS would not have been possible.

  And yet we are limited by physical realities. So our liberation has been built upon a great deal of self-delusion, which has turned gradually into very real political, social and economic weaknesses.

  The argument today between those who see themselves as the forces of progress and those who appear to be resisting is a continuation of the old drive by the abstract religions to eliminate the animist view. Yet many of the new animists—environmentalists and sociologists, among others—are the product of a strange cross-breeding. They call for the reintegration of humanity into the worldly whole, but belong themselves to the intellectual structures of their enemies.

  The professional environmentalists are a good example of this contradiction. They lobby like arms contractors. Haunt international conferences. Fight for tiny amendments in government and corporate behaviour. Small changes in content rules. They have the strength of fighting with their opponents’ best weapons.

  But after only twenty years in existence much of the environmental movement has taken on the form of just another corporation or interest group. Their interest may be disinterest, but their methods are one with the rational élites and are therefore limited to the details of corporatist life. These new animists are attempting to justify restraint and a common-sense approach to self-respect with the use of intellectual tools designed to eliminate both.

  Still, they are a sign of more than dissatisfaction. There are dozens of other signs of people trying to take their distances from the rational system. Often these attempts seem silly or naïve and are discounted by the corporatist structures. But these people are reaching in the same direction, away from the isolation of our society. What they are seeking is some sense of integration or balance.

  ANOREXIA A condition aspired to by most middle-class women. See: MONARCHS.

  ANSWERS A mechanism for avoiding questions.

  This might be called obsessional avoidance or a manic syndrome. It is based on the belief that the possession of an education—particularly if it leads to professional or expert status and, above all, if it involves some responsibility or power—carries with it an obligation to provide the answer to every question posed in your area of knowledge. This has become much more than the opiate of the rational élites. It may be the West’s most serious addiction.

  Time is of the essence in this process. An inability to provide the answer immediately is a professional fault. The availability of unlimited facts can produce an equally unlimited number of absolute answers in most areas. Memory is not highly regarded. Right answers which turn out to be wrong are simply replaced by a new formula. The result of these sequential truths is an assertive or declarative society which admires neither reflection nor doubt and has difficulty with the idea that to most questions there are many answers, none of them absolute and few of them satisfactory except in a limited way.

  Answers are the abstract face of SOLUTIONS.

  ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM A self-validation ritual created by and for intellectuals.

  There is no reason to believe that large parts of any population wish to reject learning or those who are learned. People want the best for their society and themselves. The extent to which a populace falls back on superstition or violence can be traced to the ignorance in which their élites have managed to keep them, the ill-treatment they have suffered and the despair into which a combination of ignorance and suffering have driven them.

  Given the opportunity, those who know a
nd have less want themselves or their children to know and have more. They understand perfectly that learning is central to general wellbeing. The disappearance of the old working-class in Germany, France and northern Italy between 1945 and 1980 is a remarkable example of this understanding.

  Yet political movements continue to capitalize on the dark side of populism. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s a number of groups gathered public support—Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front National in France, Ross Perot in the United States, the new German Right, the Reform Party and the Bloc Québécois in Canada, the Northern League, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the Neo-Fascist movement in Italy. These movements share the same message, each in their local way. It combines a simplistic as opposed to straightforward approach to public affairs with an ability to tap the public’s disgust over the established élites.

  The conclusion drawn by the PLATOnists—who account for most of our élites—is that the population constitutes a deep and dangerous well of ignorance and irrationality; if our civilization is in crisis the fault must lie with the populace which is not rising to the inescapable challenges. And yet civilizations do not collapse because the citizenry are corrupt or lazy or anti-intellectual. These people do not have the power or influence to either lead or destroy. Civilizations collapse when those who have power fail to do their job. Ross Perot was created by Harvard, not by illiterate farmers.

  Our élites are concerned by what they see as intellectual LUDDITISM all around them—television, films and music prospering at the lowest common denominator; spreading functional illiteracy; a lack of public appreciation for the expertise which the élites see as guiding all aspects of human life. It appears to them as if the populace is stubbornly refusing to fill an appropriate role in a CORPORATIST society.

  Perhaps this is because the anti-intellectualism over which the élites make such a fuss is in fact the reply of the citizenry to both the élites’ own pretension of leadership and their failure to lead successfully. This profoundly pyramidal model of leadership takes the form of obscure language, controlled information and the reduction of individual participation at almost all levels to one of pure function.

  The élites have masked their failures by insisting that the population is lazy, reads junk, watches television and is badly educated. The population has responded by treating the élites with a contempt reminiscent of the attitudes of the pre-modern underclasses.

  If ECONOMICS are rendered incomprehensible except to experts and in addition are unable to deal with our economic problems, why should anyone respect economists? If the corporate managerial élites cannot explain in a non-dogmatic, reasonable manner what they are doing and why, is there any reason to believe that their decisions will serve the general good? If those who create the tools of public communication—such as fiction—write novels that do not communicate, why should the public consider these works relevant or important?

  It’s not that everyone must understand everything; but those who are not experts must see that they are being dealt with openly and honestly; that they are part of the process of an integrated civilization. They will understand and participate to the best of their ability. If excluded they will treat the élites with an equal contempt. See: CIVILIZATION.

  ANTS Ants do nothing 71.5 per cent of the time. They are trying to think of what can usefully be done next. And this in spite of their reputation—shared with beavers and BEES—as hard-working role models for the human race.

  Most humans in positions of responsibility work more than 28.5 per cent of the time. It could be argued that, being brighter than ants, we need less time to think. This is a technically correct and reassuring argument. Yet a comparison of the incidence of error among ants versus that among human beings would not come out in our favour. We could counter that, by risking error, human society—or at least human knowledge—has progressed, while that of the ants remains stable. But if we are so bright, then why are we so eager to spend as long as possible on the non-intellectual tasks which hard work represents, while desperately economizing on the time spent thinking? An outside observer, an ant for example, might wonder whether we are afraid of our ability to think and more precisely of the self-doubt which it involves. See: HARD WORK.

  APPLE Spherical object created by thirty-two chemical products, then dipped in wax, then gassed. In the long run an apple is as likely to bring on a doctor as to keep one away.

  APPLIED CIVILIZATION A gift of the physically or economically stronger to the weaker. See: CIVILIZATION.

  APPLIED CORPORATISM The mediocre usually gain power because of long service, corruption, back-room manipulations, error or luck. But from time to time they arrive at the top precisely because they are the accurate image of the power structure in place. And so occasionally, when a leader not good enough for the job wins office, the citizenry should be grateful for what amounts to a moment of truth.

  George Bush was the exact reflection of a corporatist society. In his experience and attitudes he combined the interests of several business and government sectors. The standard ideological view—both that of the Right and of the Left—was that the Bush presidency presented an opportunity for special interests to cash in. And of course they did, leaving some happy and others outraged. But the principal role of a corporatist leader is not to help his friends grow rich. They will do that anyway. Nor is it to worry about the management of any one interest group.

  The job of a corporatist president is to manage the relationships between the groups. In helping the arms industry to work with the Pentagon to work with the security agencies to work with the oil industry to work with the environmental agencies and so on, he encourages nationwide stability. If successful he will have indirectly eliminated interference from that rival system—citizen-based democracy—which technically maintains legal control over the constitutional structures of the Republic.

  Criticisms of the Bush presidency based on accusations of corruption or of upper-class social indifference or of deficient domestic economic strategies missed the point. Corporatist leaders do not have policy strategies any more than they have ethical standards. What they do believe in is the stable management of cooperation between interest groups. This, they are convinced, will make society work effectively.

  Even if the counterweight of ethics, democracy and justice is laid aside in such an argument, history proves the corporatists wrong. Interest groups are devoid of the broad common sense required to see beyond immediate self-interest. Without it they are little more than idiot savants, unable to avoid disasters and unable to understand why. Thus the superficial stability which President Bush produced was unsatisfactory and even unpleasant and was ultimately unacceptable to the voter. The one disadvantage attached to the inevitable dismissal by the public of a corporatist president is that the removal of an individual does not alter reality. See: CORPORATISM.

  ARMAMENTS Extremely useful for fighting wars. A dead weight in any civil economy.

  Throughout history functioning societies have accepted that an appropriate quantity of arms is a necessary burden which must be paid for, even though they cannot contribute to prosperity. There are two reasons for this endemic negative weight:

  1. Arms are a consumer good. They either sit on the shelf like unused lipstick or are used to destroy other arms and people. In the process a large part of them disappear. They either explode or are exploded by the other side.

  In short, the purpose and use of arms includes none of the intrinsic qualities of capital goods. They cannot, for example, be used to make other goods or to provide services. That is, they contain almost no multiplier effect. Steel used for weapons has a multiplier of one—steel into weapons. But steel into road-building equipment and trucks is another matter. The equipment produces roads which permit transport, which uses trucks, which carry goods which create trade in other areas.

  2. Arms have no market value. They cannot have one because the seller is a single government, and the buyer is a single governm
ent. And the seller and the buyer are usually one and the same government.

  That the company producing the weaponry may be privately owned, or that there are several rival privately owned companies, is irrelevant. Markets (competition) are created by demand, not by production. There is no economic demand for arms. They are required only to protect the state or to destroy another state. This is not an economic function.

  In order to create real market values for arms, we would have to set expressed values—fixed or floating—for each person killed or each object destroyed. During the French/English Indian wars of the eighteenth century this was tried. Scalps were assigned a cash value. A market was launched. The result was military and social disaster for all three sides (the English, the French and the Indians). A somewhat less specific market system was attempted during the Renaissance with the mercenary armies, especially the condottieri in Italy. It was equally disastrous.

  The problem with linking military activity to any market-place has always been that if you set values for destruction you encourage destruction, which is not the same thing as preventing or winning wars, which is, after all, the purpose of armies and of arms.

  Curiously enough, since the early 1960s—and in particular since President Kennedy’s special message to Congress of February 6, 1961—the Western technocratic élites have been attempting to convert weaponry into a positive economic force. This imposition of an abstract idea onto a non-conforming reality is the sort of economic determinism which resembles alchemy, the obsessive mediaeval belief that base metal could be turned into gold. There is nothing unusual about the alchemist approach. Charles Mackay described sixteen phenomena similar to our armaments folly in his mid-nineteenth century masterpiece Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.3.

  Kennedy and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, treated arms as if they were automobiles and so the armaments industry began to act as if it were Detroit. These two sectors were artificially linked by imaginary truths such as TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS. National weapons needs were to be paid for by massive exports of more or less the same weaponry. Around the world a fresh new technocracy followed suit. Productive civil economies were transformed into falsely productive military economies.