The Doubter's Companion Page 9

  CURE The notion that we can be cured is above all obsessional. To the extent that doctors become active agents of this obsession, the cure becomes a focus of unspoken hysteria.

  Take the treatment known as blood-letting. It was standard medical procedure for at least 2,300 years—from Athens to the middle of the nineteenth century. Just as new medical methods began to undermine its credibility in the early 1800s, a French doctor, François Broussais, proved yet again by the judicious use of statistics that bleeding a patient could cure a whole range of diseases, from the plague and cancer to nervous disorders and headaches. The argument as always was based on the theory that disease is caused by “an excess of blood.” This excess can be drawn off either by slitting open the skin (venesection) or by applying leeches. In 1833, 41 million leeches were imported into France for that purpose.

  The obsession was over by 1850 and doctors could say that our civilization had PROGRESSed beyond that sort of treatment. But the popularity of bleeding had never had to do with the presence or absence of progress for the simple reason that it had never worked. Of course it often produced a short-term superficially beneficial effect. Whatever agitated a patient—fever or convulsions—the removal of blood calmed him for the simple reason that he was weakened.

  In this way tens of thousands of people were killed by medical practitioners. Between the 14th and 15th of December, 1799, George Washington was effectively murdered by his old friend Doctor Cräik. He was bled four times. In fact, the first time was at his own insistence before the doctor arrived. People were bled the way women’s breasts have been lopped off for the last fifty years. That they died of cancer anyway didn’t seem to discourage anyone.

  This mechanistic approach reached its apogee in the twentieth century’s world of drugs. There are now some 30,000 different medications behind the counter. After the remarkable breakthroughs of the 1940s and 1950s, doctors took to declaring that the world was cured.

  The surgeon-general of the United States in 1969: “The war against infectious diseases has been won.”11 These words were no sooner out than malaria, cholera and gonorrhea, all three theoretically beaten, began to mutate and so escaped the control of most drugs. As if from nowhere, dozens of new, drug-resistant viral infections appeared, as did AIDS.

  Researchers and doctors see themselves as locked in a war on disease. Even if this doubtful military analogy is accepted, they have been using bad military strategy. To cure is to eliminate. A good general knows that trying to eliminate the enemy simply causes the next war. Disease, like war, is never more than a small part of an unlimited interlocking pattern. That’s why at the centre of any stable victory is some sort of peaceful coexistence.

  Neither diseases nor the diseased exist in isolation. It is the isolation of our specialists, locked up inside their narrow sectors, which makes them believe that a disease is a phenomenon with natural limits. See: HUMANISM and DEATH.

  CYNICISM An effective social mechanism for preventing communication.

  Cynicism is found in people who see themselves principally as members of a class or ideological group and not as individuals. It indicates a lack of self-confidence. Through an appearance of world weariness it attempts to suggest the possession of inside knowledge. The cynic knows and can’t be bothered to tell those who are ignorant.

  Since no real discussion is possible, the cynic’s group-attitudes cannot be questioned. Cynicism is thus an aggressively superior attitude which aborts debate in order to disguise inferiority.

  As a result, the eighteenth-century idea that wrongdoing was caused by ignorance has been reversed. Instead, the possession of expert knowledge is regularly used to argue that only the naïve don’t understand why it is necessary and even good to do wrong. This approach has been particularly popular in the NEO-CONSERVATIVE movement as a way of justifying economic policies which produce suffering.

  D

  DANDRUFF The ANSWER is usually vinegar. To some problems there are solutions.

  What we call dandruff is often the result of a PH imbalance on the skin, which shampoo exacerbates. Wash your hair with a simple non-detergent shampoo, soap, olive oil, beer, almost anything. Rinse. Then close your eyes and pour on some vinegar. The extremely cheap but natural sort—apple cider, for example—is probably best. The smell will stimulate interesting conversations in changing-room showers and your explanation will win you friends. Wait thirty to sixty seconds. Rinse it off. The smell will go away. So will your dandruff.

  All dermatologists, pharmacists and pharmaceutical companies know this simple secret. They don’t tell you because they make money by converting dandruff into a complex medical and social problem. By most professional standards this would amount to legally defined incompetence or misrepresentation.

  Dandruff shampoos that promise to keep your shoulders and even your head clean are harsh detergents and may promote baldness, which ought to constitute malpractice.

  DAVOS (THE ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM) Tucked safely into the Swiss Alps, a consecrated temple of tomorrow’s conventional wisdom for political and business leaders.

  Once a year in the depths of winter two thousand businessmen, academics, politicians and civil servants gather there under the gaze of three hundred journalists. The consultants speak up in the hope of winning clients. Politicians attempt to impress lenders. Businessmen glad-hand like salt-tax collectors, happy to be there and filled with world-saving ideas.

  Davos is a slightly ludicrous attempt at something worrying—an international assembly on the corporatist model. See: INDOLENCE.

  DEATH Something which has happened—although this has not been statistically verified—to everyone who has lived, with a few disputed exceptions. As neither Christ nor his Mother nor the Buddha ascended bodily in the presence of licensed medical practitioners, it could be argued that while not everyone is dead, everyone who has lived has eventually died. In a world filled with risk and speculation, death remains one of the few things which can be relied upon. It is more inevitable even than birth, since we cannot say that everyone who could have been born was born.

  In its struggle to preserve the human body, modern medicine has achieved what we now call miracles. Still, it hasn’t saved anyone from death, just postponed the appointment. These admirable delays are generally treated as the greatest accomplishments of modern civilization. Lives have been saved, we say, when we mean prolonged. That small slip of the tongue betrays the great cliché—that we do not want to die.

  Our growing technical sophistication seems to have had a negative effect on the reasonableness with which we face it. Where once death was treated with a certain bluntness, as part of family life, we have fallen back on childish denial. We don’t die, we pass on, we decease, we are the beloved, people are sorry to hear about us. To hear what? There has never been an era in which death was such an unacceptable topic of conversation. Humans have never so planned their prolonged lives and taken so little into account their termination.

  Among the possible explanations for this change is the decline of organized religion. However, more compelling is modern society’s obsession with function. The overwhelming importance now attached to what people do is the natural product of a society which defines itself by its systems and structures. These systems have no meaning in themselves, but they function as if they were eternal. Like medicine with lives, they prolong conscious limitation out of sight.

  Millions of people, either old or terminally sick, lie in hospitals with tubes up all their orifices, waiting. Apparently they are not waiting for death. If they were, they would probably want to free their bodies of machinery and be transported to a place where they might prepare to take leave of their family and friends and then consider their life as it was lived and then consider the approaching bridge or cliff.

  Conscious thought isn’t greatly admired in a civilization devoted to systems. Active consciousness is seen as a form of rebellion. And yet what possible harm could self-doubt do when
the doubter is no longer strong enough to walk, let alone preach?

  Neither current education nor the life that follows is designed to prepare the individual for that inner conversation. The sight of millions of self-doubting diers—compos mentis or not—would sow doubt among those still proceeding through their stages of specialization and promotion. Besides, care of the human body is a specialist profession to be handled as part of a continuous process. To remove individuals from that system before it has finished with their bodies would be to suggest either that process is less important than this civilization says it is or that the medical profession is not doing its job properly. See: HOBBES and SOCRATES.

  DEBT, UNSUSTAINABLE LEVELS OF National debts are treated today as if they were unforgiving gods with the power to control, alter and if necessary destroy a country. This financial trap is usually presented as if it were peculiar to our time, as well as being a profound comment on the profligate habits of the population. The reality may be less disturbing.

  1. The building up of unsustainable debt loads is a commonplace of history. There are several standard means of resolving the problem: execute the lenders, exile them, default outright or simply renegotiate to achieve partial default and low interest rates.

  2. There is no example of a nation becoming rich by paying its debts.

  3. There are dozens of examples of nations becoming rich by defaulting or renegotiating.

  This begins formally in the sixth century BC with Solon taking power in debt-crippled Athens. His organization of a general default—“the shaking off of the burdens”—set the city-state on its road to democracy and prosperity. The Athens which is still remembered as the central inspiration of WESTERN CIVILIZATION was the direct product of a national default. One way or another most Western countries, including the United States, have done the same thing at some point. Most national defaults lead to sustained periods of prosperity.

  4. The non-payment of debts carries no moral weight. The only moral standards recognized in Western society as being relevant to lending are those which identify profit made from loans as a sin. Loans themselves are mere contracts and therefore cannot carry moral value.

  5. As all businessmen know, contracts are to be respected whenever possible. When not possible, regulations exist to aid default or renegotiation. Businessmen regularly do both and happily walk away.

  The collapse of the Reichmann financial empire—larger than most countries—is a recent example. The family was able to turn around, walk away and almost immediately begin a new life, promoting the biggest property development in the history of Mexico.

  6. There are no general regulations dealing with the financial problems of nations simply because they are themselves the regulatory authority. There is however well-established historic precedent. Mexico effectively defaulted in 1982–83, thus regenerating its economy. The reaction of Western lenders has been to treat these crises as special cases. The sort of thing that only happens to Third World countries. That’s nonsense.

  7. The one major difference between private and public debt is that the public sort cannot be based upon real collateral. This makes default a more natural solution to unviable situations.

  The question of national collateral was fully addressed in the eighteenth century when it became clear that an indebted people could not owe their national rights (their land and property) to a lender. The citizen’s natural and concrete rights took precedence over the lender’s abstract contractual rights.

  One of the most peculiar and insidious aspects of twentieth-century CORPORATISM has been an attempt to reverse this precedence. The managerial imperative suggests that national debts can be indirectly collateralized in several ways. Governments can be forced to sell national property to pay debts (PRIVATIZATION). They can also be pressed to transfer ownership of national property to lenders, as has been done in the Third World.

  There is also the threat that defaulting nations will be treated as international pariahs. This is a strange argument since it doesn’t apply in the private sector (see 5). It is also an idle threat, as Mexico has demonstrated (see 6).

  8. Debts—both public and private—become unsustainable when the borrower’s cash flow no longer handily carries the interest payments. Once a national economy has lost that rate of cash flow, it is unlikely to get it back. The weight of the debt on the economy makes it impossible.

  9. A nation cannot make debts sustainable by cutting costs. Cuts may produce marginal savings, but savings are not cash flow. This is another example of the alchemist’s temptation.

  Mrs. Thatcher spent a decade trying to slash the British national debt. She had the advantage of being able to use North Sea oil income for this purpose. The result was a damaged industrial sector, economic stagnation and endemic unemployment.

  The payment of debts is a negative process which can only be a drain on investment and growth. The more successful major repayment programs are, the more the economy will be damaged.

  10. Strong nations weaken their own economies by forcing weaker ones to maintain unsustainable debt-levels. For example, in spite of enormous efforts on all sides, the Third World debt has continued to grow. In 1993 it was $1.6 trillion. This costs them far more in interest payments sent to the West than the West sends in aid. The practical effect is to make economic growth impossible. The Third World thus constitutes a dead weight in our own ongoing DEPRESSION; a barrier to renewed cash flow.

  11. Civilizations which become obsessed by sustaining unsustainable debt-loads have forgotten the basic nature of money. Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring abstract value. Unhealthy societies often become mesmerized by money and treat it as if it were something concrete. The effect is to destroy the currency’s practical value.

  12. An obsession with such false realities and with debt repayment indicates a linear, narrow, managerial approach to economics. The management of an economy is the profession of finance-department technocrats, economists and bankers. Their approach is quite naturally one of continuity. This is a means of denying failure.

  To treat money or debt as a contractual matter—therefore open to non-payment or to renegotiation—would mean treating the managerial profession as of secondary importance and unrelated to fundamental truths. What sensible people might see as originality or practicality, financial experts see as a threat to their professional self-pride.

  13. Does all of this mean that governments should default on their national debts? Not exactly. What it does mean is that we are imprisoned in a linear and managerial approach which denies reality, to say nothing of experience. Money is first a matter of imagination and second of fixed agreements on the willing suspension of disbelief.

  In other words, it is possible to approach the debt problem in quite different ways.

  14. There have been changes which limit our actions in comparison to those of Solon or Henry IV, who negotiated his way out of an impossible debt situation in the early seventeenth century and re-established prosperity. First we have to recognize and protect the investment made by citizens directly (government bonds) and indirectly (bank deposits) in the financing of national debts. Second, there is the new and unregulated complexity of the international MONEY MARKETS, which now constitutes an important corporatist element.

  15. Our central problem is one of approach. For two decades governments have been instructing economists and finance officials to come up with ways in which the debt can be paid down and interest payments maintained.

  No one has instructed them to propose methods for not paying the debt and not maintaining interest payments. No one has asked them to use their creativity in place of a priori logic.

  16. Were the members of the Group of Seven (G7) each to pool their best economists and give them a month to come up with modern versions of default, we might be surprised by the ease with which practical proposals would appear.

  17. There are two simple guiding points:

  A. The appearance of co
ntinuity is easily achieved in default scenarios through paper mechanisms which can be categorized as “debt retirement.”

  B. What is difficult for a single country in contemporary circumstances is easy for a group, particularly if that group speaks for the developed world. See: ETHICS.

  DECONSTRUCTIONISM A generalized denial of CIVILIZATION can’t help but be a voice of evil.

  To insist that language is in contradiction with itself or nothing more than a system of self-serving formulae or essentially meaningless is to argue that human communications have no ethical, creative or social value. Fortunately deconstructionism can also be seen as a school of light comedy. After all, to argue that language has no meaning is to eliminate your own argument. The deconstructionists may after all simply be suffering from an acute lack of IRONY.

  Jacques Derrida and his disciples protest that what they actually mean is that language never means exactly what it says. If so, they have come rather late in life to what has always been a given between writers and readers. Besides, their protest is disingenuous, since through simple observation we can see that the practical intent of deconstructionism is to demote the communications of the writer and the citizen to the level of naïvety if not idiocy and to insert the critic or professor as the essential intermediary. This is a prime example of how intellectuals create ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM.

  In fairness it must be assumed that these thinkers are better intentioned than their writings make them appear to be. Individual deconstructionists may well think of themselves as socialists or liberals or conservatives or something else. But since their argument undermines the value of public discourse, they can’t help but be the servants of whatever anti-democratic forces are at work. These days the deconstructionist argument is a great support to both CORPORATISM (in which language is a secondary tool of self-interest broken up into obscure dialects) and those on the ideological extremes whether of the left or the right (where language is propaganda).