The Doubter's Companion

by John Ralston Saul

  The natural and continual desire of the corporatist technocracy is therefore discreetly to remove powers from elected assemblies, governments, JURIES and other public bodies in order to transfer them to legal texts dependent first on administration and second on judges, who will arbitrate when required. See: LEADERSHIP.

  JURY A body which demonstrates the inherently incomplete nature of law and fact.

  Law guides. Fact illustrates. The jury then considers the best possible truth. Its work is an illustration of HUMANIST balance, which explains why the profession of lawyers and judges is constantly reducing the type of cases and the conditions in which juries can be used. See: TRUTH.

  K

  KANT, IMMANUEL A swamp which has seeped into our minds and separated the intellect from reality.

  Genius. Well-intentioned. Devoted to the supreme principle of morality. And yet this charming man became the Thomas Aquinas of Reason.

  Kant was the first major modern philosopher to spend his life closeted in a university. With him begins the confusion between thinking and teaching. Living in isolation from the realities of his day, he knew about ideas, but knew little about the world from which they sprang or to which they would eventually be applied. Although a talented teacher, he had no sense of the philosopher’s obligation to communicate with humanity and so wrote in the most obscure university language. Less than a century after others had made a concerted and partly successful effort to free philosophy from the controls of mediaeval scholasticism, he dragged it back into hermetic dialect.

  Kant systematized reason. Divided it into different types. Sought to defend the independence of science and of morality. But this systematization encouraged those who followed to develop impenetrable separations between reality and the intellect which could disarm philosophy as a public weapon.

  Specialists who have made a career out of teaching or examining the Kantian mysteries dare others to join them down in the morass where his essential ideas await. To those who refuse to join them they may well thumb their noses with superior contempt. That is a standard military tactic intended to draw an enemy onto unfavourable ground. When they shout out their version of the schoolboy taunt—“Kan’t! Kan’t!”—the public can quite sensibly stand their ground and reply, “Won’t!” See:PHILOSOPHY.

  KISS One sort of kiss is private and involves lovers, babies, relations and friends. The other is public and involves a queen’s hand, Christ’s cheek, a potentate’s toes or the conferral of an honour by someone in power.

  The first is a physical emanation of emotion. The second is an expression of power and contract. It is important not to confuse the two.

  When the future King of England, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the descendant of William the Conqueror and Elizabeth I, stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace some years ago with his new bride and kissed her full on the lips for hundreds of millions of people watching around the world, he confused the private with the public. That is, there seemed to be some confusion between his historic constitutional role and that of a young romantic leading man—a movie star who makes his living by giving public imitations of the private kiss.

  Whether kings actually kiss their wives with passion in private is their business. This particular one was the result of a clever idea to modernize the monarchy by making it more exciting. More starlike. Palace courtiers probably developed the plan.

  What they missed was that you can’t pick and choose among the characteristics of the star. The star is an illusion and therefore contains no separate compartments or functions. Everything being nothing, it’s all one. If you act out certain scenes from your private life in public, then like a star, your whole life is dumped automatically into the public domain. There can be no invasion of privacy. Stars make their living off what spectators fantasize about them.

  The prince’s kiss was a banal Faustian bargain of the sort which has destroyed dozens of politicians who try to get elected by selling their lifestyle. But a constitutional monarch’s case is special. Prince Charming is a stock celluloid myth. As subsequent events demonstrated, mixing it with the myth of legitimacy, which a real king incarnates, automatically risks both. See: HAPPY FAMILY.

  L

  LAGOS A jewel in the crown of the new international economy.

  Only twenty years ago this vibrant Nigerian metropolis of 9 million inhabitants was a sleepy little town of 80,000. People from rural villages all over the country expressed their belief in the future by abandoning limited agrarian lives and moving to the capital city. No sooner were they settled in Lagos than it seemed to them as if they had been kept out in the countryside by some form of hypnosis which had chained them to base sentiments disguised as stability, continuity, family life, personal security and a sheeplike desire to eat every day. Thanks to the energizing and liberating forces of competition they are now free to join the modern labour force.

  By cleverly refusing to own property or become reliant on sewage systems or clean water, they have developed lean income requirements and so are able to advance themselves as internationally competitive employees. In an imaginative yet hardheaded approach to overpopulation they have managed to achieve record child mortality rates. Finally, in spite of employers’ entreaties, they have brushed aside such noncompetitive crutches as job security, pensions and safe work conditions. The courageous children of Lagos, eager to improve their lot, have placed themselves in the forefront of this proud new work force.

  Before the flowering of the market system, Nigerians were often limited to mediaeval barter. The world’s economic experts could scarcely feel a modern industrial pulse, let alone measure it. Now the planners are able to put this country squarely on the GNP chart with other modern nations at $315 per person per annum. Soon, no doubt, their efforts will carry them even higher. The sky, as they say in Lagos, is the limit. The proof is that the Nigerian branches of international corporations are prospering and so are eager to go on paying their efficient employees.

  Some Western leftists denigrate these proud people, call their prosperous capital a “squatters’ slum” and their government a military dictatorship. This is the jealous babbling of the lazy. The ambition of the workers of Lagos is an example to all of us in the so-called developed world. If we wish to keep our jobs we also must become competitive. As to the claims of naïve student Marxists and overweight union bosses that the Nigerian workers are being mistreated, this simply demonstrates that we in the West have become so attached to our unearned comfort that we no longer know what competition means. Our grandparents knew. Hard work and dedication. We have become lazy, self-indulgent and dependent on support structures which in today’s tough new environment are simply not realistic.

  LEADERSHIP “Why is there such a dearth of good leaders? Because we’re in a leadership crisis.” This is the chorus of modern lament.

  The proverbial wise foreigner—Swift’s giant King of Brobdingnag or Montesquieu’s Persian in Paris writing home—would probably note that this is a curious obsession for democracies to harbour. Democrats are supposed to be obsessed by their own participation and that of the citizenry in general. Leadership, after all, is the cry of unevolved, craven peoples frightened by the idea of individual responsibility. The sort of people who desire nothing better than a god or a divinely inspired chief to hold them to his bosom, or better still hers, for protection and reassurance. See: PROPAGANDA.

  LEFT VERSUS RIGHT The result of an unfortunate seating arrangement.

  In October 1789 the Paris mob, led by women, walked to Versailles, stormed the palace and dragged the king back to town with them. The Assembly had no choice but to follow. Louis was put in his gilded cage, the Tuileries Palace. The nearest building capable of seating several hundred elected representatives in the same room was the palace stables out in what are now the Tuileries Gardens. The need to board and exercise a large number of horses had imposed a particular sort of structure. That shape in turn imposed a semicircular seating plan on
the carpenters brought in to do the emergency conversion.

  It naturally followed that those who hated each other most sat as far away from each other as possible, to the extreme right and left of the podium. Thus the needs of horses helped to create our idea of irreconcilable political opposites. Had architecture permitted this semi-circle to complete itself, the reactionaries and the revolutionaries would have found themselves quite naturally sitting together. See: NEOCONSERVATIVE.

  LEVEL PLAYING FIELD An ideological abstraction adopted as a universal value by the management of large corporations.

  The level playing field is an idealized vision of the open market. Here the close relationship between corporate mythology and competitive sport is fully consummated. The theory is that, in a world where governments have not falsified the natural rules of the market-place, corporations will be able to go out onto the field and struggle manfully against each other. In these conditions the best “man,” that is, the most efficient, will win. The result will be low prices, maximum production and varied choice for the consumer, as well as progress, continual growth and prosperity.

  Curiously enough this essentially American concept has an old-fashioned British Empire etymology. But the training of élites on playing fields—Eton’s or not—implied an idea of ethics. There would be competition, but it would be fair and good and among gentlemen. There was also never any suggestion that playing fields were places of open or free competition. Or that they were exempted from national regulations. Every second in sport, after all, is controlled by strictly enforced man-made rules.

  The playing field is a paradigm of regulations. Its length and width are defined. It is usually marked out with lines across which a player can cross only in defined circumstances. The number of players, their roles, how long they can be on, penalties for breaking rules, regulated uniforms, pads and instruments, the length of each period, the length of the game itself—all of this is regulated and enforced. To the extent that a playing field is made level, it is by complex regulations and, as in golf and horse-racing, man-made handicaps.

  Sport is a romantic metaphor for warfare. Real men fight according to strict rules and the winner takes all. The fate of the losers, whether death or humiliation, isn’t of great concern. The playing field is unapologetically exclusive. It seeks to promote the winner and exclude the losers.

  If the word “level” is defined as meaning unregulated and is added to the term playing field, and that phrase is applied to a whole economy, then a further step has been taken. Not only does such an economy seek to exclude all losers but it attempts to remove the normal restraining rules of sport. On this level playing field there is no room for public service, the public weal, self-restraint, responsibility or any civic virtue.

  As a result, the one thing the level playing field is not is level. It is a slippery slope on which only the strongest or the biggest can grab hold. The rest slip down into a heap at the bottom and scratch each other’s eyes out in an attempt to rise to the level of survival.

  This idea of unregulated warfare appeals to our foolish self-pride by suggesting that only a weakling, a coward or an incompetent could be afraid to come out from behind artificial protection in order to fight like a man. Of course only a fool rises to this kind of taunting, because an unstructured playing field favours not only the strong but also the large and the inefficient. Even with the fairest of rules, smaller groups must always work twice as hard and be twice as smart. They must use rapid action, mobility and guerrilla tactics, all the time keeping a safe distance from the sweeping might of the great imperial forces. If you remove the rules, you remove the tools for survival of the small force.

  History is filled with a long list of small armies and small nations who have risen to the taunts of large neighbours. The next recorded event is their destruction. Whatever the explanation for these moments of confusion and error, a fool is a fool and history buries one with little comment.

  In short, the people who cry loudest for a level playing field fall into two categories: those who own the goal-posts and fools. See: IDEOLOGY.

  LOS ANGELES A Biblical city built, as the parable goes, on sand, subject to earthquakes, flooding, mud slides, forest fires, drought, race riots and gang warfare, as well as record levels of police corruption, violence and pollution. It is home to the film and television industry, which is devoted to selling the American way.

  LOVE The solution to all problems in inverse ratio to income. A state of emotion which is usually, but not always, focused on at least one other person. A term which has no meaning if defined. See: ORGASM.

  LOYOLA, ST. IGNATIUS Inventor of the modern rational-education system by which our élites are trained in staff colleges, business schools and schools of public administration. He also single-handedly stopped the Reformation by substituting for content what we would call games theory. There is a castrating or asexual aspect to Loyola’s theory of education which appears to have come quite naturally to him. See: GANG OF FIVE.

  LUDDITES Highly trained individuals whose careers were destroyed by technological progress. This progress was treated as inevitable and uncontrollable. The Luddites therefore occupied the only remaining intellectual position, which consisted of rejecting technological progress.

  This reduction of attitudes to two extreme positions was accomplished between 1811 and 1830 when the introduction of Watt’s steam-engines and water-driven wool-finishing machines made hundreds of handicraftsmen redundant. Industrialization was spreading from sector to sector and quickly eliminated most crafts along with tens of thousands of jobs.

  The Luddites (named after an imaginary leader, Ned Lud) broke up and burnt factories. Their revolt ended in a group trial in 1813. Five were hanged. The attitude of society towards unrestrained technological progress was made perfectly clear. The judge said the Luddites’ actions were “one of the greatest atrocities that was ever committed in a civilized country.”1

  This was a classic case of provocation and order versus despair and disorder. Wilfrid Laurier described the nature of this type of conflict when he spoke in 1886 about the Riel Rebellion. “What is hateful…is not rebellion, but the despotism which induces that rebellion; not rebels but the men who, having the enjoyment of power, do not discharge the duties of power; the men who, when they are asked for a loaf, give a stone.”2

  What society misunderstood early in the nineteenth century when faced by the industrial revolution was the full nature of the change. The debate should not have been over whether there should be technological progress or not. It was more accurately a question of progress in what conditions: what progress, when, in what circumstances? Market extremists would argue that what happened was inevitable and eventually brought general prosperity. Their view ignores the social disorder, followed by suffering, followed by serious social disorder that this approach towards change brought on. Communism was the direct result. England, France, Germany and Sweden suffered recurring internal violence throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of it expanding into civil wars. Most of these countries passed within a shadow of revolution.

  The question is therefore not whether technological progress was necessary, but whether it was necessary to go about it in a barbaric manner. It can be argued that the Luddites were wrong in 1811. But society spent the next 150 years rendering progress civilized and thereby proving that the infuriated craftsmen had been right at least in spirit. Did these decades of wasted time, effort, lives and money represent an intelligent use of human talents?

  This is precisely the question which the remarkable technological change of the late twentieth century raises. As in the early nineteenth, great social disorder has been unleashed. High levels of unemployment have become so endemic that they are disguised as retirement or pre-retirement or part-time unsecured labour.

  The 50 million unemployed in the West are today’s Luddites. Their preliminary revulsion can be seen in the rise of destabilizing and often falsely populist
movements throughout the West. The question therefore is not whether the automatization of factories, for example, is a good or a bad thing, but whether allowing undirected technology to lead society by its nose will not create far greater problems in the short, medium and even long term than it solves.

  Why are we so eager to revive the crises of the industrial revolution? We have the clear memory of what it involved. We are only just beginning to come out of the profound social and political divisions it created. The naïve outsider would be surprised at our determination not to pursue a moderate, balanced approach. See: PROGRESS.

  LUDENDORFF, ERICH Brilliant First World War German staff officer whose abstract analyses of military problems consistently produced short-term technical gains followed by long-term real disaster.

  In 1914 his revised Schlieffen Plan got the German army almost as far as Paris, but it left them short of their destination and locked into trench warfare. The party with the largest population (the Allies) stood the best chance of winning by default the slugging match which followed simply because they were better able to survive sustained bleeding.

  In 1917 he approved unrestricted submarine warfare against the British in order to break their blockade of Germany. This ensured American entry into the war and guaranteed German defeat.

  Again in 1917 he facilitated the return of Bolshevik emigrés (including Lenin) to destabilize the new Russian republic and force peace. The result was the Soviet regime which lasted seventy years and in 1945 decimated Germany.

  The collapse of his remarkable 1918 offensive led him to believe that his skills had been betrayed by the citizenry. As so often with highly skilled technocrats, they can find no explanation for the failure of their perfect systems and so blame the imperfections of the human race.