The Doubter's Companion

by John Ralston Saul

  Ludendorff was the very model of the technocrat. To the end he believed that reality could be altered by imposing perfect abstract systems. In the postwar period his desire for guaranteed absolute solutions led him to become a Nazi. See: TECHNOCRAT.

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  MCDONALD, RONALD Post-modern philosopher. In somewhat the same way that Voltaire was the public intellectual face of the Enlightenment, Ronald McDonald is the face and the voice of consumer culture.

  The moral underpinning of this movement is addiction. The philosophical dilemma proposed by the phrase “fast food” is: how fast can the seller make the buyer buy more? Thus the seller is a spiritual child of those religious leaders who must first incite desire in order then to channel it in a useful direction. Religious leaders can reinforce desire with fear, an advantage not shared by fast-food leaders.

  The latter, on the other hand, are reinforced by ADVERTISING and science. Since Galileo it has increasingly been argued that scientific progress has fundamentally altered our philosophic possibilities. For example, even before modern public relations, desire was amplifiable by illusion. The desire for fast food is no different. It is based not on hunger but on the illusion of hunger. Science, however, has contributed a better understanding of three key elements capable of accentuating that illusion: salt, grease and sugar.

  Salt, somewhat like monosodium glutamate, attacks the taste receptors on the tongue and excites them. If grease is combined with the salt, a chemical reaction is provoked which accentuates this excitement, which in turn translates into a meaningful simulation of hunger. The further addition of sugar will then provoke an abrupt rise in blood-sugar levels. As on a roller-coaster this can only be followed by an abrupt fall, which takes the form of a yet more extreme sensation of weakness and hunger. At this point fast food, through the ingenious use of basic science, comes close to reconstituting the old religious marriage (in fact a philosophical tension) between desire and fear. Indeed, with a new outlet opening somewhere in the world every eighteen minutes, Ronald McDonald may be the most successful scientist/philosopher since Albert Einstein. A suitable heir-apparent to Mickey Mouse. A philosopher-king. See: A BIG MAC and WHITE BREAD.

  MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLO Author of the first how-to-succeed-by-getting-power-and-keeping-it business book, which could have been the non-fiction best-seller for Christmas, 1513. See: GANG OF FIVE.

  MAINSTREAM In the humanist ideal, the mainstream is where interesting debate, the generating of new ideas and creativity take place. In rational society this mainstream is considered uncontrollable and is therefore made marginal. The centre ground is occupied instead by structures and courtiers.

  The professional administrators of power—the managerial élites, the falsely Heroic leaders patterned on stars, the stars themselves and the lobbyists—appear to have gained control of the public mechanisms. In a healthy society, particularly a healthy democratic society, this would not be the case. The courtiers would be in the wings gossiping about how to get on stage.

  It is easier for an intelligent divine monarch or pope to identify this sort of problem. Being the central repository of power and the sole focus of the courtier, the potentate can easily see the difference between the mainstream and the margins. Thus Pope Julius II sought out Michelangelo, not some reassuring court painter. And Louis XIV did not give power to the Duc de Saint Simon. This was the advantage of strong leadership which many Enlightenment thinkers admired. However, few monarchs or popes are intelligent. And even those who are, are quickly overwhelmed by the flood of power-seekers.

  Democratic society’s strength—the absence of a concentrated repository of power—is also its weakness. In the disorder of the average day, those with the skills of power can easily present themselves as indispensable, while those with something to contribute will seem insufficiently focused on immediate problem-solving. And so they will be swept aside.

  The citizen’s problem is how to keep the mainstream open to the needs of the public weal. This can only be done if great effort and care are expended on differentiating content and manners.

  MANAGER Drawn from the French word “ménager” or one who does domestic housework, this function has gradually been elevated to the noblest of levels.

  The strengths of the manager are continuity, stability and the delivery of services and products from existing structures. Unfortunately managers also discourage creativity, imagination, non-linear thinking, individualism and speaking out, an insubordinate act by which problems are identified. The manager distrusts public debate, abhors any admission of doubt and stifles unpredictable behaviour.

  Management is a tertiary skill—a method, not a value. And yet we apply it to every domain as if it were the ideal of our civilization. Our confusion can be seen in the current attempts to revitalize basic school training by aligning it with the “needs” of the business community. In a time of prolonged economic crisis we have decided to concentrate on utility. But these business attitudes are themselves part of the managerial obsession. They reduce even science and mathematics to a narrow, goal-oriented management tool.

  If growth and progress are what we need to get out of our crisis, then it will be found not through managerial attitudes but through the release of talents. That means teaching students to think. If mere utility is what we want, then its place is not in the schools but in a revised and modernized apprentice system.

  At the level of élite education our assumptions have taken on disastrous proportions. For example, between 1975 and 1993 Canada created 3.1 million new jobs of which 2.1 million were managers or professionals. One million were low-paid and unskilled. Managers and professionals represent an important cost to the economy while producing nothing. Where then is the wealth to come from to pay for the managers? Instead of asking themselves this question, they continually look for reasons to increase the percentage of their own kind in any organization.

  The more we train these people as if management were a primary skill, the more we handicap their ability to become citizens capable of providing direction. It is an understatement to say that the Western élites have increasingly failed in their obligations over the last quarter-century. They spend their time cleaning houses that are falling down. See: SAT.

  MANNERS People are always splendid when they’re dead. See: POLITENESS.

  MARKET-PLACE The market-place is as amusing and charming as a risqué Peter Pan, endlessly believing in true love yet seeking the pleasure of free love, endlessly re-creating its own virginity, unequipped with memory or common sense, which is its strength and its weakness.

  Left to its own devices the market is capable of the most miraculous of inventions and the silliest of self-delusions. It is an extreme romantic. It also has a real purpose—the same one it has always had. That is to organize the supply and exchange of goods or to finance the production of goods—thus facilitating and financing the economy. But the market cannot achieve in a regular and lasting manner its own purpose because it is only an unconscious and abstract mechanism. The factor which must be added in order to create the restraint, balance and consciousness necessary for long-term prosperity is human leadership. That leadership takes the form of effective REGULATION.

  The market-place is, of course, a very good thing. Without it we are reduced to being exploited by personal or bureaucratic absolutism.

  But is it a sufficient foundation upon which to build a society? Does it provide or permit a viable relationship between citizens? Does the market know so much more than we that it would be better to simply defer to it? Must we pray before its opaque inevitability?

  In all earlier civilizations, it should be remembered, commerce was treated as a narrow activity and by no means the senior sector in society.

  In our current faith built on competition, efficiency and the market-place, the technocrats’ role as religious facilitators has been expanded to one of paramount importance. However, the message coming out of this priesthood is sometimes difficult to grasp, with its me
aning buried inside the impenetrable dialect of post-modern economics. But if all of that is simply stripped away, what remains is a simple message: our repeated attempts since the eighteenth century to regulate economies have apparently failed. By extension this priesthood is saying that, from classical Greece on, all of our attempts to control the savage economic elements which surround us in order to bring about reasonable stability have been pointless.

  It appears that we should have been passive all along. Had we relaxed and let the market decide, this abstract economic force would have found its own natural balance. In other words, what at first glance appears to be a practical, down-toearth approach to doing business turns out to be a straightforward rejection of the idea of civilization. Part of the explanation is that our contemporary priests are better at ECONOMETRICS than they are at general social analysis. Most of them don’t really seem to know much about how civilizations function or how humans have dealt with similar problems in the past.

  After all, past civilizations have successfully regulated their economic lives over long periods of time. And they have done this to the general advantage of society. Collapse, when it comes, more often has to do with social change than with the forces of the market-place. Societies rise, grow old and die; we all know that. In the meantime centuries of successful economic regulation have made social structures work in places as varied as Athens, Rome, mediaeval Europe and in much of the modern West.

  Our priests have reduced past history to its short and sharp failures, instead of concentrating on the long periods of success. Market economists are little more than naïve nihilists. If we were to apply their approach to other areas, painting for example, we would reduce the history of art to chocolate-box pictures and conclude that the human race should stop painting and merely receive images from the landscape which surrounds us. See: HOLY TRINITY—TWENTIETH CENTURY.

  MARXIST The only serious functioning Marxists left in the West are the senior management of large, usually transnational corporations. The only serious Marxist thinkers are NEO-CONSERVATIVE.

  Marxism is primarily an analysis of how society works—or rather, how it must work. This dialectic is based upon the struggle of the classes and the battle of the unregulated market-place in which the strongest win. It is a market-place which cannot be tempered, according to Marx. It must and will run free and so function as a battleground between those who have power and those who don’t. The marketplace will seek to maximize profits even if this is to the disadvantage of most. Profits and power are the truth of the economic struggle and economic determinism will decide the social structure.

  Most functioning Marxists had stopped believing this sort of stuff by the end of the Second World War. They had come around to the ideology of stable bureaucratic management. In that they resembled the technocrats of Western governmental and corporate bureaucracies.

  But these Western corporate managers and their academic acolytes were in fact thrown into a state of confusion by the collapse of 1929. It seemed as if the pure capitalist analysis, of which they were the official inheritors, had failed. An unrestricted market-place had led not to ongoing growth and prosperity, but to total economic collapse. The ideology of a natural and general equilibrium produced by competition had been given its chance and had self-destructed for all to see and suffer the consequences.

  A good thirty-five years passed before the corporate leaders were able to erase from their own memory and from that of the public this failure. They then rediscovered with a virginal ideologic enthusiasm the virtues of the unregulated market.

  This time they were supported by an intellectually sophisticated explanation for the dialectic provided by a group of economists centred at the CHICAGO SCHOOL. They were able to dispense with the idea that public institutions could achieve social stability, protect the weak or encourage a wider distribution of wealth. Their new argument would have made Marx proud. It was not that they did not wish to help the weak or promote fairness. It was the natural rules of the market-place—the dialectic—which made the class struggle inevitable.

  The only disagreement between the Neo-conservatives and Marx is over who wins the battle in the end. This is a small detail. Far more important is their agreement that society must function as a wide-open struggle.

  Some people are surprised that Marxism should have reemerged on the Right. However, ideas, once launched, become public property. And they often reappear in several disguises before discovering their true form.

  MELON, THE See: STRAWBERRY.

  MEMORY A practical quality which allows us to weigh what has already been done against what might be done now. Memory is therefore a key to responsible action.

  The rational method has slowly reduced memory to romanticism. “This power of retaining,” as Samuel Johnson put it, “is particularly useful for identifying old actions which have simply been dressed up in new clothes for reapplication by a new generation.”1 In the contemporary Oxford definition, the solid operative words Johnson used are gone. In their place are “recollection, remembrance, remember.”2

  Romanticism is a fantasized version of the past. Unpleasant events and personal or national failures are erased, while comforts and successes are exaggerated. Or wrongs may be exaggerated and comforts and successes erased. On either side romanticism is intended to energize false hopes. In its most exaggerated form it denies the relevance of memory and constructs free-standing abstract ideologies.

  Memory—that is, the real power to retain—is central to the idea of a HUMANIST equilibrium. It is despised by the sophisticated structures of management, which delight in romanticism as a useful plaything.

  MONARCHS, IN PARTICULAR, ROYAL ALLIANCES Essential to the development and spread of rich desserts.

  Catherine de Medici arrived in France with macaroons. Marie de Medici was energized by the sugar injections of her Neapolitan pastry chef, who brought such hometown specialties to Paris as the millefeuille. The absorption of Normandy by the French kings helped to popularize the northern habit of combining vast quantities of butter and cream with something sweet. King Stanislaus Leszinski of Poland poured rum on his baba for the first time in 1736. The Hapsburgs sponsored endless variations on the trinity of bitter chocolate, cream and cake throughout their vast empire. Emperor Franz Josef’s favourite was the Ischler Törtchen from Zauner. It has the deceptive appearance of a large double cookie, but the butter-crumbly cake is filled with a chocolate-and-vanilla cream, apricot marmalade on top, bitter chocolate covering that, and sprinkled with crushed pistachios.

  That the utility of royal families was coming to an end could be seen in late nineteenth-century Vienna, where so much good work had been done, when Franz Josef’s wife, the Empress Elizabeth, had a personal gymnasium installed in her royal apartments and began to watch her figure as if she were an actress. From there to a commoner-become-Princess of Wales who suffered from bulimia has been an unfortunate direct line. See: WHITE BREAD.

  MONEY MARKETS, INTERNATIONAL An imaginary market in which a multiple illusion of currencies is speculated upon without reference to the normal agreements on value.

  The quantities of money traded bear no relationship to growth or production. They are manifestations of pure inflation. The international money markets represent the regularization, through a specialist technocracy and a revolution in technological communications, of the speculative economy. The South Sea Bubble, John Law and all the other great financial manipulations of the last three centuries have finally been normalized as standard business practice.

  Simpler people may be confused. They may feel that the economic instability which has persisted for two decades will not recede until some order and control has been brought to this inflationary speculation. The more sophisticated among us know that times have changed and that markets no longer need to be related to reality. These international money markets are a new truth. Of what and for what is irrelevant. Only the naïve would concern themselves with those questions. There is a
market. There is competition. All the rest is idle chatter.

  MONEY, THE VOLATILIZATION OF The act of causing wealth to disappear from an economy. This is most effectively done through speculation in areas unrelated to growth.

  Societies get into trouble when they begin to believe that money is real, which it isn’t. Those foolish enough to forget that money is in the nature of a working illusion based on a tacit agreement about value also tend to mistreat their currency. For example, they may shove it out onto an unregulated market-place where every punter can give it a kick. They may endlessly print it, which produces classic inflation. Or they may use it for speculation in an uncontrolled manner, which will cause the money to evaporate. All of this constitutes volatilization and causes poverty.

  Money comes closest to respecting the agreement on value when it is earned and multiplied through investment, labour and purchasing. Investment and labour produce real goods which can be bought. The money lent for investment earns interest for the banks. The wages earned by labour are deposited in those same institutions. If the banks in turn lend a reasonable multiple of this money out to people investing in real growth or in the sort of property which practical needs make necessary, there is a potential for real growth in value.

  But if banks use this value to speculate or lend to those who speculate, they risk volatilization. For example, if they speculate unnecessarily in the international currency markets and lose, then the real wealth created by investment, production and labour simply evaporates with that lost money. If they lend it to those who speculate in property, as has increasingly happened over the last thirty years, then the day the property boom collapses, the real value which the speculators had borrowed also evaporates. The same is true of the large merger and take-over speculations of the last three decades. And of the international money-market binges.