The Doubter's Companion

by John Ralston Saul

  1. Evacuating your bowels immediately after waking up (described in polite conversation as found dead in the bathroom).

  2. During orgasm (died peacefully in bed).

  3. While playing tennis or jogging.

  4. In old age. See: DEATH.

  NEGATIVE WEALTH A quality proper to business leaders whose debt load is out of control. Less important people and governments do not have negative wealth. They have DEBT.

  NEO-CONSERVATIVE The exact opposite of a conservative.

  Neo-conservatives are the Bolsheviks of the Right. Like the Bolsheviks, they appear in restrained groups driven by a simple ideology. They seek practical ways to achieve real power in order to make revolutionary changes. These “practical ways” usually involve creating a misunderstanding over the “revolutionary changes” to follow.

  The first step in the advancement of a Bolshevik movement is the establishment of intellectual respectability. This was achieved by hiring bevies of ACADEMIC CONSULTANTS to lay out a marginal idea—that the West should revert to the rough capitalism of the nineteenth century—as if it were not only an historic necessity but a natural inevitability. Their determinism literally mimicked the Marxists. What a few years before had been seen as marginal nonsense was now driven home as received wisdom by right wing newspaper columnists.

  The second stage involved a series of coups d’état within established conservative parties, beginning with those of Britain, the United States and Canada. The movement was then able to enter elections disguised as a conservative renewal. They won power with the support of an electorate which would be among the first to suffer from their policies—the middle and lower-middle classes.

  The third step again mimicked the Bolsheviks. This was the key to destabilizing the opposition—including the now-captive and confused conservatives—in order to win re-election. They redefined the political spectrum so that their marginal ideas occupied all of the territory from the extreme right to the centre. This left many conservatives redefined as dangerous liberals (the Wets, moderate Republicans and radical Tories). The liberals suddenly resembled socialists and the socialists, communists. In other words, the great mainstream which had presided over the remarkable rise of the West was squeezed over to the marginal edge of public debate.

  Since the essential characteristics of Neo-conservativism are revolutionary, it was perfectly natural for them to begin by disguising their actions behind reassuring phrases. What they believe is that wholesale change in structures is the only way to change society. Continuity, careful progress and memory are their enemy. However, to admit this in the early stages of holding power is to risk losing it. Eventually they felt free to turn on those who rejected their ideas of change and tar them as cowards.

  With hindsight it can be seen that the movement was and remains a paradoxical mixture of silly abstract ideology and crude self-interest. The Neo-conservative recipe for public action seemed to have been drawn directly from that of MUSSOLINI, which turned on praise of free enterprise, insistence on the need to reduce bureaucracy, suggestions that unemployment relief was part of the economic problem, sotto voce hints that social inequalities should be increased not removed, and an aggressive foreign policy.1

  By the early 1990s they had so successfully redrawn the intellectual map that whenever liberals returned to power they spent their time mouthing Neo-conservative formulae. At the same time, a growing number of political parties appeared who were openly corporatist or Mussolinian. Thanks to the respectability given their ideology by the Neoconservatives they could present themselves as moderate conservative reformers. They began to make serious political inroads in Canada, the United States, Germany and, of course, Italy. There, three parties drawn from the Mussolini mould triumphed in the 1994 general election. No Neo-conservative movements elsewhere in the West expressed despair or concern.

  All of this explained why the Neo-conservatives treat CYNICISM as a sign of wisdom. It is not unreasonable to place them among the last true MARXISTS, since they believe in the inevitability of class warfare, which they are certain they can win by provoking it while they have power.

  NEW WORLD ORDER A sweeping vision of a changed world in which life will be both different and better. This concept projects the assured resonance of ideology although devoid of ideological content, as well as of sweep, as well as of content. In the past the word “new” has usually been inserted into political programs when the intent is to erase all memory of past experience. The use of the word “world” betrays a certain megalomania. And “order” resonates with a long history of para-military projects.

  The reaction of many sensible people to the New World Order was that we might do better to be kind to ourselves.

  After half a century of putting up with two rival—and once new—world orders, it might be nice to relax into the luxurious sloth of not trying to build a new New World Order right away. Something more modest might be appropriate.

  These concerns were not fully expressed before fashion changed and this new dream was abandoned and forgotten.

  NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH Mussolini’s favourite writer—filled him with “spiritual eroticism.”2 See: MUSSOLINI.

  NIHILISM The only socially acceptable attitude for those who reject Western society’s evolution into a civilization of structure which has a place in the grid for each individual.

  In the words of Cioran, the most eloquent and bitter of contemporary nihilists, “If you try to be free, you die of hunger. They will not tolerate you unless you are successively servile and despotic.”3 Nihilism is acceptable because its refusal provides breathing space for discontent without creating the threat of an alternative. Nihilistic rock or rap, nihilistic movie heroes, nihilistic lost-generation novels. These attitudes of despair provide a steam-release valve for social pressures. Nihilism is preferred over ideological refusals, even though those are dependent on wholesale change and therefore, in practical terms, also provide harmless breathing space.

  The one truly unacceptable social attitude is to refuse refusal while limiting acquiescence to conscious cooperation. This means constantly judging a society which insists upon being taken for granted.

  O

  OIL

  1. Illustrates that price is rarely related to cost in a free-market system.

  In this case cost is rarely more than a few pennies, the price rarely less than double-digit dollars. The differential can be glimpsed in the ease with which the oil states (and indirectly the oil companies) financed the entire Gulf War; $626 billion in 1990–91 alone.

  2. Illustrates that “strategic” commodities cannot be priced by buyer-seller competition.

  Oil acquired this status the moment it was widely used. In fact the status was actually declared by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, before the First World War, when the decision was made to rebuild the British navy, then the largest in the world. The non-competitive nature of strategic goods is usually forgotten by those who want to use the market-place to reduce the cost of ARMAMENTS.

  3. Illustrates that if a strategic commodity is strategic, people will go to war over it.

  Once Saddam Hussein had been thrown out of Kuwait, none of the Allies worried very long about whether he stayed in power or what he did to his minorities. Nor did they worry about whether the returning Kuwait regime would rule in a less mediaeval manner. The oil delivery system had been restored and that was the cause of the war.

  4. Illustrates that the Holy Trinity is still a viable concept.

  After all, oil is a commodity we consume on our way to buy more while driving on a petroleum-based surface.

  OLYMPIC IDEAL The Greek games began in 776 BC as a competition among amateur athletes from the different city-states. The purpose was to bring the citizens of the rival cities together in an apolitical gathering, which would reduce squabbling and develop a larger sense of community.

  The rising merchant class in those cities subsequently inverted their purpose by introduc
ing the idea of city rivalry into the games. The city-states then began subsidizing their athletes indirectly and often invisibly. The amateur athletes were soon living a parody of amateurism. They had careers and future income riding on the competition. Winners became heroes, that is to say political heroes. They were fed at the cost of the state for the rest of their lives.

  Subtle corruption gradually turned into rank dishonesty. Athletes were eventually bribed to lose. In AD 394 the games were abolished because they had become a parody of the amateur idea, a focus of corruption and a source of political rivalry.

  The Olympic Games were re-established in 1896 as a competition among amateur athletes. One of the purposes was to bring citizens of rival countries together in an apolitical gathering. What the Greeks managed to do in 1,170 years, we have done in less than 100. See: XENOPHOBIA.

  ONE One should never say “one.” It is a neutered pronoun which suggests that one is too proper to have a sex. A term once popular in Victorian parlours, it is now most at home in committee meetings where everyone wants to have one’s way, but no one wants to take responsibility.

  OPTIMISM When applied by ourselves to ourselves, a pleasant and sometimes useful distraction from the oppressiveness of a day and the certainty of death.

  When encouraged as a social attitude it is an infantalizing force which removes the individual’s conscious power to criticize, refuse and DOUBT. Optimism, like patriotism, is the public tool of scoundrels and ideologues. See: PESSIMISM.

  ORAL LANGUAGE From Draco and Solon in early Athens onward our oral talents have gradually been displaced and eventually diminished by our talent for writing. That this progress from the oral was indeed an improvement doesn’t need to be argued. Cultures entirely dependent on the spoken word become its prisoner. The story of our progress in writing materials has run parallel with an explosion in the human imagination.

  Yet even though the oral no longer had any quantifiable utility beyond common daily intercourse, it never lost its energy. This was because, as Harold Innis demonstrated in The Bias of Communication, those who have power always attempt to control language and knowledge.1 They have found it possible to control the written language for lengthy periods of time. Then there is an explosion that has invariably been ignited by the force of the uncontrollable oral.

  Among these moments of piercing directness there is, of course, Socrates, with his refusal to write anything down. Christ’s preaching, St. Francis’s disarmingly innocent verbal rebellion. Dante, although writing, was consciously attempting “to be of service to the speech of the common people.”2 The simple elegant prose of Erasmus was after the same thing. Written. But written in such a way that the oral process was freed from the prison of theology—that is, ideology—and scholasticism. The plays of the Renaissance now seem to us very written, but then they were a response to censorship and largely unpublished, with a last minute ad libbed quality. Pamphlets and the novel, as Swift and Voltaire demonstrated, were developed not for study, but to be read as if they were spoken and, indeed to be read out loud so that those who didn’t or couldn’t read could participate. Newspapers were invented as an answer to suffocating scholasticism. They arrived with an urgent, last-minute thrown-together sense of information and opinion so recent that it was hardly written. And the whole phenomenon of parliaments, assemblies, public rallies and public debates represented a great oral swelling which brought us democracy and citizens’ rights.

  The twentieth century has produced a qualitative change in this written-oral tension. There is now more free-floating knowledge, information and opinion than we could ever know what to do with. We are drowning in information which, being unlimited, without shape and rarely of applicable relevance, has itself become a form of control.

  For the first time knowledge is not power. Instead public language has become a disordered distraction. The centre of power has moved to a second language which is made up of a myriad specialist dialects. It is not powerful because it is functioning language—it isn’t—but because each dialect is attached to a mechanism of practical power.

  This scholastic language doesn’t mind being obscure, ineffectual, meaningless or boring. It has none of the pretensions of real language. It is simply the instruction manual of the corporatist system. Irrelevance as a language of general communication is what gives it power.

  Meanwhile the first level of language floods out through satellites beaming five hundred television channels and information highways delivering endless quantities of information. The effect is to solidify the division between language and power. The very quantity of what is being delivered reduces the citizen to the role of passive receiver and so makes language unusable as an effective weapon against power.

  This is one of the explanations for the return of inevitability in public affairs on a scale unseen since Solon and Socrates began to break down the passivity imposed by the gods and destiny of Homeric myth.

  It seems now as if the progress in writing materials has bypassed linguistic utility, at least for the moment. For the first time, not controlled but an uncontrolled written language has become a force for human passivity.

  Many of us feel a certain innocent pleasure when we are absorbed in this maze. Millions more every year dive into their personal electronic screens and swim like eager minnows through the shapeless sea of information as if the ability to swim were in itself a victory or a power.

  The very idea of power prospering from uncontrolled instead of controlled passivity is truly something new. The traditional idea that some sort of freedom and control over those in power can be achieved by reverting to a simple oral language simply doesn’t work when modern communications systems are drowning us in an oral language which has no practical relationship to power.

  But true oral language is not simply spoken. It is also tied to a certain use. For a start it is aggressive and inquisitive. This Socratic model has perhaps finally come of age.

  The point is not to plunge into quantities of information or to be absorbed into majestic highways of information. To the extent that the information and activities involved are facilitated then so much the better. But this is the illusion of language. It is little more than information gathering, like a municipal employee picking up litter with a pointed stick.

  Oral language is more properly an individual expressing concern. It can be practically applied by emulating that annoying old man who arrived early every morning in the market-place in order to begin upsetting as many people as he could by asking endless blunt questions. See: SOCRATES.

  ORGASM The most common emotive experience, sometimes shared, sometimes not.

  Although the orgasm is technically a muscle spasm related to the reproductive process, human imagination relies upon its status as a conscious emotional act. According to the World Health Organization there are 100 million of these every day, making it thousands of times more common than birth and death.3 For those who do not see themselves as having replaced GOD, it is a workmanlike replacement for a religious experience. Samuel Johnson defined it as a “sudden vehemence,”4 which may be why the orgasm has become the last refuge of twentieth-century individualism. See: PENIS.

  P

  PANIC A highly underrated capacity thanks to which individuals are able to indicate clearly that they believe something is wrong.

  The managerial approach, so dominant in our society, does not include the possibility of error. It depends on sequential expert solutions. If there is a problem, the relevant expert will suggest an adjustment. Panic here can only mean that a situation is out of control; that is, the individuals who are meant to be managed are individually out of control.

  Given their head, most humans panic with great dignity and imagination. This can be called democratic expression or practical common sense. Managed control, on the other hand, can be termed structural ideology; that is, an ideology not of content but of form. See: CONTROL.

  PARTICIPATION Democracy is built and maintained through indiv
idual participation, yet society is structured to discourage it.

  And ours is the most structured of civilizations. Forty-hour work weeks. Work breaks calculated to a minute. Weekends measured for recuperation. Various specific leaves for sickness and giving birth. Set holiday periods. Official days of celebration or mourning. When it’s all added up and the time to eat, copulate, sleep and see families is included, twenty-four hours have been accounted for.

  The only built-in space of time for individual participation is a fixed period for voting, which probably averages out to an hour a year. The only time society formally organizes extended participation is over matters of violence. (Military service or when a judge orders convicted criminals to do public service.)

  Why is the function which makes democracy viable treated as if it were expendable? Or rather, why is it excluded by being reduced to a minor activity requiring the sacrifice of time formally allotted to other things?

  Nothing prevents us from revising the schedule to build in four or five hours per week for public participation. Our failure to do something like this is a statement either about the state of the democratic ethic or about the real nature of power in our society. See: CORPORATISM.

  PEACE DIVIDEND One of those amusing little phrases used for about twelve months by people in the know.

  Like “the WAR ON DRUGS,” “the recession is over” and “peace in our time,” this term belongs in the short-term Utopia category.

  What with disorder in the former Soviet Bloc and fear that a major cut-back in ARMAMENTS production might cause more economic problems, it has since been decided that there will not be a peace dividend after all. No one has actually announced this change in plans. To do so would suggest that the citizenry remember what they have been told. The peace dividend has simply disappeared from the lips of everyone in the know. Better not to tax the populace at large with the complexities of continuity, and just get on with the next amusing phrase. See: DUAL USE.