by Mario Fabbri
THIRD SECTION
Why does imaginary economy
escape common awareness?
31. Premise: the advance of irrational thinking
We have seen that the development of the imaginary economy is validly supported by a growing disregard for productive efficiency, and that this, in its turn, fits into a broad shift in the irrational-unrealistic direction of common ways of thinking.
Let us reflect on the reasons for these two important developments.
Technological progress and increasing productivity fuel the imaginary economy but also provide the human species with an abundance of goods never seen before.
This puts men in a situation very different from those in which and for which the species was ‘built’ by natural selection.
It produces another case of what some pages ago we called causation by disappearance.
In this new situation in which the needs of life have become less pressing, the ability to engage with material problems, which had always been the obvious criterion for success, has visibly weakened for most people.
This is logical because the ability to deal with material problems develops in accordance with the difficulties one encounters in life, in the course of everyone’s ‘training for reality’.
A child’s mind, in fact, overflows with fantasies of omnipotence and the aspiration to find magic recipes.
It is the failures of these attempts, the clash with an outside world which is indifferent to our wishes, that instils a certain amount of realism into the individual: a certain ability to organise his own actions so as to achieve the results possible using the resources available to him.
The offspring of a wealthy family, who is systematically shielded from problems and frustrations, has few opportunities to learn realism and remains readily bogged down in a world of unrealistic expectations.
So as an adult, he is ill-equipped to tackle the difficulties he encounters outside the protected environment in which he was brought up.
And today, widespread prosperity and well-being makes the training for reality of a great many people not unlike that of the children of the wealthy in the past.
It is, therefore, the whole of society which has made the shift towards the spoiled child syndrome, and is less trained to face up to material problems.
We must also take into account that an individual’s training for reality can take place in two different environments: that of nature, i.e. of things, vs that of men, i.e. of social dealings – caricaturally the world of engineers vs that of lawyers – who follow very different logics.
Nature is a strict but honest teacher: her rules stand firm and no transgression or trickery is possible.
But whoever manages to obtain a thorough grasp of them may predict fairly confidently what it will do and not do, and the results that he may achieve from his own actions.
And this is a strong incentive for developing a real technical competence, an effective capacity to evaluate situations in a balanced rather than a superficial or emotional manner.
But in modern societies the increasing dominance of man over the material environment makes training for nature’s rationality less and less present, while increasing the proportion of situations in which men engage with other men rather than with nature.
And in human environments the ability to persuade and impress, good looks,1 the vocation for interpersonal relations normally take precedence over competence in addressing and solving material problems.
If, to be successful, it is important to know how to impress and manipulate others, it is mostly in that direction that skills and competencies are channelled. It’s about issues they feel to be really important that men hone their skills.
Today, in a population trained almost exclusively in a human environment, the ‘material rationality’ of normal reasoning and speech has diminished, and to persuade listeners today, even more than in the past, catch-phrases, emphatically uttered slogans and a self-assured posture are enough.
And, in the bigger and bigger collective spaces protected from material difficulties, familiarity with the values typical of organisations and their neurotic ways increases.
Bureaucratic logic, whereby it is fundamental not to achieve results but to respect norms, is taking over common thinking.
I happened to hear on television that the police had seized some toys for failing to comply with the norms. The speaker said:
The toys were dangerous for children because they did not have the CE mark.2
That is: to decide if a toy is dangerous one must not look at it, but verify it has the correct labelling.
Today it is easier and easier to come across this bureaucratic logic, obsessed with rules and inattentive to things…
The governor of Arkansas decides to speed up the executions of seven death row inmates, scheduling them all from 17 to 27 April 2017, because 30 April is the use-by-date for the lethal drug the State has available.
A commentator still arguing in the traditional way asks:
Why do lethal injection drugs need an expiry date? Surely, out-of-date drugs cannot have more dire consequences than death.3
In the same bureaucratic logic, still in the United States, before an execution the ‘last cigarette’ is denied to the condemned. After all, cigarettes are officially harmful to health.
And, anyway, smoking is forbidden in the execution chamber.
In such a context in which it is mainly conceptions created by man that drive thoughts and actions, collective fantasies are bolder than in past societies, which were poorer and therefore better trained to cope with the rationality of nature.
So, magical conceptions such as homeopathy and many other alternative medicines4 and pseudosciences are not only widely endorsed but have found credit even among ‘the educated’.
Searching through history for affinities with the present situation, we find some interesting similarities in the complex superstitions of the Japanese aristocracy of the Heian age in the 10h and 11th centuries:
[Directional taboos which] had great practical importance for the aristocracy can be divided into three main types. First there was the permanently and universally unlucky direction, north-east.
It was to guard the capital from this direction that the great complex of Tendai monasteries had been built on Mount Hiei…
The second type was permanently unlucky during specific periods of one’s life; at the age of sixteen, for instance, one might (depending on one’s sex, the time of one’s birth, or other particulars) have to avoid the north-west.
The final and more frequent type was universally but temporarily unlucky and was based on the position of certain moving divinities. These divinities descended from the heavens… Each time the divinity stopped in a given direction, that sector was considered ‘closed’…
Certain activities and movements, varying with different divinities and related to the ‘closed’ direction, were strictly prohibited.
It was common knowledge, for example, that Doku… spent his springs in the oven, his summers at the gate, his autumns in the well, and his winters in the courtyard. To make repairs in any of these four places while the deity was in residence could be disastrous…
Certain methods had, however, been devised for circumventing the taboos. If repairs were essential, the owner could move out of his house into a temporary dwelling and escape the danger by a complex system of ‘converting’ the unlucky direction…
Directional taboos were not observed by commoners until the fifteenth century, but from Heian literature we can judge what a great role they played in the activities of the nobility…5
Superstitions of this kind can be found at many times and places, but what in the Heian case is remarkable is the great burden they were on the lives of those concerned:
One effect [of taboos] was to put a further
brake on the already slow pace of life. A provincial governor setting out for his post, a gentleman reporting to his office in a Ministry, an official intending to break ground for the construction of a new government building – all might be inordinately delayed by the fear of violating taboos.6
The unusual space enjoyed by these fantasies with Heian aristocrats has a simple explanation: it reflects their situation of unusual detachment from material problems.
The Heian aristocracy was about one-thousandth of the Japanese population: a few thousand people who dominated highly disciplined peasants, and who, unlike other aristocracies, did not even have to concern themselves with wars.
They lived in a space protected from material difficulties, just like most of the modern population does and, as they had no material problems to tackle, channelled their energies into tackling complex problems that were human inventions.
We must bear in mind that natural selection can only produce life forms ‘designed’ to cope with difficulties.
Given this innate disposition, to give vent to his energies man needs difficulties to overcome; and if they are missing, he creates them.
This produces both crosswords and extreme sports, and also explains why the appearance of serious difficulties dissolves the existential crises of the more sensitive.7
Therefore, when Morris says that commoners began observing directional taboos in the 15th century, we understand that this is an age when the pressure of material progress had so reduced the ‘availability’ of real difficulties as to open up, even in the life of ordinary people, a space for the demanding but prestigious practices of the upper classes.
Like the Heian aristocracy, in the widespread protected spaces of our times, man builds unsubstantial but demanding fantasies remote from the material difficulties, which natural selection has forged him to deal with.
The most fertile terrain for these creations today is the ethical, where we see the multiplication of ‘rights’, which cheerfully promise much more than it is realistically possible to obtain.
The fantastic component of the phenomenon emerges more clearly if we look at the latest and as yet unconsolidated new entries such as animal rights or the rights of nature, where we also see the reappearance – or the non-elimination – of the animism present in children and in very primitive cultures. A commentator:
Animals, plants and rocks8 cannot defend themselves. Maybe they can take revenge9 for man’s misdeeds, let’s grant them that, but they cannot take legal action.
That is false! In recent years, a movement has been growing that aims to affirm the rights of non-humans, and results are starting to be seen.10
From a site that promotes the rights of nature:
[In Ecuador] a lawsuit [was] brought by Richard Frederick Wheeler and Eleanor Geer Huddle in the name of the Vilcabamba River. The river was a plaintiff in the case, seeking to enforce its own constitutional rights to exist and thrive. The healthy functioning and flow of the river was being impacted by a government road-widening construction project. In 2011, the Provincial Justice Court of Loja ruled in favour of the Vilcabamba River. This marked the first time since that a court upheld the constitutional rights of nature.11
It goes without saying that the human inclination to collective fantasies and irrealistic conceptions is clearly observable in the imaginary economy too.
In accordance with the logic we have set out, it will be seen that it is precisely the abundance of resources that goes to people’s heads as it is usually successful companies which are in the position to use their huge resources to close themselves away with greatest effectiveness in a world of pleasant fantasies and neurotic pastimes.
Think of the headquarters of those big companies that are getting themselves into serious trouble but continue to refuse to come to terms with the situation, lost in a more enjoyable alternative reality, shared by the company’s top brass.
1 A good example is the preference for tall individuals, who were traditionally chosen by rulers as grenadiers or royal guards. In modern times, height has certainly been a major factor in the US president’s selection – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heights_of_presidents_and_presidential_candidates_of_the_United_States – and it is also a factor that promotes the rise of managers in big companies, cf. Short guys finish last. Heightism, in The Economist, 23 December 1995.
2 A marking required by European norms for many product-types.
3 Blogger Richard Beasley commenting about Joe PALAZZOLO, In Arkansas Executioners Face a Job Unlike Any Other, in Wall Street Journal, 12 April 2017.
4 I do not take into account the placebo effect and the powerful mutual suggestion mechanisms present in the social animal man.
5 MORRIS, The World of the Shining Prince, pp. 125-126.
6 Ibid., p. 126.
7 This vocation to overcome difficulties also explains why a certain ‘existential relief’ to those involved may be provided even by inconclusive activities quoted on pp. 80-81.
8 Regarding the possible rights of rocks (!), we can refer to STONE, Should Trees Have Standing?, p. XI, who among possible rightsholders mentions also rocks, but with not too much conviction.
9 I remember a television debate about the huge tsunami of 2004 in the Pacific in which a ‘defender of nature raped by man’ managed, in line with his moral inclination, to find human guilt even for the underwater earthquake that caused the disaster. He claimed that, as it has been offended, “nature takes revenge”.
10 Fabio Balocco: “Wild law”, i diritti inalienabili della natura: www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2012/12/27/wild-law-diritti-inalienabili-della-natura/
11 From http://celdf.org/rights/rights-of-nature/ read on 24 April 2016.
32. Reality as a social construction
Man is capable of producing a world
that he then experiences as something other than a human product.
Berger & Luckmann1
Every morning, all over the world, untold millions of workers leave their homes to fill endless rows of offices, persuaded they are performing useful activities, as the income they receive confirms.
Instead, it is just a sort of giant theatrical performance put on to provide players with their piece of the surplus of the production system.
Facing the extraordinary vastness of what escapes collective consciousness, it is difficult to convince ourselves that the confusion between micro and macro planes, and the complexity of the economic system are enough to explain the general invisibility of the imaginary economy.
We need a broader and more general explanation and we can get it from the sociology of knowledge, whereby in human societies ‘reality’ is largely the product of reciprocal collective suggestions.
But first we must explain what we mean by reality and for this a story will, as usual, fit the bill.
Imagine an archipelago of three islands, Fantastic, Credulous and Cynical, where a story circulates about a fearsome heavenly tiger that on certain nights comes down to earth and, if it finds a man on his own, devours him completely before disappearing without trace.
On Fantastic island the tiger really exists and it appears occasionally without making a sound, to take its due. Sightings of the animal are rare but they usually correspond to actual incursions and the great tiger really is responsible for many disappearances.
On Fantastic it is perfectly logical to be scared of the tiger and insane to remain alone at night if one can avoid it.
On Credulous there is no tiger, but the people are convinced that there is.
From childhood, they are brought up, like the people of Fantastic, to fear it and would never spontaneously sleep alone.
Sightings of the tiger are rarer than on Fantastic but human disappearances are always ascribed to the animal.
Often they are crimes. The person committing them knows he can rely upon the credulity of his countryme
n, but remains convinced that, not in this case, but normally, it is the magic beast that has devoured the people who have disappeared.
On Fantastic and Credulous there are a few people who doubt the tiger’s existence… and they are, as a matter of course, considered mad.
There is no tiger on Cynical and the people know it, and stories about the terrible night-time marauder are only used to scare children.
Within the meaning of reality we adopt here, the inhabitants of Credulous live in realities similar to those of Fantastic, not to those of Cynical.
In fact on Credulous and Fantastic fears and behaviour, and usually even the reasons why inhabitants believe in the tiger’s existence, are identical.
Because, even on Fantastic, most of the people are convinced that the tiger exists not because they have seen it, but because that is the general consensus: namely for the same reason the inhabitants of Credulous are persuaded.
This ability to create solid realities simply out of the collective consensus is a fundamental disposition of human communities.
And, from an evolutionary perspective, it is easy to explain: when speaking of that other fundamental human disposition, complaisance, we said that for the social animal homo sapiens being part of a close-knit group favours having offspring to whom to transmit his genes.
In this context, the fact that the members of the human group live within a common reality, that they are ‘attuned’ to one another by the adoption of an identical platform of ideas, beliefs and values, is of paramount importance.
In this collective reality, the human group’s knowledge of the material world is integrated with appropriate fantasies that interlink its many elements, creating a coherent overall picture even if actual knowledge is partial and faulty.
This logical coherence makes the construction sound and credible, enabling individuals to find their bearings and act confidently in line with human group actions, so benefiting group cohesion.