by Mario Fabbri
It is inevitable for natural selection to foster the spread of genes that favour the creation and soundness of collective realities, and hence the cohesion of human groups.2
To think this may not happen is to reject the logic of natural selection.
In many idiosyncrasies of human communities there appears to be a clear connection with such sociobiological strategy: orthodoxies, excommunication and persecution of heretics, uncritical adherence to the party line…3
The collective reality may to a large extent be fantastic and arbitrary, as the spectacular variety of the civilisations of different times and places shows.
The only inescapable constraint is that it must be sufficiently effective in addressing the interactions between human group and material world.
But when, like today, human control over nature gets stronger, the fantastic component gets more room to grow.
The strength of adherence to collective reality can vary greatly among group members.
Those for whom it is sounder are the conformists who make up the backbone of any society: natural selection achieves this result by making them more insecure so that for them being separate from others is distressing.
Conformists are caught up so effectively by collective reality4 that they fail to distinguish it from the ‘things’ of the outside world, and clearly they are not led to reflections such as those we are now expounding.
But even the most individualistic and self-assured can arrive at such considerations only in time of ‘cultural crisis’, when cracks in common reality become particularly visible.
A metaphor might help us understand:
A man immersed in a reality created by collective suggestion is like a fish swimming in the calm, deep waters of a river which does not perceive the presence of the water all around it.
But if the flow of the river is disturbed and the fish is thrown among the rapids and maybe at times even emerges into the air, then the water becomes visible to it…
That is: if a society is very stable and changes are slow and under the attention threshold, the reality is well defined and rock-solid for everyone.
And nobody can doubt its ‘objective’ nature.
But if a period of rapid change – like the present – sets in, a reality well fitted to the new and shifting situation does not have enough time to consolidate.
So, some people manage to note the presence of weirdness and inconsistencies in it, and considerations can arise like those we are developing now.
They may emerge at different times and places, but always during a cultural crisis: when the old value system is collapsing and a new one has not yet taken a firm grip on people’s minds.
So, in 4th century BC China, in the creative and tormented Age of the Warring States, the taoist Chuang Tzu clearly perceives that what appears like external reality, endowed with sense, is a product of men who give warmth and colour to a cold, indifferent non-human cosmos.
An extraordinary fragment from his chapter On the equality of things:
When people say a thing is good then that thing is good.
When people say a thing is not good then that thing is not good.
A road becomes a road when people walk on it,5 and things are ‘what they are’ because people say so.
Why are things correct? They are correct because people say they are. Why are things not correct? They are not correct because people say they are not.
But in itself everything is always what it is, correct. In itself everything is perfectly formed.6 A thing cannot be different from itself, not correct. A thing cannot not be perfectly formed.
Take a slender column or a large pillar, an ugly woman and the beautiful Hsi-Shih, the ugly and the beautiful, the singular and the extraordinary. In Tao they are all the same.7
Here we have the opposition between the Tao plane, where things are intrinsically devoid of aesthetic (beautiful/ugly) or moral (good/not good) values, and the plane of men where men project and then get back their own values and emotions rebounded from a cosmos in itself devoid of sense.8
So, in full agreement with Berger and Luckmann’s we conclude that…
the ‘reality’ in which we feel located is only in part a product of the material world, and for the remainder is a collective construction of conceptions and fantasies, men project on to the external world, in which they then find them, but perceiving them as coming from outside and ‘objective’.
And of this collective reality today the imaginary economy is an integral part.
1 BERGER, The Social Construction of Reality, p. 78.
2 There is today a controversy between biologists on the confused idea of group selection, in which elegant methodological-metaphysical elements emerge which do not add anything to our understanding of phenomena. As in the unsolvable disputes between individualistic and solidaristic economists, in these subtle diatribes the political-character inclinations of the controversialists emerge. It is, for example, logical to suspect that it is the most individualistic who deprecate the use of the sometimes fuzzy concept of ‘group’… Cf. Rovina delle nazioni, pp. 303-305.
3 These attitudes and the force with which they are pursued are subject to wide variations among different societies and eras. See the chapters On crucial alternations between centralising and individualistic eras in Fabbrica delle illusioni, p. 47 ff. and Religious fundamentalism as therapy for anxiety by change, in Rovina delle nazioni, p.150 ff.
4 The technical term in psychology is consensual validation. Cf. Rovina delle nazioni, pp. 57-59.
5 This beautiful metaphor and the overall meaning of the text escaped most translators who do not realise that here the Chinese term Tao, rather than ‘cosmos’ or ‘the absolute’, must be taken in its literal meaning of ‘road’. Cf. Wing-TSIT CHAN, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, p. 184, note 23.
6 This passage has some suggestive similarities with a fragment, which some commentators consider obscure, from Heraclitus who lived in early 5th century BC Greece, another age of rapid changes: “For the gods all things are fine, good and just: men consider some just, others unjust.” Cf. ERACLITO, I frammenti e le testimonianze, pp. 33 and 165-167.
7 I have elaborated this version by comparing several Italian and English translations of this passage, which is made difficult to translate by the often purposive ambiguity of the Chinese language. Some are almost unusable and the best is easily that by Wing-TSIT CHAN, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, pp. 183-184.
8 Radical conceptions like these are perceptive, but also distressing for many, and as a result a ‘moderate Taoist’ version became popular, from which the unbearable view of a senseless cosmos is removed. But the opposition between two planes remains: the first is the state of nature in which man originally lived and which is ‘good’, that is still endowed with sense, and the other emerges from the overlap on it of modernisation and rationality, two human products, opposed to intuition/enlightenment, which generate false values instead of the ‘true’ ones of the state of nature.
33. The policeman of reality
We have said that the success of the group requires the reality created by collective suggestion to be robust and even its more fantastic parts to produce an impression of solid certainty.
To measure the strength this suggestion can arrive at it is enough to look at the collective fantasies that take over other people but not ourselves: think, for example, of the mass suicides that have been carried out with calm determination by some religious sects.
Other spectacular examples are the great financial bubbles which lead so many qualified investors to attribute to stocks absurdly high values that they feel to be appropriate because this is the general consensus around them.
But the power of these collective certainties is above all apparent in the grandiose diversity of civilisations in history:
An Egyptian worker celebrates with his workmates because they have added another heavy stone to the great pyramid; the scholastic doctor is analysing a subtle theological question in front of his admiring pupils; a modern manager is pleased because finally he has obtained ISO certification for the company and brags with colleagues about what he did…
These people live in quite different worlds, but each of them is immersed in a solid reality created for him by the surrounding society.
We have already observed that to the social animal homo sapiens, collective realities are a fundamental product of natural selection.
Now we add that it is also fundamental for man to be capable of neutralising the inconsistencies and contradictions1 that may emerge in collective reality, without being too concerned.
Natural selection has even taken care of this and men do it instinctively without even realising…
Just think of the spectacular ability of moralists and utopians not to let facts scratch their unshakable fantasies.
But there are many defensive techniques useful for neutralising cracks in collective reality:
targeted oversights, obtuse incomprehension, transposition to the ridiculous, escape into moral indignation, leading astray…2
A subtle, imperceptible uneasiness is enough to interrupt a line of thought that is approaching ‘dangerous areas’ and to send attention off in another direction.3
We can look at this varied repertoire of defences as a true ‘policeman of reality’.
We find the policeman busily at work even on inconspicuous topics…
Taking a cue from the manager who is pleased to have finally received ISO certification, let’s think of the growing pile of ‘documentation’ which, generated at times by specific regulations but often by mere management whim, is now normal for companies to prepare and file, but which is used very little or not at all, admirably fuelling the growth of the imaginary economy.
From personal experience in information systems I can flag the futility of much of this documentation, possibly embellished with elegant diagrams with arrows, which is held to be a necessary addition to program sources, by many managers or entities which have authority over, but not familiarity with, or knowledge of, programming.
Here the point is that to the practical uselessness of these instruments, nobody pays any real attention.
They are never measured or controlled because such attention would show how very little they are used and how superfluous they are.
It is this lack of reflection that we are reflecting upon here.
A conformist cannot take note of these inefficiencies, because it is impossible for him to swim against the tide of common opinion which considers these instruments to be useful and commendable.
And if their ‘commendableness’ were to be strongly confirmed by morality, their futility might escape even the most critical observer.
But today things are moving too fast for such consolidation to occur in this tiny corner of reality.
A more significant example: many look with approval at the enormous number of verifications and formalities the pharmaceutical industry has to complete before distributing a new drug to the public.
And they remove without reflection from consciousness the perfectly reasonable doubt that all these delays might ‘statistically’ increase, rather than decrease, death and suffering.
We see that the policeman of reality is able to direct and restrict thinking even on matters of life and death.
What we have presented are instances of the powerful defensive technique called dissociation4 whose extreme case is the ‘compartmentalised minds’ described by students of prejudice.5
It is thanks to dissociation that most of the oddities, inefficiencies and absurdities visible in the compartment of a normal working life, coexist happily with the theories of economists which, in a different compartment, describe the working of the economic system on very different terms.
The policeman of reality knows how to make good use of the innate capacity of the human mind to allow contradictions to coexist peacefully.
A curious example of this operation would be provided by a reader of this book who finds himself in agreement with what it says, while at the same time continues to consider creditworthy the analyses of authoritative traditional economists.
In a similar ‘dissociative logic’, a human community can also split up into separate compartments, each of which is largely ignorant of what occurs in the others.
In this way ‘sub-cultures’ are created that give members of each compartment different but consistent visions of their own limited experience, even if the whole group stays within an area abounding in inconsistencies such as the imaginary economy. We proposed this case…
[In certain companies we note] an extreme distance… between the words of top managers… and the reality of workers… Where one group speaks willingly of “industrial excellence”, others only see behaviour that is nothing short of senseless. In other words, the various players do not live in the same world…6
Now it becomes clearer: the policeman of reality of top managers keeps them locked into the thinking that is current in the top echelons of the company and stops them from paying attention to what is happening below.
But it is by no means easy to spot what the policeman of reality is up to, because the first inconsistency he removes from the radar is his own existence.
In fact, no one ever speaks about him.
∗ ∗ ∗
We are now in a position to answer the question of why the imaginary economy escapes common awareness.
The fundamental reason is that at all times and places, the mass of people cannot fail to feel the representations of the collective reality created by the society that surrounds them as solid and objective.
And of this collective reality, the activities of the imaginary economy are today an integral part, appearing as they do to everyone as logical and objectively indispensable.
1 These attitudes have other benefits besides helping to keep solid collective reality. Here is, from Fabbrica delle illusioni, p. 223, a penetrating observation of Paul Samuelson: “until you know a subject perfectly, you always are in a state where you believe in A and you also believe in non-A.”, quoted in BIRNER, The Cambridge Controversies in Capital Theory, p. 3.
2 As a result, stories, as those we have often employed here, are a particularly good way of presenting alternative visions of reality to a conformist.
In fact direct attempts to contest the official version comes up against numerous pre-packed sophisms and distractions automatically springing to his mind to neutralise the most common and dangerous criticisms of accepted ideas.
The conformist immediately pulls them out and stands firm with the official vision, without needing to reflect on what is being said to him. But with a story you transport him into a fantasy world and until the end he will not understand exactly where he is going. So, with the automatic triggers directing attention elsewhere removed, he follows the argument and grasps its intrinsic soundness. So when the precise correspondence between story and reality emerges it may be too late to ‘find a remedy’. This technique is quite useful to critics of accepted ideas. See the visionary economist William Potter in his Key of Wealth (1650), p. 21: “… it is no unusual thing for men to give a more upright and impartiall sentence in matters, which are in such sort propounded, under form figurative and parabolically sense as they discerne not to what particular cases. Such their sentence may be applied to the unexpected convincing them, by their own agreement, unto things which otherwise they would never have consented to”.
3 The method of last resort is shifting attention elsewhere by evoking another conspicuous element to divert the mind toward it. Also the repetitive jingles that sometimes get stuck in the head seem like emergency remedies to prevent the cropping up in the conscious mi
nd of unpleasant thoughts that the normal selection-removal mechanisms of the unconscious have failed to stop at greater depths.
4 The technique of dividing reality into compartments is born from its practical advantages, because, without needing to reach an unlikely general understanding of reality, it often allows us to manage individual sections of it effectively. Even the most integralist, for example, can manage their daily problems, as part of a different sphere of reality. The aim of the present text is, on the contrary, to integrate into a single schema cognitions of separate compartments of present human knowledge, whose overall consistency is hidden if one limits self to the specialist view of each compartment.
5 Cf. ROKEACH, The Open and Closed Mind, pp. 225-226.
6 DUPUY, Lost in management, pp. 49-50.
34. Summary
Here are the most important points we have proposed:
1. In the last two centuries production technologies have evolved very rapidly, greatly reducing the per capita working time necessary to sustain today’s consumption of material goods. But the growth of this consumption is subject to inertia and resistances, men’s way of life can still become more opulent, but more slowly.
2. In the moral sphere the rule that the correct way to receive an income is to ‘work’ remains firm or, if anything, firmer than before. It is for this reason that the percentage of the adult population that is made up of workers does not decrease.
3. It is therefore inevitable that a growing part of working activity must be ‘unproductive of goods’ because were such goods to be produced they could not be sold, causing severe problems to the economic system.
4. The huge number of unproductive jobs increases apace because of pressure from the population of aspiring workers, made irresistible by human complaisance, which transforms a growing quantity of unproductive activities into normal, if not obligatory, behaviour.