The Doubter's Companion (13 page)

In other words, it is possible to approach the debt problem in quite different ways.

14. There have been changes which limit our actions in comparison to those of Solon or Henry IV, who negotiated his way out of an impossible debt situation in the early seventeenth century and re-established prosperity. First we have to recognize and protect the investment made by citizens directly (government bonds) and indirectly (bank deposits) in the financing of national debts. Second, there is the new and unregulated complexity of the international
MONEY MARKETS,
which now constitutes an important corporatist element.

15. Our central problem is one of approach. For two decades governments have been instructing economists and finance officials to come up with ways in which the debt can be paid down and interest payments maintained.

No one has instructed them to propose methods for not paying the debt and not maintaining interest payments. No one has asked them to use their creativity in place of
a priori
logic.

16. Were the members of the Group of Seven (G7) each to pool their best economists and give them a month to come up with modern versions of default, we might be surprised by the ease with which practical proposals would appear.

17. There are two simple guiding points:

A. The appearance of continuity is easily achieved in default scenarios through paper mechanisms which can be categorized as “debt retirement.”

B. What is difficult for a single country in contemporary circumstances is easy for a group, particularly if that group speaks for the developed world. See:
ETHICS.

DECONSTRUCTIONISM
   A generalized denial of
CIVILIZATION
can't help but be a voice of evil.

To insist that language is in contradiction with itself or nothing more than a system of self-serving formulae or essentially meaningless is to argue that human communications have no ethical, creative or social value. Fortunately deconstructionism can also be seen as a school of light comedy. After all, to argue that language has no meaning is to eliminate your own argument. The deconstructionists may after all simply be suffering from an acute lack of IRONY.

Jacques Derrida and his disciples protest that what they actually mean is that language never means exactly what it says. If so, they have come rather late in life to what has always been a given between writers and readers. Besides, their protest is disingenuous, since through simple observation we can see that the practical intent of deconstructionism is to demote the communications of the writer and the citizen to the level of naïvety if not idiocy and to insert the critic or professor as the essential intermediary. This is a prime example of how intellectuals create
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM.

In fairness it must be assumed that these thinkers are better intentioned than their writings make them appear to be. Individual deconstructionists may well think of themselves as socialists or liberals or conservatives or something else. But since their argument undermines the value of public discourse, they can't help but be the servants of whatever anti-democratic forces are at work. These days the deconstructionist argument is a great support to both CORPORATISM (in which language is a secondary tool of self-interest broken up into obscure dialects) and those on the ideological extremes whether of the left or the right (where language is propaganda).

Most deconstructionists are academics. It is remarkable, given their belief in the meaninglessness of language, that they have so little trouble assigning A's, B's and C's to their students.
¹
Perhaps this is a hint that their whole argument is an insider's joke. With hindsight, of course, the same can be said of the intellectual arguments used by Hitler and Stalin.

Note:
Deconstructionists tend to insist that the proper term is deconstruction, not deconstructionism. That is, they do not want to be treated as an ism. They hate being deconstructed. See:
SCHOLASTICISM.

DEMOCRACY
   An existential system in which words are more important than actions. Not a judgemental system.

Democracy is not intended to be efficient, linear, logical, cheap, the source of absolute truth, manned by angels, saints or virgins, profitable, the justification for any particular economic system, a simple matter of majority rule or for that matter a simple matter of majorities. Nor is it an administrative procedure, patriotic, a reflection of tribalism, a passive servant of either law or regulation, elegant or particularly charming.

Democracy is the only system capable of reflecting the humanist premise of equilibrium or
BALANCE.
The key to its secret is the involvement of the citizen. See:
REFERENDUM.

DENIAL
   Characteristic reflex of a technocrat. Since actions are the result of solutions arrived at by experts there can be no
ERROR.
Error is replaced by a linear succession of right answers. This requires the systematic denial of error when each preceding answer fails to do its job in spite of being right.

The contaminated blood scandals of the late 1980s and early 1990s involved a series of errors in several Western countries by various medical authorities who failed to screen properly blood donations for HIV infections. The universal methods of the medical profession (corporation) produced the same initial approach in each country. This involved errors, which in each case were rigorously denied, which led to further damage being done to uninformed patients, which led eventually to public inquiries which ought to have been extremely damaging to the medical corporation and caused them to rethink their general approach to communication and error. Instead, they went into an emergency state of denial and were able to muddy the waters enough to limit the damage to unfocused outrage.

The denials or lies were exactly the same in Canada, England, France, Germany and the United States. The desperation to be seen to be right in all cases was more important than the lives of patients.

This mania for denial has marked policies ranging from the economy to defence. It constitutes an assertion that expertise and the corporatist structure are more important than reality. See:
DIALECTS.

DEPRESSION
   A form of economic disaster common throughout history. In 1973 the word was deleted from all Western languages and replaced by the term recession.

There are three reasons for this rebaptism:

FIRST, depressions have been fixed in the public imagination with images drawn from the collapse of 1929–39. Yet the West has been stricken by a series of modern depressions since the mid-eighteenth century. They have all been products of both the industrial revolution and the new financing methods, yet each has looked quite different. There is no reason for them now suddenly to begin looking alike.

Society's structures have changed radically since 1929, in an effort to eliminate through regulation the worst of the economic instabilities which had brought on the crisis in the first place. People believed that regulation was necessary because time after time, from the eighteenth century onward, the market-place had proved itself devoid of the characteristic of sensible self-regulation. It could only regulate itself through boom and bust cycles, which led not to a gradual levelling-out, but to recurrent depressions.

The changes begun in 1932 were also intended to eliminate the extreme social inequities—or rather iniquities—brought on by the crisis. However effective the new regulations, there would always be economic highs and lows. But that didn't mean children had to be in soup-kitchens. This idea of social reform through regulation was actually a return to the pre-capitalist view of society as a conscious whole. It was no longer acceptable to think of society as no more than an abstract economic mechanism in which some were winners and others losers who might fall as far into despair as the market found useful.

If the Depression which began in 1973 has appeared far less dramatic than the preceding one, it is thanks to the balancing effect of regulation.

SECOND, the pseudo-scientific approach to economic reality leads the economists and their more powerful half-brothers, the business school professors, to believe that they are constantly managing real situations. This is a delusion filled with paradoxes. For example, the ideologues of the market-place see themselves as managing detail within the great inevitable flow of competition. The truth about modern economists is that their macro visions are rarely more than inflated versions of their micro science. This isn't unusual in a society dominated by technocratic systems. Contemporary military strategy, for example, is rarely more than a blow-up of tactics.

The economy is now seen as a series of details, and the experts believe they can measure their way. They resemble a sailor who sets his course, without a compass or a sea-anchor, from the trough of the waves, by calculating his way up to the next crest.

THIRD, the themes of contemporary leadership contain a strange combination of mythological optimism (which promises continual progress towards a better world) and virtual inertia brought on by slavery to micro-economic systems.

Thus, those with power feel obliged to promise big solutions, while in reality they seldom move beyond the obscure briefs of their experts.

To admit to the existence of anything as uncontrollable as a depression would be to admit failure, which is tantamount to declaring that you have no right to power. As a result the political, administrative and academic élites insist that, since 1973, we have suffered from a series of recessions. Recessions differ from depressions in length and severity, so there is a strong feeling that they can be managed. The word depression is feared because it suggests a profound social imbalance which is beyond management. If a depression were to exist, the élites would have to engage in serious self-criticism. They would have to reconsider how the economic system functions. Our élites are not trained or chosen to think of themselves in those terms. They are sometimes falsely Heroic; but in reality they are themselves a micro phenomenon.

The Western refusal to respond intelligently to the crisis has been as blatant on the Left as on the Right. At the annual
DAVOS
gathering in January 1993, the fashionable economist Lester Thurow declared that we are not in the great Depression, but in the great Recession. This left the false impression that our only need is to stimulate the economy. But stagnation is the characteristic of Act II in a depression tragedy. Act I involves crisis and collapse; Act II stagnation; Act III brings regeneration either through a cataclysmic fire or through the discovery of a new approach. That discovery lies inevitably in the root causes of the crisis—Act I.

Yet we remain stubbornly in Act II. After all, the most important trade good remains an artificial industry—armaments—which continues to dominate the high-tech sector. Public funding, that is
TAXATION,
remains at an impasse. An abstract, ideological obsession with
EFFICIENCY
and
COMPETITION
continues to undermine our social economic structures. The international money markets—a monstrous and unregulated descendant of South Sea Bubble–style speculation—remains so powerful that it can overwhelm any economy, whatever its health or productivity. Western governments are still unwilling to deal with the implications for competition, employment and money flows of the
TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS,
even though passivity means that national and even multinational policies are meaningless. The profession of economists remains fixated on the virtues of the service industries without bothering to identify the highly contradictory elements which this term contains. And they are unwilling to make sense of the relationship between their technical tinkering and their abstract theories on debt and inflation. More to the point, they continue to see economics as a mathematical abstract rather than a manifestation of civilization.

How can we have solid economic recovery when the dominant economic schools do not begin from the assumption that there are 270 million people in Western Europe and 300 million in North America and that all of these people must somehow be involved in the economy? If ignored, they become expensive, even destructive dead-weights. Such disembodied and abstract theories can only weaken society and incidentally its economy.

All of these problems could have been focused on before 1973. Yet, no sooner had the crisis begun, then most were abruptly seen as strengths and thus encouraged to become crutches for the ailing system in place. To suggest that now all we need do to ensure recovery is stimulate or educate or single out potential areas of growth is to act as if economies only exist as superficial appearances.

With a little disinterested common sense it is possible, however, to identify a handful of key phenomena which, if not entirely responsible, account for much of our crisis.

1. The failure of our managerial
ÉLITE
s, whether public or private, which throws doubt on our assumptions about organization, leadership and higher education (see:
MANAGER)
.

2. Our belief that technology has purpose and direction and therefore needs no guidance.

3. The inability of our élites to examine what will, can and must happen to traditional ideas of
GROWTH
in an advanced industrial society.

4. As a result, the conversion of our economics to dependence on inflationary, non-growth activities such as the
MONEY MARKETS, ARMAMENTS
production, mergers and acquisitions and
PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT.

5. As a further result, an explosion in public and private
DEBT
accompanied by a simplistic, linear belief that we must strip ourselves naked in order to pay those debts.

6. The re-opening of the nineteenth-century file on unregulated competition. This was initiated by the transnational corporations who are making use of cheap unprotected labour in the Third World to undermine the
STANDARDS OF PRODUCTION
inside the developed nations (encouraged by an ideological approach to the practical mechanism of free trade).