The Doubter's Companion (23 page)

There are big ideologies and little ones. They come in international, national and local shapes. Some require skyscrapers, others circumcision. Like fiction they are dependent on the willing suspension of disbelief, because God only appears in private and before his official spokespeople, class leaders themselves decide the content and pecking order of classes, experts choose their facts judiciously, blood-ties aren't pure and the passive acceptance of a determinist market means denying 2,500 years of Western civilization from Athens and Rome through the Renaissance to the creation of middle-class democracies.

Which is ideology? Which not? You shall know them by their assertion of truth, their contempt for considered reflection and their fear of debate.

IMAGE
   In a society devoted to illusion, the image assumes three more or less dangerous forms.

There is the image that the creator knows to be untrue but expects to convince the public is true. This is the straightforward lie and can be dealt with because it is precise. A pin stuck in at the right moment and it deflates or explodes.

There is the image that the creator knows to be untrue and does not expect to fool the public; just to distract or disorient them. This can be dangerous because it suggests that meaning does not matter. It is increasingly common, feeds off technology and makes mockery of the idea of civilization and language.

Finally there is the image in which the creator comes to believe. Whether the public is taken in or not, this is the most dangerous sort because it involves the denial of reality by those who have a direct impact on reality.

In all three cases the image has the advantage of appearing and therefore appearing to be true. For example, in surveys of lie-perception levels, 75 per cent of those questioned will pick out an average lie when they hear it; 65 per cent when they read it; and 50 per cent when they see it.
¹

The reason that revolutionary change is often tied to
ORAL LANGUAGE
is that this remains the most accurate means of real communication. We have great difficulty disbelieving what we see. This is one of the great risks in a society increasingly dependent on electronically manipulable images. See:
PROPAGANDA.

INAUGURATION GALA
   Religious ceremony in which each newly elected president of the United States is consecrated as the most famous person in the world. This coronation of the leader of celebrities is now more important than the formal swearing-in ceremony the next day, with its boring speeches and endless parade of nobodies.

The inauguration gala of President Clinton and his consort on January 19, 1993, was a flawless example of this ceremony. Ten thousand people paid a thousand dollars each to be there in gowns and black tie. The entire proceedings were beamed live to the nation, indeed to North America and, by the new international American networks, around the world.

Those stars laying on their hands included the actresses Goldie Hawn and Sally Field, in mini-skirts split up the side, marching out arm in arm to declare to the president-elect that they were there to speak on behalf of the mothers of America. Michael Jackson spoke for American children, with a crowd of them dancing behind him. Finally, Barbra Streisand, the high priestess of stardom, in a combination appearance as the Declaration of Independence and the Statue of Liberty, spoke and sang on behalf of America as a whole, its mythology, individualism, freedom, Los Angeles and New York. “I pray for your stamina. I pray for your health.”

Attentive courtiers noted that in the course of the evening the president-elect cried seven times. They followed suit.

On June 19, 1981, Nancy Reagan had cried only once when Frank Sinatra sang lyrics in her honour during the inaugural gala. But neither of these emotional moments matched that at the end of John Kennedy's gala (also staged by Frank Sinatra) when the president-elect went on stage to declare: “I'm proud to be a Democrat, because since the time of Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic party has been identified with the pursuit of excellence and we saw excellence tonight.”
²

That Jefferson might have understood excellence to mean singers and actors glorifying a new president in the manner of a royal fête at Versailles under Louis XIV may have come as a surprise to anyone who persisted in identifying the third president with a modest, republican public demeanour. In any case, Kennedy reworked the Jefferson line a short time later when receiving Nobel prize winners at the White House. See:
LEADERSHIP.

INDIVIDUALISM
   The exercise through public participation of our obligations to the body of the citizenry.

INDOLENCE
   An important newspaper
BARON
has devoted himself to exposing this word. He explains that the cause of poverty throughout the world is indolence. Ten per cent of Americans would not be on food stamps if they simply used their initiative and worked harder.

He was saying this at the
DAVOS
   conference in Switzerland just the other day. People have apparently become perfectly happy to while away a comfortable existence on stamps and social-welfare frauds. If they had only followed his father's advice, they'd have “stuck it to the bastards” and become really rich. This image of hundreds and hundreds of millions of millionaires sticking it to each other, there being no longer any other category of citizen to stick it to, is so all-inclusive that there is no need for others to concern themselves with this word. See:
MYRMECOPHAGA JUBATA.

INEFFICIENCY
   The divorce of the function of an operation from its purpose.

Sometimes the standard rhetoric which equates inefficiency with government bureaucracy is perfectly accurate. Yet it would be hard to imagine operations more efficient than most state-owned utilities. They deliver water and energy, collect sewage and garbage, maintain transport infrastructures and generally make the lives of tens of millions of people possible in a relatively smooth and invisible manner.

Which is more inefficient, behind the times, conservative in its investment policies, yet wasteful in its rewarding of executives: the German State railway system or the French textile industry? The American post office or the aeronautics firms Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas? EDF (the French State electrical power corporation) or much of the West's private and deposit banking sector, which has repeatedly bankrupted itself over the last three decades through extravagant and unprofessional lending? The Canadian national medicare system or the American private system which, before attempts began to reform it, left forty million people without protection and cost a fortune to both corporations and individuals?

It cannot be argued in a non-ideological manner that inefficiency is a matter of public versus private ownership. Competition can help to discourage unnecessary bureaucratic waste, but the market-place also creates waste through its notoriously short memory, difficulty thinking more than a few months ahead and a chronic weakness for fashion, which like the shapes of shoe-heels can come and go abruptly.

The underlying cause of waste in both sectors is loss of direction. This in turn can be traced to a disconnection between the manner in which an operation functions and its purpose. The greater the disconnection, the greater the inefficiency.

The purpose of an army is to discourage wars or win them. Yet officers easily become distracted by management imperatives, internal power structures, class divisions and the prestige attached to stockpiles of armaments. As a result they tend to disfavour those officers who are competent strategists (and who favour the use of uncertainty) while promoting courtiers who delight in management, power structures, class and arms stockpiling, but cannot win wars.

Waste and confusion in the automobile industry can be traced to a similar obsession with management. Much of the instability and gross wastefulness in the financial sector over the last two decades can be traced to amnesia as to their role in the economy—the financing of infrastructures and production.

These errors are often justified by a blunt, even barbaric, ideology which insists that the purpose of society is the maximization of profit. That is to deform a narrow but useful mechanism into an absolute yet abstract god. The obsessive pursuit of profit is a prime example of divorcing function from purpose and therefore an invitation to inefficiency and waste. See:
NATIONALIZATION.

INFERIORITY COMPLEX
   The most dangerous characteristic in a public figure. It feeds aggression and contempt towards others.

Alfred Adler explained early in this century that we all suffer from a sense of inferiority.
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The important question is therefore to what degree is it felt? There is no particular rule as to which child will suffer from an uncontrollable sense of inferiority. It can just as easily be a rich kid who goes to private school, inherits seven million dollars and ends up a press baron, as a poor child of doubtful lineage and nationality born on the Austro-German border.

Individuals whose primary drive stems from their feeling of inferiority are a threat to the public interest. Not only do they tend to seek power in search of self-affirmation, their insecurity actually helps them to achieve it. Once there, they seek to demonstrate the inferiority of those under them. Their sense that they have been wronged justifies the substitution of their own emotional satisfaction for such fundamentals as the public weal and ethics.

These people fall into three broad categories. There are those who seek to win the love of important people. They can be found today where they have always been—clinging to the coat-tails of those who have more power than themselves. As a result they may become known for brief periods as the one who has the ear of the one who has power. Then they slip away, forgotten. At a higher level, there are those who seek to win positions where they themselves must be loved. Both of these types are the essentially craven—the natural courtiers, courtesans and quislings. The most important love they can feel is unleashed by access to power. The effect is to confirm them in their contempt for others and themselves.

The third type seeks revenge for the humiliation of their birth and circumstances. Once in power they bluster and bully, talk about the need for toughness, show contempt for others, and consciously humiliate them. This punishment is justified by the conviction that the victims deserve to suffer because they are not strong or competitive or successful enough to resist.

The most destructive holders of power often combine these three categories.

Those who are ruled by their own sense of inferiority use their obsessional talents to manipulate the insecurity in others. That is how they come to power. This very success confirms them in their contempt for others and allows them to claim that you can always succeed by appealing to the worst in the general public.

INSTRUMENTAL REASON
   A clever justification for a real problem.

Philosophers from Max Weber on have gazed upon what appear to be the equally beneficial and catastrophic effects of reason when applied, and have been filled with confusion and despair. If the catastrophes outweigh the benefits and reason is thus judged a failure, the only option might well be a return to superstition and arbitrary power.

In thinking this way philosophers have turned themselves into victims of their own logic. After all, it was they who argued in the first place that the choice was between the dark ages and reason; that there were no other options.

The discomfort brought on by their artificial, stark logic seems to have provoked them to split reason into two. If reason once applied did not work, then the problem, or so the argument goes, was not reason itself but a lesser, concrete form called instrumental reason.

This amounted to an intellectural beheading. Weber led the way with two terms:
wertrational
and
zweckrational
.
⁴
First there was reason; pure, unsullied reason; a field-day for the positive intellect. Second there was the instrumental category; a sort of lower-case, plebeian reason which had been deformed through attempts at practical application. Interestingly enough, Weber listed the common variety ahead of the ideal sort. Being a practical man he knew which was the more important. The result in any case has been that philosophers who wish to can quite comfortably reply to any critique of rational methodology that it is merely the instrumental sort.

This is not a bad argument, but it doesn't really work. After all, the conversion of what were once marginal armaments industries into the most important industrial product of the West is the result of instrumental reason. As are the endless bureaucratic problems which plague business and government. As is the invention of a new, gigantic money market, almost entirely devoted to inflationary activity. As is the military staff methodology which has killed more people in this century than any other has put onto the battlefield.

If these systems events, which so dominate our lives and the affairs of our civilization that they may destroy it and us, are merely the result of instrumental reason, then what is there left for reason itself to be? Is reason merely a harmless ideal abstraction to be debated and dissected in universities?

The true origins of this approach are revealing. It was Aristotle who distinguished between theoretical and practical reason. This was part of the Aristotelian method upon which mediaeval
SCHOLASTICISM
was constructed. The enthusiasm with which contemporary philosophy has embraced instrumental reason illustrates the extent to which we have sunk into bad mediaeval habits.

The effect of this division is to let philosophy off the hook. It no longer has to deal with the relationship between ideas and reality if every idea has an independent sub-category which betrays the idea from which it emerged. Granted, the result is a pleasant illusion for philosophers. They can talk on without the disturbing interference of reality.