The Doubter's Companion (25 page)

Those in positions of authority know the real situation. By the early 1990s political leaders were sufficiently panicked to begin concentrating on job creation. Unfortunately these initiatives are unrelated to the basic economic policies which have been encouraged by the same leaders after being developed and put in place by the public and private technocracy. An increasingly unregulated international market-place, unmonitored technological change and an increase in unsecured part-time labour deprived of benefits combine to render the idea of job creation policies somewhat comic.

Job creation is endlessly evoked in the context of such things as retraining and worker involvement in long-term quality production. Both assume high levels of corporate loyalty.

But the global economy is defined in part as a permanent search for the cheapest production parameters. Corporations therefore increasingly see their employment obligations as short-term. Why then would they invest in long-term training? And why would executives or workers commit themselves to long-term quality production systems? And what possible role could loyalty have in an economy which encourages the employer to abandon the employee at any moment?

Most job-creation theories are either consultant-talk or wishful thinking. When employment ministers get together to discuss the crisis, as they did in Detroit early in 1994, they reappear at the end of their meetings looking bemused.

There are dozens of job strategies they can opt for. But once they are examined with any degree of disinterest, even a fool can see that they are dependent on massive changes in the economic policies recommended by the bulk of the economists, accepted by the quasi-totality of the public and private technocracies, and now finally in place in spite of their inability to produce prosperity or growth.

JOGGING
   An urban sport whose principal long-term effect is to cripple middle- and upper-middle-class professionals. Enthusiasts include orthopaedic surgeons and running-shoe manufacturers.

JUDGE
   Modern form of the word “Prince” as originally conceived by Machiavelli.

Given a choice over the final seat of authority, our public and private technocracies prefer a disinterested personage appointed for long periods of time, unattached to daily reality and limited to passive intervention triggered either by disagreement among experts or by the shortfalls in legal clarity.

The natural and continual desire of the corporatist technocracy is therefore discreetly to remove powers from elected assemblies, governments,
JURIES
and other public bodies in order to transfer them to legal texts dependent first on administration and second on judges, who will arbitrate when required. See:
LEADERSHIP.

JURY
   A body which demonstrates the inherently incomplete nature of law and fact.

Law guides. Fact illustrates. The jury then considers the best possible truth. Its work is an illustration of
HUMANIST
balance, which explains why the profession of lawyers and judges is constantly reducing the type of cases and the conditions in which juries can be used. See:
TRUTH.

K

KANT, IMMANUEL
   A swamp which has seeped into our minds and separated the intellect from reality.

Genius. Well-intentioned. Devoted to
the supreme principle of morality.
And yet this charming man became the Thomas Aquinas of Reason.

Kant was the first major modern philosopher to spend his life closeted in a university. With him begins the confusion between thinking and teaching. Living in isolation from the realities of his day, he knew about ideas, but knew little about the world from which they sprang or to which they would eventually be applied. Although a talented teacher, he had no sense of the philosopher's obligation to communicate with humanity and so wrote in the most obscure university language. Less than a century after others had made a concerted and partly successful effort to free philosophy from the controls of mediaeval scholasticism, he dragged it back into hermetic dialect.

Kant systematized reason. Divided it into different types. Sought to defend the independence of science and of morality. But this systematization encouraged those who followed to develop impenetrable separations between reality and the intellect which could disarm philosophy as a public weapon.

Specialists who have made a career out of teaching or examining the Kantian mysteries dare others to join them down in the morass where his essential ideas await. To those who refuse to join them they may well thumb their noses with superior contempt. That is a standard military tactic intended to draw an enemy onto unfavourable ground. When they shout out their version of the schoolboy taunt—“Kan't! Kan't!”—the public can quite sensibly stand their ground and reply, “Won't!” See:
PHILOSOPHY.

KISS
   One sort of kiss is private and involves lovers, babies, relations and friends. The other is public and involves a queen's hand, Christ's cheek, a potentate's toes or the conferral of an honour by someone in power.

The first is a physical emanation of emotion. The second is an expression of power and contract. It is important not to confuse the two.

When the future King of England, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the descendant of William the Conqueror and Elizabeth I, stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace some years ago with his new bride and kissed her full on the lips for hundreds of millions of people watching around the world, he confused the private with the public. That is, there seemed to be some confusion between his historic constitutional role and that of a young romantic leading man—a movie star who makes his living by giving public imitations of the private kiss.

Whether kings actually kiss their wives with passion in private is their business. This particular one was the result of a clever idea to modernize the monarchy by making it more exciting. More starlike. Palace courtiers probably developed the plan.

What they missed was that you can't pick and choose among the characteristics of the star. The star is an illusion and therefore contains no separate compartments or functions. Everything being nothing, it's all one. If you act out certain scenes from your private life in public, then like a star, your whole life is dumped automatically into the public domain. There can be no invasion of privacy. Stars make their living off what spectators fantasize about them.

The prince's kiss was a banal Faustian bargain of the sort which has destroyed dozens of politicians who try to get elected by selling their lifestyle. But a constitutional monarch's case is special. Prince Charming is a stock celluloid myth. As subsequent events demonstrated, mixing it with the myth of legitimacy, which a real king incarnates, automatically risks both. See:
HAPPY FAMILY.

L

LAGOS
   A jewel in the crown of the new international economy.

Only twenty years ago this vibrant Nigerian metropolis of 9 million inhabitants was a sleepy little town of 80,000. People from rural villages all over the country expressed their belief in the future by abandoning limited agrarian lives and moving to the capital city. No sooner were they settled in Lagos than it seemed to them as if they had been kept out in the countryside by some form of hypnosis which had chained them to base sentiments disguised as stability, continuity, family life, personal security and a sheeplike desire to eat every day. Thanks to the energizing and liberating forces of competition they are now free to join the modern labour force.

By cleverly refusing to own property or become reliant on sewage systems or clean water, they have developed lean income requirements and so are able to advance themselves as internationally competitive employees. In an imaginative yet hardheaded approach to overpopulation they have managed to achieve record child mortality rates. Finally, in spite of employers' entreaties, they have brushed aside such noncompetitive crutches as job security, pensions and safe work conditions. The courageous children of Lagos, eager to improve their lot, have placed themselves in the forefront of this proud new work force.

Before the flowering of the market system, Nigerians were often limited to mediaeval barter. The world's economic experts could scarcely feel a modern industrial pulse, let alone measure it. Now the planners are able to put this country squarely on the GNP chart with other modern nations at $315 per person per annum. Soon, no doubt, their efforts will carry them even higher. The sky, as they say in Lagos, is the limit. The proof is that the Nigerian branches of international corporations are prospering and so are eager to go on paying their efficient employees.

Some Western leftists denigrate these proud people, call their prosperous capital a “squatters' slum” and their government a military dictatorship. This is the jealous babbling of the lazy. The ambition of the workers of Lagos is an example to all of us in the so-called developed world. If we wish to keep our jobs we also must become competitive. As to the claims of naïve student Marxists and overweight union bosses that the Nigerian workers are being mistreated, this simply demonstrates that we in the West have become so attached to our unearned comfort that we no longer know what competition means. Our grandparents knew. Hard work and dedication. We have become lazy, self-indulgent and dependent on support structures which in today's tough new environment are simply not realistic.

LEADERSHIP
   “Why is there such a dearth of good leaders? Because we're in a leadership crisis.” This is the chorus of modern lament.

The proverbial wise foreigner—Swift's giant King of Brobdingnag or Montesquieu's Persian in Paris writing home—would probably note that this is a curious obsession for democracies to harbour. Democrats are supposed to be obsessed by their own participation and that of the citizenry in general. Leadership, after all, is the cry of unevolved, craven peoples frightened by the idea of individual responsibility. The sort of people who desire nothing better than a god or a divinely inspired chief to hold them to his bosom, or better still hers, for protection and reassurance. See:
PROPAGANDA.

LEFT VERSUS RIGHT
   The result of an unfortunate seating arrangement.

In October 1789 the Paris mob, led by women, walked to Versailles, stormed the palace and dragged the king back to town with them. The Assembly had no choice but to follow. Louis was put in his gilded cage, the Tuileries Palace. The nearest building capable of seating several hundred elected representatives in the same room was the palace stables out in what are now the Tuileries Gardens. The need to board and exercise a large number of horses had imposed a particular sort of structure. That shape in turn imposed a semicircular seating plan on the carpenters brought in to do the emergency conversion.

It naturally followed that those who hated each other most sat as far away from each other as possible, to the extreme right and left of the podium. Thus the needs of horses helped to create our idea of irreconcilable political opposites. Had architecture permitted this semi-circle to complete itself, the reactionaries and the revolutionaries would have found themselves quite naturally sitting together. See:
NEOCONSERVATIVE.

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
   An ideological abstraction adopted as a universal value by the management of large corporations.

The level playing field is an idealized vision of the open market. Here the close relationship between corporate mythology and competitive sport is fully consummated. The theory is that, in a world where governments have not falsified the natural rules of the market-place, corporations will be able to go out onto the field and struggle manfully against each other. In these conditions the best “man,” that is, the most efficient, will win. The result will be low prices, maximum production and varied choice for the consumer, as well as progress, continual growth and prosperity.

Curiously enough this essentially American concept has an old-fashioned British Empire etymology. But the training of élites on playing fields—Eton's or not—implied an idea of ethics. There would be competition, but it would be fair and good and among gentlemen. There was also never any suggestion that playing fields were places of open or free competition. Or that they were exempted from national regulations. Every second in sport, after all, is controlled by strictly enforced man-made rules.

The playing field is a paradigm of regulations. Its length and width are defined. It is usually marked out with lines across which a player can cross only in defined circumstances. The number of players, their roles, how long they can be on, penalties for breaking rules, regulated uniforms, pads and instruments, the length of each period, the length of the game itself—all of this is regulated and enforced. To the extent that a playing field is made level, it is by complex regulations and, as in golf and horse-racing, man-made handicaps.

Sport is a romantic metaphor for warfare. Real men fight according to strict rules and the winner takes all. The fate of the losers, whether death or humiliation, isn't of great concern. The playing field is unapologetically exclusive. It seeks to promote the winner and exclude the losers.

If the word “level” is defined as meaning unregulated and is added to the term playing field, and that phrase is applied to a whole economy, then a further step has been taken. Not only does such an economy seek to exclude all losers but it attempts to remove the normal restraining rules of sport. On this level playing field there is no room for public service, the public weal, self-restraint, responsibility or any civic virtue.

As a result, the one thing the level playing field is not is level. It is a slippery slope on which only the strongest or the biggest can grab hold. The rest slip down into a heap at the bottom and scratch each other's eyes out in an attempt to rise to the level of survival.