The Doubter's Companion (6 page)

In 1993 the departing director of the French secret service, Claude Silberzahn, laid out for his agents their three principal areas of work. The first two were the rise of “ethnic intolerance” and the “extraordinary and frenetic quest for money in all its forms…by the political and economic élites, as if money had no smell…when often it is dirty, doubtful and illicit.”
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This atmosphere repulses most people.

More balanced citizens may have strong convictions about the public weal and public service. But they are less likely to be obsessed by the exercising of power. The Federalist Papers, in arguing for the new American constitution, argued for checks and balances which would neutralize the power of factions and so draw the best citizens out into the public process. But the ultimate checks and balances are not constitutional. They are the approval and disapproval of the citizen. So long as we reward raw ambition and the skilful manipulation of power, we will continue to draw those whose interest is self-interest. See:
BANALITY
and
CARLYLE.

BALANCE
   See:
HUMANISM.

BALLROOM
   There are four architectural periods:

Pre-1850: Situated one floor above ground level (the
piano nobile
) in a palace, chateau or large house. Vaulted ceilings were succeeded by flat painted ceilings. Used for dancing. A mainstay of the Jane Austen–Leo Tolstoy novel.

1850–1945: Situated on the ground floor of hotels and commonly decorated with classical columns and gold leaf. The floors were sprung for dancing, but they are now most often used by businessmen's lunch clubs to listen to speakers or for charity functions. A fixture of Edith Whartonesque fiction.

1946–1970: Situated on the fortieth floor (the penthouse) where they revolve. These rooms are decorated with oil-based materials in primary colours. They are usually empty. Sometimes used in feature films to depict modern life.

Post-1970: Situated in hotel basements beside the garage. These cement rooms seat 2,500 people when all the partitions are folded back. They are used for
BUSINESS CONFERENCES
and
AWARD SHOWs.
Thanks to the division of society into thousands of specialized groups, they are always full. The basement ballroom has replaced the opera house, which itself replaced the royal palaces as the place in which the élites legitimize themselves. They exist in a post-literate vacuum. See:
CORPORATISM.

BANALITY
   The political philosopher Hannah Arendt confused the meaning of this word by introducing in 1961 her brilliant but limiting concept, “the banality of evil.” In the late 1980s and early 1990s a minor political figure, Brian Mulroney, released the term by demonstrating that it could also reasonably be understood to mean the evil of banality. See:
CARLYLE
and
SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS.

BANKERS
   Pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.

All three Western religions have always forbidden the collection of interest on loans. When Samuel Johnson defined the banker in the eighteenth century his status was clear: “One that trafficks in money.”
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Their venal sin of usury continues to sit high on lists of scriptural wrongdoing, which raises the question of why bankers—the money-market sort excluded—tend to be frequent church-goers. The respect in which they have increasingly been held over the last two centuries has paralleled the growth of economics based on long-term debt, which has spread into every corner of society, from governments and corporations to the poor. The more money owed, the more the lender is respected, so long as the borrower intends to pay it back.

But what effect does this have on the moral position of bank employees? Few modern bankers are owners. Except through their salaries they do not profit from interest payments. Are they or are they not among the damned? Perhaps they should themselves be seen as victims of usury, having little choice but to lend their lives to the usurious process in order to feed their families. Yet for the borrower, these employees are the human face of usury.

The clearest situation for bankers would be if God didn't exist. They would then be morally home-free and could go to church in a more relaxed frame of mind. See: DEBT.

BARONS: ROBBER, PRESS, ETC.
   Individuals operating in spite of—or perhaps thanks to—a severe inferiority complex transformed into megalomania.

As Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller demonstrated, the robber variety can find some inner peace through the semi-physical therapy of having people make and do things. A select few may even come to resemble the sort of mediaeval barons who bullied King John into signing the Magna Carta. The press sector offers less scope for improvement. Devoid of practical therapeutic tools, it leaves the mentally unstable to pontificate publicly while using their power to bully others into silence. So long as the widespread ownership of newspapers prevents them from limiting the public's general freedom of speech, these unhappy individuals provide others with the welcome distraction of colourful comic relief. See:
INFERIORITY COMPLEXES.

BEES
   In his
Philosophical Dictionary
Voltaire points out that bees seem superior to humans because one of their secretions is useful. Nothing a human secretes is of use; quite the contrary. Whatever we produce makes us disagreeable to be around.
⁵

The bee's social organization also invites comparisons. If the queen were to be removed and the drones were able to convince the worker bees to go on working while they stepped in as
MANAGER
s, what would happen to our supply of honey?

BIOGRAPHICAL FILMS
   Since attention to historical detail ruins filmed drama, the essential property of biographical cinema is that it improves in quality by not telling the truth.

These films, whether describing the lives of American presidents or criminals, French generals or Russian kings, are among the major beneficiaries of the “big lie” idea. As a result they have helped to create a modern mythology which erases the Western idea of intellectual inquiry and returns to the pre-intellectual tradition of mythological gods and heroes. This is the context in which portraits of John Kennedy, James Hoffa, Al Capone, Napoleon and so on can most easily be understood.

BIOGRAPHY
   Respectable pornography, thanks to which the reader can become a peeping tom on the life of a famous person.

Biography has increasingly replaced the novel as the most popular form of serious reading. While in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the novel provided the reader with a reflection of him or herself, today the biography encourages the gratuitous pleasures and self-delusion of voyeurism. See:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

BIRTH CONTROL PILL
   Responsible for a sense of loss and even failure among people who came of age in the 1960s, the birth control pill produced a twenty-five-year-long holiday from reality. For the first time in history, sex had no consequences. It was what it felt like. Nothing more.

Then a rising tide of new venereal diseases appeared, culminating with AIDS. And part of the feminist movement began to argue that the pill reflected a male desire for convenience, while another part replied that it gave women control. They no longer had to berate men to take precautions. And suddenly, like a ghost from the past, the condom was back. For the rest of their lives the sixties generation will live in an atmosphere of regret—some over the good times lost forever, but most because they didn't take advantage of a once-in-eternity opportunity. See:
ORGASM.

BLOOD (1)
   A mythological and almost always invisible liquid.

Apart from a banal utility as the fuel of life, its real value lies in what is called the blood line. Purity of line justifies all actions which are dependent on paternity, tribalism and nationalism. Blood lineage makes certain groups better lovers, others more individualistic, others more honest, others quite simply nicer. It fuels their creative genius. Makes them courageous and inspired warriors.

These are the burdens, which each individual must bear, as copulation interweaves with history. They cannot assume individual responsibility. Individuals are not even responsible for their own claims of superiority which lead them to murder, rape, exploit or dominate others. Such acts can only be attributed to paternity or tribalism.

Unfortunately, modern medicine has still to catch up with these self-evident truths. It remains unable to prove paternity, let alone racial purity. Laboratories can only reduce blood to a few broad types common to most races. Fortunately, the demonstrable fact that certain tribes are better lovers or more individualistic and the clear understanding that particular groups deserve to be raped and murdered removes the need for scientific proof of the blood line.

BLOOD (2)
   The most probable explanation for the fundamental practicality of women versus the endemic romanticism of men is that women, from twelve years old to their mid-fifties, must handle their own blood as it pours from their bodies one week out of every four.

The signs of male mortality are much more abstract. Only war guarantees them a regular confrontation with blood, which may explain the romance of organized violence.

Men have always presented themselves as clear-headed and practical versus the female who is enveloped in a romantic mist. This is an early and persistent example of the
DICTATORSHIP OF VOCABULARY.
See also:
TOUGH.

BLUE JEANS
   One of the most successful impositions of voluntary visual conformism in the history of the world. Curiously enough, the primary attribute of this particular piece of clothing is meant to be a rejection of conformity in the name of individualism.

BORING
   The scientific community speaks about its work in a cool and disinterested manner. To present an exciting profile would be unprofessional. Any excess of emotion would suggest a lack of neutrality and therefore a tendency to read what they want in the facts rather than reporting what they see. Scientific objectivity must therefore appear to be boring.

Scientists are well aware that their work is neither boring nor objective. If it were, very few discoveries would be made.

Social science, being falsely empirical, is triply obsessed by the obligation to present itself as the objective interpretation of observed reality. Since the more or less hard edges of scientific inquiry are not involved, social scientists are free to be more categorical about truth, reality and what they call facts. They therefore seek to be more boring than scientists. See:
DIALECTS.

BRETTON WOODS
   A system for international financial management and stability which was put in place by the Allies, minus the Soviets, in 1944 and destroyed in 1973 by President Richard Nixon without consideration being given to a replacement.

Nixon hoped in this way to solve some short-term American economic problems by re-creating the sort of financial disorder in which the largest power would be best placed to benefit. It could be said that this was the single most evil act undertaken by an elected leader in the postwar period. Other leaders should not be discouraged, however. The opportunity to do worse is perpetual. See:
DEPRESSION.

BRIEFING BOOKS
   The protocols of power in the second half of the twentieth century.

Whoever structures and/or writes the argument, which each book disguises as objective fact and disinterested analysis, ultimately controls the decision-making process. Briefing books are rarely read by those who receive them, but are referred to as if they contained Holy Writ. Where once a single collection of Testaments was sufficient, thousands of these contemporary gospels are now presented every day in every sector in every country. They assert brief moments of artificially constructed absolute truth. See:
FACTS.

BUDDHISM (TIBETAN)
   The most popular form of Buddhism in the West because it has the least Buddhist content.

Like Christianity, Buddhism contains many schools. Some concentrate on providing their priests, preachers or monks with a living, usually by appealing to the least noble instincts in the population. The Tibetan approach combines Buddhist form with content dominated by the worst of animism.

Tibet is a country in which poverty was and remains the rule, where the monkhood has always been the equivalent of a privileged élite. For centuries religion has been the sole export and only source of hard currency. So a select group in each generation of monks would walk down out of the mountains to chant and teach in richer places. China was their primary source of income. The difficulty was that the sophisticated Chinese élites weren't particularly interested in the Buddha's argument.

The aristocracy and the Mandarins were already committed to the complex ethical system of Confucius, thanks to which the empire could be administered. What they wanted from these rather crude but mysterious mountain monks were light entertainment and amusement. Like a miraculous glove adjusting to the hand it needs to fit, the Tibetans complied by drawing upon their childhood memories of superstition and magic.

With the Chinese invasion of the 1950s most of the monks were either locked into the country or locked out. For those on the outside life continued as it always had, except that they travelled West instead of East. In the process they discovered that, as with the pre-revolutionary Chinese élites, our equivalent had a taste for mystical circus entertainment.

They also discovered that the rich Westerners, who were dissatisfied enough with their lives to approach a Buddhist teacher, were nevertheless attached to their money and belongings. They were often willing to finance the monks, but not to become devoutly poor themselves. Although Buddhism is primarily about giving up desires and attachments to the tangible world, these monks have diligently worked to demonstrate that Westerners are an exception to the rule. The monks have developed an anti-materialistic way of materialism to help us through our lives. Providing we're willing to do a bit of chanting and fasting, we can have our cake and eat it. Reflecting on the glovelike approach of these holy men, it is difficult not to believe that our modern concept of the service industry was originally a Tibetan invention.