The Doubter's Companion (4 page)

ALLIES
   See:
SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS.

AMORALITY
   A quality admired and rewarded in modern organizations, where it is referred to through metaphors such as professionalism and efficiency.

Amorality is corporatist wisdom. It is one of the terms which highlights the confusion in society between what is officially taught as a value and what is actually rewarded by the structure.

Immorality is doing wrong of our own volition. Amorality is doing it because a structure or an organization expects us to do it. Amorality is thus worse than immorality because it involves denying our responsibility and therefore our existence as anything more than an animal. See:
BLOOD (1)
and
ETHICS.

ANGLO-SAXONS
   A racial group composed mainly of Celts, Chinese, Germans, Italians, Ukrainians, French and other peoples who have been conquered by or immigrated to the English-speaking world. To blame for everything. See:
XENOPHOBIA (PASSIVE)
.

ANIMISM
   Religion devoid of abstraction and therefore resistant to use by sophisticated power structures.

The last few decades have seen animism make a determined comeback, particularly among disaffected members of the rational élites. What their beliefs are has never been clear. Some talk of souls and spirits. Some of popular culture. Jung's archetypes have been remarkably popular.

Underlying all of this is a large group of highly educated people reaching for an integrated view of existence. The straightforward hill-tribe beliefs of Southeast Asia probably come as close as any to expressing their idea. Everything has life. Humans are alive, but then so are trees and rocks. We are all part of a single process so we must act in concert with the whole.

The large intellectual religions have little difficulty understanding each other, whatever their rivalries. They share almost identical ideals as well as their corruption by society. These religions also share a disdain for animism.

This usually takes the form of an attack on superstition. Some of it is justified. But most animistic superstition consists not of destructive fear but of populist ways to deal with social problems. Dietary rules. Marriage restrictions. The abstract religions do the same, except that their rules on everything from eating pork to fornication are apparently received as direct instructions from God.

What bothers the intellectual religions about animism is not the idea that everything from rocks to humans contains life, but that humans are therefore no more than a constituent part of a living whole which is the earth. That this view denies special rights and powers to the human is upsetting. That it denies special rights and powers to the structures of society is unacceptable.

Large organized societies are dependent on the separation of the human race from all the rest. This denial or demotion of the non-abstract frees us to act as if we were not limited by our physical realities. Without this liberation much of our
PROGRESS
would not have been possible.

And yet we are limited by physical realities. So our liberation has been built upon a great deal of self-delusion, which has turned gradually into very real political, social and economic weaknesses.

The argument today between those who see themselves as the forces of progress and those who appear to be resisting is a continuation of the old drive by the abstract religions to eliminate the animist view. Yet many of the new animists—environmentalists and sociologists, among others—are the product of a strange cross-breeding. They call for the reintegration of humanity into the worldly whole, but belong themselves to the intellectual structures of their enemies.

The professional environmentalists are a good example of this contradiction. They lobby like arms contractors. Haunt international conferences. Fight for tiny amendments in government and corporate behaviour. Small changes in content rules. They have the strength of fighting with their opponents' best weapons.

But after only twenty years in existence much of the environmental movement has taken on the form of just another corporation or interest group. Their interest may be disinterest, but their methods are one with the rational élites and are therefore limited to the details of corporatist life. These new animists are attempting to justify restraint and a common-sense approach to self-respect with the use of intellectual tools designed to eliminate both.

Still, they are a sign of more than dissatisfaction. There are dozens of other signs of people trying to take their distances from the rational system. Often these attempts seem silly or naïve and are discounted by the corporatist structures. But these people are reaching in the same direction, away from the isolation of our society. What they are seeking is some sense of integration or balance.

ANOREXIA
   A condition aspired to by most middle-class women. See:
MONARCHS.

ANSWERS
   A mechanism for avoiding questions.

This might be called obsessional avoidance or a manic syndrome. It is based on the belief that the possession of an education—particularly if it leads to professional or expert status and, above all, if it involves some responsibility or power—carries with it an obligation to provide the answer to every question posed in your area of knowledge. This has become much more than the opiate of the rational élites. It may be the West's most serious addiction.

Time is of the essence in this process. An inability to provide the answer immediately is a professional fault. The availability of unlimited facts can produce an equally unlimited number of absolute answers in most areas. Memory is not highly regarded. Right answers which turn out to be wrong are simply replaced by a new formula. The result of these sequential truths is an assertive or declarative society which admires neither reflection nor doubt and has difficulty with the idea that to most questions there are many answers, none of them absolute and few of them satisfactory except in a limited way.

Answers are the abstract face of
SOLUTIONS.

ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM
   A self-validation ritual created by and for intellectuals.

There is no reason to believe that large parts of any population wish to reject learning or those who are learned. People want the best for their society and themselves. The extent to which a populace falls back on superstition or violence can be traced to the ignorance in which their élites have managed to keep them, the ill-treatment they have suffered and the despair into which a combination of ignorance and suffering have driven them.

Given the opportunity, those who know and have less want themselves or their children to know and have more. They understand perfectly that learning is central to general wellbeing. The disappearance of the old working-class in Germany, France and northern Italy between 1945 and 1980 is a remarkable example of this understanding.

Yet political movements continue to capitalize on the dark side of populism. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s a number of groups gathered public support—Jean-Marie Le Pen and his
Front National
in France, Ross Perot in the United States, the new German Right, the Reform Party and the Bloc Québécois in Canada, the Northern League, Silvio Berlusconi's
Forza Italia
and the Neo-Fascist movement in Italy. These movements share the same message, each in their local way. It combines a simplistic as opposed to straightforward approach to public affairs with an ability to tap the public's disgust over the established élites.

The conclusion drawn by the
PLATO
nists—who account for most of our élites—is that the population constitutes a deep and dangerous well of ignorance and irrationality; if our civilization is in crisis the fault must lie with the populace which is not rising to the inescapable challenges. And yet civilizations do not collapse because the citizenry are corrupt or lazy or anti-intellectual. These people do not have the power or influence to either lead or destroy. Civilizations collapse when those who have power fail to do their job. Ross Perot was created by Harvard, not by illiterate farmers.

Our élites are concerned by what they see as intellectual
LUDDITISM
all around them—television, films and music prospering at the lowest common denominator; spreading functional illiteracy; a lack of public appreciation for the expertise which the élites see as guiding all aspects of human life. It appears to them as if the populace is stubbornly refusing to fill an appropriate role in a
CORPORATIST
society.

Perhaps this is because the anti-intellectualism over which the élites make such a fuss is in fact the reply of the citizenry to both the élites' own pretension of leadership and their failure to lead successfully. This profoundly pyramidal model of leadership takes the form of obscure language, controlled information and the reduction of individual participation at almost all levels to one of pure function.

The élites have masked their failures by insisting that the population is lazy, reads junk, watches television and is badly educated. The population has responded by treating the élites with a contempt reminiscent of the attitudes of the pre-modern underclasses.

If
ECONOMICS
are rendered incomprehensible except to experts and in addition are unable to deal with our economic problems, why should anyone respect economists? If the corporate managerial élites cannot explain in a non-dogmatic, reasonable manner what they are doing and why, is there any reason to believe that their decisions will serve the general good? If those who create the tools of public communication—such as fiction—write novels that do not communicate, why should the public consider these works relevant or important?

It's not that everyone must understand everything; but those who are not experts must see that they are being dealt with openly and honestly; that they are part of the process of an integrated civilization. They will understand and participate to the best of their ability. If excluded they will treat the élites with an equal contempt. See:
CIVILIZATION.

ANTS
   Ants do nothing 71.5 per cent of the time. They are trying to think of what can usefully be done next. And this in spite of their reputation—shared with beavers and BEES—as hard-working role models for the human race.

Most humans in positions of responsibility work more than 28.5 per cent of the time. It could be argued that, being brighter than ants, we need less time to think. This is a technically correct and reassuring argument. Yet a comparison of the incidence of error among ants versus that among human beings would not come out in our favour. We could counter that, by risking error, human society—or at least human knowledge—has progressed, while that of the ants remains stable. But if we are so bright, then why are we so eager to spend as long as possible on the non-intellectual tasks which hard work represents, while desperately economizing on the time spent thinking? An outside observer, an ant for example, might wonder whether we are afraid of our ability to think and more precisely of the self-doubt which it involves. See:
HARD WORK.

APPLE
   Spherical object created by thirty-two chemical products, then dipped in wax, then gassed. In the long run an apple is as likely to bring on a doctor as to keep one away.

APPLIED CIVILIZATION
   A gift of the physically or economically stronger to the weaker. See:
CIVILIZATION.

APPLIED CORPORATISM
   The mediocre usually gain power because of long service, corruption, back-room manipulations, error or luck. But from time to time they arrive at the top precisely because they are the accurate image of the power structure in place. And so occasionally, when a leader not good enough for the job wins office, the citizenry should be grateful for what amounts to a moment of truth.

George Bush was the exact reflection of a corporatist society. In his experience and attitudes he combined the interests of several business and government sectors. The standard ideological view—both that of the Right and of the Left—was that the Bush presidency presented an opportunity for special interests to cash in. And of course they did, leaving some happy and others outraged. But the principal role of a corporatist leader is not to help his friends grow rich. They will do that anyway. Nor is it to worry about the management of any one interest group.

The job of a corporatist president is to manage the relationships between the groups. In helping the arms industry to work with the Pentagon to work with the security agencies to work with the oil industry to work with the environmental agencies and so on, he encourages nationwide stability. If successful he will have indirectly eliminated interference from that rival system—citizen-based democracy—which technically maintains legal control over the constitutional structures of the Republic.

Criticisms of the Bush presidency based on accusations of corruption or of upper-class social indifference or of deficient domestic economic strategies missed the point. Corporatist leaders do not have policy strategies any more than they have ethical standards. What they do believe in is the stable management of cooperation between interest groups. This, they are convinced, will make society work effectively.

Even if the counterweight of ethics, democracy and justice is laid aside in such an argument, history proves the corporatists wrong. Interest groups are devoid of the broad common sense required to see beyond immediate self-interest. Without it they are little more than idiot savants, unable to avoid disasters and unable to understand why. Thus the superficial stability which President Bush produced was unsatisfactory and even unpleasant and was ultimately unacceptable to the voter. The one disadvantage attached to the inevitable dismissal by the public of a corporatist president is that the removal of an individual does not alter reality. See:
CORPORATISM.