The Doubter's Companion (10 page)

Competition in a middle-class society must include the costs of a middle-class infrastructure. In a Third World society these secondary costs are almost non-existent. Thus if a middle-class people compete without the benefit of a formal handicap against slaves (to take the most extreme example), the slaves will be more competitive.

Hundreds of other factors create hundreds of other levels of competition. That's why in serious competition, such as hockey or football, there are strict regulations controlling time, movement, numbers, dress, language. Unregulated competition is a naïve metaphor for anarchy. See:
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD.

COMTE, AUGUSTE
   Having invented sociology, he bears some responsibility for society's return to a persistent belief that human behaviour can be quantified—as it was in the Middle Ages with the statistical weighing of sins. Behaviour can then be altered in a manner satisfactory to the value system established by the quantifiers—rather in the way sins could be wiped out through the calculation and sale of indulgences. See:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
and
FREUD.

CONFESSIONALS
   Business schools, law schools, medical schools and schools of public administration have recently taken to teaching ethics with some enthusiasm. This has come in response to the widespread public perception of unethical behaviour by the élites—in particular by the corporate leadership—during the 1980s. The public's scepticism and the eagerness of the élite schools to appear to be doing better are signs of a general crisis of confidence in the rational élites.

However, the general thrust of what is taught in these schools remains unethical or is simply detached from ethics. The market-place, for example, is presented as a form of pure competition enshrining rational and necessary values such as efficiency, productivity and profit. Ethics taught in this context is reduced to a non-competitive sacrifice or something which may have to be dealt with in order to facilitate management.

What does it mean to throw in an hour of ethics on Friday afternoon, except a return to the weekly confessional visit in a society organized to encourage sin? We teach ethics to make people feel better by making them feel guilty. Perhaps that's why the chapel at the Harvard Business School was financed by the graduates of Michael Milken's year. See:
ETHICS.

CONRAD, JOSEPH
   The essential modern writer. He demonstrated that the novel could have a third century of relevance if the story was transformed into metaphysics disguised as reality.

Many of those who have continued to believe that the novel is central to public communication have gone out of their way to acknowledge Conrad as a spiritual godfather. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, André Malraux, J.M.G. Le Clézio, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez among others.

Their conviction can be opposed to the prolongation of the art for art's sake movement, which has paralleled the West's obsession with specialization. Rather like doctors who devote their lives to a single organ, this school of writing has tried to divide fiction into a multitude of water-tight compartments. Their use of language is divisive and given to what might be called literary dialects which resemble the rigid
SCHOLASTIC
dialectics of the Middle Ages.

Conrad's most obvious strength was that of a Pole coming to English as an adult. While other writers were struggling with the baggage of their respective literatures, Conrad enjoyed virginal freedom. Just as his life at sea forced a certain practicality upon him, no matter how dramatic the circumstances, so the uncharted waters of English turned him into a practical explorer of the language. And his emotional freedom from any particular nation, with their interests and prejudices, made him a natural Universalist. When he wrote about power or ambition or hypocrisy or courage, he wrote about the things themselves in a way which has rarely been accomplished.

CONSULTANTS
   In an attempt to discredit SOCRATES, the SOPHIST Antiphon attacked him as follows:

Socrates, you decline to take money for your society. Yet, if you believed your cloak or house or anything you possess to be worth money, you would not part with it for nothing…. Clearly, then, if you set any value on your society, you would insist on getting the proper price for that too.… Wise you cannot be, since your knowledge is not worth anything.

Socrates replied:

Antiphon, it is common opinion among us in regard to beauty and wisdom that there is an honourable and a shameful way of bestowing them. For to offer one's beauty for money to all comers is called prostitution.… So is it with wisdom. Those who offer it to all comers for money are known as sophists, prostitutes of wisdom.
⁷

See:
ACADEMIC CONSULTANTS.

CONSUMPTION

“You can never get enough of what you don't really want."

” Eric Hoffer
⁸

The problem with markets dependent on consumption is that the consumer cannot be relied upon to know what he or she wants.

Consumers are unreliable. The producer must constantly try to outguess them. This is risky and tiring. Above all, in a stable middle-class society, people don't need or want enough goods to support an economy built upon their desire to consume. They already have a great deal. There is only so much room in their houses. Their family size shrinks as their class level rises. The middle-class mentality inevitably admires restraint and care and seeks quality goods which last and can be repaired.

It is therefore more rational to simply decide what people should want, then tell them they need it, then sell it to them. This three-step process is called consumption. See:
PROPAGANDA.

CONTROL, BEING IN
   Ideal of managers and housewives. The enemy of creativity and growth, whether economic, social or individual. One of the most destructive characteristics of modern society.

What is it exactly that they are trying to control? See:
FEAR
and
MANAGER.

CONVENIENCE
   Thanks to flags of convenience and Third World fleets, the world of shipping—No! Don't skip this!—has been the first sector to attain the Utopian ideal of free trade.

Most goods that cannot be shipped by road or rail continue to move by boat. Only information can travel by the air waves and only small, light, high-cost goods by air itself. What could be more fitting? The first sector to achieve a truly open market in the new global economy is the one whose business it is to make the global market function.

The result has been the virtual elimination of the merchant marines of developed countries. The new merchant marines belong to corporations which sail under flags of convenience or are domiciled in large Third World countries.

Flags of convenience are truly Utopian because they permit the avoidance of all national regulations. They are issued by small countries which do not care what happens on the ships carrying their flag. Ownership is usually structured through off-shore financial mazes in order to escape completely from restrictive regulations.

The now enormous Third World merchant marines have simpler structures. A Filipino ship will probably have a Filipino captain and crew. They are able to compete against the flags of convenience because the Filipino government either encourages them to operate in a competitive manner or turns a blind eye to the way they function.

How are competitive shipping rates achieved by either system? Lower maintenance and safety standards keep expenses down. The crews are protected by no civilized regulations. At best they are treated as raw labour to be paid wages that are a mere fraction of those in developed countries. They can also be hired, fired and treated on a day-today basis exactly as the captain wishes. Since many of the crews are national units from Third World countries, the practical effect has been the creation of small floating slave gangs. Having gradually outlawed socially unacceptable standards on our own ships, we promptly sabotaged our fleets by sending and receiving our goods on those which adhere to eighteenth-century standards.

There is nothing to prevent us from creating an effective international registering system which only accepts ships that meet agreed-upon standards. Competition could then revolve around reliability, speed and service instead of depending on the lowest possible cost, achieved if necessary by the use of slave labour. Unregistered ships could be excluded from our ports.

But our governments suffer from an old syndrome—“If we don't use cheap labour, other countries will.” This formula has been used over the centuries to justify everything from the slave trade and child labour to intense pollution and selling arms to all comers. It is the most banal of excuses for doing wrong.

Our governments listen to the corporations, who quite simply have goods to ship and want to do so at the lowest possible cost. They say this is because the market-place must establish value and they believe that this can only be done through the free market, competition and efficiency. The shipping industry has proved that this is possible and shipping is central to trade and trade brings prosperity for everybody.

That the Western fleets have been destroyed in the process and ugly systems of exploitation re-established is beside the point. Government interference would mean an artificial market-place and the return of organized sailors with middle-class pretensions. When this happened between the 1930s and 1960s sailors in the merchant marine became so rich that they could easily have been mistaken for degenerate playboys. See:
FREE TRADE.

CORPORATION
   Any interest group: specialist, professional, public or private, profit-oriented or not. The one characteristic shared by all corporations is that the primary relationship of individual members is to the organization and not to society at large.

In a corporatist society, the corporation replaces the individual and therefore supersedes the role of democracy. In their own relationship with the outside world, corporations deal whenever possible with other corporations, not with individuals. The modern corporation is a direct descendant of the mediaeval craft guild.

CORPORATISM
   Among the most important yet most rarely used words. Better than any other it describes the organization of modern society.

Corporatism is the persistent rival school of representative government. In place of the democratic idea of individual citizens who vote, confer legitimacy and participate to the best of their ability, individuals in the corporatist state are reduced to the role of secondary participants. They belong to their professional or expert groups—their corporations—and the state is run by ongoing negotiations between those various interests. This is the natural way of organizing things in a civilization based on expertise and devoted to the exercise of power through bureaucratic structures.

One of the characteristics of a strong movement within a civilization is that it persists throughout long periods of history. Each time it fails to win or hold on to power, it will submerge into the general stream of events for a time and then resurface as if from nowhere, disguised in a new, more attractive form.

The early, practical corporatist organizations—the mediaeval craft guilds—were imitated in the organization and specialization of the Catholic religious orders. These two experiences produced the original corporatist states, the Republic of
VENICE
first among them. The whole concept was pushed by a growing intellectual rivalry between democracy and corporatism and a conscious intellectual movement in favour of corporatism.

Hegel, who was treated almost as “the official philosopher” during his time teaching philosophy in Berlin (1818–31), believed that “the real is the rational and the rational is the real.” He considered “a corporative state as more rational than democracy…citizens should participate in the affairs of the State as members of subordinate wholes, corporations or Estates, rather than as individuals… Representatives should represent corporations or Estates rather than the individual citizens precisely as such.”
⁹
It isn't surprising that the almost social-democratic policies of Bismarck in the second half of the nineteenth century were produced out of an essentially corporatist society.

The surface argument of corporatism has always been that democracy is inefficient, ineffective, corrupting, subject to whims and emotion. Corporatism, on the other hand, presents itself as professional and responsible. It promises to deliver prosperity by helping those who know how to do their jobs properly and in concert.

These claims resurfaced in the 1920s in Italy. And if Mussolini's cumbersome corporatist structures didn't function, corporatism itself did. In both Italy and Germany the relationships which were able to work quite happily under a dictatorship were those between expert groups. Even the academic community worked away happily on the theoretical structures of this new anti-parliamentary national contract.

Since 1945 we have downplayed the corporatist aspect of both the Nazis and the Fascists. Instead we have demonized those two regimes into simple manifestations of evil. Such false simplification obscures the fact that they were proposing—or rather reproposing—a complete and complex alternate to democracy.

The Second World War was about many things, but at its heart it was a battle between two concepts of civilization—the one based on individualism and democracy, the other on corporatist authoritarianism. Theoretically the democratic individualists won. Yet since 1945 corporatism has advanced with even greater strength and now has a real hold on day-to-day power. Somehow we seem to have lost World War II after all.

The first superficial corporatist resurgence came in the form of endless social contract negotiations during the 1960s and 1970s. Unions, management organizations and governments sat down to do deals in order to ensure the smooth functioning of society. This was presented as a new efficient form of government tailored to the new complex industrial state. Parliaments were seen as too cumbersome and inefficient to deal with their problems. Mediation and arbitration became greatly admired skills. Everyone seemed to have forgotten that these were precisely the arguments used by Mussolini. The new efficient process reached its chaotic conclusion in Britain, where elected governments of both the Left and the Right were held to ransom and eventually destroyed by these interest groups.