Excerpts from The Unconscious Civilization
by John Ralston Saul
(as annotated by Robert Bateman, reprinted with permission from the author)
The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good.
The point of these received wisdoms of the second half of the 20th century is that the very heart and soul of our 2,500 year old civilization is, apparently, economics, and from that heart flowed, and continues to flow, everything else. We must therefore fling down and fling up the structures of our society as the marketplace orders. If we don't, the marketplace will do it anyway.
It's not that the economists' advice hasn't been taken. It has, in great detail, with great reverence. And in general, it has failed.
Now, given our inability over the past two decades to deal with an unbreakable chain of unemployment, debt, inflation and no real growth, we have drifted farther and farther out into a cold, unfriendly, confusing sea. The new certitude of those in positions of authority - those out of the water - is that the certain answer is to cut away the life preservers.
The relatively conservative English military historian John Keegan states that 50 million people have been killed by war since the peace began in 1945. What's more, much of the responsibility for such violence lies with the international arms traffic - the largest international trade good of our day.
And although government after government, from the Left to the Right, has been elected on a platform of job creation, the reality is that they have no idea of what to do. Why? Because jobs are one of the last steps on the production chain.
Anyway, the marketplace these days is into job elimination.
Edward Luttwak, the conservative American historian, says that if current trends continue, the United States will be a Third World country by 2020.
The neo-conservatives, who are closely linked to the neo-corporatists, are rather different. They claim to be conservatives, when everything they stand for is a rejection of conservatism. They claim to present an alternate social model, when they are little more than the courtiers of the corporatists movement. Their agitation is filled with the bitterness and cynicism typical of courtiers who
scramble for crumbs at the banquet tables of real power, but are always denied a proper chair.
We have all by our actions or lack of them - in particular over the last quarter century - agreed to deny reality.
The world is filled today, as it has often been in the past, with nations that embrace free markets, close censorship and false or no general elections.
We've had a hundred years of psychotherapy and things are getting worse.
Socrates: "Let no day pass without discussing goodness."
The money used to produce a 20 second spot for McDonald's would finance hours of television programming. Propaganda is therefore the purpose. Content is the frill or decoration.
Socrates: "If I say I cannot "mind my own business" you will not believe that I am serious. If on the other hand I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and that examining both myself or others is really the very best thing a man can do and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living, you will be even less inclined to believe me. Nevertheless, gentlemen, that is how it is."
Many individuals in identifying government as their enemy have focused almost exclusively on the bureaucracy of government, but business is also dominated by a top-heavy bureaucracy. I would suggest that today the problem of managerial deadweight is far greater in the private sector than in the public. I would suggest that one of the key reasons that the private sector has been unable to revive and reinvent itself over the last two decades has been a lack of creativity brought on by a managerial rather than a creative owner-based leadership.
This is what makes the neo-conservative and market force arguments so ingenuous. Their remarkably successful demonization of the public sector has turned much of the citizenry against their own mechanism. They have been enrolled in the cause of interests that have no particular concern for the citizen's welfare. Instead, the citizen is reduced to the status of a subject at the foot of the throne of the marketplace.
There has been a remarkable growth in the lobbying industry, which has as its sole purpose the conversion of elected representatives and senior civil servants to the particular interest of the lobbyist. That is, lobbyists are in the business of corrupting the people's representatives and servants away from the public good.
Of course, the regional governments can't raise taxes. The source of revenue would simply leave for another region. In fact, the effect of decentralization without guaranteed funding and national and multinational standards is a competition between regions for the lowest possible tax rates.
Technology and the market are useful phenomena to be respected. But they are neither gods nor wild animals.
...the transnational or the very large national corporation. Their training and these structures have very little to do with capitalism or risk. They are reincarnations of the seventeenth-century royal monopolies.
Most business leaders who preach the ideology of capitalism, free markets, personal initiative and risk are themselves not capitalists. At the top of their bureaucratic business profession, the managers take fewer personal risks than a senior civil servant, who does not have the protection of stock options and golden parachutes.
So the effect of the privatization movement is to take perfectly good private-sector risk capital and invest it in the non-risk side of the economy. Private industry energy and money that ought to be going into front-line capitalist activity is being diverted to the rear guard of basic services.
The marketplace has been constantly evoked over the last quarter-century as the source of freedom and democracy as well as the only possible force to lead us back to growth. But after two decades of having their way, the exponents of this theory have no results to show us. But they have been in charge, they have held and continue to hold the levers of power, and they have not produced. This is a very long trial period - five times the length of a world war, double the reign of Napoleon who changed the face of Europe, longer than the reign of Stalin or Roosevelt, whose regimes had such fundamental impacts.
A few decades ago we were told that only if inflation were defeated would growth revive. Subsequently we were told that the key to
growth was to cut the fat in business. Then it turned out that the problem was the fat in government. Then salvation was to come
through an increase in trade. We have done all of these things. Nothing has happened.
But what happens to the corporate money that is not taxed? If it were invested properly, perhaps the growth engendered would be worth society's sacrifice. But, as I have already said, the managers have been wasting their corporations' massive incomes on such things as mergers and acquisitions, privatized public utilities which are unlikely to engender growth, to say nothing of their skyscrapers and high salaries.
The unregulated money markets have now given us over twenty years of crisis, instability, gratuitous speculation and no real growth. And on the subject of growth, what we are experiencing is a feeding frenzy of delusion. The money markets are a prime example. But so also are the commercial property booms; the endless investment in management structures; and our embroidering of consumerism which ranges from the highly baroque to the outright lunatic.
You know a society is in trouble when the virtual totality of the elite, now a good third of the population, adopts public silence and private passivity on the professional level, then walks away from society to blow off accumulated steam on private pleasures.
Our civilization is locked in the grip of an ideology - corporatism. An ideology that denies and undermines the legitimacy of individuals as the citizen in a democracy. The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a worship of self-interest and a denial of the public good. The practical effects on the individual are passivity and conformism in the areas that matter, and non-conformism in the areas that don't.
(From the CBC Massey Lecture Series)
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