The Doubter's Companion (27 page)

Left to its own devices the market is capable of the most miraculous of inventions and the silliest of self-delusions. It is an extreme romantic. It also has a real purpose—the same one it has always had. That is to organize the supply and exchange of goods or to finance the production of goods—thus facilitating and financing the economy. But the market cannot achieve in a regular and lasting manner its own purpose because it is only an unconscious and abstract mechanism. The factor which must be added in order to create the restraint, balance and consciousness necessary for long-term prosperity is human leadership. That leadership takes the form of effective
REGULATION.

The market-place is, of course, a very good thing. Without it we are reduced to being exploited by personal or bureaucratic absolutism.

But is it a sufficient foundation upon which to build a society? Does it provide or permit a viable relationship between citizens? Does the market know so much more than we that it would be better to simply defer to it? Must we pray before its opaque inevitability?

In all earlier civilizations, it should be remembered, commerce was treated as a narrow activity and by no means the senior sector in society.

In our current faith built on competition, efficiency and the market-place, the technocrats' role as religious facilitators has been expanded to one of paramount importance. However, the message coming out of this priesthood is sometimes difficult to grasp, with its meaning buried inside the impenetrable dialect of post-modern economics. But if all of that is simply stripped away, what remains is a simple message: our repeated attempts since the eighteenth century to regulate economies have apparently failed. By extension this priesthood is saying that, from classical Greece on, all of our attempts to control the savage economic elements which surround us in order to bring about reasonable stability have been pointless.

It appears that we should have been passive all along. Had we relaxed and let the market decide, this abstract economic force would have found its own natural balance. In other words, what at first glance appears to be a practical, down-toearth approach to doing business turns out to be a straightforward rejection of the idea of civilization. Part of the explanation is that our contemporary priests are better at
ECONOMETRICS
than they are at general social analysis. Most of them don't really seem to know much about how civilizations function or how humans have dealt with similar problems in the past.

After all, past civilizations have successfully regulated their economic lives over long periods of time. And they have done this to the general advantage of society. Collapse, when it comes, more often has to do with social change than with the forces of the market-place. Societies rise, grow old and die; we all know that. In the meantime centuries of successful economic regulation have made social structures work in places as varied as Athens, Rome, mediaeval Europe and in much of the modern West.

Our priests have reduced past history to its short and sharp failures, instead of concentrating on the long periods of success. Market economists are little more than naïve nihilists. If we were to apply their approach to other areas, painting for example, we would reduce the history of art to chocolate-box pictures and conclude that the human race should stop painting and merely receive images from the landscape which surrounds us. See:
HOLY TRINITY—TWENTIETH CENTURY.

MARXIST
   The only serious functioning Marxists left in the West are the senior management of large, usually transnational corporations. The only serious Marxist thinkers are
NEO-CONSERVATIVE.

Marxism is primarily an analysis of how society works—or rather, how it must work. This dialectic is based upon the struggle of the classes and the battle of the unregulated market-place in which the strongest win. It is a market-place which cannot be tempered, according to Marx. It must and will run free and so function as a battleground between those who have power and those who don't. The marketplace will seek to maximize profits even if this is to the disadvantage of most. Profits and power are the truth of the economic struggle and economic determinism will decide the social structure.

Most functioning Marxists had stopped believing this sort of stuff by the end of the Second World War. They had come around to the ideology of stable bureaucratic management. In that they resembled the technocrats of Western governmental and corporate bureaucracies.

But these Western corporate managers and their academic acolytes were in fact thrown into a state of confusion by the collapse of 1929. It seemed as if the pure capitalist analysis, of which they were the official inheritors, had failed. An unrestricted market-place had led not to ongoing growth and prosperity, but to total economic collapse. The ideology of a natural and general equilibrium produced by competition had been given its chance and had self-destructed for all to see and suffer the consequences.

A good thirty-five years passed before the corporate leaders were able to erase from their own memory and from that of the public this failure. They then rediscovered with a virginal ideologic enthusiasm the virtues of the unregulated market.

This time they were supported by an intellectually sophisticated explanation for the dialectic provided by a group of economists centred at the
CHICAGO SCHOOL.
They were able to dispense with the idea that public institutions could achieve social stability, protect the weak or encourage a wider distribution of wealth. Their new argument would have made Marx proud. It was not that they did not wish to help the weak or promote fairness. It was the natural rules of the market-place—the dialectic—which made the class struggle inevitable.

The only disagreement between the Neo-conservatives and Marx is over who wins the battle in the end. This is a small detail. Far more important is their agreement that society must function as a wide-open struggle.

Some people are surprised that Marxism should have reemerged on the Right. However, ideas, once launched, become public property. And they often reappear in several disguises before discovering their true form.

MELON, THE
   See:
STRAWBERRY.

MEMORY
   A practical quality which allows us to weigh what has already been done against what might be done now. Memory is therefore a key to responsible action.

The rational method has slowly reduced memory to romanticism. “This power of retaining,” as Samuel Johnson put it, “is particularly useful for identifying old actions which have simply been dressed up in new clothes for reapplication by a new generation.”
¹
In the contemporary Oxford definition, the solid operative words Johnson used are gone. In their place are “recollection, remembrance, remember.”
²

Romanticism is a fantasized version of the past. Unpleasant events and personal or national failures are erased, while comforts and successes are exaggerated. Or wrongs may be exaggerated and comforts and successes erased. On either side romanticism is intended to energize false hopes. In its most exaggerated form it denies the relevance of memory and constructs free-standing abstract ideologies.

Memory—that is, the real power to retain—is central to the idea of a
HUMANIST
equilibrium. It is despised by the sophisticated structures of management, which delight in romanticism as a useful plaything.

MONARCHS, IN PARTICULAR, ROYAL ALLIANCES
   Essential to the development and spread of rich desserts.

Catherine de Medici arrived in France with macaroons. Marie de Medici was energized by the sugar injections of her Neapolitan pastry chef, who brought such hometown specialties to Paris as the
millefeuille.
The absorption of Normandy by the French kings helped to popularize the northern habit of combining vast quantities of butter and cream with something sweet. King Stanislaus Leszinski of Poland poured rum on his
baba
for the first time in 1736. The Hapsburgs sponsored endless variations on the trinity of bitter chocolate, cream and cake throughout their vast empire. Emperor Franz Josef's favourite was the Ischler Törtchen from Zauner. It has the deceptive appearance of a large double cookie, but the butter-crumbly cake is filled with a chocolate-and-vanilla cream, apricot marmalade on top, bitter chocolate covering that, and sprinkled with crushed pistachios.

That the utility of royal families was coming to an end could be seen in late nineteenth-century Vienna, where so much good work had been done, when Franz Josef's wife, the Empress Elizabeth, had a personal gymnasium installed in her royal apartments and began to watch her figure as if she were an actress. From there to a commoner-become-Princess of Wales who suffered from bulimia has been an unfortunate direct line. See:
WHITE BREAD.

MONEY MARKETS, INTERNATIONAL
   An imaginary market in which a multiple illusion of currencies is speculated upon without reference to the normal agreements on value.

The quantities of money traded bear no relationship to growth or production. They are manifestations of pure inflation. The international money markets represent the regularization, through a specialist technocracy and a revolution in technological communications, of the speculative economy. The South Sea Bubble, John Law and all the other great financial manipulations of the last three centuries have finally been normalized as standard business practice.

Simpler people may be confused. They may feel that the economic instability which has persisted for two decades will not recede until some order and control has been brought to this inflationary speculation. The more sophisticated among us know that times have changed and that markets no longer need to be related to reality. These international money markets are a new truth. Of what and for what is irrelevant. Only the naïve would concern themselves with those questions. There is a market. There is competition. All the rest is idle chatter.

MONEY, THE VOLATILIZATION OF
   The act of causing wealth to disappear from an economy. This is most effectively done through speculation in areas unrelated to growth.

Societies get into trouble when they begin to believe that money is real, which it isn't. Those foolish enough to forget that money is in the nature of a working illusion based on a tacit agreement about value also tend to mistreat their currency. For example, they may shove it out onto an unregulated market-place where every punter can give it a kick. They may endlessly print it, which produces classic inflation. Or they may use it for speculation in an uncontrolled manner, which will cause the money to evaporate. All of this constitutes volatilization and causes poverty.

Money comes closest to respecting the agreement on value when it is earned and multiplied through investment, labour and purchasing. Investment and labour produce real goods which can be bought. The money lent for investment earns interest for the banks. The wages earned by labour are deposited in those same institutions. If the banks in turn lend a reasonable multiple of this money out to people investing in real growth or in the sort of property which practical needs make necessary, there is a potential for real growth in value.

But if banks use this value to speculate or lend to those who speculate, they risk volatilization. For example, if they speculate unnecessarily in the international currency markets and lose, then the real wealth created by investment, production and labour simply evaporates with that lost money. If they lend it to those who speculate in property, as has increasingly happened over the last thirty years, then the day the property boom collapses, the real value which the speculators had borrowed also evaporates. The same is true of the large merger and take-over speculations of the last three decades. And of the international money-market binges.

Speculators and corporate managers berate us for not working hard enough to create sufficient wealth to fuel growth. But a more reasonable explanation for the lack of solid money in our society is that repeatedly over the last thirty years the citizenry have deposited the real wealth they created by investing, working and producing. And repeatedly their élites have borrowed that money and volatilized it. See:
DEPRESSION.

MORAL CRUSADE
   Public activity undertaken by middle-aged men who are cheating on their wives or diddling little boys.

Moral crusades are particularly popular among those seeking power for their own personal pleasure, politicians who can't think of anything useful to do with their mandates and religious professionals suffering from a personal inability to communicate with their god. In military terms, a diversionary tactic.

MORO, ALDO
   A leading Christian Democrat and former Italian Prime Minister. Moro was kidnapped on March 16, 1978, by as yet unidentified terrorists. After a two-month drama in which the police had no success, his body was found in the trunk of a car in the centre of Rome outside 9 via Michelangelo Caetani.

This is a short block away from—in fact equidistant between—the headquarters of the Christian Democrat party and the Communist party, which are just down the street from the Gesù, the Jesuit headquarters which, curiously enough, is across the little piazza del Gesù from the Italian headquarters of the Masonic Order. Only the mafia are missing from this intimate neighbourhood, but then they rarely advertise their office locations and often prefer to work indirectly through the good offices of political, social and religious organizations.

The killers' choice of a drop-off location indicates a sense of humour. Either that or they didn't have far to drive.

There is now a fine life-size medallion of the slain leader's head beside a very large, elegant bronze plaque high on the wall at number 9. The plaque contains several extensive explanatory paragraphs written in a handsome raised lettering, also bronze. Unfortunately the script size is so small that no one can read the message.