The Doubter's Companion (28 page)

MUSEUMS
   Safe storage for stolen objects.

There are those who bridle at the idea of this thievery. On the other hand, spreading the creativity of the past around the world has protected it against war and disaster. Museums seem particularly concerned by the safety factor since they keep most of their objects in basement vaults. There curators can keep them catalogued and invisible while they go out to complete their collections by buying more or soliciting from
COLLECTORS.

MUSSOLINI, BENITO
   Much more than Hitler, he was the nascent modern Heroic leader. Mussolini combined the interests of corporatism with public relations and sport, while replacing public debate and citizen participation with false populism and the illusion of direct democracy.

His uniforms and strutting manners at first glance date him. But these were only a particularity of the time. His approach may have left an improvised rough-around-theedges impression, but he was inventing a genre. And it wasn't as rough as all that. He declared himself for and against policies without relationship to his real intentions, rather in the way consumer goods are now test-marketed in search of public desires which can then be exploited. He turned himself into a figure as imaginary as the Marlborough Man, by inventing his own past and arranging for biographies to be written which were pure fiction. Already in 1927 he was saying that “invention is more useful than truth.”
³

Mussolini returned to power in Italy in 1994 in a composite of three leaders. The head of the contemporary fascist party, Gianfranco Fini, had brought his party to its true home by adopting an anonymous technocratic image. Umberto Bossi's Northern League took on all the characteristics of rough-and-tumble false populism to disguise self-interest.

But the most wide-ranging refinement of the Mussolinian principles can be found in Silvio Berlusconi. His control of all private television and use of it for propaganda is flawless. He has adopted the early Fascist policy of advancing behind a major football team. This divisionary “populist” method was laid out in detail in 1939 by Mussolini's son-in-law, Count Ciano.
⁴
Berlusconi stated after buying U.C. Milan that in the future his empire would be like an iceberg, with the football team being the visible part. The name of his political party is a football chant—Go Italy! As for his rhetoric about free markets, it contradicts his use of monopolies, oligopolies and the technocracy. His rise to riches through close association with the most corrupt of politicians makes a mockery of his promise to clean things up.

None of this is secret. It is all widely and publicly discussed. Yet knowing does not seem to help.

The rise of the new Mussolinians demonstrates the failure of our hope that knowledge could defeat wrong. Knowledge unattached to a sensible balance of human qualities—such as ethics, memory, common sense and reason—is powerless. Knowledge unattached to humanism merely encourages the passive acceptance of what we know to be wrong.

Berlusconi is the modern face of corporatism. But he represents a general, not an Italian phenomenon. Similar false populist movements and individuals are springing up throughout the West. In the United States, English and French Canada, France and Germany they are capitalizing on the anger and confusion in the citizenry. The interests they represent are in large part responsible for the problems they denounce, but their appearances deny the relationship.

The depths of this illusion-versus-reality problem can be seen in the reaction to events in Italy of the weekly magazine
THE ECONOMIST
, the technocrat's Bible. A few days after the election, their lead editorial was devoted to a respectful and ethically neutral analysis of the Berlusconi-Neo-Fascist-Northern League success. What mattered, they concluded, in a tone reminiscent of similar interests faced by, the first rise of corporatism in the 1920s and 1930s, was that the new government “safeguard the economic legacy” of their predecessors.
⁵
In the next issue, the same page was devoted to railing against the hypocrisy of those who protested the rise of child labour in the
GLOBAL ECONOMY.
See:
CORPORATISM
and
DIRECT DEMOCRACY.

MUZAK
   A public noise neither requested nor listened to by individuals. It is the descendant of a school of public relations invented by the Nazis.

The underlying premise of Muzak is that individuals can be reduced to categories. If you can identify which category each individual belongs to, you can make them do what you want by providing the appropriate emotive surroundings and stimuli. The idea is to identify the few standard characteristics which link all individuals or satisfy them in particular circumstances. The Nuremberg Rally was an early attempt at creating this kind of total motivational atmosphere.

Born in elevators and supermarkets, Muzak has spread to restaurants, hotels, airplanes, telephone hold services and waiting rooms.

The public-relations experts believe that human beings fear silence—that is, the absence of constantly imposed direction. It is further believed that if we can be relieved of our fears, we will gain enough self-confidence to buy, eat, vote, fly, or simply go on living.

This approach, with its contempt for individuals, is the product of a false sense of superiority inside the world of public relations. “False” because their superiority takes the form of
CYNICISM
which is itself a sign of insecurity.

It isn't surprising, therefore, that Muzak often does not produce the intended results. Many people become annoyed when their hearing is invaded, particularly when the sound is persistent. Others fall silent and feel constrained, because they are part of a tradition that believes music should be listened to.

Designed to ease light talk in restaurants, background music more often reduces people to silence or to whispers. Intended to relax passengers as airplanes taxi down runways, it tends to enervate the majority who, had they wanted to listen to music at that moment, would have chosen other music. Places of entertainment or escape have come to resemble miniature brave new worlds where it has been calculated that the individual will disappear into a category. For example, restaurants which are not as good as they think tend to play baroque music. Expensive hotels, which seek to express quality but do not trust the taste of the rich, will mix Mozart and Sinatra together, as if they were one.

When employees are asked to turn it off or down, they reply:

1. The system is beyond their competence.

2. Other people would complain.

When asked whether anyone has ever complained about its absence on a day when it was inadvertently not turned on or, indeed, whether anyone has ever actually requested this sound or asked that a particular section be repeated, the employee will move away from the questioner.

MYRMECOPHAGA JUBATA
   Ant-eater. The existence of this predator demonstrates that thinking 71 per cent of the time, as ants do, won't prevent you from being eaten. Thinking less than that, as humans do, will almost guarantee it. See:
ANTS.

MYTHOLOGY
   Having killed God and replaced him with ourselves, we are dissatisfied with the results. How else can the rise of mythology be explained?

The man-god we opted for was a very narrow being whose powers were dependent on reason. We've now tried him in several costumes—above all, that of the superman and the systems-man. The result has been the reinstallation of a multiplying horde of mythological gods that have been tailored to leave us officially on our throne.

Nietzsche was only the most famous to lay out this pattern. Wagner projected the gods back onto the world stage with heavenly music. Jung gave them the authority of medical science by laying them out as archetypes from which none of us can escape. “Called or not,” he had carved over his door, “the gods will come.” Hitler and Mussolini combined in a single personage the Greek/Roman gods, those of the woods and rational man. This was so successful that public relations and modern politics still feed off their basic model. Comic-books and films delivered human gods who were somehow the result of an intervention by a deity, based on the model of Zeus sleeping with a mortal or God with Mary. Superman evolved into
Mad Max
and
The Terminator
. Mysterious and powerful aliens began to fill our lives, at first via science fiction, then in films and television series such as
Star Trek
and
Star Wars
.

It was inevitable that false popularizers would roll the Jungian myths together with the all-powerful wood gods and so encourage the idea that if man could not be the only god, then he must be a passive victim of destiny.

But we need not be passive victims. This is the product of the options we have laid out for ourselves. By refusing the larger
HUMANIST
vision, we have left ourselves an unsatisfactory choice between arid reason and the false comfort of mythology. See:
UNCONSCIOUS.

N

NAFTA
   Not a free trade agreement.

Signed by Canada, Mexico and the United States in 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement replaced the 1988 Free Trade Agreement (FTA), between Canada and the United States. It wasn't a free trade agreement either. Long before either treaty was signed all three countries were approaching virtual free trade.

Why then such insistence on the term? This is a classic example of the
   DICTATORSHIP OF VOCABULARY.
“Free” carries positive baggage. Who can be against freedom? “Free trade” promises prosperity. Only romantic dreamers can be against it.

NAFTA, like FTA, is an economic integration agreement. It respects the corporatist model in which an unregulated market is given primacy over all other aspects of society by the simple act of excluding those other aspects from the treaty. It places the cheap, unsecured labour of Mexico and the southern United States in opposition to the middle-class labour of Canada and much of the northern United States. The effect on the cheap labour can be seen in Mexico's Maquiladora Zone. The effect on the more expensive can be seen in endemic high unemployment rates.

NAFTA creates the mechanism for a social
fait accompli
without the social issues being discussed. It frees the transnational corporation and its managers from geographical realities and obligations.

This approach is the exact opposite of that used in the European Community, which is attempting to balance political and social realities with market forces. See:
FREE TRADE
and
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD.

NANNYISM
   Nannies are foreigners, except in England. The standard English nanny is strong on received wisdom and weak on thinking, more opinionated than bright, self-assured well beyond any understanding of the real world. What nannies do understand is the nature of their power over children, who must be broken to the potty, accustomed to basic prejudices and prepared for life as members of a group, not as individuals.

The average English male Conservative Party voter, member of parliament or government minister either has had a nanny or belongs to a class (the middle or lower-middle) which subscribes to the values of nannyism. No ideological system could be better suited to subduing, using or humiliating the average male. With these individuals in hand, Mrs. Thatcher controlled the mechanism necessary to control the country as a whole.

That some cabinet ministers spoke warmly of her sex appeal says a great deal about their childhoods. Nannies manage children by controlling their bowels and creating a titillation/punishment tension around their genitals.

That Mrs. Thatcher eliminated every other woman in sight should not be attributed to traditional jealousy. Nannies rule alone. Their chief enemy is not wet* dreams or dirty hands, but the only other viable female figure—the Mother—who is an amateur, given to romanticism and liable to use natural rather than meritorious authority over a child.

Nannies impose rich and powerful life-models (dukes, for example, or the United States) on their children because they themselves are insecure snobs and must appeal to ideals above and beyond both themselves and those who employ them.

Nannies never change their mind. That would involve thinking and doubt. They walk stiffly, briskly and talk energetically to deny the existence of doubt.

Nannies teach their children that strangers and foreigners are dirty, untrustworthy and lazy.

A nanny does not know how to talk to strangers and foreigners. What she does know is that the world contains three categories: the ideal rich and powerful life-model, the parents and the child. Foreigners are neither of the first two. They must therefore be an inferior sort of child and she treats them as such. To the English-speaking foreigner this will appear to be crude but comic behaviour. For those born to other tongues, her bullying approach will sometimes seem inappropriate, but most often inexplicable.

* Mrs. Thatcher insulted the more intelligent sort of Conservative for being weak and “wet.” Good boys do what they're told. They control their genitals. What isn't clear is why those who are obedient to their nanny are considered manly, while the others, the bad boys with their wet dreams (a sign, after all, of potency) are treated as if their manhood were in doubt. See:
SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS.

NATIONALISM
   See:
TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS.

NATIONALIZATION

1. Ideology.

2. A way to finance political parties.

Nationalization enriches friendly lawyers, accountants, bankers and investors. They then make contributions to their benefactor's party, give jobs to defeated or retiring candidates, enrich the private lives of politicians with travel and entertainment and, in certain cases, fill their on- or off-shore bank accounts.