John Ralston Saul
Canadian author and philosopher.
[Modern capitalism] is masterful at producing services people don't need and in large part probably don't want. It is brilliant at convincing people that they do need and want them. But it has difficulty turning itself to the production of those services which people really do need. Not only that, it often spends an enormous amount of time and effort convincing people that those services are either unrealistic, marginal or counterproductive.
[O]ur élite is primarily and increasingly managerial. A managerial élite manages. A crisis, unfortunately, requires thought. Thought is not a management function.
A referendum is little more than a "rumour of choice." The idea behind the mechanism, ever since its first modern manifestations two centuries ago under Napoleon, has been to replace democracy with the sensation of democracy. That is: to replace the slow, complex, eternally unclear continuity of democracy, and all the awkwardness of citizen participation, with something clear and fast which allows those in power to impose their agenda. Through an apparently simple question with a one-syllable answer, those who ask can get a blank cheque from the citizenry; that is, if they choose their moment well and come up with a winning question.
[T]he ideal of the rugged individual opening up the American West is still applied as an essential truth to ten million citizens living in the small area of New York City, as if ten million bulls should and could be squeezed into a china shop.
In the humanist ideal, the mainstream is where interesting debate, the generating of new ideas and creativity take place. In rational society this mainstream is considered uncontrollable and is therefore made marginal. The centre ground is occupied instead by structures and courtiers.
The transnational corporations and the money markets have declared the era of human-designed regulations over. Now the market must reign. Because few people in the business community are paid to think about phrases such as "Western civilization," they don't seem to realize that they are proposing the arbitrary denial of 2,500 years of human experience.
Happy family: The existence and maintenance of [this] is thought to make a politician fit for public office. According to this theory, the public are less concerned by whether or not they are effectively represented than by the need to be assured that the penises and vaginas of public officials are only used in legally sanctioned circumstances.
The dominant system of power in the west has been Platonist — a system which functions on highly developed levels of structure and law. This is the school of pure rationality and fear of the undefined — fear of doubt. The minority system has been Socratic or humanist. It is interested in doubt and not overwhelmed by the Platonist-Hobbesian desperate need to tie things down.
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.
It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal.
Freud, Sigmund: A man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would listen — or better still, talk — that their parents were just as bad.
Which is ideology? Which not? You shall know them by their assertion of truth, their contempt for considered reflection, and their fear of debate.
On June 22nd, [1633,] in the morning, in the great hall of the Convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Galileo was found guilty of holding a false doctrine. He went down on his knees and both abjured and condemned his own errors. He swore never to argue such doctrines again. It was thus definitely confirmed that the sun did rotate around the earth...Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. Saint Mary Over Minerva. Power over wisdom.
[S]hould we attempt to use sensible words to deal with these problems, they will be caught up immediately in the structures of the official arguments which accompany the official modern ideologies — arguments as sterile as the ideologies are irrelevant. Our society contains no method of serious self-criticism for the simple reason that it is now a self-justifying system which generates its own logic.
I would remind you...that Socrates was executed not for saying what things were or should be, but for seeking practical indications of where some reasonable approximation of truth might be. He was executed not for his megalomania or grandiose propositions or certitudes, but for stubbornly doubting the absolute truths of others.
The citizenry insist and insist and insist that they are proud of the Medicare system and that they want it to work. They continually send instructions to this effect to their governments. They do so in every imaginable way. And yet, day by day, the governments and the bureaucracies chip away at the system as if in the hope that, by opening holes in it and creating a new ineffectiveness, the citizenry will drop their commitment to it.
The strength of representative democracy is its ability to slow down those in power who wish to govern by blank cheque, but also those not in power who wish to yank the state about on the sole basis of their self-interest.
All the lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us over the last hundred years that it is the acceptance of differences, not the search for similarities which enables people to relate to each other in their personal or family lives.
An important newspaper baron...explains that the cause of poverty throughout the world is indolence. Ten per cent of Americans would not be on food stamps if they simply worked harder.... If only they had followed his father's advice, they'd have "stuck it to the bastards" and become really rich. This image of hundreds and hundreds of millions of millionaires sticking it to each other, there no longer being any other category of citizen to stick it to, is so all-inclusive that there is no need for others to concern themselves with this word.
It is the considered opinion of most members of our rational élites that, in any given difference of opinion with reality, reality is wrong.