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Originally posted by 1kiki:

Anyway, I'm about halfway through the entire BBC production. But while they do a good job explaining the origins of the crazy market theory, they don't explain WHY the politicos adopted it so wholeheartedly. And they don't make the case that the populace substantially did either. I think there's a lot of specific British history and worldview I don't have that make it feel like there are a lot of gaps. But I'll finish it. It's good to get a different POV.

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I argue that the rational elites, aggressive and without direction, claimed credit for many of the accomplishments of the humanists while blaming the humanists for the disasters they themselves brought on. The effect of this parallel development on military strategy, science, politics and business makes up the body of "Voltaire's Bastards."

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The ability to embrace doubt in the middle of a crisis is a sign of strength. Voltaire’s Bastards ends with what might seem a surprising eulogy to doubt— our ability to live with uncertainty as a creative force. You could call this an expression of consciousness. If we can bring ourselves to live consciously then we will be able to embrace both stability and change, which means we may do better at dealing with crises.

That eulogy to doubt included descriptions of what I have seen over the years in both the Arctic and the Sahara. Existing in doubt is a strength of people who live in extreme conditions. They must be conscious or they will die.

We, flowers of the temperate zones, can float half awake through a padded world. We have our dramas and our suffering. But most of that we impose upon ourselves.

The greatest drama we have imposed on ourselves is our willful misinterpretation of consciousness. The Socratic conviction was that virtues were forms of knowledge and therefore no man willingly does wrong. What I said in Voltaire’s Bastards about our modern elites was that, by abandoning humanism in favour of an ideology of reason, they had inverted the equation. Now they justify doing wrong because they do know. This rational sophistication makes them passive, terrified of uncertainty, unable to change when faced by reality, ready to accept the worst.

You might call this profound cynicism: the mindset of the courtier or consultant or advisor. In any case, they believe themselves to be immobilized by what they know. This, they think, is professional behaviour. To be precise, they know so much that they believe it would be amateurish or emotive to do anything much about the environment, global warming, poverty, debt, to mention just a few problems.

This passive or fearful mind-set, tied to expertise and power, has steadily worsened over the last twenty years as the power of managerial leadership has grown. Theirs is a mind-set obsessed by systems and by control over systems as the essence of power. It is the opposite of leadership. It is all about form over content; a mind-set in which continuity and mediocrity are the same thing.

Today their power is such that they feel comfortable manacling the citizenry with debts transferred to them from corporate bodies. They take pleasure in weighing job creation against planetary warming, as if these were opposites. It is as if they, being experts, had cleverly negotiated a deal with the planet itself. A trade off. As simple as that.

Is this naivety? Ignorance? Even Odysseus knew you couldn’t do a deal with Zeus.

I mentioned in Voltaire’s Bastards that the late twentieth century resembled the mid-eighteenth, with a large, sophisticated, self-referential and pessimistic elite. This is what you might call the self-destructive nature of the overly sophisticated. Twenty years later this also is increasingly true: We have an elite pessimistic not only about its own ability to do things but, thanks to an astonishing transfer of responsibility, pessimistic about the citizenry.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
Second

I'm afraid I'll probably never read the book, as worthy as it may be.

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One of his responsibilities was to give accounts of Chicago Cubs baseball games via telegraph. During one game between the Cubs and their arch rivals the St. Louis Cardinals that was tied 0-0 in the 9th inning, the telegraph went dead: An often repeated tale of Reagan's radio days recounts how he delivered "play-by-play broadcasts" of Chicago Cubs baseball games he had never seen. His flawless recitations were based solely on telegraph accounts of games in progress. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/40_reagan/reagan_early.html

6. Once in 1934, during the ninth inning of a Cubs - St. Louis Cardinals game, the wire went dead. Reagan smoothly improvised a fictional play-by-play (in which hitters on both teams gained a superhuman ability to foul off pitches) until the wire was restored.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan

7. Reagan says: “There were several other stations broadcasting that game and I knew I’d lose my audience if I told them we’d lost our telegraph connections so I took a chance. I had (Billy) Jurges hit another foul. Then I had him foul one that only missed being a homerun by a foot. I had him foul one back in the stands and took up some time describing the two lads that got in a fight over the ball. I kept on having him foul balls until I was setting a record for a ballplayer hitting successive foul balls and I was getting more than a little scared. Just then my operator started typing. When he passed me the paper I started to giggle - it said: ‘Jurges popped out on the first ball pitched.’” http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3120.html

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

The ability to lie convincingly is the mark of an actor ... or a sociopath. The rather disturbing conclusion I reach from this example ... and pretty much most of human history ... is that most people love to be lied to, as long as it's a story they're used to hearing.

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