The Doubter's Companion (39 page)

Trickle-down economics was introduced in the early 1960s by men like Robert McNamara. For thirty years it caused delay and waste and justified overspending. By the late 1980s its credibility had worn out. It was then rebaptized as
DUAL USE
economics.

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL
   The inspirational and technical source of modern advertising, public relations, political packaging, feature film mythologizing and most television documentaries.

It was Hitler himself who in 1934 insisted that Leni Riefenstahl make a feature film in the guise of a documentary about the Nazi party's annual Nuremburg rally. Hitler's genius for this new art of propaganda had led him to choose a young dramatic film-maker who was also a professional dancer and actress. What he wanted, as Robert Dassanowsky-Harris has pointed out, was far more than propaganda.
⁷

Riefenstahl immediately understood that this film could have no plot. Its place would have to be filled by an intense use of the effects normally used to illustrate the story. This dazzling use of form would replace content. The result was a dramatic tension which had little or nothing to do with the banal events of the rally. Indeed, there was no need for anything to happen at the rally. And so, thanks to the use of modern equipment, dramatics could replace drama. Indeed the most remarkable characteristic of
Triumph of the Will
is that it is devoid of content.

Many of Riefenstahl's methods had been used before. Some by other ideologies, some by commercial film-makers. As for the formal realization that “content” was an obstacle to the exercise of power, Mussolini had worked his way through that problem in the 1920s. Riefenstahl, like Hitler, could take advantage of Mussolini's and Stalin's experiments in public relations. What was new was her understanding of talking movies, which were only five years old, as a tool of public discourse.

She drew together all the known techniques of cinema-graphic public relations and used them to package the most important raw political force of the time. The result demonstrated that the techniques of cinema allowed not simply separation of verbal, historical and contemporary meaning from the image which theoretically represented them, but the domination of language and real events by the dramatic use of images.

Her primary technique was that the camera never stopped moving and so the viewer was caught up in the drama of motion as if on a roller-coaster. Much of the time her cameras were following banal objects like the back of Hitler's hand. Marching legs. Shovels. Flags. The sun rises to a swell of rising music and we see in the beautiful Gothic windows of Nuremburg houses that Nazi flags are swaying gently like the lace curtains favoured by little old ladies. Legs goose-stepping aggressively to soft music are alternated with small babies playing to booming martial music.

Most shots last no longer than five seconds. Close-ups constantly alternate with mass movement. The Brownshirts—whose élite had been massacred by Hitler a short time before—are shown having romantic, boyish fun as if at a scout camp while the speeches go on about fraternity and loyalty. A speech by Hitler to a national work brigade insists that Germany must be classless and that all Germans must engage in manual labour. It is succeeded a few minutes later by another speech in which Hitler says to senior party members that they are the élite—the ruling class which will reap the benefits of power and run everything. The words have been so subsumed in the visual drama that there is no real sense of contradiction.

Indeed, as the portrait of a real event the film makes no sense at all. Yet the viewer is constantly breathless. This divorce of image from reality, precisely in order to suggest meanings for which no argument is offered, has remained the central theme of propaganda.

Calvin Klein sells underwear with muscular young people who aren't wearing any. Like Hitler, they are presented as totems. Diet Coke shows their bottle against the photo of a crowd of intense marathon swimmers about to race away. The only words are “TASTE IT.” As with the Brownshirts having boyish fun, the product, the images and the words have no relationship. The non-linear suggestion, which avoids all the burdens of proof and argument, is that wearing Calvin Klein underwear will make you beautiful and muscular. Drinking Diet Coke will have the same effect, except that you must wear goggles and a bathing suit. To note that Calvin Klein actually produces a cheap and banal product or that soft drinks make you fat and rot your teeth would be a cynical reference to an irrelevant reality.

In any case, it isn't about selling underwear. In a 1992 examination of television advertising during American presidential elections, the most obvious characteristic in every election and relating to every candidate was that these ads were “not communicating information but eliciting emotion.”
⁸

Whenever a party leader speaks in
Triumph of the Will
, the viewer can make a concerted effort to shut out the moving image, the mesmerizing light, the emotive music and coldly isolate the individual. Most of them turn out to be middleaged portly men with strangled little voices. They look comic in their uniforms. They contradict their own heroic images. But the film techniques sweep all of that away and they become like gods bathed in heavenly light on deific podiums. These techniques are habitually used nowadays at political meetings from the local level to the nomination of leaders.

Goebbels later explained what was being invented under Hitler's guidance. “This is the really great art—to educate without revealing the purpose of the education.” The Nazis saw this as “apolitical” education or, as Anton Kaes puts it, politicizing through entertainment.
⁹
Part of the secret to the success of this technique is the transformation of the documentary into dramatic art or, as Oliver Stone has demonstrated, of dramatic art into the documentary.

The point is not that the moving picture is essentially dishonest, but that its techniques permit a separation of the image from reality and the creation of an alternate reality which may be an absolute lie. See:
PLATOON.

TRUTH
   A reassuring notion which, in practice, is difficult to identify. The determination to establish truth often means that violence must be done to other people.

“Truth is life,” Frank Lloyd Wright said,
¹⁰
which inevitably includes death and suggests that while a reasoned answer is useful, it will not be true—unless life (or reality) is denied. For those who are afraid of reality—that is, of life—it is important to find a naïve construct which can be identified as truth.

One explanation for the popularity of courtroom dramas is that they turn endlessly around the problem of truth. The specialists battle over details in a complex procedure involving policemen, lawyers, expert witnesses and judges, while the
JURY
watches, listens and waits. The professionals struggle with structure while the citizen strives to retain a clear sense of the spirit of the law.

Each knows that a trial is not primarily about guilt or innocence, but about realizable truth. What can we know? Can we really know it? What can we understand it to mean?

That is why the reduction of law to technical judgements produces public anger. The area of criminal justice is only a lightning rod for general frustration. The frustration with the bureaucratic process is not one reducible to sentiments of right or left. It is an anger that the search for truth has been reduced to regulations which are only peripherally concerned with reality. To reduce law to the letter, in opposition to the spirit, is perceived by the citizenry, whose law it is, to be the ultimate betrayal. See:
WISDOM.

U

UNCONSCIOUS
   The introduction of the unconscious and the collective unconscious by FREUD and Jung permitted the reinstatement of the gods and destiny in modern society.

REASON
had been used to tie down every conscious human act and thus formally eliminated from our lives the rule of superstition and ignorance. The
discovery
of the unconscious opened wide a back door and created a new irrational power called
MYTHOLOGY
.

UNEMPLOYMENT
   An expensive luxury.

So expensive that industrialized societies cannot afford more than a certain percentage of the adult population unemployed for more than a few years. This seems to be less than a decade and somewhere between 5 and 7 per cent.

Unfortunately there is no practical relationship between this little funding problem and the economic policies which have held sway in the West throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century. To all intents and purposes they exist on separate planets.

It is therefore entirely possible to follow faithfully all of the recommended policies relating to growth, competitiveness, efficiency, trade and retraining, only to find that the economy is being bankrupted by the level of unemployment. What this suggests is that our economic policies are abstract ideologies unrelated to the real societies they are invented to serve.

UNITED STATES

1. Centre of the greatest empire in the history of the world.

2. The first great empire since Rome not to see itself as the official reincarnation of Rome, which may mean that, unlike the others, it is Rome.

3. The constant recipient from Britain, the immediately preceding empire, of courtierlike attentions in the degenerate, late-Athenian style, which may confirm 2.

 The Roman élites looked to Athens for their reassuring cultural background. As the size and imperial nature of the empire grew, so the insecurity of the honest Roman soldier-farmers came to the fore and they turned increasingly to the slick Athenian men of culture. Roman architecture became more and more derivative of Greece. And Rome itself was permanently swarming with Athenian gentlemen who had fled their ever-more provincial homeland to advise the new rich on decor, grammar and the proper form of public debate.

In much the same way New York, Washington and Los Angeles swarm with ever-larger numbers of British actors capable of the grand style, journalists, editors and antique dealers. The élites remain addicted to English furniture and fussy patterns, to the English country-house style and (like the Romans trooping off for a bit of culture in Athens) troop off regularly to London.

4. A nation given either to unjustified over-enthusiasms or infantile furies.

Such theatrical extremes are often the privilege of the truly powerful. What distinguishes the American versions is the carpet upon which they are played out—an admirable
MYTHOLOGY
of individual freedom which real life converts into a short-term view of the best chance for personal gain.

5. A degenerate civilization. A nation in decline.

These are broad themes which are hard to quantify when the history of the empire is still in progress. In any case, what do “degenerate” and “decline” mean? Rome was degenerate in AD 100 and in serious decline. The borders were undulating with barbarians. The empire itself was slipping into revolt. Then Hadrian came to the throne. Between AD 117 and 138 he motivated everyone capable of motivation. The empire recovered. As a result, the fall of the Roman Empire took about 350 years.

6. A highly sophisticated
THIRD WORLD
country.

The three-way contrast between the complex, civilized, rich and highly trained élites, the weak middle class and the vast majority of the population who are excluded from the benefits of the empire and so participate mainly through the great American mythology is what first strikes those who come from more middle-class societies. The nation whose mythology is devoted to equality is increasingly a society of class divisions in the style of the Third World.

7. A late-nineteenth-century state.

 There are certain truths about each country having to do with geography and history that can't really be changed, even by Herculean will-power. When revolutionary attempts are made to change a nation's “circumstances,” the result is usually confusion and disorder. The United States seems to be largely a product of high capitalism. The nation became a great empire thanks to a system of unregulated capitalism which first involved slaves, then semi-slaves and powerless immigrants. There have been recurring attempts to bring the nineteenth-century system into check, but these have never lasted more than four or eight years. As a result, the natural state of the empire has been and continues to be unregulated capitalism.

8. A profoundly divided nation destined for permanent civil war.

This is the inescapable result of building a nation on the enslavement of one part by another. Those who think of society as a living organism cannot help seeing organized mass slavery as a self-inflicted wound which can never heal. The larger and stronger the body grows, the more it will feel pain and bleed. Humans learn to live with agony and violence. We are a species as adaptable as rats. But the violence of America must be in some way the inheritance of its economic creation.

9. A nation from which the second-largest commercial export is cultural products and which, as a direct consequence, treats free access everywhere for these products as the primary characteristic of a free country. The domination of smaller local cultures by that of America is seen as the inevitable result of the irresistible attraction of American culture. If the result is that these smaller societies lose their cultures, this is seen as the intelligent expression of their freedom. American culture, like that of Japan, is structured to eliminate or to assimilate all but token foreign penetration.

10. Several completely separate countries unified only by two mechanisms: an internal market, gigantic, rich and varied enough to make foreign markets of little importance; and a mythology so brilliant and pure that it can never interfere with real life.

11. Home of Thomas Jefferson, the most remarkable public figure yet produced by the modern West.