How MumboJumbo Conquered The World

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How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World

• A Short History of Modern Delusions
• Francis Wheen

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The voodoo revolution 1

• I am in politics because of the conflict between
  good and evil, Thatcher said, and I believe
  that in the end good will triumph. Speaking to
  the Zürich Economic Society in 1977, she warned
  that we must not focus our attention exclusively
  on the material, because, though important, it is
  not the main issue. The main issues are moral . .
  The economic success of the Western world is a
  product of its moral philosophy and practice. The
  economic results are better because the moral
  philosophy is superior...

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The voodoo revolution 2

• Where once businesses made products, now they
  made deals. As more and more money was borrowed
  from abroad to cover the difference between what
  Americans produced and what they consumed, a few
  voices began to question how and when the lOUs
  for this bogus prosperity would be honoured....
  Some of Wall Streets best-performing stocks in
  1987 were enterprises that had neither profits
  nor products obscure drug firms which were
  rumoured to have a cure for AIDS, or ATE Corp,
  which claimed to be developing a wristwatch-based
  paging system.

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Old snake-oil, new bottles 1

• In 1982 a young management consultant from
  McKinsey Co., Thomas J. Peters, co-wrote In
  Search of Excellence, which celebrated Americas
  best companies and sought to identify the secrets
  of their success. In Search of Excellence sold
  five million copies... After that, the deluge
  The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by
  Stephen R. Covey, The Fifth Discipline by Peter
  Senge, The One-Minute Manager by Kenneth
  Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, Awaken the Giant
  Within by Anthony Robbins . . .

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Old snake-oil, new bottles 2

• The New York Times established a separate
  category for Advice, How-to and Miscellaneous.
  The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun appeared
  in 1991 and other authors came up with Gandhi
  The Heart of an Executive, Confucius in the
  Boardroom, If Aristotle Ran General Motors, Make
  It So Management Lessons from Star Trek the
  Next Generation, Elizabeth I CEO Strategic
  Lessons in Leadership from the Woman Who Built an
  Empire and Moses CEO. The ten commandments, we
  now learn, were the worlds first mission
  statement.

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Old snake-oil, new bottles 3

• Publishers extended their self-help lists to
  include more emollient titles on personal
  growth Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Road
  Less Travelled and Men Are from Mars, Women Are
  from Venus or fiction such as Redfields novel
  The Celestine Prophecy, which sold five million
  copies in the United States alone. New Age and
  New Economy also overlapped ... in Barrie
  Dolnicks The Executive Mystic Psychic Power
  Tools for Success or Paul Zane Pilzers God Wants
  You to be Rich.

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Old snake-oil, new bottles 4

• Deepak Chopra, MD, a Harvard-trained
  endocrinologist, turned to trascendental
  meditation (TM) and ayurvedic medicine in the
  early 1980s. In 1993, ... he used the Oprah
  Winfrey show to promote his book Ageless Body,
  Timeless Mind. Since then he has published
  twenty-five books and issued at least 100
  different audiotapes, videos and CD-ROMs, in
  which Eastern philosophy, Christian parables and
  even Arthurian legends are distilled into a
  bubble-bath for the soul. (One video offers
  Lessons from the Teaching of Merlin.)

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Old snake-oil, new bottles 5

• Anthony Robbins, who once worked as a school
  janitor, had earned about 80 million some of
  it from book such as Awaken the Giant Within and
  Unlimited Power, but mostly from his talent for
  persuading sober-suited executives to shout Yes!
  I can do it! I will lead not follow! while Tina
  Turners Simply the Best blasted out of the PA
  system. John Gray had an income-stream of 10
  million in 1999, partly from 350 Mars and Venus
  facilitators who paid him for the privilege of
  distributing his books at monthly workshops.

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Old snake-oil, new bottles 6

• According to the executive manager of B. H.
  Emporiums, a Canadian retail chain, ... if I pay
  Blanchard 15,000 to say it, my general
  managers and my people listen. If Im paid to say
  it, my people dont listen in the same way. The
  mega-stars ... knew how to put on a performance.
  Anthony Robbins, a six-foot-seven Superman
  lookalike, would ask his audience to take off
  their shoes and socks and walk across hot coals
  while he repeated the soothing mantra cool moss,
  cool moss.

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Old snake-oil, new bottles 8

• There is no better metaphor for the products of
  the knowledge economy than the recipe, the
  British guru Charles Leadbeater writes in Living
  on Thin Air The New Economy (1999). Think of
  the world as divided up into chocolate cakes and
  chocolate-cake recipes . . . We can all use the
  same chocolate-cake recipe, at the same time,
  without anyone being worse off. It is quite
  unlike a piece of cake. Tony Blair hailed
  Leadbeater as an extraordinarily interesting
  thinker whose book raises critical questions
  for Britains future.

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Old snake-oil, new bottles 9

• Did you stumble into the natural history
  department by mistake? Lions Dont Need To Roar
  Stand Out, Fit In and Move Ahead in Business, by
  Debra Benton, Swimming with the Sharks Without
  Being Eaten Alive by Harvey Mackay, and Teaching
  the Elephants to Dance Empowering Change in Your
  Organisation by James A. Belasco. Charles Handys
  The Age of Unreason has a picture of a leaping
  frog on its front cover. Why? If you put a frog
  in water and slowly heat it, the frog will
  eventually let itself be boiled to death.

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Old snake-oil, new bottles 12

• In the autumn of 1998 more than 200 officials
  from the Department of Education were treated to
  a lecture from de Bono on his Six Thinking Hats
  system of decision-making. The idea, he
  explained, was that civil servants should put on
  a red hat when they wanted to talk about hunches
  and instincts, a yellow hat if they were listing
  the advantages of a project, a black hat while
  playing devils advocate, and so on.

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The demolition merchants of reality 1

• Although much post-modernism may be nonsense, it
  is nonsense with a purpose by using
  quasi-scientific terminology the po-mo
  theologians intended to explode the objectivity
  of science itself. The fact that they knew
  nothing about mathematics, physics or chemistry
  was no obstacle. Luce Irigaray, a high priestess
  of the movement, denounced Einsteins Emc2 as a
  sexed equation, since it privileges the speed
  of light over other less masculine speeds that
  are vitally necessary to us.

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The demolition merchants of reality 2

• For Lacan, however, there is nothing that cant
  be expressed algebraically Thus the erectile
  organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance
  ecstasy, not in itself, or even in the form of
  an image, but as a part lacking in the desired
  image that is why it is equivalent to the \/-i
  of the signification produced above, of the
  jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of
  its statement to the function of lack of
  signifier (-1).

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The demolition merchants of reality 3

• For two centuries, progressives had championed
  science against obscurantism. The sudden lurch of
  academic humanists and social scientists towards
  epistemic relativism not only betrayed this
  heritage but jeopardised the already fragile
  prospects for a progressive social critique,
  since it was impossible to combat bogus ideas if
  all notions of truth and falsity ceased to have
  any validity.

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The demolition merchants of reality 4

• The legacy of post-modernism is a paralysis
  of reason, a refusal to observe any qualitative
  difference between reasonable hypotheses and
  swirling hogwash. At a time when countless loopy
  creeds were winning new converts it gave aid and
  comfort to the pedlars of nonsense. Even
  extra-terrestial conspiracy theories were granted
  some academic respectability, notably through the
  publication in 1998 of Aliens in America
  Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace
  ...

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The catastrophists 1

• The swelling popularity of quack potions and
  treatments in recent years is yet another
  manifestation of the retreat from reason and
  scientific method. According to a 1998 survey by
  the Journal of the American Medical Association,
  the use of homeopathic preparations in the United
  States more than doubled between 1990 and 1997.
  In Britain, by the end of the twentieth century
  the countrys 36,000 general practitioners were
  outnumbered by the 50,000 purveyors of
  complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

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The catastrophists 2

• It is a brave politician who risks incurring the
  wrath of ... patients 83 million Americans spend
  27 billion a year on alternative medicine, and
  most of them are entitled to vote. In 1992 the US
  governments National Institutes of Health was
  awarded 2 million of public money to establish
  an Office of Alternative Medicine (later the
  National Centre for Complementary Alternative
  Medicine). Within eight years, thanks to
  strenuous lobbying, Congress had increased he
  budget to 90 million.

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The catastrophists 4

• Homeopathy has often been subjected to rigorous
  scientific testing since its discovery by the
  German physician Samuel Hahnemann at the end of
  the eighteenth century, and it has always failed
  most recently on a BBC Horizon documentary in
  2003. A typical dilution is 30C, that is, one
  part cure to 10030 parts water even if it
  contained only one molecule of the homeopathic
  ingredient, the amount of water required would be
  far greater than that in all the oceans of the
  earth...

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The catastrophists 5

• A teacher in Ontario, Professor James Alcock,
  noticed that one of the information sources
  most frequently cited in student essays was The
  X-Files. When he reminded them that it was
  fiction, they countered Yes, but its based on
  fact. In an article for the New York Times in
  1996, Professor Wayne Anderson of Sacramento City
  College reported that over half the students in
  his astronomy class believed that the governnent
  had concealed the truth about the arrival of
  UFOs they too cited The X-Files as a source.

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Candles in the wind

• Ours is an evangelical culture. So many people,
  convinced that theyve been saved by Jesus, cured
  by homeopathy or the laying on of hands, abducted
  by aliens or protected by angels, seek public
  acknowledgement that their convictions are true.
  Imbued with messianic fervour, or simply seeking
  validation, they are not content to hoard the
  truth they are compelled to share it and convert
  the unenlightened, relying on the force of their
  own intense emotions. Generally, the only proof
  offered for a fantastic belief is the passion it
  inspires.
• WENDY KAMINER, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestials
  (1999)

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Forward to the past

• The myth that two decades of mumbo-jumbo have
  been accompanied by swift technological and
  economic progress ... is hard to dislodge. Yet
  the data from the IMF and the World Bank are
  unambiguous. In Latin America and the Caribbean,
  GDP grew by 75 per cent per person from 1960 to
  1980 in the next twenty years it rose by just 7
  per cent. In sub-Saharan Africa there was an
  increase of about 34 per cent in the 1960s and
  1970s between 1980 and 2000 per-capita income
  actually fell by 15 per cent.