Fire the Bodyguard
Part One
Truth,
Winston Churchill once famously said, is so precious that she must sometimes be
accompanied by a bodyguard of lies. He was speaking, of course, of the role of
deception in wartime. But if truth is so precious, then surely, when peace
returns, she deserves to travel unprotected by such an unsavory escort.
For a long
time, capitalism felt itself besieged by socialist-inspired class war. As
result its defenders were obliged to employ the ideological equivalent of
Churchill’s “bodyguard.” A propaganda of deception was the result. This
propaganda aimed to disarm capitalism’s socialist foes by vindicating the
system against charges which, whether or not they were true, posed significant
dangers by mobilizing mass opposition to big business, the free market, private
property, and other hallmarks of capitalist enterprise. Just because of the
demagogic appeal which these charges possessed, it was necessary in many cases
to deny their validity, even when they were in fact true, or at least truer
than the propaganda would admit.
The problem
with deception as a strategy is that it can often disarm its promoters along
with its targets. Lies grow legs and generate intellectual confusion, leading
to gross errors in the thinking and often actual practice of the liars.
Capitalism once may have needed its “bodyguard of lies” for self-defense
against socialism’s attacks. But no such need now exists. The socialist
movement everywhere is ruined. So why keep the bodyguard on wages? He is
costing more than he is worth.
Take for
example the large-scale unemployment, and consequent impoverishment, that the
recent financial crisis has inflicted on the working classes of the
industrialized world. Most pro-capitalist propaganda accepts the
liberal-socialist conventional wisdom that these are bad things, but argues
that they are not intrinsic to capitalism and are instead mere anomalies, or
the result of too much government meddling in the free market system.
But the
truth is that they are good things, not bad, so all the arguments
predicated on them being bad things are inherently false.
They are
good because of the factual reality that workers are lazy and would prefer to
be paid not to work. If they can’t make enough money to lead decent lives while
not working, then they will work, but they will strive energetically (indeed,
one of the few things they will do energetically) to convert their
workplaces into pseudo-work places. In the absence of countervailing forces,
they will do this by organizing themselves into trade unions and threatening
strikes, and by mobilizing their voting power to enact laws to raise their
wages, guarantee their job security, and reduce their workloads.
Capitalism’s
way of counteracting these featherbedding techniques by the workers is mass
unemployment. Unemployment creates economic conditions in which those desperate
for any job at all compete in the employment market against those who already
have jobs. The effect of course is to drive down wages and push up worker
productivity – in other words, a sure-fire tonic against worker laziness.
A certain
amount of unemployment must always be maintained for the sake of worker
discipline. But a steep rise in unemployment is a sure sign that endemic worker
laziness has become systemically intolerable and must be restrained by
extraordinary means – usually a financial crisis, a recession, or in truly
severe cases, a depression.
These
simple economic facts are not new discoveries. They have simply been obscured
by the “bodyguard.” But no enemy means no need for bodyguards. The truth that
workers are lazy and shiftless unless whipped into shape by external force – ultimately,
by the threat of starvation – is neither shameful nor self-serving. It is not
shameful because without the necessary discipline, the world’s working masses
would remain sunk in the slough of peasant sloth and brutality in which they
subsisted for so many thousands of years before capitalism came long to rescue
them. And it is not self-serving because such discipline benefits the whole
world, not just the capitalists and their workers. All of history testifies to
this. Especially recent history, which has witnessed the ignominious
disintegration of capitalism’s only serious challenger – socialism.
So fire the
bodyguard and tell the truth! It will pay dividends.
