Chapter 4
Snake Oil for the Soul: The Self-Help Industry
The financial excesses of the 1980s created a market for get-rich guides starting with Thomas Peters' In Search of Excellence (1982), followed by countless management bestsellers offering numbered steps to success. Money became equated with sex appeal, with films like Wall Street making corporate raiders seem glamorous despite their repulsive qualities. The spiritual-financial fusion reached its apex with Deepak Chopra, whose appearance on Oprah in 1993 catapulted him to guru status, selling millions of books blending Eastern mysticism with prosperity gospel.
Chopra's message that "affluence is simply our natural state" appealed to both celebrities and executives, earning him over $20 million annually. His blend of Eastern philosophy, Christian parables, and materialistic affirmations attracted followers from Demi Moore to Michael Milken. Despite critics' mockery, Chopra built an empire selling the comforting message that wealth reflects spiritual development and that "people who have achieved an enormous amount of success are inherently very spiritual."
The self-help industry's profitability is staggering: Kenneth Blanchard earning $6 million annually, Stephen Covey's consultancy generating $400 million with 3,000 employees across forty countries, Anthony Robbins amassing $80 million from motivational speaking, and John Gray collecting $10 million from his Mars/Venus empire. By century's end, self-help publications generated $560 million annually, with the entire "self-improvement industry" worth $2.48 billion.
These gurus follow a predictable formula pioneered by Dale Carnegie: simplistic animal metaphors (dancing elephants, boiling frogs, fishing executives), and numbered lists of principles. Stephen Covey offers "Seven Habits," "Three Resolutions," and "Eight Ways to Enrich Marriage," while Anthony Robbins provides "Five Keys to Wealth" and even "365 lessons in self-mastery." These childish cliches gain credibility through sophisticated-sounding jargon like "re-engineering," "demassing," and "benchmarking."
The political embrace of management theory intensified under Tony Blair, whose government increased spending on consultants by over 50% to 550 million annually. Labour ministers attended weekend seminars run by Andersen Consulting, while Edward de Bono was hired to develop "bright ideas" using his "Six Thinking Hats system"-which he immodestly claimed was "the first new way of thinking in 2,400 years."
Yet gurus reveal their fallibility when attempting to identify real-world examples of their principles. Edward de Bono's 1985 book Tactics showcased "successful" entrepreneurs including Harry Helmsley (later convicted of tax evasion) and Robert Maxwell (exposed as a massive fraudster). Even Tom Peters, whose In Search of Excellence celebrated supposedly exemplary companies, found most of them in steep decline within five years, prompting him to pivot and write Thriving on Chaos, declaring "there are no excellent companies."
Chapter 5
The End of History and Other Grand Delusions
As the millennium approached, public intellectuals became obsessed with endings and conclusions. Post-modernism gave way to declarations about "the end" of everything from art to science to nature. This cultural pessimism found expression in unexpected bestsellers like Paul Kennedy's 677-page history tome The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which predicted American decline through "imperial overstretch." Though Kennedy failed to foresee the Soviet Union's collapse, he claimed this actually confirmed his thesis.
The appetite for grand historical narratives then elevated Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis, which boldly declared Western liberal democracy "the final form of human government" and "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution." Fukuyama's thesis claimed liberal democracy as history's endpoint, though he contradicted himself by acknowledging that the Hegelian historical terminus was actually Prussian monarchy, not American capitalism. He dismissively suggested that unlike "less reflective ages," we've arrived at liberal democracy "exhausted" after pursuing alternatives.
This hubris was matched by Samuel Huntington, who followed Fukuyama's marketing formula: first publish in a journal, devise a simplistic concept understandable by politicians and talk show hosts, then expand it into a bestselling book. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" theory divided the world into seven or eight distinct civilizations, creating arbitrary categories that reflected his prejudices rather than reality. His crude "West vs. the Rest" worldview ignored that most conflicts occur within civilizations, not between them.
Despite appearing opposed, both Fukuyama and Huntington shared a rigid determinism, reducing complex human affairs to simplistic grand narratives that policy-makers eagerly embraced. Their theories gained traction not because they accurately described reality but because they provided comforting simplicity in an increasingly complex world.
Chapter 6
The Postmodern Assault on Reality
By the late 1980s, postmodernists dominated American academia, controlling the Modern Languages Association and faculty recruitment with the same intolerance they had once criticized. Yale University became the movement's center, with Derrida, de Man, and Miller as its high priests. The doctrine spread beyond literature departments into cultural studies, anthropology, and political science, where students learned that "reality" required quotation marks and the world was merely a socially constructed text.
Literary theories had clear political alignments: Russian Formalists were linked to Bolshevism, while post-structuralism emerged after the failed 1968 Paris uprisings. Unable to break state power structures, theorists instead subverted language structures. This approach eventually evolved into a way of avoiding politics altogether. Michel Foucault even praised Khomeini's Iranian regime, claiming its "different regime of truth" made suppression of dissent acceptable as a "necessary and highly prized additional level of meaning."
Despite rejecting grand narratives, many postmodernists accepted capitalism's triumph as inevitable, retreating into celebrating marginalized experiences and consumer culture while abandoning traditional radical concerns with production conditions. Their relativism collapses under scrutiny, as Richard Evans demonstrated during David Irving's lawsuit against historian Deborah Lipstadt. When Irving sued Lipstadt for calling him a pro-Nazi who distorted facts, Evans meticulously investigated Irving's footnotes, producing a 700-page report exposing his omissions, misquotations and fabrications.
This old-fashioned source-checking-what postmodernists dismiss as "fetishising the documents"-definitively proved Irving wrong. The dangers of relativism extend beyond academia. Eric Hobsbawm noted that historical facts can be twisted into dangerous myths, as when the 1389 Battle of Kosovo was used to justify Serbian oppression of Albanians. Unlike opinions, certain facts remain objectively true-the Earth rotates on its axis regardless of what people once believed.
Despite this, anti-scientific relativism flourished. Paul Feyerabend's "Against Method" argued that teaching science in schools represented state tyranny, claiming science was "not necessarily the best" form of thought. This intellectual climate enabled widespread rejection of scientific consensus-a 1993 poll found 47% of Americans believed humans were created in their present form within the last 10,000 years.
Chapter 7
The Catastrophists: Superstition in the Modern Age
The chapter opens with the nursery tale of Chicken Licken, who believes the sky is falling after an acorn hits her tail-a metaphor for irrational panic. It then describes a 1962 incident at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles when a planetary conjunction coincided with a partial solar eclipse. Despite the astronomical event's harmlessness, many visitors displayed extreme anxiety, repeatedly asking "What is going to happen?" and "What does it mean?" One woman was found weeping hysterically, demonstrating how susceptible some people are to suggestion and catastrophic thinking.
In 1982, the Griffith Observatory faced another panic when terrified residents called about the world ending on March 10th. This fear stemmed from "The Jupiter Effect," a bestselling 1974 book by British astrophysicists John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann who claimed a rare planetary alignment would trigger massive earthquakes in Los Angeles. Though quickly debunked by scientists and even retracted by Gribbin himself by 1980, the media revived the scare as the date approached.
The revelation that President Reagan and his wife consulted astrologer Joan Quigley for "virtually every major move and decision" caused surprisingly little outrage. Columnist Alexander Cockburn noted this merely reflected mainstream America's superstitious tendencies, with the United States retaining "about the same per capita level of religious superstition as Bangladesh." A study found 48% of Wall Street stockholders used horoscopes for investment decisions.
By the late 1990s, Britain's 36,000 general practitioners were outnumbered by 50,000 practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine. As journalist John Diamond discovered when diagnosed with cancer, well-meaning people bombarded him with suggestions for unproven treatments. Richard Dawkins noted that there's only "medicine that works and medicine that doesn't"-if alternative treatments are proven effective in controlled trials, they simply become medicine.
The British royal family's embrace of alternative therapies parallels their dependence on another irrational faith-hereditary monarchy. Queen Elizabeth II carries homeopathic remedies at all times, Princess Diana practiced reflexology, and Prince Charles has championed "holistic" treatments since 1982. Even the conservative Prince Philip had his eccentricities, subscribing to Flying Saucer Review since the 1950s.
By the 1990s, alien visitation had saturated popular culture through films like Close Encounters and TV shows like The X-Files. Creator Chris Carter admitted prioritizing supernatural explanations over rational ones because they made better entertainment, dismissing concerns about his show's impact with "it's just fiction." Richard Dawkins countered in his 1996 Dimbleby lecture that consistently portraying rational explanations as wrong creates harmful bias.
In 1995, after decades of UFO conspiracy theories, "proof" finally emerged: grainy footage allegedly showing military doctors autopsying aliens from the 1947 Roswell incident. Television networks worldwide broadcast this "evidence," with even respected journalists like the Guardian's Martin Walker declaring it "the first hard evidence" that seemed "convincingly to be the autopsy of some kind of being." The truth was far more mundane-the entire film had been shot in a Bedfordshire barn in 1994 by two karaoke video producers using orange peels for alien eyes and chicken guts from a local butcher.
Chapter 8
With God on Our Side: Religion and Politics
God has been a permanent American resident since the Mayflower, but it was during the Cold War that America discovered the political utility of religious invocation. President Truman framed the fight against Communism as a crusade against atheism, while Billy Graham warned that "Communism is inspired, directed and motivated by the Devil himself." This religious framing of politics intensified during Reagan's presidency, who characterized the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and appealed to evangelical voters by rejecting Carter's talk of "limits and self-denial."
Many Reaganite evangelists became stalwart defenders of Israel, seemingly abandoning the anti-Semitic tradition represented by figures like Father Charles Coughlin. Jerry Falwell declared that "whoever stands against Israel stands against God," though this philo-Semitism had ulterior motives-in his pre-millennialist creed, Israel's rebuilding was necessary for the mass conversion of Jews during the Second Coming.
When Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, religious conservatives often sided with Iran against free expression. Pat Buchanan condemned The Satanic Verses as "a blasphemous assault on the faith of hundreds of millions," while President Bush merely warned Iran against harming American interests. Even in England, Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey expressed understanding for "devout Muslims' reaction" without condemning the death threat.
Following the Cold War's end, America struggled to identify new enemies. As Colin Powell lamented in 1991, "I'm running out of demons." Japan briefly became the replacement bogeyman, with a 1990 Gallup poll showing 60% of Americans considered Japanese economic power the "critical threat"-nearly twice those concerned about Russia. Politicians fanned anti-Japanese sentiment during the 1991 recession, with Pat Buchanan warning "we're going to play hardball" and local officials making openly racist remarks.
America's constant need for enemies stems not from psychological necessity but from the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about in his 1961 farewell address. The defense industry thrived on the post-9/11 "war on terror," with Bush proposing a $396 billion defense budget exceeding the next fifteen highest-spending countries combined. The demonology shifts capriciously-Iran was enemy number one after 1979, then Washington sold arms to Iranian mullahs to fight the Sandinistas while helping Saddam against Iran, only to mobilize against "the Hitler of the Gulf" when he invaded Kuwait.
Chapter 9
The Age of Feeling Over Reason
In September 1981, shortly after Reagan entered the White House, Alasdair MacIntyre's philosophical tract "After Virtue" became a surprise bestseller following Newsweek's praise for this "stunning new study of ethics." MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment had been "a catastrophe" for ethical discourse, creating a "new dark age" of barbarism and nihilism. His solution was retreating to medieval monastic orders, writing that "the barbarians are not waiting beyond our frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time."
MacIntyre's work struck a powerful chord with intellectuals across the spectrum. The Weekly Standard described him as "possibly the greatest moral philosopher of the last fifty years." Following his lead, conservatives, Marxists, post-modernists and pre-modernists queued up to attack Enlightenment ideas. John Gray, professor at the London School of Economics, became particularly vicious in his attacks, publishing increasingly apocalyptic works advocating Eastern mysticism as salvation from "Western shipwreck."
More seriously, critics like Adorno and Horkheimer accused the Enlightenment of leading directly to Nazi gas chambers and Soviet gulags. Their "dialectic of Enlightenment" argued that by replacing myth with science, modernist thinkers created repressive power systems culminating in Hitler. This argument is fundamentally flawed-Hitler was a fanatical nationalist from the Romantic tradition that opposed Enlightenment rationalism. The philosophers who developed human rights concepts-the very standards by which we condemn Nazi atrocities-are conveniently omitted from their critique.
Beyond intellectual attacks, intense sentimentality has replaced reasoned consideration in public discourse. Reagan's presidency was "the era of good feelings," while Clinton mastered empathy. His successor Al Gore attempted calculated emotional displays at Democratic conventions-first describing his son's near-fatal accident in 1992, then in 1996 recounting his sister Nancy's death from lung cancer in excruciating detail. Despite his tearful pledge to fight tobacco until his last breath, Gore had previously boasted to tobacco farmers about his lifelong experience growing and selling tobacco, even accepting contributions from the tobacco lobby.
The age of feeling produced celebrities who competed to display their vulnerabilities. After Diana's death, even questioning the mass mourning became treasonous. Professor Anthony O'Hear merely suggested the reaction lacked proportion, yet was savaged as a "rat-faced little loser" by the Daily Mirror and even criticized by Prime Minister Blair while on diplomatic business abroad. This pillorying confirmed O'Hear had discovered an intolerable truth.
Chapter 10
The Third Way: Politics Beyond Left and Right?
Andrew Martin's 1998 novel Bilton satirizes a fictional British prime minister who announces his guiding principle is "Social Dynamics"-a policy so vague and contradictory that it's "both, either or neither" left-wing or right-wing. This ideologically ambiguous program rewards "socially useful" acts through complex tax breaks while promoting both "community" values and profit motives. The narrator describes it as "like one of those trick drawings of a staircase which at first glance looks plausible enough, but which then takes on the appearance of something quite unclimbable."
Blair began as a left-wing barrister writing for the New Statesman, defending unions against Thatcher's restrictions and supporting unilateral nuclear disarmament. In 1987, he still insisted "the 'free' market does not distribute fairly or efficiently" and predicted Thatcherism's failure. Yet after becoming Labour leader in 1994, he orchestrated a stunning ideological reversal. He rewrote Labour's founding principles, embraced nuclear weapons, accepted Thatcher's union restrictions, rejected interventionist industrial policy, and endorsed privatization and low taxation.
Just as Harold Wilson had embraced science in 1963 to modernize Labour's image, Blair sought his defining vision. Speaking to Singapore business executives in 1996, he unveiled the "stakeholder economy" concept borrowed from Will Hutton's book The State We're In. Blair briefly made "stakeholder" his mantra-stakeholder economy, stakeholder society, stakeholder welfare system-before abandoning it upon realizing Hutton was an unreconstructed Keynesian.
Blair then flirted with Amitai Etzioni's "communitarianism," which emphasized responsibilities over rights, and embraced the think-tank Demos, founded by former leftists Geoff Mulgan and Martin Jacques, who specialized in clothing right-wing ideas in progressive language. Demos claimed to have moved "beyond left and right" and promoted concepts like "holistic government," "flexible networks," and most significantly, "the Third Way"-Anthony Giddens' vague ideology positioned somewhere "between the Second Coming and the Fourth Dimension."
Giddens, a former leftist who lurched rightward, proposed contradictory ideas like legally binding children's responsibilities to parents and simultaneously arguing for both more and less market regulation. His book became sacred text for Blairites, impressing leaders from Clinton to Schroder who hoped to be all things to all people. Blair's own Fabian Society pamphlet on the Third Way was equally contradictory, claiming entrepreneurs naturally promote social justice while simultaneously arguing government intervention was necessary to protect workers. The Third Way reconciled contradictions by pretending they didn't exist-praising both market competition and welfare states without acknowledging the tension between them.
Chapter 11
The Market as God: Globalization's Contradictions
Benjamin Barber's observation that neither tribalism nor globalism promotes democracy was borne out by figures like Rupert Murdoch, who despite championing freedom, shamelessly kowtowed to Chinese autocrats for business advantage. Murdoch's media empire demonstrated the hypocrisy, removing BBC World Service from his Star network to gain permission for a Chinese cable station and dropping Chris Patten's memoir to secure market access.
The global market became a quasi-religious entity, with business books like "God Wants You to Be Rich" becoming bestsellers and Harvard divinity professor Harvey Cox noting how market commentary mimicked religious language with its myths of origin, fall, and redemption. Cox observed that in the era of Market religion, skeptics and freethinkers had disappeared, with questioning the Market's omniscience becoming tantamount to questioning Providence itself.
Thomas Friedman's bestseller "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" became the gospel of this faith, dividing humanity between modern consumers aspiring to luxury and "dodos" still fighting over tradition. Friedman particularly disdained the French for resisting McWorld, boasting about American cultural dominance in traditionally French-influenced regions. His encounters with the world's poor were superficial yet self-confirming, like interpreting a Vietnamese woman's sidewalk weighing service as proof that "globalization emerges from below" rather than being imposed by unaccountable institutions like the IMF and World Bank.
The expansion of foreign intellectual-property claims drains resources from developing countries and prevents them from following successful models like South Korea or Taiwan. Historically, economic development preceded trade liberalization, often requiring import restrictions, tariffs, subsidies and exchange controls. Yet the Washington consensus now demands poorer nations liberalize before they can compete-essentially "kicking away the ladder" as economist Ha-Joon Chang puts it.
America demands rights without responsibilities, promoting global markets while refusing political consequences. It imposes the New World Order on "rogue states" yet opts out of international obligations like the landmines treaty, international criminal court, and Kyoto protocol, citing sovereignty concerns. When poorer nations assert their sovereignty, they're punished for impeding free trade.
Globalization didn't begin in the 1980s but has been dominant since the fifteenth century voyages of discovery. By the Enlightenment, it was already widely discussed. In 1770, Abbe Raynal described a "revolution in commerce" linking continents with "flying bridges of communication." The most concise account of globalization appears in The Communist Manifesto (1848), where Marx and Engels described how the bourgeoisie's need for expanding markets "chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe," giving production and consumption a "cosmopolitan character" and creating "universal inter-dependence of nations."
Today's globalization contains fatal contradictions. While rich nations demand free movement of capital and goods (at least their own), they reject free movement of labor-perhaps the biggest difference from nineteenth-century globalization, when migration faced few barriers. There's no historical evidence that simple laissez-faire drives prosperity. The IMF's own data shows that 1950-1973-characterized by capital controls, fixed exchange rates, strong unions, large public sectors and government demand management-was the most successful period of the twentieth century, with average annual growth in per capita GDP of 2.9%, twice as high as the neoliberal era that followed.
Chapter 12
The Return to Reason: A Path Forward
The economic experiment Margaret Thatcher initiated in Britain a quarter-century ago was later imposed worldwide by her followers and even copied by liberal and social democratic politicians. Yet this new orthodoxy has failed to match its predecessor's achievements and has proven fundamentally irrational. Ironically, Thatcher herself witnessed the consequences when she joined Tiger Management's advisory board in May 1998 for $1 million annually. Five months after hiring her for her "political insight," the hedge fund lost $2 billion in a single day betting against the Japanese yen.
The financial market that destroyed Tiger Management was the same one that had made its fortune. Even Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan had warned of "irrational exuberance" in 1996, triggering market drops worldwide. His caution about share prices needing correlation with earnings was quickly forgotten as markets succumbed to dotcom mania between 1998-2000. Investors abandoned rational valuation, pouring money into companies with no earnings whatsoever.
After 9/11, the left struggled to apply rational materialism to explain religious extremism. Philosopher Michael Walzer urged fellow leftists to acknowledge that "material interests don't exhaust the possibilities of human motivation" and to defend "secular enlightenment, human rights, and democratic government" against religious radicalism. Yet since Khomeini's return to Iran, many leftists had embraced Islamic fundamentalism through the "my-enemy's-enemy" principle.
Depicting Islamism as essentially political represents what philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a "category mistake"-yoking together incompatible concepts. While Islamism has political antecedents, it's fundamentally different from conventional political movements. Unlike secular predecessors, Islamic terrorists don't call themselves freedom fighters. Their sole ambition is exterminating infidels and establishing shariah law.
Anti-American Muslims and Western conservatives like Samuel Huntington share the same flawed thesis of unbridgeable fault-lines between civilizations. This theory that liberal democracy cannot transfer between cultures has been repeatedly disproven throughout history. In the 19th century, critics claimed democracy was limited to Anglo-Saxons or Protestants; when Catholic Spain embraced democracy, the fault-line shifted to "Slavs" and "Orthodox Christians." India's democratic success shattered the notion that only Christian societies could sustain liberal institutions.
Truth is great and will prevail-or in George Santayana's tougher formulation, "The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it." Santayana's warning that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" stands chiseled over the entrance to the US Archives in Washington DC. He described this historical amnesia as the condition of "children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience." But those who refuse to learn from experience and instead discredit rationalism-whether holy warriors, anti-scientific relativists, economic fundamentalists, post-modernists, New Age mystics or doomsayers-aren't just condemning themselves to repeat the past. They wish to consign us all to a life in darkness.
