As an English major (a weekend major) who found himself with a weekday job and the skills to negotiate the very different set of rules that obtained in business (the classic weekday major), I found that my weekend major was instrumental in my ability to negotiate my way up the corporate ladder. I wouldn’t have traded my major for a classic weekday major for anything, because I do feel as though I get a lot out of my major that others who majored in business did. My education paid off when I started working, too. As I said in my blog post the other day, I never wanted to do anything but work for myself. It only took me 4 years to start my own company after I got out of graduate school. But I had to make some compromises with my weekend major in the process. The compromises I had to make were quite instructive.
I believe that most liberal arts majors believe that that their liberal arts majors give them a sense of being “whole,” and they value that sense of wholeness. This behavior of searching after “wholeness” is correct. From the point of view of a liberal arts major, business majors are people who have grasped only a “partial” truth, and that the part that takes advantage of others by subterfuge for the purpose of making money. I believed this right up until the point when I got a job in the “real world” of business.
Sometimes this week (or early next week) I will post my post on the 100 business books I read in 1996-1997 that convinced me that there was something wrong with the liberal arts configuration of the universe. It is not that I betrayed my “whole” ideals to take advantage of others (something that every academic thinks and most of my friend think, as well). It is that there is no “whole” available to us as human beings. We are each blinded to our lack of “wholeness” by the fact that each of us has a “whole” consciousness, but as Descartes points out somewhere,
Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.
But if everyone were really as “whole” as they feel, then no one would need an education. As it is, people clamber for education and the bookstores are filled with self-help sections to help people in the land of the free and the home of the brave get help from others who they feel are wiser than they are. Descartes himself was not so satisfied: he invented modern philosophy as a remedy to what ails us (this was before Paris Hilton took over that role from him).
Art as “Whole”; Business as “Partial”
That means that anyone who takes the academic position of believing that they are living a “whole” life is fooling themselves. It is my view that, rather than being “whole,” liberal arts majors are leaving out the part of human experience in which people exchange things with one another for a position derived from existential idealist thinkers like Sartre (who was a Marxist) and Nietzsche (who hated the decline of aristocratic culture to the bourgeoisie), both of whom closed themselves off from interoperative procedures for an individual “authentic” existence of individuals without concern for the larger society. One could argue that Sartre, being a Marxist, was concerned for the larger society, but only if we recognize that Marx’s concern for xollective society comes from his lack of concern for the individuals who coolect together in groups to get on equal ground with their capitalist pig bosses, a thing that caused Soviet society to lose in their competition with America in the Cold War. I don’t believe, with Marx of Sartre, that we need to forego our individuality in order to be better collective citizens. It is not an either/or situation.
The interoperative culture of business operates on a different set of principles than the classic libeeral art major operates on. Business revolves around setting of a price in a world of competition. When a price has been reached, it is a win-win situation for both parties. Rather than going back to the “whole” position of academia—which never can be “whole” on account of their having left out the mechanisms by which people actually interoperate in their day to day lives—I believe that the interoperative principles of business should be incorporated into our “whole” experience before we should be allowed to call our experience “whole.”
This exclusion of the win-win (non-Zero sum game in game theory) procedures of business in favor of the “us-versus-them” procedures of academia (a Zero-sum game in game theory) makes the academic as partial as everyone else. The problem with academics is that they don’t recognize this, as everyone in the business world does. At the same time, business doesn’t recognize what they are missing by chasing only after profits in a world that offers so much more in the way of art. But—and I think this is important—the world progresses on processes derived from business; not on Obama’s “progressive” idealist policies, which share the academic idealism that wages war on an excluded business world from their nobler position above the clouds.
From the perspective of a Republican, this sounds like the snobbery of an elite that is attempting to hold power at the expense of those who those who have been excluded from the elite. In academia, this usually comes from the requirement that people have a PhD before they will be allowed any authority to speak. As I can attest, such people were the first to be drummed out of academia. That situation left only those who occupy the left as having any “rightful” authority in the eyes of the elite. But as my favorite philosopher-scholar-critic (Jacques Derrida, who is also a Marxist) says, people who are excluded from a system are not eliminated from the system (unless you actually manage to kill them, as Hitler, Saddam Hussein, the Hutus, and countless others in the Machiavellian age have attempted and failed to do). They will form a new position—also imperfect, but with the advantage of appealing to the suppressed majority of people without credentials, whether of having a PhD in this country of having a Nazi party membership card in Nazi Germany—and this will capture the attention of more people than the elite think it should. The elite will dig in, as the Church did in the Middle Ages when those new-fangled kids showed up with their and non-Christian pagan humanist nonsense. The Church, the most powerful institution in its day, never saw what was clearly coming coming.
This is why I actually watch Fox News and listen to Rush Limbaugh. I also listened to Al Franken when he was on the radio, and he is a follower of mine on Twitter, and I watch Rachel Maddow; but I truly believe that Limbaugh is the progenitor of the way of New Media, which I see as a new way of building a solid audience of true believers. The Old Media, like the medieval Church before it, disdains to pay attention to the upstart Limbaugh, just as Obama does, because they have their hands on the “truth.”
From the point of view of my business education, where there is no “truth,” just the rise and fall of groups between extremes (I would use a Bollinger Band construction if I was in a classroom with you to illustrate my point), the rise of Limbaugh has been attended by a host of imitators; but Limbaugh and his followers on the left and the right will eventually fall, as others have fallen before him. He’s like the mobile homes industry group in 1968 or the bowling industry group in 1958. They shoot up, then after a few years fall back to ground. Limbaugh has lasted for a generation, and the is no sign of his failing, yet; but I still expect him to fall eventually. Politics, like lightbulbs, brightest before the dawn. But while he is ascendant—and he is ascendant whether you are listening to him or not—it behooves (me) to keep an eye on him, as I get more information about where the country is going than I would by ignoring him (and I think he’s extermely funny and has the best political memory of anybody on the radio or on television).
But in the meantime, the left is suffering from a clear case of what I call Derrida syndrome. They feel that their ability to exclude people eliminates those people. This elinimates their broad scope that got them into power, but it does not secure them in their position. It only drives the opposition to the margins (this was something that the left laid exclusive claim to when I was in graduate school).
My Books
My Spenser book (on the academic level) and Art in the Age of Talk Radio (on the populist level) are my efforts to correct this misconfiguration, which I find at the heart of the art world. If you want to fix American culture, I believe that we need to pay attention to our strengths, rather than ignoring them because we are satisfied with ourselves, as both the left and right are. My approach is to attack this problem on the level of aesthetics. Both of those books should be out before the end of the year.
And just so we’re clear, it has been my experience in and out of academia that my position in what I call (after line II.ii.20.3 in Spenser’s Faerie Queene; how much of a geek am I?) “middle space” makes me a target from both extremes (the left feels I’m too conservative; the right feels I’m too liberal), and I expect that to continue indefinitely. Both political parties are looking to shore up their bases (à la Limbaugh) and they are more than willing to lecture me but not as willing to listen to my objections. That is why I’m not a political person, which is amenable to such exteremes but which has no way to compromise with differing principles than one’s own.
In my novel Poker Tales, I chart the victory of stupid America over the much better educated French (in the tale called “Four Parisians”). In my opinion, the American victory is bittersweet, but it is nevertheless total. Culture has forever gone away from France. And while progress has settled in America for now, after the Cold War (dealt with in the “Reykjavik” chapter of Poker Tales), everybody but the idealistic academics have devoted themselves to epicurean pleasures. But their own form of self-satisfaction dooms them to the same fate as everyone else in America by having them point out that it is only the stupid beliefs of their enemies (the “them” in “us-versus-them”) that have problems in their thought while the “us’s” on the academic inside are pure. Limbaugh and Al Franken both thought they had their hands on “the truth.” Both accused the other party of not playing fair (Franken wrote a book of such “truths” entitled Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot). But when two intellectual giants (thanks, Al) meet, how are we to decide between the two? In my world, we don’t go back to our premises and decide that it’s all “them’s” fault, as we can see no fault in our own premises. We consider the evidence that “them” bring to the table, and we respond, not emotionally in an appeal designed to get more listeners who share our beliefs, but through reason in the “middle space.” And sometimes that means having to admit that some of your premises were wrong.
Business In and Out of America
America, which invented the processes of hard work as the way to unbelievable national wealth, is to my mind a poor candidate for guiding the future in a post-Cold War world in which even Communist China has realized that individually-oriented capitalism (not collective communism) is the way to wealth. American strengths came with weaknesses, and we are now literally paying for our weaknesses with an enormous trade deficit with China, while our leading academics while away in their hours in Ivory Towers dreaming their idealist dreams of escape from the materiality of “mere money” to a fictional and unrealizable paradise where “whole” justice reigns. Justice is a goal, not an end point.
This is why I keep insisting that the American superpower will inevitably pass from our shores, as business people, who have given us the greatest system of wealth creation ever conceived of in human history, will pass out of high-tax and hostile America as soon as they are given a place to set up business with freedom to innovate (which the politically-locked down, Confucian educational system of China lacks and if I had my guess will never obtain) as well as much lower taxes. I feel like Cassandra when I say this, but I’ll say it again. By setting up business as the fall guy in America, we are preparing the exit of the wealthy few economic leaders from our shores on the basis of our having drunk the Limbaugh Kool-Aid and believing that Limbaugh’s temporary reign in this country is in any way permanent. Business, not politics, not patriotism, is driving the bus.
I am willing to admit that my experience is tainted by my living in Cook County, IL, (one of the most corrupt counties in the union) in a state where Governor Quinn raised taxes by 33% (!) last year, as well as passing a law that made it impossible for entrepreneurs to sell their products on Amazon. 8,000 small businesses moved to Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Iowa, or Wisconsin as a result. I even considered moving my 1-person business to nearby Indiana before I realized that Quinn’s law wouldn’t affect my printing my books through Amazon. I would have, though.
The only reason that rich people, who have enough liquid wealth to move anywhere, put up with the situation in high-tax America, is not that they are patriotic—that is a situation being propped up by the hated Limbaugh, who has a large number of beleaguered entrepreneurs in his audience—but that there are no other equally palatable option available to most of them. If they could live in America, where their friends as family are, while holding their business in a low-tax Caribbean island that takes only 5%, a lot of them would. A large number of them already have. And they are shipping jobs overseas for the same reason. If they don’t, someone else will undercut them and put them out of business. The only reason that individual people don’t move is that they have not found a suitable country to settle in, and America isn’t that bad a place to be. But, as they say in business, past performance is no guarantee of future results. In a country where 5% of the people pay 40% of the taxes, the status quo depends on people to have no other option, but counting on it would be (in my opinion) a mistake.
In my opinion, this situation is reversible, but not by those extremists who currently retain control and who are fighting over ownership of the political center. But then, as I frequently ask on this blog, Who am I?
Just my 2¢.
