Now what’s going to happen to us without Barbarians?**
The Dutch doctor Bernard de Mandeville, who set up his practice in England in the early eighteenth century, published in 1714 an essay he called The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits, in which he argued that the system of mutual assistance which allows society, like a beehive, to function, feeds on the honeyed passion of consumers who love to acquire what they don’t need. A virtuous society, Mandeville maintained, in which only the basic requirements must be satisfied, would have neither trade nor culture, and therefore collapse for want of employment. The consumer society that came fully into being almost two centuries later, took Mandeville’s sarcastic arguments literally. Flattering the senses, valuing possession over worth or need, it turned the notion of value on its head: value, according to the codes of advertising, became not the worth of an object nor a service measured in its practice, but a perception based on how extensively the service or object was promoted and under what brand name. In the consumer world, Berkeley’s esse est percepi has a different meaning. Perception is at the root of being, but things acquire value not because they need to exist but because they are perceived as being needed. Desire becomes then not the source but the end-product of consumption.
Like Jack London’s Assassination Bureau, Hal [9000 in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey] is a failproof machine, built to reach the wished-for goal “at all costs,” even at the cost of its maker’s life. The mercantile structure that we have built as the driving engine of our society is as perfect as those other imaginary constructs, and as lethal. We have given it the command to reach a goal, to render financial profit at all cost; we have forgotten to inscribe in its memory the caveat: except at the cost of our lives. For the vast economic machinery that governs every aspect of our societies . . . we are the Barbarians. That appears to be the identity awaiting us.
In our search for structures within which we can be with one another, we may have ended up with societies from whose benefits we all seem destined to be excluded. Disregarding the abuse of human rights for the sake of economic partnerships, allowing the devastation of the planet with the excuse of ever-increasing financial benefits, refusing to adopt scientific solutions because of superstitious beliefs: all these things allow partnerships, profits, and beliefs to overide the responsibilites we have toward each other, toward ourselves individually, and toward the world.
[Fashion dictates]; that is to say, that the dictates of commercial dogma are made to impregnate so deeply the fabric of society that no strand remains unaffected, and even though we might consciously refuse to follow the day’s fashion, we will nevertheless become “slaves to the system.”
This last point is all important: the industry must educate us in our stupidity, because we don’t come by stupidity naturally [my emphasis]. On the contrary, we come into the world as intelligent creatures, curious and avid for instruction. It takes immense time and effort, individually and collectively, to dull and eventually stifle our intellectual and aesthetic capabilities, our creative perception, and our use of language.***
Paradoxically, it is the very rich nature of language that allows for it to be co-opted, to be reduced to dogma or, on the contrary, to flourish as literature.
ALBERTO MANGUEL, The City of Words
Cartoon: Mr. Fish
*Northrop Frye
**Constantin Cavafy
*** What I call, “trained to be comfortable.”
