David Mamet: The Secret Knowledge

What is this New Age “worker” selling? He is flattering his clients’ vanity through the pocketbook. This is a pretty good example of Mr. Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class . We gain status, he teaches, through the display of wealth. But there is only so much wealth one can display, and the rich, having accrued wealth too copious for their own individual display, must display it through leisure. Sadly, though one may have innumerable homes, one can only have a finite amount of leisure—one can do nothing only twenty-four hours a day. But one is limited only by one’s purse in employing others to do more nothing on one’s behalf, their number and uselessness a reflection of their controller’s worth and status.

Now we see the Liberal Young not flocking but stampeding into film schools. Why the stampede? The movie industry is bust, television has gone to the dogs (reality programming), and no one has yet figured out the transition to Internet distribution. There are, in short, no jobs at the end of this exhaustive four-year course of watching movies.

There is, however, protection . The film school student is protected, by his community, in his election not to work .

Film, and the Arts in general, have long been exempted from the category of “toil,” and so have been the refuge of the Leisure Class. This, however, was understood, if only unconsciously, as a socially acceptable holding area, protecting the males until they got an actual job (in the real, non-showbiz world), the females until they got an actual male.

The jobs are no more, and the females are unlikely to marry a twenty-six-year-old fellow with no skills and no ambition to acquire them. 18Only the imprimatur remains.

There is an additional effect of the Liberal, learned aversion to actual work: the young “practitioner” can exist only among his own. His specialized skills can be sold only in the Liberal Communities. He, thus, will quite literally never , cradle-to-grave, encounter a Conservative Idea, let alone a Conservative.

These young people have, in the useful if lurid phrase, grown up in a parallel country. They do not know what they do not know, and their insulation, geographically and professionally, ensures their continued ignorance—those they meet, that which they read and see, nothing will induce nor force them to confront their inherited cultural assumptions, of which they are unaware, considering them “the nature of the world.”

The world in which they live, in contradistinction to the America which created the wealth to allow their leisure, does not understand the concept of work. It is not that we are becoming, but that we have become two cultures occupying the same space.

There is a good piece of fiction on this phenomenon. It is a novel by James Hilton, Lost Horizon . In this beautiful fantasy, a flier, blown off course and crashed in the Himalayas, is rescued and taken to a mysterious, inaccessible lamasery in Tibet.

Here he discovers a perfect land—all its inhabitants are artists and philosophers, there is no disease, a person can, indeed, live as long as he wishes to; there is no want, the people of the Valley have for millennia devoted themselves to the care, physical, material, and sexual, of the folks on the Mountain.

This is a sweet tale by a great storyteller. It is also, less admirably, a Fascist tract. For Mr. Hilton’s paradise (he understands, if only subconsciously) can exist only if there are slaves.

Here we see the progression from good ideas to horror, down the path Mr. Hayek pointed out in The Road to Serfdom . We will recall that the sibilant in the acronym NAZI stands for Socialist. They, like the Italian Fascists and the pre-Bolshevik Russian Communists, believed, in their beginnings, in Social Justice, and the Fair Distribution of goods. But these sweet ideas are encumbered in execution by the realization that someone , finally, has to do the work; their adamant practice will quite soon reveal this: “Oh. We will need slaves.” 19

These slaves may be called, variously, the Rich, the Jews, the Kulaks, the Gypsies, Armenians, countercultural elements, and so on, but they are chosen not for their odious qualities but for their supine or defenseless nature. And they are enslaved to allow the elite not only exemption from work but exemption from thought.

Originally they are enlisted (fellow travelers, or “useful idiots”) or convinced (taxpayers) in order to allow the ideological an exemption from toil and the malleable exemption from thought. As the money dries up, the ideologues are easily supplanted by tyrants and the malleable chained to their oars.

History provides no counter-example. A country which will not work will fall.

Our Hero (Hugh Conway) in Lost Horizon discovers, midway through the book, that it was no accident which led him to the lamasery; he, like all the inhabitants, was originally kidnapped—chosen for his “readiness” to unquestioningly accept this new, changeless, and perfect life. Like the young of the Left.

6

THE MUSIC MAN

Somebody must have power in the state, and it is idle and academic to debate whether those who have power should or should not also have wealth, since they will, in fact, take it. Either you allow people to have power because they are rich, or they become rich through the possession of power. It does not make much difference in practice. Therefore all the common talk about the new equality and the abolition of privilege did not seem to have much meaning. That talk was usually to be heard from the lips of the left-wing writers and politicians who were at the very moment of uttering it busy with establishing new privileges for themselves and their children.

—Christopher Hollis, Death of a Gentleman , 1937

A subjective system can never be shown to have failed. If its goals are indeterminate, general, and its progress incapable of measurement, how can its performance be faulted?

Karl Kraus makes this point about Freudianism, describing it as “the disease which presents itself as its own cure.” I came across this quote in Dead Aid , by Dambisa Moyo, an economist whose work for her native Gambia led her to identify the country’s problem not as a structural disposition toward poverty, but as international aid. She makes the case that aid prevents the development of a national economy, the exploitation of national resources, the prosecution of national interests, and leads to the subjugation of recipients to the powers of those agencies, international and domestic, who profit from aid, and, thus, from poverty: bureaucrats, dictators, and thieves.

The distribution of alms, she writes, is based, at bottom, on the notion that it will help—actual evidence to the contrary is stilled by those personally interested in graft, profit, or in a subjective feeling of philanthropy.

Why should Gambia et al. be incapable of self-development? Internationally this supposed lack is attributed to a structural cultural residue of colonialism. But what does this mean, and how might such “structural” inabilities be identified, to what attributed (the United States, Australia, and Canada were all once colonies, Britain a colony of Rome), and how ameliorated?

For if these questions cannot be answered, as Ms. Moyo asks of Gambia and Mr. Kraus of psychoanalysis, and if the underlying assumption cannot be challenged, what possible “cure” other than increased and continued application of that which a reasoned and impartial investigation might identify as the cause of the problem?

If, for example, African Americans are to have a special judicial status because of a legacy of slavery, how might one determine, conclusively, that that legacy has dissipated and it is time to welcome the descendants of its victims back into the general population? (Could such a “legacy” exist for a thousand years? Even the most vehement supporters of the idea would probably say no. Then, for how long? And how might one recognize its absence, and upon what authority announce it?) If Latina women are wiser than white men, 20then, in a dispute between the two, to accept the reasoning of the latter rather than the former can always be to risk the accusation of racism.