John Ralston Saul, The Doubter’s Companion
The system does not encourage competition. Competition is an illusion · · · The only people who compete are those who have no power · · · It is not just the separate institutions and corporations of the system who wield a monopoly over mankind; the system itself is radically, or fundamentally, monopolistic. We are forced to live within, and thereby conform to it.
Capitalism, we are often told, is a highly competitive system which is antagonistic to monopoly power; and yet here we are in a world in which the ten largest corporations make more money than most of the countries of the world, in which a few tech companies exclusively dominate our ability to communicate with each other and in which seven oil companies wield total control over the world’s energy supplies.
In the real world money makes money, wealth attracts wealth, competition annihilates competitors and ownership of land and private property is inherently monopolistic, as is state power. An aggressively competitive system based on the prerogatives of capital inevitably leads to a few powerful corporations becoming more powerful, owning more and more and absorbing or merging with their ‘competitors,’ and with the state, until one colossal state-assisted corporation has a monopoly or, more commonly in late capitalist systems,1 a small number of mega-corps working together to ‘compete’ within mutually beneficial boundaries, form an oligopoly (or cartel). Within this small group of megawealthy oligarchs there is limited competition and therefore limited pressure to cut costs and multiply surplus (exacerbated by a debt-economy which compels everyone to over-produce), but the cartel as a whole (official term; industry) works as one to fix prices, lobby for favourable regulation,2 dominate resources, curtail self-sufficiency, suppress labour power, corrupt individual and communal autonomy and, in general, defend the system which they are part of against the threat of independence. Individual companies then disguise their monolithic sameness behind — and generate markets for their over-produced mediocrity with — the varied splendours of advertising (see myths 8 and 9).
The Myth of Competition conveniently side-steps the oligopolistic realities of class power (see myth 4) and the total dominance of monopolistic capital, focusing on the occasional fall of a large corporation, the sadistic warfare of smaller businesses fighting their way up and the arena where genuine — indeed pitilessly fierce — competition does exist: at the very bottom.
It is here, at the base of the Golden Pyramid, in a world of artificially scarce resources (see myth 3), that ordinary people have to fight, tooth and nail, against each other in order to gain enough of the Big Pie. Competition, as used by the owners of capital, like the word capitalism itself, actually means competition for you, not for us. You must fight your way to the top of the ‘academic league table,’ in order to get your hands on one of a handful of actually useful degrees. You must scrabble over each other to get your foot up onto the next-but-bottom stage of the mountain of filth so that you may, perhaps, one day, earn the right to give more orders than you receive. You must fight to win. You must have your ‘free markets’. You, not us, because we don’t want them, we don’t like them; and anyway we were born winners (see myth 5).
Another way to put this, now well recognised by critics of the system, is that capitalism, the lizard-eat-lizard world of constant, pitiless competition, is for the general public. The corporate world is legally, financially and militarily protected by governments, and, in times of duress, generously bailed out by them; the very definition of socialism. Socialism and welfare for us, capitalism and warfare for you.
The dice are not just loaded for people, but for ideas. Firstly, and most conspicuously, in that ideas are, in the highly developed system we live in, owned by capital. Just as physical property is inherently monopolistic — the prestige land that, say, the Duke of Westminster owns can, while it is his, only be used for his benefit — so intellectual property prevents anybody from ‘competing’ upon its virtual territory. Ideas, words, theories, characters, fragments of song, patents and the like are locked up, well beyond the reach of ordinary folk, who must compete without access to their own cultural heritage3.
There are also monopolistic pressures upon the spread of ideas. There is, we are led to believe, a competitive system of ‘natural’ selection operating in universities and newspapers, just as there is between businesses, individuals, animals, plants and genes. This is why ideas which support the system rise to the top, because they are right, you see, because they have defeated what is wrong, in a fair fight; and not, say, because intellectual competition in a hierarchical institution always leads to ideas which justify the institution, its owners and managers, and the system it is part of. Such ideas include the belief that reality is ultimately mind-knowable; that consciousness is reducible to thought; that psychological problems are physical illnesses (see myth 26); that gender is an illusion (or is real, with one gender superior; see myth 29); or that history represents progress (see myth 12); that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy (see myth 10); that tradition in art is out of date; that quality is subjective; that we are the good guys; that you cannot escape cause-and-effect; that humans are essentially warlike and selfish; that life was once ‘nasty, brutish and short’; that our closest relatives are incorrigibly violent chimpanzees; that the universe and the origins of life were, essentially, accidents (or cosmic rabbits pulled out of God’s Big Hat); that anyone who rejects the system is, actually, morally corrupt or laughably naive; that traditional knowledge is rigid and whimsical; that the professional world is benevolent, efficient and fair (see myth 28); that capitalism, or feudalism, or communism, or whatever ideological branch of the system is in control, is normal and natural, indeed is written into the fabric of reality; that sharing as inevitable tragedy; that endless alienated work is a prerequisite for dignity and ‘prosperity’ (see myth 21); that technological progress is a prerequisite for human health and happiness; that love is a chemical; that genes determine of behaviour4; that science (see myth 23) or religion (see myth 25) are the only ways to understand life; that happiness is a product which can be bought; that freedom is synonymous with obedience; that suffering is a primal fact of existence; that disorder and violence are inevitable consequences of the absence of ‘law and order,’ or of power and authority, and that poverty is the fault of the poor. In short; all the myths of the system.
Systemacrats working in academia or media, spend their lives looking for (or inventing) facts which support their myths, and then beaming them into us 24/7, until they emerge, ‘naturally’, from the people who surround us — from the conversation of our friends and family and work colleagues — eventually coalescing into what we call ‘the normal world’, any challenge to which is, ipso facto, weird, pretentious, ludicrous, depressing or terrifyingly extreme.
Those who discuss such ideas, the ‘unbiased, independent’ journalists and academics who ‘fairly’ rise to public platforms, always somehow manage to neglect to mention the monopolistic power of the institution they are part of or, even more taboo, the totalising dominance of the system itself. For monopoly does not just extend to the individual institutions of capitalism; these organisations are part of a far more extensive and disabling primary context. Individual organisations or cartels may or may not be monopolies, and we may or may not be able to choose this or that product or job, but, as Ivan Illich exhaustively detailed,5 the entire system represents a radical monopoly; an interlinking network of institutions or industries that have become the exclusive means of satisfying human needs — such as locomotion, shelter, knowledge, healing and energy — which once occasioned a personal or social response.
Self is to ego what society is to system. When the former — self and society — pass tipping points of complexity, size and power, they overwhelm the people and groups of people they are supposed to serve and become the latter — system and ego. Me and Us radically monopolise experience at the expense of I and We, replacing individual and collective consciousness with mental-emotional projections. It looks like a person, it looks like a people, but it is not. It is a personality pretending to be a person. It is a social order pretending to be a society.
‘Nobody is forcing you!’ says the defender of the modern system. ‘You can work where you like, read whatever newspaper you like, eat whatever food you like…’ He does not understand — or, rather chooses not to understand — that although you may be able to choose between Ford and Toyota, or UnitedHealth and Virgin Care, or Oxford and Harvard, or British Gas and E.on, or London and Tokyo — you have to use cars to get around, hospitals to get treatment (even in national health services), higher education credentials to get a decent job, the electricity grid to power your house and the supermarket to power your body. You have to rely on a totalitarian professionalised system to meet your ‘needs’ as a client, a patient, a student, a prisoner and a consumer. You have to work at some kind of moronic, alienating task. You have no alternative because the omnipresent, ultra-monopolistic, market-system demands that humans become entirely dependent on it. This totalising monopoly is invisible — or, at best, not obvious — and so is never addressed anywhere, although, as technology increasingly permits the system to usurp private life, it is exploited, on an unimaginable scale, by oligarchic tech companies which are able to use their monopoly over communication channels to convert personal ownership, personal use and all forms of human creation and activity (media content, houses, cars, consumer products, friendship, etc.) into corporate control, or possession by proxy. Thus Uber, Alibaba, Airbnb, Facebook, Deliveroo and worldwide systems of contract farming increasingly dominate productive activity without having to own anything6 (much as supermarkets dominate food production without owning any farmland), extending the radical power of the system into the final realms of human experience. To say that you have a choice in such a state of affairs is like saying a cyborg is free to plug itself in where it likes, or a Sim is free to build a castle, or you are free, in your dreams, to fall in love.
Two centuries ago capitalists were powerful individuals in competition with each other. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century the institutions they controlled became larger and larger, effectively taking on a life of their own — in fact large corporations are legally defined as people, with the same rights as people; or, in the case of the corporation, immortal people. See Joel Bakan, The Corporation.
Which includes the infrastructure, education and security services it requires to ‘safely’ operate. All of which the monopolistic state hands over.
Does this mean I don’t mind my ideas being stolen or my books copied? In a word, no, I don’t mind. Obviously, in a market system, where I live, I am forced to earn a crust and defend my work from exploitation within the market. Equally obviously, you should acknowledge your sources; but if ordinary individuals want to use my stuff or can’t afford to pay for it, fill yer boots.
See Russell Bonduriansky and Troy Day, Extended Heredity, A New Understanding of Inheritance and Evolution and Nessa Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution.
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality.
Except of course the millions of hours of labour ‘congealed’ in the technology they possess. See myth 1.
7. The Myth of Choice
Every day people are denied an authentic life and sold back its representation.
Larry Law
The system is designed to restrict meaningful choice, which is and must be impossible in the system · · · The system permits meaningless choice. You can do what you want, as long as it doesn’t really matter · · · Only those who can be trusted not to make meaningful choices about their lives, are free to do as they please.
When owners and their managers say that the system promotes choice they mean that it promotes meaningful choice for the ultra wealthy and trivial choice for everyone else. The market for the masses can only permit choice between products and services which generate profit. Thus, in the Huxleyan wing of the system we are permitted to choose our phone colour, television channel, car badge, pizza topping, and cleaning job; but are prevented from choosing superb drama, truthful news, foot-friendly environments, cheap widespread public transport, carrots that taste of carrots, job-sharing, poaching, foraging, deschooled education and the occupation of unused land.
The fundamental sameness of all products and activities within the market is masked, and has to be masked, by the awesome variety and individuality of their packaging and promotional texts. These obscure the fact that the stuff we use is made by miserable people and from tortured animals, and therefore are not stamped with the beauty of free individual attention or of wild nature; the fact that, at least for the masses, our clothes, tools and furniture are constructed from shoddy materials and built to quickly wear out; the fact that artistic and cultural products are nearly always derivative, imitating successful competitors and precursors and necessarily sucked of intensity, subversion and ‘offense’ (see myth 30); the fact that craft, and therefore beautifully crafted objects, is a threat to capitalism; the fact that, in short, the universal pressures of cost cutting, corporate concentration (see myth 6), extreme caution (see myth 19) and class interest result in a ghastly conveyor-belt of nearly identical goods, services and activities.1 All this is unmentionable or invisible.
The market cannot function with freedom of choice any more than it can with freedom of speech, thought, feeling, movement or action. People who are free to choose invariably choose things which are good for themselves, their communities and their environments; such as healthy local food, ample free time to take care of each other, active entertainment, sharing of tools, mastery of tools and spending time with teachers they like. The system, on the other hand, prefers choice to be limited to things which are good for the system; such as food transported from the other side of the world, no free time whatsoever, massively expensive, non-participatory, spectacles, high-tech imagination-limiting ‘fun’, everyone having their own drill, car, lawnmower and printer, imposed motorways, imposed virtual communication, imposed syllabuses and a mechanised world in which contact with human beings is increasingly impossible. These things equal growth, therefore you must choose them.2
If people didn’t automatically make market-friendly choices; if they didn’t automatically elect to talk to their phones before their neighbours, buy bookshelves from ikea rather than learn joinery, choose work in a ceramics factory over free time at their own potter’s wheel, apply moisturiser rather than drink water, drive to the supermarket rather than grow potatoes, consume business-friendly news from the bbc or The New York Times instead of learn what is actually happening in the world from an independent press or throw themselves upon the latest space-saving or time-saving gadget (as if space and time were really artefacts that can be saved); if they didn’t ‘choose’ such things, the jet-plane of the market would instantly run out of fuel and tumble from the sky; and that cannot be allowed to happen.
It is, therefore insane ‘choices’ which must be promoted by the formative institutions of capitalism (official term; school), the propaganda systems of capitalism (official term; news) and by the restraints imposed by the punitive-legislative-wing of the technocratic corporate world (official term: government); all other choices must be systematically destroyed, at massive expense, so that new, shoddy, conviviality-corrupting products can be continually generated, continually demanded and continually consumed; while those who generate, demand and consume them are pacified and controlled.
So vital is it to promote continual, indiscriminate consumption and production, the manufacture of goods and services must be subordinated to the manufacture of needs, addictions and indoctrinated subservience. Goods must be produced to meet the needs of advertisers (and ‘researchers’), news stories — not to mention audiences — must be produced to meet the needs of sponsors and wars must be produced to meet the needs of weapons3 manufacturers. Ultimately, for the market system, what people need, is to need, so anything which makes people more needy — and more poorly informed about the nature of their neediness — is good. This is why the history of capitalism is the history of depriving people of the capacity and the desire to provision themselves (see myth 13). The ‘independence’ button cannot be found and nobody is looking for it.
Eventually, when the system has dominated human life for long enough, dependence upon it becomes total and with dependence comes shame, denial, hyper-sensitivity to criticism, fear and all the other symptoms of addiction. Meaningful independent choice then ceases to be visible, let alone practicable, and any suggestion that qualitatively different options might be available are unconsciously registered as an existential threat to be handled in the standard manner; ignore, ridicule, attack and exalt. It is at this point, when inmates of the omni-prison believe their ability to choose is as free as their options are wide, that the system can trust them to ‘freely choose’.
William Morris, Useful Work vs. Useless Toil.
Or make choices within the constraints they impose.
‘Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars. Now wars are manufactured to sell weapons’. Arundhati Roy
8. The Myth of Freedom
If you leave a man on land which is someone else’s property and tell him that he is a completely free man and can work for himself, it’s as if you drop him in the middle of the Atlantic and tell him that he is free to go ashore.
Henry George
We are free within the political, social, psychological, emotional and moral constraints of the system · · · Freedom from the system is illegal · · · The system is so totalising that any attempt to free oneself partially from it, inevitably ends in failure and pain, thus demonstrating the necessity of unfreedom.
We are free to do exactly as we’re told, we are free to buy exactly what we’re sold.1 We are free to do dull alienating work, or be poor, free to eat expensive, tasteless pap, or starve, free to watch ‘mainstream’ excrement, or be bored, free to choose any parasitic landlord we like. The limits which compel us into market-consumption, on the one hand, or poverty, starvation, boredom, etc. on the other, are never mentioned. We are never reminded that we are unable to use our feet to get around, our land to grow food or our mouths to communicate with each other; the fact that land, knowledge and channels of communication — not to mention energy, drugs, diagnostic equipment, motorways and railways — are all owned by, or totally dependent on, a minuscule group of hyper-wealthy elites, and managed by a slightly larger but immensely powerful and ultimately self-interested professional class, is ignored in capitalist definitions of freedom and in all popular discussions on the nature of liberty.
In fact the capitalist wing of the system does require free people — in the sense that it needs to rent its slaves (hire is the official term), rather than own them, so as to be able to call on whatever labour power it requires, and to renounce the responsibility that slave-owners and feudal lords had for their chattel. But all system-slaves must be deprived of both the means of production and any meaningful control over the fruits of their labour, forcing them either to sell their bodies to Orwellian slave owners or rent them to Huxleyan hyper-capitalists.
Hyper-capitalists also require what they call ‘free markets’; freedom to buy any labour they like, at any price, freedom to buy the laws they need to operate, freedom to trade what they like, freedom to conglomerate into megacorps, freedom to exploit any resource they like, freedom to annihilate craft, freedom to tear communities apart, freedom to cover every square inch of our living spaces with exhortations to consume and freedom to convert the entire natural world into a poisonous resource. That every other living creature on earth finds that their freedoms — to speak, think, move or simply exist — decrease as those of corporate capital increase, cannot be included in official definitions of ‘freedom’ which must mean freedom for the market, never, ever, from it.
