How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. Francis Wheen

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СКАЧАТЬ mantra soon became the catchphrase of every Big Swinging Dick in New York and London – Masters of the Universe, as Tom Wolfe called them in The Bonfire of the Vanities. For ambitious young things who had yet to join the club, there was one urgent question: I’ve got the red braces, I’ve got the attitude, I’ve got greed in abundance, so how can I grab some of the loot?

      Help was at hand. In 1982 a young management consultant from McKinsey & Co., Thomas J. Peters, co-wrote In Search of Excellence, a relentlessly optimistic primer which celebrated America’s best companies and sought to identify the secrets of their success. As the Economist noted, Peters had ‘a knack of saying the right thing at the right time’: In Search of Excellence was published in the very week when unemployment in the US reached its highest level since the 1930s, and it found a ready audience in a nation worried about declining competitiveness but sick of hearing about the Japanese miracle. (Perhaps Peters had learned from the precedent of Dale Carnegie, whose equally cheerful and vastly popular How to Win Friends and Influence People had appeared in 1936, in the depths of the Depression.) In Search of Excellence sold five million copies, and Peters used the proceeds to buy a 1,300 acre farm in Vermont, complete with cattle and llamas.

      After that, the deluge: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, The One-Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins … The New York Times list of non-fiction bestsellers soon became so clogged with inspirational tracts that the paper established a separate category for ‘Advice, How-to and Miscellaneous’. Even men who had already made their fortune hastened to cash in: the Chrysler boss Lee Iacocca, the gloriously vulgar property developer Donald Trump and the rebarbative media mogul Al Neuharth all dashed off inspirational, ghost-written blockbusters that sold by the ton. (Neuharth’s title, Confessions of an S.O.B., perfectly evokes its rancid flavour.) Victor Kiam – the tiresome self-publicist who liked Remington razors so much that he bought the company – passed on the ideas which had propelled him to plutocracy in Go for It and Keep Going for It. ‘Turn those negatives into positives!’ ‘A little bit of courtesy and caring. It goes such a long way.’ ‘Business is a game. Play it to win.’ ‘When you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’ ‘When opportunity knocks, the entrepreneur is always home.’ ‘Any job worth doing is worth doing well.’

      The authors of the American declaration of independence had prefaced their statement of human rights by announcing ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’. If Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues didn’t flinch from stating the obvious, why should Victor Kiam or his rivals? Had the founding fathers only thought of copyrighting the text, they too could have enjoyed huge royalty cheques. One man who certainly understood how to profit from ideas that had hitherto been regarded as common property was Benjamin Franklin, whose Poor Richard’s Almanack (1733) is a pot-pourri of similarly banal yet uplifting mottos –‘early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’, ‘little strokes fell great oaks’, and so forth. Pleasantly surprised by its reception, Franklin reworked the aphorisms into bestselling pamphlets such as The Way to Wealth and Advice to a Young Tradesman.

      Two and a half centuries later, the market for platitudes became so crowded that ever more exotic angles were required to catch the eye of airport browsers. In the words of Mike Fuller, author of Above the Bottom Line, ‘you have to have a shtick of some kind’. One promising approach, as the emphasis shifted from ‘management’ to ‘leadership’, was to seek out historical analogies, though the history usually turned out to be a mere promotional gimmick rather than a serious examination of past experience. The pioneer here was Wess Roberts (or Wess Roberts PhD as he styled himself, forgetting that non-medical ‘doctors’ who insist on drawing attention to their postgraduate qualification – Henry Kissinger in the US, Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland – always bring disaster in their wake: it’s tantamount to having the warning ‘This Man is Dangerous’ tattooed on one’s forehead). Roberts’s book The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun appeared in 1991 and soon found its way on to the bookshelves of every middle manager in the United States. Described as a ‘fantastic’ guide which ‘will help you make the most of your leadership potential’, it vouchsafed these truly fantastic discoveries: ‘You must have resilience to overcome personal misfortunes, discouragement, rejection and disappointment’; ‘When the consequences of your actions are too grim to bear, look for another option.’ Could anything be sillier? You bet: other authors have since come up with Gandhi: The Heart of an Executive, Confucius in the Boardroom, If Aristotle Ran General Motors, Make It So: Management Lessons from ‘Star Trek the Next Generation’, Elizabeth I CEO: Strategic Lessons in Leadership from the Woman Who Built an Empire and Moses: CEO. The ten commandments, we now learn, were the world’s first mission statement.

      Recognising that not everyone wanted to be Donald Trump, or even Queen Elizabeth I, publishers extended their self-help lists to include more emollient titles on ‘personal growth’ – Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Road Less Travelled and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus – or even out-and-out fiction such as James Redfield’s novel The Celestine Prophecy, allegedly based on a manuscript revealing the secrets of the ancient Mayans, which sold five million copies in the United States alone. These might seem more New Age than New Economy, but it is instructive to note how often the two overlapped, as in Barrie Dolnick’s The Executive Mystic: Psychic Power Tools for Success or Paul Zane Pilzer’s bestseller, God Wants You to be Rich. When Anthony Robbins performed for a 14,000-strong crowd at a stadium in Dallas, the supporting speakers included John Gray, the man who inflicted Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus on the world. (Also on stage were country-music singer Trisha Yearwood, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman and General Norman Schwarzkopf: one is irresistibly reminded of early Beatles concerts featuring guest appearances by Freddie and the Dreamers, the Yardbirds and Rolf Harris.)

      The juxtaposition of Robbins and Gray was all too congruous: there had long been a powerful spiritual impetus in American can-do literature. The popular nineteenth-century author Horatio Alger, who in novels such as Do and Dare and Strive and Succeed strove to persuade the nation that perseverance will always be rewarded, was a former Unitarian minister, defrocked for ‘unnatural familiarity with boys’. Norman Vincent Peale, a Methodist minister, became the most successful self-help guru since Dale Carnegie with The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), which argued that Christians had a head-start in business: a typical anecdote concerned a saleswoman who told herself, ‘If God be for me, then I know that with God’s help I can sell vacuum cleaners.’ One of Peale’s modern counterparts, Stephen Covey, is a devout Mormon from Salt Lake City.

      The marriage of mysticism and money-making reached its consummation in Deepak Chopra (or rather, Deepak Chopra MD), a Harvard-trained endocrinologist who turned to transcendental meditation (TM) and ayurvedic medicine in the early 1980s. He began marketing TM herbal cures – and indeed praised them in the Journal of the American Medical Association without mentioning that he was the sole shareholder in the distribution company. Chopra’s transformation from an obscure salesman of alternative potions to a national guru can be dated precisely to Monday 12 July 1993, when he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to promote his book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind. His revelation that ‘love is the ultimate truth’ was perfectly pitched for Oprah and her millions of fretful yet hopeful viewers. Within twenty-four hours of the broadcast 137,000 copies of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind had been ordered, and Chopra’s publishers – the deliciously named Harmony Books – were reprinting round the clock. By the end of the week there were 400,000 copies in circulation.

      Since then he has published twenty-five books and issued at least 100 different audiotapes, videos and CD-ROMs, in which Eastern philosophy, Christian parables and even Arthurian legends are distilled into a bubble-bath for the soul. (One video offers ‘Lessons from the Teaching of Merlin’.) Like Covey and Robbins, he understands the magic allure of numbered bullet-points: hence titles such as СКАЧАТЬ