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

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СКАЧАТЬ what are the seven habits of highly effective people? How do we awaken the giant within? The short answer is: never overestimate the intelligence of your audience. ‘Did you ever consider’, Stephen Covey asks in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), ‘how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm – to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow.’ The echo of Chauncey Gardener, the idiot savant who dispensed horticultural wisdom in Jerzy Kosinski’s satire Being There, is presumably accidental.

      Anthony Robbins prefers to take his imagery from the kitchen rather than the farmyard. ‘A nice metaphor for the components and use of strategies is that of baking,’ he observes in Unlimited Power (1986). ‘If someone makes the greatest chocolate cake in the world, can you produce the same quality results? Of course you can, if you have that person’s recipe … if you follow the recipe to the letter, you will produce the same results, even though you may never have baked such a cake before in your life.’ This weary analogy clearly had a profound effect on at least one reader. ‘There is no better metaphor for the products of the knowledge economy than the recipe,’ the British guru Charles Leadbeater writes in Living on Thin Air: The New Economy (1999). ‘Think of the world as divided up into chocolate cakes and chocolate-cake recipes … We can all use the same chocolate-cake recipe, at the same time, without anyone being worse off. It is quite unlike a piece of cake.’ Tony Blair, in turn, was deeply impressed, hailing Leadbeater as ‘an extraordinarily interesting thinker’ whose book ‘raises critical questions for Britain’s future’. Another Labour minister, Peter Mandelson, described Living on Thin Air as ‘a blueprint for what a radical modernising project will entail in years to come’.

      The man ultimately responsible for all this lucrative twaddle is Dale Carnegie, and most of his successors stick pretty closely to the formula (oh, all right, recipe) devised by the pioneer. It was certainly Carnegie who cottoned on to the selling power of animal analogies, peppering his prose with such eternal verities as ‘no one ever kicks a dead dog’ and ‘if you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive’. Studying the titles on display in the management section of Borders’ bookshop, you might assume that you’d stumbled into the natural history department by mistake: Lions Don’t Need To Roar: Stand Out, Fit In and Move Ahead in Business, by Debra Benton, Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive by Harvey Mackay and Teaching the Elephants to Dance: Empowering Change in Your Organisation by James A. Belasco. Charles Handy’s The Age of Unreason has a picture of a leaping frog on its front cover. Why? ‘If you put a frog in water and slowly heat it, the frog will eventually let itself be boiled to death,’ he explains. ‘We, too, will not survive if we don’t respond to the radical way in which the world is changing.’ Not to be outdone, Stephen Covey includes a section on fish in his Principle-Centred Leadership. ‘I’ve long been impressed’, he reveals, ‘with the many parallels between fishing and managing. In reality, senior-level executives are really fishing the stream. That is, they’re looking at the business in the context of the total environment and devising ways to “reel in” desired results …’ And what does it get them? A pile of dead trout.

      Apart from dancing elephants and boiling frogs, the other essential ingredient of these books is lists. Following the distinguished example of God, who condensed the laws of righteousness into ten easy-to-understand instructions, the authors seek to persuade their readers that the secrets of success are finite and can be briefly enumerated. Again Carnegie was the pioneer, offering ‘seven ways to peace and happiness’ and ‘four good working habits that will help prevent fatigue and worry’. Having hit the jackpot with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey went even further in his sequel, whose chapter headings include ‘Three Resolutions’, ‘Six Days of Creation’, ‘Six Conditions of Empowerment’, ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ (didn’t someone else think of that first?), ‘Seven Chronic Problems’, ‘Eight Ways to Enrich Marriage and Family Relationships’ and, generously enough, ‘Thirty Methods of Influence’. Meanwhile, Anthony Robbins has discovered the ‘Five Keys to Wealth and Happiness’ and ‘Seven Lies of Success’. More ambitiously still, his book Giant Steps provides no fewer than ‘365 lessons in self-mastery’ – though some of them are pretty skimpy. Here is Lesson 364, in its entirety: ‘Remember to expect miracles … because you are one.’

      If the gurus offered nothing but cracker-mottoes, their appeal might have been limited to a few simpletons; but the faux naivety was cunningly seasoned with an equally faux sophistication. They made liberal use of neologistic jargon –‘re-engineering’, ‘demassing’, ‘downsizing’, ‘benchmarking’ – to give their twee clichés an appearance of scientific method and intellectual rigour. And it worked: even grizzled New York police chiefs and four-star generals began babbling about ‘the mobility pool’ and ‘proactive outplacement’. (‘Of course this benchmarking is only a rough guide,’ one Pentagon official told a reporter. ‘The ultimate benchmarking exercise is war.’) Stephen Covey’s client-list in the US included the departments of energy, defence, interior and transportation, the postal service – and Bill Clinton, who invited both Covey and Anthony Robbins to spend the weekend with him in December 1994.

      Reeling from his party’s defeat by Newt Gingrich’s Republicans in the previous month’s congressional elections, the president summoned no fewer than five feelgood authors to help him ‘search for a way back’. The other three were Marianne Williamson, a glamorous Hollywood mystic (and, one need hardly add, bestselling author) who had performed the marriage rites at Elizabeth Taylor’s 1991 wedding to Larry Fortemsky; Jean Houston, a self-styled ‘sacred psychologist’ whose fourteen books included Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self; and her friend Mary Catherine Bateson, an anthropology professor whose study of ‘non-traditional life paths’ had been praised by Hillary Clinton.

      This quintet of sages asked the president to describe his best qualities. ‘I have a good heart,’ he said. ‘I really do. And I hope I have a decent mind.’ (If so, one might ask, why seek solace from snake-oil vendors?) As they talked long into the night, and all the following day, the conversation was increasingly dominated by Hillary’s problems – the constant personal attacks she endured, and the failure of her plan to reform health-care. Jean Houston, who felt that ‘being Hillary Clinton was like being Mozart with his hands cut off’, informed the First Lady that she was ‘carrying the burden of 5,000 years of history when women were subservient … She was reversing thousands of years of expectation and was there up front, probably more than virtually any woman in human history – apart from Joan of Arc’

      The latter-day Joan was understandably flattered. Over the next six months Houston and Bateson often visited Hillary Clinton in Washington, urging her to talk to the spirits of historical figures who would understand her travails and thus help her ‘achieve self-healing’. Sitting with her two psychic counsellors at a circular table in the White House solarium, she held conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt (her ‘spiritual archetype’) and Mahatma Gandhi (‘a powerful symbol of stoic self-denial’). It was only when Houston proposed speaking to Jesus Christ –‘the epitome of the wounded, betrayed and isolated’ – that Hillary called a halt. ‘That’, she explained, ‘would be too personal.’ The reticence seems rather puzzling: don’t millions of Christians speak to Jesus, both publicly and privately, through their prayers?

      There was little the Republicans could do to exploit ‘Wackygate’, as it became known: too many people remembered Ronald Reagan’s dependence on Nancy’s astrologer. Those with longer memories might even have recalled that Norman Vincent Peale, the man who brought God into the selling of vacuum-cleaners, was a regular visitor to the White House during Eisenhower’s presidency and presided at the wedding of Richard Nixon’s daughter Julie. Indeed, a few months before Clinton’s chinwag with the gurus, three former presidents – Ford, Reagan and Bush – had joined Peale’s widow, the Rev. Robert Schuller and Zig Ziglar (‘America’s No. 1 motivational speaker’) in a СКАЧАТЬ