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

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СКАЧАТЬ interviewer that ‘in this country there are people who believe it’s a sin to be successful’.

      In 1990, with his promiscuous ardour apparently undiminished, Robinson produced The Risk Takers Five Years On, in which he boasted that some of his original interviewees, including Robert Maxwell and Asil Nadir, had ‘gone from strength to strength’. Maxwell, he predicted, would eventually retire, covered in glory, leaving his sons Kevin and Ian with the exciting challenge of ‘keeping dad’s ship afloat’. Well, at least the buoyancy metaphor was accurate: Maxwell’s corpse was found floating off the coast of Spain on 5 November 1991, after a fall from his yacht.

      For his revised edition, Robinson added several chapters on ‘big players’ he had missed the first time around – among them Gerald Ratner, ‘the world’s largest jeweller’, and Michael Smurfit, an ‘indisputable success’. Once more, alas, the demon lovers turned out to be all mouth and no trousers. With the subsequent admission that one of his products was ‘crap’, Ratner managed to transform his firm’s annual profit of £112 million into a loss of £122 million and was forced to quit. Smurfit resigned as chairman of Irish Telecom only a few weeks after Robinson’s book appeared, when it was revealed that he had bought a new corporate HQ without informing his fellow-directors, and that he was a shareholder in a company which had previously owned the property. At the same time, he invested heavily in the Brent Walker group – which duly went belly-up, taking £10 million of his money with it.

      What of the Guardian’s own small endeavour to burnish the image of go-getters, the Young Businessman of the Year competition? At the 1987 ceremony, where Lord Young advised that ‘people should look up to successful businessmen in the same way that they look up to successful sportsmen and successful pop stars’, the winner was John Ashcroft of Coloroll, who repeated the leitmotif in his acceptance speech. ‘We live in an age which applauds the millionaire McCartneys and Simon Le Bons and is now beginning to accept the large salaried superstar creations of the manufacturing sector. Long may it continue.’ Within three years, Coloroll had collapsed, crushed by £400 million of debts. The dashing Mr Ashcroft then started up a chain of shops; by 1993, it too was in the hands of the receivers.

      The Guardian’s annual mating ritual with ‘business success’ only served to confirm the old proverb: post coitum omne animal triste est. The 1988 prize went to John Gunn of British & Commonwealth Holdings; two years later B&C crashed with £1 billion in liabilities. Richard Brewster, chief executive of the packaging group David S. Smith (Holdings), took the palm in 1990, praised by the judges for his ‘management skills in rebuilding an important British industry’. By 1991, he had gone –‘hounded’, as one City commentator cruelly observed, ‘by the curse of having been nominated Guardian Young Businessman of the Year’. The award itself, like so many of its winners, conked out soon afterwards.

      Typical British defeatism, some might say: a true professional would heed Victor Kiam’s wise words and ‘turn those negatives into positives!’ In 1987, five years after Tom Peters initiated the craze for management blockbusters with In Search of Excellence, most of the US firms he had marked as ‘excellent’ were in steep decline. The cover of Business Week magazine, which first noticed his remarkable inability to pick winners, carried the single word ‘Oops!’ Worse still, a comparative study in the Financial Analysts’ Journal found that whereas stocks in two-thirds of Peters’s model corporations had underperformed Standard & Poor’s 500 index, those in thirty-nine companies which were reckoned abysmal by Peters’s six ‘measures of excellence’ had actually outperformed the market over the same five-year period.

      Was Peters abashed? Of course not: when opportunity knocks, the entrepreneur is always home! With admirable chutzpah, he capitalised on the blunder by writing another bestseller, which advocated entirely different solutions to the problems of American business. ‘Excellence isn’t,’ he announced in the opening sentences of Thriving on Chaos (1987). ‘There are no excellent companies.’ With his customary impeccable timing the book was published on Black Monday, when the Dow Jones plummeted by 20 per cent – thus apparently confirming his new discovery that the world had spun out of control and ‘no company is safe’.

      Or, to quote the unimprovable headline on a despatch from the Agence France Presse news agency in the closing months of the year 2000: ‘Order, Chaos Vie to Shape 21st Century’.

       3 It’s the end of the world as we know it

       ‘Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,’ said Scrooge, ‘answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they the shadows of the things that May be only?’

      Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.

       ‘Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,’ said Scrooge. ‘But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!’

      CHARLES DICKENS, A Christmas Carol

      For public intellectuals in the early 1980s, one little prefix was obligatory. Post-modernism, post-feminism, post-Fordism and ‘post-culture’ (a term coined by Professor George Steiner) all joined the lexicon of modish discourse. Within a few years, however, even these concepts had been superseded. When the economist Lester C. Thurow said that ‘the sun is about to set on the post-industrial era’, James Atlas of the New York Times posed the obvious question: ‘What follows post?’

      In The Sense of an Ending, the British literary critic Sir Frank Kermode argued that humans require an illusion of order and narrative: ‘To make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems.’ With the fin de siècle and indeed the end of the millennium looming, there was a palpable sense of imminent closure and conclusion: the critic Arthur Danto announced ‘the end of art’; the New Yorker writer Bill McKibben was paid a $1 million advance for his book The End of Nature; an editor at the Scientific American, John Horgan, published The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. As Atlas commented, ‘clearly, it’s late in the day’. President Reagan had celebrated the arrival of ‘morning in America’; before most people had even managed to finish their breakfast, however, the shadows of evening were already lengthening, and citizens who had been enchanted by the Gipper’s sunny optimism now seemed to have an almost masochistic yearning for gloomy jeremiads.

      One unlikely beneficiary of this new appetite was Paul Kennedy, a bearded, soft-spoken Englishman from the history faculty at Yale University, whose 677-page tome The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 was published by Random House in January 1988, with an initial print-run of 9,000. By mid-February it had sold more than 100,000 copies. Few of these readers, one must assume, were particularly curious about the old imperial powers of China, Spain, Holland or Britain, whose histories comprised most of the book. Nor, one guesses, would Kennedy have been inundated with requests from TV talk shows or invitations to address congressional committees had he stuck to his original plan and ended the narrative in about 1945. Deciding that this would be ‘a cop-out’, he added a speculative final chapter predicting that American hegemony was waning. Simply put, the Kennedy thesis asserted that great empires establish themselves through economic might, but are then obliged to spend an ever larger proportion of their wealth on military prowess with which to protect themselves from upstart rivals. The consequent ‘imperial overstretch’ seals their fate. It happened to the Bourbons and the Habsburgs, and would just as surely happen to the apparently omnipotent United States within a few years.

      ‘When СКАЧАТЬ