THERE'S NO ART IN HELL

A Final Word

[Exclusive to the THERE’S NO ART IN HELL blog]

This morning I read an essay by Frank Rich at the NY Times bemoaning the gullibility of the American people over the past decade. I like Rich’s writing. It’s often tough and direct. He’s a guy who obviously tries to get it right and do the right thing. Too bad in today’s article he writes, “If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled.” He goes on to talk about the Tiger Woods train wreck, the story’s point of origination, and the media’s complicity in the sham. “What’s equally striking, if not shocking, is that the American establishment and news media — all of it, not just golf writers or celebrity tabloids — fell for the Woods myth as hard as any fan and actively helped sustain and enhance it.” This is all bullshit, of course. Trillions are spent to mold and shape the American free speech arena today. It’s ridiculous to assign culpability to the citizenry for their susceptibility to propaganda, a/k/a marketing, “push,” or whatever you want to call mind control, or psy-ops on a national scale. The deck is stacked. The message machine is no longer effectively restricted by a corrupt government. Not surprisingly, the corporations and their agents/agencies, like the ones who own the Times, over the past decade tend to get just about anything they want, even when it’s in direct conflict with American interests or the will of the American people. I’m not surprised that Rich doesn’t ‘fess up here - just a bit disappointed; another opportunity for one important guy, a big-time commentator to tell the truth, to blow the whistle, lost. Americans have to be asking, and are - I hear it a lot - what’s our recourse. I’ve heard more ordinary people talk about getting guns and engaging in general rebellion, than at any other time in my life. It may come to that. It usually does, when the tyrants face a citizenry that is not yet completely dismantled. I hope it doesn’t, because art doesn’t usually fare well during civil war, or any other kind. But without freedom, there is no worthwhile art.

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As for Salon. Towards the end of THERE’S NO ART IN HELL, I mentioned that Salon had launched a new feature, Film Salon, and that Film Salon was publishing “best of the decade” mini-essays. One of these was written about the largely forgettable, visually well designed Adam Sandler vehicle/Paul Thomas Anderson date movie “Punch Drunk Love.”

About PDL, Karina Longworth writes:

“Punch-Drunk Love” is a film, but it is also something else: It creates for itself a new space to exist, in between cinema and painting. It is literally a moving painting, because of Jeremy Blake’s color-field interludes and also because of the way these interventions into the film space seem to haunt the non-painted imagery. But it is also in the same class as a Rothko or Newman or Kandinsky, in that it visualizes the invisible and the intangible, in a way that transcends narrative and forces us to engage with its space and its presence within our space. It is a moving painting — it’s a painting that moves the viewer.

This is also bullshit. Film is not painting, period. Saying it is does not legitimize film. Directors trying to make films that are paintings make films that don’t fully realize as cinema - which is cool as it could be, without having to pretend to be art (i.e., painting or sculpture). “Artists” installing films in painting or sculpture galleries generally make crap movies and force everyone around them to redefine art, depending on how much collectors have invested in the work. As a dimensional artist who works in all kinds of contemporary media, I suggest building new architecture for moving image experiences that don’t require an audience/viewers to sit still for hours, rather than co-opting space needed for painting and sculpture, which is exceedingly limited at this point, and therefore exceedingly valuable. Full disclosure: I have presented moving images in many formats in galleries and will do so again - AS A PROOF OF WHAT I WROTE ABOVE, and to suggest the complementary value of multimedia arrays - based on content. On the other hand: Just because SONY wants everyone to believe that one of its pictures is a supreme artistic vehicle, and will do anything to monopolize market share, doesn’t mean we have to accept that. An article like Longworth’s is nothing but pro-consumer portable “art” propaganda.

Fuck off Salon.

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Why does this matter? If you’ve read THERE’S NO ART IN HELL, you’ll know why.

If you wanna stick your head in the sand or up your ass, that’s your prerogative, like the consumer portable song says. If not - well, if we take a minute away from Tiger’s mistresses to peek at health care system reform - this is it. Plus more war, torture, infrastructure disintegration, family dissolution, for-profit penal industry expansion and educational failure. Hurrah the Super Class. Everyone else: welcome to serfdom. It’s not coming. It’s already here. This is not meant as a warning. This is a wake up call.

THERE’S NO ART IN HELL (BOOK 3, PART 6)

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If you’ve a voice, sing: if your limbs are supple, dance:

and please, with whatever you do that’s pleasing.

And though drunkenness is harmful, it’s useful to pretend:

make your sly tongue stammer with lisping sounds,

then, whatever you say or do that seems too forward,

it will be thought excessive wine’s to blame.
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[Ovid, ibid]

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The British historian Arnold Toynbee argued that civilizations thrive when the lower classes aspire to be like the upper classes, and they decay when the upper classes try to be like the lower classes. Looked at through this prism, it’s hard not to see America in a prolonged period of decay.
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[America Through the Reality Lens,” by Jonah Goldberg, LA Times]

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[The Dimensional Research Team #1 gathers on a grim day in December 09, following recent news that the US Senate has effectively legislated a massive boon to the insurance and banking industries, and the Obama administration has committed to indefinitely extend the imperial US wars in the Middle East. The will of the American people has been ignored in all cases, and the prime beneficiaries are huge multinational corporations.]

PJM: I cannot express in words how angry I am.

MILO: You don’t need to, Paul. We share your feelings.

ALL: True.

PJM: Based on our findings over the past weeks, I think it will be necessary and right to change the focus of our research group, and transition towards the assembly of an action team.

ALL: Agreed.

ZEELIO: We have endeavored to share our findings with the global community, in real time. It is our hope that we have served you well.

ALL: Yes.

PJM: Before concluding this phase of the project, I believe we must address the matter of Drucker and his destructive, subversive application of dimensional processes.

ALL: Agreed.

V: Pre-model: It is the idea that hid the hatred, the war on humanity.

PJM: Let’s turn to Chapter 18, in the book of Management: “Managing the Work and Worker in Manual Work.”

MILO: Now, that’s an innovative, creative title. I suppose in Peter’s mind he’s distinguishing among types of work. He has after all redefined Knowledge as Work, the first stage in owning and managing thought and mind, the first step in erasing democratic intellectual freedom.

PJM: In two years at Drucker School, none of the esteemed professors mentioned this.

ZEELIO: They are not Americans, or if they are, they are Americans who privatize personal interests and gains, and socialize losses, the prime directive of the globalist movement, for the ultimate destruction of free bottom-to-top society.

V: I suggest we parse the document.

ALL: Agreed.

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The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the twentieth century was fiftyfold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing.

The most important contribution management needs to make in the twenty-first century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker.

The most valuable assets of a twentieth-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable asset of a twenty-first-century institution, whether business or non-business, is its knowledge worker and their productivity.
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PJM: I would say that Drucker here continues the long and disgusting tradition of business writers who claim the value others create. The productivity he describes, as we will see, was the result of artist work, done thirty years before Charles Winslow Taylor’s, and scientific invention carried out over centuries in the field of optics and optical reproduction. The camera begat productivity, as Drucker defines it, applied first by artists, and forged into the yoke of slavery by greedy, humanity-despising individuals bent on power.

MILO: You are speaking of Muybridge and Eakins from the 1870s onward. As for the innovation that pitched vision towards this dimensional hinge, one could argue that art and science had not yet divorced, when the experiments on representation of vision began to yield tremendous advances. Ultimately the modern mechanical camera would manifest, but for centuries prior to the invention of the camera, artists and experimenters in Europe were assembling the tools and components and data that would result in the technical advances necessary to produce a camera. Taylor does not occur without the camera, and his usage of it does not occur without Eakins and Muybridge, and the artists who precede them.

ZEELIO: Clearly, a person as unimaginative as Peter Drucker could conveniently ignore all this in his formation of pro-Management propaganda. We can discuss this further as Drucker commences his celebration of the monster Taylor.

V: The most troubling action of Drucker in his opener is certainly, as has been suggested by Milo’s reflection on the chapter title, is the author’s conflation of knowledge with work. If there is a subtlety to Drucker, it is apparent in his general failure to apply intellectual honesty to his merging of terms. As any child could tell you, knowing something does not get something done. As any child will tell you, figuring out how to get someone else to do your chores for you is a childish victory. As any mature and responsible adult will tell you, knowing you must do a thing, and how to do it, and then doing it, is the definition of maturity and responsibility. Drucker, that great proponent of self-regulating ethics for the business sector (another convenient conflation), possesses himself the ethics of a spoiled child. To suggest that the aristocratic, monarchical society he was born to had for centuries enforced such a code is to understand Drucker on a fundamental level. To propose that monarchical Austria of the early 1900s was undemocratic fundamentally is unequivocal, and true. Drucker’s lifelong ambition, conflated within his so-called management theory, is little more than a childish attempt to re-institute in the free world the childish brattishness of his Austrian youth.

MILO: If so, how did he come to enjoy such fame in the business world?

ZEELIO: He provided the propaganda for generations of top-down, undemocratic oppressors. Drucker is a villain.

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MILO: Of course, philosophically, knowledge cannot be equated to work. In fact, philosophy is the only knowledge work. How did Drucker feel about philosophy as “work?”

PJM: “‘Isms” - that is philosophical systems - may be called the atmosphere.’” Although he ultimately arrived at the conclusion that “society is dimensional” and “perceptual,” Drucker’s views on managing society rode on hazy definition of it:

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“Society” is vague and impossible to define, argue my historian friends, my economist friends, my philosopher friends. They are absolutely right. But equally resistant to definition are history, economics, philosophy, science, and poetry - indeed everything worthwhile thinking, talking, and writing about.
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[Drucker, Introduction to The End of Economic Man]

MILO: Peter leaves art off his shortlist.

ZEELIO: Confusing, given he lectured on Japanese art for a decade. I presume he talked about it and thought about it for class. We know he wrote about it.

PJM: Drucker seemed confused about many things, while writing as though nothing confused him.

MILO: Anything that confused him he covered up with cryptic notations, or omitted, Like President W. Bush.

V: Judging from our Chapter 18 text, Drucker was apparently confused about the Western, specifically Greek, framing constructs of techne and episteme.

PJM: In other texts, he piddled with non-sequitor definitions of technology in relation to knowledge work and manual labor. One assumes it is difficult to remedy multiple usages of root meanings in directional, essentially Cartesian analysis. Drucker was always a top-down man, and at the top was the Episteme, and at the bottom was the worker.

V: I thought Drucker claimed to not be Cartesian.

PJM: Joe said he did.

ZEELIO: I think Drucker was confused about DesCartes.

PJM: I think Drucker’s MO involves projecting (in the psychology sense) the “vague and impossible to define” on to any phenomenon that causes him displeasure, discomfort or otherwise interferes with any design or disposition he advocates or experiences. I think this might explain his aversion to Contemporary Western art. It definitely relates to Drucker’s intellectual immaturity and anti-democratic tendencies. When put upon, he retracts like a snail in a shell of conservatism, or Christian values.

ZEELIO: I don’t think he’s confused at all. I think he’s interested in de- and re-defining those constructs to his own ends, in the service of the top-down class hierarchy, who epitomize childish immaturity, characterized by wanton disregard for the welfare of others. In other words, whereas you frame Drucker’s misrepresentations in the vernacular of psychology and aesthetics, but I see his failings in terms of service. Who paid his bills?

V: He evidently catered to many consumers, operating as a dimensional businessman. One of his jobs was the sage academic professor, beloved by many of his students and colleagues, a big fish in the tiny Claremont pond. He also cultivated a publishing business, submitting short work to business journals and other periodicals, in addition to the book titles. Drucker operated as a consultant to profits and nonprofits, and one presumes to government figures and entities as well. Wasn’t he a hire of Thatcher?

MILO: I’m not sure, but it won’t be hard to find out, will it. It should be clear why he wished to keep his various enterprises variously interlocked. The academic world provided cover and protection. Free speech arising from a de-defined ideology is hardly a domain susceptible to accountability, at least it was most of Drucker’s career. He enjoyed a comfortable disconnect from the consequences of his “work” by positioning himself under the roof of the Ivory Tower. Consultancies verified legitimacy (and probably added samoleans to the War Chest). The books and articles were bread and butter, no-hands moneymakers over time.

PJM: Then, there was art.

ZEELIO: Drucker tried fiction, badly.

V: Doesn’t the answer to Drucker’s artistic tendencies appear in the Nazi book, in one of the introductions? Drucker is describing his authorial perspective, or position:

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The End of Economic Man was meant to be a concrete social and political analysis of a profound crisis. It was not conceived as “history,” and is not written as such. But it also does not “report” events. It tries to understand them. It might, therefore, be read today as a portrait, perhaps a self-portrait, of the period and as a perception of those nightmare years between the two world wars. What comes through perhaps most strongly are the pervasive realities of these years which to us today, thirty years later, are almost inconceivable.
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MILO: Except that the United States and now the rest of the world face roughly the same conditions that Drucker describes. Only this time it was Drucker and his management society that precipitated the cataclysm. Notice, too, his conflation in the quoted passage of representation, which he defines as “reporting.” Evidently, he was already prone to disassociating understanding from vision, or witnessing. I think this points to Drucker’s incapacity for the horrors of reality, without which there can be no appreciation of its beauties. Perhaps this is why Drucker could never attain artistry. It is much easier to peer out a window in Claremont and design portraits of events that never actually occur. This is the stuff of Kinkaid. This is the stuff of Bush. Can it be any wonder that Drucker found artistic affiliation with the Japanese, whose art is nothing if not detachment for carnage and oppression and escape into pristine and delicate cubicles as fragile as rice paper to five-criminal blades?

ZEELIO: What is with this Germanic thing and art? Hitler was a frustrated artist. Look at Jung and his crazy Red Book, Freud with his artist analyses and cold fish figurist descendant, in some weird way a manifestation of that bizarre conjugation. Here we see that Drucker also had aspirations as a portraitist. The modern Germanic mentation, as Beuys discovered, is wild man in a cage of repressive tendencies that erupt into horrific episodes of all-directional mayhem and abuse. No wonder they love Paul McCarthy over there.

PJM: None of this analysis escapes the Germanic locus of the Super Class or its de-definition of self-centeredness in the extreme…

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Does a camera exist for capturing knowledge, to enhance productivity?

MILO: Yes, it is called Google.

V: I find this terribly difficult to discuss, without becoming enraged. At its most basic, the moral imperatives are absolutely clear.

ZEELIO: As a lead into “THE PRODUCTIVITY OF THE MANUAL WORKER,” Drucker begins:

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It was only a little over a hundred years ago that for the first time an educated person actually looked at manual work and manual worker, and then began to study both… The first man to do both, that is, to work as a manual worker and then to study manual work, was Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915).
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V: Drucker cannot bring himself to admire or cite the works of Eakins or Muybridge, much less the Impressionists, or any of the other, many, generations of American and European artists, dating back to Michelangelo, and the other in the 1500s. All worked in various manual fields. All produced amazing representations of labor over that timeline, always improving realism, always clarifying representation, providing most likely the fundamental impetus for social recognition that tyranny over labor was morally repugnant.

ZEELIO: Drucker’s issues with this are obviously both religious and class-oriented. It is no wonder that Marx is so frequently confronted in Drucker’s writing, though Drucker never can bring himself to address why Marx is so problematic for Drucker, at the roots. Drucker despises the working man. Of course he despises the American democracy. He despises the art outside the context of the Church (see his comments on religion’s impotence and value as social critique, for a marvelous exercise in de-definition and obscuring, in the End…Economic Man). He never forgives Western Art for leaving the altar, I don’t think.

PJM: Can we all agree: There is no justification for a tiny minority to define itself as the earthly power over a majority of others. That is the very definition of tyranny. The rest of Drucker’s arguments are simply obfuscations or technical manuals, designs for tyranny.

ALL: Agreed!

V: Drucker can never seem to reconcile the artist as a social free agent. He is forever attempting to position himself as a more trustworthy agent, capable of surpassing the artist in visionary value, minus all the stereotypical character defects of the Western artist (which Drucker re-defines as charisma versus lack of charisma, as in leadership). In the end, no one bit.

ZEELIO: So the entirety of the Drucker design becomes a construct for the destruction of art and artist.

MILO: …In order to elevate the artistically-challenged or retarded Drucker into the artist’s thorny thrown, atop the free speech hierarchy. My God, Drucker is Salieri and the artist is Mozart.

PJM: You certainly punch a hole in the Drucker Management balloon. The video interview with Drucker included in the “I Love You, Monster” data set is enough to reinforce your indictment. An exploration of the Druckerian motivation is not really required is it? It’s as old as Cain and Abel. The mental twists are typical of human malevolence, and have been chronicled on uncounted occasions past - the 7 Deadly Sins, for example, apply adequately for the analysis. Lust, envy, pride…

V: Is it necessary to apply psychology to Drucker’s “artistry,” as Freudian exercise?

MILO: The obvious answer is “no.” Mihalyi C already tried that one, and Drucker turned him down, while kindly suggesting he supported the Flow guys’ positive psycho “work.” The more interesting question is whether conjoining the trajectories of Hitler, Freud and Drucker in the dimensional analysis is a practice in hyperbole, or whether this is actually the proper inquiry.

PJM: If you don’t mind, I can structure this in 4D.

ALL: Go ahead.

PJM: Viewed through a Druckerian *tripartheid sector* configuration, it is perfectly reasonable to analyze these three men and their effects in relation to one another, and as a unit, and as individuals. As a social topology, we could describe the array any way you’d like.

ZEELIO: As a dimensional Reich!

[It may in that form sustain 1000 years of war against mankind, but for the few -MGT]

PJM: OK. Let’s call our 3 Reich “HDF.” Within HDF Drucker determines the business sector, Freud the social sector and Hitler the government sector.

MILO: If we put it on a timeline HDF becomes more comprehensible.

PJM: Why not use Drucker’s Centennial?

MILO: OK.

ZEELIO: What are the significant points on the timeline?

MILO: 1939-45 contains a midpoint of relevance. The election of Bush 2 in 2000 is a fine secondary point. Establish the commencement of the Austro-Prussian conflagration on the eve of WW1 as a start point.

V: How do the HDF intra-dynamics operate? What are the rules?

PJM: Drucker’s seminal book, the anti-Hitler screed he was so proud of, gives us a clue. We can propose that Peter was ambitious, and his position on Hitler suggests that Drucker envisioned the business sector as the ruler of the other two. That’s how it’s turned out anyway, thanks to the armies of democracy, and the blood of Americans.

V: Reviewing Peter’s initial text, The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totatitarianism, many of Drucker’s criticisms of Hitler’s Nazi governance are no less applicable to Drucker’s management society, but of course the madness of modern business practice is rationalized and justified in the Druckerian schema, always reinforced by the myth of free markets, and the Darwinian nature of business success and failure within that mythology - like all mythologies, abstract. For Drucker, all can be solved by more effective leadership, or a clearer mission, or a better understanding of consumer desires and future needs, and so forth, ad infinitum. Or, to put it in more practical terms, the presence of strong oversight by an independent critical consultant, specializing in organizational social ecology, whatever the fuck that might be.

PJM: Drucker’s moonlighting job description. 

MILO: A secular priest with artistic inclinations and no allegiances.

V: Drucker congenitally excommunicated from his analysis the consideration that “big business” or labor unrest or propaganda could ever be a negative cause in cataclysmic social disruption. In the Economic Man book, he writes, “The whole thesis is nothing but a feeble attempt to reconcile Marxist theory with the facts by falsifying history; it is a lame apology but not a serious explanation.” Big business never profited from fascism, Drucker posits; “of all the classes it probably suffers most from totalitarian economics.”

PJM: He died before the full bloom of big business in America, but he still manages there to sound exactly like a contemporary conservative talk radio pundit. The rhetorical trope is the same, and pervasive from Tea Partiers to corporate lobbyists now. It is in such details that we can decipher Drucker’s real contribution to the public political discourse. On the one hand there is glowing language on corporate social responsibility (to avoid regulation or accountability), on the other a profound avoidance of blame. For anything. As for the real power of mass message systems, Drucker wrote this:

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In fighting against fascism we profess to fight for democracy and freedom, for individual liberty and for the inalienable rights and dignity of man. If we ourselves admit that the masses can be lured by propaganda to give up these rights, there can be no justification at all for our creed and we had better become fascists ourselves. This would at least be more sincere and less harmful than the pretentiousness of the fake aristocratism which, while bemoaning the decline of freedom and liberty, fears the “revolt of the masses.”
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MILO: This is an apt description of political talk and implication on the broadcast networks over the past year or two.  

V: Someone pass this along to the marketing department. From a writer who talked about creating the future, in terms of consumer satisfactions and needs…

ZEELIO: To summarize, in hindsight, Drucker in his fame-maker book may as well have been originally writing about the behaviors of corporate organizations, when he declaimed against Hitler’s machine. As for Freud, Drucker hardly conceded any measure of social power to the brain doctors, any more than he is willing to concede the discourse-shaping power of democratic speech, even though his lifelong occupations could not have existed without it.

PJM: In actual corporate practice, though, invading mindspace is a fundamental property of the field. Towards this subject, Drucker seemed to adhere to the same pantomime as the second Bush in his conduct of dirty politics. Drucker allowed for others to do his guerrilla work, and appeared to remain above the fray, tacitly approving of tactical means, if the end justified them. As far as I can tell, Drucker barely considered laborers as human. “The most valuable assets of a twentieth-century company were its production equipment.” This was also true of the previous century, when mine owners would pull the mules out of the mines after an explosion, before rescuing the workers, since the mules were more costly to replace than the miners.

ZEELIO: Take the revolutionary derivation of freedom and equality. Drucker sees it only in terms of right-to-power, which in his world-view is best and finally embodied in top-down management:

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In every social system that bases itself on the European tradition, the justification for power must be the central problem. For it is through this concept alone that freedom and equality - or, as was formerly said, justice - can be projected into the social and political reality; and freedom and equality have been Europe’s basic spiritual ideas since the introduction of Christianity.
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MILO: Evidently, for Drucker, the colonial era never happened, and neither did the systemic inequalities that marched Europe to the guillotine, post American- and French-revolutions, and eventually to the charnel houses of the 20th Century, until the crushing forces of democracy and Marxism descended on Continental Europe and nearly exterminated the civilization there. If it had not been for American mercy at that time, the remnants of the Super Class would never have risen again to the heights they now enjoy, a fact that Drucker could never relish, though he must concede it, with obfuscation. After all it was American manaagement, and Taylor, who won the war. 

ZEELIO: As a typical business sector type, Drucker let others fight and die for his interests, waiting until the dust settled to capitalize on the outcome, even while playing his allegiances against one another. See how he abandoned his own people to join the Allies, then commenced a lifelong program to undermine the emerging world-power democracy. Drucker’s ideology has justified the actions most harmful to the post-War United States’ interests. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Peter Drucker enjoyed the luxuries of America, while propagandizing a global business model that could only evolve into an anti-US WMD.

MILO: As for Drucker’s view of Freud and psychoanalysis, there need be no conjecture on that account. He described it thoroughly in Adventures of a Bystander, in the section titled “Report from Atlantis.” Here is a passage that I cannot successfully add to or subtract from:

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In the “Heroic Age” of psychoanalysis, between 1890 and 1914, Freud repudiated every one of his non-Jewish followers or associates who was Austrian, German or German-speaking, or even a Continental European male. That he broke with Carl Jung and forced Jung in turn to break with him is one example. He could tolerate non-Jews only if they were foreigners, and even then he preferred women like the French Princess Bonaparte - for women did not, of course, rank as equals in Freud’s world. For all their German culture - their constant references to German poets and writers, their humanist culture of the German Gymnasium, their strong Wagnerianism, and their aesthetics of the educated German “humanist” whose taste had been formed by Jakob Burckhart’s Culture of the Renaissance in Italy - the members of the Freud circle could not rid themselves of their intense Jewishness. Their jokes were Jewish, and it is a Freudian tenet, after all, that jokes speak the truth of the heart. The non-Jew was irksome, difficult, a stranger, an irritation - and soon gotten rid of.

This, however, Freud, grand master of non-Jewish German culture, could not admit, least of all to himself. He needed an explanation that would put the blame on others, hence the Freudian slip of “anti-Semitic discrimination” and near-persecution.
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PJM: Wow. It would appear that Peter had some issues.

V: Proposition: Drucker is an amoral and evil sleeper cell of one, who attacks us (the American democracy) because he hates our freedoms?

ZEELIO: If we return to Management, Chapter 18, we find historian Drucker painting a social or self-portrait, projecting the relevant issues in economic terms, as opposed to terms of social or socio-eco-political equity. Remember, he is not Marxist:

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Throughout recorded history - and actually well before any history was recorded - there have been, of course, steady advances in what we today call “productivity.” But they were the result of new tools, of new methods, of new technology; they were advances in what the economist calls “capital.”
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MILO: Unfortunately, the War on Terror has designated the wrong enemy for its shock and awe.

PJM: So the artist and scientist (as in Eakins and the inventors of the camera) are “capitalists.” One can discern how the leeching businessmen, the thief of invention, came up with the notion that he was the driver of innovation, that he was a force for the creative. Drucker is a liar. No businessman invents. He capitalizes on invention. Hacks like Drucker justify the larceny, in historical terms.

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There were few advances throughout the ages in what the economy calls “labor,” that is, in the productivity of the worker. It was axiomatic throughout history that workers could produce more only by working harder or by working longer hours. The nineteenth-century economists disagreed as much about most things as economists do today. But they all agreed - from David Ricardo (1772-1823) through Karl Marx - that there are enormous differences in skill among workers, but there are none in respect to productivity other than between hard workers and lazy ones, or between physically strong workers and weak ones. Productivity did not exist.
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MILO: It can be no surprise that Drucker’s torch bearers are so excited about prospects with China! Allegiance is no hindrance!

V: Drucker is an enemy of the craftsman, and America is a craftsman’s state. In Drucker’s worldview, there is no connectedness between thought and making. In his perspective, peering out his Claremont window at the Mexican in the backyard, there is only labor and capital, and the arts, humanities and sciences are subsumed in the generation of Capital, as determined by management, and directed by leadership. Drucker was a tyrant without an empire. His theory, though, wrote the planks of the platform that would establish an American empire, where before there had been democracy.

PJM: Regarding the Drucker proposition: Drucker is no more an enemy of the state than Freud is, given that Freud’s domain is the inner state. It is Freud’s “work” that launched the research into mind function expressing in the patient’s social interaction, akin to Taylor’s research into physical functions of the worker in the workplace. Management in both originations eventually becomes the central question of power distribution and justification. Freud assigned the roots of power to the inner social organs, which he proposed could be managed, and projected into the environment. Hitler assigned the roots of power to the external social organs, as a function of brute force, informed by magical history, lashing out like lightning and thunder on the environment. Drucker assigned the roots of power to proper management, throughout the social ecology, to pervade the environment, via productive, managed, stabilized thought.

V: I’d like to attempt a summary of the psychoanalytic domain, in its early manifestations. It was Freud who defined a person with a mind (invisible internal perceptual complex, combinative - with neural and anatomical components - with some external manifestations), as a patient with symptoms (thoughts), which the good doctor might correct. Jung expanded this model to define a person with an internal imaging system as a patient with dreams, for analysis purposes.

MILO: Psychology and its manifold derivations have been reframed for the business sector and located primarily in the marketing department.

ZEELIO: Now every firm of any significance boasts a Human Resources department, spanning the psychological and its manifestations (social, legal and quasi-militarily, as enforcement). In the government sector, from the military to child protective services, the applications for social management through mind control are diverse as they are creative and innovative.

MILO: Another proposition: The NWO utilizes the citizenry, through governmental authority, as guinea pigs in a range of social experimentation, and the results of this experimentation are privatized, and sold back to the government at a tremendous profit by the business sector. An example is the contractor work at Abu Ghraib, involving psychological and physical torture of inmates.

ZEELIO: Hitler in so many ways paved the way for Drucker’s “work,” even going so far as to provide Drucker his first relevant content, as point of origination. Drucker, though, was more effective than Hitler in achieving the ends of the Germanic tribal monarchies. What is Salzburg today, in conjunction with Davos, but the Capital of the world, at least in the minds of the Super Class? What was Hitler’s aim has been accomplished by Drucker’s society of organizations. In the power points, the localization of the HDF Reich at Davos and Switzerland, we see the signifiers of Drucker’s brand of quiet power pantomimed as humility, sustaining or built on confident manipulation of medium. The model is the the sage, as a post-Jungian archetype, applying ancient wisdom in the affairs of mankind.

V: Did you see the NY Times article on Jung’s Red Book? Amazing! The first illustration in the accompanying slideshow shows a drawing in Jung’s journal quite reminiscent of the one you formulated for Maciariello’s Proof, in the thesis.

MILO: The paintings of Jung’s are quite nice.

PJM: So what title in the New World Order would we award Drucker?

MILO: We wouldn’t have to - Bush gave him his medal. It’s all positively Orwellian.

V: Speaking of Orwell, it was Bush’s father who introduced the NWO into the parlance of American political speech and empowered a genre of conspiracy theory too big to fail.

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Until now, the world we’ve known has been a world divided – a world of barbed wire and concrete block, conflict and cold war.

Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a “world order” in which “the principles of justice and fair play … protect the weak against the strong …” A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfil the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.
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[President HW Bush, March 6, 1991, in the address to Congress after the first Iraq War]

MILO: How does Bush 1’s narrative comport with reality?

PJM: Arlon’s here.

ARLON: Hello, all.

ALL: Hello.

ZEELIO: I guess it’s time. Do you have the gasoline and rope?