> What did concern me was Fred's endorsement of some odd elements in
Dominic's
> post. I've read that latter about five times now, and it seems to me that
it
> is (whether consciously or not) perpetuating one of the hoariest
> conservative myths of all: that people are naturally evil and therefore
need
> to be curbed, by the force of law and the force of 'hard-edged' economic
> realities.
> That telling word 'determinism' was lodged in Dom's post.

On the occasions when I've run into people behaving in evil and stupid ways,
I've often tended to wish that something forceful and hard-edged would come
along and curb them. Batman, for instance. Authoritarian fantasies come
readily to people who are used to being picked on. The robes of the Taliban
are a kind of superhero costume - "your bullets cannot harm me - my wings
are like a shield of steel..."

I don't think it's true that you have to believe that people are naturally
or preternaturally evil in order to think of the rule of law as something
useful. "Potentially" evil will do. I suppose I don't believe that the
potential for evil is ever not there. There's always someone somewhere
drawing little felt-tip skulls on the walls of his rumpus room.

Economic determinism is as much a feature of some marxisms as it is a
feature of some right-wing ideologies. The joke doesn't work without the
punchline: I was describing the rather commonplace accommodation of
neo-liberal tenets about the "icy" or "iron" determinism of markets with the
incompossibly "warm" and "fuzzy" hopes and wishes of social democracy. Every
"sensible" person accepts the former to a greater or lesser degree, and
every "decent" person has at least a minimal investment in the latter; but
it's actually senseless and contradictory to be "sensible and decent" in
this way. Anyone whose politics can be mapped according to the currently
prevailing intellectual stereotypes is caught up in this contradiction,
which defines Blairism as much as "compassionate conservatism". Whether you
lean leftwards or rightwards within this supposed consensus ultimately makes
no difference to its bogosity.

I agree about the experience of work: the managerial perspective is that
people have to be continually bullied into getting their act together,
"people" meaning everyone below oneself in the management hierarchy, but the
chaos goes all the way up and is in no way rooted in the incompetance of any
single tier of an organisation. Having to implement other people's
thoughtlessly-taken "strategic" decisions means having to square circles,
fit quarts into pint-pots and add one and one together to make three. What's
interesting is that there *is* an "iron law" of sorts at work here after
all: the one that says that one and one together does not and cannot make
three. If the wishes of managers could be effortlessly fulfilled without
encountering any sort of resistance from what for want of a better word I'll
call "reality", then the chaos would vanish.

I don't in spite of this believe that reality is an entirely disorganised
and "potentialised" muddle. It has powerful self-organising tendencies, and
can be curtly "actual" when it feels like it (as anyone who has ever walked
into a lamppost should appreciate). There's a sort of dualism that would
have it that all human "dreams of order" are delusions caused by a failure
of the imagination to apprehend the primal chaos of existence. This is
bollocks, and is used all too often by muddled thinkers to excuse the
failure of *their* imaginations to cope with any order of systematicity
higher than that of an A-level social psychology textbook...

Dom