The Doubter's Companion Read Free

struck between the two.
    Simple folk may have some difficulty mastering the skills involved, but the sophisticated understand innately how the pleasure of abasing others can be heightened by being abased themselves.
    The illusion among the most skilled is that they can achieve ultimate pleasure through a type of ambition or drive, which they call competence. This causes them to rise higher and so to win ever-greater power. But what is the value of this status in a highly structured society devoid of any particular purpose except the right, for a limited time, to give more orders than are received? Courtiers used to scurry around palace corridors with much the same illusion of importance.
    When the time comes to retire from the functions of power, many collapse into a psychic crisis. They feel as if they have been ejected into a void. This is because society has not been rewarding them for their competence or their knowledge, but for their occupation of positions of power. Their very success has required a disembodied abasement of the individual. And when they leave power, the agreeable sense of purpose which it conveyed simply withers away.
    Of course, power must be wielded or there is no civilization. But in a society so devoted to power and run by hierarchies of expertise, the élites are unconsciously addicted to an abstract form of sadomasochism. This may explain why success so often translates into triumphalism and constant complaints about the incompetence of others. The underlying assumption of most civilizations, including our own, is the exact opposite. Success is supposed to produce a flowering of modesty and concern for others. See: CORPORATISM.
    ABELARD, PETER    A twelfth-century pioneer of rational theological inquiry who laid the early foundations of SCHOLASTICISM and fell in love with a seventeen-year-old student. After a tempestuous love affair followed by a secret marriage, he suffered a neutralizing encounter with a knife wielded by her male relations.
    Abelard accepted the monastic life without good grace. However, in his increasingly bad-tempered dialectical teachings, he did not deal with the connection between his inquiry and his fate. See: LOYOLA and PENIS.
    ABSOLUTE    Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death, which may explain why political and economic theories are presented so seriously.
    Absolutism is a deadly serious business. If even a hair’s breadth of space is left around the edges of a theory, doubt may be able to squeeze through. The citizen may then begin to smile and wonder whether the intellectual justifications of power are really nonsense. Few within the expert élites see themselves as ideologues and yet they quite happily act as carriers of truth in whatever their field.
    Whether it reveals the dictatorship of the proletariat or the virtues of privatization, truth is ideology. Not their truths, our élites say. They are simply delivering the inevitable conclusions of facts rationally organized. Absolutism is the weakness of others. Our élites have the good fortune simply to be right. See: DOUBT, IDEOLOGY and SERIOUS.
    ACADEMIC CONSULTANTS    The only place organized specifically for truth to be sought and understanding to be taught is the UNIVERSITY. In the late twentieth century some professors have reinterpreted the long-standing premise that since truth is a supreme value, it is therefore without price. If it’s so supreme, it must have a market value.
    Academics are the chief custodians of Western civilization’s memory and as such of its ethical framework. Academic independence was fought for over a thousand years, with the gradual spread of TENURE over the last century and a half constituting the final step in the protection of intellectual freedom.
    What does it mean, then, if a sizable portion of today’s academics—in particular the social scientists—sell their expertise to