Wake up, Citizens! Ye have Slept Long Enough

Saul, John Ralston, The Unconscious Civilization. Concord: House of Anansi Press, 1995
 
“The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good. Corporatism is an ideology which claims rationality as its central quality. The overall effects on the individual are passivity and conformity in those areas which matter and non-conformism in those which don’t (2).”
 
John Ralston Saul’s book is a late-teenager by now, but his take on the roads that governance and corporatism are taking us down is probably more relevant now than it was in 1995. That road—according to Ralston Saul—is a garden path. At stake is no less than the gradual disenfranchisement of the citizens of Western democracies. For power to be acceptable, it must have behind it clear legitimacy; in a truly democratic country power is legitimized by the citizens. In Western democracies today, power is legitimized by groups operating outside the direct influence of the citizens, hence the contention that our society is becoming more and more corporatist, less and less democratic.
 
Corporatism: noun, the control of a state or organization by large interest groups. (Concise Oxford English Dictionary) An example of corporatism at work, in Ralston Saul’s view, is the failure by President Clinton to reform the health care system in the USA, a promise on which he was elected. It was corporatist interests and the technocrats negotiating with each other that put the kybosh on the citizens’ wish to have a better system. That’s how corporatism delegitimizes citizens. More recently, we’ve seen how Obama has struggled against vested interest to bring about reform in the same area, and at this writing, it’s not clear how far corporate interest groups will allow change to happen. 

We could find numerous examples closer to home. I give you one. The last election in Canada was precipitated by a clear decision by the speaker of the House of Commons and the opposition that the Harper government was guilty of contempt of parliament. Most recently, the same government—this time with a 39% majority—has rammed through a myriad of laws and amendments to laws via a massive omnibus bill, deliberately preventing a whole host of measures from being subjected to proper public scrutiny. Such contempt of parliament is tantamount to contempt for the electorate. Many of the laws and amendments clearly pander to multinational corporate interests: the relaxing of environmental standards, for instance. Decision making consists of an ideologically-based government negotiating with entrenched interest groups, particularly those that favour the political stripe of the day.
 
Ralston Saul is blunt: “The result has been a remarkable growth in the lobbying industry, which has as its sole purpose the conversion of elected representatives and senior civil servants to the particular interest of the lobbyist. That is, lobbyists are in the business of corrupting the people’s representatives and servants away from the public good (93).” The debacle of the F-38s is a current example: the ministry of defense was so badly bamboozled by the military establishment (interest group) and the aviation industry (interest groups) that poor Peter McKay simply had no coherent defense for his “corruption” by the lobbyists and technocrats! On another issue, we know which interest groups want a pipeline from the oil sands at Fort McMurray to Kitimat; we know what efforts the Harper government is making to smooth the way for that. They are clearly on the corporatist side here, the dramatic symbol of that being the shutting down of citizen opposition, this time as a “budgetary measure” embedded in the omnibus bill.
 
Ralston Saul quotes Scottish Philosopher David Hume writing way back in the mid-18th Century: “'It is easy for the rich, in an arbitrary government, to conspire against [the middle class], and to throw the whole burthen of the taxes on their shoulders (143).’” We have seen how easily the Canadian population accepted the incremental reduction in corporate taxes in the recent past. We have also seen how willingly Western governments have bailed out corporations that are failing, inevitably through their own folly and greed. Who will bear these costs in the end? (No need to answer; that was a rhetorical question.)
 
There’s a great deal more to consider in a book on such a broad subject. Citizens rendered passive by the domination of the elite in a society is not the whole story. Life consists of more than the economy: education, health, stimulation, shelter, food, employment, career, clean air and water, beauty and art, etc., etc. “The world is so full of a number of things/I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in A Child’s Garden of Verses.” With so much to experience and enjoy, a citizenry is easily lulled into giving up its rightful role in its governance. Most of the people I talk to on a regular basis see the Occupy Movement, the Montreal student demonstrations and other such street actions as either unjustified, stupid, or both. Few see such actions as citizens trying to claim back their legitimate say in how they are governed. That old saw—people inevitably get the government they deserve—is relevant here; I think Ralston Saul would agree.
 
How do we get back to the place where our government is again legitimized by the citizenry, where corporatist power is checked by the will of the people, where governments again hold us in the respect that we deserve? Ralston Saul suggests what to many of us has been obvious for years: education must again teach children and youth to be citizens before lulling them into becoming life-long functionaries in a corporate world. Beginning with the industrial revolution, corporatist interests have sought to mechanize humans, to make them pliable and compliant modules on production lines, in offices and oil fields, in factories and warehouses. Our great sin was to allow this to happen, to think of ourselves as mechanistic functionaries.
 
John Ralston Saul demonstrates the kind of balance he urges on society in his writing. His illustrations go back to Socrates and Plato, to the literature of Shakespeare, to the careful analysis of the work of Adam Smith (which current economists have bastardized to fit their particular, managerial interests). In this eclectic approach, the reader senses that the running of our national household is not just about the economy, but that ultimately we must be governed with a view to the broad scope of life on the planet, stretching back into our history and forward into the future.
 
Only we as citizens can legitimize the choices that are made for our benefit; we must not abrogate this responsibility.