Hi Chris, Have you considered that it might in fact be very difficult for the directors of large companies to tell the truth, in view of the multifaceted nature of the reality they are responsible for, and the social contradictions of an economy based on private enterprise ? As regards the former, to tell the total story might fill a book, which you do not have time for; as regards the latter, private enterprise business secrets and the consequences of everything you say and do, require a diplomatic approach.
I am not trying to apologise for people who lie here, in fact as you know I rejected the official justifications for war with Iraq as a hoax, a fraud, I am just noting that there might be an objective basis for not being able to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. When I worked at university and as research statistician in the survey design area, I realised very clearly that when you have a complex array of data, and you have to tell a true story about that, then you could tell quite a number of stories about it, all valid, but it would be difficult to tell a story which was "the whole truth". Indeed, it could be very difficult to devise a questionnaire question which was interpreted in the same way by all respondents and left no room for various interpretations. When I was a high school student I first considered this question, and I realised from a book I read about it that "telling the truth" wasn't sufficient on its own, it had to be coupled to honesty, and later I realised that a few additional virtues were required as well. When you are young, you think that something is either true or it is false, but as you grow older you realise better that some things that are said are "sort of true" or "sort of false" and more investigation has to reveal what exactly we are dealing with. In part, this is purely a result of the ambiguity of language itself, in which case we are forced to link what somebody says to what somebody actually does, to get a better picture. But even then there are different truth criteria and interpretations possible. I am making these points because a condition of the Popperian "open society" is in fact the ability of people to live a truthful and honest life, and part of my critique of bourgeois society (and more generally class society) is that it is not in fact possible to do this, even if people strive for it, and may approximate it. Ultimately the ability for truthfulness among people is not a question of personal style, but a question of the structure of social relations within which they live. I believe it was Leon Trotsky who remarked that "lying is a result of social contradictions", and that if the social contradictions intensified, then lying would intensify as well. As long as you have a "winners and losers" class society, as long as you have profound social inequalities, you have these social contradictions, and consequently also lying. Lying as a social practice has been little studied by anthropologists, but at the root of it is of course a conflict of interests, and the critical factor here is the intensity of these conflicts. For example, there is an enormous difference between "little girl lies" as a song by the band Blondie is titled, and lies which function to justify a war that kills masses of people. I imagine that one of the themes in British society these days is that of "virtuous capitalism" (not to be confused with virtual capitalism, which is a different apology), in other words, how do we get people in the competitive world out there to behave virtuously. This relates to a point which I have numerous times, which is that markets do not spontaneously generate any particular moral conduct or promote morality as such. This is hotly disputed by the neo-liberals, who argue that for example if you wish to participate in this or that market, then you must adhere to a certain moral code, i.e. buyer and seller must be able to rely on each other in a certain way, otherwise you cannot have a successful transaction. And therefore mutual interests are served, and therefore the market promotes at least some sort of "morality". I do not deny that, of course, I am merely saying that even if you are able to accomplish a reliable transaction, it might still be possible for one or more parties to the transaction to be ripped off huge, or parties which are not even involved directly in the transaction to be ripped off huge. In which case you get people like Fukuyama to talk about the importance of "trust" and other people talk about "social capital", which consists of that stock of cultures, virtues etc. external to commercial markets which permit markets to operate efficiently. The trouble with the language used here however is, that these external conditions (which according to Marx and Engels are ultimately supposed to be guaranteed by the bourgeois political state) are only viewed in market terms, they are described in economic language, viewed through the prism of market phenomena. There is talk of human capital, social capital, cultural capital, psychic capital, inputs and outputs, products, economic climates etc. and this whole language is applied to areas of life to which they cannot be applied, other than with the consequence that they distort the real processes that are happening. Which is really to say that in the development of capitalism, economic phenomena and structures are created which make it impossible for bourgeois society to comprehend its own social nature other than in a false or at least one-sided way, however much the issue is fudged with postmodernist babble. And ultimately, it is possible to show that this "one-sided way" corresponds to the class interests of the bourgeois class, which is really one of Marx's original problematics: whereas the problem of ideology is very old and precedes even class society (see George Thomson's work on this), in bourgeois society the problem of ideology is linked to the problem of commodity fetishism, more generally, the reifications in consciousness which result more or less spontaneously from the operation of market society. Certainly, the bourgeoisie aspires to create an open, peaceful, honest business environment which offers stability, even if it means bombing and starving a few million people occasionally, but the very structure of its society creates, let us say, a certain persistent "opacity". We can of course let loose an enormous amount of sophisticated "complexity" theories on this problem, so that we can abstract with maximum speed to arrive at some objective conception of what is really going on, but the real problem is that the persistent "opacity" and "complexity" derives from the very structure of society itself, ultimately, from a specific set of private property relations that have existed on a grand scale for the last few hundred years or so of human history. And so everything that is solid sooner or later melts into air again. Michael Perelman's work on intellectual property relations is an exceptionally good example of this, of how, given intellectual private property relations and restriction of access to information, rather than the sharing of information on the basis of agreed social goals, solving a simple problem may become an enormous (and inefficient) intellectual tour de force in which numerous social barriers and obstacles have to be overcome, as compared to direct allocation of intellectual resources on the basis of an open society. Bourgeois society has no open society, only the ideology of an open society, and the more that access to resources of any kind is restricted by private property relations, the more the society is shut tight like a nun's knees. And the other side of the story is that intellectual private property creates a whole new branch of crime, including thought crimes, as anticipated in a popsong called "the dream police". Welcome to the Gulag of thought. The favourite retort of the bourgeois intelligentsia is to say, but would you not have this problem of opacity in any form of society that is more complex than a bunch of hunters and gatherers ? And my answer is no, because you can design a set of social relations and systems which permit maximal openness in society, if that is indeed your goal instead of babble about the open society of the George Soros type. One of the reasons why I am a socialist is precisely because I think you cannot do that within capitalist class society, because sooner or later you run up against the barriers of private property and class interests. In which case, there is little I personally can do, except take better care of my own meagre assets and follow my own interests, as honestly as possible. Jurriaan
