The Reality-Making Business
May 27th, 2008
Views: 651
Posted by ChrisG at 11:45 am
Matt Taibbi on why Thomas Friedman isn’t even wrong:
If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we’re not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we’re not in Kansas anymore.) That’s the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that’s all there is.
Friedman presides over the birth of a new world, one created by fiat through the breathless piling up of clichés, a world where the the Chewbacca Defence is the one solid principle of debate.
Things are true because you say they are. The only thing that matters is how sure you sound when you say it. In politics, this allows America to invade a castrated Iraq in self-defense. In the intellectual world, Friedman is now probing the outer limits of this trick’s potential, and it’s absolutely perfect, a stroke of genius, that he’s choosing to argue that the world is flat. The only thing that would have been better would be if he had chosen to argue that the moon was made of cheese. And that’s basically what he’s doing here. The internet is speeding up business communications, and global labor markets are more fluid than ever. Therefore, the moon is made of cheese. That is the rhetorical gist of The World Is Flat. It’s brilliant. Only an America-hater could fail to appreciate it.
Ok, so how do you deal with a fantasist? It sure isn’t by pointing out the myriad flaws and inconsistencies held within their argument. They are irrational after-all, so what does logicality matter – TO THEM. What matters is their belief because this is their ‘reality-making business’. Nix to truth, rationality, perspective, consideration, veracity, honesty, logic or whatever truths of rationality which you or I hold dear. What matters to them (a fantasist) is what they say and what a fantasist says informs the decisions and the reality they make. You and I know it’s complete and utter bollocks but what can we do about it? We can’t persuade them otherwise, else they wouldn’t be fantasists. What we are reduced to is a snippy commentary. The irrational will triumph.
Well-grounded and well-publicised ridicule (a la Taibbi) for fantasists who find themselves in the position of being opinion-formers, and trying to make sure that fantasists who run for political office don’t get voted in are two short- and medium-term options (don’t argue with them fer chrissakes).
Alternatively, there’s always the route taken by the underground in Eastern Europe in the 70s and 80s, i.e. build yourself an alternative civil society based on mutual aid in the hollows of the old social state while the fantasists at the top carry on bellowing their own “reality” into existence, and wait for them to get consumed by the reality they’ve spent their careers trying to deny.
One of the funniest repsonses to Friedman’s book I love to read again and again is Matt Taibbi’s rebutttal.
But on a more serious note, Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel winner for Economics and former Chief Economist at the World Bank) said while on a trip to India, that 600 million people from India (out of the one billion!) have been left out of the “development†fold of globalization. So, obviously, all India is not going to migrate into middle class, if anything the inequality is far, far worse now, after the advent of globalization. Similarly newspaper reports have pointed out how Chinese workers are working in apalling conditions, to churn out the low cost products, with poor pay, cramped rooms, no accident or health insurance benefits, no job security, no overtime, long working hours – so who is actually benefiting from this sort of globalization? Corporates ofcourse, and the few privileged people of India nd China who have been able to get educated in engineering and technology! Not the vast majority of population.
The small, but interesting book, by Aronica and Ramdoo, “The World is Flat? A Critical Analysis of Thomas Friedman’s New York Times Bestseller,” offers a great counterperspective to Friedman’s theory. It is a small book compared to the 600 page tome by Friedman, and aimed at the common man and students alike. As popular as the book may be, some reviewers assert that by what it leaves out, Friedman’s book is dangerous. The authors point to the fact that there isn’t a single table or data footnote in Friedman’s entire book.
“Globalization is the greatest reorganization of the world since the Industrial Revolution,” says Aronica.
You may want to see http://www.mkpress.com/flat
and watch http://www.mkpress.com/flatoverview.html
for an interesting counterperspective on Friedman’s
“The World is Flat”.
Also a really interesting 6 min wake-up call: Shift Happens! http://www.mkpress.com/ShiftExtreme.html
There is also a companion book listed: Extreme Competition: Innovation and the Great 21st Century Business Reformation
http://www.mkpress.com/extreme
http://www.mkpress.com/Extreme11minWMV.html