Deceit Culture 5

Will mankind maintain a civilized state? Playwright Harold Pinter sets out what seem to be impossibly stringent conditions in his Nobel prize acceptance speech of a few weeks ago:

[For politicians to maintain their power,] it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed....

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man.

I confess I see little evidence of "intellectual determination," or intellectual anything, among the people. Most seem to be following instructions — watching TV, popping pills, eating junk, chasing things they're told to chase. The liars' accomplishments are wondrous, really. People are making themselves sick, without coercion.

That lies would become increasingly potent and effective is just standard economic theory — technology improves with time. The people's opinions, in a wealthy capitalistic democracy, have obvious value. Investment in manipulation has been correspondingly high.

While the liars are increasingly adept, normal folks are getting dumber, operatively speaking. It's not that our intellectual faculties are declining. But in an unnoticed irony of our technologically advanced state, we simply have no bloody time.

We are mortal; every use of time draws down our limited allotment. Otherwise put, time is money. Do we put our time to good use?

This raises questions like, What are my fundamental goals? What is the purpose of existence? What do I really want?

We have no damn time for those questions either.

One way people do spend time, according to a New York Times column last November, is on mileage runs:

[T]he year is fast running out, and many frequent fliers who hold the highest elite-status levels - the ones that reliably get you free upgrades from coach to first class on domestic flights - are looking at their accounts, seeing they are short, and frantically planning so-called mileage runs to hit the mark by Jan. 1 and keep their privileged ranking in 2006.

In a new book, "Mileage Pro: The Insider's Guide to Frequent Flyer Programs," Randy Petersen and Tim Winship, two experts on frequent-flier miles, describe a mileage run as "a series of flights taken in a very short amount of time, solely for the purpose of accumulating frequent flyer miles, with a blatant disregard for the destinations."

["A Quick Trip to Guam Just to Run Up Flier Miles," by Joe Sharkey, New York Times, November 29, 2005.]

The article tells how, besides books, there are websites, online discussion forums, seminars and consulting services to help people navigate the technical intricacies of airline frequent flier programs. The airlines themselves, a later column reports, take a benign view:

I spoke the other day with Mark Sullivan, the managing director of loyalty marketing [at Continental], and Victor Llana, manager of the OnePass frequent-flier program.

First they said they were amazed at how cleverly my mileage run had been designed to get the most miles for the cheapest fare. "Our attitude is we're flattered that people want to take mileage runs at the end of the year because it shows how important elite status is to our customers," Mr. Sullivan said. "I don't consider that gaming the system at all."

"As long as you're not breaking any of our rules on fares or ticketing, I think it's great to see that elite status is such a motivator," Mr. Llana added.

["Why I Looked a Mileage Run in the Eye and Blinked," by Joe Sharkey, New York Times, December 13, 2005.]

Let's make a quick run of our own and take a look at our hypothetical logical world. There, they have no mileage runs — frequent flyer programs are illegal. So are all the other points and "loyalty" programs besieging consumers here. They're illegal because all they do is raise prices (by consuming costly resources — advertising, personnel, computer systems, office space) while producing zero benefits to society. Plus, let's not forget, they waste people's time. The reasoning isn't complicated.

But banning such things calls for relatively aggressive government intervention. And in our world, that's not kosher. No matter how obviously stupid, wasteful and pointless something is, it can't simply be declared stupid and outlawed.

Everyone knows why. Ask 20 people their opinions, and at least 19 will recite the conventional wisdom: "Who would decide that it's obviously stupid, wasteful and pointless?"

It's only in logical worlds that folks can discern obvious stupidity.

Business competition often leads to wasteful "arms races," like frequent flyer programs. The same kind of socially worthless activity occurs in the health care sector, as economist Paul Krugman observes:

[Health] insurance companies ... devote a lot of effort and money to screening applicants, selling insurance only to those considered unlikely to have high costs, while rejecting those with pre-existing conditions or other indicators of high future expenses.

This screening process is the main reason private health insurers spend a much higher share of their revenue on administrative costs than do government insurance programs like Medicare, which doesn't try to screen anyone out. That is, private insurance companies spend large sums not on providing medical care, but on denying insurance to those who need it most.

What happens to those denied coverage? Citizens of advanced countries — the United States included — don't believe that their fellow citizens should be denied essential health care because they can't afford it. And this belief in social justice gets translated into action, however imperfectly. Some of those unable to get private health insurance are covered by Medicaid. Others receive ''uncompensated'' treatment, which ends up being paid for either by the government or by higher medical bills for the insured. So we have a huge private health care bureaucracy whose main purpose is, in effect, to pass the buck to taxpayers.

["Health Economics 101," by Paul Krugman, New York Times, November 14, 2005.]

Suppose we did have the ability to discern obvious stupidity. What worthwhile initiatives might ensue?

Don't even think about that question if you're not prepared to get into some very radical stuff indeed. Ponder for a moment how much labor expenditure in our society is fundamentally worthless or worse. Whooooooweeee. We would be seeing some big-time changes.

But most folks are sticks-in-the-mud, unalterably convinced that however the world works, there must be good reasons for it. They always concoct an argument to defend the status quo. On worthless work, they'd argue that ending it would lead to unemployment. It's a stupid argument — but that's what it takes to defend stupidity. If a job is worthless to society, it's better for taxpayers to pay the worker to go to school.

There are vast tracts of uselessness everywhere. If we could only mine some of them in 2006 and share the proceeds, we could all get a very big bonus next year-end.

Not to mention, with the time we'd gain, we'd also have a shot at restoring the dignity of man.

Continued: Deceit Culture 6.