Les Temps Modernes.

Many years ago a Modernisation department dropped from nowhere into our Trust, like the Obelisk in 2001 A Space Odyssey, but less mysterious. It was a kind of Tufton Street think tank promoting ‘transformational’ ideas from the world of business to the antediluvians toiling in blissful ignorance. The organisation was to become a high performing lean machine. Perhaps it was a victim of its own efficency or perhaps it fell out of favour as we moved into a new era of Post-Modernisation; either way it was shutdown a couple of years later. The thing is, when you’re facing a starved and emaciated patient the cure probably isn’t to make them even leaner. There were two assumptions underpinning the modernisation approach: data drive change and health care can be reduced to function and process. The department was earnest in its mission to beam performance management and service improvement into every nook and cranny of the system. Once a year the Modernists took a day off from modernising and celebrated their own brilliance with a conference. Everyone got to wear different coloured Six Sigma hats and ponder the meaning of life: the elimination of variation. All in glorious PowerPoint.

I’ve been reading Late Soviet Britain by Abby Innes and it’s been a challenge for someone like me with suboptimal economic literacy. I’ve given up re-reading the passages on theory and focused my attention on the axiomatic truth that neoliberalism is toxic. So too was the Soviet economic model. In between the hard-for-me-to-understand stuff is her proposition that neoliberals and Soviets are isomorphic – they share the same form – bound by a shared conceit that their theoretical models actually represent reality. Sadly, for those obliged to live in their false utopias, the actual reality is that both were and are on a disastrous fool’s errand terminating with authoritarianism. Incidentally, Innes points out that utopia literally means ‘no place’ or ‘nowhere’, reminding me of Theresa May’s ‘citizen of nowhere’ dig at international elites, and indeed ordinary people like me, who saw Brexit as a manifestation of Little England nationalism. Brexit was and still is a symptom of neoliberalism’s delusional reasoning and contempt for people’s lives as well as an opportunity for neoliberals to further shrink the state, indulge in more deregulation and fill their own pockets. The Soviet system and neoliberalism are driven by the same belief that society is a simple closed system governed by rational and scientific laws. They are both fundamental Materialists who believe that social reality can be reduced to mathematical calculations. Ofcourse their models are just that, imagined representations of reality like Magritte’s pipe, and when reality doesn’t behave as it should the inadequacy of their models becomes obvious. You can’t have a Condor moment with Magritte’s pipe and you can’t have a decent society with neoliberalism. And still they cling on. The Materialist Delusion and Dawkins’ God Delusion are two sides of the same self-deceiving coin requiring the same leap of faith and the same desperate measures to defend that faith when the pipe dream goes up in smoke. Ceci n’est pas la réalité.