DOWNER’S SYNDROME: GLOBAPHILIA

(c) Copyright 1998: Graham Strachan

In a book called ‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’, American psychologist Dr. Julian Jaynes of Princeton University reasoned that in the course of human evolution man must have progressed from an animal consciousness to a fully developed human consciousness at some stage. That stage would have coincided with the development of language and was thus fairly recent. The fully developed human consciousness differs from that of the animal, in this case the ape, in its ability to think in concepts and principles which enable it to reason. The animal perceives its surroundings but, so far as can be determined, cannot integrate those percepts into concepts and reason for itself. It relies instead on instinct, learned behavior, and a tendency to follow the herd.

Jaynes reasoned that the transition from animal to human consciousness was not a sudden switching on of lights, but gradual, involving an intermediate stage he called the ‘bicameral mode’. The person in bicameral mode was not quite fully conscious in the sense of being able to reason, but could do most other things. Bicameralism was ‘following mode’. People operating in it relied on learned behavior, instructions from people in authority, and in new situations counsel from ‘the gods’. Man operated in this mode even into the fairly advanced stages of early civilisation.

The important point Jaynes made was that the transition to full consciousness was volitional, not automatic. The individual had to choose to think independently, and had to cultivate reasoning as a habit in order to stay fully conscious. It follows that, given the right circumstances (such as a society which discourages independent thought, or which fails to encourage children to reason) it is possible for masses of people to lapse back into bicameral or following mode. Such people would pick up their ideas from their surroundings rather than through independent thought. They would believe what ‘authorities’ told them to, follow the crowd, leap onto bandwagons, vote the way they thought the herd would vote, conform readily to ‘political correctness’, accept false theories which purportedly ‘explain everything’, and believe in mystical things like astrology, ‘market forces’, ‘forces of history’, and ‘Gaia mother earth’. Sound familiar?

Since the person in bicameral mode cannot think conceptually they cannot reason logically, and they instinctively sense that. Consequently they are literally terrified of an opposing viewpoint. If they try to argue logically their efforts are riddled with logical fallacies such as appeals to emotions and force. They regard independent ideas as ‘dangerous’, threats to social peace and stability, and readily agree with calls to have the holders ‘marginalised’, as they have tried to do with ‘The Hansonites’. It was this mindset which led to the use of psychiatric hospitals in the Soviet Union as places of mental ‘correction’. To the bicameral, an independent thinker is a menace both to them and to society.

Bicamerals resort frequently to a logical fallacy known as the argument from intimidation: they accuse the person with an opposing viewpoint of suffering from an irrational fear of the ‘politically correct’ view: a ‘phobia’. People who refuse to accept homosexuality as ‘normal’, for example, are diagnosed as suffering from ‘homophobia’. People who oppose the bandwagon policy of multiculturalism are accused of being ‘afraid of foreigners’, suffering from ‘xenophobia’. Australia’s Treasurer Peter Costello recently accused people who oppose ‘globalisation’ of being ‘afraid of change’. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer went a step further and gave the condition a name: ‘globaphobia’.

At the Canberra Press Club on December 1, 1997, Downer delivered an address to journalists entitled ‘Globalism or Globaphobia: Does Australia have a Choice?’ One immediately recognises the argument from intimidation in the title itself. To oppose globalism is ‘globaphobia’, and it is immediately apparent where his line of ‘argument’ is leading: Australia has no choice but to leap onto the bandwagon, to run with the herd and ‘globalise’, or risk being labelled a nation of ‘globaphobes’....a prospect people in bicameral mode appear to regard as a fate worse than death.

To the fully-conscious independently thinking human the suggestion that Australia has no choice is absurd. To him or her, man should be in control of human affairs, so the suggestion that our society is in the grip of trends which are ‘unstoppable’, ‘ireversible’, and beyond human choice or intervention is mystical nonsense. Not so to Alexander Downer. “Whether people fear globalisation or not.” declared Downer, “they cannot escape it”. To the person in bicameral mode the ‘inevitable forces of globalisation’, not humans, are in charge of human affairs. The world is still ruled by ‘the gods’, and none can escape their will.

Downer’s speech was riddled with all the logical fallacies that are the bicameral’s stock in trade. “We all fall into one of two camps”, declared Downer. “You are either a globaphobe or a globaphile”. This is the argument to extremes, the ‘false alternative’: tell opponents they can be one extreme or the other with no middle ground. They can have either an irrational fear of globalism, or an irrational love of it, but a balanced viewpoint which is neither is not an option. Needless to say, Downer is a self-diagnosed globaphiliac.

The Minister then employed the popular ‘straw man’ fallacy. This involves misrepresenting the opposing viewpoint (set up a straw man), then attacking your own misrepresentation. According to Mr. Downer, people who do not wish to relinquish control of their lives and their country to others “would slam shut Australia’s doors on the world....propose massive walls to block out our region...are preying on the fears of some Australians who suffer....reform fatigue....”. All of which is raving nonsense. Australia has always been engaged with the rest of the world and nobody is seriously proposing anything different now. People opposing globalisation simply wish to deal with the world as sovereign individuals in a self-governing country, a concept which runs counter to the desperate emotional need of the bicameral for herd-like interdependency.

Downer then resorted to two more fallacies. First, intellectual modernism (future-oriented ideas are always correct): “The globaphobes among us”, said Downer, “seek to relive the past, not confront the future”. Then came the popular ‘ad hominem’ (attack the person): opponents were “small-minded, needlessly fearful, ridiculously cautious and hopelessly visionless.” None of which says anything about the opposing viewpoint. Inevitably the appeal to force (terrible things will happen) was resorted to: to resist globalisation will result in “a world without progress....an orgy of nationalism....” Yield or be doomed! Irrational? Absolutely.

Opposing globalism, said Downer, will “shut us off from fast changing technology, from rising living standards, from new and more interesting jobs”. But after 15 years of globalism none of those things has been delivered. It fact globalisation is replacing full-time with lower-paid part-time jobs, causing a decline in living standards for the majority while the rich are getting richer. It is progessively impoverishing producers while parasitic speculators are making fortunes bringing down whole economies. Furthermore, the idea that people have to sacrifice national independence to get new technology is simply nonsense.

So how could Downer make such foolish claims in the face of mounting contrary evidence? The answer is that people operating in bicameral mode believe in theory, not actuality. They do not hold opinions based on facts, they embrace certain standpoints on faith. Evidence which threatens the belief system must be ignored, falsified, even suppressed. In this case the theory says ‘market forces’ will deliver wealth and prosperity. The fact that they don’t must therefore be a temporary aberration. The gods require sacrifices before delivering the global utopia. ‘No pain, no gain’. We must be patient, have faith, and reaffirm our commitment. In New Guinea they call it ‘cargo cultism’.

The bulk of Downer’s talk was based on a fallacy known as ‘reductionism’, by which one part of a thing is represented as the whole. A concept can thus be reduced to one of its more attractive attributes. In this case Downer concentrates on one aspect of globalism, namely ‘trade liberalisation ’, and argues that the alleged benefits from that are the benefits from ‘globalism’. He can do this because at no stage does he define what ‘globalism’ is. The uninitiated (including the journalists eating Chicken Kiev) are left with the impression that globalisation is just another name for ‘trade liberalisation’. How very wrong.

In fact globalisation is about countries relinquishing, bit by bit, their economic sovereignty, their economic assets and public utilities, together with their political, legal, and cultural sovereignty to internationalist control. The resultant ‘globalised’ world is to consist not of independent nations, but of interdependent member states of a global order under one world government. Downer might deny that, but it is now well documented by many and varied sources. He probably also would deny that he and his government are giving away Australians’ right to govern their own affairs, but at the very time he delivered his speech his government was about to sign the Financial Services Industry Agreement (FSIA) which signed away the people’s right to prevent foreign takeovers of Australian banks, and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) which would relinquish their right to limit and control what multinational corporations and foreign investors can do in and to Australia, including its people.

Downer eventually conceded there was more to globalisation than trade liberalisation, then immediately talked more about trade liberalisation, seeking to perpetuate the myth that ‘trade liberalisation will prevent wars’. In truth, whatever else they do, monopoly capitalism and ‘free trade’ do not prevent wars. From the Opium Wars, to the two World Wars, through Korea, Vietnam and Desert Storm, there has been more global conflict since the rise of monopoly capitalism and ‘free trade’ than ever before in human history. Far from preventing wars, global captalism makes huge profits financing them. At the moment American capitalists are taking advantage of trade liberalisation to sell missile guidance technology to China, a country regarded by strategists as the greatest threat to world peace. Already India and Pakistan have responded with a resumption of nuclear testing.

The globalised world Downer proposes has no provision whatsoever for democracy, no provision for individual input into the process of world government, no means by which individuals can retain control over their lives or their country. Perhaps Downer thinks Australians should be content to surrender control of their lives to the likes of himself and Peter Costello, under what the IMF’s Michael Camdessus calls ‘participative democracy’: rule by elites. Such a prospect is totally unacceptable to the fully-developed adult human intelligence. The globaphile’s world is a world of followers, of slaves, of dutiful subjects in bicameral mode, one in which the independently thinking, reasoning, sovereign human being with genuine self-esteem is regarded as a threat to the state. Mr. Downer needs a smart jolt back into full consciousness. He should also go and get some treatment for his ‘globaphilia’.

Return to Economic Rationalism Column