John Ralston Saul

Matt Holbert of Integral Journal has a post on John Ralston Saul's The Unconscious Civilization, with a lot of great excerpts. My favorites:

One of the tricks which makes this sort of closet delusion possible is that the very size and prosperity of the elite permits it to interiorize an artificial vision of civilization as a whole. Thus, ours takes seriously only what comes from its own hundreds -- indeed, thousands -- of specialized sectors. Everything turns on internal reference. Everything is carefully measured, so that heartening "body counts" of growth or job creation of whatever can be produced. Truth is not in the world, it is the measurements made by professionals. [p.9]

A managerial elite manages. A crisis, unfortunately, requires thought. Thought is not a management function. Because the managerial elites are now so large and have such a dominant effect on our education system, we are actually teaching most people to manage not to think. Not only do we not reward thought, we punish it as unprofessional. [p.14]

As for the individual, the one-third to one-half of the population who are part of the managerial elite are indeed castrated as citizens because their professions, their employment contracts and the general atmosphere of corporate loyalty make it impossible for them to participate in the public place. [p.89]

This approach and my earlier comment on how to insert the citizenry into the formal system of power are intended to indicate that our need is not, at this time, for another round of incremental changes in one direction or another. The effects of corporatism are so invasive that the strategy of the citizenry should be to change not the policies in place but the dynamics. [p.175]