How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions

All the familiar portents of disaster – swaggering hubris, speculative dementia, insupportable debt – were evident by 1987. ‘At some point something – no one can ever know when or quite what – will trigger a decision by some to get out,’ Galbraith predicted. ‘The initial fall will persuade others that the time has come, and then yet others, and then the greater fall will come. Once the purely speculative element has been built into the structure, the eventual result is, to repeat, inevitable.’ He added, however, that there was a compelling vested interest in prolonging financial insanity, and anyone who questioned its rationale could expect rough treatment from the spivs organising the three-card trick, just as the eminent banker Paul Warburg had been accused of ‘sandbagging American prosperity’ when he suggested in March 1929 that the orgy of ‘unrestrained speculation’ would soon end in tears. Galbraith’s own article in the Atlantic had originally been commissioned by the New York Times but was spiked because the editors found it ‘too alarming’.

Its eventual publication did nothing to puncture Wall Street’s exuberance, at least for a while. (‘Galbraith doesn’t like to see people making money’ was a typical reaction.) On 8 January 1987, a few days after the professor’s gloomy New Year message, traders on the floor of the stock exchange were cheering and hurling confetti in the air as the Dow Jones industrial average broke through the 2,000 level for the first time. ‘Why is the market so high when the economy continues to be so lacklustre?’ Time magazine wondered. ‘Considering such questions mere quibbles, many optimistic analysts are convinced that the crashing of the 2000 barrier is the start of another major market upsurge that might last anywhere from two to five years.’ By the end of August the Dow had climbed to 2,722.42, the fifty-fifth record high achieved that year. Employing a system known as Elliott Wave Theory, the Wall Street guru Robert Prechter calculated that it would gain another thousand points in the next twelve months. Others put their trust in the so-called Super Bowl Theory, which held that the stock market always rose when a team from the original National Football League won the championship. And why not? The theory had been vindicated in eighteen of the previous twenty years, a more impressive success rate than conventional forecasting methods.

Against the madness of crowds, Friedrich von Schiller once wrote, the very gods themselves contend in vain. What hope was there for mere mortals wishing to understand the logic of a bull market that seemed unaffected by sluggish economic growth and a decline in business earnings? To quote Galbraith again:

Ever since the Compagnie d’Occident of John Law (which was formed to search for the highly exiguous gold deposits of Louisiana); since the wonderful exfoliation of enterprises of the South Sea Bubble; since the outbreak of investment enthusiasm in Britain in the 1820s (a company ‘to drain the Red Sea with a view to recovering the treasure abandoned by the Egyptians after the crossing of the Jews’); and on down to the 1929 investment trusts, the offshore funds and Bernard Cornfeld, and yet on to Penn Square and the Latin American loans – nothing has been more remarkable than the susceptibility of the investing public to financial illusion and the like-mindedness of the most reputable of bankers, investment bankers, brokers, and free-lance financial geniuses. Nor is the reason far to seek. Nothing so gives the illusion of intelligence as personal association with large sums of money.

It is, alas, an illusion.

During the South Sea Bubble of 1720 investors hurled their money into any new venture, however weird its prospectus: ‘For extracting of Silver from Lead’; ‘For trading in Human Hair’; ‘For a Wheel of Perpetual Motion’; and, most gloriously, ‘a Company for carrying on an Undertaking of Great Advantage, but Nobody to know what it is’. Similarly, some of Wall Street’s best-performing stocks in 1987 were enterprises that had neither profits nor products – obscure drug firms which were rumoured to have a cure for AIDS, or AT&E Corp, which claimed to be developing a wristwatch-based paging system. ‘The thing could trade anywhere – up to 30 times earnings,’ a leading analyst, Evelyn Geller, said of AT&E. ‘So you’re talking about $1,000 a share. You can’t put a price on this – you can’t. You don’t know where it is going to go. You are buying a dream, a dream that is being realised.’ AT&E soon went out of business, its dream still unrealised, but Geller’s rapturous illusion shows how the market was kept afloat at a time when any rational passenger should have been racing for the lifeboats.

By the second week in October, a few dents were appearing in the hitherto impregnable dreadnought. Some blamed a spate of investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission into Wall Street’s biggest names – Drexel Burnham Lambert, Goldman Sachs, Kidder Peabody – following the arrest of Ivan Boesky. Others complained that the fall in the dollar (caused by a widening foreign trade deficit) was weighing on the market. An additional factor was ‘portfolio insurance’, the high-tech innovation which set off waves of computerised selling as soon as the market fell below a certain level, prompting a downward stampede and foiling any attempts to recover equilibrium. Meanwhile, the risk-free yield on thirty-year government bonds had risen to an unprecedented 10.22 per cent, only slightly below the risk-heavy 10.6 per cent return from the stock market. Some investors wondered why they bothered to buy shares at all.

The economic tsunami of 19 October 1987 –‘Black Monday’ – began with panic selling on the Tokyo stock exchange and then surged through Asia and Europe, following the sun, before engulfing Wall Street. The Dow Jones plummeted by 508.32 points, losing 22.6 per cent of its total value – almost twice the 12.9 per cent plunge during the crash of October 1929 which precipitated the Great Depression. ‘Of all the mysteries of the Stock Exchange,’ J. K. Galbraith had written in his history of the 1929 disaster, ‘there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who wants to sell. 24 October 1929 showed that what is mysterious is not inevitable. Often there were no buyers.’ Sure enough, on the morning of 20 October 1987 (‘Terrible Tuesday’), with no one willing to purchase stocks at any price, there was a full hour in which trading ceased altogether: it appeared that the world’s dominant financial system had simply curled up and died. What saved it from extinction was not the ‘invisible hand’ but the new chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, who flooded the market with cheap credit shortly after midday and strong-armed the big banks to do the same, thus preventing Wall Street from dragging the whole US economy into recession. Meanwhile, the regulators of the New York stock exchange also intervened to ‘preserve the integrity of the system’.

Did chastened right-wing triumphalists notice that capitalism had been rescued only by swift action from the federal government and the regulators, precisely the kind of ‘interference’ they would usually deplore? Apparently not. Ronald Reagan signalled a return to business as usual by dismissing Black Monday as ‘some kind of correction’, and magazines such as Success continued to glamorise the casino culture. Neo-liberals applauded the ‘creative destruction’ of manufacturing industry, old work practices, public institutions and anything else that stood in their path. In Washington and London, right-wing institutes and foundations proliferated like bindweed, fertilised by the enthusiasm with which Thatcher and Reagan greeted their crackpot schemes. The bow-tied young men in these think-tanks prided themselves on ‘thinking the unthinkable’, coming up with ideas such as privatisation – which would later become an unchallengeable gospel, spread everywhere from Russia to Mexico. ‘We propose things which people regard as on the edge of lunacy,’ Dr Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Insitute boasted in 1987. ‘The next thing you know, they’re on the edge of policy.’ By a blissful irony, it was one such ‘unthinkable’ scheme – the poll-tax, dreamed up by the Adam Smith Institute and recklessly adopted by Thatcher against the advice of her colleagues – which helped to bring her down in November 1990.

By then, however, her task was effectively accomplished anyway. The demise of the Marxist states in Eastern Europe seemed to vindicate all that she and Ronald Reagan had done: both socialism and Keynesianism had been pronounced dead, and unrestrained turbo-capitalism installed as the new orthodoxy. ‘What I want to see above all,’ Reagan said, ‘is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich.’ And there was no shortage of hucksters willing to explain, for a fee, just how this could be achieved.

2 Old snake-oil, new bottles (#ulink_28550c55-fed5-5bb2-8120-6d861705ef89)

There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds … In proportion as any man’s course of life is governed by accident, we always find that he increases in superstition, as may particularly be observed of gamesters and sailors, who, though of all mankind the least capable of serious reflection, abound most in frivolous and superstitious apprehensions … All human life, especially before the institution of order and good government, being subject to fortuitous accidents, it is natural that superstition should prevail everywhere in barbarous ages, and put men on the most earnest inquiry concerning those invisible powers who dispose of their happiness or misery.

DAVID HUME, A Natural History of Religion (1757)

Money is power, and power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. The logic is inescapable: rich people are sexy.

Logic has seldom been applicable to the mysteries of desire, and five minutes in the company of a typical tycoon should be enough to deflate this particular syllogism. The sheen of narcissism, the indiscriminate smile, the fawning gaggle of sycophants – what could be less alluring? One of the most resonantly repulsive images from the 1980s is of Michael Douglas, in shirtsleeves and braces, playing the snake-eyed corporate raider Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Yet the fact that Oliver Stone’s film was a moral fable with a message as old as the Bible (love of money is the root of all evil) eluded many moviegoers, mesmerised as they were by the seductive energy of sheer wickedness, and Gekko’s ‘greed is good’ mantra soon became the catchphrase of every Big Swinging Dick in New York and London – Masters of the Universe, as Tom Wolfe called them in The Bonfire of the Vanities. For ambitious young things who had yet to join the club, there was one urgent question: I’ve got the red braces, I’ve got the attitude, I’ve got greed in abundance, so how can I grab some of the loot?

Help was at hand. In 1982 a young management consultant from McKinsey & Co., Thomas J. Peters, co-wrote In Search of Excellence, a relentlessly optimistic primer which celebrated America’s best companies and sought to identify the secrets of their success. As the Economist noted, Peters had ‘a knack of saying the right thing at the right time’: In Search of Excellence was published in the very week when unemployment in the US reached its highest level since the 1930s, and it found a ready audience in a nation worried about declining competitiveness but sick of hearing about the Japanese miracle. (Perhaps Peters had learned from the precedent of Dale Carnegie, whose equally cheerful and vastly popular How to Win Friends and Influence People had appeared in 1936, in the depths of the Depression.) In Search of Excellence sold five million copies, and Peters used the proceeds to buy a 1,300 acre farm in Vermont, complete with cattle and llamas.

After that, the deluge: The Seven Habits of Highly EffectivePeople by Stephen R. Covey, The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, The One-Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins … The New York Times list of non-fiction bestsellers soon became so clogged with inspirational tracts that the paper established a separate category for ‘Advice, How-to and Miscellaneous’. Even men who had already made their fortune hastened to cash in: the Chrysler boss Lee Iacocca, the gloriously vulgar property developer Donald Trump and the rebarbative media mogul Al Neuharth all dashed off inspirational, ghost-written blockbusters that sold by the ton. (Neuharth’s title, Confessions of an S.O.B., perfectly evokes its rancid flavour.) Victor Kiam – the tiresome self-publicist who liked Remington razors so much that he bought the company – passed on the ideas which had propelled him to plutocracy in Go for It and Keep Going for It. ‘Turn those negatives into positives!’ ‘A little bit of courtesy and caring. It goes such a long way.’ ‘Business is a game. Play it to win.’ ‘When you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’ ‘When opportunity knocks, the entrepreneur is always home.’ ‘Any job worth doing is worth doing well.’

The authors of the American declaration of independence had prefaced their statement of human rights by announcing ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’. If Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues didn’t flinch from stating the obvious, why should Victor Kiam or his rivals? Had the founding fathers only thought of copyrighting the text, they too could have enjoyed huge royalty cheques. One man who certainly understood how to profit from ideas that had hitherto been regarded as common property was Benjamin Franklin, whose Poor Richard’s Almanack (1733) is a pot-pourri of similarly banal yet uplifting mottos –‘early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’, ‘little strokes fell great oaks’, and so forth. Pleasantly surprised by its reception, Franklin reworked the aphorisms into bestselling pamphlets such as The Way to Wealth and Advice to a Young Tradesman.

Two and a half centuries later, the market for platitudes became so crowded that ever more exotic angles were required to catch the eye of airport browsers. In the words of Mike Fuller, author of Above the Bottom Line, ‘you have to have a shtick of some kind’. One promising approach, as the emphasis shifted from ‘management’ to ‘leadership’, was to seek out historical analogies, though the history usually turned out to be a mere promotional gimmick rather than a serious examination of past experience. The pioneer here was Wess Roberts (or Wess Roberts PhD as he styled himself, forgetting that non-medical ‘doctors’ who insist on drawing attention to their postgraduate qualification – Henry Kissinger in the US, Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland – always bring disaster in their wake: it’s tantamount to having the warning ‘This Man is Dangerous’ tattooed on one’s forehead). Roberts’s book The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun appeared in 1991 and soon found its way on to the bookshelves of every middle manager in the United States. Described as a ‘fantastic’ guide which ‘will help you make the most of your leadership potential’, it vouchsafed these truly fantastic discoveries: ‘You must have resilience to overcome personal misfortunes, discouragement, rejection and disappointment’; ‘When the consequences of your actions are too grim to bear, look for another option.’ Could anything be sillier? You bet: other authors have since come up with Gandhi: The Heart of an Executive, Confucius in the Boardroom, If Aristotle Ran General Motors, Make It So: Management Lessons from ‘Star Trek the Next Generation’, Elizabeth I CEO: StrategicLessons in Leadership from the Woman Who Built an Empire and Moses: CEO. The ten commandments, we now learn, were the world’s first mission statement.

Recognising that not everyone wanted to be Donald Trump, or even Queen Elizabeth I, publishers extended their self-help lists to include more emollient titles on ‘personal growth’ – Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Road Less Travelled and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus – or even out-and-out fiction such as James Redfield’s novel The Celestine Prophecy, allegedly based on a manuscript revealing the secrets of the ancient Mayans, which sold five million copies in the United States alone. These might seem more New Age than New Economy, but it is instructive to note how often the two overlapped, as in Barrie Dolnick’s The Executive Mystic: Psychic Power Tools for Success or Paul Zane Pilzer’s bestseller, God Wants You to be Rich. When Anthony Robbins performed for a 14,000-strong crowd at a stadium in Dallas, the supporting speakers included John Gray, the man who inflicted Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus on the world. (Also on stage were country-music singer Trisha Yearwood, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman and General Norman Schwarzkopf: one is irresistibly reminded of early Beatles concerts featuring guest appearances by Freddie and the Dreamers, the Yardbirds and Rolf Harris.)

The juxtaposition of Robbins and Gray was all too congruous: there had long been a powerful spiritual impetus in American can-do literature. The popular nineteenth-century author Horatio Alger, who in novels such as Do and Dare and Strive and Succeed strove to persuade the nation that perseverance will always be rewarded, was a former Unitarian minister, defrocked for ‘unnatural familiarity with boys’. Norman Vincent Peale, a Methodist minister, became the most successful self-help guru since Dale Carnegie with The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), which argued that Christians had a head-start in business: a typical anecdote concerned a saleswoman who told herself, ‘If God be for me, then I know that with God’s help I can sell vacuum cleaners.’ One of Peale’s modern counterparts, Stephen Covey, is a devout Mormon from Salt Lake City.

The marriage of mysticism and money-making reached its consummation in Deepak Chopra (or rather, Deepak Chopra MD), a Harvard-trained endocrinologist who turned to transcendental meditation (TM) and ayurvedic medicine in the early 1980s. He began marketing TM herbal cures – and indeed praised them in the Journal of the American Medical Association without mentioning that he was the sole shareholder in the distribution company. Chopra’s transformation from an obscure salesman of alternative potions to a national guru can be dated precisely to Monday 12 July 1993, when he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to promote his book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind. His revelation that ‘love is the ultimate truth’ was perfectly pitched for Oprah and her millions of fretful yet hopeful viewers. Within twenty-four hours of the broadcast 137,000 copies of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind had been ordered, and Chopra’s publishers – the deliciously named Harmony Books – were reprinting round the clock. By the end of the week there were 400,000 copies in circulation.

Since then he has published twenty-five books and issued at least 100 different audiotapes, videos and CD-ROMs, in which Eastern philosophy, Christian parables and even Arthurian legends are distilled into a bubble-bath for the soul. (One video offers ‘Lessons from the Teaching of Merlin’.) Like Covey and Robbins, he understands the magic allure of numbered bullet-points: hence titles such as The Seven Laws of Spiritual Success and Way of the Wizard: 20 Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want. In public performances, the soothing effect of his Hallmark-card ruminations –‘Everything I do is a divine moment of the eternal’, ‘You and I are nothing but saints in the making’ – is intensified by his mellifluous Anglo-Indian cadences and the mellow sitar riffs that often accompany them. Those who want the full-immersion experience can book in to the Chopra Centre for Weil-Being in La Jolla, California – dubbed ‘Shangri-La Jolla’ by the irreverent – where their ‘profound personal transformation can be customised for stays of 1–7 days’. The Centre grosses about $8 million a year, though Dr Chopra himself no longer attends to customers personally. ‘It wouldn’t be in the best interest of patients,’ a spokeswoman said, ‘because of his writing and speaking engagements.’ Perhaps wisely, Deepak Chopra MD ceased renewing his California medical licence after the annus mirabilis of 1993 and therefore cannot be held professionally accountable for the consequences of his advice. ‘I don’t consider myself a religious or spiritual leader,’ he has said. ‘I consider myself a writer who explains some of the ancient wisdom traditions in contemporary language.’ And for contemporary rewards, one might add: his speaking fee is about $25,000 per lecture. One corporate client, Atlantic Richfield Co., employed Chopra for almost a decade to teach employees how to find their inner space. ‘We were going through a lot of changes at the time,’ a company spokesman explained. ‘We needed to impress on people the need to look at the world differently.’

Harold Bloom argued in his 1992 book The American Religion that many Americans are essentially Gnostics, pre-Christian believers for whom salvation ‘cannot come through the community or the congregation, but is a one-on-one act of confrontation’. Clearly this does not apply to the more traditional churchgoing masses, but it suits solipsistic New Agers seeking the ‘inner self – and high-achieving materialists who like to think that fame and riches are no more than their due, reflecting the nobility of their souls. Chopra is happy to oblige: ‘People who have achieved an enormous amount of success are inherently very spiritual … Affluence is simply our natural state.’ Vain tycoons and holistic hippies alike can take comfort from Chopra’s flattery (‘You are inherently perfect’), and from his belief that the highest human condition is ‘the state of “I am”’: since we reap what we sow, both health and wealth are largely self-generated. Following this logic ad absurdum, he argues that ‘people grow old and die because they have seen other people grow old and die. Ageing is simply learned behaviour.’ Demi Moore was so impressed by this aperçu that she named him as her personal guru, announcing that ‘through his teachings I hope to live to a great age, even 130 years isn’t impossible’. Chopra himself, rather more cautiously, says that ‘I expect to live way beyond 100.’ Why the longevity formula failed to work for Princess Diana, with whom he lunched shortly before her death, remains a mystery.

Other famous admirers have included the former junk-bond king Michael Milken, Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, Winona Ryder, Debra Winger, Madonna, Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Donna Karan, who expressed her gratitude by supplying the dapper doctor with free designer suits. Alas, as Karan looked to the east her business went west: she was replaced as chief executive of her own company in the summer of 1997, under pressure from investors who feared that a growing obsession with herbs, healing crystals and reincarnation was blinding her to the financial imperatives of running a publicly traded corporation.

For celebrities – and many others – Chopra offers a metaphysical justification for smug self-absorption, and requires no effort or sacrifice. Gita Mehta summarised the trade-off as long ago as 1979, in her excellent book Karma Cola:

The westerner is finding the dialectics of history less fascinating than the endless opportunities for narcissism provided by the Wisdom of the East … Coming at the problem from separate directions, both parties have chanced upon the same conclusion, namely, that the most effective weapon against irony is to reduce everything to the banal. You have the Karma, we’ll take the Coca-Cola, a metaphysical soft drink for a physical one.

The comic writers Christopher Buckley and John Tierney attempted to satirise the phenomenon in their book God is My Broker: A Monk Tycoon Reveals the 7½ Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth (1998) – supposedly written by one ‘Brother Ty’, a failed, alcoholic Wall Street trader who saves his soul and earns a fortune after joining a monastic order devoted to the great Chopra. Brother Ty’s ‘laws’, though amusing enough (‘If God phones, take the call’; ‘As long as God knows the truth, it doesn’t matter what you tell your customers’; ‘Money is God’s way of saying “Thanks!”’), serve only to confirm that the genre is beyond parody, and probably immune to mockery anyway. Is Brother Ty’s second law –‘God loves the poor, but that doesn’t mean He wants you to fly coach’ – any more hilariously absurd than Chopra’s advice in Creating Affluence: ‘B stands for better and best … People with wealth consciousness settle only for the best. This is also called the principle of highest first. Go first-class all the way and the universe will respond by giving you the best’? And Brother Ty’s seventh law –‘The only way to get rich from a get-rich book is to write one’ – does not seem to apply to piss-takes. Although the publishers of God is My Broker claimed that it was ‘destined to be a cult bestseller’, it remained all cult and no bestseller. Chopra himself continued to flourish, heedless of the sniggering sophisticates. Named by Time magazine as one of the hundred top Icons and Heroes of the twentieth century, he is reported to earn more than $20 million a year from his spiritual business empire. No coach class for him.

In style, as in content, the sub-genres of self-help literature had much in common. Jonathan Lazear’s Meditations for Men Who Do Too Much, aimed at workaholics who burned themselves out by reading Keep Going for It and The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, had clearly bought its wisdom off the peg from the same retail chain patronised by the management gurus, Statements of the Obvious Inc. ‘Our families, our partners, our extended families, our children will always be there for us if we can make the decision to be there for them’; ‘We need to learn to pace ourselves’; ‘Wealth doesn’t really translate to happiness’; ‘Trusting no one can be as dangerous as trusting everyone’; ‘We can learn from our failures’; ‘No one is happy all of the time.’

The gurus who were chortling and whooping all the way to the bank might have questioned that last assertion. Kenneth Blanchard parlayed the success of The One-Minute Manager into an income of $6 million a year from videotapes and lectures promoting his message that ‘people who produce good results feel good about themselves’. In the late 1990s Stephen Covey’s Utah-based consultancy had annual revenues of more than $400 million, and employed 3,000 people in forty countries to spread his gospel of ‘Principle-Centered Leadership’. Anthony Robbins, who once worked as a school janitor, had earned about $80 million – some of it from books such as Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power, but mostly from his talent for persuading sober-suited executives to shout ‘Yes! I can do it! I will lead not follow!’ while Tina Turner’s ‘Simply the Best’ blasted out of the PA system. John Gray had an ‘income-stream’ of $10 million in 1999, partly from 350 Mars and Venus ‘facilitators’ who paid him for the privilege of distributing his books at monthly workshops. By the end of the century, self-help publications were worth $560 million a year, and according to the research firm Marketdata Enterprises the total income of the ‘self-improvement industry’ in the US – from seminars, personal coaching, CDs and videos – was $2.48 billion. As Newsweek reported, ‘With slick marketing and growing acceptance by mainstream Americans, authors like Covey, Anthony Robbins and John Gray are amassing fortunes that rival those of Hollywood moguls.’

Why would mainstream Americans pay to be told what they knew already? One of Blanchard’s satisfied customers tried to explain. ‘What he’s saying is a lot of common sense and not really new,’ the executive manager of B. H. Emporiums, a Canadian retail chain, conceded. ‘But if I pay him $15,000 to say it, my general managers and my people listen. If I’m paid to say it, my people don’t listen in the same way.’ The mega-stars in this branch of showbiz may have had nothing original to impart, but they knew how to put on a performance. Anthony Robbins, a six-foot-seven Superman lookalike, would ask his audience to take off their shoes and socks and walk across hot coals while he repeated the soothing mantra ‘cool moss, cool moss’. The frenetic stage persona of Tom Peters, former McKinsey man, was a cross between Mick Jagger and Pete Townshend – arms flailing, sweat drenching his shirt.

So what are the seven habits of highly effective people? How do we awaken the giant within? The short answer is: never overestimate the intelligence of your audience. ‘Did you ever consider’, Stephen Covey asks in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), ‘how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm – to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow.’ The echo of Chauncey Gardener, the idiot savant who dispensed horticultural wisdom in Jerzy Kosinski’s satire Being There, is presumably accidental.

Anthony Robbins prefers to take his imagery from the kitchen rather than the farmyard. ‘A nice metaphor for the components and use of strategies is that of baking,’ he observes in Unlimited Power (1986). ‘If someone makes the greatest chocolate cake in the world, can you produce the same quality results? Of course you can, if you have that person’s recipe … if you follow the recipe to the letter, you will produce the same results, even though you may never have baked such a cake before in your life.’ This weary analogy clearly had a profound effect on at least one reader. ‘There is no better metaphor for the products of the knowledge economy than the recipe,’ the British guru Charles Leadbeater writes in Living on Thin Air: The New Economy (1999). ‘Think of the world as divided up into chocolate cakes and chocolate-cake recipes … We can all use the same chocolate-cake recipe, at the same time, without anyone being worse off. It is quite unlike a piece of cake.’ Tony Blair, in turn, was deeply impressed, hailing Leadbeater as ‘an extraordinarily interesting thinker’ whose book ‘raises critical questions for Britain’s future’. Another Labour minister, Peter Mandelson, described Living on Thin Air as ‘a blueprint for what a radical modernising project will entail in years to come’.

The man ultimately responsible for all this lucrative twaddle is Dale Carnegie, and most of his successors stick pretty closely to the formula (oh, all right, recipe) devised by the pioneer. It was certainly Carnegie who cottoned on to the selling power of animal analogies, peppering his prose with such eternal verities as ‘no one ever kicks a dead dog’ and ‘if you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive’. Studying the titles on display in the management section of Borders’ bookshop, you might assume that you’d stumbled into the natural history department by mistake: Lions Don’t Need To Roar: Stand Out, Fit In and Move Ahead in Business, by Debra Benton, Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive by Harvey Mackay and Teaching the Elephants to Dance: Empowering Change in Your Organisation by James A. Belasco. Charles Handy’s The Age of Unreason has a picture of a leaping frog on its front cover. Why? ‘If you put a frog in water and slowly heat it, the frog will eventually let itself be boiled to death,’ he explains. ‘We, too, will not survive if we don’t respond to the radical way in which the world is changing.’ Not to be outdone, Stephen Covey includes a section on fish in his Principle-Centred Leadership. ‘I’ve long been impressed’, he reveals, ‘with the many parallels between fishing and managing. In reality, senior-level executives are really fishing the stream. That is, they’re looking at the business in the context of the total environment and devising ways to “reel in” desired results …’ And what does it get them? A pile of dead trout.

Apart from dancing elephants and boiling frogs, the other essential ingredient of these books is lists. Following the distinguished example of God, who condensed the laws of righteousness into ten easy-to-understand instructions, the authors seek to persuade their readers that the secrets of success are finite and can be briefly enumerated. Again Carnegie was the pioneer, offering ‘seven ways to peace and happiness’ and ‘four good working habits that will help prevent fatigue and worry’. Having hit the jackpot with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey went even further in his sequel, whose chapter headings include ‘Three Resolutions’, ‘Six Days of Creation’, ‘Six Conditions of Empowerment’, ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ (didn’t someone else think of that first?), ‘Seven Chronic Problems’, ‘Eight Ways to Enrich Marriage and Family Relationships’ and, generously enough, ‘Thirty Methods of Influence’. Meanwhile, Anthony Robbins has discovered the ‘Five Keys to Wealth and Happiness’ and ‘Seven Lies of Success’. More ambitiously still, his book Giant Steps provides no fewer than ‘365 lessons in self-mastery’ – though some of them are pretty skimpy. Here is Lesson 364, in its entirety: ‘Remember to expect miracles … because you are one.’

If the gurus offered nothing but cracker-mottoes, their appeal might have been limited to a few simpletons; but the faux naivety was cunningly seasoned with an equally faux sophistication. They made liberal use of neologistic jargon –‘re-engineering’, ‘demassing’, ‘downsizing’, ‘benchmarking’ – to give their twee clichés an appearance of scientific method and intellectual rigour. And it worked: even grizzled New York police chiefs and four-star generals began babbling about ‘the mobility pool’ and ‘proactive outplacement’. (‘Of course this benchmarking is only a rough guide,’ one Pentagon official told a reporter. ‘The ultimate benchmarking exercise is war.’) Stephen Covey’s client-list in the US included the departments of energy, defence, interior and transportation, the postal service – and Bill Clinton, who invited both Covey and Anthony Robbins to spend the weekend with him in December 1994.

Reeling from his party’s defeat by Newt Gingrich’s Republicans in the previous month’s congressional elections, the president summoned no fewer than five feelgood authors to help him ‘search for a way back’. The other three were Marianne Williamson, a glamorous Hollywood mystic (and, one need hardly add, bestselling author) who had performed the marriage rites at Elizabeth Taylor’s 1991 wedding to Larry Fortemsky; Jean Houston, a self-styled ‘sacred psychologist’ whose fourteen books included Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self; and her friend Mary Catherine Bateson, an anthropology professor whose study of ‘non-traditional life paths’ had been praised by Hillary Clinton.

This quintet of sages asked the president to describe his best qualities. ‘I have a good heart,’ he said. ‘I really do. And I hope I have a decent mind.’ (If so, one might ask, why seek solace from snake-oil vendors?) As they talked long into the night, and all the following day, the conversation was increasingly dominated by Hillary’s problems – the constant personal attacks she endured, and the failure of her plan to reform health-care. Jean Houston, who felt that ‘being Hillary Clinton was like being Mozart with his hands cut off’, informed the First Lady that she was ‘carrying the burden of 5,000 years of history when women were subservient … She was reversing thousands of years of expectation and was there up front, probably more than virtually any woman in human history – apart from Joan of Arc’

The latter-day Joan was understandably flattered. Over the next six months Houston and Bateson often visited Hillary Clinton in Washington, urging her to talk to the spirits of historical figures who would understand her travails and thus help her ‘achieve self-healing’. Sitting with her two psychic counsellors at a circular table in the White House solarium, she held conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt (her ‘spiritual archetype’) and Mahatma Gandhi (‘a powerful symbol of stoic self-denial’). It was only when Houston proposed speaking to Jesus Christ –‘the epitome of the wounded, betrayed and isolated’ – that Hillary called a halt. ‘That’, she explained, ‘would be too personal.’ The reticence seems rather puzzling: don’t millions of Christians speak to Jesus, both publicly and privately, through their prayers?

There was little the Republicans could do to exploit ‘Wackygate’, as it became known: too many people remembered Ronald Reagan’s dependence on Nancy’s astrologer. Those with longer memories might even have recalled that Norman Vincent Peale, the man who brought God into the selling of vacuum-cleaners, was a regular visitor to the White House during Eisenhower’s presidency and presided at the wedding of Richard Nixon’s daughter Julie. Indeed, a few months before Clinton’s chinwag with the gurus, three former presidents – Ford, Reagan and Bush – had joined Peale’s widow, the Rev. Robert Schuller and Zig Ziglar (‘America’s No. 1 motivational speaker’) in a forty-one-gig travelling show titled Success ‘94. Ten days after the Camp David self-help session, the Republican congressman John Kasich, chairman of the House Budget Committee, invited his staff to a seminar with Doug Hall, author of Jump Start Your Brain. ‘Hall blasted the old Sam the Sham song “Woolly Bully” in the committee room,’ the Washington Post reported, ‘while the staffers shot at one another with Nerf guns.’

No wonder President Clinton remained so stubbornly popular, however many scandals buffeted his reputation: his dabblings in alternative psychology and New Age management techniques must have been a great reassurance to many fellow-citizens who had previously felt slightly shamefaced about their own dalliance with Deepak Chopra or Anthony Robbins. As Newsweek pointed out when the story of Hillary’s chats with ghosts eventually leaked, ‘From Atlantic Richfield to Xerox, corporate America has spent millions every year putting managers through the same kind of exercises in personal transformation the Clintons have been sampling for free. Houston herself has run seminars for the Department of Commerce and other federal agencies. At Stanford Business School, Prof. Michael Ray has prepared future captains of industry with Tarot cards and chants to release their deeper selves.’

Everyone was at it. In Britain, allegedly the home of the stiff upper lip, the loopier manifestations of soul-baring may have been mocked but managerial mumbo-jumbo found an eager market. By 1995 the British government was spending well over £100 million a year on management consultants, as branches of officialdom were forcibly transformed into ‘agencies’. What had once been straightforward public services, such as the health system or the BBC, acquired their own internal markets – which in turn created new blizzards of paperwork and extra layers of bureaucracy, all in the name of efficiency. The ensuing chaos was best described by an official inquiry into the semi-privatised British prison service, commissioned after two murderers and an arsonist escaped from Parkhurst jail in January 1995: ‘Any organisation which boasts one Statement of Purpose, one Vision, five Values, six Goals, seven Strategic Priorities and eight Key Performance Indicators without any clear correlation between them is producing a recipe for total confusion and exasperation.’ The home secretary promptly sacked the director-general of the prison service, Derek Lewis, a businessman who knew nothing about jails or indeed public administration. Lewis was understandably puzzled: the same government which recruited him three years earlier to give the penal system a dose of management theory had now punished him for doing just that.

This fiasco did nothing to dampen the Tories’ enthusiasm for merchants of gimmickry and gobbledegook; and the only difference made by the election of New Labour in 1997 was that that the Blairites seemed even more susceptible. Government spending on private consultants rose by 25 per cent in both 1998–9 and 1999–2000, and by more than 50 per cent the following year – from £360 million to £550 million. The recipients of this largesse could hardly believe their luck. ‘Go back two or three years,’ the trade journal Management Consultancy commented in August 2001, ‘and it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to find anyone anticipating an increase in spending of that magnitude from the state.’ Not so: Tony Blair had never concealed his reverence for management gurus. In the summer of 1996 he despatched 100 Labour frontbenchers to a weekend seminar at Templeton College, Oxford, where a posse of partners from Andersen Consulting lectured the wannabe ministers on ‘total quality service’ and ‘the management of change’. (The veteran Labour politician Lord Healey, who also spoke at the event, was unimpressed: ‘These management consultants are just making money out of suckers.’) When Blair entered Downing Street, several executives from Andersen – and McKinseys, the other leading management consultancy-were seconded to Whitehall with a brief to practise ‘blue skies thinking’. Soon afterwards, in perhaps the most remarkable manifestation of New Labour’s guru-worship, they were joined by Dr Edward de Bono, whose task was ‘to develop bright ideas on schools and jobs’.

In the autumn of 1998 more than 200 officials from the Department of Education were treated to a lecture from de Bono on his ‘Six Thinking Hats system’ of decision-making. The idea, he explained, was that civil servants should put on a red hat when they wanted to talk about hunches and instincts, a yellow hat if they were listing the advantages of a project, a black hat while playing devil’s advocate, and so on. ‘Without wishing to boast,’ he added, ‘this is the first new way of thinking to be developed for 2,400 years since the days of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle.’ In similarly unboastful fashion, de Bono often says that he invented ‘lateral thinking’ – which is like claiming to have invented poetry, or humour, or grief – and takes pride in having devised a system of ‘water logic’. Here is an example of water logic in action: ‘How often does someone who is using a traditional wet razor stop to consider whether instead of moving the razor it might be easier to keep the razor still and to move the head instead? In fact it is rather better. But no one does try it because there is “no problem to fix”.’ If his pupils in Whitehall tried this shaving technique they would soon discover why it hasn’t caught on: the result looks like an out-take from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So far as can be discovered, the education department has yet to order those coloured hats, but no doubt it benefited from his other creative insights: ‘You can’t dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper’; ‘With a problem, you look for a solution’; ‘A bird is different from an aeroplane, although both fly through the air.’

Who could disagree? Gurus are safe enough while peddling ancient clichés disguised as revolutionary new strategies. It is when they seek out instances of this wisdom in action that they come a cropper: the entrepreneur-as-hero often turns out to be merely human after all. In his 1985 book Tactics: The Art and Science of Success, Edward de Bono offered the lessons that might be learned from a number of people who ‘would generally be regarded as “successful” ’. After studying these inspiring examples, ‘the reader should say, “Why not me?”’ The millionaires he extolled included US hotelier Harry Helmsley, later convicted of massive tax evasion, and Robert Maxwell, subsequently exposed as one of the most outrageous fraudsters in British history.

One of the Thatcherites’ most frequently repeated injunctions in the 1980s was that until Britain learned to love wealth-creators it was doomed to economic decline. As the Tory minister Lord Young said in 1987 while presenting the Guardian’s, Young Businessman of the Year Award, there is a ‘strong anti-business, anti-entrepreneurial streak’ in British society. (Not that it deterred his lordship: soon afterwards he left the Cabinet for the lusher pastures of the chairman’s office at Cable & Wireless.) Jonathan Aitken, another wealthy Conservative, made the same point twenty years earlier in his book The Young Meteors. ‘One reason why we are so ill-equipped on any level to compete in manufacturing fields’, he argued, ‘is that as a nation we are only just beginning to regard profit-making through manufacturing as respectable.’ To conquer this lingering prejudice, he drew attention to some thoroughly respectable entrepreneurs – such as Gerald Ronson, aged twenty-seven, ‘one of Britain’s youngest self-made property millionaires’, and Jim Slater, the ‘brilliantly successful’ founder of Slater-Walker. Slater-Walker later performed so brilliantly that it had to be bailed out by the Bank of England, and Jim Slater was found guilty of fifteen offences under the Companies Act. Gerald Ronson, not to be outdone, served a term in Ford open prison for his participation in an illegal share-ramping operation. The catalogue of woe was completed in June 1999 when Jonathan Aitken himself, who had served as a Cabinet minister until 1995, was jailed for perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Hence the traditional British resistance to the allegedly aphrodisiac qualities of tycoons: we can’t help suspecting that they wear their socks in bed and snore all night. Even those politicians and pundits who approve in principle of capitalist self-enrichment will often join the chorus of insults directed against ‘fat cats’ who put the theory into practice, and the few attempts to idolise business chieftains have invariably ended in embarrassment. Consider the fate of the London-based American author Jeffrey Robinson, who has tried for years to persuade his adopted country that cigar-chomping magnates are sexy. In 1985, the high noon of Thatcherism, he published The Risk Takers, a collection of conversations with British businessmen who ‘turn me on’. Gerald Ronson once again paraded himself for our titillation (‘a man with a proven knack for making money’), as did Robert Maxwell. ‘He is’, Robinson announced, ‘a survivor.’ Yet another pinstriped pin-up was Asil Nadir, whose fruit-packing company Polly Peck had long been a favourite of awestruck stockbrokers. Nadir complained to his sympathetic interviewer that ‘in this country there are people who believe it’s a sin to be successful’.

In 1990, with his promiscuous ardour apparently undiminished, Robinson produced The Risk Takers Five Years On, in which he boasted that some of his original interviewees, including Robert Maxwell and Asil Nadir, had ‘gone from strength to strength’. Maxwell, he predicted, would eventually retire, covered in glory, leaving his sons Kevin and Ian with the exciting challenge of ‘keeping dad’s ship afloat’. Well, at least the buoyancy metaphor was accurate: Maxwell’s corpse was found floating off the coast of Spain on 5 November 1991, after a fall from his yacht.

For his revised edition, Robinson added several chapters on ‘big players’ he had missed the first time around – among them Gerald Ratner, ‘the world’s largest jeweller’, and Michael Smurfit, an ‘indisputable success’. Once more, alas, the demon lovers turned out to be all mouth and no trousers. With the subsequent admission that one of his products was ‘crap’, Ratner managed to transform his firm’s annual profit of £112 million into a loss of £122 million and was forced to quit. Smurfit resigned as chairman of Irish Telecom only a few weeks after Robinson’s book appeared, when it was revealed that he had bought a new corporate HQ without informing his fellow-directors, and that he was a shareholder in a company which had previously owned the property. At the same time, he invested heavily in the Brent Walker group – which duly went belly-up, taking £10 million of his money with it.

What of the Guardian’s own small endeavour to burnish the image of go-getters, the Young Businessman of the Year competition? At the 1987 ceremony, where Lord Young advised that ‘people should look up to successful businessmen in the same way that they look up to successful sportsmen and successful pop stars’, the winner was John Ashcroft of Coloroll, who repeated the leitmotif in his acceptance speech. ‘We live in an age which applauds the millionaire McCartneys and Simon Le Bons and is now beginning to accept the large salaried superstar creations of the manufacturing sector. Long may it continue.’ Within three years, Coloroll had collapsed, crushed by £400 million of debts. The dashing Mr Ashcroft then started up a chain of shops; by 1993, it too was in the hands of the receivers.