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No More Heroes

Steroids, Cocaine, Finance and Film in the 70s

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Network

In the early 1970s Paddy Chayefsky scripted two movies that set out to anatomize the problems of contemporary American life. But aside from a lot of menopausal bleating on the part of the central characters and a diffuse sense of conflict and decay, they didn't really have much to say. Nonetheless, they said it loud and long, prolixity being Chayefsky's stock-in-trade.

The two films, Arthur Hill's The Hospital and Sydney Lumet's Network, have gained a reputation as progressive films of a kind, but they're not. Chayefsky is essentially a puffed-up old reactionary with a chronically Oedipal attachment to the benign, and to the embattled Liberal patriarchs apparently needed to save America from the parade of grotesque and corrupt children set on corroding its essential institutions. The only legitimate value of the Sixties, The Hospital would suggest, is that the sexual revolution has produced a generation of hot young women whose equanimity about being raped allows for the reassertion of said patriarchs' phallic powers. Network also likes to lay the blame for the contemporary problems of American life at the feet of fringe groups, the dehumanizing effect of the mass media and foreign competition, while its heroes are, of course, two dignified middle-aged humanist patricians, one of whom, Howard Beale, has quite understandably been made mad by the repulsive stupidity of a modern world he ultimately falls victim to.

Still, let's give Chayefsky his due. There is a sequence in Network that spells out quite explicitly and in theological terms the nascent political philosophy about to dominate the next thirty plus years of political life. Howard Beale has objected to and stopped a business deal with the Arabs going through by imploring his "mad as hell" viewers to inundate the White House with letters of protest. As a consequence he is summoned to an audience with Arthur Jensen, the head of the corporation whose deal has been blocked, in order to have the larger "system of systems" spelled out to him.

JENSEN: You think you have merely stopped a business deal – that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variant, multi-national dominion of dollars! Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars! Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

(pause)

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and A T and T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state – Karl Marx? They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr. Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality – one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.

HOWARD (humble whisper): Why me?

JENSEN: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

HOWARD slowly rises from the blackness of his seat so that he is lit only by the ethereal diffusion of light shooting out from the rear of the room. He stares at JENSEN spotted on the podium, transfixed.

HOWARD: I have seen the face of God!

It's a famous sequence, which has since been quoted and sampled many times. It's not just economics represented in cosmic and theological terms, but also a vision of the world of finance and economics as real and natural, and of human life and forms of organization as epiphenomena thrown up by a series of impossibly complex interchanges, a new Sublime in the face of which non-initiates such as Beale one can only gape in awe. Jensen's argument is that in exercising one type of democracy, Beale has in fact run counter to the real, invisible movement of the truly enfranchising onward momentum of a globalizing and liberalizing free-market. Government, "people-power", and the democratic process are reactionary, hidebound forms of "folk politics" – the counter-productive flailing of the unenlightened with their irrational emotional attachments, childish sentiments and anxieties over the destruction of their humdrum life-worlds.

Jensen is the high priest of this new Religion, a seer who understands the Utopian promise of Capitalism left to operatethough its own immutable laws, a counter-utopia to the promise of Communism or even Keynesian economics, in which the state mediates between the interests of workers and capital. In Jensen's vision Capitalism beats Communism at its own game, with a new form of common ownership, that of the stockholder rather than the worker: a popular Capitalism, a stakeholder democracy in which we are all voting at every moment with our dollars and shaping and refining institutions through the always-on, 24/7, implicitly democratic processes of the Market. This kind of vision, of Capitalism as a great mystical quest, as an arena of revelation and crazy-excitement, as the hidden reality that only those enlightened Economist-Kings who have stepped outside the cave and brought back to us the deeper truths of how our world is made and unmade continues throughout the Eighties, Nineties and Noughties. One bestseller in the mid-2000s, when the prestige of economics enjoyed something of a bubble of its own was called The Economic Naturalist: Why Economics Explains Almost Everything.

And then everything falls apart.

Networks

Arthur Jensen's vision wasn't of course invented by Chayefsky, but is rather an only slightly hyperbolic rendering of the discourse of Neoliberalism. This doctrine wasn't especially new, but the postwar years had seemed to answer so finally the problems of Capitalism – especially in America, which saw a long period of uninterrupted growth, and in the newly recovering social democratic countries of Europe – that alternatives to the evils of a Keynesian mixed economy and welfare state were relegated to the fringes. When the postwar compromise seemed to come unstuck in the Seventies, with recession setting in and seemingly impossible phenomena like stagflation occurring, the Neoliberals took their chance to press home their alternate vision of the good society and the stable economy: small government, low taxes, free markets, flexible labour, and of course, restored growth.

This ideology had in reality been expounded for years by a group of thinkers broadly known as the Austrian School. Part of the Austrians' philosophy is a reverence for the entrepreneur as a heroic individualist and world-spirit, and much of their anti-communist and anti-socialist rhetoric rests on this vision of the businessman being, rather than a miserable, self-interested exploiter of labour, a beneficent Ubermensch, without whom humanity would still be dragging its knuckles through the primordial slime. Jensen's vision may be democratic and egalitarian sounding, but there is no doubt that it promotes a vision of the businessman as a minor deity, hence Beale's whispered "I have seen the face of God."

Should there be much doubt about the contempt in which the Austrian School holds the common man, or indeed about its faith in the transcendent power of the businessman, we only have to refer to two letters written by a founding father and disciple of the Austrian school, Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard respectively, to the author Ayn Rand, on the publication of her novel Atlas Shrugged:

Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel. It is also – or may I say: first of all – a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society, a substantiated rejection of the ideology of our self-styled "intellectuals" and a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies adopted by governments and political parties. It is a devastating exposure of the "moral cannibals," the "gigolos of science" and of the "academic prattle" of the makers of the "anti-industrial revolution." You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you.

If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it still is the truth that had to be said in this age of the Welfare State.

Rothbard's position on Rand is more conflicted, and later he would be at the forefront of Libertarian attacks against her "cult". The early letter contains a bizarre, barely concealed admission of his trembling schoolboy love for Ice Queen Objectivist Rand, and concludes with a reference to Nietzsche:

If Zarathustra should return to earth and ask me – as a representative of the human race – that unforgettable question "what have ye done to surpass man", I shall point to Atlas Shrugged.

Rothbard is a fascinating figure, the founder of Anarcho-capitalism, heavily opposed to Friedman and later a vicious critic of Rand herself. But still, the question of the Superman haunts the formulations of Libertarianism and Neoliberalism, as much as it does those of the Communists. Productivity is the key to economic success, to outperforming other systems, and is ideologically legitimating: when Khrushchev mockingly tells a visibly uneasy Richard Nixon that in seven years they will be waving the USA goodbye, he is boasting about the U.S.S.R.'s superior productivity, its ideological grip on its workers which can push them to unprecedented levels of raw physical strength and endurance, evoking the figure of the Communist Superman Stakhanov, against whom the Americans have no equivalent. Despite all the technological and other productivity gains of the late 60s and early 70s, productivity is still figured in terms of manpower (we will explore this more fully in considering the Terminator movies). The Superman must be found (and of course he returns in the Seventies, stripped of kitsch and ready to literally turn back time), and along with him, a new generation of more modern, clued-up capitalists.

What's certain in American films of the early Seventies is that the Old Order is dying. In Being There, Five Easy Pieces, Stay Hungry, Chinatown, and Winter Kills, an older generation is passing over, looking for an heir to continue business-as-usual. Mises descends from an aristocratic lineage and arguably seeks to recast the notion of the better man, the high-born, genetically superior aristocrat creating a new Aristocracy (literally, rule by the best) in a more demotic, democratic form. The pressing need in rebuilding the American dream is for the dream warrior; the Superman needs to be born, limits need to be surpassed, the new modern, pop-culture Capitalist, media-savvy and suited to the liberated post-hippy age, must be nurtured and sought out. These things will come to pass, but for the time being, for Rand, Mises, Rothbard and their various adherents, associates and disciples, the hated Welfare State and Big Government prevail. When the Superman does appear in the auspicious Seventies – unsurprisingly perhaps – he will be Austrian too.

Austrians Everywhere

In 1990 body-builder-turned-actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, an ex Mr. Olympia and probably the biggest box office star of the previous decade, gave an enthusiastic introduction to an updated edition of Milton Friedman's highly influential 1980 TV series Free To Choose.

This what he said:

Hi, I am Arnold Schwarzenegger. I would like a moment of your time because I wanted you to know something. I wanted you to know about Dr. Milton Friedman's TV series, Free to Choose. I truly believe that the series has changed my life. When you have such a powerful experience as that, I think you shouldn't keep it to yourself, I wanted to share it with you.

Being free to choose for me means being free to make your own decisions; free to live your own life; pursue your own goals; chase your own rainbow; without the government breathing down on your neck or standing on your shoes. For me that meant coming here to America. Because I came from a socialistic country in which the government controls the economy. It is a place where you can hear 18-year-old kids already talking about their pension. But me, I wanted more. I wanted to be the best. Individualism like that is incompatible with socialism. So I felt I had to come to America. I had no money in my pocket, but here I had the freedom to get it. I have been able to parlay my big muscles into big business and a big movie career. Along the way I was able to save and invest and I watched America change and I noticed this, that the more the government interfered and intervened and inserted itself into the free market, the worse the country did. But when the government stepped back and let the free enterprise system do its work, then the better we did, the more robust our economy grew, the better I did, and the better my business grew, and the more I was able to hire and help others.

Okay. So there I was in Palm Springs, waiting for Maria to get ready so we could go out for a game of mixed doubles. I started flipping through the television dial and I caught a glimpse of Nobel Prize winner, Economist Dr. Milton Friedman. I recognized him from the studying of my own degree of economics in business, but I didn't know I was watching Free to Choose, it knocked me out. Dr. Friedman expressed, validated and explained everything I ever thought or experienced or observed about the way the economy works. I guess I was really ready to hear it. He said, the economic race should not be arranged so that everyone ends at the finish line at the same time, but so that everyone starts at the starting line at the same time. Wow! I would like to write that one home to Austria. He said, that society that puts equality before freedom winds up with neither, but that society puts freedom before equality, we will end up with a great measure of both. Boy, if I would have come up with that one myself, I maybe wouldn't have had to get into body building.

When I did beef up my body building, at business school, of course it started with what Thomas Jefferson believed and what Adam Smith thought, even what Milton Friedman had to say, I would be free to choose, it all came together. Their economic thought with my own personal experience, and in a way I felt that I had come home. I sought out Dr. Friedman and had great pleasure and privilege of meeting him and his economist wife, Rose, and we have all become friends, and now I call him Milton. Then I became a big pain in the neck about Free to Choose.

All my friends and acquaintances got the tapes and thebooks for Christmas after Christmas, all the way through the Reagan years when I was able to tell them all; you see, Milton is right. And I think it's crucial that we all keep moving in the same direction, away from socialism and to its greater freedom and opportunity. That is why I am so excited that Milton Friedman is updating Free to Choose, bringing it into the 90s by discussing how to deal with the drug disaster, the chabain phenomenon, and of course, the miserable failure of communism. By the way, there are plans now to translate Free to Choose into the languages of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. And you know, they really need it to guide them through it, to take the first walk toward freedom. But we need it too.

I commend to you the new television series Free to Choose and encourage you to walk into the 21st century in freedom, in opportunity and in success, with Dr. Milton Friedman.

Thanks for listening.

Uncle Milt

In this introduction, Schwarzenegger's borderline lunatic enthusiasm for Friedman shines through. Perhaps it's the sheer relief of having escaped the hellish Gulag that is post-war Austria, still, due to the terrible depredations of Socialism, the country with the most even spread of wealth and the lowest crime rate in the world. What's undoubtedly true is that a tiny country such as Austria would not prove conducive to an ego of world-historical proportions such as Schwarzenegger's, and that only the U.S.A. could fully allow his self-actualization. Schwarzenegger moved there (and possibly subsequently spent some time as an illegal immigrant) in 1968, immediately falling under the spell of the great thinker and statesman Richard Nixon during a televised Presidential debate and becoming a lifelong Republican.

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Excerpted from No More Heroes by Carl Neville. Copyright © 2014 Gary Blank. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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