The Moral Bankruptcy of the Consultants

La Rochefoucauld said that there was in the misfortunes of our friends something not entirely unpleasing. 

I remember the shock with which I first read that; I was very young at the time. It was not the same kind of shock as that of discovering that your best friend has been stealing from you for years. It was more the shock of recognition of something that you have always known to be true but have failed fully to acknowledge. 

But it is not only in the misfortunes of our friends that we take an illicit pleasure: We do so in the misfortunes of those barely known to us and against whom we can have nothing personal. If you listen to people talking on a bus, or anywhere else, a good proportion of the time they are recounting with relish the misfortunes of others. Schadenfreude is so universal an emotion that I am surprised no one has declared it to be, like health, a human right. As a human right, it is almost as important as that of having someone to look down on. 

A few days ago, a neighbor of mine, with whom I enjoy very friendly relations, telephoned me and asked whether I had heard. When someone asks you whether you have heard, it means something bad for someone, though not for the person who asks it. 

I hadn’t heard, but I knew that I was about to do so. Another neighbour, with whom we pass the time of day but nothing more, had gone bankrupt—over what for us would be a large sum of money, but would be mere small change for some. 

There was no mistaking my neighbor’s pleasure in telling me this. I do not want to make him out to be any worse than I, for I confess to a frisson of pleasure at the news, though I had no real reason, apart from a generalized malice and ill-will towards my fellow creatures, to find pleasure in it. True, the new bankrupt lived in the grandest house in the neighbourhood—but of envy I acquit myself. I do not regard myself as being in competition with everyone around me and am satisfied with what I have.

My malice was not 100 percent disinterested or causeless, however. I knew the bankrupt in the days of his prosperity to have been engaged upon that parasitic activity known as “consultancy.” He had seemed to be doing very well out of it.

The modern world is plagued by consultancy. I have very little idea of what it is, or of what consultants actually do. I suppose they go round telling people how to do things in a way that is supposedly better than the way in which they are already doing them, but it seems not to be necessary for them to have any special knowledge of the things that they are being consulted about, or indeed any special knowledge of  anything: no knowledge, and no experience either, for it also seems to be the case that young people come out of college or university and go straight into consultancy without any experience of anything. It is true that when I was their age, I too was full of advice to give, but the world was sufficiently sensible in those days to have taken no notice of me.

Only in a world of assumed incompetence can so much consultancy be thought necessary. No doubt it is sometimes true that a third party can see things that the people more directly involved cannot see. This is one of the arguments in favour of psychotherapy: A person is so involved in his own affairs that someone viewing them from outside, with no vested interests or axes to grind, is able to see what the person cannot even if he is in other respects an intelligent and sensible person. 

But there are now giant companies of consultants, which must surely have a vested interest in the inefficiency and incompetence of others, because inefficiency and incompetence are what makes consultancy necessary in the first place.

There was a time when bureaucrats were expected themselves to manage the organizations of which they were in charge, but now the more bureaucrats there are, the more consultants they seem to need. The latter charge fantastic sums for their  good offices, the results of which are impossible to gauge. Worse still, bureaucrats and consultants are like molecules that pass by osmosis through that semipermeable membrane that now divides bureaucracies from consultancies. 

Bernard Shaw once wrote that he who can does, while he who cannot teaches. He wrote before the age of consultancy. He would now write that he who can does, while he who cannot consults.

And yet to say of a man that he cannot requires that you know what he is trying to do. A consultant who makes a large amount of money cannot be accused of not being able to do anything, because what he is trying to do is make a large amount of money—ex hypothesi, precisely what he does. A politician cannot be accused of incompetence merely because he has reduced his country to ruins and despair, if his object is to remain in power and he succeeds in doing so.    

A consultant such as our neighbor who specializes in telling people how to run their businesses is incompetent because he goes bankrupt, not because his ministrations do no good to anyone. Even going bankrupt is not necessarily a manifestation of incompetence if, over the years, the bankrupt has managed to extract enough money from his business to his personal use so that his bankruptcy hardly affects his personal comfort.

Of late, the distinction between public and private, never absolute, has become ever more blurred. Does a consultancy company whose principal client is the government or other public agencies belong to the public or to the private sector? As my neighbor and I discussed the bankruptcy of our other neighbor, we managed to invest our malicious pleasure at his misfortune with a semblance of moral outrage—another great source of pleasure, of course.  

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