Canadian political philosopher John Ralston Saul is the secular high-priest of doubters and cynics, a non-believer in “the gospel” of the modern corporate state, constantly debunking the conventional wisdoms offered up as “absolute truths” in Western society✲. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Saul would produce a guidebook for other secular agnostics. Wedged between his treatises on his personal philosophy ‘superstar’ Voltaire, his studies of modern Canadian society and his excursions into the realm of fiction, is JR Saul’s The Doubter’s Companion, or to give it his full title:
The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense (Viking, 1994)¹
Although Saul calls his volume “a dictionary”, the term applies more to the book’s format (utilising the standard A-Z form of the dictionary) than to its content or purpose. The Companion goes on to define Dictionary as “Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order”. And Answers are merely “a mechanism for avoiding questions”. Saul decries the trajectory of modern dictionaries and language (which have been captured by the forces of a rational orthodoxy), yearning instead for a return to the Humanist dictionaries of the 18th century (Voltaire, Diderot, Johnson, etc)².
When I first delved into The Doubter’s Companion (around 1995), my mind took me to that other great cynic’s dictionary of the early 1900s, Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. Both works, albeit very different books, are idiosyncratically unconventional takes on language and meaning in their respective societies, and both proffer a contrarian view of the established wisdom of the day. Both Saul and Bierce are provocateurs, each with their own personal axe to grind⁌.
The Doubter’s Companion, by its polemical nature is unequivocally meant to shake up orthodox thinking (TDC was described by one reader as “an abecedarium of subversion”). The dictionary form of the book is a device Saul employs to launch into short philosophical essays on topics about modern post-industrial society that concern him—corporatism, individualism, leadership and managerialism, freedom of expression, communication, public relations, advertising and the way language is distorted to control communications (see his definition of ‘ideology’). In so doing, Saul skewers the accepted veracity of many of the words, phrases and terms you will find in today’s dictionaries.
And as it is an instruction manual to help doubters navigate their way through a linguistic maze of (in Saul’s opinion) mis-defined terms, the central tenet is thus affirmed:
Doubt: The only human activity capable of controlling the use of power in a positive way. Doubt is central to understanding.
Wisdom: The purpose of doubt … wisdom is life with uncertainty, the opposite of power or ideology.
Ideology: Tendentious arguments which advance a world view as absolute truth in order to win and hold political power.
The Corporate executive “is not a capitalist but a technocrat in drag”.
Economics is “the romance of truth through measurement”.
Level playing field: An ideological abstraction adopted as a universal value by the management of large corporations.
Saul the provocateur infuses the dictionary with a regular diet of “outrageous statements and provocations”:
Marxist: The only serious functioning Marxists left in the West are the senior managers of large, usually transnational corporations.
Neo-Conservatives are the Bolsheviks of the Right (“the exact opposite of a conservative”).
Modern (that should be “post-modern”) fads of intellectual thinking such as Deconstructionism get short shrift from Saul:
Deconstructionism: Can also be seen as a school of light comedy.
Calm: A state of emotion which is overrated except in religious retreats. Calmness for Saul has a decidedly political connotation today, “it is used to control people who are dissatisfied with the way those in authority are doing their job”✬.
Public relations: A negative form of imagination. In Mussolini’s phrase, “invention is more useful than truth”.
Saul savages that that most universal institution of fast food, MacDonalds:
A Big Mac: The communion wafer of consumption. (It is) not really food but the promise of food.
He goes on sardonically to bracket it with “Perrier, one of the last sacred objects of the leading philosophical school of the late-twentieth century—public relations”…one of Saul’s greatest bête noires.
Elsewhere, in a similar vein, he brands Ronald McDonald as a “Post-modern philosopher”…the “face and voice of consumer culture”.
Contemporary education doesn’t escape a broadside from Saul, especially the American form:
SAT: A system of standardized American college entry exams designed to nurture and reward functional illiteracy.
Universities find themselves in Saul’s cross-hairs as well. Within the “exclusive territories” of the university that knowledge is divided into, the principal occupation of academics is “to invent dialects sufficiently hermetic to prevent knowledge from passing between territories”.
Happy Hour is “a depressing comment on the rest of the day”.
At different points Saul diverts momentarily from his philosophical musings to give historical clarification on certain pertinent terms of interest to him. Having defined Depression as “a form of economic disaster common throughout history”, he goes on to contend that “in 1973 the word was deleted from all Western languages and replaced by the term recession”, a softer word which in Saul’s mind allows economists to maintain the myth of appearing to “manage real situations”. The author expands his point: “to admit to the existence of anything as uncontrollable as a depression would be to admit failure”.
The book’s dictionary entries allow space for brief commentaries on individuals from the pages of history who attract Saul’s interest. These are usually philosopher-figures but not always. He has an interesting take on the great turn-of-the-century novelist Joseph Conrad, “The essential modern writer…demonstrated that the novel could have a third century of relevance if the story was transformed into metaphysics disguised as reality”.
Sigmund Freud, who in America would be described as the “father of shrinks”, gets a guernsey in the dictionary, albeit a cynical and disparaging reference – “a man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would just listen—or better still, talk—that they’re parents were just as bad”. 
Air Conditioning: An efficient means for spreading disease in enclosed public spaces.
Muzak: A public noise neither requested nor listened to by individuals. It is the descendant of a school of public relations invented by the Nazis.
For one so articulately cynical of human nature, politics, economics, most things in the modern world (except of course doubt), Saul’s definition of that attitudinal standpoint seems contradictory:
Cynicism: An effective social mechanism for preventing communication.
Pessimism on the other hand is “a valuable protection against quackery”. More beneficial than ‘scepticism’ “which slips easily into cynicism and so becomes a self-defeating negative force”.
Whereas Optimism to Saul is double-edged. When applied to oneself it is “a pleasant and sometime useful distraction” to reality, but “when encouraged as a social attitude … it is the public tool of scoundrels and ideologues” (as is patriotism).
World Class: A phrase used by provincial cities and second-rate entertainment and sports events … to assert they are not provincial or second-rate, thereby confirming that they are.
Saul includes in the alphabetical list a number of surprising and disparate entries for a reference book on philosophical common sense. These include Ants (Saul makes the unexpected and unverified statement that the members of the Formicidae family of eusocial insects “do nothing 71.5 per cent of the time”)⊡; Apple (the fruit not the corporation); Armpits (which is curiously cross-referenced to Reality); Nannyism (not sure why this topic warranted nine paragraphs and over 400 words but Saul interweaves a discourse on Margaret Thatcher, bullying and sex appeal into the entry); Urban weather patterns (wtf?); White bread (“the sophisticated product of a civilization taken to its logical conclusion … continually refined until all utility has been removed”).
Among the many asides Saul offers an interesting reflection on the city-state of Venice – he declares it “the original model of modern dictatorship, in which commercial power finds its cultural expression in painting, architecture and music … (but not) language”. And on Benito Mussolini: “the nascent modern Heroic leader (who) combined corporatism, public relations and sport together, while replacing public debate and citizen participation with false popularism and the illusion of direct democracy”.
JRS humorous and glib
The philosopher’s serious message aside, Saul produces a regular line of humorous explanations of terms, some of these are dazzlingly economic epigrams or bon mots:
Museums: Safe storage for stolen objects.
Cosmetic surgery: Cosmetic perjury.
Biography: A respectable form of pornography.
Other descriptors and definitions however are quite glib:
René Descartes is thus presented “gave credibility to the idea that the mind exists separately from the body, which suggests he didn’t look down while writing” [ba-dum-tss!].
Anorexia: A condition aspired to by most middle-class women (a subject taken much more medically serious today!).
JRS’s extensive catalogue of pet bugbears include ideology (and ideologues), applied corporatism, applied civilisation, conventional wisdom, , economic determinism, technocrats, absolute truth and certainty, dry, sectarian ‘definitions’, rigid scholasticism and structure, superstition, public relations and advertising.
Footnote: it’d be interesting to see an update of the Companion. A chance to find out what the perspicacious John Ralston Saul makes of early 21st century concepts such as social media, iPhones, fake news, drones. climate change deniers and the nanny state, to name just a handful.
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✲ whether that be from the left or right
⁌ though where Bierce is acerbic, Saul is out and out incendiary
✬ adding the rider that “calm incompetence” has risen to become a quality of high professionalism”
⊡ in case this isn’t enough on the subject, JRL follows up with an entry for ant-eaters (Myrmecophaga Jubata)
¹ Amazon‘s “dust-jacket” review summarises the book as full of “renegade opinions”; (it) uses “guerrilla lexicography to reclaim public language from stultifying dialects of modern expertise”
² ‘Doubter’s Companion’, www.freelistbooks.com
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