Have you noticed how the world appears to be overflowing with Greek and Shakespearean tragedies right now? From the never-ending Diana Inquest to stuttering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the slow-motion unwinding of the world economy, the planet has become a tangled network of crumbling dreams and broken promises.

Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister

None more so than applies to Gordon Brown, Britain’s newly appointed Prime Minister.

Regular readers may recall that, back in March, one of Syntagma’s resolutions was to give up politics. I chose the wrong moment. From the fall of Blair to the rise and precipitate decline of Brown, it’s been a fascinating rollercoaster of insights into the political psyche.

Brown, who as recently as the summer was basking in a Churchillian glow, amid a welter of crises during the holidays, is now a quivering wreck, shot through by one disaster after another. After waiting and plotting for ten years to get the job, he must now be musing on the old saw, “Be careful what you wish for … you may get it.”

First he reneged on a promised referendum on the EU constitution; then he promoted and backed off an early general election when the polls ran against him. Next, an obscure northern mortgage bank, Northern Rock — which just happens to be the fifth largest in the UK, after the big four — got caught in the worldwide credit crunch. Brown’s own regulatory system didn’t even splutter into action while all this was going on. Now taxpayers are bailing out the bank to the tune of £30 billion ($62bn), which, according to Anatole Kaletsky in The Times (London), is “the biggest financial support operation ever offered to any private company by any government anywhere in the world”.

That was followed by HM Revenue and Customs — a department created by G. Brown himself — losing half the nation’s personal details, including bank account data, in the post. As if that wasn’t bad enough, all this week Brown has been submerged by yet more scandals over unlawful Labour party funding, which is now in the hands of the police at Scotland Yard.

Success in the top political job demands two qualities : leadership, and competence as an administrator. Brown has neither. He hasn’t the charisma to be PM, and lacks administrative abilities. In other words, he has been promoted two or three notches above his level of competence. Moreover, his Cabinet is stuffed full of third-raters and hopeless middle managers who would never make the board in a decent private company.

I fear this Labour government will hang on until mid-2010 — the latest date for the next election — unless the police finally nail them for money-laundering of political donations.

Brown is a clever and highly educated man, someone I would normally admire, but he’s a philosopher not a politician. His fatal flaw is a vanity that delivers an overwhelming desire to be the top dog, although he is conspicuously unqualified for the task.

Even as a philosopher he lacks the wisdom and objectivity to recognize his own deficiencies. Psychologically he’s an observer, not a doer. A backroom wallah, not the front man for a nation.

Self-knowledge requires a degree of personal honesty which the dour Scot has yet to achieve.

Have you ever heard of the Library Angel?

It’s held to be the mysterious force that swivels your eyes toward the library shelf and the very book you need, or are looking for. Many reports of its existence have appeared in the literature for decades.

It happened to me this morning in a remainder bookshop, where I sometimes spend and hour or two on Saturdays.

First the preamble. Some years ago I started to write a novel, called Codex, about a strange ancient manuscript which contains a dark prediction about the fate of the world. A medieval scholar discovers the book in an old hoard and, after deciphering it, realizes that the world is following the same path outlined in the manuscript, which leads to a mindblowing ending.

Then I was offered a big job in London. I put the work on the novel aside and forgot about it for three years after which I decided not to continue with it.

Today, in the remainder shop I was pottering around when my eye was drawn to the pulp novel display table, which I never ever look at. There jumping off the stack into my line of sight was a paperback entitled Codex by Lev Grossman, published by Arrow (Random House) in Britain and Harcourt in the States.

Guess what it’s about? Right first time.

I bought it for a princely £1.99 ($4) and have not put it down since. It’s compulsively addictive, and quite likely better than mine would have been — but you never know.

My point is that had I written my Codex — and assuming it was at least as good — would it now be languishing on a remainder table at £1.99? And what does that say about the state of decent, non-Harry Potter fiction today?

My second point, is that if you want a great page-turner, which incidentally includes some fascinating passages about computer games, seek it out and give a little boost to poor Lev Grossman, whoever he or she may be.

Call it deja vu if you must. I believe it was the Library Angel showing me my lucky escape.

Update: Since no-one knew about the book I was writing, there is no way that Lev Grossman could have known about it. In fact, there are important points of difference between the two. Some themes are just floating in the ether at the time. The Da Vinci Code, for example created a whole genre in manuscript-driven books around the world.

My congratulations to Lev Grossman for bringing his idea to such a readable conclusion. I’m only sorry it ended up on the remaindered shelf. It doesn’t deserve it.

Abraham Lincoln’s famous maxim, “You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time”, is so obviously true you wouldn’t expect anyone to fall foul of its remorseless logic. Yet that is precisely what Britain and some other Western countries have done over the past decade.

It began with Bill Clinton and his obsessive pursuit of minority interests to bolster his poll results and show how caring he is to the wider electorate. In Britain, Tony Blair followed suit under the banner of The Third Way, a neo-Marxist equality agenda of endless social tinkering and mindless bossiness. It was how they would make the entire population love them to bits — they thought.

The Third Way signalled the death of Bentham’s Utilitarianism in British politics and the beginnings of an eerie hero worship of carefully selected in-groups and minorities.

Jeremy Bentham’s Embalmed Body

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), philosopher and social reformer, paved the way for modern fully-franchised democracy with his great maxim, “The object of all legislation should be the greatest happiness for the greatest number”. It has been the basis of modern society ever since and has clearly worked well. He even provided a mathematical formula for calculating the best possible outcome in every situation.

Then came the Clinton/Blair obsession with “dog whistling” — the pursuit of prescriptive minority rights which are often rolled out at the expense of other minorities and almost always the majority itself.

Let’s look at an analogy of Bentham’s dictum in action. Somewhere in Holland a hole appears in a dyke. A small boy senses the danger and stops the flow by putting his finger in the hole.

His cries alert farm workers nearby who rush to his aid only to find other holes appearing. They stop the trickle with their own fingers. Soon, at the urging of the Mayor, others are rushing onto the scene until the whole village is there with their fingers in hundreds of holes.

“What do we do now?” somebody shouts.

A distant voice cries, “There’s another hole.”

So now the dyke will give way taking the entire population of the village with it. The Benthamite view would be to send a small repair party to the dyke to assess the likelihood of saving it, while evacuating the rest of the village to safety. In other words, it may mean sacrificing the few in order to save the majority.

Stable Families
We know that children are happiest and more stable if brought up in married two-parent families. All the statistics prove this self-evident fact. Why then would a couple with children be financially better off in Blair’s Britain if they were not married? And why are the same “rights” given to same-sex couples in loose relationships as to married families?

Bentham’s relentless logic means that public policy should never be confused with private kindness, which is exactly what we’ve got in Brokeback Britain.

The greater public good has been destroyed in favour of a patchwork quilt of minor prescriptive measures, all jangling against each, causing huge resentment in the so-far silent majority, and destroying all social cohesion in the cities and in the country.

Children run wild at night, tormenting adults who can’t take action because of the Children’s Rights Act. This situation is an example of extensive child neglect in a society that increasingly looks to the state for everything. And that’s not to mention the destructive Human Rights Act which grants British civil rights universally to the whole world in an act of unparalleled betrayal of a nation’s right to protect itself from harm.

If New Labour had foresworn the advice of its militant Marxists, oddball, second-rate academics, and heeded the wise words of Jeremy Bentham, little of this would have happened.

That politics today is broken is clear. Only the resurrection of Bentham’s Utility agenda can save it. It’s not as if he’s that far away. His perfectly embalmed body, still in his familiar clothes and sitting in his favourite chair, can be seen in a glass cabinet in a London University college.

It would mean the end of prescriptive legislation, social engineering of the many by the few, the massive centralization of power, and the loss of the balm of Superdemocracy.

As General George Patton once said : “Don’t tell people how to do things, [suggest] what to do and let them surprise you with the result.”

Thanks to Aaron Brazell at Technosailor for the Patton quotation.

In reflective Saturday mood, I want to continue the discussion of the last two days on digital networks. This time not singling out specific networks or people. I’m also restricting the networks to those that start off as microbusinesses and build to at least mid-market positions.

This is the question : How do we measure success in a digital network?

The simple response is : against the goals set by the founders when the network was started.

That’s a bit fuzzy because goals can change; ambitions can grow or recede; new horizons can beckon; the original goals may have been unattainable or too easy because of lack of experience in the founders.

So we need an objective measure. I believe there are two :

1. The network sells to a deep-pocketed buyer, leaving the founders rich and satisfied.
2. The business becomes a viable company, paying salaries and fees to others, and a tidy income to the founders, while also growing asset value as time passes.

I suspect many an online publisher would settle for either, whatever way their initial preference leaned.

There are other measures too. For example, a business may not make much money, but gain credibility and respect among the audience it serves. The founders may then launch ancillary careers as consultants or advisers. But here we’re concentrating on publishing income from content delivered, so we’ll eliminate these sideline activities.

I’m guessing that anyone who becomes an online publisher starts out with one of the above two objectives as their main goal. What then do they need to do to reach digital Nirvana?

1. If you’re rearing a business for sale you are essentially a digital farmer. Agricultural methodology should be built into your plans.

For instance, be aware of the weather, by which I mean the internet climate, which can go from euphoric (1999) to dustbowl dismal (2001) in very short order. Sniffing the digital wind should be an important part of your day.

At present there’s a general feeling that Web 2.0 is in a mini-bubble state, with no-one currently launching IPOs on their startups. There’s also a dangerous belief that Google, the classic 2.0-timer, will protect everyone else in the space with its long coat-tails. Not a good frame of mind to adopt.

You also need to get your product right. Is it a generic thing made to be branded fully by someone else after purchase? Or is it an exotic offering that needs good branding now? I can think of examples of both out there as I write.

If it’s a shell of an idea, it will fail or succeed by the state of the market at the time and should be brought to sale as quickly as possible and in the right conditions. Such mass market fruit ripens quickly and begins to rot before you know it.

If it’s the exotic variety, it requires a unique selling point to carry it into the arms of an eager buyer. In many ways this type of network is more suited to Objective 2 than to 1. However, it can be very attractive if its branding is well-thought through and admired in the marketplace.

So, as a digital farmer you’re either selling raw chicken carcasses or chill-counter Chicken Kiev. You definitely need to know which it is, or you’ll end up giving someone indigestion.

2. If you are incubating your network as a viable business you should attend to all the things that such businesses require, from infrastructure to branding and product excellence.

This is the slower path as your objectives are longer-term. But it’s the traditional path. Few people in the past built businesses to sell under bubble conditions, catching the big wave as it forms. Only the surfing, internet generation has specialized in this kind of California dreaming.

Conditions are never less than dangerous for those who venture out into the swell. Such people really do need a gameplan for when it all goes horribly wrong. Like an alternative business plan that allows them to morph easily from Objective 1 to Objective 2, with scarcely a flutter of attention from eagle-eyed onlookers.

In the interim, success is measurable by where you are now in terms of the market conditions, the grasp you have on the situation, and the positioning you’ve achieved in the light of the outcome aimed for.

If that sounds complicated, it’s so because, until the wished-for outcome is met, you are still in no-man’s-land, that messy hinterland where the future is dark and the present edgy.

Taking home a good paycheck is some consolation for these uncertain times. In its absence, it should at least be imaginable sometime soon, or you’re in the wrong business.

And Syntagma Digital? Where do we stand? … Maybe I’ll tell you one day.