One of the characteristic features of modern western democracies is, as John Ralston Saul has pointed out, that it has focused on the development of narrow forms of expertise and then used reason to apply that narrow expertise to addressing specific social, cultural, economic and political issues. This is particularly true of the proliferating management elites produced by the also proliferating Business Schools in Universities across the West.
Those schools tend towards a focus on method, not on solutions. A good example is the Harvard Business School focus on the “case study”, which has been widely adopted in business schools across the West. It has been used as a way of training the managers needed by business and government to run organisations in accordance with an ideology. That ideology sets the general characteristics of the solution in advance and then develops methods to enable the logic that enables arrival at that pre-determined solution. No questioning of that pre-determined solution is allowed and hence the focus of the training is on the development and refinement of methods that will enable the application of reason to arrive at that solution.
These business schools resemble in that sense the work of Medieval Scholastics or Schoolmen who dominated European thought from the 9th right through until the 17th Century. They accepted the teachings of Roman Catholicism as fundamental truths and then sought to apply reason and logic to those fundamental truths to arrive at policies, both........