Do ideas matter? Of course they do. But we don’t usually think about ideas mattering to the business bottom line, profit and loss. Marjorie Cooper, a professor of marketing at Baylor University, recently showed that arcane philosophical ideas actually have cash value. Or perhaps I should say, cash costs. Prof. Cooper lists some core post-modern ideas and asks, how do post-modern ideas show up in business practice, and how do they affect the bottom line?

You’ve heard of the post-modernists, of course. These are the people who don’t believe in categories such as truth, goodness or beauty. These moral relativists perfected the brilliant rhetorical device of scare quotes: quotation marks around a word to scare people away from using the word. Truth, in post-modern hands, becomes “truth.” There is no “real” truth, just your truth, my truth and Larry King Live’s truth. We’re supposed to snicker whenever anybody says “beauty,” because we all know that “beauty” is just a word with no objective meaning. A Shakespeare sonnet is no more beautiful than the latest rap “music” “lyrics”; Monet’s waterlillies are no more beautiful than the latest modern “art” “painting.” And “good,” well, you can kiss that one good-bye.

The only category post-modernists truly respect is Power. Language is a “weapon of violence” used by those in power to impose their will on others, according to Michel Foucault, one of the “bright lights” in the post-modern “intellectual” firmament. Whoever has the power, defines the categories. Post-modernists dream of the day when they can obtain enough power to strip words of their bourgeois “meanings.” Then and only then, can words be redefined in the service of “justice” for the “oppressed” and “marginalized.” The power struggle is the only thing that is “real,” and obtaining political power allows the “good guys” to create “legitimate” meaning. In this way, post-modernism provides both justification and motivation for power lust.

Anyhow, Marjorie Cooper, being a professor of a philistine subject like marketing is not convinced by this new-fangled “philosophy.” She points out that concrete consequence of post-modernism is that people no longer have categories with which to think. If you can’t classify things as good or bad, right or wrong, true or false, it is hard to make sense of the world. Putting things into boxes labeled, “good for me” or “good, provisionally, until something better comes along” is not the same as putting them in boxes labeled Good. The post-modernists know this, but try to pretend this only brings about the desirable results of moral humility and personal tolerance.

Well, Miss Marjorie isn’t having any of that. Like a good bottom line kind of person, she asks herself, does the loss of categories of thought have any impact on profit and loss for business?

She cites numerous studies that have attempted to estimate the costs of internal fraud, including employee theft. Someone unsympathetic with business might claim that defrauding businesses isn’t a big deal. Maybe the employees believe they are creating their own system of just wages. After all, one man’s “fraud” is another man’s “justice.”

But when an employee helps himself to the firm’s assets, more than the bottom line suffers. So do the other employees, the firm’s consumers and the firm’s stockholders. Just so you know this isn’t chump change, research estimates the annual cost of internal fraud to be somewhere between the annual GDP of Bulgaria ($50 billion) and the GDP of Taiwan ($400 billion)! That’s an awful lot of money to write off with scare quotes.

She traces an even more troubling problem to post-modernism: a loss of cause and effect thinking. As you can see from the many scare quotes in previous paragraphs, it is difficult to think clearly without some categories of thought. If every category is fluid, and open to redefinition at all time, it is difficult to even formulate a coherent thought, much less develop a course of action.

But business people have to act, make plans, and evaluate their successes and failures. Prof. Cooper reports on research suggesting that many people in business have lost the ability to do even the most elementary cause and effect thinking. For instance, one of the best documented causes of poor executive decision making is the problem of managers rushing to judgment. She cites research showing that many managers make the same mistakes over and over again. They evidently do not learn from mistakes. This is the most basic kind of cost from losing cause and effect thinking.

Post-modern philosophers, safely ensconced in their ivory towers, do not have to be accountable to anyone for the harm their ideas might cause. Not so in the rough and tumble world of business. Lying to yourself and others, refusing to think clearly: clearly these behaviors have real costs.

National Catholic Register

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