Come, hear a banal little incident: a walking trail is proposed and the question of where it should cross the Ohio River becomes a matter of importance to my dear local government, a body that loves to exercise the virtue of prudence by Getting The Boys Around A Table to argue over such timeless questions as “what to do?” and “how to do it?” and “with what money?” In the midst of these deliberations, the lights flicker, a sulfuric smoke fills Meeting Room B, and something like a Rumplestiltskin appears, suggesting to the assembled laity that they pay a consulting firm to tell them the best place to cross the river—for the small cost of $600,000.
Thankfully, the laity resisted—not so the clergy! Our cathedral falls into ruin and our Bishop ponders such questions as “what to do?” and “how to do it?” And precisely at the point of human decision, with all Creation holding its breath in anticipation, His Excellency hires a consulting firm out of Baltimore, to give him a list of options—for a cool $15,000.
At first, I thought that all this political flaccidity was something of a local flavor, a timidity borne of ambiguities of Rust Belt life—as when a local university gave $20,000 to a consulting firm in order to determine whether a certain professor’s plan for introducing a certain major would turn a certain profit. (What, precisely, a university administration is for, if not to come to such answers themselves, I do not know, but the firm concluded that it would not be profitable, the professor started his program anyways, and it is now, in fact, extremely profitable). But as much as I like to imagine that my little town is anomalous in its virtues and vices, it is, in fact, a town among towns, swept up in global currents like the rest and the best of ‘em.
And the Advice Industry, or “business consulting,” has been growing unchecked since its inception, boasting a 2022 market size of $329 billion dollars. The government consulting industry has done the same: England boasts of its most consulting and consulted year yet, spending “almost $1.28 billion on contracts with consulting giants Accenture, Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC,” to the point that some have argued that the United Kingdom’s use of consultancies during the pandemic was extensive enough to “have created a parallel state.” Which is really a rather neat proposal: If governments, churches, businesses, and universities are going to lead by way of unregulated consulting firms, let us cut out the middle man, trim the fat, and enjoy direct rule by consultants. A friend relayed to me that America’s largest medical consulting firm once got so large that it required its own consultants—a double outsourcing of human prudence! These dozen-odd consultants to the consultants were called the Thought Leaders, and—for some reason—they wore matching Adidas tracksuits. Something like this could work for our country.
But if we would rather not enjoy the beneficence of a global firm of Thought Leaders, it is worth investigating why bishops and businessmen are so easily suckered into using the things at all. They’re only about a hundred years old. They have occasioned no obvious increase in human happiness by their (nearly complete) march through our sacred institutions.
I am not denying the human need for advice. “The thoughts of mortal men are fearful, and our counsels uncertain,” says the Book of Wisdom, and (excepting those boosting Bitcoin) the perpetual need of good counsel seems to describe the entire human race. But there is a difference between asking for advice and buying it.
To say, “John, you’re a bridge man, what’s the move on crossing the river?” is neither an abdication of my intellectual powers nor a puppyish servility towards John. Rather, to approach John with a hopeful inquiry is to know that I know enough to ask, to ask John, to ask John precisely this question, and to receive and understand his answer. This ground of non-expert knowledge, proper to all those who manage to put pants on in the morning, means that seeking counsel is always seeking conversation. It would be neither rude nor odd nor out of keeping with the basic norms of civil discourse to disagree with John, saying, “But John, that won’t do, putting it there would block the view here,” etc.
But were I to give John $25,000 to tell me what to do, I would occasion a shift in the relationship. His free advice becomes a commodity, purchased among commodities. As no one spends $25,000 on a car, drives it home, and only then begins to inspect its feasibility in the transportational way of things, so the very act of buying advice strongly discourages conversing with it. The burger has been bought—all that is left to do is eat.
The weight of our “cash down” presses us to accept the conclusions of the consultants as forgone conclusions. If someone purchases an answer to the question “what to do about my cathedral” at the price of $15,000, then to consider whether that answer is a good one is to consider turning a $15,000 purchase into a $15,000 waste. And as no one likes to be known as the guy who got suckered out of a twenty, much less fifteen-thousand, the very purchase of advice marshals all the power of human vanity in support of its conclusions. We have all met the man who overspends; we have all heard his denials, the way he takes people aside to point out the hidden value of his obviously bad shopping decision. Consulting firms make such shoppers out of the leaders who consult them, and while the outsourcing of decision-making to a company does not necessarily make for good decisions, it does make for men with a vested interest in calling bad decisions “good.”
Likewise, the commodification of advice allows for the illusion that advice can operate like a commodity: that it can be freed from all contingency; that it can deliver results “or your money back!” I once met a man who could not understand how his college education was useless—he had spent so much money to get it! So too, the price of advice tends leaders away from their obligation of evaluating whether it is good advice—of course it’s good advice, look how much it cost! The very absurdity of the idea that we might pay half a million dollars for a moron to espouse some idiosyncratic “solution,” packaged into the authoritative form known as “The Results Of Our Study,” rather keeps us from recognizing that such an event is, in fact, always possible. There are, after all, Big Scams.
In a mercantile world, “the expensive” serves as a convenient replacement for “the good.” In a world in which life is largely maintained through the purchase of commodities, the tasteless and dull members of this great country can climb the Mountain of Success with nothing but price-tags to Virgil them along. Buy Expensive Wine, send your kids to Expensive College, and live in Expensive Home, and chances are you will have hit upon quality by virtue of its incidental association with expense. But the relationship isn’t a necessary one. NFT’s were very expensive and are very, very dumb. Any salesman knows that upping the price allows you to signify a quality that your product doesn’t have—I recall a story of a weaver on the West Coast who couldn’t sell her blankets until she tripled their price. This accounts for the absurd expense of consultation. For truly, I could tell you where to cross the Ohio River for five bucks and a cigarette, if it were advice you were really buying—but it isn’t. We are buying the transformation of decision-making, with all its freedom and contingency, into the purchase of a commodity, with all of its apparent fixity and finality. Because of this, a cheap commodity comes to signify a bad answer and expensive commodity stands in for a good one, and the wise man who gives his advice for free is disdained over and against the sophist who charges for his teaching.
In this sense, the purpose of consulting firms is to alienate and technologize the human virtue of prudence, so that its fruits can be produced by money, rather than people, shaking us free of that dour assessment of Wisdom, that “our counsels are uncertain,” and allowing us to say, instead, that “the thoughts of men can be made accurate for a salary, their good counsel purchased for the going rate.” Whether this results in more good answers is doubtful; that it results in less responsibility is undeniable. Framing the good decision as something money can buy means that no one is personally responsible for the failure of that decision, any more than he is personally responsible for the failure of his brand new lawnmower. And we all know the way our managerial class hires these, their consultant compadres, to transform their unpopular decisions into the dictates of an awful and impenetrable fate: “I would love to keep you, Jim, but the Results of the Study show that you’re actually useless.”
I was invited to a city meeting concerning revitalization, in which two energetic lads from somewhere like New Jersey explained to a group of local politicians, city officials, and businessmen that, by purchasing the meta-data of our phone-locations over the course of a year, they had determined that our citizenry often traveled to a neighboring town in order to do their shopping. They had a sort of heat map in which the town in question glowed while our own sulked in relative darkness. I laughed, because (a) this fact was ascertainable by Just Bloody Asking the First Idiot to present himself where our citizenry shopped and (b) because the use of the major currency of surveillance capitalism to locate a nearby mall seemed rather like using a nuclear bomb to open the back of a minivan. But my mirth didn’t join anything like the chorus of giggles I thought such a method deserved. And even when the consulting firm used “data-driven results” to suggest we open more gas stations; even when they used cross-comparisons with similar towns and national averages to determine what they could have ascertained by, again, Just Bloody Asking the First Idiot whether we need a downtown grocery store; even then no one laughed.
But I was the idiot. I thought something real was happening. I did not understand that I was attending a theatrical production. It is a pleasant fiction that one hires a consulting firm to get new information. Obviously, the assembled officials already knew the information they were being given. What we were about, at that meeting and in board rooms across this beautiful country, was the transformation of the knowledge we already had into the knowledge that results from a technological process. We were not learning anything, we were enjoying a magical transformation of politics into a mechanical science.
For it is a known fact that one of the ways consulting firms proceed is by interview and survey: that is, by asking people to describe the problem and to offer possible solutions, and then amalgamating these responses into so much “data.” When the Jersey Boys had finished telling us that there were no jobs—gasp!—they had all those attending the meeting break up into small groups in order to offer “feedback” and “input” and to “fill in gaps in the data.” They then recorded our suggestions and included them in the conclusions of the resulting study—sometimes verbatim! Who, precisely, was consulting whom? And if the consulting firms consult the people who consult the consulting firms, aren’t those people technically consultants? And if they are consultants, shouldn’t they be paid, and paid well, in order to assure the validity and quality of the advice that they give? If not, then it rather seems that the consulting firms expropriate both the problems and the solutions from the people who pay them to locate problems and propose solutions, like the man who says, “I’ll mow your lawn for twenty bucks, you provide the capital and the labor and I’ll do the rest.”
The apparent necessity of consultancy does not derive from the fact that neither Barbara nor Kevin know what is wrong and what is to be done—they interview Barbara and survey Kevin and transform their answers into so many data points in order to answer the questions! No, the apparent necessity of consultancy derives from the fact that neither Barbara nor Kevin have the courage to lead or the charity to work together. That is to say that consulting firms profit from the presumed incapacity of people to be brave, a state of affairs which their activities paradoxically foster, for the very possibility of their services commodifies decision-making from the get-go; suggests that, after all, there are experts who are best as this deciding-what-to-do thing; an insinuation which, to whatever extent it is believed, produces cowed and quivering people. Consulting firms produce the need that they fulfill.
Of course, it is true that there are some institutions that are so big and complex that they require the skill of another to assess them; some institutions for which a capacity for poring over spreadsheets and coming up with a plan for greater efficiency is a capacity worth compensating. And in this sense I grant another reason for the necessity of the consultant, beyond the situation of institution-wide cowardice—namely, institution-wide greed and pride. For in all things natural and virtuous, things that grow, grow towards a state of perfection—and then give themselves away. Plants become so big—and then they bear fruit. Men and women become so developed—and then they bear children. The point just before a business becomes too complex for its owner to bear should be the point of rest—of the maintenance of perfection rather than continued growth. The point just before an amassment becomes too big is the point of distribution and gift—not the building of bigger storehouses. The man who buys house upon house until the care of home and tenant exceeds his own rational and physical capacity is a slumlord; the man who desires a multitude of useless children is biblically condemned; the man who grows a business so convoluted that he cannot understand is simply greedy; the tower that rises to the sky is Babel; the farmer who cannot possibly see the land he owns without a helicopter is a bad farmer; and the fact that our world is made up of technological systems so big and complex as to necessitate an industry devoted entirely to understanding baffling businesses and byzantine bureaucracies and telling them how to run, who to fire, and what to do with all that money—well! The consulting firm is a technological solution to a technological problem produced by our appalling tendency to grow institutions into indefinitely large amassments of power, whatever the cost. The consulting firm is the child of monopoly, of income disparity, of homogeneity and greed and, especially, of the stock market, which makes, not stable production, but the promise of future growth into a badge of success. The necessity of consultants for the running of this world should inspire us, not with fond thoughts about consulting fees, but with a desire to set the world on fire. People should be made mocked for building up businesses and bureaucracies that require paid mercenaries to make decisions about their operations.
Charlemagne, in a capitulary of 802, set out his first rule for the Empire: “that every one of his own accord should strive, according to his intelligence and strength, wholly to keep himself in the holy service of God according to the precept of God and to his own promise—inasmuch as the emperor can not exhibit the necessary care and discipline to each man singly.” And this last clause tells all, for the genuine achievement of Christian politics is to idealize the ruler who does not amass rule indefinitely, but who rules precisely to give ruling away, acknowledging his limited flesh, not as some technologically surmountable obstacle, but as a sign and sacrament of human creatureliness. As this Christian achievement is lost, human limitation is once more seen as an obstacle, the old temptation to grasp after divinity rears its serpentine head, and man “seeks after many devices” to keep what he should give away; to stay awake when he should sleep; to work when he should rest; to pretend to rule by proxy and payment what he does not, in fact, rule at all. Among these devices is the consulting firm, by which the limits of human comprehension and courage are (apparently) surpassed by the use of profits and taxes to technologically outsource decision-making. I say apparently, because in outsourcing decision-making in this manner, the leader actually ceases to make decisions. The leader whose leadership consists in following the purchased advice of consulting firms is a puppet paying for a rather expensive illusion with which to hide the strings. In actual fact, anyone who endures such a leader knows that the consulting firms are in charge, and where the firms are paid by profits, it is the workers, who produce the profits, who are exploited into producing this appearance of leadership. Where the firms are paid by taxes, it is the citizens who are exploited into producing the appearance of rule in their would-be ruler. And where the firms are paid from the tithes—angels weep.
Charging for advice is inhuman and strange because it implies that, between the seeker and the giver of advice there is no common bond; that it does not matter to the giver if the seeker follows his advice. This is a lie, for we matter infinitely to each other; our every action either expands our neighbors’ access to the good—or it restricts it. When a man seeks to know where and how to build a wall, or who to hire, or whether or not to start a grocery, or what business to invite into which building; in short, whenever one man says to another, “Come, let us reason together,” he first and foremost acknowledges that the seeker and the giver are participants in each other’s decisions; recipients of the fruits of each other’s virtues. That is to say that the giver of advice is already paid, for if his advice is good, then the following of that advice will lead to a good he will enjoy, both in the public, exterior aspect of whatever project he advises and in the effect of the good action on the advice seeker, who becomes good on the basis of good counsel, and whose good character the counsel-giver enjoys. To operate a consulting firm is a sort of usury, because it seeks to be paid twice—once by the good effect of the advice, and once again for the giving of it.
In fact, keeping advice free is about the only way of keeping it good. Only a consulting firm from out of Baltimore, paid to think, could have suggested something so damaging as they in fact suggested should replace our cathedral. The missing data of this entire industry, and the one study which I imagine would explode the whole charade, could be gathered by two follow-up questions given to all those who pay consulting firms some five years after the fact: “Did you take their advice?” “Did it turn out to be good?” If the total percentage of people who answer “no” to either question settles around 50% of all those using consulting firms, then we may as well reinstitute paganism in its entirety and consult augurs and oracles instead. But the preponderance of bad advice isn’t simply the result of the fact that the firms “don’t know the territory.” Rather, precisely as consulting firms, they can’t know the territory. If they knew it, they would be composed of people who live there; and if they are composed of people who live there, then their basic operation would be revealed as so much wickedness, namely, that they will withhold advice unless paid. For if my neighbor withholds good advice from me, he hates me. He says, in effect, “it is reasonable to put this advice, by which you would flourish, behind a paywall—for whether you flourish or not is of no concern to me.” But where advice is kept free, it is given precisely because we are social creatures, loving creatures, bound up in each other’s existence, incapable of being neutral in regards to the flourishing of our neighbor. Rather, when we receive a word from the Lord about what our friend ought to do, it “burns like a fire in our bones.” We cannot not give it—charity compels us to offer counsel wherever counsel is needed. And this is a “check” and a “balance” too, for it means that we will only give the advice we believe to be good, precisely because we are involved in it.
In sum, counsel is a gift of the Spirit; charging for it is simony. Prudence is a human virtue; paying for it should make us tremble with the same fear we would feel if we tried to buy justice. The gift of good advice is its own reward: it is usury to seek payment for it. Advice should be free, as it was customarily considered to be.