Print Page - THE GREENING OF AMERICA by CHARLES A. REICH

This book has nothing to do with climate change, but everything to do with understanding the basic principles of the thought patterns of conservative, liberal, and a newer generation of thought. When I first started reading this book I thought it spelled out the goodness of America very well. That was until it tore it all apart. Then I thought it was a book by and for liberalism and the progressive movement. That was until it tore that thought process apart as well. So then what is this newer generation thought process about....?? Well, in the coming days I will be adding sections of this book and maybe we can figure it out together as to whether it is a good thing or not.

The Coming American Revolution

America is dealing with death, not only to people in other lands, but to its own people.
We think of ourselves as an incredibly rich country, but we are also a desperately poor country---poor in most of the things that throughout the history of mankind have been cherished as riches.
There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions and social structure are changing in consequence. It promises a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. Its ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty---a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land.

This is the revolution of the new generation. Their protest and rebellion, their culture, clothes, music, drugs, ways of thought, and liberated life-style are not a passing fad or a form of dissent and refusal, nor are they in any sense irrational. The whole emerging pattern, from ideals to campus demonstrations to beads and bell-bottoms to the Woodstock Festival, makes sense and is a part of a consistent philosophy. It is both necessary and inevitable, and in time it will include not only youth, but all people in America.
The logic and necessity of the new generation--and what they are so furiously opposed to---must be seen against a background of what has gone wrong in America. It must be understood in the light of the betrayal and loss of the American dream, the rise of the Corporate State of the 1960's, and the way in which that State dominates, exploits, and ultimately destroys both nature and man. Its rationality must be measured against the insanity of existing "reason"----reason that makes impoverishment, dehumanization, and even war appear to be logical and necessary. Its logic must be read from the fact that Americans have lost control of the machinery of their society, and only new values and a new culture can restore control. Its emotions and spirit can be comprehended only by seeing contemporary America through the eyes of the new generation.

The meaning and the future of the revolution emerge from this historical perspective. The revolution is a movement to bring man's thinking, his society, and his life to terms with the revolution of technology and science that has already taken place. Technology demands of man a new mind--a higher, transcendent reason---if it is to be controlled and guided rather than become an unthinking monster. It demands a new individual responsibility for values, or it will dictate all values. And it promises a life that is more liberated and more beautiful than any man has known, if man has the courage and the imagination to seize that life.
The transformation that is coming invites us to reexamine our own lives. It confronts us with how we have lived; how would we live differently? It offers us a recovery of self. It faces us with the fact that this choice cannot be evaded, for as the freedom is already there, so must the responsibility be there.
At the heart of everything is what we shall call a change of consciousness. This means a "new head"-----a new way of living----a new man. This is what the new generation has been searching for, and what it has started achieving. Industrialism produced a new man, too---one adapted to the demands of the machine. In contrast, today's emerging consciousness seeks a new knowledge of what it means to be human, in order that the machine, having been built, may now be turned to human ends; in order that man once more can become a creative force, renewing and creating his own life and thus giving life back to his society.

It is essential to place the American crisis and this change within individuals in a philosophic perspective, showing how we got to where we are, and where we are going. Current events are so overwhelming that we only see from day to day, merely responding to each crisis as it comes, seeing only immediate evils, and seeking inadequate solutions such as merely ending a war, or merely changing our domestic priorities. A longer-range view is necessary.
What is the nature of the present American crisis? Most of us see it as a collection of problems, not necessarily related to each other, and, although profoundly troubling, nevertheless within the reach of reason and reform. But if we list these problems, not according to topic, but as elements of larger issues concerning the structure of our society itself, we can see that the present crisis is an organic one, that it arises out of the basic premises by which we live and no mere reform can touch it.

1. Disorder, Corruption, Hypocrisy, War.

The front pages of newspapers tell of the disintegration of the social fabric, and the resulting atmosphere of anxiety and terror in which we all live. Lawlessness is most often associated with crime and riots, but there is lawlessness and corruption in all the major institutions of our society---matched by indifference to responsibility and consequences, and a pervasive hypocrisy that refuses to acknowledge the facts that are everywhere visible. Both lawlessness and evasion found expression in the Vietnam War, with its unprincipled destruction of everything human, and its random, indifferent, technological cruelty.

(My note): This reference to the Vietnam War, it was a war we never should have gotten into, but once we were there we never should have left as we did, in leaving all those people to die. War always has consequences, both good and evil, but if the commanders in the field of battle were left to run the war, not politicians in Washington, D.C., most wars would have more favorable outcomes.

2. Poverty, Distorted Priorities, and Law-making by private power.

America presents a picture of drastic poverty amid affluence, an extremity of contrast unknown in other industrial nations. Likewise there is a superabundance of some goods, services, and activities such as defense manufacture, while other needs, such as education and medical care, are at a starvation level for many. these closely related kinds of inequality are not the accidents of a free economy, they are intentionally and rigidly built into the laws of our society by those with powerful influence; an example is the tax structure which subsidizes private wealth and production of luxuries and weapons at the direct expense of impoverished people and impoverished services. The nation has a planned economy, and the planning is done by the exercise of private power without concern for the general good.

(My Note): America needs to invest in defense of the nation. However, we have all heard the stories of government wastefulness in many areas and branches of government.

3. Uncontrolled technology and the Destruction of environment

Technology and production can be great benefactors of man, but they are mindless instruments; if undirected they career along with a momentum of their own. In our country they pulverize everything in their path: the landscape, the natural environment, history and tradition, the amenities and civilities, the privacy and spaciousness of life, beauty, and the fragile, slow-growing social structures which bind us together. Organization and bureaucracy, which are applications of technology to social institutions, increasingly dictate how we shall live our lives, with the logic of organization taking precedence over any other values.

4. Decline of Democracy and Liberty; Powerlessness.

The Constitution and Bill of Rights have been weakened, imperceptibly but steadily. The nation has gradually become a rigid managerial hierarchy, with a small elite and a great mass of the disenfranchised. Democracy has rapidly lost ground as power is increasingly captured by giant managerial institutions and corporations, and decisions are made by experts, specialists, and professionals safely insulated from the feelings of the people. Most governmental power has shifted from Congress to administrative agencies, and corporate power is free to ignore both stockholders and consumers. As regulation and administration have grown, liberty has been eroded and bureaucratic discretion has taken the place of the rule of law. Today both dissent and efforts at change are dealt with by repression. The pervasiveness of police, security men, the military, and compulsory military service show the changed character of American liberty.

Quote from: islandboy on November 26, 2009, 11:39:19 AM

it was a war we never should have gotten into, but once we were there we never should have left as we did, in leaving all those people to die.

There are many that have come to think like this. The U.S. was involved within Viet Nam long before the war started. We were there as agents to prevent a ruthless dictator that killed many of his own people from taking over an entire nation. We worked for many years to keep peace within Viet Nam, to prevent millions of deaths and aided in the formation of North and South Viet Nam in order to aid in that peace keeping mission.

The leader of North Viet Nam was not happy with this situation and with the aid of several other nations took action to gain control over the South. Viet Nam failed when due to pressure of an ongoing revolution within our own borders Congress decided to withdraw funding to South Viet Nam.

After the withdrawal of our Troops the largest mass killing ever in Viet Nam took place. Those killed at this time were the targets of North Viet Nam from the start. Our participation in the Viet Nam war only served to delay these killings.

Pastor Roger, Thank you for the background information as far as the history of why we were there in the first place. The vets I spoke with were upset about the war, but deeply felt sadness and regret in being pulled out of Viet Nam, and then hearing of the massive loss of life that occurred. Not only were they humbled by that experience, but then to be treated so badly upon arriving home was a double insult. War is not a pretty site, men and women die in wars to protect the lives of those at home and abroad. They stand for freedom and deserve respect and our thanks for a job well done. When government pulls the funding for a war or change the rules of the game, it is not the men and women serving who are at fault.

Quote from: islandboy on November 28, 2009, 12:40:22 PM

When government pulls the funding for a war or change the rules of the game, it is not the men and women serving who are at fault.

This is a fact. I myself was there and I also personally went through the humiliation that certain people poured out on us. I do blame our government for the ending results of Viet Nam. They were there to protect the Vietnamese from an oppressive communist takeover yet within our own borders they gave in to a small yet very outspoken and naive group that supported communism. Yes, we did lose a lot of American lives in Viet Nam, mostly due to the politics at that time. We are again seeing this same thing take place today in Afghanistan.

If our government had let the Generals and Admirals do their job there would have been a lot less loss of life in Viet Nam. Our governments hesitation in complying with our Generals in Afghanistan are again resulting in more needless deaths and I doubt that we will see any favorable results in the future either.

5. The Artificiality of Work and Culture.

Work and living have become more and more pointless and empty. There is no lack of meaningful projects that cry out to be done, but our working days are used up in work that lacks meaning: making useless or harmful projects, or serving the bureaucratic structures. For most Americans, work is mindless, exhausting, boring, servile, and hateful, something to be endured while "life" is confined to "time off." At the same time our culture has been reduced to the grossly commercial; all cultural values are for sale, and those that fail to make a profit are not preserved. Our life activities have become plastic, vicarious, and false to our genuine needs, activities fabricated by others and forced upon us.

6. Absence of Community

America is one vast, terrifying anti-community. The great organizations to which most people give their working day, and the apartments and suburbs to which they return each night, are equally places of loneliness and alienation. Modern living has obliterated place, locality, and neighborhood, and given us the anonymous separateness of our existence. The family, the most basic social system, has been ruthlessly stripped to its functional essentials. Friendship has been coated over with a layer of impenetrable artificiality as men strive to live roles designed for them. Protocol, competition, hostility, and fear have replaced the warmth of the circle of affection which might sustain man against a hostile universe.

7. Loss of Self.

Of all the forms of impoverishment that can be seen or felt in America, loss of self, or death in life, is surely the most devastating. It is, even more than the draft and the Vietnam War, (any war), the source of discontent and rage in the new generation. Beginning with school, if not before, an individual is systematically stripped of his imagination, his creativity, his heritage, his dreams, and his personal uniqueness, in order to style him into a productive unit for a mass, technological society. Instinct, feeling, and spontaneity are repressed by overwhelming forces. As the individual is drawn into the meritocracy, his working life is split from his home life, and both suffer from a lack of wholeness. Eventually, people virally become their professions, roles, or occupations, and are thenceforth strangers to themselves. Blacks long ago felt their deprivation of identity and potential for life. But white "soul" and blues are just beginning. Only a segment of youth is articulately aware that they too suffer an enforced loss of self----they too are losing the lives that could be theirs.

Before I go much further with this book, I want to add that this book was written in the sixty's, at a time when young people were in a uprising with peace marches with in someways a clarity of things, and yet their actions were not productive because the goodwill they wanted to represent came out in rebellion against the government and their own families. The flower children, the experiment with various drugs, free love without thinking of the consequences of their actions spoke louder than the ideas and message they were trying to send. Thus in this book their are pages that made me want to stop sharing, as they are not good values for any generation, old or new. But I read on and discover that within these pages are bits and pieces of worthwhile information that might help us see where new thought patterns could improve our society. But in someways it seems we are feeling powerless to act and for many though they would love to act, they don't seem to have a plan or direction to help turn things around. The Tea Party's speak volumes, but it seems no one is listening anymore. So what can you do on your own to improve your town and your neighborhood. Ponder these things as we continue on.........!

What has caused the American system to go wrong in such a organic way? The first crucial fact is the existence of a universal sense of powerlessness. We seem to be living in a society that no one created and that no one wants. The feeling of powerlessness extends even to the inhabitants of executive offices. Yet, paradoxically, it is also a fact that we have available to us the means to begin coping with virtually all the problems that beset us. Most people would initially deny this, but reflection shows how true it is. We know what causes crime and social disorder, and what can be done to eliminate those causes. We know the steps that can be taken to create greater economic equality. We are in possession of techniques to fashion and preserve more livable cities and environments. Our problems are vast, but so is our store of techniques; it is simply not being put to use.
The American crisis, then, seems clearly to be related to an inability to act. But what is the cause of this paralysis? Why, in the face of every warning, have we been unable to act? Why have we not used our resources more wisely and justly? We tell ourselves that social failure comes down to a individual moral failure; we must have the will to act; we must first find concern and compassion in our hearts.

But this diagnosis is not good enough. It is contradicted by the experience of powerlessness that is encountered by so many people today. In 1968 a majority of the people certainly wanted peace, but they could not turn their individual wills into action by society. It is not that we do not will action, but that we are unable to act, unable to put existing knowledge to use. Is something wrong with the machinery of society? It apparently no longer works, or we no longer know how to make it work.

If we seek to explain the American crisis in terms of obsolete structure, we might find an illustration in the ideal and the machinery of free speech. The ideal or principle is that every opinion must be expressed freely in order that the truth be arrived at. But the machinery for carrying out this ideal was designed for a very different society than ours, a society of small villages, town meetings, and face-to-face discussions. The First Amendment furnishes no workable means for the public to be adequately informed about complex issues. News is cut down into commodity by the mass media, a staccato piece of show business, and no one who only watches television and reads a typical newspaper could possibly know enough to be an intelligent voter. The vital decisions of the private sector of the economy receive even less adequate coverage and reporting. Moreover, the media systematically deny any fundamentally different or dissenting point of view a chance to be heard at all------it is simply kept off the air and out of the newspapers. The opinion that does get on television is commercially sponsored and thus heavily subsidized by government tax policies; the opinion that is not allowed is sometimes heavily penalized by the same tax laws, as advertising is tax deductible; conservation advertising may not be. In short, our machinery for free speech is hopelessly ineffectual in the light of the way society is organized today, and this illustrates the plight of most of our democratic machinery which has not adapted to changing realities.

Hello Islandboy,

I think that the entire world is in crisis - all for the same reason - turning away from God.

I remember the 60s well and the talk about utopias that don't exist. The only utopia will be the one established by Jesus Christ after His Second Coming - His Rule and Reign over the earth. The Christian utopia is the Heavenly Kingdom and the Real Citizenship in Heaven for Eternity.

Mankind usually makes a mess out of social experiments. I think there is a constant - the further away from God - the bigger the mess. We are currently watching societies around the world not just turning their backs on God - but also mocking Him. Sadly, I think we are witnessing the prelude to the Tribulation Period. I say "sadly" because most of the world is lost. I don't think there is much time left for mankind to turn back toward God. I'll just give thanks that we have had the opportunity and freedom to share the Gospel of the Grace of God with the world, and many are still accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. I firmly believe that many will try to stop this outreach soon - even in our own part of the world. In terms of rights and freedoms, it appears that we're headed in the wrong direction - both for individuals and societies. The time may come soon when the only free speech is that approved of by the ruling elite - the PARTY.

Love In Christ,
Tom

Tom, I agree completely with what you have written. There will never be a utopia created by people as for the most part most people refuse to get along with each other, refuse to have good manners, refuse to respect their elders. Crime has no real consequences and discipline is out the window. However, this book touches on some of these issues and I found some of the contents a worthwhile read.

Re: (can I continue?)
Sometimes I have been known to say something out of turn that I live to regret. As a friend of mine, a good Christian says of her self "there are days I don't like myself to much and I guess this is one of them." But she always says also that she is not perfect, that only the good Lord is perfect. So in times like this I ask for forgivenness and pray to the Lord, to help me mend my ways.

Quote from: islandboy on November 29, 2009, 08:33:06 PM

Of course it's okay. My post didn't hint otherwise. I was just making a comment on the thread, but this will be my last one for any of your posts.

Love In Christ,
Tom

Quote from: islandboy on November 30, 2009, 09:33:25 AM

Tom, Please forgive me for my comment. I did not mean to imply that your comment was anything other than a comment. I welcome your comments. It saddens my heart to think that you will never comment again on my posts. I just wanted to be sure that it was all right to continue on in this section on this topic, as it is in a sense a discussion on polical thought as well, but since it is a book I put it here. Please reconsider. I am sorry. :-[ :'(

I viewed this in light of a previous incident where you called me a "know it all" for making a comment in one of your threads. Maybe I also jumped to conclusions, but I viewed this incident and definitely the last one as contempt for me and an embarrassing hint that you don't want me commenting in your threads. At least this incident wasn't as embarrassing as the last one. I don't like to walk on egg-shells, but I will reconsider at some point in the future.

In the meantime, post what you want to. We'll make it clear if something violates the forum rules.

Love In Christ,
Tom

Quote from: islandboy on November 30, 2009, 02:38:39 PM

Tom, I have done all I can to say I am sorry for the comment. It was not said out of contempt. As for the other comment, that was a long time ago and I tried to make amends for that as well. If you can not forgive me then, there is nothing left to say here. The comment was not questioning your words or meaning. I had some doubts in my own mind about continuing on with this review about the book and maybe that thought was in my mind when I ask you the question. I am broken-hearted over this.

I have already forgiven you, and I don't hold grudges. So, let's try to put this behind us and move on.

Love In Christ,
Tom

As a mass phenomenon, consciousness is formed by the underlying economic and social conditions. Culture and government interact with consciousness; they are its products but they also help to form it. While consciousness is the creator of any social system, it can lag behind a system, once created, and even be manipulated by that system. Lag and manipulation are factors that produce a consciousness characterized by unreality. If we believe in free enterprise, but the nation has become an interlocking corporate system, we are living in unreality as the victims of lag, we are powerless to cope with the existing corporate system.

To show how this worked out for America, and to show the true meaning of the new generation, we have attempted to classify three general types of consciousness. One was formed in the nineteenth century, the second in the first half of this century, the third is just emerging.

The three categories are, of course, highly impressionistic and arbitrary; they make no pretense to be scientific. And, since each type of consciousness is a construct, we would not expect any real individual to exhibit in symmetrical perfection all the characteristics of one type of consciousness.

The concept of consciousness gives us the elements from which we can fashion an argument about what has happened and is happening to America. For the chaos we have just described is not chaos at all, but part of a coherent pattern of history, values, and thought. In the paragraphs that follow, we set forth the logic that emerges from behind the crisis of our contemporary life.
The great question of these times is how to live in and with a technological society; what mind and what way of life can preserve man's humanity and his very existence against the domination of the forces he has created. This question is the root of the American crisis, beneath all the immediate issues of lawlessness, and war. It is this question to which American's new generation is beginning to discover an answer, an answer based on a renewal of life that carries the hope of restoring us to our sources and ourselves.

At the opening of the industrial era, western society underwent a major change of values in which scientific technique, materialism, and the market system became ascendant over other, more humanistic values. Although the contradiction was not recognized at the time, these industrial values were inconsistent with the democratic and spiritual ideals of the new American nation, and they soon began to undermine these American ideals.
every stage of human civilization is accompanied by, and also influenced by, a consciousness. When civilization changes slowly, the existing consciousness is likely to be in substantial accord with underlying material realities. But industrialism brought sudden uprooting and rapidly accelerating rate of change. Consciousness then began to lag increasingly far behind reality, or to lose touch with a portion of reality altogether. Today a large segment of the American people still have a consciousness which was appropriate to the nineteenth-century society of small towns, face-to-face relationships, and individual economic enterprise. Another large segment of the people have a consciousness formed by organized technological and corporate society, but far removed from the realities of human needs.

In the second half of the twentieth century, this combination of an anachronistic consciousness characterized by myth, and an inhuman consciousness dominated by the machine-rationality of the Corporate State, have, between them, proved utterly unable to manage, guide, or control the immense apparatus of technology and organization that America has built. In consequence, this apparatus of power has become a mindless juggernaut, destroying the environment, obliterating human values, and assuming domination over the lives and minds of its subjects. To the injustices and exploitation of the nineteenth century, the Corporate State has added depersonalization, meaninglessness, and repression, until it has threatened to destroy all meaning and all life.

Faced with this threat to their very existence, the inhabitants of America have begun, as a matter of urgent biological necessity, to develop a new consciousness appropriate to today's realities and therefore capable of mastering the apparatus of power and bringing it under human control. This new consciousness is based on the present state of technology, and could not have arisen without it. And it represents a higher, transcendant form of reason: no lesser consciousness could permit us to exist, given the present state of our technology.

This transcendent reason has made its first appearance among the youth of America. It is the product of the contradictions, failures, and exigencies of the Corporate State itself, not of any force external to the State. It is now in the process of rapidly spreading to wider and wider segments of youth, and by degrees to older people, as they experience the recovery of self that marks conversion to a different consciousness. The new consciousness is also in the process of revolutionizing the structure of our society. It does not accomplish this by direct political means, but by changing culture and the quality of individual lives, which in turn change politics and, ultimately, structure.

When the new consciousness has achieved its revolution and rescued us from destruction, it must go about the task of learning how to live in a new way. This new way of life presupposes all that modern science can offer. It tells us how to make technology and science work for, and not against, the interests of man. This new way of life proposes a concept of work in which quality, dedication, and excellence are preserved, but work is nonalienated, is the free choice of each person, is integrated into a full and satisfying life, and expresses and affirms each individual being.
The new way of life makes both possible and necessary a culture that is nonartifical and nonalienated, a form of community in which love, respect, and a mutual search for wisdom replace the competition and separation of the past, and a liberation of each individual in which he is enabled to grow toward the highest possibilities of the human spirit.

CONSCIOUSNESS I, LOSS OF REALITY

To the American people of 1789, their nation promised a new way of life: each individual a free man; each having the right to seek his own happiness; a republican form of government in which people would be sovereign; and no arbitrary power over people's lives. Less than two hundred years later, almost every aspect of the dream has been lost.

Every form of consciousness is a reaction to a way of life that existed before, and an adaptation to new realities. In the case of what we call Consciousness I, there was a liberation from the constraints of class status and the settled village life that still existed in the old world. Consciousness I had its moment of exhilaration. Facing a new and vast land, a new freedom, and seemingly limitless riches, its reality centered on the truth of the individual effort. America would prosper if people proved energetic and hard working. The crucial thing was to release the individual energy so long held back by rigid social customs and hierarchical forms. Each newly sovereign individual could be the source of his own achievement and fulfillment. One worked for oneself, not for society. But enough individual hard work made the wheels turn. Consciousness I focused on self, but it saw self in harsh and narrow terms, accepting much self-repression as the essential concomitant of effort, allowing self to be cut off from the larger community of man, and from nature (defined as an enemy) as well. This uniquely American consciousness expressed the realities of the new nation.

To the people who came here, America represented a new beginning. They had been granted freedom from the past----a second chance. They believed that the earth belongs to the living, and that they need not be bound by traditions, customs, or authority from other lands. America would be, for them, a new community. They had an idealistic view of what man could be in the new community. The American dream was not, at least in the beginning, a rags-to-riches type of narrow materialism.

Here was a search for adventure and challenge, for man-in-nature, for the nonspecialized individual able to do many different kinds of work. What sort of man was the hero of this new land? R.W.B. Lewis tells us that the hero was not worldly, cunning, overly learned, or intellectual. His triumph would be due to the ordinary virtues----plainness, character, honesty, hard work. The innocent was the pioneer, the settler, the westerner, the boy who makes good. He was a moral being, and ultimately it would be his goodness, not his knowingness, that would triumph. Emerson, in his essays on self-reliance and politics, put his emphasis not on the forms of government but on individual character---spiritual and moral---as the basic source of the national being. The belief that character of the people is what ultimately matters retains its strength to the present day. But innocence has its great drawbacks, as America was eventually to discover. When it encounters the more worldly (view), it risks disaster.

There was another side to the American character---the harsh side of self-interest, competitiveness, suspicion of others. Each individual would go it alone, refusing to trust his neighbors, seeing another man's advantage as his own loss, seeing the world as a rat race with no rewards to losers. Underlying this attitude was the assumption that "human nature" is fundamentally bad, and that a struggle against his fellow men is man's natural condition. "There'll always be aggression and a struggle for power, and there'll always be a pecking order," says Consciousness I. There is a deep isolation and suspicion of others in Consciousness I and more faith in winning than in love. The belief in self-interest led to the corruption of American life and government by venality, dishonestly, the sale of offices, favors and votes, all under the theory that each man has a right to pursue his opportunities wherever he finds them, that "the game" is winning and getting rich and powerful, and nothing else, and no higher community exists beyond each individual's selfish appraisal of his interests.

But it was not merely corruption that undermined the America of Consciousness I. Consciousness I proved unable to change with the changing realities of America. Today it still sees America as if it were a world of small towns and simple virtues. invention and machinery and production are equivalent of progress; material success is the road to happiness; nature is beautiful but must be conquered and put to use. Competition is the law of nature and man; life is a harsh pursuit of individual self-interest. Consciousness I believes that the American dream is still possible, and that success is determined by character, morality, hard work, and self-denial. It does not accept the fact that organizations predominate over individuals in American life, or that social problems are due to something other than bad character, or that the possibility of individual success, based on ability and enterprise, is largely out of date. Consciousness I still thinks that the least government governs best. It votes for a candidate who seems to possess personal moral virtues and promises a return to earlier conditions of life, law and order, rectitude, and lower taxes. It believes that the present American crisis requires reducing government programs and expenditures, greater reliance on private business, forcing people now on welfare to go to work, taking stern measures to put down subversion at home and threats from abroad, and, above all, a general moral reawakening in the people. Today Consciousness I includes a great variety of Americans: farmers, owners of small businesses, immigrants who retain their sense of nationality, AMA-type doctors, many members of Congress, gangsters, Republicans, and "just plain folks."
In the second half of the twentieth century the beliefs of Consciousness I are drastically at variance with reality. But they are held in a stubborn, belligerent, opinionated way against all contrary evidence.

The great problem concerning Consciousness I is this: it is understandable how Consciousness I led to corruption, inequality and self-interest. But how did it lose contact with reality? How did it lose the ability to comprehend, or to govern?
American history, as it is usually taught, makes today's reality of failure and crisis a mystery and a paradox. After two hundred years of brilliant, unmatched progress, how can it be possible that we are beset by vast problems and desperate impoverishment? After watching the steady improvement of all our institutions, the development and preservation of our Constitution, and the limitless expansion of individual opportunity, why do our institutions, our personal lives, the whole character of America suddenly seem changed beyond recognition? And if Americans had always been the most independent and self-reliant people, the most jealous of their liberties, how have they permitted themselves to be reduced to the impotent "little man" of today, dominated by public and private power?

What was it in our history that Consciousness I failed to refused to see? Where was it that the American dream began to be eroded? Where did democratic values run into trouble, where and to whom did the little man begin to lose his power and independence? What caused the transformation of America? What were the new realities that went unacknowledged so long that Consciousness I was left as the repository and supporter of myth?

Soon after Americans began their experiment in a new community, the assumptions upon which the nation was based were threatened by the rise of two powerful forces, worldwide in influence: the competitive market economy and scientific technique. The forces came as benefactors (as in large part they were), offering men in all countries the possibility of liberation from static toil. The market system transforms all men into competitors in order to get them to be more aggressively productive; it does this by defining man's labor, his environment, and his culture as commodities which can be valued in money and exchanged for money, and by permitting "successful" competitors to accumulate "profit" and "surplus" in return for the exploitation of labor and resources. Scientific technique is a philosophy concerned with the basic values of life; it asserts that all activities should be carried on in that manner which is scientifically or technically "best" and "most efficient." It is technique which dictates specialization of labor, the use of machinery, systems of organization, and mass production. These forces threatened the most fundamental aspects of the American dream: the physical-human environment that made possible the pursuit of happiness, and the form of government that rejected arbitrary power.

Prior to the coming of the industrial revolution, most people were born, lived, and died in the same place, among people they knew and saw every day. There was no separation between work and living. Ties to the community were strong and seldom severed; each man lived within a circle which did not depend upon his own action, began before him, and lasted beyond him. Food and shelter were communal enterprises; no one grew fat or starved alone. The scale of everything was smaller: tools, houses, land, villages. There were no large, impersonal institutions----apartment houses, factories, or hospitals. Scale and activity were influenced by nature (for example, time was measured by the daily sun and the seasons). Laws were administered by visible local people. Most important of all, man's economic activity was rooted in, and subordinate to, his social system. That is, there were no purely economic or scientific "laws." Customs or religion---communal traditions, in short---were the regulators of life. Play, art, ritual, ceremony, and the spiritual were not separated from the other aspects of life; they were an integral part of the whole. Activity of all kinds was rooted in folk and religious culture which developed "irrationally" and without conscious design, in response to human needs. This world, both in Europe and in frontier America, was destroyed in the making of our modern world.

The impact of technology, market, and capitalism is written on our landscape, our culture, our faces. Perhaps the landscape shows it most vividly. In all societies prior to the modern, no matter how diverse in other ways, there existed an essential harmony between the people and the land, a harmony in which nature was not violently altered or violated. Modern society makes war on nature. A competitive market uses nature as a commodity to be exploited---turned into profit. Technology sees nature as an element to be conquered, regulated, controlled.
In England the two forces brought about the destruction of the countryside, the raising of hideous and unhealthy slums and mill towns. When the forces seized the once beautiful eastern states of America, they left forests denuded; rivers, harbors, and seacoasts polluted; the cities sterile; the land ripped by highways, high tension wires, and suburban swaths. They left little of the country unblighted, not even the miraculous and seemingly limitless beauty of California where today the devastation seems most wanton and cruel of all.

What happened to the land also happened, in Europe and America, to the basic social fabric. The village community was broken as men were forced to seek jobs in factories or cities. Family ties shattered for the same reason. The separated apartment replaced the village and the family home. The bonds of affection and concern between men were broken by the harsh imperatives of competition. As pecuniary relationships replaced ties of tradition, custom, religion, and respect, men obeyed authority only when forced to by economic necessity or penal laws, and in consequence modern crime became the obverse face of society. Man was uprooted from his supporting physical and social environment and, like a polar bear in a zoo, he would from then on suffer an alienated existence.

The most profound impact of the commodity system and technology was on man's own individual being. The visible ravaging of the land and the social fabric was matched by an invisible ravaging of man within. Man was not merely alienated from environment and society, he was alienated from his own functions and needs. His principal activity--work--ceased to be self-expression. He felt little of the normal satisfactions of work; he was a mere cog in production; his tasks no longer expressed his abilities. Man's most basic activity was dominated by the most impersonal of masters--money. Man became alienated from himself as money, not inner needs, and increasingly his wants became subject to outside manipulation. Losing both his work-essence and his need--essence, man was no longer a unique individual but an extension of the production--consumption system.

The second effect of industrialism was on the American political and economic system. It is worth recalling the nation's constitutional scheme. The central idea was individual sovereignty. The framers of the Constitution were men who deeply feared power, believed that any and all power corrups, and rejected the idea of any form of power over individual lives. They laid their strictures against all the types of power they knew about or had experienced. The plan was to divide power, limit it, and subject its use to many sorts of safeguards. All power was limited to that specifically granted. Thus the framers showed their conviction that power of any sort was the chief evil that could beset any people. Democracy was also a part of the plan, and with it the concept that the people were the ultimate and only sovereigns, This scheme of government went along with an economic system which at temped to embody the American dream. It sought to make it possible for every American citizen to achieve personal economic independence, ownership of his own land and home, and an opportunity to define and engage in work of his own choosing. Within this plan there was, of course, room for some people to become rich, some to remain rich, and others to remain or become poor. But this was thought necessary for the over-all objective of personal independence. The frontier lay open; opportunity was to be found on all sides; no laws restricted freedom of movement; there was virtually unlimited freedom to define "the pursuit of happiness" in any manner that might seem fulfilling to the individual concerned. It was not so for long. The forces of the market and technique were oblivious to the individual pursuit of happiness.

Consider the factory system, in which technique dictated the organization and specialization of labor, and where the market forced long hours, low wages, and a precarious security. The early miseries of factories have often been recounted; what needs to be seen here is the contrast between the factory system and the ideals concerning independence, for the factory worker was subject to overwhelming power over his life. He was rigidly disciplined. His hours, his conduct, his meals, his clothes, ultimately his friendships and thoughts were all controlled. Cities developed to house factory workers, and the cities demanded a limitation of freedom in living arrangements almost as great as that of the factory itself. Of course, no one "needed" to work in a factory or live in a city. But gradually, as the decades passed, the alternatives narrowed. Not everyone could any longer be a pioneer, settler, farmer, or individual craftsman.

For employees, whether of a factory, a business concern, or a large-scale farm, sovereign independence largely ceased to exist in practice. The power exercised over their lives was not constitutionally limited, or divided, or subject to checks and balances; no bill of rights or court protected them. No democracy existed for the employee; he was not consulted about any decision, however vital to his own life. Nor was there , for the vast majority, any hope of success; their hopes were limited to the chance to find a place within a powerful structure, and although a few did rise, the dream was realized only for those few. What was supposed to be a chance for all was now statistically impossible for most. Even more drastic, perhaps, was the loss of the pursuit of self-fulfillment. For the employee could no longer define his own quest. The kind of work he did, the manner in which he did his work, his opportunities for expression, leisure, and play were all subject to external power.
The discipline to which the worker fell subject was a harsh one. He worked long hours which absorbed nearly all of his time and energy. He was cut off from fresh air, nature, and beauty, and confined to a machine-interior. His housing was little more than an extension of the factory itself, barracks jammed together without amenities of any kind. His movements were closely regulated on the job, and what was "free" became a conventionalized movement to and from the factory, plus the motions of eating, sleeping, procreating at home. The worker was deprived of his role as a father, and this function turned over to wives and to public schools.

Independence was replaced by a grumbling servility; the worker must submit to the authority of the bosses; all sense of power and potency passed out of his hands. His mind was not wanted, nor his judgement, nor his imagination. His sense of design, of rhythm, of music, of craftsmanship were rejected. Boldness, courage, leadership, fun, play, kindness, affection, had no place in the discipline of the factory or the office.
The authority of the industrial rulers was different from the rule of the southern slave owners, but in some ways it required an equally great submission, an equally great loss of human possibility. We have often spoken of the industrial worker as a wage slave. But this imposes a narrowly economic view on his condition. His mind, his spirit, his personality, his human functions were chained as well, and, like the sad, yearning, awkward, speechless monster created by technology in the film Frankenstein, he was irrevocably cut off from the circle of humanity.

Growth of power over individuals was matched by the growth of power on a vaster stage. After the Civil War the country entered a period of business mergers, consolidations, and monoplies. This resulted in a gradual destruction of the free market, and the assumption of corporate power to plan the economy, allocate resources, divide areas of business activity, fix prices, limit entry of new businesses, and (although this was still far off) control the buyers themselves. A small group in steel and railroads, another group in oil, another in finance, became rulers of nation-states, controlling economic forces, in some ways as tightly as any socialist country has attempted to do.

The power that now was assumed, from regulation of the factory worker to regulation of the market, was power that had not previously existed in anyone's hands in America, if anywhere in the world. Thus it was not a seizure from someone else, but the subjugation of a previously free people and a previously free economy. It was, in the most literal and true sense, a conquest of the American nation.
The new lords arrayed themselves in the trappings of royalty. Monarchical homes were built, with furnishing suited for, and sometimes actually purchased from, the European aristocracy. The library-offices of J. P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick, both still perserved in New York, resemble nothing so much as two imperial throne rooms. And the American language quickly recognized the realities of the loss of democracy; there were copper "kings" and railroad "barons," an American aristocracy. The American people, who had fled the monarchies of Europe, had only a few decades of freedom before they were conquered by a set of autocrats wielding, if anything, greater power than the old.

But these were not merely the triumphs of certain successful individuals over their fellow men. From a longer perspective we can see that the seizure was also a triumph of impersonal forces--the forces of organization, efficiency, technology, planning; the forces of modern rationalism and scientific management. John D. Rockefeller was as impersonal as a mathematical formula--he was the embodiment of technique, efficiency, and, above all, of economic planning. He was the apostle of collectivism, ending individualism in the oil industry and replacing it with a centralized, planned, collective enterprise. Of course he and others were rapacious, ambitious, ruthless; but these qualities--and even more so the individual buccaneering and piracy that characterized the great age of robber barons--obscured the longer-range thrust of the times. The cold and calm Rockefeller, a true business scientist, expresses what was happening far better than some frontiersman-turned-millionaire who kept his vitality and his largely irrational ways.

The true ethic that transformed America was not the ethic of piracy and rapacity standing by its self, but that of power joined to repression and order. Organization and efficiency repressed unruly, undisciplined life. It substituted the clean, spare, inhuman direction of affairs for random, spontaneous burgeoning of life that seemed so typical of frontier America. The forces of market exploitation and technology, active through them, cut down democracy, independence, and the pursuit of happiness, and fostered instead a new managerial order, a hierarchy of power and privilege that replaced communal values with antisocial "success" and inhuman science.
Looking back, it can be seen that the forces loosed on the world at the beginning of the modern era had the potential to create all kinds of troubles which beset us today: lawlessness and disorder, because the basis for social order was destroyed; destruction of environment and culture by exploitation; threats to democracy and liberty, because man was subject to the impersonal lordship of an economic and technological system; loss of values as all values became subject to manipulation. If Americans were to preserve their dream of a republican form of government and individual economic sovereignty, as well as the environment of their lives, they would have needed to understand the forces that were threatening them, and take action to assure that these forces worked for, not against, the American dream.

Consciousness I was unwilling or unable to comprehend the transformation of America. Innocence and optimism have one basic failing: they have no fundamental depth. Americans (became) obsessed by the need to move-move-move. They tore down buildings before the building could acquire meaning and tradition; they allowed commerce and engineering to dominate principles of architecture and city planning; they were uprooted from everything. In consequence they prevented anything interior or private from forming, anything traditional from being carried along, and all is change made individuality increasingly impossible to maintain. The momentum of change swept the people along so rapidly, with so little chance to become individually self-conscious, that people were cut off from their own history. Americans were a people who had lost their identity. Their past traditions had vanished into the melting pot, their present was in flux, and no repose or reflection existed to permit the formulation of a concept of self. Innocence, self-interest, and shallowness combined in Consciousness I to produce a massive flight from responsibility and from awareness. There is a quality of willful ignorance in American life---ignorance of existing injustices, such as the treatment of the black minority, ignorance of the causes of social problems, ignorance of the world.

Americans demanded the superficial "normalcy" of the Twenties or the Fifties; they were willing to see the news about their government come to them in the form of tabloid or television entertainment; they tolerated ignorance and incompetence in high office; and when something went wrong, it was childishly blamed on "them." Politics early became the realm of untruth, and it has stayed that way ever since. That politician was elected who painted the most untrue picture of America, who took us farthest from the changes that were actually taking place in America.
Although many writers saw these aspects of the American character, few realized what we are now able to see--how disastrous the shortcomings of Consciousness I would prove to be. Americans have no understanding of the dangers of industrialism, they possess no set of values to oppose those of industrialism; no culture, tradition, social order, or inner knowledge of self by which to guide industrial values and choose among them. Moreover, Americans could not rise to a level of community responsibility in the face of the dangers of industrialism. Divided up into individual units defined by self-interest, they had no way of thinking for the common good, or thinking ahead, and the anti-intellectual and sometimes childish tendency of Americans not to think at all allowed them to rest easy in this posture.

Consciousness I has been, and continues to be, utterly unable to come to terms with the realities of private power created by industrialism. Although opposition to power is part of the essential American idea, Americans have watched corporations acquire power to plan the economy, to decide what is to be produced, to fix prices, to regulate essential services, including the distribution of news and information (so vital to the working of a democracy), and to regulate the lives of workers, without taking effectual steps to cope with any of it. Antitrust, collective bargaining, and utility regulation were some of the measures eventually taken, but, as we shall see in the (coming) chapters, they were not effective. Consciousness I could not grasp, or could not accept, the reality that the individual was no longer competing against the success of other individuals, but against a system. It could not understand that "private property" in the hands of a corporation was a synonym for quasi-governmental power, far different from the property of an individual. It could not understand the crucial point that collective action against corporate power would not have been a step toward collectivization, but an effort to preserve democracy in a society that had already been collectivized.

Consciousness I also failed to recognize that private production was not paying its costs. For example, a manufacturer would dump its wastes into a stream but pay nothing on account of the pollution, leaving the public to share in the costs but not in the profits. The manufacturer fought against having to pay for accidental injuries to workers, although these were statistically predictable, leaving the costs to be borne, sometimes for a whole lifetime, by the unfortunate individual and his family. Unemployment, old-age insecurity, and inadequate education for an advancing technology were part of the price of manufacture, and should have been rectified through taxation. But the relationship between the corporation and society was not recognized.
Most characteristic of all, Consciousness I insisted on seeing the ills of industrialism not for what they were, but as moral problems. If a given number of automobiles are crowded onto a highway, there will be a predictable number of accidents. The moral approach tries to deal with this as a question of individual driver responsibility. It stresses safe driving and criminal penalties. Yet reduction of the accident rate is demonstrably a problem in engineering. Similarly, urban crime is seen as a moral and law enforcement problem, although crime is a product of identifiable environmental factors. The moralistic approach to public welfare is similar. Over and over again, Consciousness I sought scapegoats rather than face the forces of industrialism directly.

If the people would not dominate the forces that were changing their country, then those forces would dominate the people. Consciousness I, losing its own roots but holding tight to its myths, was ready game for manipulation by the organized forces of society. These Americans could be sold a colonial war in the name of national honor. They could be sold hundreds of billions of dollar's worth of military technology in the name of American independence. They could be sold governmental irresponsibility in the name of the old American virtue of thrift. They could be sold an ignorant and incapable leader because he looked like the embodiment of American virtues. Worst of all, perhaps, they could be sold artificial pleasures and artificial dreams to replace the high human and spiritual adventure that had once been America.

It would seem that given the way our government is now, compared to the time of the great depression, we have come full circle. Socialism again is knocking at the door. People are in dispare; lack of jobs and dwindling money supplies, scare tactics, more big government take overs. Do the people have the willpower to fight this? Or are we too weak and spineless to stand up and defend the United States of America.

I had a thought the other day that if when churches in America are threatened by lawsuits from anti-American groups or in many cases one person and they drop their traditions out of fear of loss, would it not be prudent if every church in American stood up and behind those churches, i would bet the anti-anything crowd would back down in a hurry. The same goes for towns being threatened or anything that removes the rights of the American people and the words of God, or our Constitution, from our lives. Now wouldn't that send a message loud and clear about who we are and what we believe in.

Chapter III --- The Failure of Reform
We have described the major forces that transformed America, and the consciousness that determined the nation's inability to respond. Now we turn to a third element in the development of the contemporary American state: efforts at reform, their failure, and the growth of power that resulted. Although we will mention some reforms of the populist and Progressive-Wilsonian eras, the New Deal will be the chief focus.
Since we left our account of the main forces of industrialism at some point in the nineteenth century, we should take note of how they continued during the period of reform. The primary trends we have discussed--erosion of the physical and social environment, and the growth of "private" power over the economy and over individual lives--continued at an accelerating rate, and their impact became vastly greater. The competitive market, however, was gradually replaced by something more consolidated and regulated, and both the labor market and the product market were enveloped in controls, most of them "private."
Most reform legislation in England, on the European continent, and in the United States falls in this general category. That is, the legislation tries to protect the society from the harshest effects of industrialism by such means as minimum wages for workers, prohibition of child labor, and industrial safety laws.

Beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, America became deeply divided between those people who held fast to Consciousness I and those who began to seek governmental and social reform and, beyond that, a new way of life based on the realities of the twentieth century. Perhaps the reformers never achieved a majority. But they did gain enough power to change the structure of our institutions, and to begin the creation of a new consciousness. These changes were commenced with great hope and idealism. Ultimately, however, they failed to produce what their originators wanted. They produced not a reformed democracy, but an even greater domination by industrialism. A discussion of American efforts at reform and social control must start with the various diagnoses that were made of the ills of society, which supply at least some of the assumptions under which the reforms proceeded. The presumed causes of America's troubles can be summed up simply: the evils of unlimited competition, and abuses by those with economic power.
In literature by Edward Bellamy, he likened American society to a great coach in which a privileged few were riding in comfort but others were outside, desperately clinging or pushing, driven by the lash of hunger. He pictured the bitter antagonism between people, caused by competition for jobs and the evils of gross inequality and social injustice. Upton Sinclair (in his writings), effectively showed the second half of the picture in his description of the meat-packing industry. He pictured corporate giants turning out unhealthy, adulterated meat products that were a menace to the public, and at the same time ruthlessly oppressing their employees, who lived in perpetual fear, insecurity, and misery. Abuses of the system, consequences of greed, irresponsibility, and extreme individualism, were the primary target of the reformers.

Even Ida Tarbell's far more structurally oriented study, A History of the Standard Oil Company, treated Rockefeller as a destroyer of what she considered the basically valid competitive market. And Jacob Riis, who showed that the city slums were an "urban problem" many decades ago, treated slums as an evil that could be corrected by vigorous action. The fight against abuses would be the major theme of reform.
But these deeper artistic perceptions never became political perceptions. Reform began with highly specific efforts: laws regulating unhealthy practices in the meat industry, prohibition of monopolies and piratical methods of competition, laws against railroad favoritism, provision of maximum hours for workers in certain employments, regulation of dishonest advertising. The basic theme was simple: economic power, where it has been too severely abused, must be subjected to "the public interest." This meant that government would keep an eye on the consequences of the economic system; when these got too bad, it would apply regulation (although self-regulation was always preferred). It was a moralistic system, dealing with crime but not its causes; in this sense it was typically American.
Franklin D. Roosevelt stated this moralistic approach, and also the "public interest" philosophy that was later to dominate, in his 1933 and 1937 inaugurals.

In 1933, after describing the chaos of the depression, he said: "Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and incompetence........They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers......there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of a callous and selfish wrongdoing.....we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good."
In his second inaugural address, FDR summed up the themes of his program:......we must find practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men.....We refuse to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster.....we have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public's government....We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics........in the long run economic morality pays.....This new understanding undermines the old admiration of worldly success as such. We are beginning to abandon our tolerance of the abuse of power by those who betray for profit the elementary decencies of life.

It was a diagnosis of selfish men, people left out of the system, the American dream somehow misused.
The New Deal brought together representatives of the major attitudes in the American reform movement, including those committed to the populist-Progressive-Wilson programs and those with far more advanced ideas. Speaking generally, there was a group which wanted to regulate the abuses of capitalism, one which wanted to redistribute power in society, particularly by giving recognition to the labor movement, and another (the most radical) which wanted a substantial amount of government economic planning and redistribution of wealth. The ideologically mixed and highly pragmatic New Deal program that emerged contained four main aspects.

1. Regulatory.
The New Deal tried to protect the system against abuse by creating such devices as the NRA (fair competition), the SEC (honesty and prudence in the securities market), and the Robinson-Patman Act (destructive pricing).

2. Balancing of Power.
Organized labor was given an opportunity to become a counterpower to business, and other major groups were encouraged in an effort to substitute pluralism for sheer business power.

3. Security and Welfare.
A floor was placed under the competitive labor market, through unemployment compensation, welfare, and social security, to provide a minmum "freedom from want" to the losers in the competitive struggle.

4. Radical Programs.
A beginning was made toward affirmative social-economic activity by government such as TVA, public housing programs, public works, and federal subsidies.

Beyond these particular programs the New Deal consisted of an attempt to further certain general values. It believed in the rational use of the nation's resources through organization, cooperation, planning, and regulation: ultimately it believed in reason. It believed in the maximum utilization of technology and science. It believed in a meritocracy of equal opportunity and ability, unencumbered by irrational forms of prejudice and discrimination. It believed that private business should be carried on privately, if possible, but ultimately must be subject to the public good. It believed the best route to reform to be through a strong affirmative government manned by the best educated, most intelligent, most expert men who could be found, devising and carrying out programs in the best interests of the people.
What the New Deal did was to create, in furtherance of these objectives, and to carry out its reforms, a new public state, matching in size and power the private Corporate State. For each piece of regulatory legislation a large, specialized government agency was established, and at the same time the regular executive departments of the government were greatly expanded. This physical growth was accompanied by a growth in power. The Supreme Court gave the government sweeping new constitutional authority---virtually a free hand, in place of the original constitutional idea of expressly limited powers. The dominating concept was that all private activity, individual or corporate, was subject to restriction, licensing, or regulation "in the public interest," meaning, for reasons based on the good of the whole nation.

The public state was managerial and administrative in nature; its values were rationality, order, and organization. It saw no evil in technology or power as such, so long as they were in "the public interest." In a sense the public state was government in the shape of technology.
What were the successes and failures of the New Deal? The question has implications far beyond the New Deal itself: it goes to the ability of an industrial nation to substitute rational management for the unregulated development of industrialism; it is a test of whether self-protection of society is possible, whether an administered state is possible, and whether the New Deal--liberal theory of government balanced against the private sector makes sense. The evidence is of course open to question in many respects, but it is in the nature of the problem of an administered state that laboratory experiments are impossible.
The first thing we might observe is the phenomenon of tremendous lag in American governmental actions. The reforms of the New Deal were mostly responses to ills that had been diagnosed many decades earlier. The Social Security Act, one of the most important and most characteristic New Deal reforms, looked back fifty years to Edward Bellamy's vision of the coach driven by hunger. But the solution the Social Security Act was far less comprehensive than what Bellamy himself said was needed.

Similarly the Deal welfare program was far less than Bellamy's proposal that each man receive support from society on one basis alone: "because he is a man." It is only today, more than eighty years after Bellamy, that such a proposal is beginning to be sought (over much opposition) on the political scene. Thus, most of the New Deal came too late---far, far, too late. By 1933 the problems were so different that the programs of Bellamy's era, if enacted, might either fail altogether or even do more harm than good.
Lag is quite plainly an inherent problem in any attempt at social management. There is creaky political machinery to be set in motion, stubborn and powerful vested interests to be overcome. Somebody profits from child labor, from lack of safety in mines. Meanwhile, society keeps on changing. Can government ever be flexible and swift-acting enough to deal with social problems at the same time that they occur? Can it ever act with scientific precision when it must act through the political system? The New Deal, fumbling belatedly with the problems of fifty years earlier, casts some doubt. The New Deal did succeed in coping with the Depression emergency, which might have brought down the whole system, but the system's problems were preserved along with it.
Far greater doubt about reform arises not from lag, but from the shallowness of the New Deal's accomplishments and its failure to follow through. Such radical efforts as redistribution of income, greater public ownership and planning, and programs aimed at improving the quality of life were soon abandoned.

The evils that had crept into the American political system--urban disenfranchisement, disenfranchisement of blacks, gerrymandering, bosses and undemocratic political conventions, oligarchical control of Congress, and newspaper domination of the channels of public opinion--were all left to grow worse. The black was allowed to remain in his outcast status. The tendency of American culture to crass and garish materialism was not checked. It is true that the period of reform was brief and shortly interrupted by international events; Dr. New Deal became Dr. Win-the-War. But it is clear that the New Deal never touched the deeper problems of American life, which continued to grow worse all through the 1930's.
A crucial test of the New Deal is how it dealt with the fundamental problems of industrialism. With respect to power, it is apparent that the reforms did not roll back private power. Instead, they sought to require that private power now be exercised according to standards set by the legislatures as well as standards set by corporations. The legislative standards were those of "reasonableness": only reasonable prices, or reasonable restraints of trade. But technology and corporate power, over the long run, do not have to be "unreasonable" to do their work. Unreasonableness was the hallmark of the early buccaneers. In the long run, technology had to be reasonable, and thus curbs on human unreason were in aid of the long-run assumption of power by more efficient organizations.

Neither the New Deal reforms nor the earlier Progressive reforms restored any power to individuals, or limited the power that could be applied against individuals. Originally, individuals lost power to private organizations. What the reforms did, so far as individuals were concerned, was to take some of that lost power and turn it over to "public" organizations--government, labor unions, farmer's groups. Nothing came back to the people. If anything, the public organizations gained greater power over individuals than the private organizations had held previously. And the private power remained, in addition. It was regulated, but subject to regulation, it still was there. What reform assumed was that its power would be "good" for individuals, whereas the previous power had been "bad."

The New Deal furthered the creation of a hierarchical, elitist society whose principles contrasted with those of democracy and equality. Public and private government were seen as the province of the "best" and "ablest" and "most expert" or "professional" men, the most knowledgeable, the best educated, the specialists, and above all, the lawyers, who were thought of as the "social engineers" or "policy scientists" who manned the centers of administration. In government and in business, planning and "rational allocation of resources" became key words, placing controls on the consumer market. Legislative and Judaical "interference" with administration was deplored, and the power of elected representatives and stockholders reduced. It was a transfer of power from the man in the street to the man from the "Harvard Law Review"---a transfer that had been taking place gradually for a long time, but now was accelerated, leaving the little man, the ordinary American, more a subject for the plans of others than an actual participant in his own destiny.
On the broader questions of technology and the effects of power, "good" as well as "bad," the New Deal was limited by its diagnosis. None of the great modern problems, such as loss of meaning, loss of community and self, dehumanization of environment, were in any way approached, except to encourage the trends toward making them worse. Assuming that American problems were due to abuse of the system, the New Deal did not question the system itself, nor respond to the darker side of the art of the 1930's. It believed that economic progress and quantitative advance could only be good; most of is rhetoric is about more of everything.
One accomplishment of the New Deal dwarfed all others: the creation of the public state.

The New Deal naturally gave little thought to the dangers of what it was so enthusiastically building, but we may at least raise some questions it failed to raise. What would be the long-range impact of the new public state on the working of the democratic process? How would democracy survive the rule of the expert? What would be the influence of regulation and licensing on personal liberty? How would administrative discretion and bureaucratic authority affect the rule of law? What would be the status of individuals in the new organizations, such as labor unions and the social security--welfare system? And how vulnerable was the structure to capture by special interests? Would the regulated become the regulators and use government machinery to help create restraints of trade? Would the new positive government become a grab bag for those seeking economic favors and special privileges?
The New Deal was our first great attempt at social control; and if in large measure it failed, we can still put it down as a noble experiment, an improvement on the American habit of unreality.
But have we, up to now, offered an adequate explanation for the failures of the New Deal and for the dangerous structure it built? We have neglected the question of consciousness. What role did it play?

Every step the New Deal took encountered the massive, bitter opposition of Consciousness I people. They found their world changing beyond recognition, and instead of blaming the primary forces behind that change, they blamed the efforts at solving the problems. They totally lacked the sophistication necessary to see that a measure such as the Wagner Act might be redressing an existing oppression rather than creating oppression. The businessmen who were the most vocal in their opposition had a pathological hatred of the New Deal, a hatred so intense and personal as to defy analysis. Why this hatred, when the New Deal, in retrospect, seems to have saved the capitalist system? Perhaps because the New Deal intruded irrevocably upon their make-believe, problem-free world in which the pursuit of business gain and self-interest was imagined to be automatically beneficial to all of mankind, requiring of them no additional responsibility whatever. In any event, there was a large and politically powerful number of Americans who never accepted the New Deal even when it benefited them, and used their power whenever they could to cut it back.
What about the major supporters of the New Deal, most notably organized labor, city dwellers, and portions of the South? These are the groups whose support was gained through the catastrophe of the Great Depression. But how committed were they to the New Deal program as a whole?

Looking back, we can see that each was committed only to its own interest, for which it needed the help of the government. The workers needed the Labor Board; the cities needed relief, housing, social security; the South needed the TVA, rural electrification, and farm subsidies. But none of these groups had abandoned an older picture of America save in the one particular that concerned them. Thus we have the spectacle, still to be seen today, of the western rancher who accepts federal aid for his cattle operations and federal aid for his grazing requirements, but bitterly opposes all social programs that do not concern him, and the philosophy that lies behind them. And those political allies of the New Deal, the blue-collar worker, the ethnic groups, the urban poor, were all waiting in line for their chance at the American dream, not for an assigned place in a new managerial state. When they got what they wanted and the Depression was a thing of the past, their enthusiasm for reform waned.
Nor was there any genuine radical consciousness to be found in America. The Communist Party was so tiny, so impotent, so burdened with irrelevant ideology, that it was without significance; nor did any minority, racial, or student group supply a base for radicalism. The New Deal really consisted of an alliance of interest groups, presided over by a narrow ridge of liberal intellectuals who were the main source of the New Deal thinking, the only members of the whole alliance who had any general ideas about America.

Though the liberals were the mainstay of the New Deal, they were not only numerically weak, they were also weak in determination and consciousness. Soon after the New Deal got under way, there was a counterattack by the Right aimed at the New Deal's most outspoken members; the House Un-American Activities Committee and other Red hunters succeeded in hounding from the government many of those with the most energy and creative ideas. For the others, moderation was in order, plus a discreet move into lucrative private life. These liberals were bright and aggressive; the system as it stood promised them rich rewards, and they showed little inclination to take personal risks in order to press for more drastic reforms when, for them at least, the promised land was at hand. The war, by putting other issues to the fore, relieved them of any lingering sense of guilt over their prudence. Thirty years later, it is revealing to note what became of the New Dealers. Nearly all of them took jobs where they served the very interests which were the enemies against which the New Deal fought. Many became highly paid corporate lawyers, using their know-how to help their clients avoid attempts at public regulation. Many others served as executives of large corporations. They adopted the life-styles of wealth, power, and success. They became hostile to radicalism. If their adventure with the New Deal had been a combination of idealism, glamour, and ambition, it was ambition which proved to be the lasting element. But quite apart from personal motives, the consciousness of the liberals had proved inadequate to the task.

It was not merely that the New Deal was opposed by Consciousness I; the mind that was actually creating the New Deal fell short. The liberals never imagined how great were the obstacles they faced---the incredibly stubborn opposition of those they were trying to regulate, the lack of true understanding and participation by the workers, the dangers and weaknesses of the reform structure itself. And the liberals were not aware, either, of the degree of America's problems. They knew that much was wrong, but they did not feel it as the youth of today feel it, or see it as fully as it is seen today. They did not adequately sense the plight of the black man, the tragedy of the cities, the irrationality of production of luxuries amid the starvation of public services, the dangers of repression and war. They meant well, but they tired to cure America with half-measures and without personal risk to themselves. After the New Deal ended, the liberals lasted into the 1950's and 1960's, but their day was over. The final lesson of the New Deal, then, is that social change cannot be accomplished without the support of an appropriate consciousness in the people. Mere political change, mere alterations in the law, in structure, or in government power, cannot accomplish basic reform. The New Deal was accepted as a doctor is accepted, in an hour of fear and need. But America retained its basic, almost childish refusal of serious responsibility, its lack of communal solidarity, and above all its myths. It wanted only to get on with the ball game.

What was the lasting product of these troubled years of disillusionment and reform? The theme that lingered beyond insecurity and beyond idealism was the theme of domination; these years had convinced much of America that its people must be placed under the control of something larger and more rational than individual self-restraint; that individual man must, for the good of all, become part of a system. This theme runs from Bellamy to FDR, from Mabuse to Portnoy, from the muckrakers to the young lawyers of the New Deal brain trust. The lasting product of the New Deal era was not its humanism or idealism, but a new consciousness that believed primarily in domination and the necessity for living under domination. This consciousness, which grew out of reform, we have called Consciousness II. It is not accurate to call this consciousness "liberalism" or "reformism." Neither liberalism nor reformism were ever given a fair trial in America. Indeed, humanistic liberalism, with a program adequately conceived and followed through, might have given us a viable society for many years after the New Deal. Consciousness II was often associated with "liberalism," but that usage merely altered the meaning of the latter term. For the new consciousness "liberals" cared more about order than they did about liberty. The New Deal also produced a lasting institutional product to go with Consciousness II---the public state. The hope behind this creation was that now public and private power, like the armies of two nations, would balance each other, and the result would be containment of both, and safety for the individual. What the theory neglected was the possibility that the two kinds of power might join. And this is what did happen.

The final tragedy of the reform movement is that the power it created was amalgamated with the private power already in existence, and with the now overwhelming and terrible power of technology, to form the inhuman structure in which we now live--the American Corporate State.

CONSCIOUSNESS II
We turn to the consciousness that created the Corporate State---Consciousness II. It carried forward the pessimism of the industrial era and the optimism of reform into a new "realism" that described America in very different terms than those accepted by that part of the population who remained unshaken in Consciousness I and its version of the American dream. In contrast, Consciousness II saw an America where organization predominates, and the individual must make his way through a world directed by others.

Consciousness II came into existence as a consequence of the disastrous failure of Consciousness I. In the twentieth century, Consciousness I had led to monstrous consequences: robber barons, business piracy, ruinous competition, unreliable products and false advertising, grotesque inequality, and the chaos of excessive individualism and lack of coordination and planning, leading to a gangster world. For many persons, this chaos meant a profound insecurity and sense of powerlessness. In a mass, industrial society ungoverned by any law except self-interest, the individual became the plaything of circumstances and forces beyond his control. A lifetime of hard work could be wiped out by a business failure. The Great Depression brought the whole nation to the brink of disaster. In Germany and Italy, similar insecurity led to fascism. In America, it led to a breach in the existing consciousness, a turn away from individualism. A large number of people continued as Consciousness I, but another group began to develop a new consciousness. To the newer consciousness, what the realities of the times seemed to demand was the organization and coordination of activity, the arrangement of things in a rational hierarchy of authority and responsibility, the dedication of each individual to training, work, and goals beyond himself. This seemed a mattered of the utmost biological necessity; this way of life was what "had to be" if society was to keep on functioning. Consciousness I sacrificed for individual good; now it seemed necessary to sacrifice for the common good.

Discipline and hierarchy were seen necessary because the society was not yet prepared to offer each person the kind of work he wanted or the chance to perform his work with a measure of independence.

The categories of people in the general area of Consciousness II are very diverse, including businessmen (new type), liberal intellectuals, the educated professionals and technicians, middle-class suburbanites, labor union leaders, Gene McCarthy supporters, blue-collar workers with newly purchased homes, old-line leftists, and members of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Classic examples of Consciousness II are the Kennedy's and the editorial page of THE New York Times. It is the consciousness of "liberalism," the consciousness of "reform." Most political battles in America are still fought between Consciousness I and II. Consciousness II believes that the present American crisis can be solved by greater commitment of individuals to the public interest, more social responsibility by private business, and, above all, by more affirmative government action--regulation, planning, more of a welfare state, better and more rational administration and management. Behind the facade of optimism, Consciousness II has a profoundly pessimistic view of man. It sees man in Hobbesian terms; human beings are by nature aggressive, competitive, power-seeking; uncivilized man is a jungle beast. Hence the vital need for law: without law we would all be at one another's throats; "only the law makes us free."

Consciousness II is deeply cynical about human motives and good intentions, and it doubts that man can be much improved. It is this philosophy that helps explain the great emphasis on society and institutions: these are designed to do the best possible job of administering the doubtful and deficient raw material that is "human nature." Believing that the best and most hopeful part of man is his gift of reason, Consciousness II seeks to design a world in which reason will prevail. At the heart of Consciousness II is the insistence that man produces by means of reason---the state, laws, technology, manufactured goods--constitutes the true reality. Just as Consciousness I centers on the fiction of the American Adam, the competitive struggle, and the triumph of the virtuous and strong individual, so Consciousness II rests on the fiction of logic and machinery; what it considers unreal is nature and subjective man. Consciousness II believes more in the automobile than in walking, more in the decision of an institution than in the feelings of an individual, more in a distant but rational goal than in the immediate present. One of the central aspects of Consciousness II is an acceptance of the priority of institutions, organizations, and society and a belief that the individual must tie his destiny to something of this sort, larger than himself, and subordinate his will to it. "Ask what you can do for your country (and corporation), " says the voice of Consciousness II. He is an "institution man." He sees his own life and career in terms of progress within society and within an institution.

An established hierarchy and settled procedures are seen as necessary and valuable. Achievement by character and hard work is translated into achievement in terms of a meritocracy of education, technical knowledge, and position. When he speaks of the vitally and challenges of his life, this is likely to be in terms of "his part" in the challenges of organized society; a young lawyer may actually spend most of his time doing dull legal research in the library, but he feels that his firm represents important clients and issues, and is involved in exciting controversies; it is not his work in a phenomenological sense but the significance of his work that is important to him. He relies on institutions to certify the meaning and value of his life, by rewarding accomplishment and conferring titles, office, respect, and honor. He also looks to institutions to provide personal security in terms of tenure, salary, and retirement benefits. In place of the continuity of life formerly supplied by religion and family, he sees his work living after him in institutional terms; "this organization is his monument."
Belief in the reality of society is carried into political philosophy. Government regulation of private activities, including business, is considered necessary and desirable; likewise government should help individuals and protect them from the risks of an industrial society. Consciousness II insists that "individual interests" are subject to "the public interest." Thus a typical New York Times editorial will argue that "private" interests such as the desire of hospital employees for a raise, of oil companies to maintain prices, or protecting students to air grievances, must be subordinated to "the public interest." A similar philosophy is a strong part of our current constitutional law.

In this sense the "liberalism" of Felix Frankfurter, the communism of Lenin, and the patriotism of a policeman's benevolent association are all alike; they insist on the primary reality of the State, not the individual. Consciousness II does not accept any "absolute" liberty for the individual; rather, it regards all individual liberty as subject to overriding state interest. Consciousness II is deeply committed to reform. We can thank its reformist tendencies for changes in the criminal law, for social security, the movement against racial discrimination, regulation of business, government economic planning, internationalism, an end of corruption in government, public projects like TVA, collective bargaining, and improvement of work conditions, and so on down a long, honorable, and admirable list. These reforms help to define Consciousness II because they may be seen as part of a battle with the past. Much of the energy of Consciousness II has gone into battling the evils that resulted from Consciousness I---prejudice, discrimination, irrationality, self-seeking, isolationism, localism, outworn traditions, and superstitions; Consciousness II has worn itself out fighting the know-nothingism of earlier America, Consciousness II believes optimistically in the possibility of social progress ( as distinguished from individual progress, which it doubts). Confront men of Consciousness II with any list of evils and the response is cheerfulness: they know what measures can be taken, they see signs of improvement, and they compare the present favorably with the evils of the past which have been overcome. Even today they still believe America's problems can be solved by pushing ahead with material progress, equality, a greater public commitment to social welfare, to rebuild cities, and to revised domestic priorties.

Consciousness II believes in the central ideology of technology, the domination of man and environment by technique. Accordingly, science, technology, organization, and planning are prime values. Different groups within Consciousness II might disagree---aircraft executives mightthink the nation should be dominated by machine and computer technology, while professors of English, horrified by this, would think the world should be dominated by rationally critical thought---but the idea of domination is common to both, although neither would necessarily acknowledge that similarity. Throughout all of Consciousness II runs the theme that society will function best if it is planned, organized, rationalized, administered.
Consciousness II believes in control. Even the broadest civil libertarian outlook is placed in a framework of procedures, supervision, and limits. Consciousness II deeply fears what man would be like, and what masses of people would be like, if not placed under the ascendancy of reason. There is in all of this a rejection of unfettered diversity and unresolved conflict. Liberalism, of course, supports conflict as a means to the attainment of the greatest possible rationality (the truth of the market place) and it supports pluralism as a means to attain a balance in society. Consciousness II wants conflict-resolution; it is deeply procedural because procedures help get things "settled"; its paradise would be one possessing an appropriate tribunal or authority where problems are "solved."

Consciousness II, although nominally "liberal," has the potential to become repressive. It welcomes every point of view and tolerates every idea, but wants everything expressed through proper channels and procedures; it wants no interference with rationalities; it wants no disruptions of orderly processes. "Freedom" must not destroy the underlying order that enables all types of freedom to flourish in orderly fashion. Consciousness II believes in a meritocracy of ability and accomplishment, the object of which is to promote excellence. Rejecting the rigid structures, caste systems, and hereditary aristocracies of the past, it seeks to open society to universal achievement.
As Consciousness II might conceive of the meritocracy, the society would be so structured as to produce, encourage, and reward those forms of excellence which are socially valuable: the excellent medical man, the excellent lawyer, the excellent scientist. Consciousness II believes in the uncommon man; the man of special abilities and effort, the man who is intelligent, sophisticated, exciting, and powerful. It believes that this form of "merit" can and should be judged by society, using standards that are external and rational; there is an objective difference between an excellent engineer and an incompetent one. Consciousness II believes that this merit is both an inborn capacity and a moral quality. Since it is a moral quality, or a virtue, it furnishes the appropriate basis for a "democratic aristocracy" in which society's "best" people---judged by rational standards---receive the rewards of money, status, security, and respect.

The meritocracy is therefore structured so as to provide an equal opportunity for all at the starting point, but it rejects the idea of equality thereafter, for such equality is a war with excellence. Consciousness II people are tremendously concerned with one another's comparative status, and they often speak of others in terms of their abilities or lack of abilities; he is "able," he is "not very able," he is "first rate," he is a "C student," he is the "executive type," he is "plodding and unimaginative." There is an abstract equality of opportunity, but not an equality of individual human beings. Consciousness II is thus profoundly antipopulist and in a large sense, antidemocratic. It is no accident that the most successful Consciousness II individuals surround themselves, not with vulgar material display, but with the signs of elegant style and taste; it is no accident that they show an impatient, intolerant, and disdainfull attitude toward individual members of the very groups they are "trying to help"---the less intelligent, the ill-educated, and above all the blue-collar "boob." For "reason" has led Consciousness II to believe in an elitist society---with never a doubt that the standards by which the elite is determined are the correct ones: utility to the technological society. The absolute worth of each individual is, to Consciousness II, a mere religious doctrine, having no application in reality. One of the central beliefs of Consciousness II concerns work. The belief is that the individual should do his best to fit himself into a function that is needed by society, subordinating himself to the requirements of the occupation or institution that he chosen. He feels this as a duty, and is willing to make "sacrifices" for it. He may have an almost puritanical willingness to deny his own feelings. Self-sacrifice is regarded as a virtue for two reasons. First, because it serves a higher purpose, that of the state, organization, or profession. Second, because it serves to advance the individual and his family in terms of the rewards that society can offer.

The Consciousness II man thus adopts, as his personal values, the structure of standards and rewards set by his occupation or organization. We are not now speaking of the purposes which the organization is designed to achieve, but what the organization defines as standards of individual success. Thus the individual directs his activities toward such goals as a promotion, a raise in salary, a better office, respect and commendation by his colleagues, a title, "recognition" by his profession. He becomes an oppressive person who does not enjoy himself while at work, who does not seem to have any personal distance from the hurdles that have been set for him. In some cases this even leads the individual to unethical or illegal behavior, which he slips into because it all seems to be part of "playing the game." A prime characteristic of the Consciousness II person is his disclaimer of personal responsibility for what his organization does or for what society does. He pictures himself as a person without absolute or transcendental values; he cannot make a personal judgment; he must accept the premises of society. He cites the compartmentalization of his work, his lack of general authority. He says that he must defer to the judgments of experts in other areas where he is not competant; if his company is making a dangerous product, that is a matter within the special competence of Product Design; if his country is making war, that is the responsibility of political and military experts. It is not for him to "take a stand"; he doesn't know enough; it would be unprofessional. But this is only a refusal to be responsible, it is a refusal to think independently.

For example, lawyers talk about the rationality and equality of the law, but they simply do not get outside the accepted assumptions to think about how the law operates as an instrument of one class in society against another. Accordingly, the public values of Consciousness II can stray far from reality; they simply do not question the assumptions, however unreal, of the system in which they function. Like Consciousness I, Consciousness II sees life in terms of a fiercely competitive struggle for success. The difference lies in the means of struggle and the terms of success, for with Consciousness II these are defined by organizational or institutional values. This difference lends an air of gentility or public spiritedness to the struggle by Consciousness II. He can claim, and convince himself, that his struggle is for something other than pure selfishness. His efforts produce good for the corporation or institution, good for the public interest, good for his fellow man, for the more he helps his institution, the more "self-sacrificing" he is, the more he helps himself to get ahead.
Consciousness II does not celebrate his own success with ostentation but with sophistication. Nevertheless, in Consciousness II the struggle does show through from time to time; an excess of zeal, a lack of nicety about means, or a cold and impersonal attitude, combined with driving energy, reveal the true state of things.

But the void below the meritocracy is far worse than being "at the bottom of the heap" in earlier days; everything that makes the Consciousness II man feel his own reality is lost. His friends are made through his work; they are unlikely to find anything in common with him after his downfall. In a world where men are recognized only by their credentials, to lose credentials is to cease being a human being. Thus it is that some of the most successful men of our times are also among the most insecure; they have to go on proving themselves as if there were cracks in their stylish floors through which they could still catch glimpses of the abyss.
In sum, the new man's insecurity is greater than that of the old. The new man is tied to uncertain forms and forces over which he feels little control and may at any time be victimized by an impersonal "system"; moreover, when the new man loses, he seems to have less in the way of personal strength---roots, perhaps---to fall back on. He lacks a sense of self that could be sustained despite rejection by the system. And he lacks a community of friends who can be counted on to support him with their affection despite the judgment of society. Because it classifies and judges individuals according to generalized standards, Consciousness II often fails to see behind the classifications to the unique individual. Upon meeting a person, the first thought is to classify him, the second thought is to judge him, and the third is to find the best way to deal with him. The difference between Consciousness I and II can be felt immediately across a lunch table; I is observant of the particular person who is opposite; II pays no attention, and is indifferent to most personal cues and signs of personality. II's conversation, unless he has some particular goal, would be pretty much the same regardless of who was sitting opposite.

Dependence on the meritocracy struggle makes Consciousness II, despite all of his liberal-reformist convictions, deeply cautious and profoundly conservative. He can fight for reform just so long as the fight is in the same direction that organized society is going; beginning in the 1950's he could fight racial discrimination, after 1967 he could oppose the Vietnam War, in 1969 he was for "revised priorities," but he was still following the direction of his organization and of society. And insisting on the use of accepted procedures, he makes sure that nothing he says or does will be perceived by his organization as a threat to its own power. Consciousness II is in favor of many reforms, but he will not jeopardize his own status to fight for them; he will not put his own body on the line.
Between the values of his working life and those of his home life Consciousness II draws a strict line. His home life is characterized by many values which are contrary to those of his job; here he may be gentle, human, playful; here he may deplore what the organized part of society is doing. He is made sick by pollution of water and air, denounces dehumanization in organizations, scorns those who are motivated solely by institutional goals; but these values appear within a closely guarded shelter of privateness. Consciousness II puts all his earnings into an individual burrow for himself and his family; he prefers owning a private home at a ski resort to living at a ski lodge; he wants a private summer home at the beach. This privateness and the "good" values that go with it seem related. What Consciousness II does is to "buy out" of the system. Taking no personal responsibility for the evils of society, he shelters himself from them in a private enclave, and from that sanctuary allows his "real" values a carefully limited expression. He does not risk himself or his family by this process. His children get "all the advantages" that he can give them in life's struggle. He does not have to live with his own work-values.

Thus a crucial aspect of Consciousness II is a profound schizophrenia, a split between his working and his private self. It is this split that sometimes infuriates his children when they become of college age, for they see it as hypocrisy or selling out. But it is schizophrenia, not hypocrisy. The individual has two roles, two lives, two masks, two sets of values. It cannot be said, as is true of the hypocrite, that one self is real and the other false. These two values simply coexist; they are part of the basic definition of "reality"; the "reality" of Consciousness II is that there is a "public" and a "private" man. Neither the man at work nor the man at home is the whole man; it is impossible to know, talk to, or confront the whole man, for that wholeness is precisely what does not exist. The only thing that is real is two separate men.
Because of his lack of wholeness, because of his enforced playing of roles and subjection to outside standards, the consciousness of a Consciousness II person becomes vulnerable to outside manipulation. The individual has no inner reality against which to test what the outside world tells him is real. And the Corporate State does not ignore this vulnerability.

The apparatus for consciousness creation and manipulation is vast and formidable. We start with the entire advertising industry, which deliberately sets out to influence the values and wants of the people it reaches. The mass media are perhaps an even more important factor; by showing us a way of life, they insist on a particular picture of reality, and by creating that picture of outside events known as "news" they further affect reality. Government makes other direct efforts to influence consciousness, the most important of which is compulsory education. Perhaps the greatest influence of all is the culture and environment that society creates. In the aggregate, the forces working to create consciousness are overwhelming. And it should not be supposed that these forces are undirected. They are directed in at least two ways. First, by what is deliberately excluded. For example, many attitudes, points of view, and pictures of reality cannot get shown on television; this includes not only political ideas, but also the strictly non-political, such as a real view of middle-class life in place of the cheerful comedies one usually sees. Secondly, some views of reality are heavily subsidized while others are not.
The state does not wish to leave consciousness to chance, and nothing is more subsidized in our society than commercial advertising itself. Given a people who are vulnerable and a machinery with this power, the consequence is that much of Consciousness II is "false consciousness," a consciousness imposed by the state for its own purposes.

Consciousness II has been convinced that man's needs are best met by trying to dominate experience rather than being subject to experience. It insists that "real" experience is that which is dominated, not that which comes to the individual who is unguarded and open. When experience is dominated, it has no impact. One learns nothing new, feels nothing new; the sources of life have been dried up; there is a sadness and sterility to Consciousness II. It is like a person whose life is busily scheduled; nothing is permitted to happen to him; the whole day proceeds as expected and planned. Consciousness II people are busy people in this sense. The man to whom something can happen must be ready to be diverted from his course and thoughts. A camping trip is full of potential for experience. There may be a sudden storm, the food may have been forgotten, the party may decide to hike all night by flashlight and sleep all day. But nothing can happen on a camping trip with too-competent people. They can take care of any event. Consciousness I also takes pride in competence, ability, and knowledge. The camping journals of Consciousness I people sound embarrassingly sentimental and florid, but the quality of wonder is still there.
All that we have said about Consciousness II may perhaps best be summarized in terms of its relationship to reality. Consciousness II came into existence as a response to the realities of organization and technology. But it pushed these values too far; it came to believe that the individual has no existence apart from his work and his relationship to society.

Without his career, without his function, he would be a non-person; hence the terrible fear of failure in the competitive struggle; below the meritocracy is an abyss where people have ceased to exist altogether. Thus there is a loss of a sense of the reality of self, apart from the way in which society judges self. And because of this, a sense of reality about organizations and society is lost as well. No matter what systems, structures, and values they produce, even mass destruction through war, they pass unchallenged as "reality"; the individual has no subjective standard of reality with which to evaluate or oppose the purported reality of efficiency, technological progress, or megadeaths based on some doctrine of political necessity.
Consciousness II is the victim of a cruel deception. It has been persuaded that the richness, the satisfactions, the joy of life are to be found in power, success, status, acceptance, popularity, achievements, rewards, excellence, and the rational, competent mind. It wants nothing to do with dread, awe, wonder, mystery, accidents, failure, helplessness, magic. It has been deprived of the search for self that only these experiences make possible. And it has produced a society that is the image of its own alienation and impoverishment.

The corporate state is an immensely powerful machine, ordered, legalistic, rational, yet utterly out of human control, wholly and perfectly indifferent to any human values. Our present system has gone beyond anything that could properly be called the creation of capitalism or imperialism or a power elite. That, at least would be a human shape. Of course a power elite does exist and is made rich by the system, but the elite are no longer in control, they are now merely taking advantage of forces that have a life of their own. Nor is our system a purely technological society, although technology has increasingly supplied the basis for our choices and superseded other values. What we have is technology, organization, and administration out of control, running for their own sake, but at the same time subject to manipulation and profiteering by the power interests of our society for their own non-human ends. And we have turned over to this system the control and direction of everything----the natural environment, our minds, our lives. Other societies have had bad systems, but we have endured because a part of life went on outside the system. We have turned over everything, rendered ourselves powerless, and thus allowed mindless machinery to become our master.
The American Corporate State today can be thought of as a single vast corporation, with every person as an involuntary member and employee.

It consists primarily of large industrial organizations, plus nonprofit institutions such as foundations and the educational system, all related to the whole as divisions to a business corporation. Government is only a part of the state, but government coordinates it and provides a variety of needed services. The Corporate State is a complete reversal of the original American ideal and plan. The State, and not the market or the people or any abstract economic laws, determines what shall be produced, what shall be consumed, and how it shall be allocated. It determines, for example, that railroads shall decay while highways flourish; that coal miners shall be poor and advertising executives rich. Jobs and occupations in the society are rigidly defined and controlled, and arranged in a hierarchy of rewards, status, and authority. An individual can move from one position to another, but he gains little freedom thereby, for in each position he is subject to conditions imposed upon it; individuals have no protected area of liberty, privacy, or individual sovereignty beyond the reach of the State. The State is subject neither to democratic controls, constitutional limits, or legal regulation. Instead, the organizations in the Corporate State are motivated primarily by the demands of technology and of their own internal structure. Technology has imperatives such as these: if computers have been developed, they must be put to use; if faster planes can be produced, they must be put into service; if there is a more efficient way of organizing an office staff, it must be done; if psychological tests provide added information for personnel directors, they must be used on prospective employees. A general in charge of troops at Berkeley described the use of a helicopter to attack students with chemicals as "logical." As for organizations, their imperative is to grow. They need stability, freedom from outside interference, constantly increasing profits. Everyone in the organization wants more and better personnel, more functions, increased status and prestige---in a word, growth.

The medium through which these forces operate is law. The legal system is not primarily concerned with justice, equality, or individual rights; it functions as an instrument of State domination, and it acts to prevent the intervention of human values or individual choice. Although the forces driving the State are impersonal rather than evil, they are wholly indifferent to man's needs, and tend to have the same consequences as would a system expressly designed for the purpose of destroying human beings and their society.
The essence of the Corporate State is that it is relentlessly single-mined; it has only one value, the value of technology--organization--efficiency--growth--progress. The State is perfectly rational and logical. It is based on principle. But life cannot be supported on the basis of any single principle. Yet no other value is allowed to interfere with this one, not amenity, not beauty, not community, not even the supreme value of life itself. Thus the State is essentially mindless; it has only one idea and it rolls along, never stopping to think, consider, balance, or judge. Only such single-valued mindlessness would cut the last redwoods, pollute the most beautiful beaches, invent machines to injure and destroy plant and human life. To have only one value is, in human terms, to be mad. It is to be a machine.

In the remainder of this chapter, we shall attempt to outline the main features of the Corporate State. (I will add parts of each title caption starting with the following number)

1. AMALGAMATION & INTEGRATION.
We normally consider the units of the Corporate State, such as the federal government, an automobile company, a private foundation, as if they were separate from each other. This is, however, not the case. In the Corporate State, most of the "public" functions of government are actually performed by the "private" sector of the economy. And most "government" functions are services performed for the private sector. The government hires "private" firms to build national defense systems, to supply the space program, to construct the interstate highway system, and sometimes, in the case of think institutes, to do its "thinking" for it. An enormous portion of the federal budget is spent in simply hiring out government functions. This much is obvious, although many people do not seem to be aware of it. What is less obvious is the "deputizing" system by which a far larger sector of the "private" economy is enlisted in government service.

The government itself could do what private foundations now do: aid education, sponsor research, and other things which do not command a profit in the commercial sense. It is the government's decision that these same functions are better performed by foundations. It is the same judgement that government makes when it hires Boeing to build an interstate highway, Public utilities---airlines, railroads, truck carriers, taxicabs, oil pipe lines, the telephone company---all are "deputized" in this fashion. They carry on "public" functions---functions that in other societies might be performed by the government itself.
Let us now look at the opposite side of the coin: government as the servant of the "private" sector. Once again, sometimes the relationship is formal and obvious. The government spends huge amounts for research and development, and private companies are often able to get the benefits of this. Airports are built at public expense for private airlines to use. Highways are built for private trucking firms to use. The government pays all sorts of subsidies, direct and indirect, to various industries. It supplies credit services and financial aid to homeowners. It grows trees on public forest lands and sells them at cut-rate prices to private lumber companies. It builds roads to aid ski developments. It is true that government has always existed to serve the society; that police and fire departments help business too; that paving streets helps business, and so do wars that open up new markets---and that is what government is and always has been all about. But today , government activity in aid of the private sector is enormously greater, more pervasive, more immediately felt than ever before.

Government help today is essential, not a luxury. The airlines could not operate without allocation of routes and regulation of landing and take-offs, nor could the television industry. The educational system, elementary school through high school, is essential for the production of people able to work in today's industry. Thus it may be said that everyone who operates "privately" really is aided and subsidized, to one degree or another, by the public; the sturdy, independent rancher rides off into the sunset on land irrigated by government subsidy, past sheep whose grazing is subsidized and crops whose prices are artificially maintained by government action; he does not look like a welfare client, but he is on the dole nevertheless.
This public-private and private-public integration, when added to the inescapable legislative power we have already described, gives us the picture of the State as a single corporation. Once the line between "public" and "private" becomes meaningless and is erased, the various units of the Corporate State no longer appear to be parts of a diverse and pluralistic system in which one kind of power limits another kind of power; the various centers of power do not limit each other, they all weigh in on the same side of the scale, with only the individual on the other side. With public and private merged, we can discern the real monolith of power and realize there is nothing at all within the system to impose checks and balances, to offer competition, to raise even a voice of caution or doubt. We are all involuntary members, and there is no zone of the private to offer a retreat.

One way to appreciate the true nature of the public-private amalgamated State, is to list some examples of power that can be found in the United States.
POWER to determine the hour at which employees come to work, the hour at which they have lunch, the hour when they go home;
POWER to make Business Week available to airline passengers but not The Nation;
POWER to raise bank interest rates;
POWER to wake all patients in a hospital at 6 A.M.;
POWER to forbid apartment dwellers to have pets or children;
POWER to require peanut butter eaters to choose between homogenized or chunky peanut butter and prevent them from buying "real" peanut butter;
POWER to force all young people who want to go to collage to do a certain kind of mechanical problem-solving devised by the Collage Entrance Examination Board, ( or learn Spanish.) ;
POWER to require that all public school teachers be fingerprinted;
POWER to popularize snowmobiles instead of snowshoes, so the winter forests screech with mechanical noise;
POWER to force all riders in automobiles to sit in seats designed to torture the lower lumbar regions of the human anatomy;
POWER to use forest products in constructing homes, making furniture, and publishing newspapers, thereby creating a demand for cutting timber.
POWER to dominate public consciousness through the mass media;
POWER to induce lung cancer in thosands of persons by promoting the sale of cigarettes;
POWER to turn off a man's telephone service;
POWER to provide railroad passengers with washrooms that are filthy;
POWER to encourage or discourage various forms of scholarship, educational activity, philanthropy, and research;
POWER to construct office buildings with windows that will not open, or without any windows at all;
POWER to determine what lifestyles will be or not be acceptable for employees;
POWER to make relatively large or small investments in the safety of consumer products;
POWER to change the culture of a foreign country.
Were we confronted by this list and more, and told that all of this power was held by a single tyrannical ruler, we would find the prospect frightening indeed.

2. THE PRINCIPLE OF ADMINISTRATION AND HIERARCHY.
The activities, policies, and decisions of a society might theoretically be carried out by a variety of methods---voluntary cooperation by individuals, the physical coercion of a military tyranny, or psychological conditioning. The Corporate State has chosen to rely on the method of administration and hierarchy. So pervasive, indeed, is the principle of administration that in many ways the Corporate State is in its essence an administrative state. The theory of administration is that the best way to conduct any activity is to subject it to rational control. A framework of organization is provided. Lines of authority, responsibility, and supervision are established as clearly as possible; everyone is arranged in a hierarchy. Rules are drawn for every imaginable contingency, so that individual choice is minimized. Arrangements are made to check on what everyone does, to have reports and permanent records. The random, the irrational, and the alternative ways of doing things are banished. It is worth recalling how this State derived from classic liberalism, and more proximately, from the New Deal and the welfare state. Liberalism adopted the basic principle that there is no need for management of society itself; the "unseen hand" is all that is needed. The New Deal modified this by requiring activities to be subject to "the public interest." Gradually it came to mean ever-tightening regulation in directions fixed by the demands of a commercial, technological, mass society. Gradually it came to mean the replacement of a "political" state with an "administrative" state.

A "political" state, in our present meaning, is one in which differences, conflicts, and cultural diversity are regarded as aspects of pluralism to be represented in the political process and allowed a life of their own within the body politic. Thus political radicals, marijuana users, or culturally distinct groups would all coexist, have political voices, and contribute to the diversity and balance of the nation. This "political" model has also been called the "conflict" model, not because there are actual conflicts, but because conflicting opinions and ways of life are allowed to exist side by side. Administration means a rejection of the idea of conflict as a desirable element in society. Administration wants extremes "adjusted"; it wants differences "settled"; it wants to find out which way is "best" and use it exclusively. That which refuses to be adjusted is considered by administration as "deviance," a departure from the norm needing to be treated and cured.
This society defines that which does not fit "the public interest" as "deviance." Marijuana use is made a crime, and people using it are punished, cured, or "helped." Political radicals are expected to be "responsible"; blacks are expected to be "integrated." The society "knows what is best" for everyone; its massive energies, power, and apparatus are focused on making sure that everyone accepts "what is best." The structure of the administrative state is that of a hierarchy in which every person has a place in a table of organization, a vertical position in which he is subordinate to someone and superior to someone else. This is the structure of any bureaucracy; it represents a "rationalization" of organization ideals. When an entire society is subjected to this principle, it creates a small ruling elite and a large group of workers who play no significant part in the making of decisions. While they continue to vote in political elections, they are offered little choice among the candidates; all the major decisions about what is produced, what is consumed, how resources are allocated, the conditions of work, and so forth, are made administratively.

Administration seeks to remove decision-making from the area of politics to the area of "science." It does not accept democratic or popular choice; this is rejected in favor of professionals and experts and a rational weighting of all of the factors. Procedures are set up by which decision--making is channeled, and care is taken to define exactly which institution shall make which decisions. For each type of decision, there is someone "best" qualified to decide it; administration avoids participation in decisions by the less qualified. Its greatest outrage is directed toward a refusal to enter into its procedures---this seems almost a denial of the very principle of administration. If followed, these procedures usually produce a decision that is a compromise or balance which rejects any particular choice in its pure, uncompromised form. Choice takes place within narrow limits. Things go smoothly when the status quo is maintained, when change is slow, cautious, and evolutionary. Public welfare offers an example of the administrative model of society. The object of public welfare, apart from administration, is to protect people against the hazards of forces in an industrial society beyond their control, and the other hazards of life against which neither family nor local community any longer offer help; to provide every person with a minimum standard of security, well-being, and dignity. With the introduction of administration and hierarchy as the means for carrying out public welfare, the emphasis shifts to regulation of exactly who is qualified for welfare, how much is allotted, how it is spent, whether regulations are being followed. A large apparatus is developed for checking up, for keeping records, for making and enforcing rules, for punishing infractions. Some of this may save money, but the money saved is minimized by the costs of administration. Some of this may also serve the purpose of punishing the poor for not working, even though many are unable to work.

The tendency of administration, while it may appear to be benign and peaceful, as opposed to the turbulence of conflict, is actually violent. For the very idea of imposed order is violent. It demands compliance; nothing less than compliance will do; and it must obtain compliance, by persuasion or management if possible, by repression if necessary. It is convinced that it has "the best way" and that all others are wrong; it cannot understand those who do not accept the rightness of its view. A growing tension and anger develops against those who would question what is so carefully designed to be "best"-----for them as well as for everybody else. Administration wants the best for everybody, and all that it asks is that individuals conform their lives to the framework established by the State.

3. THE CORPORATE STATE IS AUTONOMOUS.
What controls the amalgamated power of the Corporate State? We usually make at least three reassuring assumptions. One: power is controlled by the people through the democratic process and pluralism in the case of government, and through the market in the case of the "private" sector. Two: power is controlled by the persons who are placed in a position of authority to exercise it. Three: power is subject to the Constitution and the laws. These assumptions stand as a presumed barrier to the state power we have described.
If pure democratic theory fails us in both the public and private spheres, we must nevertheless consider whether a modified version of democracy can permit large competing interests to achieve a balance which represents a rough approximation of what people want; this is the theory of pluralism. Here again the theory does not work out.
"Pluralism" represents not interests, but "organized" interests. Thus, "labor" means large labor organizations, but these do not necessarily represent the real interests of individual employees. "Labor" may support heavy defense expenditures, repressive police measures, and emphasis on economic growth, but this may not be at all an expression of the true interests of the industrial worker.
Indeed, at the organizational level there is far more agreement than difference among the "competing interests," so that they come to represent the same type of cooperation as conglomerate mergers produce among interests in the private sphere.

Even if the people had power to give orders, the orders might have little or no effect. Increasingly, the important part of government is found in the executive departments, which are staffed by career men, experts, professionals, and civil servants who have specialized knowledge of technical fields. These persons are not elected, nor are they subject to removal on political grounds. They are thus immunized from direct democratic control. Congress and the state legislatures, however, have neither the time nor the specialized knowledge to oversee all of these governmental activities. Instead, the legislatures have increasingly resorted to broad delegations of authority. Even if a statute tries to set more definite standards, such as the Federal Power Act, which lists some factors to be considered in building hydroelectric projects, the factors are simply left to be considered and weighed in the agency's discretion. What really happens is that government becomes institutionalized in the hands of professionals, experts, and managers, whose decisions are governed by the laws of bureaucratic behavior and the laws of professional behavior. These laws mean that decisions will be within narrow compass, tend to the status quo, tend to continue any policy once set, tend to reflect the interests of the organization. These organizations, then are unprepared to respond to any outside direction even if the people were in a position to give it. The same is true of the private corporate bureaucracies. If the people do not control the Corporate State, is it at least controlled by those who give the orders---the executives and the power elite behind them? Such control might not satisfy those who favor democracy or the rule of law, but it would still be control that had to consider the broad trends of public opinion--still a major difference from no control at all.

Let us focus on an imaginary organization---government or private (an agency or corporation)----and its executive head---the personification of the "power elite." We enter into the paneled executive suite or, in the case of a more sophisticated organization, a suite in the most advanced taste, and there we expect to find an individual or "team" who really do exercise power. But the trappings, from the modern sculpture to the console telephone, do not tell the whole story. Any organization is subject to the demands of technology, of its own organization, and to its own middle-management. The corporation must respond to advances in technology. It must act in such a way as to preserve and foster its own organization. It is subject to the decision-making power of those in middle-management whose interests lie with the advance of organization and technology. If the organization is a private corporation, the power elite must take much else into consideration; the fact that there are financial interests: bondholders, stockholders, banks and bankers, institutional owners (such as pension funds and mutual funds), potential raiders seeking financial control, possible financial control by a system of conglomerate ownership.This is not to suggest that stockholders or bondholders have any significant part in management, that there is any investor democracy, or that conglomerate structure necessarily means guidance of management. But the very existence of these interests creates certain impersonal demands upon the corporation; for example, the demand for profit, for growth, for stability of income. The manager cannot act without an awareness of the constant demand for profits. Thus a television executive's decision about whether to put on a special news broadcast and "sacrifice" a paying program is made in the oppressive awareness of the demand for profit---a demand which, because it is so institutional and impersonal, literally "cares" about nothing else than profits.

The business executive is also required to be aware of many different kinds of state and federal law. The corporation is quite likely to be influenced by another set of relationships to government. It may possess valuable government contracts, subsidies, franchises or licenses, any of which can be modified or revoked. It may be the beneficiary of favored tax treatment that can be changed. It must therefore act in such a manner as to preserve whatever special privileges and advantages it has. Inside a corporation, there is the important influence of the system of decision-making. Most managements consist of a committee rather than a single head; all students of group behavior know how a committee is limited in ways that a single executive is not. Beyond this, management is limited by the many kinds of specialists and experts whose views must be consulted: the experts in marketing, in business management methods, the technicians, the whole class of people who occupy the "tech-no-structure." The structure of any large organization is bureaucratic, and all bureaucracies have certain imperatives and rules of their own. The bureaucracy acts to preserve itself and its system, to avoid any personal responsibility, to maintain any policy once set in motion. Decisions become "institutional decisions" that can be identified with no one person, and have the qualities of the group mind. The bureaucracy is so powerful that no executive, not even the President of the United States, can do much to budge it from its course. Top executives are profoundly limited by lack of knowledge. They know only what they are told. In effect, they are "briefed" by others, and the briefings is both limiting and highly selective. The executive is far to busy to find anything out for himself; he must accept the information he gets, and this sets absolute limits to his horizons. The briefing may be three steps removed from the facts, and thus be interpretation built upon interpretation--nearer fiction than fact by the time it reaches the top.

Thus the man in the chic office turns out to be a broker, a decider between limited alternatives, a mediator and arbitrator, a chairman, but not an originator. And such a position tends to be utterly inconsistent with thought, reflection, or originally. The executive cannot come up with reflections on policy, he cannot be the contemplative generalist, because he is too pressed and harried by the demands upon him. Increasingly, it is also inconsistent with the realities of the outside world, as the executive is insulated from them.
From all of this, there emerges the great revelation about the executive suite--the place from which power-hungry men seem to rule our society. The truth is far worse. In the executive suite, there may be a Leger or Braque on the wall, or a collection of African masks, there may be a vast glass-and-metal desk, but there is no one there. No one at all is in the executive suite. What looks like a man is only a representation of a man who does what the organization requires. He ( or it), does not run the machine; he tends it.

4. THE NEW PROPERTY
If the Corporate State were merely autonomous, its effects would be profoundly harmful to human beings; but the State is worse than autonomous; its machinery is influenced by private manipulation for power and gain, yet those who use it in this way have no power to influence it in a more positive direction, and ultimately they become captives as well as profiteers. These paradoxical results follow from the development of what we may call the New Property. With the rise of organization as the governing principle of American life, a change in the nature of private property and wealth necessarily followed. Organizations are not really "owned" by anyone. What formerly constituted ownership was split up into stockholder's rights to share in profits, management's power to set policy, employee's right to status and security, government's right to regulate. Thus older forms of wealth were replaced by new forms. Just as primitive forms of wealth such as beads and blankets gave way to what we familiarly know as property, so "property" gave way to rights growing out of organizations. A job, a stock certificate, a pension right, an automobile dealer's franchise, a doctor's privilege of hospital facilities, a student's status in a university---these are typical of the new forms of wealth. All of these represent relationships to organizations, so that today a person is identified by his various statuses; an engineer at Boeing, a Ford dealer, a Ph.D. in political science, a student at Yale. The growth of status with respect to private organizations has been paralleled by a rise in statuses produced by, and related to, government. The more that government has become "affirmative" in nature, engaging in regulation, allocation of resources, distribution of benefits, and public ownership, the more it has become a status-dispensing organization. These statuses, public and private, achieve their great importance because they become, for most individuals, the chief goals of life. Instead of seeking happiness in more tangible ways, the Consciousness II person defines happiness in terms of his position in the complex hierarchy of status.

A new job, he says, cannot be a mistake as long as it is "a step up," an individual gets satisfaction from "having people under him," a title can compensate for the absence of many other things. The individual feels he must be happy because he has status, as a student or a teacher, at a high-class university; if he is "at Yale" he glows with an artificial inward warmth. Statuses involve money, security, convenience, and also power, but these things do not quite express what they mean. They are a substitute self. The organizations of the Corporate State are empowered to confer and take away selfhood, and this fact, perhaps more than any other, explains the State's ability to dominate all the thinking and activities within it. In theory, all of these benefits and statuses, whether originating in the government or in "private" organizations, are distributed according to "the public interest" or the interests of the organization concerned, but never simply to advance private interests. An airline route or television channel is given to the applicant who will "best serve the public interest"; the windfall to the successful applicant is supposedly compensated by its services to the public. Likewise a government contract is awarded to the bidder who will best serve the government's interest, or who submits the lowest bid. The theory is extended to taxicab medallions and turnpike concessions; these privileges are valuable because they are partial monoplies, and they are given to the "best" applicants, just as in a private organization the promotions supposedly go to those who most "merit" them and will do the company the most good. On a grander scale, Congress votes subsidies or tax concessions to large groups, such as farmers, or the shipbuilding industry or the oil industry, on the theory that these serve the national interest.

But the whole concept of a society that assumes responsibility for allocating resources, benefits, and privileges is undercut if private interests are able to manipulate the system for their own advantage. If an airline can get a new route, not because of "merit" but because of its political influence in Washington, the allocation system becomes not an instrument of public policy but a vast and corrupt grabbag for the shrewd and the powerful. In turn, this maneuvering alters public policy. The machinery of the State begins to be influenced by these private interests. It is still autonomous, but autonomous in an even more antisocial direction. The marriage of the machinery of the Corporate State with private profiteering can be illustrated by the television industry. Technology gives us television, and the imperative of technology, unguided by other values, insists that we produce it and use it without attempting to consider what it should and should not be used for, what harm it might do, what controls are essential to its use. When private manipulation is added to the equation, it produces programs expressly designed to win huge audiences so that mass-produced products can be sold, even if this means a degradation of popular taste and consciousness. It is the worst of all possible worlds: uncontrolled technology and uncontrolled profiteering, combined into a force that is both immensely powerful and irresponsible. The combination of forces bears a large responsibility for much of what is wrong with our society, from universities where the professors care more about advancing their status than teaching, to the oil industry, where the land, sea, and atmosphere are wantonly polluted. But it should not be thought that because private interests can successfully use the Corporate State, they can influence its course in any affirmative manner. On the contrary, individuals or organizations which depend on the New Property lose their own independence of action and thought; some may become rich and powerful, but they are irrevocably tied to the source of their advantages.

Those who get few advantages may, however, be equally dependent on the system as it becomes all-pervasive. We can see this most clearly in the case of individuals who are beneficiaries of the New Property. When status and relationships to organizations replace private property, the result is a change in the degree of independent sovereignty enjoyed by the individual. Private property gave each person a domain in which he could be independent, and it enabled him to tell the rest of the world to go fly a kite. But a person whose "property" consists of a position in an organization is tied to the fate of the organization; if the organization goes down he goes with it. More important, he is subject to the power of the organization, for his "New Property" relationship is invariably conditional. There are conditions to be met for acquiring a status, maintaining it, advancing it, or avoiding its loss, and these conditions significantly affect the individual's independence. These conditions are set by the organization, not the individual, and they may be unilaterally altered by the organization. And except as specifically enacted by law, there are no limits to the conditions that may be placed on status---they may demand anything that serves the needs of the organization. A high school boy must cut his hair or be suspended, a civil servant must refrain from political activity, a college teacher must publish in scholarly journals. What are the consequences that follow from this conditioning power? It allows the rise of broad new legislative power with respect to individuals. In "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," Sherlock Holmes was consulted by a young lady who had been offered a position as a governess provided that she would agree to cut her hair short, wear a designated dress at certain times, and sit in a certain chair when requested. These conditions puzzled her enough to seek Holmes advice, but nobody questioned that the prodigiously stout man with the very smiling face, who had offered her the position at his country home, had a perfect right to make these or any other "requests" of a would-be employee. Miss Violet Hunter had only to refuse the job.

Today, in the public-private state, where organizations are nationwide, and are connected both to other organizations and to the government, the smiling request is no longer a private whim but a matter of public concern. If the telephone company, or IBM, beaming with prodigious good nature, asks that employees cut their hair, wear a certain dress, or sit in a certain chair, the fact that such companies have almost monopoly control over various areas of the labor market makes them the possessors of a legislative power never contemplated by the framers of the constitution, who said that the United States would never be a country where a man could be told whether or not he must wear a hat. This legislative power may cut deeply into the private life of the individual. Each step forward in job technology and organization means a further refining of job specifications, and today employers justify as fully relevant to the job an official inquiry into a prospective employee's home life, psychological make-up, friends and associates, political and cultural activities, and past history. No part of an employee's life is so private that it could not be deemed, by the accepted process of reasoning, a matter of legitimate concern to his employer. Today's forms issued by organizations such as the Peace Corps and VISTA ask former teachers, employers, and friends to make evaluations of an applicant based on "all they know" of the individual. Whether in the hands of "private" or "public" organizations, the new legislative power may in many circumstances be exercised without regard to existing constitutional and Bill of Rights protections. A private employer may dismiss a man, or a private university may expel a student, for an act which, as a citizen, he has a constitutional right to do; the rationale is that these "private" organizations are not limited by the Constitution. The government, which is limited by the Constitution, can nevertheless evade those limits when in its capacity as a regulator of statuses.

Would-be government employees, candidates for admission to the bar, applicants for radio or television channels, have their opinions, speeches, friends, and associations subjected to scrutiny. Here the theory is that the particular status is "not a right, but a privilege"; the individual, if denied the status, can continue to exercise his constitutional liberties, and therefore the government claims it has not taken away anything protected by the Constitution. By a similar chain of reasoning, a driver's license can be revoked although the driver has not been convicted of any violation, or a franchise can be denied because of arrests, even though they did not lead to convictions.
Power over the New Property leads to all sorts of procedural innovations unknown to the Constitution. Organizations set up investigatory procedures that take no account of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches, conduct trials where the rules of evidence are unknown, and impose punishments that may violate the principle of double jeopardy---all in the process of determining whether a student has broken university rules, or an employee of the Post Office is a security risk, or a welfare recipient is not qualified to receive one type of payment. It was the entertainment industry that instituted private boycotts and loyalty tests for those suspected of left-wing political views. All of these invasions of constitutional limitations tend to increase gradually but steadily. Job specifications increase with the technology. Competition for positions increases, and so selectivity increases. More years of training are needed to qualify. And the power of new legislation, over time, becomes encrusted with additions; congressmen tack on a loyalty oath or a no-riot provision onto old-age benefits or student aid; having the power, they do not resist exercising it. Or private employers institute lie detector tests and personality evaluation forms. In this sense the battle over liberty is not waged along a stationary line; the whole battle takes place aboard a moving platform where the passing of time alone brings new erosion's of liberty; each time the battle is resumed, it is resumed farther down the line.

Moreover, a victory may be more illusory than real. Suppose an employee or contractor wins the point. He may nevertheless be denied advancement or denied a new contract when the time comes. The organization may find other conditions which he cannot meet. It is diffcult to stop a private employer, or even the united States government, from establishing new conditions and applying them retroactively to past situations. But will anyone even want to contest the conditioning power of organizations? The Bill of Rights assumes that the individual has an interest that is separate from, and possibly contrary to, that of government. The Bill of Rights is not self-executing. One must "want" to make a speech which displeases the authorities before the right of free speech comes into play; and status works to undermine the separateness of that interest. It makes an individual decide that what is best for the organization is also best for himself; he has the same interest as the conditioning authority. He "wants" to be investigated, he "wants" to have his privacy invaded, he "wants" to fulfill special conditions because the organization's well-being is identical with his own, and he hopes to be the person who uniquely satisfies the conditions for the next rung on the ladder. Under the circumstances, rights are likely to go unused until they crease to be functional. Now we can see how the squeeze works against individuals in the Corporate State. In the preceding section of this outline we suggested that the organizations in the Corporate State gain external power as choice is reduced; the individual is compelled to deal with them and belong to them. Statuses apply a different but related kind of compulsion; they erode the individual's basis of independence, his ability and desire to "go it alone." They offer him a reward for compliance; they purchase an abandonment of independence.

From the welfare recipient to the licensed physician, from the student with a government scholarship to the man with an executive job, individuals have an "interest" in the compliance which the Corporate State demands. Power is the stick and the status-benefits are the carrot; when combined they leave few people with the means or the will to resist what is, after all, designed expressly to be in their "best interests." And the status system strikes even deeper. It destroys the potential for solidarity which would be necessary to reassert control over the Corporate State. One consequence of a status system is a rigid hierarchy. As everyone's property is transformed into relationships, so all relationships are fixed in vertical order. Everyone is above someone and below someone, and this of course gets in the way of community, for people at different levels of the hierarchy cannot join hands. Also, hierarchy results in automatic, clearly defined inequality, so that everyone can feel the differences between himself and those in other statuses. It gets to be in the interest of each status to see that the liberties of those in other statuses are repressed. One man's special status, benefits, and privileges depend upon the proper functioning of the rest of the organization; he wants to see everyone else kept in his proper place. Anyone getting unruly may alter the special laws applicable to someone else. Thus no one has any interest in anyone else's freedom.

A dramatic illustration of how a status system undermines solidarity and the potential for collective action occurred in late 1969 when the drawing occurred for the draft lottery. Students who previously had a strong sense of solidarity found that, helplessly and much against their will, they were divided; a high number and a low number inevitably felt separated from each other. In time many students managed to regain a feeling of closeness to others differently situated, but they all recognized the power of the system to divide them.
The deepest problem concerning statuses has to do with the kind of individual they create. Each person gets increasingly tied to his own status-role. He is forced more and more to become that role, as less and less of his private life remains. His thoughts and feelings center on the role. And as a role-person he is incapable of thinking of "general" values, or of assuming responsibility for society. He can do that only in the diminishing area outside his role. Consider an automobile company executive. He can propose public housing as a solution to the urban crisis. But he cannot propose that fewer cars be produced, or that models be kept the same, to save money for public housing. Thus his role prevents him from acting for the community in the one area where he has power to act, and it prevents him from even realizing that his cars are one of the things draining money that should be used for cities. As long as he is in his role, he cannot act or think responsibly within the community. Outside his role, if there is any outside, he is virtually powerless, for his power lies in the role. Thus a nation of people grows up who cannot fight back against the power that presses against them, for each, in his separate status cubicle, is utterly apart from his fellow men. What we have said concerning individuals who are dependent upon the New Property carries over to organizations. The large corporations which enjoy privileges as television licensees or holders of airline routes may get rich off the government, but they cannot and do not contest the government in any area; they are afraid of the government or even of an individual congressman or commissioner at the same time that they are using the government for their own purposes. They have no interest or will to express independent values. Their exclusive interest is simply in government favors. In this way they contribute to the autonomy and ungovernability of the Corporate State.

5. LAW: THE INHUMAN MEDIUM
Law is supposed to be a codification of those lasting human values which a people agree upon. "Thou shalt not kill" is such a law. The Corporate State is a distinctively legalistic society. It utilizes law for every facet of its activity--there has probably never been a society with so much law, or where law is so important. Thus it might be expected that law would represent a significant control over the power of the Corporate State, and a source of guidelines for it. But law in the Corporate State is something very different from a codification of values. The State has transformed it. During the New Deal period the law was gradually changed from a medium which carried traditional values of its own to a value-free medium that could be adapted to serve "public policy," which became the "public interest" of the Corporate State. This produced law that fell in line with the requirements of organization and technology, and that supported the demands of administration rather than protecting the individual. Once law had assumed this role, there began a vast proliferation of laws, statutes, regulations, and decisions. For the law began to be employed to aid all of the work of the Corporate State by compelling obedience to the State's constantly increasing demands. One area in which this can be demonstrated is the field of constitutional rights. The first point that must be made is that despite the vast growth of corporate power the courts, except in the area of racial discrimination, have failed to hold that corporations are subject to the Bill of Rights. A mere statement of this fact may not seem very significant; corporations, after all, are not supposed to exercise the governmental powers with which the Bill of Rights was concerned. But this has been radically changed by the emergence of the public-private state. Today private institutions do exercise government power; more, indeed, than "government" itself. They decide what will be produced and what will not be produced; they do our primary economic planning; they are the chief determinants of how resources are allocated. With respect to their own employees, members, or students, they act in an unmistakably governmental fashion; they punish conduct, deprive people of their positions within the organization, or decide on advancement. In a sweeping way they influence the opinions, expression, associations, and behavior of all of us. Hence the fact that the Bill of Rights is inapplicable is of paramount importance; it means that these constitutional safeguards actually apply only to one part (and not the most significant part) of the power of the Corporate State.

We have two governments in America, then----one under the Constitution and a much greater one not under the Constitution. Consider a right such as freedom of speech. "Government" is forbidden to interfere with free speech, but corporations can fire employees for free speech; private organizations can discriminate against those who exercise free speech; newspapers, television, and magazines can refuse to carry "radical" opinion. In short, the "inapplicability" of our Bill of Rights is one of the crucial facts of American life today. But does the Bill of Rights afford protection even where it directly applies? The Supreme Court decisions of the last few decades are not reassuring. In its adjudications the Court gives heavy weight to the "interest of society." It defers to what the legislature-executive-administrators have decided. The commands of the state are to be overturned only if there is no "rational" basis for them or if they contravene an express provision of the Constitution, and that provision is not outweighed by "the interest of society." The result over the years has been that virtually any policy in the field of economics, production, planning, or allocation, has been declared constitutional; that all sorts of decisions classifying people in different and unequal statuses for tax or benefit purposes have gone unquestioned; that peacetime selective service has been upheld; that free speech has been severely limited.

A second area where law has been made to serve the state is that of federal regulation of economic activity. Here, if anywhere in the law, one might expect control to be exercised over corporate power. But the story is the same as the story of constitutional law. In the first place, most regulation is either very superficial or does what the regulated industry really wants to be done anyway. Regulation polices the outlaws, prevents unruly competition, limits entry into a field, and in effect rationalizes and stabilizes industry. Gabriel Kolko, in The Triumph of Conservatism, suggests that regulation began performing this function as long ago as the so-called Progressive Era; and surely regulation performed largely this function under the New Deal. Food in interstate commerce must be properly labeled, inspected, and not adulterated. Stocks must not be sold in a misleading way. These are regulations with which any industry can feel comfortable. Moreover, regulation has to a large extent been taken over by personnel representing the thinking and interests of those supposed to be regulated. The inadequacy of regulation shows most clearly in the decisions made concerning allocation of valuable resources. Consider the television channels, owned by the public and licensed free of charge to various applicants (who can make a fortune out of them, and then sell them for millions of dollars). The FCC could have distributed these channels to a wide spectrum of applicants; there could be stations controlled by blacks, by the poor, by students, by universities, by radicals, by groups with various cultural interests. The opportunity was there. What did the FCC actually do? A large number of stations, the most desirable of all, were given to the three giant networks, which proved a crucial aid to the networks in establishing domination over the entire industry. most of the remaining stations were given either to already established powers in the mass communications field, such as newspapers (with the result that in many a town the principal station would be given to the principal newspaper, so that the sources of information in the town tightened rather than loosened), or they were given to giant corporations. Regulation proceeding strictly according to law thus had the effect of giving a television monopoly to power groups in the Corporate State, and excluding all others by law.

While furthering the power of the Corporate State, the law has also served the function of advancing private interests. As the nation has become a legalistic society, law has increasingly become the medium in which private maneuver for power, status, and financial gain could take place. It has become a huge game board, like Monopoly, on which expert players make intricate moves to positions of advantage. The game of law is played with all of the legal powers of government to provide benefits, subsidies, allocate resources and franchises, and grant special exceptions and favors. It is played with the whole property-status system in which a move from one status to another provides different and increased benefits. It is played with all the duties imposed by law on citizens, including the tax laws and the draft. lawyers are the professional strategists for this game and vast amounts of energy and activity are poured into playing it. The legal game board builds up into structures that embody, "in the law itself", almost every inequity, injustice, and irrationality that has become accepted in our society. Among the greatest examples are the federal tax laws and the draft. the tax laws are surely one of the most intricate and remarkable structures of inequity that the human mind ever devised. There are hundreds of pages of inequities; special privileges of every imaginable sort. It seems accurate to say that the one overriding principle of the tax laws is that inequality and special favors are the rule that governs all. If possible, the draft law is even worse. For it sends some young men off to risk their lives and lose long years which might be spent in ways of their own choosing, while others are privileged to escape any military service. We need not linger here on facts that are so well known; the point is that the tax structure and the draft are not unusual examples of how the law works; they are entirely characteristic examples of what is true of the law as a whole.

Viewed in a broader perspective, it can be seen that for each status, class, and position in society, there is a different set of laws. There is one set of laws for the welfare recipient, one for the businessman. there is one set of laws for the government employee, another for the congressman. There is one set of laws for the farmer, another for the writer. These differences are not limited to any particular area or subject matter; for example the constitutional right of privacy is treated differently for a businessman or farmer than for a welfare recipient. A person receiving Medicare is required to take a loyalty oath; others are not. If "law" means a general rule to govern a community of people, then in the most literal and precise sense we have no law; we are a lawless society.
Behind this lawless use of law lies the fact that the greater the quantity of legal rules, the greater the amount of discretionary power is generated. If a licensed pharmacist is subject to fifty separate regulations, he can be harassed by one after another, as soon as he proves himself to have complied with the first. One school of legal philosophers has long advocated a society in which precisely drawn laws would give everyone the freedom of knowing his exact rights. But in practice, experience has shown that the greater the number of laws, the greater the resulting discretion, and the more lawless the official part of the state becomes.

For blacks, for anyone with long hair or non-conforming dress, even for youth in general, the law and police have become something to fear. The long-haired youth who drives a car is likely to be stopped, searched, and harassed by police over and over again because of his appearance alone. Blacks have experienced a similar arbitrary discrimination for years. Youth in general find curfews and other laws specially designed to "keep them in their place." All of these groups feel the law to be their enemy in two ways. First, because of the way it is enforced against them. second, because in a larger sense it is constructed against them; tax favors, subsides, and privileges are denied them and given others; special penalties are reserved for them alone. what we fail to realize is that there is a basic pattern to this kind of lawless law. When police lawlessness is revealed, such as the "police riot" in Chicago or unnecessary brutality at a university, everyone is shocked as if this were an aberration in our society. But the police have always been brutal and lawless to the powerless; we know this from how blacks were and are treated by the police in the South, and from the way young people, the poor, blacks, and outcasts are treated in the North. the cry of police lawlessness misses the point. In any large city the bureaucracies are also lawless; the building inspectors make threats and collect bribes, the liquor licensing authority is both arbitrary and corrupt, the zoning system is tyrannical but subject to influence. An individual in a small town criticizes the mayor and the zoning board rezones his house, the assessor raises the taxes, the police arrest him for minor violations, and the sanitation department declares his sewage system unsafe. Impossible? No, it has happened to unpopular and powerless people. An aberration? Not at all. It is not the misuse of power that is evil; the very existence of power is an evil. Totalitarianism is simply enough power, of whatever sort, to exercise full control over those within the system.

The point is this: there can be no rule of law in an administrative state. The ideal of the rule of law can be realized only in a political-conflict state which places limits upon official power and permits diversity to exist. Once everything is subject to regulation, the rule of law is inevitably lost, for the rule of law cannot stand as an independent principle of society; it is always tied to the question of power. The real issue in any society is the degree of power. Is that power divided or massed? Is it controlled? In a managerial society, where the individual is subject to the vast regulatory power of the state, the rule of law becomes an empty, hollow concept. One further thing needs to be said concerning the function of law in the Corporate State. In any society, there is some medium that intervenes between the individual values, choices, and needs of people and the social structure that results. In a primitive society, this mediator is the cultural-social tradition; it provides a society that is encrusted with many uses of the past, but that in a long-range sense reflects the beliefs and values of the people in it. Beginning with the market system and the industrial revolution, a new mediator appeared: money. Money did not, of course, provide as accurate a reflection of socially felt needs as the old culture did; you only got what you paid for, and so there commenced the terrible erosion of values. But money was not totally unresponsive to values either; perhaps it reflected 50 percent of them; it enhanced some while neglecting others, but it remained true that what an individual or society wanted, it could (if it could pay for it) succeed in getting.

As we have described the American Corporate State, it is a society very different from both a primitive culture and from the early market system. It is a society which is entirely indifferent to human needs and values, which can be wholly irrational, which can indeed make destructive war on its own people. What medium could possibly furnish a way for human needs to emerge so utterly distorted and ignored, and yet keep the people believing that it was "their" society? Law is such a medium. Far more than money, law is capable of intervening between man and his humanity. Why? Because law is a medium that is capable of being wholly external to the self. Primitive culture is a reflection of self, modified by time and tradition. Money is a medium which is compelled to reflect the self if the individual happens to have enough of it. But law can be given any form at all; it is capable of being made the servant of interests wholly indifferent to man. Thus it is perfectly suited to the Corporate State. And law has a second advantage: it is the very means by which standards are carried forward by any human community. When law is employed to serve the Corporate State, the people do not know what has been done to them, for law gets into the individual's mind and substitutes its external standards, whatever they may be, for the individual's own standards. We are taught that it is our moral and civic duty to substitute the law's standards for our own. It is a virtue to obey the law, a sin to ignore it in favor of one's own personal desires. That doctrine serves a community well as long as law is formed in a human image. But what if the law becomes the betrayer of the people? Its use then is diabolical. The people's best instincts are then used to disable them from fighting an enemy; They are told it is morally right to surrender. Thus the people are led to deny their own inner values in favor of law which has become, unknown to them, corrupt, unjust, and antihuman, the servant of an enemy of man---the Corporate State.

Diabolically, law can teach that what is wrong is right, that what is false is true. It does this by supplying the sole normative standard in a society become so complex, so confused, so divided, where people know so little about each other, that they can have no other standard. And so we have today the fact of law that says to a young American, "thou shalt kill," and a people who believe that it is their moral duty to obey such a law. When a "not" was accidentally left out of one of the Commandments in an early Bible, it was called the Wicked Bible; today it is our law which has become wicked, and has robbed us of the ability to know what is just and what is human.
Behind the law stands that even more basic element of the Corporate State, "reason." It is a state built upon "reason." But just as what is denominated as "law" has been distorted to fit the ends of the state, so reason itself has been distorted to become merely an expression of the state's values. The "reason" of the Corporate State leaves out so many values, ignores so many human needs, and pushes its own interests so singlemindedly that it amounts to this: the state has called its own insanity by the name of reason.
Ultimately, what the Corporate State does is to separate man from his sources of meaning and truth. To humans, the cosmos cannot be a source of truth. Nor can an entity such as the state. For human beings, the only truth must be found in their own humanity, in each other, in their relation to the living world. When the Corporate State forces its "public interest" truth as a substitute for man's internal truth---for the truth man creates---it cuts him off from the only reality he can live by. We say a man is mad when he believes he is Napoleon, or kills someone because an outside voice told him to do so. A society is mad when its actions are no longer guided by what will make men healthier and happier, when its power is no longer in the service of life. It is this fact that stands back of the fury and rebellion of youth. That anger is based on much else besides. But perhaps its deepest basis is the sense that the State has cut man off from his sources, cut him off from his values and from knowledge. The State is the enemy not merely because of oppression, injustice, and war, but because it has made itself the enemy of life itself.

THE LOST SELF
What kind of life does man live under the domination of the Corporate State? The process by which man is deprived of his self begins with his institutionalized training in public school for a place in the machinery of the State. The object of the training is not merely to teach him how to perform some specific function, it is to make him become that function; to see and judge himself and others in terms of functions, and to abandon any aspect of self, thinking, questioning, feeling, loving; that has no utility for either production or consumption in the Corporate State. The training for the role of consumer is just as important as the training for a job, and at least equally significant for loss of self. Job training in school consists of learning goal-behavior and an accompanying discipline and repression of unrelated instincts and interests. Goal-behavior is simply the substitution of outside ends for inner objectives. In the classroom, the goals set for the child include memorizing and being able to repeat certain information and opinions, completing papers and tests according to prescribed standards, and conforming to certain rules of deportment. The more senseless the goals the better, for that child is best prepared who will pursue any goal that is set with equal effort.
Consumer training in school consists of preventing the formation of individual consciousness, taste, aesthetic standards, self-knowledge, and the ability to create one's own satisfactions. Solitude, separateness, undirected time, and silence, which are necessary for consciousness, are not permitted. Groups are encouraged to set values, inhibiting the growth of self-knowledge. Since activity and initiative are the key to finding one's own standards and satisfactions, the child is taught passivity, so that it must depend for satisfactions on what is provided by the society. Thus the child is taught to depend on the fun of cheering for the basketball team, rather than spending the same two hours searching for some individual interest.

In school, the meritocracy shapethe whole structure of education. The object is not simply to train the child for a function in the State, but to begin the process of arranging everyone in a hierarchy of statuses, a process which will be completed many years later. Accordingly, school is full of devices for measuring and comparing children. Tests--academic, psychological, physical, and social--dominate the curriculum. The tracking system, in many public high schools, separates students into "ability groups" for their training. The end of the high school training process comes with the state's decision: who goes to a good collage, who goes to a bad collage, who goes to the white-collar occupations, who is destined for the factory or the filling station. Except for those born to wealth or hopeless poverty, this classification is the most important thing that happens to a person in our society; it determines almost everything else about the kind of life he will have. It determines a man's entire standing in the community; the amount of honor, gain, and respect he receives; indeed, his entire value as a human being. It also determines his relationships to others, friendships, how he lives, his interests except for an ever-narrowing private area which in many cases vanishes into nothingness by middle age. "Merit" also constitutes the way in which a man forms a knowledge of himself; it becomes the key to his identity, self-respect, and self-knowledge.
The opposite side of "merit" is doing one of society's undesirable jobs---that of the blue or white-collar worker. For these jobs, the most important requirement is not any affirmative form of training, although that is of course necessary, but a negative form of training---training in giving up those sides of human nature that are incompatible with the job. No person with a strongly developed aesthetic sense, a love of nature, a passion for music, a desire for reflection, or a strongly marked independence, could possibly be happy and contented in a factory or white-collar job. Hence these characteristics must be snuffed out in school. Taste must be lowered and vulgarized, internal reflection must be minimized, feeling for beauty cut off. All of these processes are begun in school, and then carried into later life in the case of those who are destined for the lower half of the nation's productive force.

The authority exercised by the school is in the purest sense lawless, in that the school authorities have virtually unlimited discretion. They make and change the rules, they provide whatever procedure there is for deciding if the rules have been violated, they determine punishments (backed, if necessary, by the law). There is no rule of law by which the student can assert any rights whatever. As in any total institution, all of the many different powers of the school can be brought to bear on an individual, so that he can be flunked and also removed from an athletic team if both are needed to ensure compliance. And the school's power extends out into the indefinite future. For the school can make possible, or thwart, the prospects of a job or a college education. Given black marks in high school, a student may find himself crippled for life, unable to get into a good college, unable to pursue a desired career in consequence. It is as if a prison had the authority to permanently maim or cripple prisoners for disobeying the rules; the school's jurisdiction lasts only three or four years, but its sentences can last a lifetime. While the school's authority is lawless, school is nevertheless an experience made compulsory by the full power of the law, including criminal penalties. (The option to go to private school does exist for families that can afford it, but this is not the student's own option, and it is obviously available only to a few.) School has no prison bars, or locked doors like an insane asylum, but the student is no more free to leave it than a prisoner is free to leave the penitentiary.

Thus the core of the high school experience is something more terrible than authority, indoctrination, or violence---it is an all-out assault upon the newly emerging adolescent self. The self needs, above all, privacy, liberty, and a degree of sovereignty to develop. It needs to try things, to search, to explore, to test, to err. It needs solitude--solitude to bring sense to its experiences and thereby to create a future. It needs, not enforced relationships with others, rigidly categorized into groups, teams, and organizations, but an opportunity to try different forms of relationships---to try them, to withdraw, to re-create. The school is a brutal machine for destruction of the self, controlling it, heckling it, hassling it into a thousand busy tasks, a thousand noisy groups, never giving it a moment to establish a knowledge within. After a person has been classified by the meritocracy he is fitted into the personal prison that each individual carries with him in the form of a role. Roles are nothing new to the world---peasant, knight, and bishop had roles in the Middle Ages; medicine men and warriors have roles in a primitive tribe. But roles have changed somewhat; they are ever more highly specialized, and they grow constantly more pervasive, cutting deeper into every side of the individual. The basis process which is going on during all the years of schooling is learning to become the kind of person society wants, instead of the kind of person one is, or would like to be. At the elementary level, this is seen in the student's attempting to become "academic" when his real interests are mechanical, sensual, or just plain undeveloped. At a higher and more tragic level, one can observe the violent alienation of law students from their prior selves. Finding themselves in law school for many possible reasons, they discover that they are expected to become "argumentative" personalities who listen to what someone else is saying only for the purpose of disagreeing, "analytic" rather than receptive people, who dominate information rather than respond to it; and intensely competitive and self-assertive as well. Since many of them are not this sort of personality before they start law school, they react initially with anger and despair, and later with resignation as their self-alienation becomes complete. In a very real sense, they "become stupider" during law school, as the range of their imagination is limited, their ability to respond with sensitivity and to receive impressions is reduced, and the scope of their reading and thinking is progressively narrowed.

Training toward alienation, from elementary school onward, reaches its climax when the student is forced to make his choice, first of a collage major, then of a career. Surrounding these moments is a gradually built-up picture of man as creature who has one single 'right" vocation in life, the vocation for which he is "best-fitted," and for which he can be aptitude tested and trained. The choice is surrounded by great anxiety and doubt, particularly because the student may find that his own nature fails to conform to the expected norm. He may find that he is seriously interested in music, surfing, and astronomy, that no career can encompass these interests, and that consequently he is faced with having to give up a part of himself. Often he has an "identity crisis" at this point, and it would only seem fair to say that the crisis is really not of his making at all, but one forced upon him by society's demand that he give up a portion of the identity which he has already formed. This sort of "choice" can only be a sad and desperate moment. For a young person is not only asked to give up a large portion of the "identity" he already has in favor of something unknown and perhaps far less satisfying; he must also give up all the yet undiscovered possibilities within him, and thus commit a part of himself to death before it can be born and tried out. When a collage student decides on medicine, he puts out of his mind the chance that he might learn about literature and discover a special affinity there; he will never give that potential in him a chance, but for a long time he will wonder about it.

In discussing Consciousness II, we dealt with role-playing in the context of false consciousness. But role-playing can also be viewed as a set of limitations on each individual. The role-prison drastically restricts such fundamental aspects of personality as relationships with others, personal expression, modes of thought, and goals and aspirations. Indeed, it does so with such total effectiveness that we are usually not at all aware of the prison we are in. the deepest form of role-constraint is the fact that the individual's own "true" self, if still alive, must watch helplessly while the role-self lives, enjoys, and relates to others. A young lawyer, out on a date, gets praised for his sophistication, competence, the important cases he is working on, the important people he knows, his quick and analytical professional mind. His role-self accepts the praise, but his true self withers from lack of recognition, from lack of notice, from lack of appreciation and companionship, and as the young lawyer accepts the praise he feels hollow and lonely. If the professional is imprisoned by his role, the policeman, nurse, salesman, secretary, and factory worker are even more enclosed by the relationships, thoughts, and goals prescribed by their occupations. On the job, most of what happens is sterile, impersonal, empty of experience. An airline ticket salesman, a stewardess, a pilot, a baggage handler, a telephone reservations girl, a plane mechanic, an air controller, are all expected to be mechanical people, thinking their own thoughts and expressing their own feelings as little as possible, putting in an entire working day that is dictated by the functional requirements of their jobs.

For both the professional and the non-professional, regulation does not stop with the job itself. Job requirements merge into requirements of the society as a whole. These broader and vaguer restraints are difficult to perceive, we are so accustomed to them. We are often aware of some of the particulars of this direct supervision, such as laws against the use of drugs, but as in most matters where the Corporate State is concerned we do not see the whole design. We think that the state has intervened to prevent certain excesses: murder, theft, drug addiction. But the pattern is not a series of negatives or prohibitions imposed on otherwise unregulated private lives for the good of the community. Instead, the state has undertaken to define, within rather strict limits, the life-style of its citizens with respect to (individual life choices), culture and consciousness, and political thought and activity.
Political life shall be limited to loyalty to the Corporate State, enforced by loyalty oaths (to whims of others), internal security laws, and restrictions on speech and expression; for example, life is made distinctly unpleasant for the man who wishes to contend publicly that "our form of government" is wrong. All of this repression is upheld under the legal doctrine, mentioned earlier, that "the national interest" prevails over any "individual interest." And it is all enforced by an elaborate system of official surveillance, including wiretapping, eavesdropping, invasions of privacy by police searches, police photography of demonstrators, congressional investigations, and all of the other methods with which we have become familiar. The full force of these restrictions can only be appreciated when they are seen not merely as a pattern, but as a web in which each restraint augments all of the others. The individual feels pressure from the meritocracy, from the rules concerning him, from the organization he works for, from the draft and public welfare, from regulatory laws. Anything he does is likely to be the subject of notice by some official agency. Significantly, the law makes little distinction between the criminal and non-criminal areas.

In other words, the law is not particularly concerned with distinguishing between whether an individual has breached some rule or whether he is in need of affirmative correction; criminal and civil laws are simply different means to produce the desired result. And there is cooperation among the different agencies of pressure; thus, from time to time one notes in the newspaper that some political dissenter, not easily reached by any specific law, has been attacked by permitting some portion of the character information on file concerning him to be "leaked" to his enemies. One of the ways we can perceive this surveillance most clearly is in the use of the criterion of "character" when individuals are selected for collage, graduate school, employment, and promotion. "Character" means the individual's personality, habits, friends, activities, politics, opinions, associations, and disciplinary and police record. All of these are thought by an increasing number of organizations to be an appropriate subject for investigation in order to reach a decision on an individual's "merit." In many cases these matters are thought to have an importance equal to the individual's "ability" and "achievement." Surveillance of character has become pervasive in our society. Most colleges and graduate schools and large private employers investigate applicant's character, and the federal government has elaborate procedures and many thousands of people occupied full time with character investigations. Where the government is concerned, the chief emphasis is upon making sure of political loyalty. Most agencies that determine qualifications for the various professions and occupations, such as the committees governing admission to the bar, licensing authorities for physicians, taxi drivers, boxers, and wilderness guides consider character an important element in determining their actions.

What does "good" character mean to all of these official investigators? First, that the individual has never violated, or been accused of violating, any laws, regulations, or rules of any private organization. Second, that the individual is not rebellious against the Corporate State, or against the specific objectives of organizations or against duly constituted authority, public or private, or against the conventions of life. Third, that he is a "team" man who goes along with the group, does not think or act with undue independence, and acts in ways that are approved by others. fourth, that he is not emotionally unreliable or undesirable. Fifth, that he has commended himself to his superiors at various stages in his life and in the various institutions through which he has passed. To ascertain "character," organizations make use of police and other official records, questioning of the applicant himself, and statements by school authorities, former employers, friends, and enemies. These sources of information are carefully and permanently kept secret from the applicant, who has no opportunity to refute anything reported concerning him. No adequate effort is made to ascertain the truth or reliability of statements made about an individual. A collage teacher, for example, may fill out dozens of forms each year without having anyone check the basis for his opinions. Persons asked to supply information are not limited to reasonably objective facts, but invited to answer such questions as "cooperation with others," "ethical standards," "appropriateness of dress," "language and conduct," "ability to react constructively to criticisms, suggestions, advice," "emotional stability." Although few teachers, school authorities, or former employers know individuals in their school or organizations very well, they are told to answer the questions on the basis of whatever opinions or information they have.

The information and opinions concerning an individual's character are filed away and continue to be available down through the years. Nothing in the file is ever changed or disclosed to the individual, so that his character-on-file takes on an independent existence that may have an ever more remote relationship to the real individual, assuming that it ever did resemble him. The rule of most organizations is, when in doubt, don't take a chance. Thus, a file suggests an individual may be a "risk" constitutes a permanent disability to him. The consequences to the individual of this stress upon character are profound. Beginning with childhood, he learns that he must trim his sails, be prudent, please those in authority, avoid experimentation and trouble, and try to force his individuality into the rigid mold of "good character" prescribed by the State. The State, not content with dictating his working life, has thus intruded deeply into his private life and private personality. The personality that emerges from all of this processing is, in the language of the new generation, "uptight." Uptight means rigid, tense, afraid, narrowly limited. But the concept of up-tightness, as developed by the new generation, carries a far deeper critique of the American personality. In part, up-tightness might be defined as how much of society a person carries around within himself. The uptight person is concerned with goals, with competence, with coping, with managing the past and the future. He is a person with a coating or crust over him, so that he can tolerate impersonal relations, inauthenticity, loneliness, hassling, bad vibrations. He is preoccupied with the nonsensual aspects of existence, so that he has little capacity to receive or give out sensual vibrations. He is a person who can successfully handle the frustrations, difficulties, trauma's, and demands of the Corporate State, and by that very fact is diminished in his humanity, tense, angry, and tight as he confronts the world.

The individual was placed in the position of seeing much that was wrong in his society but remaining personally aloof. He could not be passionate; he could not be moral. He might have private feelings but publicly, and especially in his work, he went along with the system. Sadly, many of those who took no public stand undoubtedly felt deeply concerned, but there was no communication between likeminded people, no solidarity which would have made effective action possible. To take a public stand meant being picked off, one by one, without even the satisfaction of having done any good. To perceive evil was to feel utterly alone. For the individual of the Fifties and Sixties, deprived of his political and public manhood, denied work of which he could be proud, the Corporate State provided substitute images of the heroic life: the cowboy, the gangster, the detective, the virile romantic hero. Rare indeed was the popular entertainment which attempted to show that an individual could be proud of his job or, except in war, proud of his contribution to society. He must watch the deterioration of his community as a spectator in the bleachers, a nonparticipant in the great events of his times. The product of the system we have described is the "new man" of the technological age, a man suitable for operating machines and working within organizations. He is a man who permits himself to be dominated by technique, by propaganda, by training, by advertising, by the state, all to the end that he shall be as perfectly suited as possible for playing his part. He is an artificially streamlined man, from whom irrationality, unpredictability, and complexity have been removed as far as possible. He is oversimplified in the service of reason; he tries to control himself by reason, and the result is not man but a smoothed-down man.

But the real tragedy of the lost self in America is not that of the professional middle class, who have had all the advantages, but the tragedy of the white-collar and blue-collar worker, who never had a chance. The meritocracy has placed them low on the scale, convincing them that they have little value as people. The productive state has demanded output from them all their lives, draining them of life, creativity, vitality, and never giving them a chance to be renewed. Competition has made them fearful and suspicious of their fellow men, believing that every other man is not a brother but a threatening rival with a knife at the throat of his adversaries. Imprisoned in masks, they endure an unutterable loneliness. Their lives are stories of disappointed hopes, hopes disintegrating into the bitterness and envy that is ever present in even the most casual conversation of the worker. Caring nothing about their work, nothing about what happens to them, they face a prospect stretching all the way to retirement, another form of death. But death is with them already, in their sullen boredom, their unchanging routines, their minds closed to new ideas and new feelings, their bodies slumped in front of television to watch the ball game on Sunday. If anyone doubts these words, let him look at the faces of America. Stand at a commuter train station and see the blank, hollow, bitter faces. Sit in a government cafeteria and see the faces set in rigidity, in unawareness, in timid compliance, or bureaucratic obstinacy; the career women with all their beauty fled, the men with all their manhood drained. We do not look at faces very often in America, even less than we look at ruined rivers and devastated hills.

What have we all lost? What aspects of the human experience are either missing altogether from our lives or present only in feeble imitation of their real quality? Let us take our list off the yellow pad where it was jotted down one fine morning in early summer.
Adventure, Travel: The Yukon, the Hebrides, a blizzard, fog on the Grand Banks, the lost cities of Crete, climbing a mountain on rock and ice in elemental cold and wind.
Sex Experiences: In different times, circumstances, and localities, in moments of happiness, sorrow, need, and comfortable familiarity.
Nature: The experience of living in harmony with nature, on a farm, or by the sea, or near a lake or meadow, knowing, using, and returning the elements; Thoreau at Walden.
Physical Activity: Chopping wood, carrying a boat, running, walking, climbing, experiencing heat and cold, swimming, building a house, paddling a canoe.
Clothes: Clothes to express various moods, and to express the body, its strength, its shape, its sensuality, its harmony with the rest of nature. Clothes for fun, for work, for dignity.
Morality: Having a moral stand with respect to something happening to oneself, to others, or to society; maintaining that stand, and giving it expression.

Bravery, Worship, Magic and Mystery, Awe, Wonder, Reverence, Fear, Dread, Awareness of Death, Spontaneity, Romance, Dance, Play, Ceremony and Ritual, Performing for others.
Creativity: In more primitive cultures, creativity and art are part of everyday life, and each person has an opportunity to exercise his creative side.
Imagination and Music as a part of daily life.
Multimedia experiences: Music, light, smell, dance, all together.
Alterations of Time: Staying up all night, getting up before dawn, sleeping all day, working three days straight, or being wholly oblivious to measured time.
Seasons: Observing the four changes of season by stopping other activities for a while and going to some place where the change is fully visible.
Growth, Learning, Change: Constantly learning new things, experiencing changes of feelings and personality, continually growing in experiences and consciousness.
Harmony: Enough time and reflection to assemble various experiences and changes into a harmony within the individual, relating them to each other and to earlier experiences.

Inner Life: Introspection, reflection.
Responding to Own Needs: Staying in bed when the need is felt, drinking a milk shake on a hot afternoon, or stopping everything to watch a rainstorm.
Own Special Excellence: Having enough independence to disregard other people's standards of excellence, and then pursue it.
Wholeness: Being completely present with another person, or completely given to some experience, rather than being partially withheld as most roles demand.
Sensuality: Being sensually aware of all the stimuli at a given moment; smell, temperature, breeze, noises, the tempo of one's own body.
New Feelings: Experiencing feelings or emotions qualitatively different from those previously known.
Expanded Consciousness: Experiencing previously unknown kinds of awareness, new values, new understanding.
New Environments: Experiencing a total new environment long enough to make adjustments to it and understand its terms (such as six months in the tropics).
Creating an Environment: Taking whatever elements are given, natural, human, and social, and making a unique pattern out of them as one's own creation.
Conflict, Disorder, Suffering, Pain, Challenge, Transcendence, Myth Making and Telling, Literature, Art, Theatre, Films, Bare Feet, Aesthetic Enjoyment of Food, New Ways of Thinking, Nonrational thoughts, New Ideas, ability to Listen to Others.

People: Perceiving Them Non-verbally.
People: Seeing the Uniqueness of Each One.
People: Creativity in Relationships.
People: Exchanging Experiences.
People: Exchanging Feelings.
People: Being Vulnerable with Them.
People: Friendship.
Affection, Community, Solidarity, Brotherhood, Liberation.

Indeed, the saddest thing of all in America is probably the fate of most of its teen-agers. For at sixteen or seventeen, no matter how oppressive the Corporate State, there is still a moment when life is within their grasp. There are a few years when they pulse to music, know beaches and the sea, value what is raunchy, wear clothes that express their bodies, flare against authority, seek new experience, know how to play, laugh, and feel, and cherish one another. But it is a short, short road from Teensville to Squarestown; soon their senses have been dulled, their strength put under restraint, their minds lobotomized; bodies still young, cut off from selves, walk the windowless, endless corridors of the Corporate State.

When man allows machines and the machine-state to master his consciousness, he imperils not only his inner being but also the world he inhabits and upon which he depends. He permits himself to be forced to exist in a universe that is, in the most profound sense, at war with human life. More and more individuals and groups speak out against the destruction of the natural world.
The Corporate State draws its vitality by a procedure that impoverishes the natural world. It grows by a process that we call "impoverishment by substitution." It is not a question of mistaken priorities or lack of awareness or even of greed. The "progress" of the State is rooted in destruction of existing values. Most discussion concerning our environmental crisis assumes that it is just a case of neglect or of excess. The first view is war and inertia permitting of problems to grow out of hand. The second view is that we are guilty of a moral failure, that in our rush to acquire and grow, we have not paused to tend to deeper qualitative values; we have simply not assumed moral responsibility for how things are used--the ends to which new technology and systems are put. The third view is our problem is permitting the introduction of any and all technology without controls, priorities, or values. The fourth view emphasizes a more general failure to plan--a failure to agree in advance on goals and then provide for them. A fifth view, perhaps the most pessimistic, suggests that our success itself leads to loss of meaning, that affluence and progress bring on the trouble with our children that they just have too much. All of these views "blame" man but they do not take account of the uncontrolled forces that dominate the Corporate State.

What is the logic of these forces? What do they, if left to themselves, tend to do with man's natural world? Up to now we have stressed their indifference to man's values. But this indifference does not mean that the forces lack a pattern of their own. They want to exploit, for their own purposes, the natural and human resources that are available. They want to substitute for whatever exists something of their own manufacture. And they want to prevent man from becoming aware of what is happening to him.

(My note: Like making climate change profitable to Al Gore, and universities and experts to get large grant money to hide the truth of what was really happening. I believe pollution could be the main causes, and that is man-made waste, but everyone has his hand in this, and rich should not be made richer by promoting their own agenda).

Suppose a man is employed to work in a coal mine, and after twenty years he develops an occupational illness of the lungs. The costs of his illness, to himself and his family, in terms of direct expenses, losses of opportunity for his children, and more general deprivation and suffering, are part of the "hidden" costs of coal mining. if they are not included in the man's salary, or otherwise paid for by the producer, they fall upon the individuals concerned and upon society, and the social gain represented by production of coal is actually offset by the uncompensated loss of health, education, happiness, and psychological stability. For example, we may have more coal but also more juvenile delinquency if the miner's children are uncared for at home; the real costs of coal include crime, more policemen, courts, community insecurity. Perhaps, by some measurement, the production of coal still represents a net gain, but it will be far less of a gain than is usually assumed, and may actually, by other standards, be a net loss. Just as the mining of coal has its unexamined human costs, so it has "hidden" environmental costs. To call them "hidden" is simply to show how our awareness has been dulled, for they assault one's senses and one's feelings. And to call them "Environmental" is also an inadequate description, for environmental costs are really indirect human costs. What we are referring to is the destruction of landscape by mining, the denudation of hills and valleys, the pollution of streams and of air, the degradation of cultural life by long hours, physical exhaustion, lack of education, and making the world a more depressing place to live in, and this should be measured against the energy coal gives off.

Today a man gets poorer simply by standing still. There is a general rise in prices, a gradual inflation each year. One of the important costs of a rapidly growing and changing economy is the risk that each individual bears--that he and his training or job will become obsolete. Such an economy has many victims, but it does not pretend to pay more than a tiny fraction of the costs, although they are just as much costs of production as the physical industrial accidents which once wee treated the same way. An example of another type of cost for the individual is the growth of large cities. Living in an urban environment is far more expensive than in a small town. And at the same time so many country pleasures are lost that the urban worker needs expensive substitutes---television, for example, instead of a Sunday afternoon ball game with local friends. Since one of the consequences of "growth" is to make the simple product complicated, individuals are constantly having to pay more for a "better" product---color instead of black-and-white TV, homogenized instead of regular peanut butter. There is no logical place to end this catalogue, but there is a moral place---with the human costs of the draft and war. A man drafted into the army lost some of his most productive years. Some of his best opportunities for education are passed by, his family loses his support, and if he is injured or killed, the loss is incalculable and irreparable. Yet individuals--poor ones especially--are required to pay these costs of the defense and war policies that are one consequence of uncontrolled power. In short, we can say that the same power that turns out America's affluence also creates our social problems of poverty and wealth. Poverty and inequality are part of the cost of the well-being we enjoy. they are not an accidental consequence or some unfinished business, but a built-in part of the structure itself.

Today, continued growth depends upon creating new wants, developing new goods and services. In large measure, this is done by a process of "substitution." One cannot sell anything to a satisfied man. Ergo, make him want something new, or take away something he has and then sell him something to take its place. Take away man's appreciation of natural body odors and then sell him deodorants and perfumes. Remove adventure from daily life and substitute manufactured adventure on television. Make it hard for an adult man to enjoy physical sport and give him a seat in a stadium to watch professionals play. Give him less time to cook and sell him instant dinners. It has always been contended that the logic of commerce is improvement: make a better mousetrap and everyone will profit. But that is only what some optimists hope will be the result of commerce. The logic of commerce is simply to sell, whether the product is better or worse. Pollution of a beach is of course an accident; only a paranoid would see it as a plot to sell swimming pools. But failure to safeguard footpaths does sell cars. The substitution phenomenon can be seen at work in the case of our neglected public services. We have "no money" for urban public schools, although they have obsolete plant and equipment, lack adequate teaching staffs, and suffer from broken windows, unheated rooms, hopelessness, and despair. We have "no money" for improving the urban environment, "no money" for public libraries and museums, "no money" for the Job Corps or other youth programs. We have "no money" for all the tasks which we know are necessary if the society is to be kept from tearing itself apart. Where is the money, then?

Plainly, the money is not in the municipal or state treasuries. Is it in the suburbs? Suburban areas do have better schools and services, and yet most of the money in the suburbs comes from the cities. It is clear that the arbitrary boundaries of municipalities leave the suburbs free to avoid the city's social problems and provide for themselves with all the insularity of the Long Island Sound town that thinks it has the "right" to limit beach privileges to residents because they live there, as if the suburb could exist for one minute without the city to support it. But suburban public services, while pleasant by city standards, are hardly excessive; they are merely adequate. They could not be stretched to cover, on the same level of quality, the millions of city residents as well. It is widely thought that money for the poor and the cities is actually to be found in the federal government's vast expenditures for war and weapons, plus its lesser but nevertheless huge subsidy programs to industry. But even if our military-industrial spending, industrial subsidies, and other unnecessary public expenditures came to one hundred billion dollars a year, it would not be enough. Consider simply the matter of public education. Suppose we estimate that there are 35,000,000 children from deprived backgrounds who now get a substandard education, and who would require a relatively high quality of education if they are to enjoy anything approaching equality of opportunity in later life. Estimating the cost of such an improvement in their present education by private school standards ( far less than college costs), we could suggest $3,000 per year per child, or $105,000,000,000 annually. In short, the entire one hundred billion dollars obtained by the most optimistic estimate of what could be gotten from the federal budget, would be used up in providing for the educational needs of these children. Not a cent would be left for other types of education, including colleges, adult education, the education of less deprived children. And yet other billions, hundreds of billions, would still be needed for capital expenditures for dilapidated schools, for urban housing, transportation, medicine, for the adult poor, for the aged, and so forth down the list. We repeat, the entire federal budget would not be enough.

By now it should be perfectly clear where the money is: it is not in the "public sector" at all but in the "private sector"---the consumer economy where most of our resources are now expended. "The money" is now being spent for consumer goods. It is being spent on all of the things, large and small, that make up the affluent American way of life--automobiles, appliances, vacations, highways, food, and clothing. All of these things have reached beyond any standard of necessity to higher and higher standards of luxury. It is here that we must, if we wish, tighten our belts. So long as vast social deprivation exists, we do not "need" cars that become obsolete, vacation trips to Europe, electric dishwashers, supersonic planes, or even television entertainment. We not only do not "need" them, we cannot afford them. It is possible to make the above statement and to mean by it no more than a moral point---that we should all think of our poor brothers, etc.. But if we treat the question of priorities as a moral issue we misunderstand the way in which priorities are established in our society. They are very definitely not established by individual moral decisions. They are decided by the exercise of power, power controlled by the most massive forces in our society. There is no individual choice involved. But where are those forces? Where is the power that says we must spend our money, not on our social needs, but on luxury and waste? This power must be highly visible, for it is one of the most important influences in our society. As we look around, we do not immediately discern it. Where is the command that says "ignore the needs of society"? Look again----it is there.

The most powerful, the loudest, and the most persistent command in our society is the command to buy, to consume, to make material progress, to "grow." The voice of advertising urges us to buy, buy, buy--and it never lets up. And the voice of advertising is only the most obvious of the forces that include the mass media's portrayal of a "way of life" in their programs and stories, the rhetoric of businessmen and politicians praising economic "progress" and "growth," and the overwhelming influence of American high schools and colleges in portraying a materialistic way of life as a desirable form of existence, individually and nationally. What are these voices saying? As we seem to hear them, they say "buy," "consume," "enjoy," "grow," "advance." But this is only half their message. The other half---just as real as if it were spread in full--page newspaper ads, or spoken imperatively by firm, confident television announcers---is this: "Don't spend money on city schools, on hospitals, on the poor." "Ignore the pressing needs of society." "Don't think about what's inadequate or impoverished in our communal life." "Forget the blacks, forget the poor, forget the most elementary demands of decency and justice." If we actually heard and saw such ads, we would be incredibly outraged; yet we "do" hear them and see them, and we heed them. If it is true that the logic of our economy is what might be called "impoverishment by substitution," this explains what is happening to our world, but it does not explain why we are all so blind both to the process and to the consequences. Not only do we fail to see rather obvious relationships, such as that between the availability of electric toothbrushes and the shortage of good schools, but we fail to see the impoverishment of our lives by the "progress" of our economy.

There is a pattern to this blindness too, and it is related to the logic we have already described. In the first place, the substitution phenomenon tends to dull our awareness, even though the substitute may fail to perform the vital functions of the original. Football on Sunday TV is not the same as physical play, but it serves as a placebo to lessen our awareness of loss. It is not substitution alone, but the management of consciousness that necessarily accompanies substitution, that offers an explanation for our unawareness. To demonstrate this, let us borrow some thinking from Marshall McLuhan. A young boy asks his father, "What do you do, Daddy?" Here is how the father might answer: "I struggle with crowds, traffic jams, and parking problems for about one hour. I talk a great deal on the telephone to people I hardly know. I dictate to a secretary and then proofread what she types. I have all sorts of meetings with people I don't know very well, or like very much. I eat lunch in a big hurry and can't taste or remember what I've eaten. I hurry, hurry, hurry. I spend my time in very functional offices with very functional furniture, and I never look at the weather or sky or people passing by. I talk but I don't sing or dance or touch people. I spend the last hour, all alone, struggling with crowds, traffic, and parking." Now this same father might also answer: "I am a lawyer. I help people and businesses to solve their problems. I help everybody to know the rules that we all have to live by, and to get along according to these rules." Both answers are "true." Why is the first truth less recognized than the second?

McLuhan's answer is that a medium itself has no "content." A light bulb, he says, has no content. The "content" of the father's day is being a lawyer, the purpose of his activity. The medium, however, is the father's actual activities during the day. And, as McLuhan says, the medium is the message, although we don't know it. Translated into more general or cultural terms, it might be said that we are trained to be aware of the goal of our activities, but not to be aware of what is actually happening. What are we doing? Going from New York to San Francisco. Ask again. Sitting five abreast, bored and anxious, re-reading the airline brochure, cramped, isolated, seeing and thinking nothing. What are we doing? Ask again..... It is apparent that we are far less aware of some sides of our culture than of other sides. It is this differential awareness that is revealed when we all know that a jet travels from New York to San Francisco, but we are "surprised" to learn that a jet makes a great deal of noise. At the most simple level of explanation we could say that we are taught to be an instrumental people; we think of the purposes or goals of some aactivity rather than of the ctivity itself; where the plane is going, what a lawyer is trying to accomplish, what the future results of a telephone conversation will be. A businessman, to use a familiar illustration, is persuaded to think of profits, not of what it takes to make them, or what the effect of making them is. We are numb to some things, other things are repressed, and our consciousnesses are so managed that certain things are simply omitted from the culture. The ordinary man's suit eliminates his body from the culture during the day; during a conference one conferee has no awareness of another's body. On the other hand, if businessmen dressed in the Renaissance clothes that we see on the Shakespearean stage, the body would again come back into their culture. In somewhat the same way, our awareness of the hours spent on the plane is "taken out of the culture."

The whole logic we have been describing--exploitation, substitution, numbing of awareness--may be seen at once in the phenomenon of Disneyland. Economic progress destroys nature, adventure, traditions, and the local community. A plastic substitute is constructed and admission is charged. Advertising and promotion then work to convince the people that they are really experiencing Main Street, The Wild West, the history and adventure of America. As the families flock to the clean, sunny, happy enclosure, how many of them realize that something precious has been taken from them, that they are being charged for a substitute that offers only sterile pretense in place of real experience? how many find the chief experience at Disneyland to be a sense of loss of all that they are "seeing" ?
If substitution is the pattern by which the Corporate State has created a world, perhaps we can now look and see what that world has cost us. Perhaps we can throw off the numbness enough to take a more accurate measure of our losses. We can start with poverty and the allocation of resources, and continue through environment, work, culture, and community.

Each year still more is spent for private use by the fortunate portion of the country; the gross national product rises steadily; and each year there are more drastic cutbacks in expenditures for the community purposes. The decay is spreading; more and more institutions feel the strain; even symphony orchestras are trapped in the spiral of rising expenditures for new kitchen utensils and garden implements. but the sufferers are not institutions but people; the people who are already at the bottom of the ladder, and, above all, the young people whose hopes die in an overcrowded, dingy, and stultifying school. If we leave the subject of allocation of resources and public services, and proceed to the physical environment in which we live, the problem is again one of seeing. Some aspects of the environment created by the Corporate State are not at all difficult to notice; they make a violent assault upon the senses. Noise, whether of jets, supersonic planes, or 3-wheelers on a forest trail, attack us all. Air pollution causes people to cough and cry, and airport or automobile congestion causes acute misery and anxiety. In the same way, we are aware of the increase of crowding, of long lines, of enforced orderliness, of the disappearance of space between people. We have a large capacity to get used to such discomforts, but the technology seems to force us faster than we can adapt. thus those who have barely adapted to the interior of a hundred-passenger jet must face the prospect of a five-hundred-passenger jet, with people sitting ten abreast. We are also aware of violent alterations in the environment which change our accustomed way of life. Freeways cut up our cities and countryside, developments encroach upon the seashore and level the hills, ugliness is strewn everywhere, neon glares obscure the night, huge buildings block the sun. We walk a favorite woods path only to encounter the desolation of bulldozers, blasted tree stumps, and destroyed vegetation. In these instances of assault, where there is little offsetting satisfaction, it can readily be understood why people are starting to realize that they are being pushed, shoved, and hassled.

But there are other kinds of environmental change that are not so obvious. A good example is a modern, high-rise apartment house. Life inside is enclosed by small, identical rectangles that provide not a wasted cubic foot of space for the occupant, nor an irregular angle or cranny where his thoughts can find refuge. Fresh air is not welcomed; it is filtered through an air-conditioning system. The sounds of weather are muffled, but the grating sounds of other occupants penetrate through the thin, uninsulated walls, ceiling, and floors. Long hallways remind the occupant that he or she is only a number on an identical metal door. Some apartments are located near elevators, incinerator shafts, or other maintenance facilities, and so are subject to disturbance from these sources. everyone is dependent on elevators; these prevent one from going for a casual look outside. a pretentious lobby and guard make sure that no occupant can expect the knock of an unexpected friend. Safe in his apartment, the occupant has no contact with the life of the street, with wind or weather, with the seasons, or with the land. // Of all the changes that have happened to man, perhaps the deepest and least understood is his loss of land, of weather, of growing things, and of the knowledge of his body that these things give. We deprive man of exercise or use for most of his muscles. We feed him substances that have no comprehensible relationship to any living or growing things, or to any work or effort on his part. We insist upon so much waste that man never establishes any knowledge of the properties of particular objects, whether clothes or food; everything is thrown away before it acquires any meaning. And man is wholly, utterly, irretrievably deprived of any sense of place. Most people are forced to move several times during their lives, and even if they stay in the same place, the environment is constantly being altered, so that it can no longer be recognized.

Man used to spend a thousand years in the same place, his roots went down deep; he built his life around the rhythms of the earth and his mental stability upon the constancies of nature. Can a hundred years change his physiology enough so that the need for these rhythms and certainties no longer exists? We know almost nothing of the origins of mental illness and character disorders; we know still less about the sources of happiness, satisfaction, and stability. One thing that is certainly lost is the ability to adapt to physical circumstances. A storm can now disable a city; this is said to be because our technology is so interdependent and therefore so vulnerable. But it must also be true that human beings have ever less ability to cope with any new circumstances, they are ever more passive, they cannot make do, or do without a meal, they cannot walk, and many streets and bridges are now built without sidewalks. In a deeper sense, the ability to cope is related to some kind of environmental stability. One learns to cope with the idiosyncrasies of an old car or an old fireplace, but one cannot learn anything useful about constantly new appliances. In its turn, this inability to cope produces anxiety.

Once the State begins to control the environment, it is natural to act against people as for them, where policy so requires. Thus the same power that produces air-conditioning produces poison gas, defoliating agents, chemical Mace, or does research on germ warfare. For we have shown that in the Corporate State, power is not controlled by any human values and is indifferent to such values. So it is that we produce weapons of destruction with the same efficiency that we produce jets and apartment buildings; so it is that in war we systematically assault the environment of a whole nation---the growing things, the wildlife, the communities---as policy requires. The bombed ruins, the planned sterility of an apartment house, the "accidental" destructiveness of jet noise over a residential community, are all forms of the substitution phenomenon spoken of earlier--the substitution for the natural environment, whatever the consequences for man. A third aspect of the world of the Corporate State concerns work. The special problem of the Corporate State concerns the artificially of much work that is now done----another aspect of the substitution phenomenon.
High school or college teaching illustrates what is happening. The basic task of a teacher is to teach students, and a related task is to pursue his own scholarly interests and keep his mind alive. But the Corporate State has forced many teachers to spend much of their time and energy on artificial administrative activities, and activities created for them to serve administrative purposes.

College teachers have endless committee and faculty meetings devoted to such problems as new appointments, promotions, curriculum, and admissions. They attend panel discussions, symposia, give speeches, and participate in professional conventions in many parts of the country and even in foreign countries. Their advice or assistance is sought by outside organizations ranging from presidential commissions to local community groups. And above all, they are continuously engaged in "research and publication," activities that require half or a third of any college teacher's time. And this is not the self-renewal and search for enlightenment that a teacher needs, it is high pressure, forced type of "production", designed to satisfy criteria for promotion and tenure. Teaching continues, of course, but the average professor does not have time for the sort of personal concern for students that would constitute teaching in a more old-fashioned sense of the word. It is clear that there has been a substitution of one kind of work for another.
The pattern by which real work (work that is satisfying and personal) is transformed into something artificial and empty is visible all through those jobs which are under the influence of technology and organization. In the medical profession, there is an acute shortage of doctors to care for people; so acute that many hospitals use foreign- trained doctors for their staffs, and many localities are wholly without medical care. It is commonplace observation that personal care by doctors has drastically declined. What has happened?

One thing is that the available doctors have been lured into the organizational vortex---research, technology, administration, professional activities---and hence have no time to practice. This aspect of the problem is much the same as the problem of teachers. A second problem is the increasingly costly, time-consuming, specialized, and demanding education, with its diminishing satisfactions. If one is going to lead an organizational--technological life, there are better places to lead it than medicine. The great lure of medicine, its personal side, participation in the crises of life, helping people in a vital way, is lost in the process. From work we move to culture. There is much that we could say about the shabbiness and tawdriness of American mass culture, about neon signs and hotdog stands, but it has been well said elsewhere, and is of no special concern here. Our concern is with culture and consciousness. Culture in America provides one more manifestation of the concept of impoverishment by substitution. Because of the substitution phenomenon, one of the prime characteristics of American culture is that the genuine is replaced by the simulated. When the radio gives us five minutes of news, there is staccato noise or music in the background, sounds of explosions, fighting, or catastrophes to simulate excitement; we are not allowed to find excitement in the news itself. Substitution: When something is put in its place, the ability to experience the genuine is reduced. It deadens our curiosity and makes our ignorance more stubborn.

Adventure, challenge, danger, imagination, awe, and the spiritual are banished by this culture, which tries to make everything safe, bland, and equally delightful. Perhaps the greatest and least visable form of impoverishment caused by the Corporate State is the destruction of community. Man's greatest need, after food and water, is for a circle of affection; man is a communal animal and he craves his kind. But even though we are starved for community in our world, we may not realize it. Today our experience of genuine human community is so limited that we are hardly aware of our loss, and the substitutes provided keep us so busy that emptiness is drowned in busyness. Actually, the erosion of community is one of the major effects of the industrial revolution, and such consequences as the destruction of villages and the effects of harsh competition have been discussed. Our concern is with the continuation of that process by the world of the Corporate State, and the operation of the substitution phenomenon: the substitution of false communities for real ones. For example, the Corporate State continues the destruction of neighborhoods, replacing them with offices or apartments, and the neighborhood people are compelled to look to new forms for a sense of belonging.
It is ironic that the form of community most praised and cherished by American society, the family, has probably suffered the greatest destruction at the hands of the Corporate State, Technology has deprived the family of almost all of its functions. The State wants the family to be a unit for consumption, to exist for the purpose of watching television, using leisure products and services, and living the life of false culture. The State wants its consuming units as small as possible; were it not for certain biological necessities for which substitutes have not yet come into use, the solitary individual would be the best possible unit for the State's purposes.

As it is, the State's domination is shown by the fact that old people are separated from the rest of the family, condemned to uselessness and isolation, perhaps to a "leisure community", aunts and cousins have suffered the same fate, and the "family" has been reduced to the "nuclear" grouping of parents and young children. Technology has created a youth culture, consisting of education for positions in the system, plus a special consumer status, and the result is that children cease to be a part of the family by the time they reach high school. This leaves the parents themselves---although they are also separated to a significant extent by the husbands's job and the wife's increasingly special functions. A nuclear family is, quite evidently, not a large enough unit to supply the warmth, security, and familiarity of a communal circle of affection. Two is better than one, but it is not enough. But when the couple searches for something more, they cannot find it. Friday and Saturday dinner parties, with their hours of sterile conversation, provide no warmth for any of the participants; if warmth, fondness, affection, and companionship were food, a person could go to dinner and cocktail parties nightly and soon starve. What has the State provided to take the place of the circle of affection? First and foremost, "love", "sex", and "romance" to be pursued in frenzied fashion beginning with puberty, and with the aid of countless commodities, but strangely depersonalized and unsatisfying. Finally, a theory that the process of living consists of using things, instead of being with people.

Over the years we have gradually got used to an ever-more frantic pace of living, a constant acceleration of experience, where men eat, talk, and think faster and faster, until a memorandum read on a plane while eating a precooked lunch becomes the normal way of life. One of the great new activities is security. A profession of security men has grown up, numbering hundreds of thousands of persons, who protect us from ourselves. But the greatest new activity is, of course, technological war and preparation for war. the manufacture of arms is one of the largest businesses, the study of strategy one of the prime mental efforts. The energies, resources, and the minds of Americans are lavished upon this as upon nothing else. A world that is artificial is also one that is lifeless, and a society that sets out to manufacture an artificial world ends as a manufacturer of death.
It is all epitomized by Astro Turf, the new artificial football field developed by Monsanto, with nylon tufts that are "better than grass," a shock-absorbing pad beneath that "can't turn to mud even if it rains buckets," no dirt so that "uniforms stay clean and bright the whole game long," a grass-green color that the coming of winter cannot fade, and better footing than earth can provide. This is how we are using our resources while the poor get poorer; this is how we are losing our knowledge of land and living things.

In this world, to one beginning a life, there are no open roads for the body, the mind, or the spirit, only long, hard, paved freeways to nowhere. For amid all the promises of science and knowledge, of discovery, wealth, and freedom, life, instead of being expanded, has been narrowed and become miserly; and humans, knowing the possibilities of a rich and varied banquet, are forced to live in deprivation, hollowness, and despair. To a young person, the Corporate State beckons with a skeleton grin: "Step right in, you'll love it----it's just like living."
(The Machine Begins To Self-Destruct)
With its massive and concentrated power, the Corporate State seems invulnerable to reform or revolution. Nevertheless, in the last few years the State has been beset by deep troubles from within, from many different groups of angry and dissatisfied people. How is this possible, when the State's position is so unchallengeable, and its critics are so weak, divided, and lacking in a plan or theory of how to proceed? It is our theory that the State itself is now bringing about its own destruction. The machine itself has begun to do the work of revolution. The State is now generating forces that will accomplish what no revolutionaries could accomplish by themselves. And there is nothing the State can do, by repression or power, to prevent these forces from bringing it down.

It has been the prevailing belief among most political theorists that the State could satisfy its own people. The more thoughtful of these theorists would acknowledge that the State has profound flaws, that it causes enough destruction to furnish motivation for a dozen revolutions. But these flaws are not enough to bring the machine to a halt so long as people accept them, so long as people are convinced that despite our troubles we are better off than we have ever been. Establishment thinkers believe that the State can make reforms at a rate sufficient to satisfy most demands. Gadgets, entertainment, sex, leisure, and even some harmless dissent and "radical culture" are all means the State can employ to keep a real rebellion from ever getting started. But many Left thinkers believe that nothing short of revolution can dismantle the State.

In 1965 this seemed plausible indeed, and supported by almost all available facts. But today, with year's of additional perspective, it is clear that the Corporate State cannot possibly do what the theory expects of it. Keeping people happy and pacified, under either the Establishment or the Marcuse thesis, requires a government that is intelligent, flexible, sophisticated, able to understand what needs to be done, and then put its understanding into effect. Such a government would have to be one that its leaders could control and direct. It is the very essence of the Corporate State that no one can control it, either for the beneficent purpose of perserving human values, or for the purpose of pacifying the people within it. We have spelled out many of the reasons why sophisticated and flexible social control is, as a realistic matter, impossible. The political system is too rigid, vested interests have too powerful an ability to prevent change, and the whole theory of government-as-management prevents new initiatives or ideas. The present federal government, as well as most large corporations, seems wholly to lack even a single person in a responsible job who has the insight to know what needs to be done. But it is not only the State's inability to manage that is causing its self-destruction. There are forces at work directly undermining the State, contradictions in its structure that are tearing apart the social fabric. The chief of these, which we will soon discuss, are eroding the motivation of the worker, the satisfaction of the consumer, and the willingness of all citizens to put "the public interest" ahead of their own immediate desires. The heart of the State's power lies in its ability to maintain its people in a condition of false consciousness. It could indulge in any irrationality, so long as that false consciousness is preserved.

What has now happened is that the State has finally begun to act in the one way that must be fatal to it---it has begun to do things which pierce the illusions and myths of Consciousness I and II. While these illusions were intact, there was no limit to the State's power. But like some almost-human machine in a science-fiction drama, its madness has turned back on it, and it has begun to self-destruct. With every possible means available to keep people from seeing the truth, it has started to force the truth on them. For the most part, the State's piercing of Consciousness I and II have so far produced only bitterness, cynicism, despair, and fury at some unseen foe. But where the arrows of truth reached those who were the most strongly endowed with hope and vitality, they led not to mere disaffection, but to something even more dangerous to the State----a new consciousness.

The Corporate State depends upon two human elements: a willing worker and a willing consumer. These are its two vulnerable spots. Consciousness II supplies the motive power: the individual works for the public interest and for status and advantage within the system, he consumes according to the dictates of false consciousness, and then must work even harder, and so the wheel turns. This makes the system heavily dependent upon the continuance of a consciousness ready to work and consume. We have shown, that in reality work and consumption in our society are artificial, oppressive, and unsatisfying; Consciousness II keeps people unaware of this impoverishment. But this unawareness will not necessarily last forever; the Corporate State is actually on perilously thin ice.
The State works hard to keep the worker-consumer contented. But this is the contradiction under which it works: the overly persuaded consumer may no longer be a willing worker. To have consumers for its constantly increasing flow of products, the Corporate State must have individuals who live for hedonistic pleasures, constant change, and expanding freedom. To have workers for its system of production, the State must have individuals who are ever more self-denying, self-disciplined, and narrowly confined. In theory, they are supposed to accept the discipline of their work in order to enjoy the pleasures of consumption. But the theory is all wrong.

For some people it is wrong in fact, because hard work does not leave time or energy for outside enjoyment. For some people, it is wrong in principle, because if they are persuaded to believe in the principle of hedonism, they find it hard to hold on to the principle of service. And for a large group of people, it is simply impossible on a personal level; they are psychologically unable to go back and forth between self-denial and pleasure. When the consumer-worker contradiction touches blacks, it produces the angry militancy of those who believe they have been left out of something. When it touches blue-collar workers, it makes them angry too, but since they believe in the Corporate State, they find someone else to blame it on. And when it hits middle-class youth, it helps produce hippies.

The great selling point of America is "FREEDOM." America is a "free" country; it is part of the "free world," in contrast to the communist world. But what is really meant by this freedom? Imperceptibly, it has come to mean consumer freedom. Consumer freedom is freedom to travel, ski, buy a house, eat frozen Chinese food, live like a member of the "now generation"; freedom to buy anything and go anywhere. For work, on the other hand, there is no longer any concept of freedom at all. Most of the repression of self we discussed earlier--the meritocracy, loyalty, character files, employment regulation--occurs in connection with work; the worker does not live in a "free country." But can consumer freedom be turned off at the office door?

The consumer is stirred to other desires besides freedom. Let us focus for a moment on advertising. It is only the visible portion of a much deeper consumer ethic, but its visibility allows us to study it. Most advertising attempts to sell a particular commodity by playing upon a supposed underlying need, such as sex, status, or excitement. Buy our automobile and you will get all three, the ads say. But in trying to sell more and more commodities by the use of these needs, advertising cannot help but raise the intensity of the needs themselves. A man not only wants a car----quite independently, he wants more sex, status, and excitement. Advertising is designed to create, and does create, dissatisfaction. But dissatisfaction is no mere toy; it is the stuff of revolutions.
Generally, it is assumed that the American economy is capable not only of creating wants, but also of coming reasonably close to satisfying them. But if one creates a desire for sex, status, and excitement, and then sells a man an automobile, the desires are likely to remain unsatisfied. The wants created are real enough, but the satisfactions are unreal. (Another example) A newspaper ad shows a drawing of a group of young people at a beautiful beach; they are beautiful also, and happy, healthy, and carefree besides. It stirs desires in the desk-bound reader. He hardly notices that the ad is for beachwear.

In The New York Times of March 4, 1969, there appeared a two-page spread, showing a magnificent, dreamy, misty island scene, fog hovering over exotic mountains, a shallow area of water in the foreground, with a couple meditatively contemplating the scene; the caption says, "the time is now. The girl is your wife." What was for sale? An airplane ride by Pam Am. What was stirred up? The longing for relaxation, absence of work, for new experiences, for closeness to nature, companionship, sensuality, romance, love, mystery, awe, far horizons, freedom from work and from routine. The ad creates a desire to be a beachcomber on some deserted island, a desire for escape, romance, idleness. In short, the ideal of the hippies, bare feet and all.
Behind the worker-consumer contradiction lies a related problem for the State. American society no longer has any viable concept of work. We are no longer expected to find work happy or satisfying. There is, for example, no advertising designed to create pride in craftsmanship or in worker's self-discipline. Nor is anyone convinced that he should work for the good of the community. Instead, the belief is created that one works only for money and status. This puts a heavy burden on money and status, a burden they are no longer able to carry. Money and status offer satisfactions that are primarily relative; one must be relatively well off compared to others.
(NOTE: Whatever happened to just being happy with what you have,.... and not expecting a piece of someone else's stuff? )

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Entertainment => Books => Topic started by: islandboy on November 26, 2009, 09:52:09 AM