THE GREENING OF AMERICA by CHARLES A. REICH

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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.

[islandboy]

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.

[islandboy]

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.

[islandboy]

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.

[islandboy]

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.

[islandboy]

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.

[islandboy]

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.

[islandboy]

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.

[islandboy]

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.

[islandboy]

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.

[islandboy]

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.

[islandboy]

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.

[islandboy]

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.

[islandboy]

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.

[islandboy]

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.