REBELLIOUS ORGMEN AND TAME INTELLECTUALS

...And if they are to take sides in this world, they can do so only with a society in which, according to Nietzsche's profound words, the judge will yield to the creator, whether he be a worker or an intellectual...

...The artist fashions himself in that ceaseless oscillation from himself to others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community from which he cannot tear himself...

...Did Leon Trotsky write The Permanent Revolution...

...A lot of money even in boom times, and all of it a waste and a bloody nuisance too, defacing the landscape and bombarding our eardrums...

...In our house there is a little girl wlio, when she is of two minds about something, expresses her ambivalence with an original portmanteau word...

...Political leanings, marital relations, credit ratings, personality test scores: nothing relevant would be omitted...

...Was it the cornerstone of his work...

...and Packard is aggrieved only about a handful of ostensibly villainous psychologists...

...professional persuaders have no business treating Ike and Adlai like autos, bath salts and lawn mowers...

...Apart from that minority of malcontents who are somehow unable to "get with it," most intellectuals are Accommodated Men...

...If racists should gain the upper hand in this society they would straightway draw upon the tolerance literature that has been accumulating all these years and turn it upside down...

...From the mass circulation magazines, where he had labored faithfully, there emerges Mr...

...Given the ubiquity and circumambience, the sheer volume of it, this is of course just what we cannot do...

...Hucksters should not try to merchandise their products in the political arena...

...His prototype romantic capitulators, but even the in-is the Marquis de Sade as described transigent intellectuals were likely to by Albert Camus in The Rebel: a man be swallowed up by a corporate or-who starts out as Prometheus and ends ganism ravenous for ideas...

...Last year Daniel Bell struck a smart blow at advertising...

...His is criticism within the system and not of the system— on par with a worker's letter to Pravda complaining about his plant manager...

...All the armies of tyranny with their millions of men cannot people his solitude —even, and especially, if he is willing to fall into step with them...

...he must serve those who are subject to it...

...Some literal-minded editorialists took this spoof seriously, and objected to the idea...

...III Packard, like all good people, is most exercised about the presence of motivation research in politics...

...But then, who reads footnotes...

...Former critics are commonly quiescent or jubilant...

...11 Recently William Whyte published a grim little morality tale called The Organization Man which sets many of our problems in proper focus...

...The junior executive who had sent for him quickly explained that a big boss had just read two valuable books...

...They have spilled their seed on barren ground for long enough...

...a great many advertising men, publicists, fund raisers, personnel experts, and political leaders, in fact numerically a majority, still doa straightforward job...

...The articulate and experienced but abortive rebel, by contrast with his tongue-tied adolescent brother, knows that something is wrong, that unbearable pressures are being brought into play...

...Does Packard care to criticize that economy...

...The notion was that if a thousand Influentials were known by name, they could be circularized and organized to pressure Congressmen for more sensible legislation—like a national "right to work" law and a more reasonable wages and hours act...

...It is beyond the apprehension of such men that a few hundred motivation researchers are simply a small saprophyte on the body of American advertising and that American advertising, while senseless, is merely a small and necessary part of the American economy...

...To me art is not a solitary delight...

...Hence it forces the artist not to isolate himself...

...Thanks to Packard, word has also spread that certain psychiatric findings can be and are profitably perverted...

...That word is "Nyes"—meaning no, but yes, after all, yes...

...And as they are reduced to serenity, protests come not from the Academy or from politics but, curiously, from within business itself...

...He is even moved to denounce them—and then quickly, if not tropismatically, to withdraw from their implications...

...If the criticism they write dribbles off into inconsequence and offers gimmicks instead of solutions, we should not complain too harshly...

...The principal fact about advertising is that it must be used on a large scale because so many identical products with different brand names are poured on to the American market...

...From the speech of acceptance by Albert Camus upon the award of the Nobel Prize for literature...

...he just isn't very troubled by our society and wishes that others weren't either...

...In the Winter 1958 issue of Midstream Fiedler refers for the umpteenth time to a vestigial group of radicals who emphasize their "alienation" (a word which so greatly annoys him that he can't stop using it) and feel "an obligation to the attitudes of dissent which survives the ideological grounds for dissent...

...And the man who, as often happens, chose the path of art because he was aware of his difference soon learns that he can nourish his art, and his difference, solely by admitting his resemblance to all...

...The meaning of this cri-own insights...

...Others took the idea seriously and embraced it...

...Whyte expresses polite disgust on nearly every line of his book...

...Niccolo Tucci captured the whole point long ago when he imagined a Soviet worker going to Stalin and saying, "I want you to remove my chains...

...You decadent hyena...

...Omnivorousness is perhaps the most striking quality of corporate civilization...

...Sputnik-Mutnik...

...And why not...

...Edouard Heimann, the economist who was a discussant that day, admitted that the consumer is king in our system, but he suggested that we reflect upon the nature of monarchy: usually the king is a man surrounded by courtiers and toadies who, through flattery, get him to do what they want...

...Presently their voices were raised in cries of anguish and pain which, when heard against the background of the intellectuals' dithyrambic recitation, produced a fine modern atonal effect...

...Only the experts really understand how to handle marginal differentiation...

...But," says the worker, "I don't want any chains at all...

...No more than the juvenile delinquent, the hophead, the cat, the hipster, can this kind of unfocussed rebel stop swatting flies and start draining swamps...

...Here is Whyte's account: Unfortunately, however, many who took it literally thought it was a splendid idea and the net effect of the article on them was to embolden them to action...

...All recoil once they peer deeply into the abyss, and no one can blame them for averting their gaze...

...At which Stalin exclaims, "You wrecker...

...So "lest readers get too excited, I made the end patently ridiculous: with the card, I said, society would be protected from people who questioned things and rocked the boat...

...This odd discourse which ultimately produces a kind of speech pathology amounting to strangulation conveys the full measure of a deep commitment to everything that the new rebel genuinely abhors...

...Who says we've lost our know-how...

...it subjects him to the humblest and most universal truth...

...Translated by Justin O'Brien...

...A socialist, and a liberal too, might be able to find some more constructive use to which such a sum could be put...

...He was summoned one day last year to ply his peculiar trade ("Market Psychology") in the research division of a large company...

...All this was to be handled by a central organization staffed with competent coders, testers and tenders who would eventually "process" the entire population...

...Very well, then Fortune Magazine will give us America: The Permanent Revolution...

...His rebellion, though real, is like most other forms of contemporary in surgency: it is for a variety of reasons hopelessly abortive...

...Whyte advises the Organization Man to cheat on personality tests...

...This is why true artists scorn nothing...

...I cannot live as person without my art...

...Leslie Fiedler speaks for them—and don't tell me that Fiedler's vision has been impaired...

...But the number of dissenters or Dissenters in American intellectual life today is pitiably small...

...Out of the communications industry in which he had been immersed came Mr...

...One was Personal Influence, a sociological study of consumer habits by Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz which might be expected to interest eggheads in business (some of them refer to it as Personnel Influence...

...Having said so much, Whyte grew fearful that his readers' mouths might be watering in unseemly fashion...

...My friend, hardly able to contain himself during the interview, believes that if he had earnestly recommended certain portions of Capital as firsthand material on the exploitation of labor, that too would have been given a serious hearing...

...Not that it matters...

...When the bland are leading the bland, any resource may be tapped and converted...

...The major function of advertising is to establish marginal differentiation—or the illusion of difference, when in fact there is no difference...

...Well, he tells me," said the young man, "that, according to Mills, a very few people in key positions do all the deciding about most public and private matters...

...I wish quite simply humanism, which is where they ought to propose that we reverse the process to have originated in the first place...

...They force themselves to understand instead of judging...

...Spectorsky to anatomize the exurb...

...today the bought us out whether we were ready sensitive executive squirms in an idento sell or not...

...He points out...

...and many of the creations of ad men are tasteful, honest works of artistry...

...He remarked in The New Leader that the previous year more than ten billion dollars were spent on advertising in the U.S...

...His card would be revoked and that would be that...

...Nowhere more so than on page 177, for it is there that Whyte reports what happened after he wrote a satirical 120 piece in Fortune with such a deliberately heavy hand that no one—except the American businessman—could take him seriously...

...Such lese majeste would be unthinkable...

...and reprinted with permission...

...But the silence of an unknown prisoner subjected to humiliations at the other end of the world is enough to tear the writer from exile, every time at least that he manages, amid the privileges of freedom, not to forget that silence, but to relieve it, making it re-echo by means of art...

...and if the exradicals didn't keep sourly kicking us while we're more or less down, we'd be even more obscure than we are...

...For good measure there was a footnote indicating that the whole thing was a hoax...

...Bell is labor editor of Fortune although we know him in many other roles as well...

...It is essential to me, on the contrary, because it excludes no one and allows me to live, just as I am, on a footing with all...

...Copywright 1958 by Alfred A. Knopf Inc...

...described earlier in this article: they Once it was the radical who felt frushave picked our brains, used our ideas, trated because he could not apply his taken our insights, and all too often principles in the real world...

...So the boss wants a list of those people...

...It is not cricket, he contends, to extend methods suitable for selling depilatories, soaps, toothpaste and deodorants to selling presidential candidates...

...For we have already been sufficiently rewarded by an abundance of insight from men who have gone farther than anyone could have expected but who are incapable of taking yet another step...

...Almost anyone who discovers that he has been manipulated into preferring a political Tweedledum over a Tweedledee who looks almost the same, can work himself into quite a lather over it...

...Indeed an extraordinary turnabout has taken place in our time...

...By definition, he cannot serve today those who make history...

...Interest in the other book was a little more startling, for it was The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills...

...Let us as Dissenters offer from within business that our corrupt him a better fate, and first of all by civilization is being criticized most showing him the consequences of his mercilessly...

...And yet I have never set that art above everything else...

...His firm, he suggested, was just the right outfit on which to build thecentral unit...

...But Fiedler is suffering from a delusion: he seems to see (and in Montana, too) dissenters everywhere crying their "alienation" to the heavens, and sometimes I suspect that he counts editors of DISSENT while trying to go to sleep...

...But, if he does so, our voter will lose sight of the principal fact that Packard discloses—and forgets...

...He has attempted to "expose" that technique, but they, undisturbed, want to use it for their own firms...

...But an exsocialist has other fish to fry...

...ization of our autonomy and humanity must also deflate his argument by saying, lest we misunderstand, that, "I write with the optimistic premise that individualism is as possible in our times as in others...

...Now that Packard has interested himself in subliminal perception, which he regards as even more diabolical than Motivation Research, we may be sure that it too will be well received...

...You Western counter-revolutionary swine...

...Thus his brave negation—and this holds for Whyte, Packard and the rest—is smothered in a much more strident and repetitive "Yes...

...The business point of view might, in this way, be properly represented by people who count and who by their example tell other people how to think and act...

...Stanford about his fictitious Card, "Organization could get full loyalty: if a man developed hostility he could not escape by leaving the organization...

...And William Whyte, every inch the executive, writes The Organization Man while on extended leave from Fortune, that svelte voice of big business...

...Murmurings have been discernible for some time from those who were sucked into the slimiest vortex of business...

...Bell recommends that we ignore advertising...

...There is no way of escaping commercial messages in a pecuniary culture...

...This condition was brought home to me recently by an acquaintance of mine who is employed on Madison Avenue...

...He is revolted—but within circumspect lim its...

...Besides, he has a recommendation: if you don't like advertising, said Bell, turn a deaf ear to it...

...I will have a new set forged immediately...

...Packard is quite as good an exemplar of abortive rebellion...

...His nom de plume was Otis Binet Stanford, the personification of mental measurement...

...Even onanistic insight from the bitter and disgruntled representatives of business should be welcome...

...The Universal Card which Whyte had dreamed up as part of a nightmare turned out to be no great novelty...

...By the same token, the writer's function is not without arduous duties...

...Two years ago several of us listened with rapt attention to an erudite Commencement speaker the text of whose inspirational address was—The Permanent Revolution...

...This corporate Jeremiah who flails us for allowing ourselves to be robbed by The Organ...

...The corporation's absorptive capacity is unlimited...

...and adds in case he hasn't made himself clear enough, "I speak of individualism within organization life...

...William Whyte is sickened by what he sees around him almost as much as the average intellectual is heartened by what he sees: namely, the same thing...

...As the two political parties become indistinguishable and the public begins to sense that they are so, Democratic and Republican leaders have no choice but to apply the special skills of ad alley...

...Stalin replies, "Gladly, comrade...

...December 10, 1957...

...Every idea, like every thing and no matter what its origins, is swallowed, absorbed and reused...

...Business taught us better than we knew that tique and of its frustrated authors is insight is a many-splintered thing ours to exploit...

...A stickler for the rules of scholarship, he modestly disclaimed any originality, and credited the concept to—William Whyte...

...This seemed to me to be an appropriate image of the American consumer, but it did not prompt Bell to alter his own conception of regal power in the marketplace...

...Otherwise he is alone and deprived of his art...

...And he says that it says in Personal Influence that there aren't more than a thousand opinion leaders in the United States...

...With this tool," observed the mythical Dr...

...Not to forget that silence...

...Everyone in the know will tell you that Vance Packard's bestseller, The Hidden Persuaders, which was designed to scare people away from Motivation Research, has actually given that exotic enterprise a powerful shot in the arm...

...It's the peaceful use of technology here on earth and not in outer space that really matters...

...Vance Packard, the moralist, works himself into a state of indignation over a serious threat to the human mind—and in spite of himself makes propaganda for what he most deplores...

...There were plenty of tical state of discomfort...

...If all beers are pretty much alike, what you do in the beer business is get yourself an adman who will launch a multimillion dollar campaign to prove that your beer is better, that it is dry (like many other liquids), more aphrodisiacal or less fattening...

...The president of the country's largest statistical firm called in great excite went to find out if anyone had yet started the central processing organization—he said it was the sort of idea you kick yourself for not having thought of first...

...Packard himself tells of being approached by businessmen who never heard of MR before but are tremendously impressed by his description of a new technique for manipulating the masses...

...Advertising, for example, not only plays a vital role in promoting our economic growth but is a colorful, diverting aspect of American life...

...Wouldn't it be a good thing to abolish advertising...

...When I last heard from him he was on his way to see a testing outfit he might team up with...

...In a recent speech disparaging Thorstein Veblen ("I come not to praise Veblen but to bury him"—Bell has appointed himself a professional undertaker of famous radicals), Bell implied that in this land the consumer is king...

...The Power Elite becomes fortified with an even greater sense of solidarity than before The Power Elite appeared...

...Now it is up as Onan...

...Emphasis added.] Nor was this all...

...He found that Western Electric already had an index system for its executives containing "Management Personnel Code Cards" with basic data on each man punched through a slick new machine...

...Their insights should which can be put together in defense be put to use in the name of socialist of any ideology...

...Packard, a journeyman reporter—not the old-fashioned highbrow muckraker—to hurl a bombshell on Madison Avenue...

...It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes...

...What did the boss see in these two books...

...Stanford playfully proposed the establishment of a Universal Card to be coded by electronic machines for all pertinent information about everybody...

...Think what this means: C. Wright Mills set out to write an angry indictment of the irresponsible ruling class, and his analysis has the incidental and unintended effect of helping to crystalize class consciousness in the very group under indictment...

...Spectorsky limits himself to exurbia as if it were an isolated enclave rather than the quintessence of modern American life...