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...'Power spots' like those labeled "crazy makers" (in _The Artist's Way_ books). Where such persons aren't "good for" the smooth operation of the workers doing their work (artists included, when working "professionally"). Where such persons --were artists to realize the value of finding ways to bridge with and include "crazy makers"-- could well be realized to be crucial champions much needed for the humanity quotient, but in "our" system, viewed as being in competition with the managers (our bosses), and so important to deny.
Where labor/management "relations" issues are concerned, anyway.
You've heard almost everywhere of _Brave New World_, the famous novel by Aldous Huxley, yet have you heard of the much more rare book, "Brave New World--REVISITED" (Harper & Row, 1958, 1965), which provokes thought on topics that are much deeper than mere critique of the Russians? Here are excerpts from this exceptional book, at last! (slightly edited for easier reading and such)
Chapter III. Over Organization
"The Power Elite...influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. (p.19)
"We see, then, that modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power, and to the development of a society controlled (ruthlessly in the totalitarian states, politely and inconspicuously in the democracies) by Big Business and Big Government. But societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life. How have individuals been affected by the technological advances of recent years? Here is the answer to this question given by a philosopher-psychiatrist, Dr.Erich Fromm:
Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure." (p.20)
Me, the editor, wonders what this frantic drive is about, and i come up with the idea that the people who buy into the Given imagination even to the detriment of their sanities, would frantically drive for whichever so-called "Norm" was Given to/coerced for them to be. What do you think?
Huxley, quoting Fromm:
"Our 'increasing mental sickness' may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But 'let us beware', says Dr.Fromm, 'of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting.' The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal.
'Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.' They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.
These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish 'the illusion of individuality,' but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But 'uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too...Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.'"
"In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual. We reproduce our kind by bringing the father's genes into contact with the mother's. These hereditary factors may be combined in an almost infinite number of ways. Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique.
Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature.
"Science may be defined as the reduction of multiplicity to unity. It seeks to explain the endlessly diverse phenomena of nature by ignoring the uniqueness of particular events, concentrating on what they have in common and finally abstracting some kind of 'law,'...(gives examples) (p.21)
"Here the theoretical reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity becomes the practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman uniformity, of freedom to servitude. In politics the equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In economics, th equivalent of a beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines.
"The 'Will to Order' has produced many premature syntheses based upon insufficient evidence, many absurd systems of metaphysics and theology, much pedantic mistaking of notions for realities, of symbols and abstractions for the data of immediate experience...[and] it sometimes happens that a bad philosophical system may do harm...by being used as a justification for senseless and inhuman actions. It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous. (p.22)
"The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.
"Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely co-operating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom.
"As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at one end of the scale and of total control at the other. (p.23)
"During the past century (1850s to 1950s--ed) the successive advances in technology have been accompanied by corresponding advances in organization. Complicated machinery has had to be matched by complicated social arrangements, designed to work as smoothly and efficiently as the new instruments of production. In order to fit into these organizations, individuals have had to deindiviualize themselves, have had to deny their native diversity and conform to a standard pattern, have had to do their best to become automata.
(...)
"Subject to this kind of [alienated] life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning.
(...)
"Brave New World presents a fanciful and somewhat ribald picture of a society, in which the attempt to recreate human beings in the likeness of termites has been pushed almost to the limits of the possible. That we are being propelled in the direction of Brave New World is obvious. But no less obvious is the fact that we can, if we so desire, refused to cooperate with the blind forces that are propelling us. For the moment, however, the wish to resist does not seem to be very strong or very widespread.
"As Mr. William Whyte has shown in his remarkable book, The Organization Man, a new Social Ethic is replacing our traditional ethical system--the system in which the individual is primary. The key words in this Social Ethic are "adjustment," "adaptation," "socially orientated behavior," "belongingness," "acquisition of social skills," "team work," "group living," "group loyalty," "group dynamics," "group thinking," "group creativity." Its basic assumption is that the social whole has greater worth and significance than its individual parts, that inborn biological differences should be sacrificed to cultural uniformity, that the rights of the collectivity take precedence over what the eighteenth century called the Rights of Man.
"According to [this] Social Ethic, Jesus [of Nazareth] was completely wrong in asserting that the Sabbath was made for man. On the contrary, man was made for the Sabbath, and must sacrifice his inherited idiosyncrasies and pretend to be the kind of standardized good mixer that organizers of group activity regard as ideal for their purposes.
"This ideal man is the man who displays 'dynamic conformity' (delicious phrase!) and an intense loyalty to the group, and unflagging desire to subordinate himself, to belong.
(p.25)
(...)
"[An organization] is not good in itself; it is good only to the extent that it promotes the good of the individuals who are the parts of the collective whole. To give organizations precedence persons is to subordinate ends to means. What happens when ends are subordinated to means was clearly demonstrated by Hitler and Stalin.
"Under their hideous rule personal ends were subordinated to organizational means by a mixture of violence and propaganda, systematic terror and the systematic manipulation of minds.
"In the more efficient dictatorships of tomorrow there will probably be much less violence than under Hitler and Stalin. The future dictator's subjects will be painlessly regimented by a corps of highly trained social engineers. 'The challenge of social engineering in our time,' writes an enthusiastic advocate of this new science, 'is like the challenge of technical engineering fifty years ago. If the first half of the twentieth century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers'--and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World.
"To the question quis custodiet custodes?--Who will mount guard over our guardians, who will engineer the engineers?--the answer is a bland denial that they need any supervision. There seems to be a touching belief among certain Ph.D's in sociology that Ph.D.'s in sociology will never be corrupted by power. Like Sir Galahad's, their strength is as the strength of ten because their heart is pure--and their heart is pure because they are scientists and have taken six thousand hours of social studies.
"Alas, higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue, or higher political wisdom. And to these misgivings on ethical and psychological grounds must be added misgivings of a purely scientific character.
"Can we accept the theories on which the social engineers base their practice, and in terms of which they justify their manipulations of human beings?
"For example, Professor Elton Mayo ([of the Mayo Clinic?--ed]) tells us categorically that 'man's desire to be continuously associated in work with his fellows is a strong, if not the strongest human characteristic.' This, I would say, is manifestly untrue. Some people have the kind of desire described in Mayo; others do not. It is a matter of temperament and inherited constitution.
"Any social organization based upon the assumption that 'man' (whoever 'man' may be) desires to be continuously associated with his fellows would be, for many individual men and women, a bed of Procrustes. Only by being amputated or stretched upon the [torture] rack could they be adjusted to it.
"Again, how romantically misleading are the lyrical accounts of the Middle Ages with which many contemporary theorists of social relations adorn their works! 'Membership in a guild, manorial estate or village protected medieval man throughout his life and gave him peace and serenity.' Protected him from what, we may ask. Certainly not from remorseless bullying at the hands of his superiors.
(...)
"The impersonal forces of...over-organization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system. This revival will be made more acceptable than the original...but, for the majority of men and women, it will still be a kind of servitude.
Where labor/management "relations" issues are concerned, anyway.
You've heard almost everywhere of _Brave New World_, the famous novel by Aldous Huxley, yet have you heard of the much more rare book, "Brave New World--REVISITED" (Harper & Row, 1958, 1965), which provokes thought on topics that are much deeper than mere critique of the Russians? Here are excerpts from this exceptional book, at last! (slightly edited for easier reading and such)
Chapter III. Over Organization
"The Power Elite...influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. (p.19)
"We see, then, that modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power, and to the development of a society controlled (ruthlessly in the totalitarian states, politely and inconspicuously in the democracies) by Big Business and Big Government. But societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life. How have individuals been affected by the technological advances of recent years? Here is the answer to this question given by a philosopher-psychiatrist, Dr.Erich Fromm:
Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure." (p.20)
Me, the editor, wonders what this frantic drive is about, and i come up with the idea that the people who buy into the Given imagination even to the detriment of their sanities, would frantically drive for whichever so-called "Norm" was Given to/coerced for them to be. What do you think?
Huxley, quoting Fromm:
"Our 'increasing mental sickness' may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But 'let us beware', says Dr.Fromm, 'of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting.' The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal.
'Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.' They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.
These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish 'the illusion of individuality,' but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But 'uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too...Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.'"
"In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual. We reproduce our kind by bringing the father's genes into contact with the mother's. These hereditary factors may be combined in an almost infinite number of ways. Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique.
Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature.
"Science may be defined as the reduction of multiplicity to unity. It seeks to explain the endlessly diverse phenomena of nature by ignoring the uniqueness of particular events, concentrating on what they have in common and finally abstracting some kind of 'law,'...(gives examples) (p.21)
"Here the theoretical reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity becomes the practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman uniformity, of freedom to servitude. In politics the equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In economics, th equivalent of a beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines.
"The 'Will to Order' has produced many premature syntheses based upon insufficient evidence, many absurd systems of metaphysics and theology, much pedantic mistaking of notions for realities, of symbols and abstractions for the data of immediate experience...[and] it sometimes happens that a bad philosophical system may do harm...by being used as a justification for senseless and inhuman actions. It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous. (p.22)
"The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.
"Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely co-operating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom.
"As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at one end of the scale and of total control at the other. (p.23)
"During the past century (1850s to 1950s--ed) the successive advances in technology have been accompanied by corresponding advances in organization. Complicated machinery has had to be matched by complicated social arrangements, designed to work as smoothly and efficiently as the new instruments of production. In order to fit into these organizations, individuals have had to deindiviualize themselves, have had to deny their native diversity and conform to a standard pattern, have had to do their best to become automata.
(...)
"Subject to this kind of [alienated] life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning.
(...)
"Brave New World presents a fanciful and somewhat ribald picture of a society, in which the attempt to recreate human beings in the likeness of termites has been pushed almost to the limits of the possible. That we are being propelled in the direction of Brave New World is obvious. But no less obvious is the fact that we can, if we so desire, refused to cooperate with the blind forces that are propelling us. For the moment, however, the wish to resist does not seem to be very strong or very widespread.
"As Mr. William Whyte has shown in his remarkable book, The Organization Man, a new Social Ethic is replacing our traditional ethical system--the system in which the individual is primary. The key words in this Social Ethic are "adjustment," "adaptation," "socially orientated behavior," "belongingness," "acquisition of social skills," "team work," "group living," "group loyalty," "group dynamics," "group thinking," "group creativity." Its basic assumption is that the social whole has greater worth and significance than its individual parts, that inborn biological differences should be sacrificed to cultural uniformity, that the rights of the collectivity take precedence over what the eighteenth century called the Rights of Man.
"According to [this] Social Ethic, Jesus [of Nazareth] was completely wrong in asserting that the Sabbath was made for man. On the contrary, man was made for the Sabbath, and must sacrifice his inherited idiosyncrasies and pretend to be the kind of standardized good mixer that organizers of group activity regard as ideal for their purposes.
"This ideal man is the man who displays 'dynamic conformity' (delicious phrase!) and an intense loyalty to the group, and unflagging desire to subordinate himself, to belong.
(p.25)
(...)
"[An organization] is not good in itself; it is good only to the extent that it promotes the good of the individuals who are the parts of the collective whole. To give organizations precedence persons is to subordinate ends to means. What happens when ends are subordinated to means was clearly demonstrated by Hitler and Stalin.
"Under their hideous rule personal ends were subordinated to organizational means by a mixture of violence and propaganda, systematic terror and the systematic manipulation of minds.
"In the more efficient dictatorships of tomorrow there will probably be much less violence than under Hitler and Stalin. The future dictator's subjects will be painlessly regimented by a corps of highly trained social engineers. 'The challenge of social engineering in our time,' writes an enthusiastic advocate of this new science, 'is like the challenge of technical engineering fifty years ago. If the first half of the twentieth century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers'--and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World.
"To the question quis custodiet custodes?--Who will mount guard over our guardians, who will engineer the engineers?--the answer is a bland denial that they need any supervision. There seems to be a touching belief among certain Ph.D's in sociology that Ph.D.'s in sociology will never be corrupted by power. Like Sir Galahad's, their strength is as the strength of ten because their heart is pure--and their heart is pure because they are scientists and have taken six thousand hours of social studies.
"Alas, higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue, or higher political wisdom. And to these misgivings on ethical and psychological grounds must be added misgivings of a purely scientific character.
"Can we accept the theories on which the social engineers base their practice, and in terms of which they justify their manipulations of human beings?
"For example, Professor Elton Mayo ([of the Mayo Clinic?--ed]) tells us categorically that 'man's desire to be continuously associated in work with his fellows is a strong, if not the strongest human characteristic.' This, I would say, is manifestly untrue. Some people have the kind of desire described in Mayo; others do not. It is a matter of temperament and inherited constitution.
"Any social organization based upon the assumption that 'man' (whoever 'man' may be) desires to be continuously associated with his fellows would be, for many individual men and women, a bed of Procrustes. Only by being amputated or stretched upon the [torture] rack could they be adjusted to it.
"Again, how romantically misleading are the lyrical accounts of the Middle Ages with which many contemporary theorists of social relations adorn their works! 'Membership in a guild, manorial estate or village protected medieval man throughout his life and gave him peace and serenity.' Protected him from what, we may ask. Certainly not from remorseless bullying at the hands of his superiors.
(...)
"The impersonal forces of...over-organization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system. This revival will be made more acceptable than the original...but, for the majority of men and women, it will still be a kind of servitude.
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