No More Learning

The chief instrument of economic power in the United States is the corporation, more particularly the large corporation. The corporation is, at its best, a completely rational mechanism with a single overriding goal: the maximization of profits consonant with steady growth. From an internal point of view, everything about the successful large corporation is rational which is one of the aspects that make it an attractive object of study to those who like to study something wholly rational in an irrational world. Corporate rationality, however, is wholly internal. It is at variance, with social rationality and, in fact, the rational corporation takes advantage for itself of much social irrationality, as some corporations take advantage of the desire of many people to, swill whisky and to smoke cancer-inducing cigarettes.
The United States, I am convinced, would be a vastly superior place in which to live if it were organized along corporate lines as a single corporation rationally committed to maximizing the welfare of all people. I don't have in mind here a fascist corporate state, although this is probably what the outcome would be if misguided idealists set about trying to install a benevolent political corporation. Short of such a goal, we have before us as a model the welfare capitalism of Sweden, disliked by rabid free-enterprisers athirst for tax exemption.
In its rationality the corporation does everything it can, including much that is illegal, to maximize its profits. It employs deceptive (and irrational) advertising, produces below-par goods even for vital military and space programs, resorts to deceptive packaging, evades taxes, abuses weights and measures, engages in monopolistic price- fixing, caters to popular irrationalities, overcharges, profiteers, and, in general, does whatever it can, evaluated as good or bad, legal or illegal, to maximize its position. To the outsider there is something questionable about one act or the other of the big business corporation. If the quality of the goods is excellent the price may be too high; if the price is low the quality suffers. In any event, it pays no taxes, merely collects them from customers. Again, much of corporate goods produced is of no utility other than in catering to free-floating anxieties, often stimulated by advertising. Here the rational corporation profits from irrational people.
Overreaching is not something new in history. But in its American systematization, complete with computers, it is distinctly new, and it affects every nook and cranny of society as well as of individual attitudes. It is seen, for example, in many of the formal and publicly defended economic policies of the medical profession; some doctors, alarmingly, are no more than overreaching businessmen and bad doctors to boot. It extends into the ghettos with their high prices and high installment interest rates for below-par merchandise. It is reflected in the terms and product given by builders to home buyers. It is freely practiced against the general labor force by the stronger trade unions. It stands out blatantly in advertising. Systematic overreaching of the weak, in sooth, is as American as apple pie. It is respectable. Rightly practiced it will lead one to membership in the country club, a zero in the infinite.
The rich themselves are in many ways the victims of this spirit of overreaching and must be constantly on their guard against swindles, an involved story commended to the sociologists for further inquiry. As an example, although the best medicine is available to the rich they are in fact the victims of many medical rackets and in known instances unscrupulous doctors play a cat-and-mouse game with them, prolonging their disabilities and, for all one knows, bringing them to premature avoidable ends. The rich get into this impasse on the theory that whatever costs most must be best, and there are doctors who do not hesitate to set especially high fees. There exists, among other things, a special tier of high-fee proprietary hospitals, physical and psychiatric, especially programmed to act as a vacuum cleaner on the pockets of those with ability to pay, and not markedly notable for sound medical results. The victims of such establishments, however, can comfort themselves with the fact that there are being applied in medicine the most rigorous canons of free and unregulated private enterprise.
The corp-pols, are the actual front line and cutting edge of capitalism. They represent the hard-nosed elements in the system and, during successful behavior, under the canons of strict business principles, are largely autonomous. As long as they run the corporation in harmony with hard business rationality, always with deference to public opinion (manipulated through public relations) they are in complete charge. True, if the big stockholders wished to interfere with operations they could.
The big stockholders, however, often but not always rentiers and sometimes personally tender-minded, not up to conducting confrontations with nail-hard labor leaders and nagging politicos, not always well informed, do not interfere with the corp- pols unless there is a crisis in internal company affairs or between the company and the outside world. In such instances the big stockholders can and often do intervene decisively, especially against a runaway or berserk management. Ordinarily, though, the big stockholders let well enough alone, even endorsing judicially certified illegal conduct.
Big stockholders could, it is true, meddle into the affairs of corporate management and, theoretically, could insist upon strict social-minded policies. They do not do this, usually, not because they are of the despicable temperaments pictured by C. Wright Mills and others but because they are indifferent, diffident or are afraid to disturb a smoothly running profitable operation.
Some clarification of the roles of corp-pols and pubpols seems advisable here lest they be misrepresented. Despite adverse moral judgments often registered against them by critical commentators each of these types always does broadly what is inherently required by the system he serves. More significantly, each at all times implements to the best of his ability the chief operative value of American society: worship of William James's bitch-goddess, Success. In their various ways these men are all successes and exemplify in their dreary daily activity the American doctrine of success. As men who
faithfully obey the inner rules of the game they merit and receive wide public approbation. If at times what they do appears messy under close scrutiny, this is only because the American idea of success is messy. At such times they may be called upon to act as scapegoats for the system, to take the blame as moral lepers. This they do, grimly.
It should be observed that, except for disaffected, out-of-step critics, there is no widespread rejection on the American scene of the ascendant notion of success. Not only does a broad public uncritically accept steamy monetary success as a proper life goal but it feels any questioning of this goal to be un-American, possibly traitorous or at least subversive and surely cowardly. Who but a coward would shrink from entering the glorious contest for success? The "unsuccessful" are regarded with contempt or pity, often even by themselves.
What we find, if we delve deeply enough, is a special value system at the root of it all.
The traditional value system, originated out of long and tragic human experience, was encapsulated in traditional religion. As religious mythology, cult and ritual were demolished by critical rationalism the values of which these were the virtually sole and fragile carriers also suffered, came into disrepute as goody-goodyness and were insensibly superseded by the harsh values of success, of which the mass media stood as the principal guarantors. Instead of the clergy now defining values for society the job was taken over by half-literate, often personally demoralized editors and publishers.
Religion, in the process, was reduced from a vital, widely shared world view to routine churchgoing on the part of the less educated. As the healthy baby of traditional values was thrown out with the dirty bathwater of myth and cult, the only repositories remaining for traditional values were the university and traditional philosophy, neither of which had much impact in the daily lives of people and both of which were strangers to the editors and publishers of the mass media, nearly all militantly ignorant men.
Because man by his very nature must always live by one set of values or the other, the new set of harsh values not only filled a vacuum but accorded with, the experience of what had until recently been a frontier society. In that society difficult conditions at once highlighted the competent and the incompetent. The competent man was he who could take care of himself: the self-reliant man, the successful man.
The original American fortune-builders, the Robber Barons of the nineteenth century, it is well to notice, were all with hardly an exception faintly educated or illiterate lower- class men, none at all above the lower middle class and many from even further down: unskilled laborers, farmers, wandering adventurers. The American plutocracy, in truth, did not originate from within an aristocracy but came straight from the hoi polloi and implemented by far-ranging commercial action the narrow, culturally impoverished daily values of this hoi polloi. It was this element up from the lower cultural depths, making common cause with formerly poor boys in politics, that provided American society with personal proof of the worth of the new scale of values by enriching themselves. Expression of an inherent American point of view was given by the Rev. Horatio Alger, Jr. , in his novels of successful economic derring-do on the part of poor boys.
These good-in-their-place frontier values, as much evidence now shows, are insidiously destructive in a more developed environment, even of their own votaries. While the bulk of attention is focused on the massive poverty sector of American industrial society, what is generally overlooked, except by a few close observers, is that affluent suburbia and much of the success-striving middle class is also engulfed in its own particular variety of emotional slum-ghettos. The very winners in the system, the
affluent, are in different ways as malserved as the poor, a fact increasingly evident to educated middle-class youth.
That the values put to the fore by the success cult are destructive is seen most readily in the blighted personal lives even of winning strivers under the system. Within the reaches of the Social Register we see ample evidences of the blight reflected in a book such as Cleveland Amory's Who Killed Society? Lower down we find it in special reports.
"According to psychologists, physicians, family counselors and others," reports the Wall Street Journal, "companies now absorb too much of the time, energy and devotion of their rising young executives; exhausted by their jobs, they are mere shells at home, unable to function effectively as husbands and fathers.
"The result is seldom divorce, which is bad for the careers of young men on the go. Instead, marriages in name only are preserved between weary, indifferent men and women beset by all sorts of emotional ills, including chronic loneliness, sexual frustration, alcoholism and excessive dependence on their children. " 8
There followed an interesting, long, quasi-psychiatric analysis of emotional troubles on the suburbia executive success-circuit, about which there is a growing special literature.
In two surveys in the Chicago area on attitudes of women it developed that they saw their mates, not as persons, but in order of importance as breadwinner, father and husband; and saw themselves, again, not as persons but as mother, wife and homemaker. Few of the women had any interest in or knowledge of their husband's work but evaluated the man in terms of being "a good provider" or having "a good job. " Commenting on this phenomenon Marya Mannes said: "Throughout their responses, the conclusion was inescapable that the wives cared far more about what their husbands did than about what they were, as persons. About one-third of the women not only put their own role as mothers first, but indicated that the husband was essentially outside the basic family unit of herself and her children. " It is because men are primarily an accessory to the fact of the contemporary family "instead of half of a primary relation" that so many, in the opinion of Miss Mannes, find ways outside the family of establishing the fact of their manhood. Said Miss Mannes mordantly: "Is a primary relationship between man and wife indeed possible in a society where secondary considerations--success, status, possessions, social acceptance, public opinion--impinge more and more on a family unit less and less tied together by common needs and bonds? . . . . If the illusion of a truly companionable marriage is to exist, women might start thinking of their husbands as men first, and accessories last. And vice versa. " 9
Financial deficiencies are blamed on the man; family deficiencies are blamed on the woman. As comparatively few individual incomes, only 10 per cent until the more recent Johnsonian inflation, exceed $10,000 a year, according to the cold statistics, it is evident that most American males are big flops incomewise and are wide open to cutting remarks from their success-oriented, status-craving wives wrestling with child care and household chores.
All, then, as one could easily show by citing a variety of sources, is not happy sailing in the alcohol-sustained, drug-propped affluent belt of society, which in its own way is as badly churned up as the city slums and ghettos. Children in this situation, of course, suffer most of all.
In passing, it is difficult for a habitual reader of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post to avoid concluding that the United States shelters under the glorious Star Spangled Banner an extremely
sick society, fundamentally made ill by the institutional implementation of a set of extremely destructive values.
Let us return, now, to the big corporation.
The management is the soul of any corporation. Without good management--that is, the rational application of unsentimental business principles as rigorously as possible in an imperfect world--the best corporation is bound to lose ground steadily to demonic rivals. And the importance of management is recognized in the many university courses and books and periodicals devoted to it. Management, in fact, is governance, rule. And within the modern corporation one finds the most rational and usually judicious application of rule in history, although for ends often extraneous to the general welfare. Corporate management fries its own fish and makes the best terms it can with cloudy public opinion and with government that is, with pubpols. The men who run these corporate fiefdoms, managers, are actually rulers of vast domains, corp-pols. Although comparatively most of them are not extremely rich, the corp-pols are indispensable to the rich. Some become very rich.
A good management of a corporation is the equivalent of a John D. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil Company and performs a similar general role. As pristine Rockefellers are hard to find growing naturally, it is necessary to train them up. This uptraining is done on the chain of command, from the junior executives onward. Along this chain of command many are called, few ultimately chosen; some are dropped along the way, some shunted into corporation dead ends or cul-de-sacs, some lost to rivals. The hard, sharp, rational, dominant, smart and highly acquisitive are moved upward under the incentives of higher pay, more and more public deference and elevated social status. Emerging as executive vice president and president, a man is known to be a crashing success within the system. He is somebody to be reckoned with. He is a corp-pol, as powerful in his way as any senator, sometimes more powerful. As chairman he becomes something of an Elder Statesman, ready to tell congressional committees what is, and what is not, sound. For these are all, with few exceptions, sound men. They know the inner workings of affairs as many large stockholders do not.
What critics of the abstraction called capitalism rarely see is the impersonality of the actual system, allowing few involved in it to experience it in its fullness. Thus, owners in this system, unless they are also managers, have only remote impersonal relation to it. Absentees, they are seldom directly touched by it. As far as knowing precisely what goes on, most of them are as ignorant as the common man. Some do not wish to be put to the inconvenience of knowing, in which case the system also serves them well. Capitalists, at any rate, are rarely close students of capitalism and the way it works. All most of them know is that they are getting only what they believe they are in all plain justice cosmically entitled to, and this holds of many inheritors who never soiled a finger as well as of the self-erected. The courts agree to the hilt.
As to harsh characterizations of the rich as special hard types, it is easy to show that they are false. As Lampman showed, 40 per cent of the owners of taxable estates are women. As Professor James Smith showed, women predominate among the owners of estates exceeding $10 million, a figure more recently verified by Herman P. Miller, special assistant to the director of the Census Bureau. As of 1958, millionaires by sex and average age, Miller found, were as follows: 10
Amount
(in millions)
Total
$1-2
2-3 3-5
Men Age
22,024 61
16,336 59
3,156 62
1,124 68
Women Age
17,630 58
11,063 60
3,048 56
1,320 63
5-10 1,073 63 541 67
10 and over 335 58 1,658 40
The predominant number of very big holders, then (five to one), are women of an average age of forty, who are in this category either as heirs, widows or as a consequence of estate splitting by older men, usually husbands. Most such female holdings, of course, are under the direction of male investment managers, lawyers, trustees, husbands or fathers. As far as that is concerned, some of the richest people are minors, children.
While some of the women are as dividend-hungry as any man, and some hungrier, by and large they are not hard types; nobody at all has ever suggested they are. At worst what one could say of most of them is that they are foolish, uninformed, self-centered, inexperienced, possibly insensitive, often childishly arrogant. Many of the men, given sheltered rearing under tutors and in hothouse schools, are as temperamentally detached from the workings of monopoly capitalism as the women. Usually products of the Ivy League, they are in all ways gentlemen, often highly civilized. They collect modern art, give money to universities and libraries, support unquestionably worthy causes and even give privately off the record for laudable ends.
The absurd self-image of at least some of these women, many of whom appear to consider critics of their forebears as guilty at least of le`se majeste? , was publicly projected recently by Helen Clay Frick, the seventy-seven-year-old spinster daughter of the harsh ironmaster, partner of Carnegie, who died in 1919. Miss Frick in 1965 brought suit for libel against Dr. , Sylvester K. Stevens, executive director of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, for some unusually mild depreciative characterizations of the deceased Henry Clay Frick in Stevens's Pennsylvania: Birthplace of a Nation. In what must be considered the extreme of understatement he suggested that the rapacious Frick was hardly a model Christian gentleman but was rude and autocratic.
Frick, during and after his lifetime, had steadily been depicted by many writers as the prototype of a ruthless nineteenth-century Robber Baron, overreaching and ignorant, but Miss Frick, in bringing suit, denied ever having heard any of this, claimed to be shocked at the besmirching of her sire's reputation by a scholar and asserted that he had been libeled and she had been caused great anguish of spirit. Waiving damages, she asked that the book be suppressed and the record corrected.
After carefully listening to a great deal of testimony from both sides judge Clinton R. Weidner of the Cumberland County (Pennsylvania) Court of Common Pleas, handed down a masterly fifty-one-page opinion that could have been written by justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The court's opinion was far more critical of Frick than the book had been. Not only were the alleged defamatory statements completely true, said the learned jurist, but they were milder than were warranted by the facts. Frick himself, in view of his stance as a lone wolf against the world, would have been proud of them.
As the Times pointed out, the judge's opinion, ventured in the face of as many as four plaintiffs lawyers at one time in the courtroom itself, "came close to calling her suit frivolous. " Scolding the plaintiff, the court said she knew nothing whatever about her father's affairs and wanted nobody else to know about them.
"Dr. Stevens has written what he believes to be true and what the court believes to be true," said the court firmly.
In the ordinary case, this would have been the end. But some two and a half months later, upon the withdrawal of the baseless case by stipulation, Miss Frick reopened it and thereby suddenly found herself in the role of defendant. She reopened it by absurdly
expressing "delight" at the author's "retraction of false statements. " Dr. Stevens at once characterized this statement of hers as "positively vicious and face-saving. " He went on to say: "This whole thing, on the very day she has admitted her suit was groundless, is designed to make it look as though I am retracting something and Miss Frick is graciously consenting to withdraw. "
The stipulation withdrawing the case was made "with prejudice," which meant that she lost the option of reopening her complaint. As the Times pointed out, the stipulation was signed by her attorney with the knowledge that subsequent editions of the book, after changes in two trivial references to fact, one being the suppression of the word "coal," would contain some new language sharply critical of her father.
Charging "deception" and "bad faith," attorneys for Dr. Stevens asked the court to revoke the dismissal of her suit and thrash out her claim that there had been a retraction of false statements. There the matter rests at this writing. 11
What was of general interest about this case was the way it showed one of the reserve powers of the wealthy to harass in costly and timewasting legal actions writers who comment critically on their public actions, even on those dead. It was knowledge of such powers that led attorneys for the publisher of Professor Edwin Sutherland's White Collar Crime to require that the names of companies that had been repeatedly convicted of violating the law not be mentioned. Individuals who have been convicted of violating the law, especially in the commission of felonies, can be and are thereafter often for the rest of their lives referred to as "criminals. " Any scribbler can refer to anyone of such as "ex cons. " Although it might seem that one should by the same token be able to refer to a convicted corporation as a criminal corporation, the publishers attorneys in the Sutherland case thought it the better part of prudence not to mention their names.
The situation is this: Can the Super-Cosmos Corporation, convicted in open court many times of felonies and thereupon subjected to penalties and restraining orders backed by sanctions, be referred to as a criminal corporation? Lawyers, as we have seen, advise against it, knowing that their client may soon be served by a summons sworn out by the law firm of King, Lord, Duke and Pontiff of 1 Wall Street. Hardly any judge in Anglo-Saxondom would dream of even entertaining a motion to dismiss an action brought by this pontifical firm, whose members look with basilisk eyes even upon Lowells and Cabots. The offender will surely be forced to prove that crime is crime.
Even individuals, always lower class, who have never been convicted of anything are open to unpleasant characterizations in the press. Persons frequently arrested by the police, or questioned, are thereafter often referred to as "police characters. " By this token at least the top 1,000, and probably more, leading corporations are police characters; for they are constantly having run-ins with the authorities, are constantly being questioned about alleged violations, sometimes convicted. Yet to refer to any of them as police characters or as suspected outlaws might be costly. If not themselves sovereign they are so tightly interlaced with sovereignty that one is indeed guilty of le`se majeste? , in impugning them to the slightest degree. Like a king, they are hedged by divinity.
Beyond this there are "undesirable characters," rather degage? , unaesthetic types the police do not enjoy seeing lounge about in central city districts, with newspapers often concurring in the appellation. What, now, about composing a list of undesirable corporations, opening with whiskey and cigarette companies?
Yet, most of the rich today are not a demonic crowd. They are not ordinarily fanatics. Often quite "democratic," they will bandy pleasant words with almost anyone over
drinks, will probably mildly fault their severer critics as persons who unaccountably "come on too strong. " Some of this, of course, may be simple evasiveness.
Again, they are sufficiently numerous, random products, so that the law of large numbers applies to them. They range over the whole bell-shaped spectrum of the law of probability so that for every one with some unlovely characteristic there is a balancing personality with, the opposite characteristic. There are not only Miss Fricks but diametrically opposite types. In the middle range of 50 per cent one finds more similarities, usually acceptably decorous along average lines neither great nor odious.
As I said, most of the rich, except possibly some of the self-erected, are not hard types.
The hard types in the system, the ones who make the system work like an automatic mouse-trap for the largely unconscious benefit of the rich, are, first, the corp-pols, and, second, a plain majority of the pubpols. These upward-striving intermediaries are selected hard types in the same sense that a surgeon or a commando soldier is a hard type. They are decision makers, and the decisions they make are invariably devoid of sentiment. A surgeon does not refrain from cutting because it will draw blood, possibly induce death or leave a scar; a commando does not refrain from slitting a throat because he will be dispatching some kind mother's son, some worthy wife's husband, some innocent child's father. By training and temperament these are indeed special types, not subject within their group to the law of probability as to their functional characteristics. With each one it is possible to predict almost certainly how he will act in given circumstances.
The big stockholding rich, largely absentees, to a considerable extent women, have little direct contact with the corp-pols, their plantation overseers. Such little functional contact as there is takes place, if at all, through boards of directors; on these, however, many of the very rich do not sit.
The social meeting ground for them all--big male stockholders, finpols, and corp- pols--is the metropolitan club, where there is on the whole a rather desultory mingling. Although glad to be present as evidence of their puissance, many of the intermediary corp-pols in this milieu look with some reserve, possibly even disdain, on some of the big stockholders and finpols. For the corp-pols are usually different, and know it, in that they for the most part came up the long, hard way. They feel pretty much as battle- hardened veterans do in the presence of inexperienced though superior officers. Many of the rich they no doubt look upon as pampered nonrealists. Some of the corp-pols did not finish high school because their families were too poor; others went to Jerkwater College--or to business college.
The human drive in the system clearly comes, for the most part, from the corp-pols and pubpols, men from comparatively deprived backgrounds hungry for position, money and deference. The system would work perfectly well if all the big stockholders were playboys and playgirls. The system does not really need the big stockholders who are, as it were, wards of the courts.
True, many of the rich no doubt see the situation pretty much as do the corp-pols and pubpols. They recognize that there should be money incentives and that "success," not public sustenance, is the proper goal. Whether they do or not, however, makes little difference as long as they keep hands off smoothly running operations. Difficulties are best handled by the highly paid corp-pols in concert with the pubpols, most of each category commando types.
Little is known of the direct relations between corporate managers and the big owners. "To what degree do these richest families or groups use their voting power to influence
the operations of 'their' companies? " asks Robert Heilbroner. "We do not know. There exists a shroud of secrecy over the relation between the centers of inherited wealth and the determination of working policy in capitalism. " 12
Here, one must note, top management officers even after their retirement never produce revelatory memoirs of inner company affairs as do men who have served a stint in government. The latter, even high military officers, often finally "tell all," sparing nobody up to the president of the United States and his wife. Perhaps a reason such inner revelations about the corporations never appear is that the qualified writers are still on the payroll, drawing large retirement pay. By telling what went on they might be kicking the bottom out of their own boat. Thus the system automatically covers its most significant inner traces.
We are not, however, without some clues that the big hereditary owners have some direct influence in their corporations. One clue, as we have noticed, exists in the anti- Semitism of the metropolitan clubs, introduced there by rough-house nineteenth-century tycoons and echoed today in the personnel policies of the large corporations and the memberships of country clubs. In their respective outlooks, then, the big owners and the corp-pols are not strangers to each other. Somebody must initiate such a policy at the top, somebody must enforce it. The Founding Fathers were not anti-Semitic. Other policies may similarly be left-handedly, indirectly, imposed. Yet in this quarter all is very shadowy.
Nor, one may infer, are the very rich merely accidental beneficiaries of the one-sided tax laws. Parties of interest must have asked, sub rosa, for such preferential treatment. The pubpols could not have written such laws without some prompting. Had they done so they would be in the creative class of Franz Kafka.
What is probably true of many or most of the special benefits enjoyed by the rich is that at different times some one or a few of the rich utilized leverage available to them with amiable key pubpols and exerted their will with respect to some facet of the law. Whatever was of benefit to one then became of benefit to all in that category. As many at different times busied themselves with different facets of the laws, the result was a tremendously wide range of special benefits made available to a broad upper-income class. While the full range of the benefits looks as though it could only have resulted from a common conspiracy, each individual benefit was obtained by some individual go-getter exerting his political leverage. There is, then, nothing like a central moneybund calling all the shots, only individual go-getters exerting power through stooges that brings unsought benefits to others. Naturally, nobody objects to features of the law that he finds give him a favored outcome. This is only what is known in popular parlance as "getting the breaks. " The rich get many such "breaks," for many of which most of them never asked. For most of them it is all pure serendipity.
Where the dominant rich enter the system most openly is through patronage, political and cultural. The political patronage comes from the rich directly in the form of campaign contributions and indirectly from their corporations that hand out largess through their overpaid officers in the form of campaign contributions and direct payments in the form of money from lobbyists and corporate retainers for political law firms. For sources of campaign funds, see Alexander Heard, The Costs of Democracy, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1960. Cultural patronage is exercised through the foundations and, sometimes, the trustee-controlled universities directly. Scholars and scientists whose work either contributes to the well-being of the existing establishment or provides justification and rationalization for it are supported with lavish grants and cushy appointments. Others, either critical or producing unwelcome or unusable findings, are not. It is as simple as that.
This sort of foundation patronage produces a double advantage for the donors for it is publicly designated not as patronage but as philanthropy. In some cases philanthropy may be truly involved; over the entire foundation panorama, as we have seen, it is not. The foundations serve many ulterior purposes, the very least of them philanthropic.
There is, too, the general patronage in the form of rich corporate advertising placements in the mass media, serving to keep these firmly on the side of the existing establishment at all times when the chips go down.
As far as the Establishment is concerned, there is convenient scholarship and inconvenient scholarship. Inconvenient scholarship, while tolerated is simply neither supported nor promoted. Scholarship that validates the American Celebration, however, showing Uncle Sam ueber alles, is heavily supported.
What this amounts to, quite simply, is patronage, impersonally conferred.
Basically, what gains befuddled acceptance for the system generally, it will be noticed, is verbiage--political, social, economic and cultural. Elaborate quasi- metaphysical arguments are ready at every point to prove that the existing state of affairs is exactly as it inevitably should be--all factors, of course, taken into consideration. Everybody, in other words, is right where he ought to be in the social scale, including the foundation-supported professors who excel at such arguments. Anybody who says differently is a deviant, a kook, unsound, far out in left field and probably infected by some un-American ideology. The horror of horrors is for an academic to be an avowed Marxist, as Richard Nixon showed in campaigning rabidly up and down the state of New Jersey in 1965 to have a Marxist school teacher cashiered. The obtuse Nixon lost, probably because his intended victim bore a politically potent Italian name.
It would be extraordinary if the winners in the system did not believe, after the way they had obeyed its rigorous rules (including those of inheritance), that everything was as it properly ought to be. And it is the winners who monopolize the stage in evaluating the system.
The Role of the People
But neither overreaching nor patronage would get very far unless they were practiced within a population that was emotionally simple and not in possession of sound knowledge and realistic judgment. Most of the population, whatever one may say on its behalf, is of this order, is quite uninformed and readily susceptible of being emotionally worked upon, distracted.
A Harris poll, for example, has shown that 40 per cent of American Catholics believe that whenever the pope delivers himself of an opinion it has the status of a law, a bizarre claim that the Catholic Church itself is far from making. 13 Just as large a percentage of non-Catholics, if not larger, are under similar misapprehensions about facts relating to the Catholic and perhaps their own ecclesiastical establishments.
A vast majority of the white population south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and large numbers, probably a majority elsewhere, are firmly of the belief that Negroes are subhuman or only semihuman, despite the positive assertions of biology and anthropology to the contrary. Merely to argue the scientific findings in many quarters is to risk being assaulted by righteously indignant citizens who consider the speaker erotically irregular, a "nigger-lover. "
A Louis Harris poll in 1966 showed that whereas 78 per cent of the more affluent and educated sections of the population believed Negroes are unfairly discriminated against, only 46 per cent of lower-income people thought so. "Almost three out of every four
whites who earn less than $5,000 a year and never went beyond the eighth grade in school think the education available to Negroes is as good as that available to whites," said Mr. Harris. "What is more, about half of this group thinks Negroes are not discriminated against in general and that housing for Negroes is as good as it is for whites. " 14
Careful sociological studies have shown that the masses are poorly informed on vital topics despite a plethora of accurate information available and that they are politically illiberal and withdrawn in their attitudes. Astrology flourishes.
As noted earlier, the further one moves down the social scale the more authoritarian and illiberal become the individuals.
Professor Robert E. Lane on the basis of a comprehensive study concluded that:
The lesser degree of political participation and interest in lower status groups is partly accountable by the following factors: (1) Lower-strata women (but not men) have less leisure available for political activity. (2) Lower status persons have less economic security, and, partly for that reason, feel less of a sense of control over their (political) environment. (3) The threat of deprivation of upper-strata groups present in the politics of the welfare state provides greater motivation than the promise of reward to the lower- status groups.
The relation of public policy to the group stakes at issue in that policy is made more visible to upper-status groups than to lower-status groups.
Lower-status individuals can influence and benefit from governmental action only socially, by group activity and membership, while upper-class persons can influence and benefit from such action individually. Therefore, upper-class persons have a higher incentive to participate.
Lower-status people, feeling at a disadvantage compared to upper-class people, tend to avoid social contact in mixed groups, withdraw interest, defer to others in "difficult" matters, and generally reveal a lack of self-confidence. Actually, lack of experience and influence combined with pressures to be "opinionated" leads to unrealistic participation in some instances.
Child-rearing practices in the lower-status groups tend to provide a less adequate personality basis for appropriately self-assertive social participation.
The social norms and roles in the lower-status group tend to emphasize political participation less than do the norms and roles of the upper-status groups. There is a tendency for these political roles to be concentrated in middle-class rather than upper- class or working-class groups. . . .
Lower-status persons experience greater cross pressures with respect to (a) ethnic versus class identifications, (b) divergent political appeals of the media to which they are exposed, and conflict between media and status identification, (c) community leadership and own-group leadership, and (d) subjective versus objective class identification.
Lower-status persons belong to fewer formal organizations and have fewer intimate personal friends. However, union membership tends to modify this pattern.
Lower-status persons have less capacity to deal with abstract issues and less awareness of their larger social environment.
Lower-status persons are less satisfied with their lives and communities, leading, in a minimally class conscious society, to withdrawal from civic activities, or, alternatively, to participation in deviant politics.
Inter-class mobility tends to weaken the forces for political participation, a tendency modified by identification with upper-status (participant) norms by both upwardly mobile and downwardly mobile groups. 15
None of this, however, accounts for greater lower-class response when politicians promise authoritarian repression of some segment of the populace. The promise by such as Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace that heads are going to roll never fails to galvanize the lower orders politically.
The lower-status groups--that is, those below the middle class--are, in other words, confused. And it is this element, peasantlike in outlook, that constitutes most of the electorate, accounting for the easy nomination and election of so many persons who in medical parlance would be designated as quacks or unqualified practitioners. Public office in the United States--and elsewhere--is full of them: quacks.
Politics, contrary to roaring democratic theory, is not something that can be readily practiced with proper success by anybody. Politics, like any other discipline, requires qualified specialists.
Here a note seems in order. There is theoretical as well as practical politics. The multi- vocal structure of theoretical politics is laid out in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Kant and many similar savants. A formal exercise in practical politics, based on actual political maneuver, is Machiavelli's The Prince. Biographies abound with additional material. Formally qualified people in career politics ought to be thoroughly acquainted with this whole literature and to be broadly grounded as well in logic, semantics, linguistics, epistemology, scientific methods, the social studies and the humanities. Simply by laying down such formal requirements I have disqualified practically every working politician on the American scene. But I have no hesitancy in saying that those who, do not have some approach to such preparation are at the very least quacks. Quackery is of the very essence of being a politician on the American scene, a leader of the booboisie into fetid blind alleys.
This quackery shows itself most blatantly in the wild abuse of language by routine career politicians. Language in routine American politics is not used to inform, or to analyze problems but to manipulate emotions and to obfuscate. Purely whimsical bandying of language, as in the case of Senator Everett Dirksen, can alone make one a national character in the eyes of the press. But the more sober use of language by politicians not given to the devious Dirksen's fanciful flights of bombinating rhetoric is equally misleading so that the nation literally, under President Johnson, fell into the position of the polity of George Orwell's 1984 where peace means war, defense means aggression, the Great Society means the Shabby Society, prosperity means recession and a "war on poverty" means befuddlement of the poor and the perpetration of financial skulduggery.
Few politicians use language warrantably. In a well-known dictum, they use it to conceal thought. The gobbledegook of endless government reports and political speeches furnishes proof without end. The Congressional Record is full of the stuff. Madison Avenue and the politicians are as one in this respect. Such use of language stamps the user an arrant quack, on a par with a healer who professes to cure disease with electric belts and charms.
The United States Senate no doubt contains the greatest concentration of professional political intelligence in the nation. Yet, leaving aside terms such as liberal, moderate and conservative and applying the loosest criteria possible, it is difficult to exempt more than a bare third of it from the rubric of quack. The House of Representatives is far more meagerly equipped, and in the state legislatures it is often a case of 100 per cent quackery among their various member lawyers, real estate and insurance brokers, loan
sharks, undertakers and small-time dealers. The executive offices are for the most part filled by similar quacks, fugitives from anything resembling culture. Ghost writers fill the breach.
Still, the average officeholder is of a capability far superior to the average of the peasantlike populace he serves. The politician is not, as often supposed, of an inferior order comparatively. There is not the slightest doubt that Senators Stennis and Eastland, for example, are people superior in ability and drive to the population average in Mississippi. And the same holds true elsewhere. Again, officeholders, whatever one may say of them, meet the criteria of the broad electorate. They have what it takes to gain acceptance by the boobs. The "pork barrel," for which the politicos are castigated, is what gains them votes out in the spiritually barren home districts.
As Professor Lane remarks:
Most of the current criticism of popular rule does not emanate from the enemies of democracy, but rather from its saddened friends. It deals in part with the capacities of the people to make wise decisions in their own interest, the strength of their desire to participate in government, and the nature of the benefits they derive therefrom. On the basis of clinical research and public opinion polls, students of democratic government have concluded that the electorate is wanting both in vital information and in rational pursuit of enduring self-interest; the tasks have exceeded the capacities of the public to perform them. Thus, Walter Lippmann, continuing a line of argument he began so brilliantly in Public Opinion some thirty-five years ago, states that a central cause for the breakdown of democratic governments in modern times has been that "the assemblies and the mass electorates have acquired the monopoly of effective powers" and do not know how to use them. . . .
Erich Fromm, although he favors widespread social participation, has cast doubt upon men's desire for the burdens which such participation implies. Freedom implies choice, participation implies responsibility, and under stress the majority of the people may find choice painful and responsibility too weighty a load. Apathy, withdrawal, conformity, "pseudo-willing," result. . . .
It is said that the masses have not gained through their new political power because the sources of their trouble are not political but economic. Democracy is a mask for plutocracy, and the plutocrats remain entrenched in power. Thus the long struggle to enfranchise the masses of men has, so far, come to no avail; the franchise is useful only as it offers leverage to attack the real citadel of power.
[Commenting here, Lane says:] This idea is curiously at the confluence of three streams of thought. The first, liberal democracy, is illustrated by [Carl L. ] Becker who says that "economic forces . . . brought about an increasing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the fortunate few, and thereby nullified, for the majority of people, many of those essential liberties which provide both the theoretical justification and the necessary conditions for the practical success of democratic institutions. " The second element in this confluence is contributed by Mosca and Pareto, both of whom identify democracy with plutocracy. And the third element, of coarse, is the Marxian interpretation of bourgeois democracy as a complex of institutions manipulated by the capitalist class. 16
That the universal franchise and the wide open consumer market are on the basis of their experience with it, now fully acceptable to the dominate orders has been seen in the massive and costly efforts of the Johnson Administration to force them upon the Vietnamese at the point of firepower. In the Johnsonian view even people to whom the idea of voting is bewildering, contra-cultural and perhaps repugnant, are to be forced to vote. This, the American Way, it is held, will lead to their liberation. Yet neither voting
nor the open consumer market has led to the liberation of the masses in the United States; rather have they delivered them into the pincers of ignorance, poverty or near poverty and emotional deprivation. The masses are, literally, stupefied by the "opportunities" open to them.
Voting, unless there is ground-up, knowledge-based participation, cannot lead to popular deliverance. Only if the assumption were true that each participant is of fairly equal capability could the process work. But people simply are not of equal capability and motivation, contrary to the dream of the early democrats. They must lose out in the electoral game for a multitude of reasons, some of which have been cited. The shrewd manipulators--the pubpols, corp-pols, finpols, admen and scholpols--must come out on top every time just as the heavyweight champion must easily defeat every amateur who steps into the ring with him.
Democrats, liberals and radicals, have wasted millions of words and hours of their time trying to arouse the people in their own interests either to electoral or to revolutionary assault, and always without avail. Marx predicted, erroneously, that factory operatives, the workers, would take the lead in an assault on the owners; such an assault has never taken place in any industrial country. Marxist parties have taken power only under conditions of war-induced general social collapse, as in agricultural Russia and China, with only the most meager of Marxist proletarian support. Non-Marxist peasants in both cases were the revolutionary instrument. (Marx, inter alia, detested the peasantry, which he saw as reactionary. )
Nor have popular causes been more successful in the electoral arena, where splinter parties have long failed to gain even a foot-hold. For the mass does not vote for its objective interests; it always votes for some fantasy.
From Lincoln onward no more than two out of nineteen presidents are argued by anybody to have been oriented toward the popular interest and even those two are rejected by some experts as true paladins of the people. The people, very obviously, are not capable of wielding the electoral sword, thus accounting for the success of institutionalized overreaching and patronage. The rich, in plain fact, are rich because they cannot help it. They are playing marbles for big stakes against blind men, cannot help winning with little effort.
To the Marxists all these presidents were tools of the capitalist Establishment; but not to the people, to whom the Marxists look vainly as the instrument of social reconstruction. As to this, say the Marxists, the people are fooled by the mass media; but it is of the essence of politics, as of military affairs, not to be fooled. To be fooled in politics is to be conquered. In losing out so consistently by means of open elections the people, clearly, are being hoist by their own petard. They have not the least inkling what the elections are all about.
It would be difficult for any set of men, however qualified, to run so complexly ponderous a country as the United States really well. As it is, the United States is very, very poorly run, year after year, by the quacks, overreachers and patrons, as the accumulation and multiplication of social problems attest. At the same time, propagandic apologists continually bellow how well the country is run. Nothing, though, ever seems to get any better; everything gets demonstrably worse and worse, converging toward some awesome future crisis, some catastrophic reckoning. Apre`s nous, le deluge.
So really bad is the situation that American sociologists have gradually developed a forbidding branch of their discipline labeled, simply, Social Problems, the equivalent of pathology in medicine. To this melancholy subject scores of textbooks are devoted, dealing with crime, its causes and its steady increase; rigging of courts and elections;
poverty; racial and religious conflict; curtailments of civil rights; prison brutality; ill health and inadequate and profit-perverted medical care; mal-education, non-education and illiteracy; the prevalence of divorce and desertion; the excesses of pressure groups; faulty mass transportation; child mistreatment and abandonment; personal anomy; inadequate housing; social disorganization; widespread psychic disorder; slums, overcrowding and overpopulation in relation to available facilities; advertising and propaganda; unattended mental illness; commercialized alcoholism; gambling; drug addiction; traffic tangles; prostitution; pathological deviancies; war, etc. , etc. 17 All of this bespeaks a very sick society, a poor political system.
What is most remarkable about all these problems is that despite the reports and recommendations of one public commission after the other none ever appears to be solved or even made more tractable. Each appears to be growing greater and new ones, such as water and air pollution and air traffic, are constantly being added. As the sociologists report, many causes are discernible but a general cause seldom mentioned is simple political neglect. Forthright confrontation of the problems is prevented by the various forms of political blockage at which the pubpols are most adept.