Our Society Is Becoming One Of Giant Enterprises

By Author: peter
Total Articles: 191
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In general, our society is becoming one of giant enterprises directed by a bureaucratic management in which man becomes a small, well-oiled cog in the machinery .The oiling is done with higher wages, well-ventilated factories said piped music, and by psychologists and "human-relations "experts; yet all this oiling does not alter the fact that man has become powerless, that he does not wholeheartedly participate in his work and that he is bored with it. In fact, the blue- and the white-collar workers have become economic puppets who dance to the tune of automated machines and bureaucratic management.

The worker and employee are anxious, not only because they might find themselves out of a job are they anxious also because they are unable to acquire any real satisfaction or interest in life. They live and die without ever having confronted the fundamental realities of human existence as emotionally and intellectually independent and productive human beings.

On each side of the principal street, there are houses and mansions of great size, with Omega Replica Watches ...
... their gardens, and near to these, the dwellings of the artisans, who work in shops, at their several trades. The inhabitants of the city use paper money as currency. The men as well as the women have fair complexions, and are handsome. The greater part of them are always clothed in silk, in consequence of the vast quantity of that material produced in the territory of Kin -sai. They are friendly towards each other, and persons who inhabit the same street, both men and wq^nen, from the mere circumstance of neighborhoods, appear like one family. In their aomestic manners they are free from jealousy4 or suspicion of their wives, to whom great respect is shown, and any man would be accounted infamous who should presume to use indecent expressions to a married woman. To strangers also, who visit their city in the way of commerce3, they give proofs of cordiality6, inviting them freely to their houses, showing them hospitable attention, and furnishing them with the best advice and assistance in their mercantile transactions.

Those higher up on the social ladder are no less anxious. Their lives are no less empty than those of their subordinates. They are even more insecure in some respects. They are in a highly competitive race. To be promoted or to fall behind is not a matter of salary but even more a matter of self-respect. When they apply for their first job, they are tested for intelligence as well as for the right mixture of submissiveness and independence. From that moment on they are tested again and again by the psychologists, for whom testing is a big business, and by their superiors, who judge their behavior, sociability, capacity to get along,etc.This constant need to prove that one is as good as or better than one's Tag Heuer Replica fellow-competitor creates constant anxiety and stress, the very causes of unhappiness and illness.

Am I suggesting that we should return to the preindustrial mode of production or to nineteenth century "free enterprise capitalism"? Certainly not. Problems are never solved by returning to a stage which one has already outgrown. I suggest transforming our social system from a bureaucratically managed industrialism in which maximal production and consumption are ends in themselves into a humanist industrialism in which man and full development of his potentialities, those of love and reason, are the aims of all social arrangements. Production and consumption should serve only as means to this end, and should be prevented from ruling man