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The Magi’s gifts are subtle bribes”—and those standing watch outside the manger were devotees of industrial idolatry—“the shepherds worship clock and wage.”
“I SHOULD LIKE TO see a bottle of Coca-Cola on every table in England,” Hector Dexter tells his luncheon companions in Nancy Mitford’s novel The Blessing (1951).
Import Coca-Cola—“the Pause that Refreshes.”
“But isn’t it terribly nasty?” Dexter’s host Grace Allingham interjects. Unfazed, he swells with a patriotic flourish:
When I say a bottle of Coca-Cola … I mean an outward and visible sign of something inward and spiritual, I mean it as if each Coca-Cola bottle contained a djinn, and as if that djinn was our great American civilization ready to spring out of each bottle and cover the whole global universe with its great wide wings. That is what I mean.
The pause that refreshes is a mass-produced, sacramental phial of Americanism.
In February of the same year, the magazine’s editors published a special issue titled U.S.A.: The Permanent Revolution. In an appendix to Luce’s proclamation of “the American Century,” they claimed that capitalism represented the longings of decolonizing peoples more authentically than the revolutionary dreams of Marxist guerrillas.
Fortune’s clerics reasoned that imperialism was impossible, as all peoples aspire to capitalist modernity: “the question of Americans thrusting themselves on anybody can never really arise.”
In Network (1976), Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet’s film satirizing the television industry, Arthur Jensen, the chairman of a communications conglomerate, demonstrates that Dexter’s winged demon has already enveloped the globe. Alarmed by Howard Beale—a newscaster whose populist harangues have made him “the mad prophet of the airwaves”—Jensen invites him to a meeting in “Valhalla,” the dimly-lit corporate boardroom. Roaring to Beale that he has “meddled with the primal forces of nature,” Jensen proceeds to explain the universe:4 There are no nations, there are no peoples … there is only one
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There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and IT&T and AT&T, and Du Pont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. These are the nations of the world today.… We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies.… The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale.… One vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit—in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
“And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel,” Jensen says as he touches the mad prophet’s arm and anoints him the bearer of the gospel. “I have seen the face of God,” the demented herald murmurs. “You just might be right, Mr. Beale,” Jensen replies. God and Mammon have finally merged into the largest monopoly ever contemplated.
Beale had indeed seen the face of God: the factitious god of capital, with Arthur Jensen as its emanation.
the subsumption of all peoples into “one market, under God,”
In the conventional wisdom, the counterculture erupted as a jacquerie against the pinstriped lords of the corporate commonwealth. The problem with this Manichean tale is that dissatisfaction with conformity and hierarchy emerged, not only from intellectuals, beatniks, and hippies, but also from within corporate culture itself.
Well before any psychedelic antics began disturbing the peace of the bourgeois utopia, business was already forging a new moral and symbolic imagination, a universe where the conquest of cool converged with the triumph of pecuniary enchantment.
Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Gary Becker—argued for an unprecedented extension of the scope and magnitude of market relations, aiming to insulate the market from democracy and bring all of life into the volatile crucible of capital accumulation. The market, in their view, is the ontological architecture of the cosmos, an omniscient and inerrant being more righteous than mere quivering mortals. A way of being as well as a paradigm of what Sheldon Wolin has called “inverted totalitarianism”—the transformation of political democracy into a subsidiary of corporate
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“Man cannot live without an economic theology,” as Galbraith noted in American Capitalism (1952).
As “the operative faith” of the American people,” the American Way of Life was a bona fide religion, Herberg argued, complete with “its rituals, its holidays and its liturgy, its saints and its sancta.” Herberg listed the doctrinal elements of the American Way—capitalist economics, individual responsibility, a facile idealism—and noted its incarnation in a host of objects, from the flag to indoor plumbing to Coca-Cola bottles, the enchanted tokens of postwar capitalism.
“the meaning of America,” drawing from the canonical repertoire of business apologetics—technological advance, “human relations” management, abundance, the cosmopolitan effects of trade and travel. Declaring that “a vast dispersion of ownership and initiative” now characterized American society, the editors announced that “capital has become, not the master of society, but its servant,”
Banalities made the spring air stale: knowing platitudes about the “constantly changing problems of our society,” earnest and forgettable bromides about “mutual understanding” between management and labor.
as Alan Harrington put it, the citadel of the Fordist necropolis.
As Thomas Frank has observed, while The Organization Man “may have been astute social criticism”—maybe even “one of the first sparks of the counterculture”—it was definitely “a management book, a sweeping study of American business and its problems.”
Whyte opened The Organization Man with an explicit and oft-overlooked disclaimer: “This book is not a plea for nonconformity.”
In the Social Ethic, “the organization man seeks a redefinition of his place on earth,” Whyte declared, something that “will do for him what the Protestant Ethic did once.”
The religious quality of the Social Ethic was especially evident in “human relations” management literature; Whyte noted that Elton Mayo and his protégés were “evangelists as well as researchers,”
Whyte was struck by the “quasi-religious overtones” with which organization men endowed human relations theory, and he described one convention of managers and industrial relations specialists as a “convocation of believers.”
Whyte found that human relations ideology now impe...
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Residents of Park Forest wanted a “useful church,” Whyte wrote,
Modesto’s Centralist brochure outlines a contemplative mysticism of mediocrity that doubles as a philosophy of will to power:
By practicing Centralism, Hingham turns his life around: he posts record sales for the company and rekindles his waning romance with his girlfriend Rose. But he founders when his boss sends him to the company’s annual sales convention, and Rose begins to find him so eerily predictable that she ends their love affair. When Hingham travels to Broad View to meet Dr. Modesto, he discovers that his guru is an inmate in an insane asylum; the “revelations” that ignited Hingham’s success have been the promulgations of a lunatic.
New brands of managerial thinking—“Theory Y,” as they were dubbed collectively—anticipated a post-Fordist workplace where employees were given greater autonomy in devising the means of their own exploitation. Meanwhile, the “creative revolution” in advertising both roused the industry from aesthetic fatigue and inaugurated a brave new era in the rituals of commodity fetishism.
David O. Woodbury, a science journalist highly regarded in business and technology circles, contended that the most inspiring promise of automation was not to increase leisure but to prolong the life of the Protestant work ethic. Woodbury rejoiced that technological progress would enable us to work even harder, not less. It would be better, he argued, if workers “did not attempt to work less, but to become more ambitious instead.” Rather than annul or mitigate the curse of incessant toil, automation would bestow an ecstatically promethean character to labor. Peering out to the horizon of
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Capital’s will to power was most bluntly exemplified in Lemuel Boulware, the pugnacious vice president of General Electric who rapidly became notorious as the pinstriped Ajax of corporate management. “The employees got the idea that they were in the driver’s seat,” he told a management convention in 1946, reflecting on the GE strike. “This is the attitude, gentlemen, that must be reversed. This is the fantasy that must be eradicated.”
Executives and engineers were candid about their intention to use automation to bring labor to heel. As the editors of American Machinist, the machinery industry’s leading magazine, confirmed in 1952, automation “is a philosophy of control.”
Alfred Teplitz of U.S. Steel lauded MIT’s servomechanical laboratory in 1952 for its invention of numerical control, which empowered “the control equipment itself rather than the operator.”
Nils Olesten, head of the numerical control department at Rohr Aircraft, hoped that automation would bring “the decision-making in many manufacturing operations closer to management,” while Alan Smith, a prominent management consultant with Arthur D. Li...
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Like Andrew Ure a century before, American business leaders sought in automation an instrument with which to teach docility to the refractory hand of labor.
The latter essay was a minor masterpiece of corporate humanist technophilia. The new machinery, the authors conceded, “may well loose waves of temporary unemployment” and “degrade the worker to an unskilled and tradeless nonentity”—prices for progress that Fortune considered well worth paying. Besides, the automated factory outstripped human beings in existential and well as productive superiority: machines could, in their words, “see better than eyes, calculate more reliably than brains, communicate faster and farther than the voice, record more accurately than memory.”12 Automation would
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As one of the theoretical craftsmen of postwar automation, Norbert Wiener was a remarkably penetrating but ultimately equivocal critic of its enchantments.
Wiener’s earliest expositions of cybernetics—Cybernetics (1948) and The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), the latter a best-seller—were studded with passages of prophetic alarm.
Precisely because they could be programmed with any conceivable form of information, cybernetic devices could arrogate and degrade professional and managerial skills. Indeed, as machinery decomposed and reabsorbed more ingenuity, the trajectory of capitalist automation accelerated toward a future of universal human stupefaction and subjugation.
Because the automatic machine is “the precise equivalent of slave labor,” anyone who competes with it “must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.”
Yet Wiener was at least as compelling when he reflected on the religious and metaphysical implications of cybernetic technology. In Cybernetics, he likened automatic machines to archaic “technologies of magic” and compared his fellow scientists and engineers to the legendary Rabbi of Prague, who awakened the Golem, a large statue of clay, through kabbalistic incantation.
Many of his friends and followers—the “gadget-worshippers” who staffed the research laboratories of corporate industry—were also “priests of power” who, contemptuous of fleshly limitations and evasive of personal responsibility, sought perfect subordinates who never disagreed, showed fatigue, or organized unions. These shamans and priests of modernity pursued their quest for absolute power with automated machinery, “the modern counterpart of the Golem.” “Those who suffer from a power complex,” he had written in 1950, “find the mechanization of man a simple way to realize their ambitions.”
Wiener could do little more than make heartfelt appeals to the professional-managerial elite—hardly a propitious prospect, given his own acknowledgment that most scientists and engineers were eager to assist in the technological enslavement of workers.
He was one of the first to see a fully automated milling machine—“a
The ideal self, in this view, was almost infinitely protean, displaying, as Rogers explained in On Becoming a Person (1961), “an absence of rigidity, of tight organization … a maximum of adaptability, a discovery of structure in experience, a flowing, changing organization of self and personality.”
“Discoverers of banality,” as Russell Jacoby once described them, they peddled a farrago of uplift packaged as the latest psychological science. Maslow in particular was a virtuoso of platitude, a master in pawning off nuggets of cliché as extraordinary pearls of insight.
“we control the process, not the people”—having already controlled the people by rearranging the process.
One of the firms, the Compton Advertising Agency, hired Dichter to work on its Ivory Soap account. After conducting a hundred “non-directive interviews” in which he asked subjects to talk about their bathing habits and experiences, Dichter concluded that soap was not about hygiene but rather about erotic self-indulgence. “One of the few occasions when the puritanical American was allowed to caress himself or herself,” lingering in the bathtub gratified the basic impulse of primary narcissism. Thus, Ivory needed to understand that it wasn’t selling soap—it was selling sexual allure, voluptuous
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