To stay rich, people must be nearer to the dead than the living.
—Stephen Vizinczey, An Innocent Millionaire
Money is mourned with deeper sorrow than friends or kindred.
—Juvenal, Satires
Every few days one or another of the country’s eminent prophets wonders what has gone wrong with the once prosperous American enterprise. Why has the nation’s productivity declined? Why is the debt so heavy and the balance of international trade so skewed in favor of Germany or Japan? What has become of the moral commonwealth, and why are so many politicians under indictment or in jail?
Perhaps I have been corrupted by my upbringing in the precincts of wealth, or possibly I have lived too long in the city of New York, but I suspect the answers have to do with ascribing authority to something as abstract and as inherently meaningless as money. The crippling effects of the general stupefaction account for phenomena as diverse as the passion for mergers and acquisitions, for the trade deficit and the absence of vigorous political debate among either Democrats or Republicans, for the emptiness of spirit that stares out of the face of national television. The ratings accorded to Dynasty define the ethos of an age that thinks it possible to buy the future as if it were an oyster or a dress.
That the obsession with money dulls the capacity for feeling and thought I think can be accepted as an axiom requiring no further argument. The paralysis can be seen in statistical tables as well as in the expressions of art and politics. The economy weakens, and so do the indices of perception. Immobilized by fears of various denominations, too many people begin to look like animals standing perfectly still in attitudes of trembling defense. The attitude of mind leads not to safety, not to the “steady state” so lovingly promoted in the early 1970s as the rich man’s dream of heaven, but, by the degrees made apparent during the late 1970s and early 1980s, into paralysis and debt.
From the beginning of the American argument the creditor classes have done their best to prevent the introduction of new ideas and new products as well as to forestall any seditious shifts in the balance of capital. During the years of the Reagan ascendancy the defense of property became a radical cause. Given the cost of bringing to market a newly designed car, weapons system or situation comedy, the ladies and gentlemen charged with making the necessary commitments find it hard to take chances with anything that isn’t as safe as it is banal. The money looms so large (roughly $400 billion, for instance, in the nation’s pension funds) that the people responsible for its deployment become easily frightened and prefer to leave the decisions to a computer program. Of the trades taking place on the New York Stock Exchange, 80 percent involve institutions—banks, mutual and pension funds, insurance companies. The individual investor has all but disappeared from the market, and the notion of the exchange as a reflection of “the people’s capitalism” (a slogan popular in the early 1960s) has been reduced to absurdity.
The tax “reforms” passed by the Congress in the autumn of 1986 amidst almost universal applause clearly favor the safest and most sterile investments and work to the advantage of the least creative of the country’s professions (i.e., lawyers, accountants, retailers, broadcasters, suppliers of franchised hamburgers). Labor allies itself with management in the effort to make time stand still, and their agents jointly lobby Congress for protective tariffs against the foreign manufactures with which they no longer can compete.122 The frenzied speculation in the stock market adds nothing to the sum of the nation’s well-being or common store of value. A few people become very, very rich, usually at the cost of destroying one or more companies that prior to their dismemberment had been providing employment, tax revenues and the hope of innovation. People who can think of nothing else to do resort to the law courts as a means of transferring wealth from one account to another.123 Again, their efforts add nothing to the commonwealth. The shuffling of paper (a macroeconomic variation on the game of three-card monte) consumes more and more of the nation’s energy and intellect. The litigiousness of the society aids and abets the shriveling of national enterprise. People wonder, with T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, whether they dare to eat a peach or move across the street. Relatively few people under the age of thirty-five can afford to buy a house—or even entertain the hope of ever buying a house.124 Business can do nothing without consulting lawyers. Newspaper editors worried about libel suits speak of a “chilling effect” and interpret the First Amendment as a license temporarily on loan from a sullen prince. Too many people, often against their will and better judgment, feel they have little choice except to join the legion of speculators. Their houses turn into real estate deals, and their assets ebb and flow like the tide, in and out of the stock market, the money funds, the gambling casinos.
To the extent that the desire for profit exceeds the desire for life, the translations of human beings into body counts or paying customers supersedes their uses as people. They become objects that can be sold at auction in celebrity raffles. Flesh has been transformed into property, which, in a commercial society, is akin to salvation. The rich achieve in life the apotheosis that lesser men achieve only in death. They become their own masterpieces, rare jewels for which the world offers more or less satisfactory settings, precious ornaments infinitely more beautiful than anything else in their art collections. At an expensive dinner party in Dallas I once sat next to a woman wearing a dress made of such heavy metallic fabric that she couldn’t bend from the waist and could barely lift her arms. Taking into account her immaculate silence it occurred to me that she might as well have sent the dress on a hanger.125
At Yale University in the autumn of 1984 a drama student satisfied the requirement for his senior theater project by declaring himself a work of art. He walked around the campus for several weeks in the company of a friend whom he had appointed as his curator. He construed his mere presence (walking to class, shaving, doing his laundry, etc.) as an exhibition. The same aesthetic governs the lives of people stunted by their faith in money. Remarking on the impoverishment of coined souls, the British journalist Henry Fairlie once said: “The rich—in their own eyes, one fears, as well as ours—are toys. The longer one gazes at them, the less enviable they seem. They only go through the motions of being themselves. They run down if they’re not wound up during the day.”
The translation of human beings into objects of art entails certain disadvantages. Most of these were revealed to the Lydian King Midas, who, being owed a wish by a satyr, asked that everything he touched be turned to gold. The wish was granted, and Midas, who was a fool as well as a poor judge of music, discovered that his meat and drink were made of gold. He would have starved to death had not the gods taken pity on his condition and released him from the paralysis of his golden wish.
The heirs to his stupidity lack his connections on Olympus. The substitution of money for all other value becomes so complete as to change them, if not into gold, at least into stone. To describe the rich as people is often to make a mistake with the language. Rich nouns or pronouns, perhaps, but not people. The rich tend to identify themselves with a sum of money, and by so doing they relinquish most of their claims to their own humanity. Their money becomes a synthetic fabrication of heart and mind, an artificial circulatory system. This is why it is so difficult to borrow from the rich, why they forget to pay their bills. To ask them for money is to ask them, literally, for blood. Having lost the capacity to distinguish between money as necessity and money as luxury, they imagine that the loss of the third car or the second sailboat will cause them to vanish. When preoccupied with the existential question of their net worth, the expression in their eyes narrows into a lizard’s stare.
It is an expression I have seen often enough in the eyes of stockbrokers, gamblers and petty thieves. Maxime Du Camp noticed it in Gustave Flaubert’s eyes when the novelist abandoned himself to the dream of riches. Assuming an income of 1 million francs a year, Flaubert liked to imagine himself possessed of coach horses that would be the envy of England, of servants who eased his feet into diamond-studded shoes, of a dining room decorated with espaliers of flowering jasmine and the fluttering of brightly-feathered finches.
“When these dreams took possession of him,” Du Camp noted in his diary, “he became almost rigid and reminded one of an opium eater in a state of trance. He seemed to have his head in the clouds, to be living in a dream of gold. This habit was one reason why he found steady work difficult.”126
The transformation of men into stone can take place within the instant of a single misplaced phrase. The abrupt change of manner often has been remarked upon by people who raise funds for charitable causes. For weeks or months they stalk their quarries of wealth, but if they make a careless movement, mention a specific sum at anything other than the precise moment, the prospective patron takes alarm and lumbers off into the library like a startled wildebeest. Whenever possible, of course, the rich prefer to endow monuments and tombs, and I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.
The coldness and indifference of the rich follow from their inability to take seriously other people’s desires, and they constantly ask themselves the peevish questions, “Who are all those other people out there, and what in heaven’s name do they want?” The self becomes so inextricably identified with money that the rich man imagines that only his attachment to it gives it meaning, substance and virtue. Money has no discernible reality in the hands of lesser mortals because lesser mortals have no use for it. When seized by occasional bouts of romantic sympathy for the poor, the rich construe the lower classes as a kind of clay in which to mold the images of reform. They get easily annoyed if the little marionettes begin to speak and think and move of their own volition. Nelson Rockefeller’s son, Rodman, struck the right tone when, during the moral excitements of the 1960s, he decided to sponsor the cause of human rights. He made arrangements for a grand fete at the family estate in Pocantico Hills, offering to raise several million dollars for the NAACP if Martin Luther King, Jr., would issue a statement endorsing Rodman’s father’s candidacy for governor of New York. King refused to do so, and Rodman canceled the fete. His aides pointed out that King’s political endorsement hadn’t been previously discussed, that the invitations already had been sent, and that it would be exceedingly embarrassing, not to say humiliating, to rescind one’s humanitarian concern on such short notice.
“I don’t care,” Rodman said. “It’s my house and my money, and I can do what I want.”127
In order to preserve the condition of soul appropriate to an object, the rich man learns to alienate himself from anything so subversive as thought, passion, intellect or imagination. He can buy a place in the midst of events (a box at the tennis matches, say, or an ambassador’s post in London), but if he knows what’s good for him and heeds the advice of the family lawyers, he will avoid the stronger and more dangerous sentiments. Among all the emotions, the rich have the least talent for love. It is possible to love one’s dog, dress or duck-shooting hat, but a human being presents a more difficult problem. The rich might wish to experience feelings of affection, but it is almost impossible to chip away the enamel of their narcissism. They take up all the space in all the mirrors in the house. Their children, who represent the most present and therefore the most annoying claim on their attention, usually receive the brunt of their irritation.
Writing in Ms. magazine in the spring of 1986, Sallie Bingham, the estranged heiress to the Louisville newspaper fortune, noted the consequences of what could be called “the Midas effect”:
Rich families shed, in each generation, their most passionate and outspoken members. In the shedding the family loses the possibility of renewal, of change. Safety is gained, but a safety that is rigid and judgmental.
Of all the stories I have heard on this point, the saddest was one told to me by an acquaintance named Mills, who reached the age of thirty-five before he found the courage to ask his father why his father had never loved him. Mills had been born to the privileges of wealth, but he had chosen to make his career as a professor of political theories of which his father disapproved. Mills put the question at a time when his father was senior partner in a New York investment bank, a director of corporations and a faithful servant of the plutocracy. He had deeded his fortune to the Smithsonian Institution—on the ground that an institution would be more respectful of it than his errant son and unkempt grandchildren—and his answer to his son’s question was as quick and instinctive as the movement of an alarmed wolf. Mills told me the story several years later, but he could remember the expression on his father’s face as vividly as if the conversation had taken place that same afternoon.
“That’s not true,” his father had said. “I’ve always been utterly honest with you. I’ve always tried to deal with you exactly as I would deal with the Justice Department or the IRS.”
Subject to the prejudices of his class, Mills’s father over the years had been known to compare both the Justice Department and the IRS to marauding bands of the envious poor.
“I know that,” Mills said, “but I am your eldest son, and I thought . . . ”
He never succeeded in saying what it was he thought. Nor could he remember what he might have said. Before he could get to the end of his sentence, his father said:
“That’s your mistake.”
Mills never again mentioned the subject of his inheritance except in the presence of his own and his father’s lawyer.
In cultural arenas the stupefaction induced by excessive faith in money results in an audible silence. The large publishing houses and Hollywood studios suffer the same inhibitions as General Motors and the Pentagon. The scripts must pass the judgment of committees, and the committees, mindful of the enormous expense necessary to the manufacture and sale of the product ($40 million for a movie; $2 million as an advance against royalties for a celebrity’s autobiography), seldom gamble on anything that hasn’t been done before. The immense sums of money press down, like the weight of gravity, on the buoyancy of imaginative thought.
The debate that takes place in the nominally enlightened journals of opinion betrays an equivalent lack of courage. The conversation minces along like a dog on a leash, the arc of acceptable thought as narrow as the perimeters established by American troops in the wilderness of Vietnam. The writer who insults the wisdom in office risks losing his or her hope of patronage. Professors and sober-minded journalists who compose the American intelligentsia yield to nobody, not even to George Steinbrenner, in the keenness of their desire for money and preferment. Their writing reflects the calculation of their advantage rather than their talent for expression. In the midst of the intellectual enthusiasms of the 1960s, I remember engaging in a heated argument with a Texas oil entrepreneur who held the New York literary crowd in open contempt. “How much do you think it would cost,” he said, “to change them all into obedient hounds? Fifty thousand dollars a year? One hundred thousand a year? Seventy-five thousand dollars a year and guaranteed invitations to the White House?” At the time I thought the gentleman both a Philistine and a fool. Not many years later, having seen an impressive number of soi-disant liberals transform themselves into rabid conservatives for the sake of tenure, a foundation grant or their names in the literary press, I still thought the gentleman a Philistine, but not a stupid or unobservant Philistine.
Having been obliged to edit the kind of prose that A. Bartlett Giamatti once described as “the higher institutional,” I suspect that its weakness and deadly earnestness reflects a fear of giving offense. Who can afford to say the wrong thing? Who knows what will happen next, or who will be appointed to what office, or what critic will be given one’s book to review for The New York Times? Given the possible financial consequences, only very young writers or very old and famous writers can afford the risks of wit or plain speaking. Writers who still have reputations to protect have become successful by virtue of having become commodities, and they dare not take chances with the product. If William F. Buckley, Jr., allowed himself to endorse a liberal opinion, his readers might become restive and confused. They wouldn’t be getting what they thought they had paid for, and they could complain that the label on the box of Buckley’s conservatism falsely represented the merchandise within.
To the extent that the writers of the present generation feel themselves intimidated, impotent or enraged, their vision of the world tends to narrow and shrivel. In modern fiction, as in modern painting or television, the techniques of abstraction (i.e., of making the part a surrogate for the whole) reduce the scale of conception to an oblique fragment of talk between two or three characters on an empty stage. The writers produce miniatures, and the painters work within the limits of minimalist art. Their ambition becomes as small as the coteries that make up their audiences. In the less-crowded space of the nineteenth century, Tolstoi and Balzac could project their characters in rounded, rather than flat, dimensions, populating their scenes with human figures instead of with symbols. To the modern writer this would be too frightening. The world seems so huge and so full of terror that it becomes necessary to reduce it to a model or a toy. To concede too much reality to a character unlike oneself might result in a diminishing of self, and this alarms people—not only novelists but also evangelists and corporation presidents. Thus protagonists of both fiction and the higher forms of corporate advertisement resemble the authors of the play within the play, pitted against gigantic grotesques, no more believable than the balloons and floats dragged into the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day.
Remarking on the intellectual despotism characteristic of American discourse, Tocqueville said: “I know no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of expression than in America.” Fortunately for the Reagan administration, Tocqueville’s dictum is as appropriate to the 1980s as it was to the 1840s. The citizenry uncomplainingly submits to examinations of its blood, its urine and its speech. At the end of 1983 the General Accounting Office estimated that 225,000 current and former government employees with access to classified information had consented to the principle of censorship. The clerks in question signed an agreement stating that they would submit any text they might write (even unto the days of their death) to government review.
When highly placed government officials resign their office for reasons of principle or conscience, they go as quietly as thieves. By definition members of the equestrian class, usually lawyers or Wall Street bond salesmen, they preserve their silence out of respect for the protocols of wealth. If they were discovered to be “unsound” (i.e., the sort of people who make scenes and say what they think) their peers might pronounce them, by mutual and silent consent, ineligible for other places and titles within the honeycombs of privilege. An impressive number of functionaries quit the Johnson administration in disagreement with the president’s self-defeating policies in Vietnam (among them Cyrus Vance, McGeorge Bundy, and Robert McNamara), but none raised even a whisper of a public objection. The criminal syndicates refer to the practice as the code of omerta.
The fear of change is as traditional among vicars of the American media as it is among the captains of American industry. Nothing so terrifies most reporters and editors as the arrival of a new idea. Hoping to extend indefinitely the perpetual present in which images pass for reality, the media deal in the semblance, not the substance, of change. Wars might come and go, but the seven o’clock news lives forever. When, in the winter of 1986-87, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev advocated radical changes in Soviet society and foreign policy, the American media insisted he was lying, that his much-advertised glasnost was nothing more than a ruse. The Washington columnists held as tightly to their inventories of stereotyped truth as a child to its nurse. To entertain, even briefly, the thought of genuine change was a possibility too painful to bear.
The performances in the national political theater might degenerate into farce or opéra bouffe, but only a licensed satirist can afford to say so.128 Dependent on the gossip and good will of his patrons in office, no ambitious journalist dares risk giving offense to anybody important enough to provide him with a steady supply of news. Over dinner one night in a New York restaurant I remember both Tom Wicker and Edwin Newman explaining that while they were in service as White House correspondents it never occurred to them to ask a president a rude question. Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, continued to write coquettish little notes to President Nixon even while her paper was demanding his impeachment. In the few weeks before Nixon left the White House, Mrs. Graham was still assuring him they were the best of friends and would have dinner together once the unpleasantness had been put safely out of mind.
The balance of the current political argument favors the weight of objects, not the force of ideas, and the wisdom in office (both in government and media) interprets the word “conservative” to mean the safekeeping of property as opposed to the preservation of a habit of mind or a process of becoming.129 The Department of Health and Human Services needs fifty-five employees to respond to a letter from the secretary. Arms manufacturers applying for Pentagon contracts report having to fill out forms that sometimes number as many as 23,000 pages of small type. The Congress, intent on buying allies, insists that countries receiving American aid payments vote with the United States at the United Nations. The American armed services worry more about budgets than about military tactics. Only one soldier in every four can boast of a “combat specialty”; everybody else belongs to a headquarters’ staff and ascribes to the belief that the orderly arrangement of documents takes precedence over the training of troops. When it comes time to appoint a secretary of state nobody can think of more than two or three ornamental gentlemen capable of performing the duties of so august and ceremonial an office. Within the purview of science the fear of litigation and the emphasis on profit (i.e., on applied rather than basic research) stifles the impulse toward experiment and innovation. The large amount of government money distributed through the institutes and the universities favors orthodox lines of reasoning. The venture capitalist money seeks out, especially in biotechnology, miraculous cures and transformations that can be sold at miraculous prices. The inertia of money and the presence of lawyers combine to yield a state of intellectual paralysis. Offering advice conforming to the wisdom of the age, a Washington attorney in the autumn of 1985 told his client, a research group supposedly on the frontier of the future, “Don’t innovate; don’t experiment; don’t be venturesome; don’t go out on a limb.”
He might also have said, “don’t think.” Certainly this was the posture of the statesmen responsible for the American debacle in Vietnam. In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman attributes the stupidity of our military expedition in Southeast Asia to nonpartisan states of “self-hypnosis” that afflicted three successive presidents and their circles of sleep-walking advisers. Against all sense, and despite contradictions apparent in the facts, the American high command, both civilian and military, insisted on its cherished dream of power. Our reasons for fighting the war changed with the circumstances: first we were defending all of Asia against Communist subversion (“the domino theory”), then we were proving the credibility of American power (for fear that other nations on other continents might smile behind their hands), and lastly, after 50,000 Americans had been killed, to prove a point of honor. Tuchman cites the dictum of George Kennan, who said of the men in Washington (most notably Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow and Maxwell Taylor), “they were like men in a dream,” incapable of “any realistic assessment of the effects of their own acts.” Elsewhere in her book, Tuchman compares the stewards of American empire during the Vietnam War with the eighteenth-century British aristocrats who presided over the loss of American colonies. Both companies of fatuous gentlemen were distinguished by their ignorance and pride. Like the modern Americans, the British ministers and peers thought themselves invulnerable to the arrows of fortune. Being accustomed to the illusion of omnipotence (i.e., to the obedience of their domestic servants) they lacked a sense of political realism. Describing their qualities in a letter to Charles Fox, Edmund Burke attributed their foolishness to “plentiful fortunes, assured rank and quiet homes.”130
The somnambulism characteristic of large corporations can be fairly well inferred from the number of companies lost over the past several years in the maelstrom of takeovers and leveraged buyouts. When denounced as upstarts, the acquisitors—gentlemen on the order of T. Boone Pickens, the Belzberg brothers and the once fortunate Ivan Boesky—invariably say the companies were too indolently managed, that the assets were dribbling through the fingers of corporate hirelings too soft and too frightened to command the respect of their accountants. The more sardonic of the speculators, notably Pickens, present themselves as blessings in disguise, agents of a divine financial ecology sent to thin the herds and winnow wheat from chaff. The argument is exaggerated, but it is true that the corporate executive, unlike the small businessman or free-booting entrepreneur, isn’t paid to take chances.
Anybody who says this in public, of course, is likely to be thought un-American. In November 1986, Richard Darman, then deputy secretary of the Treasury, told an audience at the Japan Society in New York that the conventional American business establishment was “bloated, risk-averse, inefficient and unimaginative.” Executives paid $1 million a year, he said, devote less time to research and development than “they spend reviewing their golf scores.” He observed that most high-ranking members of “the corpocracy” owe their places not to character or intelligence but to “the strength of their demeanor and a failure to make observable mistakes.” As can be well imagined, the publication of Darman’s remarks provoked a flurry of outraged denials in the business magazines.
The corpocracy doesn’t like to be reminded that an accomplished CEO bears comparison to a butler or gamekeeper—a dull but stouthearted and boyish fellow who can be counted on to look after the porcelain or the grouse; reliable enough to act as custodian of a large and valuable property, but not clever enough to steal anything important. In a word, he is precisely the sort of man prepared at Hotchkiss and Yale to fit the norm of mediocrity once defined by Paul D. Cravath, patriarch of the New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore, in terms of the qualities desirable in apprentice lawyers. “Brilliant intellectual powers are not essential. Too much imagination, too much wit, too great cleverness, too facile fluency, if not leavened by a sound sense of proportion, are quite as likely to impede success as to promote it. The best clients are apt to be afraid of those qualities.”
The makers of mythologies about American business often mention “profit maximization” as the raison d’être of the corporate mechanism. Only seldom have I found this to be so. Maximization of profit would imply an operation run according to the arithmetic of performance, which would wreak havoc on everybody’s comfortable arrangements. Let the rabbit of free enterprise out of its velveteen bag and too many people would have to be fired, too much idiocy exposed to judgment or ridicule, too much vanity sacrificed to the fires of efficiency. Such a catastrophe obviously would threaten the American way of life, to say nothing of the belief in free markets. As dependent as a child on the institution that suckles him, the devoted corporate manager seeks to build protective layers of bureaucracy, to expand and make stronger the shell of hierarchy, to keep the systems comfortably in place.131 Once all the institutional needs have been met (i.e., tending the slowly revolving water wheel that yields jobs, money, income, taxes, benefits, insurance, stock options, picnics, limousines, pensions, dividends, etc.) then, if anybody has any surplus time or energy to invest, the institution might direct its attention to the making of a profit. The $190 billion spent on mergers and acquisitions in 1986 often resulted in institutions of elephantine size, but it has yet to be proved that the stately rearrangement of tables of organization resulted in better products or more intelligent management. Too much money was employed in the service of debt, which, like the money watering the sterile deserts of the weapons’ industry, heavily depletes the funding available for thought.
The promoters of the American dream inevitably speak of the “rugged individual” who sets himself against the resident establishment—cultural, political, scientific—and goes off into the appropriate wilderness to unearth beauty, truth or a fortune in California real estate. The hero is largely imaginary, apparently the invention of the literary East in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Disenchanted with what they knew of crowded commerce in seaboard towns, the writers in Boston and New York comforted themselves with tales of the noble frontiersmen still at large on the Great Plains. In the 1920s and 1930s the romance was cut into strips of movie film by a generation of displaced Europeans who confused the history of the United States with their own reasons for leaving Odessa or Berlin. The image of the rugged individualist might sell automobiles and cigarettes, but as an exemplary model of a successful American life it is ruinous. Except in a few well-publicized instances (enough to lend credence to the iconography painted on the walls of the media), the rigorous practice of rugged individualism usually leads to poverty, ostracism and disgrace. The rugged individualist is too often mistaken for misfit, maverick, spoilsport, sore thumb.
No matter how effusive our rhetoric to the contrary, most Americans cannot bring themselves to trust the unaffiliated individual. We prefer to repose our confidence in institutions: a brand name, a corporation, a bank. It is the figure of Babbitt or Cyrus Vance, not Clint Eastwood, who represents the triumph of the American dream—the man who goes along to get along, who knows the right people and belongs to the right clubs, whose every opinion seconds the nomination of the chairman, who submits easily, and with a winning smile, to what Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority.”
As often as not, corporate success depends upon the aspirant’s willingness, over many years and under a bewildering variety of circumstances, to sacrifice whatever trace elements of personality might get him in trouble with the management or the police. The poor fellow learns to submerge his own being in the corporate being, to subvert his own voice to the institutional voice, to acquire the “plastic capability” President Nixon so much admired in General Alexander Haig. Only when the candidate has enlisted in the ranks of Hollow Men does he become eligible for the reward of a tax-deductible personality; only when it is certain he will have nothing to say does the corporation set him up with a microphone and an audience.
Much the same process takes place within the withered groves of the American academy. The winning of tenure at a prominent university almost always obliges the candidate to give up his own voice and applaud, with possibly a few urbane and scholarly asides, opinions approved by the head of the department. The resulting stultification, described in some detail in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, leads to an intellectual orthodoxy as narrow and humorless as the dogma espoused by the National Association of Manufacturers.
As Americans, we have a genius for organization, and we achieve our most impressive results when working together in groups. This appears to have been true of the national temperament since the first arriviste theologians formed a joint-stock company in Massachusetts Bay for the development of Puritan real estate. The pioneers moving west in the 1840s and 1850s gathered at Independence, Missouri, to join their wagon trains into corporate entities meant to last just long enough for the trek to California. Any man attempting to go it on his own would have been lucky to see Colorado. The hazards of the journey needed at least fifty wagons to set up a coherent defense against terrain, Indians and weather. The same talent for cooperation characterized the building of American barns and the settling of American towns. During the twentieth century the preference for large institutional combination increasingly has come to define American scientific and technological discovery as well as the method of American business and journalism. The distinctively American art forms—musical comedy, jazz, the movies—all rely on collaboration. So also the making of public personalities, which, contrary to the fables about stars born overnight in a shower of klieg light, requires a large supporting cast of technicians, distributors, agents, publicists, and beauticians, all harnessed together in the kind of team effort necessary to the construction of a shopping mall or an F-16. Big-time American journalism is group journalism, and the people who succeed at it learn to speak or write in the institutional voice of The New Yorker, Newsweek or CBS Evening News. Dan Rather’s voice is the voice of a committee. More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudices of his audience. Deprive William Safire of the insignia of The New York Times, and he would have a hard time selling his truths to a weekly broadsheet in suburban Duluth.
When the chairman of a large corporation retires or finds it expedient to quit the premises in the custody of police, the event almost never affects the price of company stock. The investors know that the institution, not the individual, tends the engines of commerce. Nor is it ever just one publishing house or automobile company that stumbles into financial ruin; it is all publishing houses and all automobile companies. If the practice of free enterprise coincided with the theory, it would be reasonable to expect that an exceptionally gifted organization (more attuned to social change, more subtle in its technology, more aggressive in its marketing strategy) would defy the prevailing trends and so accumulate earnings worthy of the sainted J.P. Morgan. But except on the margins of the major industries, or among companies small enough to retain the character of free-booting partnerships, the miracle almost never occurs. The oligopolies behave in the manner of stately sheep, all tending in the same direction, all comforting themselves with the same bleating explanations borrowed from the same newsletters and trade association speeches.
Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country. Strip him of his corporate rank and titles, and not only does he sink into obscurity, but he is also likely to vanish from the sight of the insurance companies—which means that his life, invisible and uninsured, is no longer worth the price of salvation.
In the faces of innumerable company functionaries (within the ateliers of the media as well as in the honeycombs of large corporations), I have seen precisely the same hunted look that I noticed in George Amory’s eyes that winter afternoon at the Plaza Hotel. What would happen to them if they were to be abandoned by the organization that furnishes them with titles, degree, comfort and permission to exist? Where would they go, and who would hire them? Who would notice them? In what voices would they speak?
The loss of an institutional identity gives rise to the spectacle of the retired corporate hierarch revolving like a dead moon in the orbit of his extinct influence. If he retires on Monday, his telephones fall silent on Tuesday; on Wednesday his portrait disappears from the brightly lit galleries of the business press, and by Friday nobody is much interested in his observations about NATO or the rate of inflation. The effect is even worse in Washington. Government functionaries deprived of their function have nothing else on which to base their claims to self, which is why American officials so seldom resign on matters of principle.
Money always implies the promise of magic, but the effect is much magnified when, as now, people have lost faith in everything else. During the 1960s and early 1970s the political and cultural argument in the United States still reflected at least a residual belief in competing systems of value, in possibilities loosely associated with the talk of disarmament, social justice, environmentalism and human rights. By the time President Reagan arrived in the White House the aspirations of prior decades were seen as so much dreaming nonsense.
To the extent that we forget how to love or respect one another—preferring to regard each other as commodities or targets of opportunity—we settle for the emblems of status, abandon our hopes for what Schopenhauer meant by happiness in concreto and set our whole hearts on happiness in abstracto—that is, on money. The belief in what isn’t there, in a fiction instead of a fact, accords with the transcendental bias of the American mind and our long-established preference for the impalpable and the unseen.