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Introduction - Part 2
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In fixating ourselves so compulsively on security, in treating it as a "buy-product" of a mass manufacturer rather than a byproduct of our own individual effort, we are surrendering through our symbols a try at the main chance for the sake of the consoling grace of what little we can get — but it is guaranteed! — from the hind tit.
The effort-saving guarantee implicit throughout our communications symboland has diminutized many of our other normal drives as well. In our choice of Symbols of Success we have abandoned serious attempts to master the execution of a vocation. Now our major concern lies in evoking an Executive image. Our Symbols of Sociability reveal how we have yielded the natural and healthy need to communicate with each other to the candied tongues and falsely ecstatic purrs of "people who like people." Our Symbols of Sophistication tell us how paltry our attempts really are at creatively individualizing ourselves from the mass; how uninspired is our knack for dealing with change, which we have come to distrust; how hungrily we search for a lively pulse-beat among the limp wrists or an enduring blood line among the incessant yearly changes of model. Yet perhaps it is our Symbols of Sex that condemn us most. Our women are arctic. Our symbolic men are little men. Their deeds are little deeds. Apparently we have lost our admiration for greatness in what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has named our "Age without Heroes." Today the team is our heroic symbol and football is called the typical American game by sports telecaster Mai Alberts because "the thrill of teamwork in football is typical of American life. There's nothing in sports like the thrill of an eleven-man team working as a unit." Shades of Red Grange! The "increasing despotism of the majority" which Alexis de Tocqueville warned against after visiting the young United States in the 1830's has finally made our foremost national industry the production of symbolic techniques to smooth conflict. From pulpit to analyst's couch to supermarket shelf, the "public relations approach" is applied everywhere. Our symbols no longer invigorate. They compensate. Serenity, itself symbolized by the tranquilizer, is in the air. All is calm, all is bright. As Arthur Koestler has characterized us, we are "a generation without profile, whose typical gesture is a great silent shrug." As we have gone on and on narcotizing the individual eccentricity in our society, our labors have brought forth mouselike interdisciplinary, interdepartmental, interdenominational symbols whose collectivist scorn for a cult of the responsible individual may be equaled in our time only by Communism. We like to say that our collectivism provides us with a balanced bipartisan view. But most of the time the balanced view turns out to be what has been called a vague point of equilibrium between platitudes. Most of us today live in just such an equilibrium. More and more of us work within great balanced organizations. The decline of our laboring classes, the growth of our white-collar class, the rise of suburbia, have all hastened the increasing homogeneity of American society. Though we continue to speak of ourselves as rugged individuals, our actual life is becoming more and more collective and anonymous. "No geniuses here. Just a bunch of average Americans working together," says the sound track of a Monsanto Chemical Company public relations film. How much of a chance does that give self-realization in the old-fashioned don't-give-a-damn sense?
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