News & Updates:
Like the website?
|
The Sociables
|
Articles In This Section:
|
||||
|
THE "agonizing process of 'life adjustment' " is slyly socializing our college campuses, Anthony Neville has written in the Princeton Alumni Weekly. "While an inevitable handful of fraternities hold out in favor of their traditional role of irresponsibility, a significant majority of the houses fall in line with the lofty goals set out for them. They cook barbecues for orphans, paint slum houses, and visit hospitals at Christmas . . . Most of them have had to give up their role as the last sanctuaries of pure, unabashed hedonism." Under this newly reformed type of fraternity system where the "best men" are those who are "neat and conservative, and inclined to 'do-goodism' . . . the resulting atmosphere is akin to that of a Sunday evening church youth group."
Off campus as well as on, virtually all America has become as sociable as a Sunday evening youth group. The chatty gruel of our national "fraternity system" under which everybody fraternizes with everybody else has almost entirely replaced the grueling silence, the muteness, the isolation of our roughhewn, old-fashioned American individualism. Gone, and happily so, are the days of every man for himself. Yet what kind of bargain is it that we have driven with our other-directed life today which allows so few men, or really any man, to be truly of himself or alone by himself? "If I am like everybody else," Robert Hutchins has satirically commented about our concerted effort to embargo apartness in favor of togetherness, "if I have no feelings or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved; saved from the frightening experiences of aloneness." Rather than be alone, so great are our insecurities that we will be anything not to be by ourselves. We will fraternize with other people even though they bore us or abhor us. We will mirror their friendly faces and candied tongues with a saccharine sociability of our own. We will be insincere, insufferable, and insensitive even to the sleeve-tuggings of our basic humanism if only other people will let us cling to them. In our mad frenzy to be sociable, we will do what is expedient rather than what may be right; what is juvenile — and often delinquent — rather than what may be mature; what is noisily and publicly ballyhooed rather than what may be solemnly and privately purposeful because we have found that a certain level of constant noise acts as a kind of sound barrier against our loneliness. The only way we can be sure there are other trees just like us out there in the forest is when we hear them fall. In our society today, the traditional concept of the single individual as responsible, participating in major decisions affecting his life, and then defending his decisions unpopular though they and he may be, is a wee bit of Americana. The long history of unpopular dissent in our country has come to a major turning point, if not to an end. As modernists, we will go to almost any length to guarantee ourselves against unpopularity. In many of our colleges, Stephen Birmingham has pointed out, the majority group of students is known as the "straight arrows." As their name implies, straight arrows are in the middle. "They are the fence sitters, the controversy straddlers. Straight arrows play it safe. They are on everybody's side. As tides in campus affairs turn, so do they, but not enough to endanger their center-of-the-road position. (If straight arrows had any strength of character everybody would detest them; since they haven't any everybody tolerates them good-naturedly.)" When straight arrows graduate into business, their four years of majoring in straddling prepares them to feel perfectly at home with office equipment like the Harwald "Group-Thinkometer." The Thinkometer is the true Thinking-Man's Filter, effectively filtering out controversy from business affairs. By means of an interconnected series of "Yes" and "No" buttons placed before every thinking man, the "Thinkometer" delivers to its master computer only the anonymous total reaction of the group as a whole. Majority decisions can therefore be arrived at painlessly, without any of the individual embarrassment of contentious discussion. Because buttons are obscurely pushed, no necks need be visibly stuck out, no noses counted, no faces lost.
| ||||||
|
 Subscribe                       
Add URL - thepsychologyofmarketing
.com Blog
Related terms you should consider: sales and marketing and marketing seminar - Also see loose diamonds for good info. All Rights Reserved. - Site Map - Privacy Policy - Disclaimer - Terms of Use - Contact |
||||||
