Education for Tragedy by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Man and Moloch

THE LIVES of most contemporary men are lived on the sufferance of some bureaucratic organization or another. This is true, in the first instance, of a man’s vocational life. His talents are employed, or not employed, by some bureaucracy in advancing its goals or enhancing its image. If employed, he is provided by the organization in turn with means to draw on the products of other bureaucratic organizations in sustaining him in the rest of his life. Bureaucratic organizations are thus primary factors in contemporary man’s employment as worker. Increasingly, he must reckon also with bureaucracies in his nonworker roles—as citizen, as student, and as client in quest of health, recreational and welfare services as well.

Moreover, the organizations which environ his life are endowed with earthly immortality as legally corporate persons—an immortality to which biologic man cannot reasonably aspire. They are made up of men but possess a continuity and character which extend beyond the life spans of any or all of the men who for a time occupy positions within their pyramidal structures. Being pyramidal in structure, to men living on their middle or lower slopes, the decisions of the organization—decisions which affect fundamentally their employment or nonemployment, their status as workers or nonworkers, indeed, as men—are shrouded in mystery. Perhaps the mystery enshrouds those on their utmost pinnacles as well.

It is not surprising that these corporate persons—these quasi-human giants on whom our lives basically depend—have received increasing attention by scientific students of man and society over the past three generations of mortal men. But it may be doubted whether these studies have plumbed the mysteries of corporate organizations. Nor is it surprising that temples, schools of administration and management, have developed to instruct men in manipulating, if not always in comprehending, these mysteries. Polemic writings of justification and attack upon bureaucracy are vast in bulk but only meagerly enlightening.

Some writers of imaginative literature too have attempted to assay the inner reactions of men to organizations which make a more or less total demand upon their lives. The most insightful literature has been written from the standpoint of men dependent upon but in some degree estranged from a bureaucratic system.

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