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By Root 172 0

as to things. This managerial class, while it does not own the enterprise legally, controls it factually; it is responsible, in an effective way, neither to the stockholders nor to those who work in the enterprise. In fact, while the most important fields of production are in the hands of the large corporations, these corporations are practically ruled by their top employees. The giant corporations which control the economic, and to a large degree the political, destiny of the country constitute the very opposite of the democratic process; they represent power without control by those submitted to it.

Aside from the industrial bureaucracy, the vast majority of the population is administered by still other bureaucracies. First of all, by the governmental bureaucracy (including that of the armed forces) which influences and directs the lives of many millions in one form or another. More and more the industrial, military and governmental bureaucracies are becoming intertwined, both in their activities and, increasingly, in their personnel. With the development of ever greater enterprises, unions have also developed into big bureaucratic machines in which the individual member has very little to say. Many union chiefs are managerial bureaucrats, just as industrial chiefs are.

All these bureaucracies have no plan, and no vision; and due to the very nature of bureaucratic administration, this has to be so. When man is transformed into a thing and managed like a thing, his managers themselves become things; and things have no will, no vision, no plan.

With the bureaucratic management of people, the democratic process becomes transformed into a ritual. Whether it is a stockholders’ meeting of a big enterprise, a political election or a union meeting, the individual has lost almost all influence to determine decisions and to participate actively in the making of decisions. Especially in the political sphere, elections become more and more reduced to plebiscites in which the individual can express preference for one of two slates of professional politicians, and the best that can be said is that he is governed with his consent. But the means to bring about this consent are those of suggestion and manipulation and, with all that, the most fundamental decisions—those of foreign policy which involve peace and war—are made by small groups which the average citizen hardly even knows.

The political ideas of democracy, as the founding fathers of the United States conceived them, were not purely political ideas. They were rooted in the spiritual tradition which came to us from prophetic Messianism, the gospels, humanism, and from the enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century. All these ideas and movements were centered around one hope: that man, in the course of his history, can liberate himself from poverty, ignorance and injustice, and that he can build a society of harmony, peace and union between man and man and between man and nature. The idea that history has a goal and the faith in man’s perfectability within the historical process have been the most specific elements of Occidental thought. They are the soil in which the American tradition is rooted and from which it draws its strength and vitality. What has happened to the idea of the perfectability of man and of society? It has deteriorated into a flat concept of “progress,” into a vision of the production of more and better things, rather than standing for the birth of the fully alive and productive man. Our political concepts have today lost their spiritual roots. They have become matters of expediency, judged by the criterion of whether they help us to a higher standard of living and to a more effective form of political administration. Having lost their roots in the hearts and longings of man, they have become empty shells, to be thrown away if expediency warrants it.

The individual is managed and manipulated not only in the sphere of production, but also in the sphere of consumption, which allegedly is the one in which the individual expresses his free choice.