Word: gibney
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...David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd worries about other-directedness and herd instinct. William H. Whyte in The Organization Man examines the loss of individuality caused by modern corporate life. Vance Packard in The Status Seekers sees the trouble in a craving for the symbols of importance. Frank Gibney, a journalistic G.P., has a simpler, more sweeping and engagingly old-fashioned diagnosis: the whole place is getting to be crooked, just plain crooked...
Diagnostician Gibney, a LIFE staff writer and author (The Frozen Revolution, Five Gentlemen of Japan), warns earnestly: "Older powers than ours have been fatally undermined when the gap grew too great between the citizen's private sense of wrong and the public morality to which he and his fellows were pledged." To document the gap, Gibney attempts to chronicle every conceivable device of legal and illegal corner cutting, bunching them all into what might be termed Gibney's Unified Sociological Field Theory of the "Genial Society...
From such "acceptable'' forms of petty larceny, Gibney moves on to the more spectacular types that pique the Internal Revenue Department. Among the intriguing cases are the undertaker who tried to deduct his wife's grocery bills because she met so many potential customers during her shopping trips, and the possibly legendary San Francisco taxpayer who deducted the cost of his love affairs as a medical expenditure because his physician advised him that sex would calm his nerves...
From tax cheating Gibney moves on to the kickback artists in business, the most spectacular among them being unquestionably a New York dress buyer named Stanley Sternberg, who worked for a branch of Sears, Roebuck. When he was shown the door in 1952, it appeared that manufacturers who wanted him to place orders with them, in addition to making regular payments, had fed him daily, clothed him and his family, partly furnished his home. One manufacturer was assigned to take Sternberg's aged parents to dinner almost nightly; the wife of another was pressed into service to supply...
Matter over Mind. The Genial Society, with all its deceptions, Gibney believes, has come about because businesses have become too large and impersonal to be readily held accountable; because technological complexity of modern products makes it difficult to see through exaggerated advertising; because aspirations once funneled into spiritual and national ideals have been diverted to materialism...