Word: modern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Contemporary critics often appear to believe that the smothering of individuality is a consequence of intentional decisions by people at the top. Right-wingers blame Government leaders, left-wingers blame corporate leaders. But the modern leader is always in some measure caught in the system. To a considerable degree, the system determines how and when he will exercise power. The queen bee is as much a prisoner of the system as is any other in the hive...
...loss of a sense of community is particularly serious. In some ways modern society binds the individual too tightly, but in other ways it holds him too loosely-and the latter causes as much pain as the former. He feels constrained by the conformity required in a highly organized society, but he also feels lost and without moorings. And both feelings may be traced to the same cause: the disappearance of the natural human community and its replacement by formula controls that irk and give no sense of security...
...large-scale organization tends to smother individuality. But today's young person doesn't give due weight to the fact that large-scale organization, properly designed, can also benefit the individual, enrich his life, increase his choices. Everyone lampoons modern technological society, but no one is prepared to give up his refrigerator. Everyone condemns bigness, but there is no movement of population toward the unspoiled, lonely places of the continent. We must identify those features of modern organization that strengthen the individual and those that diminish him. Given such analysis, we can design institutions that would strengthen...
...Just as modern man obsessively breaks up the forms and patterns of life and then finds himself nervous and afraid in a formless world, so, in the name of freedom, he compulsively dissolves the limits on behavior and then finds himself unhappy in a world without limits. He sweeps aside rules, manners, formalities and standards of taste, anything that even slightly inhibits the free play of emotion and impulse. Yet not only the claims of civility but also the realities of individual development call for some measure of selfdiscipline. We have explored about as fully as a civilization...
...Cinderella-Rockefella was one of the year's hottest international hits (1,500,000 sales overseas alone). He is an accomplished guitarist and a pop artist whose life-sized photograph of a Greyhound bus is in the collection of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. He is, most recently, an author whose new anthology of verse and musings, The Mason Williams Reading Matter (Doubleday; $2.95), has present sales...