Word: systemization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...trend proceeds in the private sphere, corporations merge, small colleges and small businesses find survival increasingly difficult. I find myself treasuring every remaining bit of pluralism, everything that stands between us and an all-embracing system. When I hear young people recommending the abolition of private enterprise, I question whether they have weighed the consequences. It may not have occurred to them that socialism or any other alternative to private enterprise would certainly mean the shouldering by Government of huge new burdens. Our giant corporations would not disappear. They would simply be merged into unimaginably vast Government ministries. And bureaucracy...
...society capable of continuous renewal will be one that develops to the fullest its human resources, that removes obstacles to individual fulfillment, that emphasizes education, lifelong learning and selfdiscovery. We are still far from having created such a system...
...problems is that the end toward which all modern societies, whatever their ideology, seem to be moving is the beehive model, in which the total system perfects itself as the individual is steadily dwarfed. All modern societies, capitalist or Communist, are moving toward ever larger and more inclusive systems of organization, toward ever greater dominance of the system's purposes over individual purposes...
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...
Among the dissenters today we hear a few with a special message. They say: "We don't need reform, we need revolution. The whole system is rotten and should be destroyed." I have talked long and seriously with such people and have found that most of them don't really mean it. There is an awesome theatricality about today's radicalism. But some, of course, do mean it. They have fallen victim to an old and naive doctrine-that man is naturally good, humane, decent, just and honorable, but that corrupt and wicked institutions have transformed...