December 29, 2002
Baton Rouge, Louisianna, USA
11:28am. Sitting on Seed’s bed, I’m reading “The Culture Consumers” by Alvin Toffler. He quotes Robert Merton:
“The bureaucratic structure exerts a constant pressure upon the official to be ‘methodical, prudent, disciplined.’ If the bureaucracy is to operate successfully, it must attain a high degree of reliability of behavior. To achieve this reliability, bureaucracy depersonalizes human relationships and encourages conformity. Standardized rules kill the spontaneity of natural human relations. Jobs are defined neatly. Lines of authority are spelled out with exactitude. Communication in the organization becomes increasingly formalized. A memo world is created. Paper stockades begin to fence people in.”
Max Lerner wrote: “Most American babies…. are born in standardized hospitals, with a standardized tag put around them to keep them from getting confused with other standardized products of the hospital. Many of them grow up in uniform rows of tenements or of small-town or suburban houses…. They spend the days of their years with monotonous regularity in factory, office, and shop, performing routinized operations at regular intervals….. They are drafted into standardized armies, and if they escape the death of mechanized warfare they die of highly uniform diseases, and to the accompaniment of routine platitudes they are buried in standardized graves and celebrated by standardized obituary notices. Caricature? Yes, perhaps a crude one, but with a core of frightening validity in it.”
