With marketplace judgment undermined, internal competition within businesses has slipped its moorings.

---

Is there anything we can now rely on to control the arbitrariness and perversity of human nature, when put in hierarchical relationships? Or have we completely slipped our moorings?

To gauge how far we have drifted from America’s original socioeconomic objectives, we need only ask a simple question:

Would our founding fathers have gone on as glowingly as they did about the creation of a "natural aristocracy," if what they envisioned was the advancement process in a contemporary corporate bureaucracy?

Perhaps we should nowadays be paying more attention to the words of different spokesmen—some of whom have yet to become widely known.  For example, a union organizer may ultimately have been speaking for many more of us than he originally knew, and less in a spirit of sour grapes than it might have seemed, when he offered the following rather salty characterization of why his type of organization might be needed in the contemporary white collar environment:

"They may hire the secretary who's a good typist," said the organizer. "Then again, they may hire the one with the big tits."

As the ability to create an appealing impression comes to assume increasing importance in the corporate advancement equation, there are significant corollary effects in the larger social order, where status tends to be based on income and occupation.     When status in the corporate order accrues to those who are most adept at managing perceptions, this skill tends to come to the fore in the esteem of society at large.

(c) COPYRIGHT 1994   ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

---