BLACK BART #2
Dropping out, leaving the rat race, rejecting society's myths -- by whatever label we brand this new and expanding phenomenon, or whichever rationale underlies the label -- usually involves a major change in both a person's view of himself, his values, his goals, and an internal readjustment of his previous self-vs-society relationship. But sometimes the view of self, the values and the relationship remain essentially the same and only the goals and the environment change. The key to this diffcrence in scope (often the essential difference between young and old dropouts) is the extent of the rejection: Is the self, as well as the society, rejected? If the view of self was totally dependent upon society's approval (selling out), the rejector inevitably suffers a debilitating identity loss. On the other hand, if the rejector had always individuated -- recognized the disparity between his and society's values, worked within society's framework, yet retained the integrity of his own values -- the transition is relatively easy and can be very rewarding; the previous dichotomy removed, a new fulfillment becomes possible.
I spent the first half of my life climbing to the top of a variety of social and vocational mountains and in almost every case I enjoyed the climb -- the pleasure came in the trying, the doing -- but not the summit. This seeming paradox needs explaining: Obviously I've rejected (like from the start) the American Success value -- but not its action counterpart, That has, in fact, been my primary value: motion, the passage from potency to action -- actualizing think-talk in do -- Adventurel
Like most people, I started out as a child and, like most, had many continuing values instilled there. Several have had major consequence; each tells something of my self-vs-society relationship:
THE GAME. A large part of my father's philosophy was transferred to me. He looked at life, especially the vocational side of it, as a game; a game to be played for the pure joy of playing; a sport of constantly testing the self against the possible. Competitiveness was too easy a label for him, and essentially invalid, because it implies winning as its end, and winning wasn't exactly his purpose. Everytime he seemed to win (represented, usually, by making an exceptional amount of money) he would contrive, unconsciously perhaps, some way to lose (the money). He seemed to enjoy restarting from scratch. Cycling between the economic poles made for an interesting childhood: contrast enables vitality just as surely as it defines beauty. Conceptualizing the major project I was involved in at any moment as the 'Only Game in Town' became permanently internalized.
ANTI-MASS. My father called it reverse psychology. On Wall Street it's commonly known as the Odd-Lot theory. Every successful entrepreneur employs some version of it and most of the world's wealthy got that way by honoring it, Its essence is simple: whenever you are uncertain of the direction to take, look to see what the majority is doing and simply do the opposite. The implication is deeper than just that the majority is almost always wrong. It recognizes that the majority is always influenced by a leader, an idea or a myth, external to itself, whose interests are not synonymous with the welfare of the led. Overdone, the concept buries altruism, but on balance it has tremendous personal value. Following it, you remain simply unsusceptible to mass conditioning.
MY OWN LITTLE MOTOR. Both of my parents, each in a different way, consciously worked at instilling in me a self-energizing, internal power plant. Riesman has defined this as the ingredient which separates the 'inner-directed' from the 'other-directed' and I can agree -- the damn little thing has been churning inside of me since childhood. It revs up especially high, turning me in my own direction whenever some 'other' attempts to direct me.
NOBLESSE OBLIGE We certainly weren't highborn in the terms of English aristocracy, but we were relatively well off and lived in a community whose central condition was comparable. Family, school and community combined their efforts in instilling a sense of social concern; an abiding obligation (once you had taken care of yourself and your own) not only to display charitable conduct, but to work at something that might do some good for the rest of the world.
My childhood was pretty enjoyable; perhaps because I adventured through most of it Even the early part-time and summer jobs were fun, if not completely absorbing, because I always sought them out for something other than money: soda-jerk/delivery boy, to gain access to unlimited sucrose and to learn to drive; deckhand on a Great Lakes ore freighter; roughneck on a drilling rig in the Texas oil fields. Fortunately, I learned very little in school, just enough to know what they were talking about, but never enough to be impressed by it. My real education was acquired at home or in my own explorations, and later, through a lot of private reading. My family traveled extensively and that added a dimension simply not attainable in a geography class.
For awhile, in high school, I was a proselyte in the competitive game -- wrestling and swimming teams, several letters and a few championship medals -- but winning as an end was mitigated soon after graduation; mitigated by essentially reverting to my father's view of life. I began to see winning, getting to the top, as a means, not an end; pointing upward simply as a method for maintaining direction while you enjoyed the adventure of the climb.
Pearl Harbor happened on a Sunday in December during my first semester in college. On Monday I was off adventuring as an Army Air Corps pilot. That war was great. There we were, playing leapfrog above the clouds or buzzing southern landscapes in the hottest fighter planes in the world -- having a ball! It was one long existential moment of private eternity. I never saw an enemy; I spent the whole damn war as an instructor.
As the moment passed, a new awareness came. Not quite abstract negation, but coupled with Anti-Mass, I began to evolve a new consciousness. The army personified stupidity, and living it, I soon saw its authority as hollow, and from that, perhaps all authority. Our government, all governments, had just finished killing millions of people, and the experience of Hiroshima forecast that they would soon be killing millions more. World conditions were worse, not better, than before the war. Government itself, perhaps even civilization, was the core of the insanity. Feeling somewhat like a minority of one, I pretty fully abandoned world and social concerns, detached myself from the larger society and began to live only in my own existential time. Then, selfishly in earnest, I began to play The Game.
College, after the war, was a drag. The courses, the whole purpose, except for having to pay the entrance fee to the business world with a diploma, were essentially irrelevant, but the fraternity-sorority scene was rather absorbing at first. The concept of fraternity carried a promise of community (albeit one that failed in fruition) and the sororities were effective supermarkets for wife-shopping. I married there, and because it meant so much to my wife, began the social climbing trip there too. We held off having children until I finished school, and then had our only child, a son, and with him, the beginning of a whole new lifc for me.
Most of my fraternity brothers went to work either for large corporations or their family's business. Anticipating that the vibrations of My Own Little Motor would not harmonize well with the prevailing environment of Corporationland, I opted for my own business, and together with my brother and all the money we could borrow, opened a hardware and paint store in the town where we went to college.
The first six months were a real struggle, but it finally began to look like we were going to survive when the Korean War broke out and we were both recalled by the Air Force. My wife came in to manage the business and did an exceptional job for the year we were gone. At the end of our tours my brother decided not to return to the retail business and went off to do his own thing, and my wife and I, in partnership, riding the first wave of large planned shopping centers, began a rapid expansion. With both of us putting in ten to twelve-hour days, six and a half days a week, we had five stores in less than four years, a small wholesale business, and were starting to manufacture our own products. Within our trade, in our area, we were literally on top. Our social status, while certainly not in the first line of 'old money', was steadily growing. We were both feeling very fulfilled, the adventure was fabulous, but there were a few contradictions.
Our son was being raised, not by us with our burdensome work schedules, but by an endless series of nursemaids, housekeepers, nursery schools and baby-sitters. We hardly ever saw him awake. The situation really frustrated our father-mother instincts. There was also another, rather unexpected problem: It's lonely at the top! Leading in any field of endeavor literally isolates a person. You've not only left your former peers behind, but the combination of either their awe or jealousy (or both) and your own preoccupation with 'business as wife and mistress' creates insurmountable barriers to openness in communication. Employer-employee relations, even liberal ones, always run to a standoff: employees are usually compulsively cautious and few are capable of seeing the whole picture, while any employer who tries usually finds that familiarity does breed contempt. Lawyers and accountants are narrow specialists and, in effect, not too different from part-time employees. Suppliers, customers and competitors simply have other points of reference. Unfortunately, the only one available with whom you can intelligently mirror a problem is the guy you shave in the morning.
The Eisenhower recession of 1956 put a crimp on my financing methods. I had been using expansion to finance itself, riding on the float of growth revenue: like the acquiring conglomerate, the franchise racket or the chain letter, I was betting on the come! The recession halted the growth and I had to pull back to catch up. OK, that's a normal business expectation, but removing the growth removed the thrill I got from playing the game. Then too, weariness from the long hours began to catch up, and most important, an awareness came of how far away from us those hours were pushing our son. Thrill of the climb gone, and suddenly realizing what the business was doing to us, I walked right up to it -- and knocked down our whole toy castle: five stores, wholesale business, a house and our social standing. My wife never forgave me, but for awhile I did get back to being a father.
We recovered enough money to live on for some time, vacationed in the Smokies and Florida for several months, and then bought a house in Miami. We both took easy local jobs and settled back, trying to get used to working for somebody else and only forty hours a week. Most of my now excess energy went into raising our son, but after a few months I was bored stiff and looking for a new mountain. Deciding to try to mistress somebody else's business instead of marrying another one of my own, and hoping to hold my Little Motor down with programed individuation, I walked into the corporate jungle.
The era of the 'expert' was in full swing and I couldn't find any job openings for presidents so, picking an expert's hat out of a random bag, I applied for a job as an accountant. I had a vague idea of the function but no knowledge at all of the content. I got the job and immediately ran out to buy some textbooks and read like mad. Three months later I was assistant controller for a large food store chain, but still knew less about accounting than our bookkeeper. Realizing that I needed at least the appearance of better tools if I was going to stay in this game, I went back to evening college in accounting.
In American business mythology an expert's appearance of a good bag of tools is usually more important than his ability to use them, The range of doctor's fees between Harlem and Park Avenue is a not unique example. Generally, industry fills its lower paying accounting jobs (or law or whatever) with new graduates, its middle management jobs from prestigeous public accounting firms, and its top jobs by stealing from its competitors. Essentially, the major ingredient at the first level is assumption, at the middle level, appearance (prestige), and at the top level, sophisticated appearance, or reputation. Stories of climbing to the top within one company are, with few exceptions, pure myth. It's actually done like musical chairs; moving laterally from one company to another in order to move up.
Knowing these game rules and being impatient, I moved to Florida's most prestigeous accounting firm when I had but half of the degree requirenents (a degree is really extraneous if you move fast enough -- employers after the first move just assume it). I spent a year there, all the while looking for the next musical chair. It finally came in the form of a controllership of a client shoe manufacturer. The year there was spent mostly in the development of other 'hats' (manufacturing 'expert' and, since the company was seeking to become a conglomerate, acquisitions 'expert') and, by getting into continuing contact with other companies in the trade, developing a reputation. The next chair was in a competitor's firm by whom I arranged to be stolen, and the job was running the company.
A quick, though inadequate, image of musical chair progress is visible in my salary history in this five year period. From an equivalent in my own company of 25,000 a year, I worked my way back down to 7,500, then laterally to 10,000, laterally again to 15,000 and, over and up, to 40,000. In the following seven years I made four more moves, the final two of which were at 50,000. My factual job description was that of hired president, though the titles ranged from that to executive vice president, chief executive officer, etc. Once in, I stayed within the same trade because what I sold, essentially, was reputation; and reputation, by its nature, is subject-confined. A1though most of the companies were publicly owned, they were all of medium size: from 400 to 2000 employees.
It certainly doesn't require genius to play at this game -- unless genius is defined as an attitude -- but it does have certain pragmatic requisites. Willingness to travel is one. In a ten-year period, I worked in or out of New York, Miami, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Spain, and Taiwan, in addition to visiting customers and suppliers in every part of this country and western Europe. On one of the last jobs I averaged thirty hours a week on commercial airlines. That, coupled with business luncheons and sales sessions, can bring the impression that life is a moving cocktail lounge. Another requirement, at least in my experience, is a willingness to make quick decisions, for in industry all problems ultimately filter, singularly or grouped, to the top. Employees and middle managers alike are conditioned not to make decisions, and although they are also motivated to hide problems, they rarely decide them. Quite literally, the only product produced at the top is decisions.
A third willingness, one I had hoped to avoid but couldn't, is to marry the job. An example of what this really means might hc found in a partial description of one of my last jobs: head of the shoe manufacturing division of a large conglomerate whose executive offices were on Wall Street, with sales offices in St. Louis and factories in Missouri, Puerto Rico and Taiwan. We lived in Bucks County, 100 miles from New York. I spent at least one day a week in the New York office (more if there were acquisitions to be worked on), two or three days in St. Louis, usually one day in the Missouri plant to work on product development, and tried to get to the Puerto Rican plants every two or three weeks and the ones in Taiwan every six weeks. In my spare time I handled the major customers .
The bathrooms in our home and in the apartments in New York and St, Louis were equipped with telephones, as was my car and the air-taxis I often used. Secretaries in New York and St, Louis kept pinpoint track of my location 18 hours a day, every day. I can't remember ever walking through an airport terminal during the whole year without being paged, and on several occasions while in the airliner. The calls started about six in the morning (from Taiwan, they had just finished dinner) and usually lasted until midnight. I felt like a football coach calling plays in an 18-hour-a-day game on a gridiron I couldn't see. I hate telephones! My wife used to have to schedule weekend appointments with me. Although I might fly over it two or three times a week, I rarely got home more than once a month. Married? To whom?
Don't let either my heavy-handed flippancy or my offhanded egoism mislead you --leading this kind of life brings heavy physical and psychological burdens. I never learned to bear them continuously. We weren't large spenders, but neither was I an avid saver, and when we had an excess I tended to utilize it for periods of temporary retirement. Ten years ago we bought a postage-stamp-size farm in Pennsylvania, and every other year or so I retired to it for a year. Farming it, landscaping, building, raising horses was my esthetic outlet, psychic regeneration, reassertion of physical aliveness, The farm wasn't economically productive; it consumed income instead of producing it. Its expense, the tuition for our son at an expensive New England prep school, and all other expenses -- our annual nut -- built up to between 20 and 25,000 and stayed there.
So long as I worked one year out of two, we could handle it. Finding another high paying job whenever I was ready was rarely a problem. In fact, the image of independence inherent in my frequent retirements tended to enhance my reputation in the trade: "Grant's not available yet, he's still playing with his horses."
Playing, incautiously, with a particularly spirited one, one day toward the end of one of the years of retirement, produced a bad fall and a ruptured disk. Six months in traction and four more recovering from a spinal operation -- all during the year I should have been working -- played havoc with our income program; the expense nut went right on. As soon as I could walk again, I rushed back into the rat race.
Several months later, just when a little blue was beginning to show in our financial sky, our son, in school in New England, was suddenly stricken with a rare nerve disease. By the time we reached him, he was in a Boston hospital, totally paralyzed but for one eyelid, with an artificial respirator doing all of his breathing for him. Medical prognosis: probable death within a few days, and should he live, it could only be as a physical vegetable. My wife and I took an apartment in Boston and figuratively lived in the hospital's intensive care unit 18 hours a day. He survived the four months it took for the paralysis to subside to where his own diaphragm could take over from the respirator. Stays in several rehabilitative hospitals followed, but except for breathing on his own, he showed little progress.
Disgusted with the passivity of American physical medicine, we built a combination hospital roon/rehabilitation center in one wing of the farm house, and imported a live-in physical therapist from Finland. The active vs. passive attitude of the therapist, her high skill level, non-institutional care and love, combined with his own determination, had him walking -- not normally, but walking nevertheless -- in four months, The cost of the ailment exceeded 50,000. Would a poor man's son have lived? It took almost two years at top salary to pay off all of the borrowings. My temporary retirement days were over.
That long, agonizing existential moment of horror, not knowing first if he would live, and then if he would walk, shook all of my values to the core. As a result, most of the values acquired in adulthood (status, power, property, son as projection of self -- my ticket to immortality) failed to survive the shakeup, while those instilled in childllood took on renewed stature. Concern for Noblesse Oblige returned, and with it a growing disgust for the sole pursuit of self-accomplishnent. Long before I officially left it, I knew that all of my old life was over.
Returning to school soon after he could walk, our son, now hyperactive, began a political evolution that would soon intersect an evolving one of my own: campaigning for McCarthy, agitating for radical change in staid old St Grottlesex, participating in an endless series of peace demonstrations throughout the East, and finally, a few riots. At first, defending my generation, I played the conservative father bit, but I soon found that my answers to his questions were satisfying neither of us. Before long my secretary, unknown to herself, was scheduling my business trips to coincide with a demonstration in Chicago or Washington, where I would march with my son. Or when we couldn't attend the national ones together, then separately, and calling each other that night. "You OK? Did you get busted?" "No, I'm OK. Hid in a church. How was Washington?" "Big turnout, 200,000 maybe, but calm. No trashing, but we liberated the Reflecting Pool in front of the Washington Monument for about 4 hours. I guess that won't stop the war, but at least it seems to be bringing us all together."
It seemed a perverse comment on Executive America (or at least a reflection of my own schizophrenic role) one day in Chicago, when in the morning I completed a half-million dollar sale to Sears, and in the afternoon, taking a cab from my suite in the Conrad Hilton, I participated in the Weatherman 'Days of Rage' riots, then hailed another cab to return to the suite and a 'successful sale' celebration,
My attraction to the movement, my increasingly radical leanings, my growing militancy set no better with my wife than the paradox of living one life and sympathizing with another set with me. Security, a comfortable social status, a lack of more than passing concern for people and events beyond her own sphere were her dominant preoccupations. She had been an excellent partner and mother, but we were both growing weary of 23 years with the same person. And she needed something else; a sense of fulfillment for having accomplished something outside of the family, inside of herself. She went back to work and is now managing a large clinic. As soon as I paid off all of my debts, I dropped out.
Dropped out first from Corporationland, and that was the easiest because the adventure of the clirnb was long since gone and the top was empty; empty of any semblance of humanity, in purpose or in fact. People, employees, customers, had become things, means, not ends, and I was frankly afraid of becoming a product. I had seen it too often. My best buddy from the arrny days, once more liberal than I, had become extremely successful in the life insurance business, lived it every moment until finally he reached the pinnacle -- today, he is a life insurance policy! He can't even bear to talk to his long-haired son. Another buddy from school days, a brilliant physicist who has worked on atomic energy since Oak Ridge days, today is his own product -- an atomic warhead --pathologically incapable of connecting his work with death.
Dropped out next from Monogamy, and that was the hardest. Hard because of the person involved, not because of the form, for I had long before rejected, intellectually, the concept that one could only love one other. While I still love her (now as one of several), continuing to live together, each now with radically different goals, could have resulted in nothing less than tearing each other apart, and I value both of us too much for that.
Dropped out finally, and this at the greatest risk, from Patriarchy, I had played the part so many play in a land devoid of community -- do-it-yourself, create your own community, a nuclear family; impose on it your own values and in a fractionalized, often hostile world, retreat into it to seek reinforcement. OK, but it's socially self-defeating because done a million times over, it only furthers fractionalization. Within this context I had also played another role: projection of self to son -- do-it-yourself immortality. That's OK too, to a point, but unfortunately I excelled. I left Montessori behind at three, when my son was beginning to read and write. During the six years of public school which I permitted, I restructured, daily, all of the misinformation they instilled. At twelve he was sent to the best private school league in the world. Throughout, I instructed him in Anti-Mass: a sailboat instead of a bike, a piano in place of Little League, a horse instead of a car. In a sense, what I was preparing him for -- public service -- was a cover for my own guilt complex. Then there was another factor -- money. The league I'd put him in reeked with Brahmin wealth. He'd grown accustorned to it, expected it. I wasn't convinced that staying in Corporationland just to meet those expectations of his would be doing either of us a favor. He was in his first semester of college when I decided to drop out. "I'11 cover all of your bills for the next year, kid. After that you're on your own." He chose to stay in school and has managed to scam the funds to do it. I'm still the patriarch of record, though no longer in fact, and surprisingly, we are now also very close friends. Peers of a sort; fellow revolutionaries!
That, oversimplified, is the extent of my value rejection. My goals, however, are completely reoriented; changed from the pursuit of self-accomplishment within the framework of a decaying society, to involvement in social revolution. These new goals are commune/community oriented, service directed, and this time I'm not working for pay. Needless to say, I've transcended any need for a top. My new environment is quite different: knowing people, face-to-face and openly instead of as voices on a million telephones; living in a community small enough to see across instead of on a world-wide gridiron; traveling on foot, sometimes with backpack, or occasionally by car instead of in a flying cocktail lounge; making love instead of money; slowing down just enough to enjoy my own aliveness in counterplay with the aliveness of others, I still individuate, though less and less because I'm working and living with people now whose values and goals, while not exactly the same, are more in common with my own.
It wasn't completely easy in the beginning because a lot of old habits and preconceptions did have to be purged, but at each level of release of the old, the personal sense of freedom being attained was very satisfying. But negation of the old alone -- albeit a mandatory prerequisite -- is no guarantee of liberation. Man (at least this one) has to live for something, and searching for that form was pure adventure (notwithstanding long days at sea) as I sampled various bits of the youth-culture alternatives: the demonstrations, writing for an underground newspaper, helping to organize a segment of the counter-economy, attending and teaching at a free university, getting busted, living in a comnune, sampling drugs. At first I probably visualized myself as leading an urban guerrilla band, but gradually my militant drives gave way to non-violent ones. Seeing the kind of people that the violent ones (physical or rhetorical) were becoming, I relearned what I always knew: inhuman means prostitute human ends! Seeing, too, community as the missing ingredient in a society gone mad and realizing that, while they are partisan and therefore not a cure-all, communes do offer a form around which a better world can be built; a new societal building block for a society which is now beyond repair and must be rebuilt. I'm a dedicated communard now, and once again I'm having a ball! Life is for living, not hoarding, and that is the Only Game In Town.
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