Roots of terrorism and other bad stuff
“For the individual there is no society unless he has social status and function.”
The individual must know where he stands in the order and be able to feel with good reason that he fills a role in making that society work.
The rulers must be legitimate rulers, representative of those whom they rule and responsive to their needs.
The individual who lacks status and function is not only unhappy; HE IS DANGEROUS.
Lacking a fixed (though not immutable) place in the order of things, he is a destructive wanderer through the cosmos.
Feeling no responsibility to a society in which he has no place, he sets little value on life.
He will DESTROY and KILL because he has NO REASON not to destroy and kill.
When human beings seek status and do not find it, THE WORLD IS IN TROUBLE.
From John Tarrant’s Drucker: The Man Who Invented the Corporate Society (1976)
Also see Post-Capitalist Society by Drucker
In chapter two — Drucker’s vision of the New World — Tarrant summarizes some key ideas from Drucker’s first three books — The End of Economic Man (the origins of totalitarianism); The Future of Industrial Man; and The Concept of the Corporation .
Some thought fragments from chapter two:
“By 1936 Drucker was looking at a world in chaos.
Totalitarianism and militarism were in the saddle.
The traditions of centuries were being destroyed.
Civilization thrashed in a gigantic convulsion.
Drucker permitted no unwarranted optimism to give a roseate cast to his somber view.
He saw that the old order was crumbling.
That destruction, he concluded, would be complete.
Hitler would be beaten in the end; Drucker was sure of that, because he was sure that totalitarianism could not sustain itself.
But a thousand years of civilization was likely to fall along with the dictators.
These thoughts Drucker was preparing to put into his first book in English, The End of Economic Man— if he could find a publisher for such a depressing document.
Drucker saw little that could be said to give hope to the anguished free world, and he was unwilling to provide spurious messages of good cheer.
The rise of fascism was more than a spasm of history; it marked an end to a way of living that had been the underpinning of freedom and progress in the world.
The current situation was not merely an episode of history; it was the death agony of a scheme of economic, political, and social existence that had been constructed and nurtured since the end of the Dark Ages.
Yet, within ten years, Drucker had forged a philosophy by which he felt free men could live and grow again.
In three remarkable books — The End of Economic Man, The Future of Industrial Man, and Concept of the Corporation — he completed the building of an ideological framework for peace, freedom, and human development.
The End of Economic Man starts as an analysis of the roots and the nature of fascism.
But totalitarianism is not really what the book is about.
Drucker says that civilization had been based on a concept of the supremacy of economic values.
The systems of government by which the world had been run — socialism no less than capitalism — were grounded in the assumption that human beings, on the whole, tend to act in accordance with their economic interests.
Man, if he was anything, was Economic Man.
There would always be aberrations, but man’s values were essentially economic values; and thus an ordered and professedly more decent world order could be sought and achieved through the satisfaction of economic needs.
Drucker contemplated Economic Man and saw a corpse.
It would be convenient to say that Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were the murderers; but it was not that simple.
Totalitarianism was the immediate instrument of destruction, but it was also the terminal excrescence of organic decay.
sidebar → Beware of men riding on white horses — offering to fix things (Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Mao)
And now Drucker comes to a point that would under-lie much of his work for the next three decades.
At the same time, he poses a philosophical problem for himself, which he will return to grapple with again and again — and which in the end he will have to admit he has by no means overcome.
For here he sets forth the touchstone for the free industrial society of the future: “No society can function as a society unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate power.”
“For the individual there is no society unless he has social status and function.”
The individual must know where he stands in the order and be able to feel with good reason that he fills a role in making that society work.
The rulers must be legitimate rulers, representative of those whom they rule and responsive to their needs.
The individual who lacks status and function is not only unhappy; HE IS DANGEROUS.
Lacking a fixed (though not immutable) place in the order of things, he is a destructive wanderer through the cosmos.
Feeling no responsibility to a society in which he has no place, he sets little value on life.
He will DESTROY and KILL because he has NO REASON not to destroy and kill.
Here we see prefigured the current, awful realities of the rootless destroyers — the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
“Status-seeking,” Drucker was saying, is not an egocentric foible.
It is a part of the human condition.
When human beings seek status and do not find it, THE WORLD IS IN TROUBLE.
He anticipates the debate that was to grow over the question of “relativism versus eternal verities.”
He scorns both extremes — but he is a lot tougher on the relativists.
He dismisses the “masses” and derides the kind of thinking that glorifies the faceless crowd.
The masses are not glorious; they are “a product of SOCIAL DECOMPOSITION and a RANK POISON.”
Cold? Remote? Cynically snobbish?
Maybe; but Drucker’s aim is to take people out of the mass and MAKE THEM FUNCTIONING INDIVIDUALS in a FUNCTIONING SOCIETY.”
Make everybody a contributor
“I am often asked whether I am an optimist or a pessimist.
For any survivor of this century to be an optimist would be fatuous.
We surely are nowhere near the end of the turbulences, the transformations, the sudden upsets, which have made this century one of the meanest, cruelest, bloodiest in human history.” — Drucker in Post-Capitalist Society
The Western Roots of Anti-Western Terror
The Decline of the West Revisited
See The Social Sector in a century of social transformation — emergence of knowledge society
What does all of this mean for you?
