About one thing at least the Birchers are right and the liberals are wrong.  They are right in rejecting the liberals' romantic notions about accepting dissenting youth into the mainstream of American life, about finding them jobs in which they can direct their idealism into constructive channels.  Rightists don't think that is possible.  When they see a long-haired youth in jeans and an army jacket, they call him a threat.  They call the Beatles (and rock music in general) a threat.  They call marijuana a threat.  And they are right.  A pot-smoking kid in castoff clothes with Beatles tunes floating around in his head is a direct challenge to most of this country's operating assumptions, and if those assumptions are going to stand unshaken that challenge must be beaten down.

About nearly everything else the rightists are wrong, especially in their belief that our American operating assumptions are defensible and even, somehow holy.  The word "holy" is significant, because the assumptions that are being challenged are intertwined with religion, with the Puritan ethic, with that brand of pseudo Christianity that sees competition as God's selection process and success as virtue rewarded.  Our admiration for diligence and success has put us on top of the world in a remarkably short time.  Americans, in fact, created the modern success machine--invented nearly all of its working parts and put them together in a system which is the end product of all of human engineering.  The automobile, the airplane, the telegraph, the telephone, the production line, the computer, big business, big government, modern warfare--the system is essentially American invention.  None of the pieces work in dependently any more, and they are constantly becoming more interdependent.  Together they form the "Corporate State" (Charles Reich) or the "Combine" (Ken Kesey), an enormous machine which not only desires success, but expects success and demands success.  It is built on a prediction of success, and cannot cope with failure.  And we have become overly fearful of failure and far too protective about our position.  It has also made the present reaction against the "establishment" inevitable, and it may have made revolutionary change inevitable by making gradual change hazardous.

The "Puritan ethic" has built our national psyche around success and failure, and it is in our treatment of failure and our frantic quest for success that we are best defined.  Failure first.  There are two elements in our attitude toward failure.  There is first of all a fear that it might happen to us (resulting in a need to feel and look successful even when we are not) and, secondly, there is a feeling that those who have failed should feel inferior to those of us who have succeeded, should not get "uppity," should "know their place."

The race problem is at least partially a problem of needing someone on the bottom to show us how far down we cannot go.  Blacks as "niggers" gives all whites someone to look down on.  Much of the problem with welfare is due to our feeling that people should not feel good about getting it (see the second semantic parable in S.I. Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action).  Many of our problems with crime can be traced to the same part of our character.  Most juvenile offenders as well as adult offenders do not stay out of prison after they are released because prisons are for punishment rather than rehabilitation.  After all, criminals are the most miserable failures of all, and you can't coddle them.  In some of our large cities most crimes are committed by drug addicts trying to support habits, habits that can cost hundreds of dollars a day because we treat addicts like criminals rather than sick people, and practically beg organized crime to control the flow of junk.  If we let doctors instead of cops treat addicts, heroin  would be cheap and there would be no reason for illicit drugs or drug-related theft.  But junkies must be punished.

Even our biggest problem, the war in Vietnam, can be (and has been) analyzed as another example of our fear of failure.  Nixon has said that he will not be the first American president to lose a war, though an orderly and immediate retreat would be far more honorable than even another month of fighting.  Nearly every other country in the world has at one time or another lost a war, and it would probably be good for us to lose one (for all practical purposes we have lost this one), but we must make it look like we have won, or at least like we didn't lose.

Even more ridiculous than our fear of failure is our thirst for success.  In any competition, there are far more losers than winners, so success is simply not available to most people.  But (because we are so success-oriented) we cannot admit that, so the appearance of success becomes more important than real success.  Our most necessary possessions (houses, cars, clothes . . . ) are shoddy and expensive because they are built, sold, and bought not only for practical reasons (shelter, transportation, warmth . . . ) but for other reasons as well--houses are not solid, but are split-level; cars need repairs almost immediately, but get girls; clothes wear out quickly, but impress.  Image has become more important than content.  Real friendships are less important than the appearance of friendship (fraternities, lodges, clubs).  Freshness of food is less important than the appearance of freshness, and produce is dyed and injected, not to keep it fresh, but to keep it looking fresh.  At universities Ph.D.'s and published professors are more important than good teachers.  Fashion in clothing replaces taste. The search for knowledge gives way to "keeping up with the latest books."  The real purpose of a wedding is less important than the impression it makes.  Respect at a funeral is less important than the appearance of respect, and coffins alone can cost thousands of dollars.

Much of our preoccupation with appearances is related to the Machine's demand for success.  To keep up appearances we must spend money, and that is pretty much what the Machine means when it says "success."  By demanding success for itself it makes demands on us, and it is in a position to do so because it has stopped being our servant, has gotten clean out of control, and has in a very real sense become our master--by making itself indispensable.  To become efficient it had to become unified.  Becoming unified meant joining the separate parts of American society into one structure with a single life, so that what is good for General Motors really is good for America, because the well-being of General Motors is as essential to the well-being of the country as the well-being of the stomach is to the well-being of the body.  When G.M. goes on strike, the economy falters.

In other words, the Machine that gives us life (or at least orders our lives, which is nearly as essential) can now force us to act in a certain way--not the way that it is good for us to act, but in the way that it is good for it, for us to act.  And this Machine does not prosper unless it is growing.  It does not remain healthy unless it becomes bigger (unless the Gross National Product grows by a certain number of billions of dollars) each year.  If it gets smaller, there is a recession.  The relationship is not actually  cause and effect--a recession may be defined as "the Machine getting smaller."  It must grow and we must act in ways that will keep it growing.  We must spend money and keep up appearances and accept the value system of the Machine:  virtue equals success equals money.  It is our patriotic duty to act in all sorts of ways that it is not good for people to act, because if we do not we jeopardize our hold on life.

The more interdependent the Machine becomes, the more necessary it is that growth occur, and the more likely it is that even a temporary setback would be disastrous.  The Machine is built on the assumption that eternal growth is possible, that even after the territorial frontiers have been exhausted there will always be scientific frontiers.  And that is an invalid assumption.  We have already found that the moon is an unprofitable territorial frontier, and that many scientific frontiers do not yield monetary rewards.  And if we demand a monetary reward on our investments we will neglect our most pressing needs.

The Machine makes other invalid assumptions, notably the one about the natural selection of competition.  The Machine assumes that it can allow the fittest to survive, and it is possible that the best man doesn't always win.  Perhaps he rarely wins.  Maybe there is no correlation at all between the best man and the winning man.  Perhaps there is an inverse correlation.  Malvina Reynolds, the old lady who wrote "Little Boxes," also wrote a song called "I Don't Mind Failing."  Here are two verses:

I don't mind wearing the ragged britches,
'Cause those who succeed are the sons of bitches.
I don't mind failing in this world.

I'll stay down here with the raggedy crew,
'Cause gettin' up there means steppin' on you.
I don't mind failing in this world.

Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (written before 1930) discusses the problem:  "There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering and on tiptoe.  But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure.  After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea.  In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that is not possible, on the road to pain."

There has always been a system (like ours in kind, but not in degree) and most people have always been willing (happy) to sacrifice both pain and pleasure for comfort.  And there has always been a minority to whom the trade seemed like treason.  In American history these few have been among our pioneers always just ahead of civilization, always moving on once the number of people in a place made it necessary to organize.  But the frontier is gone; there is no more wilderness to tame; there is no away to go.  The dragons have all been slain--all but one, the Machine itself.  The pioneers, who once were able to evade the system that stifled them, now have to stand and fight, because the game they are unwilling to play is the only game in town.  It is also the livelihood of those both willing and unwilling to play, so fighting it is suicidal for the pioneers and threatening to everyone else.  And the Machine is big--big enough, perhaps, to withstand any attack.

It may be that the only way to kill it is to starve it, to refuse to play, to drop out.  To be healthy it must grow and to grow it needs cooperation from nearly all of us.  If enough people simply decide not to play by the Machine's rules, not to accept its values, the Machine will fall apart.  That is what the commune movement is all about, and in a less noble way that is what the drug movement is all about.  It is against the Machine's rules, and it is something to "go through."  It involves pleasure and pain, but not the normal middle.

So what's with that godawful music?  Besides being pleasurable in itself, it is (like drugs) a statement of rejection of Machine values, a rejection specifically of the Muzak-Johnny Mann Singers type of music which seems inexplicably to be the main musical fare of most adults, but a statement of a more general rejection as well.  And the music is, like drugs, an experience.  It is involving.  It is meant to change people's heads.  But the music has an importance beyond its sound, beyond its image.  Its content has been one of the strongest forces in increasing the number of people who realize just what the Machine is.  Not all rock music has a content; much of it is ridiculous, but some rock musicians have had a greater effect on their listeners than musicians have ever had before.  Putting the rejection, the statement, the dropping out into poetic form makes them memorable, and putting them into songs produces, to a certain degree, automatic assent.  Once you have committed a song to memory--and it doesn't take long--you don't really listen to it any more, but sing along with it.  If it is especially memorable, it begins to make a home for itself in your mind.

The drugs, the music, the long hair, the lifestyle are a valid reaction to an inhuman system, valid as a reaction and valid apart from the fact that they are a reaction.  In other words, they are not simply a statement of rejection of one system of values.  The criticism that "you don't have anything to offer to replace the system you are attacking" is only partially true.  Listen and watch.

What about education?  If the Machine has enlarged and synthesized itself beyond the point of no return, so that its response to attack cannot be an offer of compromise, but must be a tightening of its structures, then educational institutions are in a more delicate and more important position than any other institutions.  Talking about something completely different, Andre Gide describes the process in Madeline:

It always seems to them (and this was the case of Wilde) that it is not as victims to their theories that they succumb, but rather, on the contrary, for having been inconsistent with themselves on some point.  Wilde insisted on this at some length. It is not for having been an individualist, but for not having been one sufficiently, that I repent today.

According to the Machine, the function of education is to mold people to fit the society.  Educational innovation does not serve that purpose--it works directly against that purpose.  And the Machine is beginning to demand that educators step back into line.  It is attempting to impose behavioral objectives and accountability on educators in order to force them to adopt the Machine value system, to define success in terms of competition and measurable results, and even (since, if success is measured in terms of competition, for every success there must by definition be a failure and since there is a realization nearly all the way around the bargaining table that not even a majority can actually succeed) to force them to play games with the objectives and evaluation, and to substitute the appearance of success for real success.

The issue of accountability at its most basic level is a Machine-ordered attack on education itself.  Education, where it has actually been education, has increased the number of resistors.  Accountability is an attempt to replace education with indoctrination, to stop fooling around with the affective domain and start training people.

Steven Stills said a couple of years ago in a song called "For What It's Worth," that:

There's battle lines bein' drawn.
 

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