COMPETITIVE PERSONALITY
441
In this market the human expressions are no longer expressions
of private aspirations. For all the features of the character, especially
the familial ones- the kindly gesture, tact, courtesy, the smile-now
become expressions of the company's aspirations. They are the salaried
mask of the individual, available by the week, designed to advance
the competitive position of the store with the public. Year after year
they are enforced by the store's bureaucratic discipline, including the
"professional shopper" who reports to the personnel department. In
due course, this life of alienation sets up its own traits in the person–
ality, selected, constructed, and used as instruments in the competitive
struggle of the employees within the store, and between the store and
the con-suming public. Such is the creative function of the new com–
petition.
Yet the personality market, in one sense, is still subject to the old
laws of supply and demand. \Vhen a "seller's market" exists and la–
bor is hard to buy, the well-earned aggressions of the salespeople come
out and jeopardize the good will of the buying public. When there
is a "buyer's market" and jobs are hard to get, the salespeople must
repress again and practice politeness. Thus the laws of supply and
demand, as in an older epoch of capitalism, continue to regulate the
intimate life-fate of the individual and the kind of personality that
may be developed and displayed.
The old competition is dead, even if the old liberal alibis for it
arc now incarnate as fetishes . But new kinds of competition, making
new kinds of people, have arisen.
Near the top of the new hierarchy are the new entrepreneurs, Lhe
bureaucratic fixers and the business experts; and at the bottom are
the people on the personality markets. Somewhere in between, the
little businessman struggles to gain the stable security of big business
by having his tribute also guaranteed, and yet, in the
name
of
com~
petition, hoping somehow for the main chance.
Both of the newer types serve the bureaucracies, and both, in
their own way, practice the creative art of selling. In a restricted
market economy, salesmanship is truly praised as a creative act, but
it is entirely too serious a matter to be trusted to mere creativity. The
more alert chieftains are becoming aware of this. The really great
opportunities for expropriation are in the field of the huma.'1 person–
ality itself. The fate of competition, and the character it will assume,
depends upon the success or failure of the adventures of monopolists
in this field.
