James Burnham
THE SUICIDAL MANIA OF
AMERICAN BUSINESS*
The American businessman is a genius in his kind. He is
on the average remarkable, and from his ranks have come authentic
individual geniuses in remarkable number. He has proved himself the
master of the techniques of production.
In
the auxiliaries of produc–
tion, in financing and distribution and sales, he is scarcely less as–
tounding.
Within his own field, he is alert, inventive, keen, perceptive, quick
to change and adapt. Confronted with a new process, a new machine,
a new method, he drives quickly through cant to realities. And, in
his field, he has a magnitude of vision which puts to shame the
businessmen of other nations. Who else drives railroads two thousand
miles into nowhere; thinks of pipelines in thousands instead of dozens
of miles; puts up a thousand houses at once, as Levitt does, or creates
whole towns in a year, as at the atomic projects; links every citizen,
or nearly every one, with every telephone in the world; within a de–
cade encases the female legs of half the world with a new chemical?
All this is true. But the American businessman, alas, suffers also,
and most grievously, from a hypertrophy of occupational function.
Within his arena so accomplished a performer, he often proves an
oaf when he ventures, or is forced, outside. His alertness, vision,
quickness, invention are somehow transformed into their opposites.
In
art, philosophy, and in political or social affairs of any but the crudest
sort, he is likely to be drearily prejudiced, emptily pompous, narrowly
unperceptive, hopelessly backward-looking, naively credulous. At his
banquets, his conventions, his clubs, and in his family circle, he tire–
lessly repeats the most banal of ritualistic abstractions, without relev–
ance, content, or style.
It
is as if his entire creative spirit were chan-
*
This is a selection from
The Coming Defeat of Communism,
by James
Burnham, scheduled for publication by The John Day Company in February of
this year. Copyright 1950 by James Burnham.
