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CHAPTER 1

The Post-Cold-War-Condition

Imagine a scene in a possible Hitchcock film. A train is going deeper into an arid mountain region, but the passengers are strangely becoming more and more apprehensive. A while ago it was only a sense of unease, then it became nervousness and now it is barely controlled panic. In quick succession a series of incidents suggested that the train seems to be running without an engineer, that there is no one at the controls in the locomotive, and the passengers also discovered that the emergency brakes don't function. The train is running downhill and by now is moving far too quickly for anyone to jump off. One further still more terrifying matter has become clear: namely, it seems that every last one of the doors and equally all the windows have been locked in a completely firm and indestructible way.

The image of this train is a metaphor for a belief and a set of emotions that very many experience in our culture. We feel incapacitated, stuck in a progression of events, trapped in the unfolding of an inevitable story. It is ominous and by degrees it becomes steadily more frightening. What is most characteristic and intensely awful is that we have not even a shred of an idea, not even the faintest ghost of a notion of how the progression could be stopped, or reversed, or even just redirected into an improved and more hopeful direction. Of course people run backward and forward through the wagons and gesticulate or shout, but everyone aboard knows with a frozen, ironclad conviction, that this is only a distracting and upsetting show. What is bound to happen, if not sooner then later, is by now inescapable and clear. The train will jump off the rails, will hit a wall, or will careen off a bridge and plunge down into a river.

The mass of often sharply divergent groups who nonetheless all somehow find themselves on this train is genuinely astounding. The millions who construe the coming apocalyptic disaster in ecological terms have images for the calamities which we are approaching which are more vivid, more hypnotically compelling than those of any other. The train, as they envision it, runs downhill toward the depletion of resources such as coal or oil, but more lurid than that, some see us descending into a world of increasing salinity; of fertile lands turning into deserts and dust, of cities along coastlines collapsing into the rising sea, and of ever-larger regions of once verdant land covered and suffocating under layers of construction, tar and cement.

Other, by now equally massive and widely dispersed hosts of people see the most imminent, the most quickly approaching threat in the deepening and widening bifurcation between the rich and the poor. Many of them awoke only quite recently to the mind-shaking fact that the 80 percent of the earth which we so far self-deludingly called the "developing world" have actually fallen into a downward spiral. The sight of what is happening will soon eradicate the smug complacency of the fantasy that these countries are "catching up." As we come to face the form of life into which they are descending we may have to invent new categories and words for terms like anarchy or chaos which may become too placid, too smooth, too glib from long wear.

The many millions whose eyes are increasingly focused on the issue of poverty have of course long anticipated the nightmare of a last and final war in which the rich will be arraigned in battle against the poor. What is at this present moment slowly dawning in many different minds is the realization that what we now, at this stage, have decided to call "terrorism" may well be differently understood and differently named 10 years from now. It is possible that it will have become quite patent that what we now live through was actually one of the first stages of this war — different enough from what wars had been like before, making it necessary that years had to pass till we were ready to admit that this was the nature of the conflict in which we in fact were embroiled.

Still other throngs associate their sense of riding downhill in a welded-shut train with the decline, the fall, the steady drying out and crumbling of what formerly was our own upper crust culture. The point is not that we too suffer, and not that we should become exclusively absorbed in the horror spectacles of the Third Word. The point is to have at least some basic intuitive overall grasp of what is happening in the time in which we now live. In that spirit it is entirely necessary and right to insist that in addition to the environment and also the horrific deepening split, the life of the privileged, in any case of the vast majority of them, is also in a steep and fear-inspiring decline. These people react to the collapse of what was formerly the quality of their lives. This includes the provisions for their health-care and their retirements and really the whole of the social safety net. It also includes libraries and museums which from lack of funds reduce their opening hours, and orchestras and theaters that show the effects of budget cuts, and to the fact that one could write a requiem for virtually all universities except for some few in the United States. It could apply to the idiotification of television, or the pitiful erosion of what formerly once was journalism, or again to the descent of politics into prostitution. Or of course also to the vulgarization of our personal relationships and not least to the vastly spreading consequences of our ubiquitous lack of time. The results of haste and of the slow relentless crescendo of stress.

It is very important for the past history but also for the future prospects of New Work — in particular for the cardinal issue of "power" — that there are a good number of managers from the top echelons of the most renowned corporations who talk very much as if they too were trapped in this locked train. There is a difference, though. Among world-class managers the imagery is not that the train will plunge over a cliff, or that it will collide with a mountain wall. The prevalent fear is more that the terrain will become ever flatter but at the same time also harsher and more difficult, and that the climate will become more arid and ever less fertile. The train will slow down and eventually grind to a wheezing halt. Among the high-rolling elite the great and only partly hidden fear is of a chronic slowing of the economy, of a protracted irreversible decline, of a permanent, not cyclical, paralysis, of a standstill, and a final stop.

Certainly we have all heard by now that top managers feel pressured, driven, frightened, overworked and exhausted. In the last 30 years I have closely known, and often personally counseled, numerous executives who were proud of their corner offices and their thick carpets. Without exception their complaint was that they could not stop; that there was no such thing as rest and stability and permanence! Exactly the reverse: to desist, to cease was tantamount to slipping down and then hurtling into empty space. The true image is therefore not a cage, but a greased and slippery slide, steep enough so that one can stay in place only with the utmost exertion. The ghastliest part is that the slide is very short and right above an abyss. If one pauses one is first demoted and then, soon after, fired. The abyss below the slide is in other words deep, and just as in films it is full of snakes.

It is perhaps even more significant that the greased slide over the abyss describes by no means only the individual, personal lives of those who are (temporarily) at the top — and I, of course, mean not only managers, but also physicians, engineers, professors and attorneys. It describes very closely the situation of many of the most successful business people, financiers and entrepreneurs who conceptualize our society, our economic system and even our culture as a whole. In the last 30 years I have observed many times that not just executives in the auto-industry, but also many top managers in the computer industry and specifically in the legendary Silicon Valley, experience the entire economic structure in which we are now living with a sense of desperation that contrasts sharply with the surface optimism they are professionally obliged to wear as a mask.

But just as individuals cling with their hands and rudder with their feet merely so that they will not careen down into empty space, so our economy and society too must stay in white-hot overdrive merely to keep afloat. New products, new inventions, new technologies, new industries, new markets must be fed perpetually into the great chute. The question of how long will whatever is already in the big machine keep us going before we start to sink sits in most boardrooms in its own chair right next to the table. Constantly there is the sense that we need a new idea, another twist, maybe an entirely new stream of products, or as one says: the next "Big Thing!" Or else? Exactly, the "else" is the point. If nothing comes to our rescue, then decline and deterioration will begin and stagnation becomes omnipresent. It is crucially important to make this part of the picture: in our time, not only the miserable or wretched see us trapped on a downhill course. No, many of the pampered and privileged elite have exactly the same picture. This is a fact of momentous significance, for it indicates at the very start that not only the poor and inconsequential look for the possibility of a great change, but that many of those who are not far from the levers of power do the same.

Of course it would be easy to list and to describe still other large constituencies whose basic mindset is also that of being trapped in a cage-like train. Some see the coming collapse mainly inside the domain of health. Others formulate it as "The Coming of Anarchism" and point to fratricide in the Balkans, to tribalism in Africa, and to the dominant control that international crime — the mafia — has gained in a long list of countries. We could all add on to this list, but the point, the central and pivotal issue is a different question: whatever happened? What was the origin, or what were the separate and converging causes that reduced us to this condition of helplessness, of passivity, of dumbfounded desperation? Does not the sketched enumeration which we just reviewed, underscore how very extraordinary and weird this paralysis is. Does not the sheer number of those who feel altogether that they are caught in a giant machine contribute to the weirdness of it? If collectively our number is truly immense then why can't we muster enough energy to alter the direction of this descending course? Does not the enormity of the number who now live not just in a silent, but in a comatose opposition make this embarrassing and insulting to our remnants of common sense? To call it a majority would be a fatuous under-assessment. To come at all close to an accurate sense of the proportions one would have to turn the table and ask: not, who shares the conviction that we as a culture are on an ominous, ill-boding course but, where are the exceptions? Who still believes that we as a whole, the entire modern, industrial super-enterprise is on solid and promising tracks? The answer is of course, that this number is pathetically small. Which raises the insistence and the urgency of our question: why, given this fact, this tilted proportionality, why in spite of it does this grand and encompassing mass act as if it had been magically bewitched and was incarcerated in this spooky fairy-tale train? Especially, since in some nominal sense we still think of ourselves as in a democracy? Why do we feel so helpless, so incapacitated, so obviously trapped, so without recourse? What has reduced us to this condition? What was the sequence of events, what were the causes of this weird paralysis, this strange and specific impotence?

There are deep reasons, reasons with roots that go very far down. Brutally, the first very large part of this is that we exist in an economic system that careens in that direction with incredible power and force and we are helpless because there exist no alternatives to this economic behemoth. Try as we might to even vividly imagine an economic alternative that would be more powerful, or more productive than the system we currently have seems impossible. It lies beyond the boundaries of what we can imagine. Therefore we do not even have a notion of the direction, or of the ball-park in which an alternative could lie. We feel utterly helpless, quite dumbfounded and thoroughly nonplussed.

We all of course know that once upon a time an economic alternative did not just exist but that it in effect covered half of the globe. We of course also know the fate of that once mighty alternative: it vanished, it disintegrated, it collapsed.

The death of socialism

As with other deaths, more time may still have to elapse until the full reality of the dying of socialism will come home to us. Thirty years have not been enough to grasp it, in part because it was as strange and unheard of as any death that ever struck. For generations it had been the hope of humanity par excellence! Half of mankind had believed in it, and generations had struggled for its cause, had suffered and allowed themselves even to be tortured in prisons and in camps. Then overnight it was gone. It died so utterly and completely there was not even a corpse that remained which one could have mourned. Socialism had been a complete, detailed, coherent alternative! It was not only a column here and an arch over there; it was integrated and worked out and in some sense complete. It had evolved into a fully furnished counter-world in stark juxtaposition to the world that now is.

That anything so detailed and so vast, that had ruled half the world, could turn into mist virtually in one single night should have seemed like a mad, preposterous nightmare. By rights, half of the world should have sung dirges and worn black veils for years. Nothing like that came to pass. An uncountable number of people shrugged, brushed the dust off their lapels and went on as if nothing much had occurred. We never stopped. We never probed. We never thought persistently about the implications and consequences which the death of that colossus was likely to have. Even the most blatant and obvious of these we did not absorb. How could we not have anticipated right from the first day that our own system, suddenly without a counterweight, without the force which hitherto had kept it in check, would inescapably lurch toward the more extreme? Toward the unbalanced, the tilting, the brutal, the dangerous and the shrill? The effect in the regions of power was obviously enormous, but not only that. It also engendered huge changes in our political, intellectual and even our spiritual world. One talks of shift in the intellectual spectrum, of a movement by a few inches. This was deeply different. It was not a shift. A massive portion of our intellectual ground broke away, as in an earthquake. The fundamental polarity was gone; it had shrunk and shriveled and become infernally small. Where formerly there had been genuine issues and debates, there was now only haggling, quibbling and splitting of hair, an essentially futile rope-pulling by inches.

How truly amazing that we did not react, that the shock did not send us reeling? For as it in fact occurred, there was barely a muffled sob, in spite of the millions of authentic human corpses, and the countless lives that had burned in sacrificial hope with enough faith and energy to produce the light of a small star. That we simply turned and went on is an incredible performance, unequaled in history. Nero at least played the fiddle when Rome was burning. We carefully peeled a salami, and deliberately put thin slices of it on our next bread!

The other culture

Finding ourselves without any alternative is one main reason for our sense of paralysis, for the mentality of the locked train. We are dragged along by a giant machine that possesses such indescribable force that there is no question of changing its course. Our sense of impossibility, of being locked in stocks as in the Middle Ages is nonetheless strange and puzzling and maybe downright bizarre. For we do not live in one uniform, homogeneous, goose-stepping world. We are miles from that, and one could say, we do not have that excuse. In fact even though there very clearly is no economic, no systemic alternative, there oddly enough do exist two quite distinct and in most ways even opposed separate cultures. In a superficial way most everyone is naturally aware of this, and in a slipshod, cursory fashion most everyone could also describe the two. The finger-painted clichés attached to the official, conventional, "straight" and "square" culture are power-suits for both women and men and the accouterments that match them. Next would come that this official culture gives obeisance, preeminence and deference to the global corporations and that it therefore not only wants, but requires, as a necessity to have growth. Which means that it needs "free trade" and good investment and good business climates, which very often in turn amount to low wages and if possible no labor unions. That entails further a certain set of social policies, and of course a certain relationship to the military.

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Excerpted from "New Work New Culture"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Frithjof Bergmann.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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