SOME time ago, in his role as a department head of a major mid-western university program, a colleague of mine — Ted — was approached by a member of the university's senate, who offered him the following proposition:
As you know, Ted, the university is in financial difficulty and is projecting an operating deficit for each of the following three years. In response to a request from the president, the Senate Committee on Finance and Administration has met and talked about a number of approaches for coping with the problem. After careful consideration of a variety of alternatives, we have decided that the quickest, most effective, and most realistic way to cope with the problem is to cut back on staff, since, as you know, the faculty code has a financial exigency clause which permits us to release even tenured faculty if we can prove their academic programs are not financially viable. And, as you also probably know, the College of Humanities is not pulling its weight. Consequently, here is what we want to do — and we will need your cooperation if the plan is to be carried out with minimum disruption to all involved. Given that any attempt to get rid of faculty, particularly those with tenure, will undoubtedly create an uproar, the president of the university, acting on the advice of our committee, is going to call for an across-the-board reduction in the faculty; and we want to support him with a vote of confidence in the Faculty Senate. That kind of consensual, democratic action should make everyone feel as if no one is being singled out or discriminated against. However, you people in the Business School, along with those in the School of Law, are the real money-makers in the university; so, if you go along with the vote, we will guarantee not to cut back on your faculty. In fact, we will work out a way, informally, of course, for you to add faculty. That should make everyone happy, except for die dead wood we get rid of. Naturally, they are going to complain. It's human nature, you know, to resist change. No matter how we do it, though, we intend to make their "outplacement" as painless as possible. We will give them at least a year's salary, as required by the school's governing code. We will also offer to help them get jobs somewhere else, although that probably isn't very realistic, since academic jobs are in short supply. We want them and everyone else to feel as if we are trying to help, though. Anyway, that is what we have in mind. Can we count on your cooperation?
As he listened to the proposition, Ted recalls that he suddenly thought of Hannah Arendt's classic book on organization and bureaucracy, Eicbmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[58] Ted thought of the collusive role played by the Jewish councils — the most powerful, respected, and trusted members of the Jewish community — in the liquidation of their own people, including, in the end, themselves.
According to Arendt, members of the councils closely cooperated in the destruction of their associates, colleagues, friends, and relatives through a variety of actions. For example, they compiled lists for the Nazis of persons to be deported. They secured money from deportees to pay the expenses related to their deportation and extermination. They distributed the yellow star badges and arm bands on behalf of the Nazis to potential deportees so that they could be identified easily when the "roundup" occurred. They collected the assets of those who were deported and turned those assets over to the Nazis. They served as police during the actual seizure of people and property. Finally, they made decisions about the minute minority who were to be saved — essentially, those who were the most community-oriented and the most prominent members of the faith.
As my friend looked into the face of the esteemed university senator who was presenting the proposition, he recounts, "I suddenly saw Adolph Eichmann, the banal bureaucrat, head of the Center for Emigration of Austrian Jews, standing before me. Although clothed in academic robes, the senatorial Eichmann was offering me an opportunity to join our own version of a Jewish council. In return, we would accrue the temporary rewards from the division of the assets of my deported colleagues in the College of Humanities."
The senator's request for cooperation and support further reminded Ted of Arendt's statement that the Nazis possessed neither the will power nor the manpower to remain "tough" when they met the determined opposition of the Danes to the Nazis' proposals relating to deporting the Jews from Denmark. When the Germans attempted to introduce the yellow badges to identify Danish Jews for deportation, they were told by the Danes that the king would be the first to wear one. In the same vein, influential officials of the Danish government, unlike the Norwegian Nazi collaborator Quisling, said that they would resign immediately if they observed any anti-Jewish acts by the Germans. Facing such unified opposition, the Germans failed, for all intents and purposes, in their attempt to export the Danish Jews. As Arendt so poetically put it: "They had met resistance based on 'principle,' and their 'toughness' had melted like butter in the sun."[59] In addition, as a result, a few of the Germans "had even been encouraged to express a few timid beginnings of genuine courage"[60] by communicating to their superiors their doubts and disagreements about the policy of deportation. In other words, the Danes' principled acts not only saved the majority of their Jewish citizenry but also freed some of the Germans to act with humane courage. Thus, the Danes' actions shifted — at least psychologically — from being solely acts of resistance to being acts that recognized and released their captors' nascent humanity.
Ted tells me that he suddenly realized that he was being propositioned — seduced, if you will — to join the university senators in a bureaucratic bed in which a kiss is not a preamble to producing a child of God but rather is the precursor to rape.
Reassured by that flash of insight, Ted replied: "No thanks. You cannot count on my cooperation. I don't send people to the gas chamber."
Not being illiterate, the senator knew immediately what Ted meant. His reply was one of instantaneous fury: "You surely don't really believe that there is any similarity between getting rid of a couple of dozen unproductive, dead-wood faculty members and shipping six million innocent people to their deaths in gas chambers, do you? What do you think I am? A murderer of some sort?"
At first Ted thought that the senator had a valid point. Perhaps Ted had been incorrect, unfair, unkind, and, ultimately, mean to his senatorial colleague. However, as he began to experience guilt at the thought of his unkind indiscretion, he also remembered the age-old parable of the man who was attempting to engage the services of a woman of the night. In the process of negotiating the fee, he offered her five dollars. In fury, she shouted, "Five dollars! What do you think I am? A common whore?" "That, Madam," he replied, "has already been established. All we are doing now is debating price."
Building upon the metaphor mixed in the blender of Ted's mind, he said, "That, Senator, has already been established, because if I go along with your proposal, all that will be left to debate is price. In fact, all I can think of to talk about now is how much of our colleagues' salaries will go to us, once we get them on the trains."
The senator again reacted with rage. Not only was he well-read, but he clearly also knew the parable of the woman of the night.
Then, in a reaction that Ted neither expected nor understood at the time, the senator's attitude quickly shifted from anger to poignant silence. After a moment, he said, "I'll be damned. You are right. We were about to 'sell them down the river.' I knew something was wrong with what we were doing. I just didn't know what. I'm going back to the committee and I'll tell them I think we are going about this the wrong way." Like the Nazis, his hard-nosed, intransigent managerial toughness melted like butter when confronted with opposition that was grounded in principle. As a consequence, he, too, was freed to behave morally. Much later, when Ted told me this story, he said, "I tell you, Jerry, the fact that he reversed himself shook me up. I have learned a lot from that — maybe more than I ever wanted to know."
The full impact of my colleague's story did not hit me until I, too, read Arendt's work. The effect was particularly great when I came across Eichmann's bittersweet description of his birth: "I entered life on earth in the aspect of a human being."[61] Later, I learned that a half-dozen "unfriendly" psychiatrists who had interviewed him prior to his trial had described him as "normal." (One was reported to have said that he was "more normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him.")[62] In addition, the psychiatrists concluded that he had a "desirable" attitude toward his family, his relatives, and his friends. In a similar manner, a minister who visited him regularly described him as "a man with positive ideas."[63] Faced with such information, I realized the clear possibility that — despite all his evil — Eichmann, like the university senator, had possessed a potential for moral, principled, compassionate behavior.
In fact, had he not possessed such a potential, no one could have accused him of being so immoral and evil, any more than one could accuse a water buffalo of immoral behavior for goring a child. It is only because Eichmann failed to exercise his human choice to behave morally that he is damnable.
Finally, as I read about Eichmann's life, I realized that I was unable to find a single recorded instance in his official SS career when a colleague, a subordinate, a friend, a family member, or an enemy confronted him directly with the immorality of his administrative actions. Likewise, no one reminded him of his potential choice to behave with rectitude. In fact, during his trial, Eichmann himself said that not a single person "came to me and reproached me for anything in the performance of my duties."[64] According to Arendt's account, neither friend nor foe contradicted him on that point.
I wonder why so many people lacked the sense of principle or moral courage to confront him in that way. I also wonder why my colleague Ted, faced with similar generic circumstances, chose the alternative of expressing his respectful humanity and love, both to the members of the senate and to his colleagues in the School of Humanities, most of whom he did not know personally.
The answers to those questions as well as the conclusion to the story are very important. I have checked with my colleague, and I announce with relief and pride that the senator's reevaluation of his position, my friend's principled opposition, the principled opposition of others, or all of those events in combination saved the sacrificial humanities professors from professional extermination. In fact, despite the dire prophecies of financial collapse, the university has survived. It has survived even though each of those in its employ probably is making a little less money than he or she would be making had the spoils of a mass deportation been divided among the survivors. In addition, many members of the university community seem to share a sense of growing pride in and commitment to the institution because, like the Danes, they stuck together during a time of organizational crisis.
Since my friend recited the parable of the faculty senator, I have realized that by participating in an organization's disloyalty to peers and selfish collusion, we prostitute our souls. By doing so, we destroy the delicate threads of human fabric that are required not only to make those organizations function effectively but also to allow them to survive. Furthermore, it is my belief that such moral auctions did not begin or end with Adolph Eichmann, his colleagues, the Jewish councils, or those who died at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.
In fact, although the evil enormity of the Holocaust can never be overlooked, that generic pattern of villainy is not unique to Eichmann or to those who colluded with him. It is practiced daily in formal organizations of all kinds. Adolph Eichmann, the Jewish councils, and those we designate as their victims did not have aberrant values and thought patterns. If you don't believe that, ask the despairing, dispirited men and women who have been laid off, terminated, fired, or RIFed from General Motors, the U.S. Government, a university, or Maudine's Grocery Store and Skating Palace what the experience was like for them. Listen to their anger, their frustration, their depression, and their bitterness. Likewise, listen to those from the same organizations, who, frequently against their better judgment and will, have managed the terminations and RIFs. In general, few are overwhelmed with gratitude for the experience. Participating in evil deeds doesn't seem to be much fun for anyone.
A Jewish colleague who read a draft of this chapter initially viewed the analogy between facilitating an RIF and colluding with Eichmann as a trivialization of the Holocaust. At first I considered scrapping this chapter, because there is no comparison between being burned in Nazi crematoria and being unjustly fired by a corporation. But my Jewish colleague and I both recalled that the Holocaust began with seemingly minor acts of unjust discrimination — such as the issuance of Jewish ID cards. When the Jewish councils acquiesced to — even assisted the implementation of — that sort of relatively minor outrage, the population of Germany and the officials of the Reich began the relentless climb up the ladder toward psychological readiness to commit genocide. The incremental escalation of human rights violations also prepared the victims to accept their victimization, in a process that Bruno Bettelheim termed "identification with the aggressor."[65]
Perhaps the error resides in trivializing emotionally disruptive calamities, such as an unjust RIF. For that reason, it is a heroic act to make a mountain out of a molehill and — like Ted — to refuse to join your organization's equivalent of a Jewish council. It is easy to see a partisan who blows up a Nazi munitions train as a hero; it is more difficult to see the Jewish community leader who refused to facilitate the assignment of ID numbers as a hero. And it is still more difficult to see a recalcitrant faculty senator as a hero. It requires true moral resolve and clear thinking to recognize a tiny atrocity and nip it in the bud. The more we discussed the issues raised by Ted's story, the more my Jewish colleague and I agreed that it is important to publish that message.
Given the pervasiveness of thought that leads to seduced collusion, to assert that the actions taken by the Jewish councils were unique to the Jews is a subtle act of anti-Semitism. Likewise, to assume that the value system and thought pattern underlying the callous inhumanity of Adolph Eichmann and his associates is unique to the Germans is an equally subtle act of anti-Teutonism. Ask Pol Pot's victims in the "killing fields" of Cambodia if the qualities required for holocausts are unique to Germany. Both the Jewish councils and the Eichmanns who made up the Center for Emigration of the Austrian Jews are common bureaucratic artifacts. They are created and perpetuated by those of us who play a set of roles and apply a pattern of thought in order to build and maintain organizations of all kinds. Those roles and thought patterns, in turn, occur in profit-making companies, Christian churches, government agencies, universities, and voluntary associations. They are the basis of collusion with institutional evil. And none of us — myself included — can deny that he or she might participate as the victimizer or as the traitor who facilitates the victimization of others.
An RIF, then, is a step in the direction of a holocaust. In the words of Jules Feiffer, an RIF is a "little murder." [66] What are the dynamics of the collusion that leads organization members to murder each other?
The practice of collusion seems to require several structural elements: consenting parties who play predetermined roles, a justifying theory, and a variety of shared mental tricks to maintain that theory when faced with the tremendous internal pressure to surrender it. Such internal pressure is frequently called the impact of conscience.
I should add that the presence of formal organization does not imply that collusion in atrocities is inevitable. Bureaucracy, according to Jaques,[67] sometimes produces trust, confidence, and love. At other times it produces distrust, alienation, and paranoia. Which it produces depends on how we construct it and the consequent actions we take, day by day, as we work within it.
Consenting parties are a requirement for collusion to occur. These consenting parties collude in playing predetermined roles. As Arendt suggests, the roles, with one major exception, are not unlike the roles in a traditional play. The exception stems from the fact that in Eichmann-style organizational collusion, there are no heroes or protagonists in the usual sense of the word. There are only victims, who suffer like the leeches that suck each other dry in a "parabiotic" relationship. (I defined my term parabiotic in the preceding chapter.)
Basically, though, several roles (or jobs) must be carried out if all members are to suffer appropriately and, by doing so, are to perform the service of directing the play of organizational passions to its tragic conclusion.
The Top Management Villain. The top management villain is played by the person who, in the traditional view of leadership, is generally believed to be responsible for causing the violence, whatever form it may take. (As many of us know, a leader can delegate authority but cannot delegate responsibility.) As described by Arendt, that role was played by Hitler, Himmler, and a few other prominent Nazis.
In other formal organizations, that role in firing (or terminating or RIFing) people is generally performed by individuals with such titles as CEO, president, dean, bishop, or general. Sometimes, top management villains post the slogan of their role on their desks: "The buck stops here."
Regardless of their disparate job tides, the villains are united by the fact that the order to fire people is issued in their names. Furthermore, they order that others be fired for the purpose of suiting the selfish interests of those who remain, not because the "firees" have performed incompetently or immorally.
To fully understand the role, one must realize that top management villains act out their roles in unconscious obedience to the wishes of the majority of the other members of the organizations that they ostensibly are leading. By doing so, they serve as convenient scapegoats, whose callousness protects their constituents from the fury of those who play the roles of victims. More important, having a villain to blame makes it easier for the rest of us to escape the reality of our complicity in sanctioning the murder.
Few top management villains enjoy the role. Those who do enjoy it are truly evil. Most perform the role in the mistaken notion that they have no alternatives. Perhaps, someday, they will recognize that, like the Danes, they have the alternative of acting with humane consideration; when they do, they will become top management heroes.
The Middle Management Executioners. The middle management executioners are assigned the role of middlemen (or "middlepeople") in executing policy that they did not mandate. Played by Eichmann in Arendt's description, the role requires slavish obedience to a "godfather-like" figure. That role is somewhat akin to the one played by participants in Milgram's famous experiment in which individuals were instructed to deliver what they believed to be painful electrical shocks to unwilling victims.[68] Milgram reported that up to 65 percent of the participants delivered such shocks simply because a person in a position of authority commanded them to do so. He also reported that many did it despite strong personal reservations about their actions. Some even administered the shocks believing the victim to be in extreme danger.
Because of the executioners' intermediate role, it is difficult for the victims to attribute their destruction to them unequivocally. For instance, during his trial, Eichmann contended, with exasperating justification, that he did not commit murder alone but was an accessory to the murders that were committed, in which many others, especially his superiors and the Jewish councils, played important contributory roles. Because of the glimmers of truth it contained, this argument was not an easy one with which to cope, even for those who played the role of victim.
Thus was the Eichmann defense born. And thus does it live today in the actions of people such as Ted's senator.
The Policy Implementors. Policy implementors are those who actually carry out (as opposed to manage) the atrocity. In what might appear to be an anomaly, those who actually implement the policy are generally chosen because they have no genuine commitment to the task and gain no enjoyment from it. For example, when selecting SS personnel to carry out the task of extermination, "systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did."[69]
The SS personnel are not alone in the distaste they have for their job. In a variety of formal organizations, one hears, again and again, The hardest thing I have ever had to do was to hand out RIF notices" or "You don't know what misery is until you have to let some of your people go" or "The toughest part of being a supervisor is handling terminations." Occasionally, one even overhears a face-to-face conversation: "Sorry, John, old friend. I really don't want to let you go, but I have no choice. I just got a direct order from Headquarters to cut back 10 percent on personnel; so despite your excellent work, your loyal service, our long friendship and the many good times we have had together, I have to give you a pink slip." (In one organization, it was a yellow arm band. Whatever the color or shape, the symbolic meaning is the same.)
Because of their obvious distaste for the job, even the victims fail to blame those who actually carry out the atrocity. The guilty party is always difficult to identify when viewed in the poor light of an organization in which moral darkness prevails. Since nobody and everybody is responsible for the crimes of bureaucracies, Arendt characterizes bureaucratic activities as "rule by nobody."
Implementor's Assistants. For an organization to engage in systematic villainy, perpetrators and victims alike need the assistance of professionally trained experts if they are to function in a manner they mistakenly believe to be both efficient and humane.
Medical doctors provided that professional expertise in Eichmann's world. Using their professional skills, these physicians developed what they contended was a humane way of killing, one that granted deportees what they termed a "mercy death." They not only devised it, they also supervised it, and they were governed by the belief that the "unforgivable sin was not to kill people, but to cause unnecessary pain."[70]
Members of the personnel department usually perform this assistant's role in organizations involved in less malignant forms of termination. Sometimes the role is performed by professional consultants with a variety of euphemistic job titles, such as "outplacement specialist," "separation counselor," or "downsizing facilitator." Like the physicians, their job is not to question the efficacy or morality of the RIF; their job is to facilitate it in a way that causes the least possible amount of pain to those who are terminated.
Early Victims. Early victims are those who are the first to go. They were the mentally ill and physically infirm in Germany. They were the Jews who were deported first from Poland, France, and Belgium. They were the first hourly workers laid off by Chrysler. They were the employees of the U.S. Government who received the first RIF notices in the interoffice mail. They were the janitorial workers at American University, Washington, D.C., who were the first victims of the moves announced by its president. Early victims tend to be the weakest in terms of formal power.
The complicity of early victims in their own demise is quite subtle. About all one usually can do is ask sympathetically, as Jews have asked their surviving relatives, "Why didn't you revolt and charge and attack?"[71] or, as children of deposed employees of contemporary organizations will probably ask their parents, "Why didn't you szue or strike or tear the place apart?" Then, whoever asks the question generally feels sorry that such victims were so impotent in their plight. Although historians tend to accord early victims more sympathy and pity, such victims, in the final analysis, are neither metaphorically nor actually less dead.
Later Victims. Playing a key role, later victims are those who collude most directly with their victimizers. In their complicity, they play a role similar to that described by Winston Churchill in the early stages of World War II when he warned of the dire fate that awaited those who sought to appease Hitler. Said he, "Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All hope the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured."[72]
This role — perhaps the most disturbing one identified during Eich-mann's trial — was played by members of the Jewish councils. The councils were composed of the most prominent and powerful members of the Jewish community. According to Arendt:
Without Jewish help in administrative and police work ... there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower. There can be no doubt that without the cooperation of the [later] victims, it would hardly have been possible for a few thousand people [the Germans], most of whom, moreover, worked in offices, to liquidate many hundreds of thousands of other people.[73]
Members of the Jewish councils who provided such administrative and police assistance were given tremendous powers by the Nazis, but only on a short-term basis. Ultimately, they were also deported and killed. In Arendt's words:
Even the members of the Jewish councils were invariably exterminated.... There were no exceptions, for the fate accorded the slave laborers was only a different, slower kind of death.[74]
During RIFs, the role of later victims, ostensibly the most powerful members of the victim class, is frequently played by union officers, faculty senators, or management representatives with the well-known tide "hatchet men." Whatever their tides, they actively assist the more powerful villains, executioners, implementors, and assistants in the process of locating and terminating "early victims." In the course of their complicity, they frequently negotiate — even demand — that the order of deportation be expressed in the form of seniority rules. Thus, union leaders, usually those with the greatest amount of seniority, actually dictate the order of the march, with themselves, the most powerful and respected members of the union, going last.
Final Victims. Final victims have two distinguishing characteristics. First, they suffer as victims, but their victim status is not always recognized by historians. Second, they suffer as double victims. Not only are they victims of an injustice, but they also are victims of our need to imprison them in a role that diverts us from the difficult task of exploring our complicity in the particular crime from which they suffered. Thus, we, also, are deterred from examining our own potential complicity in future crimes.
The final victim classification includes one group that is generally cursed as persecutors — individuals such as Eichmann. For participating in atrocities, his neck was stretched on the gallows no less than his soul was shrunk at his desk. He, too, paid a high price for his participation in his organization's misdeeds. But who weeps for him? Indeed, who can make the superhuman effort to weep for Eichmann? But do we also fail to extend human compassion to perpetrators of lesser crimes? By comparison with the felonies of an Eichmann or a Pol Pot, the managers who mandate, manage, and implement corporate RIFs are commiting mere misdemeanors. Yet they also suffer from the damage they do both to others and to themselves. Although we love to hate them, I have met few persons who play that role and enjoy it. Most detest it. For that reason, they indeed need the anesthesia of "bullets to bite." Even though the pain they suffer is self-inflicted and much less obvious than that of their victims, it is no less real. Perhaps some victimizers could be forgiven if we had the ability to extend that level of grace.
Frequently acclaimed for their heroic survival, the second group of final victims includes those who spend the remainder of their lives consumed by hatred and frequently focused on achieving revenge for the wrongs they and other victims have suffered. To me, such victims are the most poignant. Sometimes members of the Jewish community, sometimes members of the management team, sometimes members of the labor council, sometimes members of the faculty union, they are united by the following statements:
We suffered as victims at the hands of the victimizers. Since you did not suffer, you cannot understand. Furthermore, the fact that you did not suffer and cannot understand means that you cannot legitimately explore die nature of our complicity in die particular crime we suffered. Unfortunately, if you cannot discuss our collusion, you cannot understand your potential for future complicity; but we are willing to sacrifice your understanding to minimize our "survivor's guilt." Our relationship as unforgiving adversaries of the victimizers must continue, and you must not interfere with it.
In one sense, the final victims have taken the well-known epigram, "Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it," and have changed it to read, "Those who study history must interpret it in a particular way. Otherwise, they might understand their potential to repeat it."
Evidently we need to have final victims. So long as they continue in their role as unforgiving, vigilant victims, we do not have to explore the nature of our complicity. As prisoners of the cosmology of roles and thought patterns that led to their victimization, and as prisoners of our implicit encouragement for them to occupy those roles, they allow us to avoid the awesome truth stated by Shakespeare: "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves." More tragically, by perpetuating the roles in the evil drama, we never get the opportunity to express and experience our extraordinary ability for love.
Assuming that we seek such an opportunity and frequently don't achieve it, the question then becomes, "Why?" What is the pattern of thought, carried by those final victims, that not only leads us to collude with evil but also prevents us from experiencing the ecstasy of love?
Once we opt to participate in a little murder, such as an RIF, we must learn and adopt a thought pattern, which we share with others, with which we can justify to ourselves and others our respective roles in the process.[12] That shared thought pattern includes an encompassing theory, euphemisms, slogans and clichés, negative fantasies, inner emigration, protective rules and regulations, selective memory, and lying. All elements of the pattern have the same function: to make life tolerable for those bound together by a common bond of loneliness and depression, generated by self-destructive, parabiotic collusion.
An Encompassing Theory. The theory's purpose is to justify collusion in the murderous process. That theory, in turn, must be broad enough to include both victims and victimizers in its Judas's kiss.
In Eichmann's Jerusalem (used in the metaphorical sense), the comprehensive theory revolved around an abiding belief in the state, its laws, and the consequent duties of a law-abiding citizen. Thus, Adolph Eichmann could do his duty to the state, obey the law, plead what came to be known as the Eichmann defense, and yet be destroyed by his slavish devotion to that theory. Likewise, at the same time — and also slavishly believing in the primacy of the state — Jews volunteered for deportation and execution. Those who tried to warn them about the terrors that awaited them if they cooperated with both Jewish and Nazi agents of the state were denounced as insane.[75]
The overriding theory used by many U.S. organizations to justify the inhumanity of firing, axing, cutting, reducing, sacking, and terminating others is provided by economists who advise us "about the inevitability of the Phillips Curve — that is, that we have to accept high levels of unemployment in order to lower the rate of inflation."[76] Once we accept that theory, we can cut others from the work force without considering either the ethical or the moral implications. We can do so despite the fact that the economists, who play the role of implementor's assistants, "seldom make the point that each country has a different Phillips curve, with ours being one of the worst. No one seems to ask, 'Why?' "[77] Specifically, no one seems to ask why both the Japanese and the West Germans provide far more job security than we and have consistently outperformed us in both productivity and the control of inflation.
Few of us care to look at a Phillips curve for what it is: an expression of the amount of greed and inhumanity a culture can tolerate before it disintegrates. Thus, by providing a theoretical justification for RIFs, economists have joined sociologists, psychologists, and management theorists as apologists for the little murders that prepare us to commit the big ones.
Euphemisms. The purpose of euphemisms is to hide from oneself and others the unpleasant reality of what one is experiencing or doing. In Eichmann's world, the essence of euphemistic thinking was embodied in the "Language Rule," which referred to "what in ordinary language would be called a lie."[78] Under the Language Rule, words such as killing, murder, and liquidation were replaced in the Nazi vocabulary with words such as final solution, evacuation, and special treatment.
Profit-making organizations, such as the Equitable Life Assurance Company, fire long-term, faithful employees and euphemistically call the process "outplacement."[79] Among employees of the federal government, the firing of others is referred to in polite company as "reductions in force" (RIFs). Academic institutions employ a more complex euphemism; when we fire a colleague, we call it "giving him or her a terminal contract." Not only do we euphemistically describe the act as a gift, but we frequently attempt to plug the leaks in our moral dikes by "honoring" the soon-to-be-departed with a cynical ceremony euphemistically called a "going-away party." In an attempt to fully divert ourselves from the reality that the ceremony attempts to hide, we generally read a resolution praising him or her for "meritorious service to the faculty and students."
Although we may laugh at our use of euphemistic "bureau-babble," most of us are painfully aware of its malignant, deceptive purpose — to protect members of the bureaucracy from the reality of the tragedy in which they are participating. Paraphrasing a Time magazine article on "bureaucrateze," engaging in compensated genital pleasuring with a strolling free-lance orgasmetrician requires no exploration of the depths of our respective souls.[80]
Slogans and Clichés. Slogans and clichés are in the same genre of deception as euphemisms. Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary defines slogans as "brief striking phrases used in advertising or promotion" and clichés as "trite expressions" of the "ideas expressed by them."
Slogans and clichés can either express reality or disguise it. Within organizations, slogans and clichés lead us away from essence and reality. They deflect us from expressions of altruism, which Vaillant believes individuals and all human organizations require if they are to survive.[81]
If we are morally upright, we might ask our organizational bedfellows, "Why are you asking me to do something dishonorable, immoral or illegal?" They might reply with a slogan/cliché such as "My honor is my loyalty" — the slogan of the SS, coined by Hider and used by Himmler in an apparent attempt to gloss over the enormity of the crimes they asked their people to commit. Others might shout, "Wear It with Pride, the Yellow Star!" a slogan created in 1933 by Robert Welthch, a Jewish journalist, in an effort to squelch thoughtful dissent by members of the Jewish community who questioned the efficacy of their leaders' commitment to the Zionist movement.[82] Some might mumble, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going" — John Mitchell's stock reply to subordinates who questioned the morality of some of the actions taken in conjunction with the Watergate break-in. Occasionally, a manager might refer to the need to "come right with people" — a slogan/cliché used by President Coy Eklund in an apparent effort to justify to himself and others the "outplacement" of several hundred long-term employees of the Equitable Life Assurance Company.[83] Now and then, you might even hear a guilt-ridden administrator say, "Occasionally in this job I just have to 'bite the bullet,'" — a university dean's response to a question about why a faculty member was fired from a job in which he or she was doing well.
Such slogans and clichés frequently inhibit organization members from pursuing the essence of important ideas, questions, or moral issues. In addition, the slogans and clichés sometimes are used in a manner that distorts their original meanings. "To bite the bullet" is a good example. Originally, that phrase was meant to describe a realistic way to make pain bearable for someone who was to undergo surgery without the aid of anesthesia. Now it is used to connote a way to reduce the "heroic" suffering of the person who inflicts the pain. Thus, when a university dean says, "I must bite the bullet" (that is, fire an innocent person), it is similar to a surgeon saying, "I'm going to cut this man's leg off without using an anesthetic. God! The pain will be excruciating. You'd better give me a bullet to bite while I saw."
Whenever the language of slogans and clichés is employed and we reply in kind, we know that we have signed a contract with the devil.
Negative Fantasies. As I mentioned in the chapter about the Abilene Paradox, another justification we use to numb the pain of participating in villainy is the fantasy of disastrous consequences if we behave morally and sensibly.
Armed with negative fantasies, Eichmann could plead that he had no choice but to obey orders. Had he not done so, he believed and/or claimed that he would have been forced to commit suicide or, by implication, would have been executed for insubordination.[84] Neither fantasy was grounded in reality. Rather, as Arendt recounts, it was surprisingly easy "for members of extermination squads to quit without serious consequence for themselves"[85] In fact, "not a single case could be traced in which an SS member suffered the death penalty because of a refusal to take part in an execution." [86]
The use of negative fantasies is not limited to victimizers. For instance, Jewish collaborators frequently contended that they had cooperated with the Nazis in deporting fellow Jews so that they could avert more serious consequences — presumably, their own deaths. Thus, Dr. Rudolph Kastner, a Jewish collaborator, contended that he withheld information from doomed Jews scheduled for "deportation" because of "'humane' considerations, such as that 'living in the expectation of death by gassing would only be harder.'"[87]
Paradoxically, both Eichmann and Kastner — one an implementor and the other a victim — employed the same thought pattern and thus became the strangest of bedfellows.
Like Eichmann, most people engaged in villainy can produce convincing negative fantasies on demand. Thus, CEOs can argue, "The company will go bankrupt and everyone will lose his job if we don't get rid of the dead wood." Labor leaders can portend, "We will all lose our jobs if we don't toss those with low seniority overboard." Union members who are allowed to stay temporarily in the lifeboat can say, "Sorry. It is necessary to throw you over the side. That is the only way to save the majority of the crew."
Whether they are produced by CEOs, university presidents, union officials, faculty members, Jewish officials, or members of the SS, it is important that the purpose of negative fantasies be understood. If I, who have them, can convince you to believe they are true, then I am released in both our minds from any personal responsibility for solving the problems in an alternative realistic manner. Furthermore, once you believe them, you, too, have been seduced into collusion.
Inner Emigration. Some active participants in the Holocaust contended later that they had inwardly opposed it. This rationale for complicity has been termed inner emigration, and such inner emigrants frequently appeared more Nazi than the "real ones."[88] Like Poor Judd in the musical comedy Oklahoma, inner emigrants "loved everybody and everything. They just never let on." That which Shames has called "a crime of silence"[89] is one manifestation of such emigration.
Arendt — incorrectly, I believe — reserves the term to describe only members of the Third Reich who inwardly believed that certain behaviors were wrong, immoral, and evil but outwardly acted another way. Unlike Arendt, I contend that inner emigration occurs among all who participate in immoral activity. For example, the Jewish officials who were, in effect, extensions of the Jewish councils, became inner emigrants when they participated in the roundup of their fellow Jews. Arendt described one such emigrant who attempted to justify his cooperation with the Nazis in rounding up Jews for deportation by asserting "that Jewish policemen would be 'more gentle and helpful' and would 'make the ordeal easier' (whereas, in fact, they were, of course, more brutal and less corruptible, since so much was at stake for them)."[90]
Inner emigration also occurs in traditional organizations. It occurs when we are joined by an emigrant colleague as we leave a staff meeting, and he or she puts an arm around our shoulder and says: "I loved the way you argued with the boss in there. You said just what I wanted to say. I was tempted to help you out, but you said it so well I didn't think there was any need for me to comment. I want you to know, though, that I was with you all the way despite my silence. Incidentally, I'm sorry about your being fired for raising hell. I hope you find another job soon, and do let me know if you need to talk with someone. I'm an excellent listener."
Inner emigration is also the process by which individuals frequently justify succumbing to conformity pressures from superiors or colleagues. For instance, managers use inner emigration to justify giving pink slips to employees who they do not believe deserve them. Teenagers use the process to justify "ripping off" stores in response to peer pressures. It is the process by which lonely, insecure cowboys attempt to explain their participation in hangings they oppose, such as the one described in poignant detail in The Ox-Bow Incident.[91] It is also a way in which reluctant virgins of both genders lose their innocence in organizations, contending all along that they did it against their wills. Rules and Regulations. Rigid adherence to rules and regulations — of which laws are a special category — is also used to justify our complicity in evil. Slavish obedience to rules and regulations is one way to avoid discomforting thoughts about our actions.
Espousing his faith in the sanctity of rules and regulations, Eichmann contended that he simply followed orders and did his duty as a law-abiding citizen of the state. As an adherent to the same faith, the personnel director of Ajax Corporation can contend that he simply followed the orders of the CEO when he distributed the pink slips. Likewise, the faculty senator can reply to the complaints of deposed faculty members that he was simply following the dictates of the faculty governing body.
Ultimately, though, a temporary escape into the fantasized protective custody of pseudocivilized rules and regulations only delays the moment at which the ultimate payment occurs. That defense didn't wash for Eichmann, and it didn't exonerate Lieutenant Calley and Captain Medina of their personal responsibility for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
Selective Memory. Selective memory — or, more accurately, selective forgetfulness — is another mental trick used to evade culpability. Eichmann was known for his inability to recall the essence of events in which he played a role that by any reasonable criterion would be called evil. However, he could remember the most mundane details of situations that enhanced his sense of status or his perverted sense of self-esteem. Thus, he could remember his visit with the minister of the interior of the Slovakian puppet government because he considered it a great honor to receive social invitations from high officials. He could even remember the way they bowled, the manner in which drinks were served, and other inconsequential details of the visit. He could not remember, however, that the purpose of the visit was to discuss the deportation of the Jews from Slovakia.[92]
Similarly, Jewish council members testifying at Eichmann's trial had great difficulty remembering the details of their own and others' collusion with the Nazis. However, they could remember, in excruciatingly painful detail, how Eichmann and his associates participated in the same events.
Once again, though, key figures in the Holocaust are not the only ones who suffer from selective memory. During the Watergate hearings and trials, the "I don't recall" replies of H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman achieved the status of a national joke.
At first, I doubted that Eichmann, the Jewish council members, and Haldeman and Ehrlichman were telling the truth. Like many others, I was convinced that they could recall the details of events they professed to have forgotten. However, now I have had the opportunity to interview my colleague's co-worker — the university senator who wanted to fire the "dead wood." I trust the senator's veracity about the incident, and I am now convinced that he and the witnesses to other greater crimes truly have forgotten their own guilty deeds. I discovered that the senator, like Eichmann, could remember many inconsequential details about his conversation with my colleague; he could remember where they stood, the content of a meeting he had attended immediately prior to the conversation, and the weather conditions. Yet he could not remember many of the details of the conversation regarding the proposal to terminate his colleagues in the School of Humanities. In his words: "That was a painful time for me. One I would rather forget."
Psychiatrists frequently call such selective forgetfulness "repression." I call it a way to avoid the reality of the parabiotic relationship in which one has participated.
Lying. To avoid ultimately confronting culpability, many of us resort to lying. Sissela Bok defines a lie as "any intentionally deceptive message which is stated."[93] Arendt, however, expands the meaning of lying to include self-deception, which includes efforts to deceive oneself in the apparent service of survival. From Arendt's description, it is clear that lying was endemic to all parties involved in Eichmann's metaphorical Jerusalem. The Jews no less than the Nazis practiced both forms of lying. Of the two, I suspect (and Arendt implies) that self-deception plays a more destructive part in collusion with evil.
In Arendt's words, the "German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by ... the same self-deception, lies and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann's mentality."[94] Simultaneously, self-deception was practiced by Jews who "volunteered for deportation from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and denounced those who tried to tell the truth as being 'not sane.'"[95]
Such lying — to oneself and to others — is endemic among members of different kinds of organizations involved in parabiotic evil. For example, Mr. Coy Eklund, president of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, apparently employed both forms of deception when he pronounced his commitment to the policy of "coming right with people" and then proceeded to fire a number of loyal, long-term employees [96] Or, describing our need to deceive ourselves, Zandy Leibowitz, a psychologist involved in RIF counseling says, "Crazy or not, people become frozen ... Until you have a specific RIF notice in your hand, the way you get up and go to work every morning is to pretend it isn't happening." [97]
The ability to lie to ourselves and others can be learned so well that we may lose our awareness that we are doing it. Wilfred Bion, for one, contends that certain forms of mental illness may stem from learning to lie.[98] More directly, he contends that we sometimes learn to lie so skillfully that we can no longer differentiate a lie from the truth.
Whatever roles or mental patterns we may employ under the banal but evil covers of the bureaucratic bed, the implications are profound. They are profound because they comprise an approach to living that, over time, dulls one's moral sensibilities and decreases the probability of our individual and collective survival. As the Nazis knew so well, the roles and mental patterns generate a "system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold," a system which "is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission."[99]
Is there any alternative? Inevitably, are all formal organizations versions of the hell that Eichmann symbolizes? Particularly during times of economic crisis, must organizations engage in the form of collusive murder that we euphemistically call RIFs?
As far as I am concerned, the answer to those rhetorical questions is no. That unequivocal response stems from my emerging understanding of the heroic role played by the Danes when they resisted the Nazis' attempts to seduce them into colluding in the deportation of Jews. When the Nazis were confronted with such resistance, "the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They had met resistance based on principle ... and had been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage?[100] (emphasis mine).
Danish resistance virtually defeated the Nazis' effort to deport Jews from Denmark. The Danes' resistance also was, paradoxically, an expression of affirming love toward the Nazis as well as toward one another. It was an expression of love because it increased the probability that all potential victims — including Jews, gentile Danes, Nazis, and others — would survive. By refusing to collude in the RIF of their Jewish citizenry, the Danes engaged in lovemaking in its most comprehensive sense.
Encouraged by the Danes' capacity for expressing love under such trying circumstances, I am convinced that all organizations have potential "Danish lovemakers." Those "lovemakers" have both the capacity and the desire to express affectionate concern toward one another, despite pressure caused by the reality of limited material resources. Not only can they express such concern, but they can do it in a way that increases the probability that the organization will survive and flourish.
The question then becomes, "How do they do it?" In particular, "How do they do it during hard times, when the temptation to terminate others' employment is great?" Well, as I think about that question, I am not sure how they do it, but I do have some thoughts about what they have to do if their relationship to one another is going to be one of love, rather than villainy. In short, I have some thoughts about how to get Adolph Eichmann out of the organization and to replace him with some "Danes."
Carl Jung contended that any dimension of human behavior can also be expressed in its opposite form. If we follow Jung's contention, then the same fuel that fired the ovens of Auschwitz must have provided the fiery energy of love that allowed the Danes to say no to the Nazis. Likewise, the fuel that stokes the layoffs at "Universal Industries" must also stoke the fate-sharing behavior of Japanese workers who take proportional pay cuts rather than permitting their associates to join the march to the metaphorical ovens of unemployment.[101]
Arendt asserts that the dynamics of the Holocaust stemmed from a universal instinct. She describes that instinct as "the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering." Building upon that possibility, Arendt continues:
The trick [emphasis mine] used by Himmler ... was very simple ... and effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!"[102]
I think Arendt is correct when she contends that a universal instinct was involved. I do not believe it was animal pity, however. Rather, I think that the dynamics of villainy are associated with our instinctive need for attachment and support from others whom we trust and the reciprocal fear that our need for attachment will be violated by separation.
Each of us, as a condition of existence, fears separation from and seeks attachment to others. Coping successfully with these reciprocal desires leads to love. Failing to cope with them successfully leads to hate and chicanery. That generalization applies to all organizations, both formal and informal.
Like the need for a heartbeat, the need for a reliable bond is basic, primitive, inborn, and universal. Consequently, any act that threatens or terminates that bond creates debilitating illness, both physical and mental. A breaking of that bond results in the anaclitic depression and marasmus (wasting away) discussed elsewhere in this book. As James Lynch asserts in The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness, separation and the feeling of loneliness it engenders are a major cause of premature death from heart disease and a contributing factor to many other life-threatening illnesses.[103] Loneliness and separation not only hurt, they also kill. Apparently, the devastating impact of the broken heart is more than a figment of the poet's imagination.
All of us have experienced arguments, broken romances, the loss of friends, divorces, deaths in the family, moves from one city to another, and RIFs. Each of us knows the kind of pain and turmoil such separation produces; and knowing that, we are deeply afraid of it and will do almost anything to avoid it. In my opinion, it was that inborn fear of separation and the reciprocal desire for attachment that led Adolph Eichmann to carry out orders with which he might not have agreed. It was his way of attempting to maintain the attachment and support of his superiors, colleagues, and subordinates. He was terrified of loneliness; Arendt herself describes him as a man for whom "the official date of Germany's defeat ... was significant ... mainly because it dawned upon him that henceforward he would have to live without being a member of something or other."[104]
The same fear of separation and desire for attachment led members of the Jewish councils to collude with their persecutors. Like Eichmann, they feared being detached from the broader German culture of which they were a part and to which they looked for support and attachment. For instance, in 1935, when German Jews were confronted with a hoard of anti-Semitic laws, a prominent member of the Jewish community expressed his fear of separation and desire for attachment when he stated his rationale for colluding with such laws: "Life is possible under every law.... A useful and respected citizen can also be a member of a minority in the midst of a great people."[105] In another form, Keen and Rappoport report that the fear of separation and desire for attachment were expressed by members of the Jewish community who could not believe the enormity of the crimes that were being committed against them and the extent to which they were being separated, both metaphorically and literally, from their countrymen: "It cannot be true — such things don't happen."[106] Then, when "such things" did begin to happen, that fear of separation led many Jews to opt to die in the presence of members of their faith rather than to endure the pain of separation that escape from their community would require. As Keen and Rappoport describe a family marched along in the sun. It was easier to die among many than to fight and suffer alone."[107] (Arendt also provides evidence that successful escape was more likely among Jews for whom the sense of community was weak.)[108]
Expressed in a different setting, that same fear of separation and desire for attachment led the university senator to seek his colleagues' separation from the faculty as a means of fulfilling his own needs for attachment with those who remained. ("If you help us get rid of others, my job will be protected and so will yours.") The senator apparently failed to realize that once an organization member becomes expendable, no one, including himself, could ever be secure. All that could be debated was the price that he and others would pay for remaining.
Fear of separation and the desire for attachment caused my colleague to consider the proposal seriously, because — like Eichmann — he would rather be attached than separated. Fortunately, he realized that the most devastating isolation would come from having to live, day to day, with others who would clearly desert (separate) him (or one another) if their own short-term interests were served by that act of organizational genocide. Living with shipmates who would toss you to the sharks when the rations run low is never a comfortable existence. It simply does not build the sense of community, loyalty, and trust that is necessary to ensure the long-term survival of the crew.
Knowing that fear of separation and desire for attachment is universal and that no one — not Eichmann, you, or I — is immune from its influence, I have reached what for me is a terrifying conclusion: When Eichmann is in the organization, it is because we are in Eichmann and he is acting on our behalf
How can we disengage Eichmann's services? We can do that by enshrining the principle that each of us has the right to live in a society (or organization) that affirms our desire to survive. From the foregoing, it would seem that survival requires attachment. Thus, we must build organizations that guarantee employment and garner reciprocal employee obligation. Further, we need to broaden the role of all organization members in formulating policy. We must install structures of altruism in our organizations. Finally, we need to study the Danes and explore moral issues as a part of daily organizational life. Although I think these ideas are germane during times when material resources are limited, I think they have equal relevance during times of material prosperity.
Guaranteed Employment. If you want to reduce fear of separation and provide a means for meeting the desire for attachment in organizations, guarantee employment. It is not by chance that the Japanese, who guarantee employment to a large portion of their work force, tend to outproduce us in virtually all competitive fields they choose to enter.[109] Assuming that the experience of separation leads to anaclitic depression and marasmus, I think it is reasonable to assume that the Japanese policy of guaranteed employment is an important element of their industrial success. I think it is also reasonable to assume that our failure to guarantee employment and our coincident proclivity to threaten our work force with anaclitic depression and marasmus has much to do with our current economic and spiritual depression.
If organizations guarantee employment, however, employees must reciprocate by committing themselves to long-term employment with their organizations. Obligations must be reciprocal, because when we leave an organization, either voluntarily or involuntarily, we create anaclitic depression and marasmus for those who remain
An example of such reciprocity is found in Japan. A significant portion of the work force is guaranteed lifetime employment, yet the trade-off is that those workers cannot quit one organization and move to another without serious negative consequence. In fact, if they do quit, they are virtually excluded from future employment opportunities with high-status organizations.
Since job-hopping has long been sanctioned in our culture, I suspect that the requirement that we obligate ourselves to our organizations (that is, to one another) will be very difficult for most of us to accept. As Philip Slater has indicated in the Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point, we have unconsciously adopted a pattern of thought based on the belief that each of us can live in lonely independence from one another.[110] That pattern, in turn, causes us to pursue marasmic separation ("I'm not going to be tied down to a job, spouse, friends, organization, or location") while starving for life-giving attachment to others. Given the entrenched nature of that thought pattern, it will require a lot of discipline and energy to change It.
The concept of guaranteed employment and reciprocal obligation also may be difficult to accept because they create an organization in which moral obligation is an important aspect of organizational life. Akio Morita, who built the Sony Corporation, implicitly spoke of that moral obligation when he said that "a company is a fate-sharing body."[111] If we accept that premise, each of us must be willing to follow the lead of the Danes and put on the "yellow arm band" when any member of our organization is threatened with "extermination." Those of us who have been trained to think as amoral pragmatists may find that such moral obligations demand more of us than we can easily offer.
The list of changes that would be required is virtually endless. However, it might include:
Taking more care in hiring new people
Placing greater emphasis on long-range planning
Motivating one another by appealing to our needs for attachment rather than to our pathological fears of separation
Designing compensation and incentive systems that reward interdependent teamwork rather than cutthroat internecine competition
Compensating organization members more equitably. (It is not by chance that the real after-tax income of CEOs of major Japanese firms is six to seven times that of a newly hired college graduate, whereas in American corporations, the ratio can easily exceed fifty to one.)[112]
Fostering a climate of cooperation, rather than adversarial relationships, between groups such as labor and management. (When that happens, Johnny Paycheck will no longer serenade country music fans with songs such as "Take This Job and Shove It.")[113]
Participative Management. The right to participate in the control of change constitutes another approach to reducing the fear of separation that leads to evil. It also provides the opportunity to experience the attachment that is required for love and, therefore, is particularly germane when organizations are under economic pressures that might otherwise result in RIFs.
Elliott Jaques defines participation as "the right of employees to collectively take part in the control of any changes whatever which they feel might adversely affect their future employment opportunities as a group." He continues: "Participation is thus intimately associated with belongingness and alienation. For a person to have a sense of belongingness requires the opportunity to belong."[114]
Externally imposed changes that might adversely affect one's own employment create separation, anaclitic depression, and marasmus. Since fear of separation is universal, few people — especially healthy ones — ever willingly cooperate with changes that might cause them to feel separated, particularly with changes that might cost them their employment.
Consequently, participation, or what is frequently termed "participative management," is effective only when it includes the right of all individuals to protect their needs for attachment. As Jaques argues, if employees are to participate, the managerial prerogative to limit participation cannot exist. Abridged participation is reminiscent of the activities of the Jewish council members, who could decide only the order in which the trains to Auschwitz would be loaded. Those limited participants in the management process could not decide whether the trains would be loaded.
Participation also eliminates resistance to change as a rationale for inhumane organizational behavior. Resistance to change is a behavioral science term frequently used by those whose sense of attachment is not threatened to rationalize taking the inhumane action of creating anaclitic depression: "We have to do something about those people who are resisting the introduction of robots. Sure, they will lose their jobs once the robots are in place, but that's the way life is. They are resistant to change, but they can't block progress."
Structures of Altruism. A third way in which organizations could facilitate love and reduce alienation is to create organizational policies and procedures that encourage members to express altruism. Again, the opportunity to express altruism is particularly important when material resources are limited.
Altruism, according to sociobiologist Edmund Wilson, is "generosity without hope of reciprocation," is genetic in origin, and is a necessary condition for the survival of the species.[115] Vaillant describes altruism as "getting pleasure from giving to others what you yourself would like to receive," and he considers it one of the mature adaptations to life.[116]
However it is defined, altruism is a source of attachment, growth, and pleasure to those who give and receive it. In contrast, firing, cutting, axing, and terminating others are not expressions of altruism. They are expressions of greed. They produce alienation and separation. They prepare us to commit holocaust.
Why is altruism so seldom encouraged by formal organizations? Perhaps, as both Vaillant and Wilson assert, altruism is not widely distributed in the culture. Because organizations seldom condone altruism, it would not be surprising if that quality were relatively rare. Nevertheless, I disagree with Vaillant and Wilson; I believe that we have a deep desire to express altruism.
For instance, when faced with a potential RIF, 87 percent of 1,400 employees surveyed by the Census Bureau in Suitland, Maryland, said that they would rather take up to sixteen days of furlough in lieu of an RIF. The Fairfax Journal speculated about the Suitland employees: "The people here are willing to share the burden. They'd rather take more furlough days than have someone lose their job."[117] In a similar fashion, A&P grocery store employees in parts of Virginia voted two to one in favor of significant pay cuts rather than seeing coworkers lose their jobs.[118] Although self-interest might have been involved for some, those whose jobs presently were secure clearly chose altruism when they opted for "give-backs" over co-worker misery. The frequency of similar generosity in the workplace indicates to me that the desire to express altruism is widely distributed. Organizations just lack structures through which it can be easily expressed.
Someday, though, structures and procedures that encourage the expression of altruism will be commonplace. Responding to our collective needs for attachment and survival, we will invent routine procedures that will formalize our desires to be decent and kind in the presence of those with whom we work. Referenda of the type conducted by the Census Bureau will be required and commonplace. Discussing approaches for legitimizing expressions of organizational altruism, a president of a small company asked me, "Assuming my people are altruistic and want to save others' jobs, how do I find that out?"
My reply was, "Ask them."
He first said, "That never occurred to me." Then, after some period of thought, he asked, "What if I find they are altruistic? Then am I required to follow the altruistic policies their answer implies? Wouldn't I be giving up my prerogatives to manage my business as I see fit?" To me, he seems to be asking the correct question.
Learning from the Danes. My final suggestion for making organizations humane is that we be willing to learn from the Danes. For instance, we need to know why the Danes were able to take their fear of separation and need for attachment and, rather than providing fuel for the ovens of Auschwitz, turn their needs into acts of survival and love. I have always wondered why we know so little about them.
Arendt, for instance, devotes only five pages of her work to the Danes' extraordinary expression of love. Rather than exploring it in depth, she refers to it as a "sui generis" event.[119] Then she devotes approximately 290 pages to various descriptions of the atrocities.
I don't know of a single, well-known book that discusses the Danes' act of courageous love in depth or in detail. Perhaps such books exist, but to my knowledge, none has received the attention that books on the Holocaust have received.
Although I am depressed about how little we know about the Danes, I am impressed with how much we know about the Japanese and their approach to work. In the service of our apparently insatiable curiosity, authors have inundated us with books such as Theory Z,[120] The Art of Japanese Management,[121] and For Harmony and Strength.[122]I contend, though, that the Japanese approach to organization is one for which the time has come, just as our North American approach to organization is one for which the time has passed. The Danes, on the other hand, expressed an approach to organization for which the time has neither come nor passed. I suspect that their approach is timeless, and for that reason, it demands timeless study.
If the Danes' contribution is so important, why have we ignored it? For me, the answer to that question is simple. For us to clearly understand what led the Danes to take enormous risks by refusing to collude in the murder of their own people, some of whom happened to be Jews, we have to be willing to take the same enormous risks in our daily organizational lives. In addition, such understanding will inevitably lead us into the exploration of moral, ethical, and spiritual issues of organizational life. For most of us, such exploration is not easy or comfortable, because it deals with the essence of our respective souls. At the same time, the willingness to deal with the ethical, the moral, and the spiritual is the most important requirement for creating effective organizations.
Learning to make conscious, thoughtful, moral choices in dealing with small organizational matters is the way we prepare ourselves to make moral choices when the big issues are involved. As I said earlier, it is particularly heroic to take moral stands when the stakes are apparently low, because the implications of our choices are not as apparent to us and to others. Whatever the stakes, it clearly is not easy to make organizational choices that are moral, ethical, and spiritual. Moral choices are always acts of will that express our affectionate concern for others. They are expressions of our desire to ensure that we and others survive. They are expressions of courage.
In that light, perhaps the vanished hippies of the sixties were unwitting allies of future generations of executives when they said, "It takes courage to make love, not war."
Amen.
[12] It is important to emphasize that the pattern is shared. Thus, the pattern differs from what psychoanalytic theorists refer to as defenses, which are individual, not collective, in nature.