Whenever Gene Autry discovered evil-doing being done, he just threw his lariat around the bad guys and dragged them off to the old hoosegow. Today, Gene would have to apply for a roping permit, wait for seventeen government agencies to review the application, and ultimately discover that roping bad guys had been limited by legislation to the Bureau of Bad Guy Roping. No wonder Gene switched to baseball.

Organizational Complexity

A big part of the problem we seem to have in making a difference today relates to the complexity of modern society. Many scholars have commented on the significance of modern specialization, one of the hallmarks of a "developed" society.

While itís unlikely that any human society has avoided the division of labor altogether-organized around age and sex if nothing else-modern specialization is qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from that of the past. Hereís an example.

In the years of the American frontier, few pioneers made their own wagon wheels as a matter of course. It was simply more convenient and efficient to buy them from specialists (called wheelwrights). And yet, out there on the trail through the badlands of the Dakotas, more than one pioneer built his or her own wheel under the pressure to survive. Under similar circumstances, however, not many of us would be up to hammering out a makeshift carburetor from an empty beer can. Or the next time your word-processor goes out of commission, you might try your luck at poking around the microcircuits with a paper clip.

Years ago, I saw a cartoon in which one person reported to another, "What a harrowing experience. The power went out on the escalator, and we were stranded for forty-five minutes." I remember laughing at the time, but now Iím not sure itís all that far-fetched. Every year, the technology that I love so much seems to make me that much more dependent on the expertise of others.

This mechanical phenomenon has a social parallel. Modern organizations are often so complicated as to be virtually impossible to deal with. No matter what your problem, the person in charge of that is likely to be in a meeting or at lunch, and no one else can handle it. You can be assured that the person you are complaining to didnít cause the problem and/ or canít do anything about it. And these arenít necessarily bad people. Youíd probably say the same things theyíre saying if you were in their shoes. The problem lies in the nature of the system itself.

Part of the difficulty lies in the sheer size of large organizations. In 1906, when San Francisco was devastated by a massive earthquake, the young manager of the cityís modest Bank of Italy, Amadeo P. Giannini, was able to get the bankís vault salvaged about a million dollars in currency, notes, and gold. Shortly thereafter, he set up a tent and desk on a San Francisco pier and began making loans to finance the rebuilding of the city. By 1979, the renamed Bank of America employed some 76,000 employees in hundreds of branches to manage 85 billion dollars in deposits and nearly 60 billion dollars in loans.

Todayís Bank of America, like any other large organization, can only function through extensive specialization, an intricate organizational structure, and firmly established bureaucratic procedures. While complex bureaucratic structures make it possible for banks to do things that would have been unthinkable in Gianniniís tent on the pier, this represents a double-edge sword.

Timothy and Michael Mescon describe an experience at a bank (not identified as Bank of America) that is familiar to anyone living in a modern, specialized society.

In retrospect, I think this was a useful breakthrough in our understanding of modern social life, but it was only a way station, not the final destination. The real problem, I suggest, lies not in the system but in system , per se. Capitalists have nothing on socialists in this respect. Both systems seem fully capable of botching things up. Something more fundamental is involved.

Structuring Responsibility

It is in the nature of complex social systems-of any political flavor-to destroy personal responsibility by structuring it. In our modern corporations and governmental agencies, we have created the illusion of responsibility. The goal was a laudable one, but the result has been less than ideal, as weíll see.

We have recognized that the average individuals in a modern society are unable to protect themselves from the failings of specialists. When you go to the supermarket, for example, and purchase a carton of milk, you really have no way of being sure the milk is pure. How can you tell if the new diet pills you purchased through an ad in a movie magazine are going to kill you? You have no way of knowing if the brakes are going to fail on your new car.

In view of the fact that each of us will be dependent on thousands and thousands of people whom weíll never see-dependent on them to do their jobs properly but unable to make sure they do-we have assigned the responsibility for such matters to other specialists. Thus, for example, the Food and Drug Administration has been assigned the responsibility of guaranteeing that the food and drugs offered for sale to us are pure. By specializing in that task, they can do a better job than either you or I could do on our own behalf.

Of course, the sheer size of our society precludes one specialist from taking on such a job. Thus the Food and Drug Administration employs thousands of subspecialists, each assigned a somewhat narrower range of responsibility. On the face of it, all this would seem to make sense-except for how it turns out.

As the assignment of responsibility itself gets more complex, it gets more ambiguous. Eventually, when something goes wrong, it isnít altogether clear which subspecialist dropped the ball. Often we find co-workers blaming each other, departments placing responsibility with other departments, and so forth.

All this gets worse yet when politics enters the picture-as it inevitably does. As soon as a government agency is created to monitor some branch of industry, individual companies and trade associations create lobbying arms to deal with the agency, and we hear charges that the lobbyists have tried to circumvent or even corrupt the agency.

Actually, the formal structuring of responsibility has a negative impact on us all. Not only are we less likely to take responsibility than before that responsibility was assigned to someone else; we become more irresponsible.

First, the system of structured responsibility weíve created sets up automatic, personal responses that rob us of the experience of responsibility. We set a machine in motion that makes it "normal" to feel someone else is responsible for how things turn out. We give up responsibility for solving the problems we observe around us.

Then , To make matters worse, the system weíve created encourages us to create problems. Once weíve hired a lifeguard for the beach, you and I feel we can swim out as far as we want, because itís the lifeguardís responsibility to tell us if weíre taking a chance and to save us if we get into trouble. Once we hire a police force, we feel free to wander into Harlem on a Saturday night and start calling folks "niggers." (Or, depending on your racial persuasion, you can drive through Biloxi and yell "Honky!" at the good ole boys.)

This phenomenon starts an intricate process that Iím sure is familiar to you. Letís suppose that we live in a small community that is littering one hundred beer cans a day on the grounds of the community park. Thatís a problem, and to solve the problem we hire one worker to have the responsibility of picking up the cans. We figure that one worker can walk around the park and pick up one hundred beer cans a day. Having created that arrangement, however, we can now let go of whatever self-restraint we have been exercising and toss the rest of our beer cans on the ground, creating a new total of two hundred cans a day.

Our one worker now cannot get the job done and demands that more help be hired. You and I are irritated, too, because weíre paying to have the park kept clean and itís as messy as before. So, to get the problem handled once and for all, we hire another person to pick up cans, a third to patrol the park and arrest anyone caught littering, and a fourth to supervise the other three.

By now we are paying a goodly sum to have our park kept clean. It has now become our right as tax-paying Americans citizens to have a clean park-even if we do throw our cans on the ground. Having created a system working against our littering, however, we have created an adversary system: "us" versus "them." Of course, we could avoid the adversary system altogether by simply throwing our beer cans in the trash barrel, but if we did that, what would be the justification for paying all those taxes? Those lazy bastards on the parkís crew would sit around all day drinking coffee, not lifting a finger to earn their piece of the taxes you and I are paying. Not wanting to get arrested, however, we toss the beer cans in the bushes so no one will see what we did. That tactic makes the trash harder pick up and requires an increase in the parkís crew. Now we need two teams of three workers each and a supervisor for each team, and the original supervisor with a private secretary and a payroll clerk.

By now the park workers have decided that itís undignified to pick up other peopleís trash and have formed a union to demand more pay in compensation for the indignity of the work. The parks director now requires a collective-bargaining specialist who, in turn, needs his or her own office and secretary, plus an annual trip to the meetings of the Association of Municipal Collective-Bargaining Specialists at Miami Beach (with per diem). To combat the growing effectiveness of the collective-bargaining specialist in City Hall, the Park Workers Local 33 now needs to expand the union staff, requiring increased union dues, requiring increased pay for the workers so they can pay the increased dues. This outrageous increase in park-worker pay creates a flap at City Hall, and the collective-bargaining specialist is given tow assistants, each of whom requires a secretary and trips to the regional meetings of the A.M.C.B.S. (in Kansas City). Now, the parks department payroll clerk needs an assistant, and the director needs an assistant director for personnel and an executive secretary. A municipal bond is floated to construct a new building to house the department. The building costs tem million dollars and is located on what was originally our park.

At last, we have eliminated the problem of beer cans in the park. We have also eliminated the park, but somehow the works, the supervisors and staff, and the union still find things to do so as to justify our continued payment of taxes as well as the repayment of the bond on the new building. Maybe we should have just thrown the goddamn cans in the trash barrel in the first place.

I have always had the feeling that this little parable would be a lot funnier if it werenít so true. Each of us has seen comparable chains of events, and we usually didnít regard them as comedy. For many Americans, the current state of civilization is downright depressing.

Taking Responsibility in Government

The lack of personal responsibility within large organizations is nowhere more evident than within the government, especially the federal government. Stories of uncaring, unthinking, and irresponsible bureaucratic misbehavior are legion. There are, however, a great many exceptions, who stand as living proof that individuals can take personal responsibility even within government.

Listen to Harlan Cleveland, formerly the U.S. ambassador to NATO, recall the late senator and vice president, Hubert Humphrey:

The doctors had found several prescriptions in the manís pocket, but he simply didnít have enough money to get them filled. Simple enough: Andris would get government assistance for him. But it wasnít that simple.

The regulations governing financial assistance set a monthly income limit of $333 for recipients. The couple whom Andris wanted to help was receiving disability and Social Security payments totaling $477 a month. They were simply too "wealthy" to receive assistance. The more Andris pursued the matter, the more frustrating she found the cobweb of regulations. For example if the man could run up a total of $714 in unpaid medical expenses over a six-month period, then he would qualify for assistance. Not too practical for someone doctors said might die if he didnít get his medicine soon.

As Andris went to the coupleís slum apartment to explain that nothing could be done, we can imagine some of what must have been running through her mind. "I didnít make the rules. In fact, I think theyíre stupid. Iíll keep trying to find a loophole." Before she could say any of that, she recognized that she had made them her personal responsibility. She stopped at a drugstore and paid $47 of her own money to fill the prescriptions. She knew social workers werenít supposed to get "too involved" in their cases. Living on a tight budget herself, she recognized that she couldnít personally pay for all the needy. But all that paled in the knowledge that she had saved an old manís life.

In American folklore, the school truant officer represents the epitome of the "heavy" in adversarial relationships. The officer is on one side, the truants on the other, and the question is who can outsmart whom. James McSherry, supervisor of attendance in the Boston school system, raises havoc with that stereotype, however.

McSherry makes relatively few arrests, for example, preferring to find other solutions. Moreover, he is especially sensitive to the real reasons for school absences. In one case, for example, he noticed that a student was always absent on the fifteenth and thirtieth of the month. Looking further into the matter, McSherry discovered that the studentís mother had him stay by the mailbox all day to ensure that their welfare check wouldnít be stolen. McSherry chose to look the other way, feeling the need for the child at home was more compelling than having him in school.

Although his official job description would not require him to go beyond attendance matters in his dealings with students, McSherry goes out of his way to support students any way he can. Visiting on truant, he found a number of paintings on the wall. When he discovered the student had painted them, he set about getting the student in touch with art schools. Although pregnant students are not required to attend school, McSherry always encourages them to attend classes at alternative facilities so they can return to school after their children are born. Because of his obvious commitment to the well-being of all the students he deals with, this unusual truant officer can visit the roughest of Bostonís neighborhoods without fear.
 
 

A special class of governmental heroes go by the name of whistle-blower. The best known, surely, is Ernest Fitzgerald, a civilian management specialist with the Air Force. In 1968, he startled his employers by testifying before the Congress regarding cost overruns. In particular, he pointed out that the C-5A transport plane would cost $2 billion more than they planned.

As a reward for his courage, the Air Force fired Fitzgerald. He spent the next fourteen years in court, winning his job back. In retrospect, Fitzgerald told reporter Rebecca Nappi, "You never recover. Having gotten into it, I wasnít going to lie, but it was a personal disaster. It ruined my career." Heís not thrilled with the term whistle-blower, feeling it implies someone who is a little strange. As Fitzgerald insists, "Telling the truth should become routine."

Fitzgeraldís willingness to step forward and tell the truth has made it that much easier for other government employees to take similar actions. Perhaps eventually we shall see a realization of Fitzgeraldís view about truth becoming routine.

For the time being, however, the overall experience of personal integrity and responsibility in government falls short of Fitzgeraldís vision. That situation fits hand-in-glove with the general publicís image of government and interactions with it.

Alienation and Disenchantment

In November 1981, the Roper Organization, a nationally respected polling firm, conducted a survey to measure what they called the "Gross National Spirit." In a number of respects, they found spirits dampened.

For example, the survey asked a national sample of adults: "In general, how satisfied are you with the way things are going in the United States today? Are you very satisfied, more or less satisfied, or not at all satisfied?" Hereís what they answered:

By the same token, a 1982 survey by the National Opinion Research Center found 68 percent of American adults agreeing with the statement: "The lot of the average man is getting worse." This was an increase from the 56 percent who agreed in 1973.

Nowhere is modern American alienation more evident than in peopleís attitudes toward their government and who it serves. In 1958, for example, a national sample of Americans were asked whether they felt the government was run for "the benefit of all" or "a few big interests looking out for themselves." In the midst of the Eisenhower years, 82 percent said government was run for the benefit of all. When the same question was asked of a national sample in 1980, a mere 23 percent would say government was run for the benefit of all; over three-fourths felt it was run on behalf of a few big interests.

In the same surveys, people were asked whether they would "trust the government in Washington to do what is right." In 1958, 16 percent said "always" and another 59 percent said "most of the time." By 1980, the percentages were 2 percent and 23 percent, respectively.

It is worth noting that the trend in attitudes has shifted somewhat since 1980, though the most recent samplings point to a high degree of alienation, as the table below shows.
 

		1958	1980	1983
Government is run for:
	Benefit of all . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	82%	23%	34%
	Few big interests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	18%	77%	66%
Trust the government in Washington to do what right:
	Always or most of the time . . . . . . . . . . . .	75%	25%	46%
	Only some or none of the time . . . . . . . . .	25%	75%	54%

Apathy

Alienation among the mass of average Americans shades off into apathy. Things seem to be going from bad to worse. Nothing we do seems to mater, so why try to do anything? Nowhere does our apathy show up more dramatically than in our voting record.

Of those qualified to vote in the 1982 Congressional elections, 48.5 percent actually did so. In fact, few than two-thirds even bothered to register. 

It is well known, of course, that voting rates in "off-year" elections are lower than when we are electing a president. And yet, our presidential election record is nothing to brag about. In 1980, in the face of a clear ideological choice between Reagan and Carter, enlivened by the third party candidacy of John Anderson, only 59.2 of the electorate voted.
 
 

Voting rates, moreover, are on the decline. Here are some recent figures:
 

PERCENT OF ELIGIBLE VOTERS VOTING
Year	Presidential	Off-Year
1964	69.3%
1966		55.4%
1968	67.8%
1970		54.6%
1972	63.0%
1974		44.7%
1976	59.2%
1978		45.9%
1980	59.2%

Chicagoís 1983 mayoral election offered a rare exception to the recent pattern of low voter turnouts. Face with the choice between electing it first Republican mayor in fifty years or its first black mayor ever, 90 percent of Chicagoís voters went to the polls to choose between Bernard Epton and Harold Washington. No one interpreted the high turnout as civic pride or good citizenship, however, and political observers generally agreed that the campaign had been one of the dirtiest in recent memory-with heavy doses of racial issues and even outright racism from both sides.

Journalist Melvin Maddocks has summed up modern American alienation and apathy as well as anyone:

The alienation, disenchantment, and apathy that increasingly characterize modern American life are joined by cynicism. No matter how good or admirable a human act my first appear, we are sure thereís something rotten under the surface. This seems due to a perversion of skepticism into cynicism.

The rise of cynicism within the media and among intellectuals cab be understood in terms of the reward structure they operate within. Suppose you are a newspaper reporter, and your city editor has assigned you to cover a local businessman who has announced he will give all his money to charity. Inevitably, a question arises as to whether the apparent altruism is genuine or if it is a ruse, hiding some kind of trickery. Your job is to investigate the situation and write a major piece on it. What kind of story are you likely to write? Letís look at the possibilities.

To simplify matters (as we tend to do), letís assume that the businessmanís promise is genuine or itís a sham. By the same token, letís assume that your article can either report the act as genuinely altruistic or you can show it to be ingenuine. When these two sets of possibilities are combined, they create a deadly reward structure.

Letís examine each of the four cells of the table. In the upper-left corner, what would happen if you wrote a positive article and it turned out that the businessmanís act was genuinely altruistic? Chances are you article would appear on page 32 of the "Lifestyle" section of the Sunday paper. Your editor might say you show "promise" and should try your hand at "serious" journalism.

Alternatively, letís suppose your article is pretty cynical, suggesting that the businessman is actually working a tax angle, looking for a civic award, or both-but it later turns out that his act was apparently genuine. I use the terms "later turns out" and "apparently" deliberately, since they point to an important distinction between the businessmanís act being genuine or false. If itís all a sham, that can become clear suddenly and pretty definitely, with the discovery of a secret Swiss bank account, the publication of a damning letter from the businessman to his accountant, etc. No sudden turn of events can demonstrate the act to be genuine, however. We decide it genuine when it fails over time to turn out ingenuine. More likely, we simply forget about it altogether. Thus, your cynical article is likely to fade from memory along with the act itself.

So far, itís pretty much a wash. As long as the businessmanís act turns out to have been genuinely altruistic, your career as a reporter is not likely to be affected much if you report his act as genuine or suggest itís a sham. But letís look at the more exciting possibilities. Suppose the businessman is really running a con by pretending to give all his money to charity.

If you are taken in by the con and write an article praising him for his altruism, and if the competing newspaper publishes the businessmanís letters to his accountant and prints a photocopy of his Swiss bank account, and the businessman flees the country two steps ahead of the federal agents, you will not have a long career in journalism. After all, as a journalist you carry a public trust to protect us all from the charlatans, and you have failed. From now on, your career in newspapers is unlikely to progress much beyond selling them.

But what if you had unearthed the damning letters, the bank book, and other evidence of the charade? Pulitzer City. From now on, your biggest professional problem would be living up to your substantial reputation.

It doesnít take a Ph.D. in logic to recognize that the reward structure in effect here is loaded heavily in favor of a negative article. Itís not so much that journalists become cynical because of all the evil theyíve witnessed; being cynical has great survival value.

Everything Iíve said about journalists applies equally to academics, except academics have a more leisurely deadline to meet. Scholars, like journalists, are charged with the responsibility to protect the rest of us from fakery, and the biggest rewards lie in uncovering ingenuineness, the greatest penalties in overlooking it. It is almost impossible not to look for the worst.

If things werenít bad enough already, the various factors that weíve been looking at have a tendency to reinforce each other. The more things are a particular way, the more they get that way. In a related phenomenon, we are at the mercy of "self-fulfilling prophecies."

To the extent that we assume that everyone is our for number one, for example, the more that becomes true. From the standpoint of someone who might want to perform a genuinely altruistic act, to make genuine contribution, the prospect of cynical scrutiny is a powerful deterrent.

And yet, despite all the powerful reasons for not taking responsibility for public ills, individual Americans do step forth.

Counterpoint: Voluntary Associations

A hundred and fifty years ago, a French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, toured the still-new United States to discover for himself what kind of society had been created in the New World. Generally despairing of the results of the French Revolution, de Tocqueville warned, "The danger that faces democratic governments is the passivity of the populace; the tendency for individuals to abandon their personal responsibility for social actions." He was generally encouraged by what he discovered in America. I particular, he was struck by the American pattern of forming voluntary associations to deal with public problems. Whatever the public need-building a road or library, repairing a damaged schoolhouse, hiring a community physician-Americans join together voluntarily to get the job done. 

"Volunteering" is still a fundamental part of American life. In a 1981 Gallup poll, for example, 29 percent of the adults surveyed said they were involved in "charity or social service activities, such as helping the poor, the sick, or the elderly." In 1974, the U.S. Bureau of the Census had found 23.5 percent engaged in volunteer work, and the Bureau estimated the value of that work at over 67 billion dollars. A 1981 survey by the Roper Organization found a similarly high level of participation:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Even during hard economic times, Americans continue to make massive financial contributions to charities. In 1980, corporations and foundations each contributed around 2.5 billion dollars. Individual Americans contributed 40 billion dollars.

Again, we are left with two faces of American society. On the one hand, we find increasing social complexity robbing individuals of the sense of public responsibility and ownership. People are alienated, disenchanted, cynical, and apathetic. Yet there remains a strong commitment to rise above such feelings and participate fully anyway.

In the chapter that follows, we are going to look more deeply into the kinds of individuals who have demonstrated a willingness to take a stand for excellence. We are about to meet some modern heroes.