Businessmen came to embrace the industrial theology of ‘responsibility,’ and learned a new set of cartelizing catechisms. The campaign to reform trad… - Butler D. Shaffer

The history of institutionalized society has been principally one of the organization and management of conflict. Do institutions not encourage the duality in our thinking that promotes the practices of projecting good and bad characteristics onto others? Do they not encourage and exploit both scapegoating and authority worship, continually reminding us of the presence of some object of fear or hared, or some other source of conflict, and consoling us that they, alone, can make our lives secure?

The State has encouraged us to develop expectations of other people, and promised to compel the fulfillment of those expectations. It has persuaded us that others are the cause of our failures, and that others should be responsible for our happiness and well-being. It has offered to save us the effect of developing self-discipline, convincing us of the superiority of institutionally-imposed discipline in providing for social order. It has pandered to our worst fears about ourselves and others, concocting bogeymen and perilous threats from which it has promised protection.

During the years 1918-38, notions of economic autonomy and self-regulating market behavior confronted the forces of industrial concentration. Free competition-with attendant low prices and aggressive trade practices—was identified with the older, unstructured forms of organization characterized by smaller, self-governing business firms. An unrestrained marketplace brought with it the specter of incessant change, a condition that was unacceptable to those charged with the responsibilities of managing and preserving the assets and market positions of business organizations. In the confrontation between ‘individualism’ and ‘instituti6nalism,’ competition came to be identified with the decentralized, unstructured practices representing the past. Individual self-interest, with its decentralizing tendencies, had to be suppressed in favor of the emerging institutional order. The attack on autonomy was a defense of the new order: the institutionally dominant, centrally directed, collective society.