American Individualism: Fact and Fiction

For two generations American political and economic life has been moving swiftly toward “bigness,” toward monolithic organization. We live by, in, and among bigger and bigger corporations, bigger and bigger unions, bigger and bigger governments. On all sides individual freedom and responsibility have shrunk. Absorbed into organizations bigger than himself, the American tends to be overpowered by these organizations, whether of industry, labor or agriculture. And whatever his orientation, he must operate in and under an ever-expanding multilateral network of occupational and governmental regulation.In the shadow of such manifold giantism modern men—practically all of them employees who rate themselves “middle class”—seem but puny figures. Man's own handiwork has become a Frankenstein monster, destroying his initiative and individuality. In the grip of forces he has created, helpless single-handed to control, he suffers from loneliness, from not belonging, from impersonality. Millions who live in great cities, hundreds of thousands employed in assembly-line factories and organized in industrial unions, thousands of stockholders who can only endorse management's policies governing “their” billion dollar corporation —all these experience frustration, helplessness.