This article is part of a series of adapted excerpts from “Bitcoin Is Venice” by Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers, which is available for purchase on Bitcoin Magazine’s store now[1].
You can find the other articles in the series here[2].
“The scientific elite is not supposed to give orders. Yet there runs through all of them a clear notion that questions of policy can be made somewhat nonpartisan by the application of science. There seems little recognition that the contributions of social science to policy-making can never go beyond staff work. Policy can never be scientific, and any social scientist who has risen to an administrative position has learned this quickly enough. Opinion, values, and debate are the heart of policy, and while fact can narrow down the realm of debate, it can do no more.
“And what a terrible world it would be! Hell is no less hell for being antiseptic. In the 1984 of Big Brother, one would at least know who the enemy was — a bunch of bad men who wanted power because they liked power. But in the other kind of 1984 one would be disarmed for not knowing who the enemy was, and when a day of reckoning came the people on the other side of the table wouldn’t be Big Brother’s bad henchmen; they would be a mild-looking group of therapists who, like the Grand Inquisitor, would be doing what they did to help you.”
–William H. Whyte, “The Organization Man[3]”
In “The Organization Man,” William Whyte makes the case that the bigness of the American corporation[i] creates all manner of subtle erosion of individualism and communitarianism alike, and instills a kind of pseudo-social
