The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  It is the other-directedness of Americans that has prevented their realizing this; between the advertisers on the one hand and the novelists and intellectuals on the other, they have assumed that other Americans were materialistic, while not giving sufficient credence to their own feelings. Indeed, the paradoxical situation in a stratum which is other-oriented is that people constantly make grave misjudgments as to what others, at least those with whom they are not in peer-group contact, but often also those with whom they spend much time, feel and think.

  To be sure, the businessmen themselves often try to act as if it were still possible to be a Kwakiutl chief in the United States. When they write articles or make speeches, they like to talk about free enterprise, about tough competition, about risk-taking. These businessmen, of course, are like World War I Legionnaires, talking about the glorious days of yore. Students and many others believe what the businessmen say on these occasions, but then have little opportunity to watch what they do. Perhaps the businessmen themselves are as much the victims of their own chants and rituals as the Kwakiutls.

  Those few students who urge that America resembles Dobu can find little in student life to sustain their view, except perhaps a bit of cheating in love or on examinations. It is rather that they see the “capitalistic system” as a jungle of sharp practice, as if nothing had changed since the days of Mark Twain, Jack London, and Frank Norris. America is to them a land of lynchings, gangsterism, and deception by little foxes and big foxes. Yet, today, only small businessmen (car dealers or furnace repairmen, for instance) have many opportunities for the “wabu-wabu” trading, that is, the sharply manipulative property-pyramiding of the Dobuan canoeists.

  If, however, these students turn to social science for their images of power in America, they will very frequently find their own view supported. The scattered remarks on the United States in Patterns of Culture are themselves an illustration. My students also read Robert Lynd’s chapter on “The Pattern of American Culture” in Knowledge for What?4 While noting contradictory exhortations to amity and brotherhood, Lynd emphasizes business as highly individualistic and politically ruthless; elsewhere he stresses the masterful ambition and conspicuous consumption typified by the older generation of the “X family” of Middle-town. Ironically, the outlook of these and other sociological critics of business is confirmed and reflected by those neoclassical economists who construct models for the rational conduct of the firm—wittingly or unwittingly presenting businessmen as dismally “economic men.”

  Partly as a result of this image of the businessman, many students at privately endowed universities have become reluctant to consider business careers, and, as more and more young people are drawn into the colleges, these attitudes become increasingly widespread. The abler ones want something “higher” and look down their noses at the boys at Wharton or even at the Harvard Business School. Business is thought to be dull and disagreeable as well as morally suspect, and the genuine moral problem involved in career choice—namely, how best to develop one’s potentialities for a full existence—is obfuscated by the false, over-dramatized choice of making money (and losing one’s soul) in business versus penury (and saving one’s soul) in government service or teaching. The notion that business today, especially big business, presents challenging intellectual problems and opportunities and is no more noticeably engaged in Dobuan sharp practice and Kwakiutl rivalry than any other career, seems not to exist even in the minds of students whose fathers are (perhaps woefully inarticulate) businessmen.

  It is likely, then, that the students’ image of business, and of American life generally, will have some self-confirming effects. Business will be forced to recruit from the less gifted and sensitive, who will not be able to take advantage of the opportunities for personal development business could offer and who, therefore, will not become models for younger men. Moreover, people who expect to meet hostility and calculation in others will justify an anticipatory hostility and calculation in themselves.

  To be sure, there are plenty of unlovely, vicious, and mean Americans, in and out of business life; plenty of frightening southern mobs, northern hoodlums, dead-end kids with and without tuxedoes. There are many cultural islands in the United States where Dobu ways abound, just as there are survivals of late nineteenth-century Kwakiutl patterns. But these islands and survivals do not make a system of power, nor are they linked by any conspiracy, fascist or otherwise.

  Now, of course, to show that Americans are neither like Kwakiutls nor Dobuans does not prove they are like ZuÑi and Hopi Indians. Obviously, in any case, the comparisons must be very rough; from the standpoint of my character types all three tribes, as long as they are in the phase of high population growth potential, would be more or less dependent on tradition-direction. My purpose is to present a parable, not a description. There is evidence, though it is perhaps somewhat understressed by Ruth Benedict, that the Pueblo Indians are actually not so bland and amiable as they seem, that they are, to a degree, antagonistic co-operators, with a good deal of repressed hostility and envy that crops up in dreams and malicious gossip. But this only strengthens the analogy with the middle-class Americans, whose other-directed cooperativeness is also not completely mild but contains repressed antagonistic elements.

  Indeed the whole emotional tone of life in the Pueblos reminds me strongly of the American peer-group, with its insulting “You think you’re big.” While the Kwakiutls pride themselves on their passions that lead them to commit murder, arson, and suicide, the Pueblos frown on any violent emotion.

  Ruth Benedict writes:

  A good man has… “a pleasing address, a yielding disposition, and a generous heart.”… He should “talk lots, as they say—that is, he should always set people at their ease—and he should without fail co-operate easily with others either in the field or in ritual, never betraying a suspicion of arrogance or a strong emotion”

  The quotation brings to mind one of the most striking patterns from our interviews with young people. When we ask them their best trait they are hard pressed for an answer, though they sometimes mention an ability to “get along well with everybody.” When we ask them, “What is your worst trait?” the most frequent single answer is “temper.” And when we go on to ask, “Is your temper, then, so bad?” it usually turns out that the interviewee has not got much of a temper. If we ask whether his temper has gotten him into much trouble, he can cite little evidence that it has. What may these answers—of course no proper sample— mean? My impression is that temper is considered the worst trait in the society of the glad hand. It is felt as an internal menace to one’s cooperative attitudes. Moreover, the peer-group regards rage and temper as faintly ridiculous: one must be able to take it with a smile or be charged with something even worse than temper, something no one will accuse himself of even in an interview—lack of a sense of humor. The inner-directed man may also worry about temper, for instance, if he is religious, but his conscience-stricken inhibitions and reaction-formations leave the emotion still alive, volcano-like, within him—often ready to erupt in political indignation—whereas the other-directed man allows or compels his emotions to heal, though not without leaving scars, in an atmosphere of enforced good fellowship and tolerance.

  Many young people today also set themselves an ideal in their sex lives not too different from the ZuÑi norm. They feel they ought to take sex with little interpersonal emotion and certainly without jealousy. The word of the wise to the young—“Don’t get involved”—has changed its meaning in a generation. Once it meant: don’t get, or get someone, pregnant; don’t run afoul of the law; don’t get in the newspapers. Today the injunction seeks to control the personal experiencing of emotion that might disrupt the camaraderie of the peer-group.

  The chief worry of the Pueblo Indians is directed not to each other’s behavior but to the weather, and their religious ceremonies are primarily directed toward rain-making. To quiet their anxiety the Indians go through rituals that must be letter
perfect. American young people have no such single ritual to assure personal or tribal success. However, one can see a similarity in the tendency to create rituals of a sort in all spheres of life. People make a ritual out of going to school, out of work, out of having fun, out of political participation as inside-dopesters or as indignants, as well as out of countless private compulsions. But the rituals, whether private or public, have usually to be rationalized as necessary; and since this is not self-evident and since the sign of success is not so explicit as a downpour of rain, the American young people can hardly get as much comfort from their rituals as the Pueblo Indians do from theirs.

  The young people who express the views I have described have begun to pass out of the adolescent peer-groups; they have not yet taken their places in the adult patterning of American life. What will be the effect of the discrepancy between their picture of the United States as a place led by Kwakiutl chiefs, leading Kwakiutl-style followers, and the reality of their progress along the “Hopi Way”? Will they seek to bring about changes, through social and political action, that will make America more comfortable for the tolerant, other-directed types? Or will they seek to adopt more ruthless, Kwakiutl-like behavior as supposedly more compatible with real life? Or, perchance, will they admit that they, too, are Americans, after all not so unique, which might require a revision of their images of power, their images of what Americans in general are like?

  Doubtless, all these things can occur, and many more. But there is perhaps one additional factor which will shape both changing ideology and changing character. The students, aware of their own repressed competitiveness and envy, think that others may try to do to them what they themselves would not dare to do to others. The society feels to them like Kwakiutl or even Dobu, not only because that is the ideology about America they have learned but also because their own cooperativeness is tinged with an antagonism they have not yet completely silenced. And perhaps this gives us an answer to a puzzle about other-directed tolerance: why, if the other-directed person is tolerant, is he himself so afraid of getting out of line? Can he not depend on the tolerance of others? It may be that he feels his own tolerance precarious, his dreadful temper ready to let fly when given permission; if he feels so irritable himself, no matter how mild his behavior, he must fear the others, no matter how amiable they, too, may appear.

  These students would prefer to live in the Pueblo culture, if they had to choose among the three described by Ruth Benedict. And, while this choice is in itself not to be quarreled with, the important fact is that they do not know that they already are living in such a culture. They want social security, not great achievements. They want approval, not fame. They are not eager to develop talents that might bring them into conflict; whereas the inner-directed young person tended to push himself to the limit of his talents and beyond. Few of them suffer, like youth in the earlier age, because they are “twenty, and so little accomplished.” Whereas the inner-directed middle-class boy often had to learn after twenty to adjust, to surrender his adolescent dreams and accept a burgher’s modest lot, the other-directed boy never had such dreams. Learning to conform to the group almost as soon as he learns anything, he does not face, at adolescence, the need to choose between his family’s world and that of his own generation or between his dreams and a world he never made.

  Since, moreover, his adjustment to reality as defined by the group begins earlier, it becomes more a matter of conforming character and less a matter of conforming behavior. The popular song, “I don’t want to set the world on fire,” expresses a typical theme. The Kwakiutl wanted to do just that, literally to set the world on fire. The other-directed person prefers love to glory. As Tocqueville saw, or foresaw: “He willingly takes up with low desires without daring to embark on lofty enterprises, of which he scarcely dreams.”

  There is a connection between the feeling these students and other young people have about their own fates and the contemporary notions of who runs the country. We have seen that the students feel themselves to be powerless, safe only when performing a ritual in approving company. Though they may seek to preserve emotional independence by not getting involved, this requirement is itself a peer-group mandate. How, then, as they look about them in America, do they explain their powerlessness? Somebody must have what they have not got: their powerlessness must be matched by power somewhere else. They see America as composed of Kwakiutls, not only because of their own residual and repressed Kwakiutl tendencies but even more because of their coerced cooperativeness. Some big chiefs must be doing this to them, they feel. They do not see that, to a great extent, it is they themselves who are doing it, through their own character.

  The chiefs have lost the power, but the followers have not gained it. The savage believes that he will secure more power by drinking the blood or shrinking the head of his enemy. But the other-directed person, far from gaining, only becomes weaker from the weakness of his fellows.

  PART III: AUTONOMY

  XII

  Adjustment or autonomy?

  Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayer said, by machinery—by automatons in human form—it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilized parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

  John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

  If the leaders have lost the power, why have the led not gained it? What is there about the character and the situation of the other-directed man which prevents the transfer? In terms of situation, it seems that the pattern of monopolistic competition of the veto groups resists individual attempts at aggrandizement. In terms of character, the other-directed man simply does not seek power; perhaps, rather, he avoids and evades it. If he happens to be an inside-dopester, he creates a formula that tells him where the power exists, and he seeks to make all the facts thereafter conform to this formula. In a sense, this means that he would rather be right than be president. His need to be in the know, his need for approval, his need in the upper strata for marginal differentiation, may lead to actions that look like a drive to get or hold power. But the fact is that the further away the inside-dopester is from inner-direction, the less is he ambitious, exploitative, and imperialistic. He expects some “others”—some Kwakiutl or Dobuan types—to be doing the exploiting. He fits himself as a minor manipulator, and self-manipulator, into the image he has of them.

  If the other-directed person does not seek power, then what does he seek? At the very least, he seeks adjustment. That is, he seeks to have the character he is supposed to have, and the inner experiences as well as outer appurtenances that are supposed to go with it. If he fails to attain adjustment, he becomes anomic—a term I shall define in a moment. At most, the other-directed man occasionally seeks to be autonomous.

  His opportunity to become autonomous lies precisely in the disparity that exists between the actual, objective pressures for conformity that are inescapable and the ritualistic pressures that spring not from the Kwakiutl-like institutions of America but from the increasingly other-directed character of its people. In other words, I do not believe that the social character evoked by today’s social structure, namely, the other-directed character, is a perfect replica of that social structure, called into being by its demands.

  I. The Adjusted, the Anomic, the Autonomous

  How, one may well ask, is it possible that a large group of influential people in a society should develop a character-structure more constricted than the society’s institutions require? One
answer is to look at history and to see that earlier institutional inevitabilities tend to perpetuate themselves in ideology and character, operating through all the subtle mechanisms of character formation discussed in the earlier chapters of Part I. By the same token, disparities between social character and adult social role can be among the important leverages of social change. It is too simple to say that character structure lags behind social structure: as any element in society changes, all other elements must also change in form or function or both. But in a large society such as the American there is room for disparities, and hence for individuals to choose different modes of reconciliation. In the upper-income strata in America, many of the pressures which individuals feel spring from their shared interpretations of what is necessary to get along. As soon as one or two in a group emancipate themselves from these interpretations, without their work or their world coming to an end, others, too, may find the courage to do so. In that case, character will change in consonance with the altered interpretations of conditions.

  In asking where the one or two innovators may come from, we must remember that social character is not all of character. The individual is capable of more than his society usually asks of him, though it is not at all easy to determine this, since potentialities may be hidden not only from others but from the individual himself.