We have been taught that institutions are necessary to provide for peace, order, and coordination; and yet our society is filled with discord, agony, and violence. We are aware that institutions have failed to provide their promised harmony. What is not so familiar to us is the role institutions have played in generating the personal and social conflict that permeates our lives. I recall how, as a child, I would stand by the kitchen table and help my mother make sugar cookies. I enjoyed most those human-shaped characters I have since come to refer to as ‘cookie cutter people.’ The pleasure I derived from my cookie cutter people was not unlike that realized by the manipulators of real people. I could fashion a limitless supply of ideal people who met my most arbitrary of expectations. I was my own trinity of God, philosopher king, and social planner, capable of continuing my progressive programs as long as the dough held out. Can we learn how to organize ourselves into groups without creating social Frankensteins; how to work and play and help one another without institutions, without politics, organizational hierarchies, rules and regulations, conflict, and all the other trappings of what we are fond of calling modern civilizations?

REVIEW:

After years of failed 'class analysis,' psychobabble, political gobbledygook, and consultant doubletalk, there is at last a book that examines the way our world works on the basis of the way it is organized, its hierarchical managerial systems. This is essential reading for everyone who is aware that those systems are now strained as never before and more likely to change than ever before.

                                                   Karl Hess, author of Dear America