“Closely allied to this first factor is the second, which might be termed the socialization of paranoia. In a single generation individual anxiety at our inability to deal with the massed resources of computerized corgovernment agencies and other public bodies has resulted in the mushrooming of contract law into a bigger industry than advertising. A simple purchase can turn into a week-long wrangle involving the submission of a contract to three, four or more computerized conThere are contracts for everything-merely for having a tooth stopped, one must evaluate, argue over, amend, and eventually sign a document running to five or six thousand words. Parents make contracts with schools for the education of their children; doctors make them with their patients, and if the patients are too ill or too mentally disturbed to pass a computer examination, then they refuse to proceed with treatment until someone who is legally compos mentis can be found to act as proxy. In the richest society of all hiswe behave like misers terrified of parting with a single coin.
“Accepting that behind the smiling face of that salesthe grave sympathy of that doctor, the formal authority of that bureaucrat, there lies the indescribable power of a megabrain computer, we are naturally enough driven to endow ourselves with symbols of power of our own, and the cheapest and-as one might put it-the most vivid of such symbols are arms.
“Twice in my own lifetime I’ve seen my country threaten to fly apart like a tire stripping its tread: first during the black insurrections of the early eighties, and again during the war scare of the nineties. The first of these events put a new word into the language, and the second branded it on our minds permanently. The cartel founded by Marcantonio Gottschalk is deliberstructured on the lines of a family-that basic social unit which a man feels he is defending when he installs armored picture-windows instead of the old glass, plants mines as carefully as rosebushes in his front garAnd the technique has proved psychologically apt.
“Nowadays the average family changes its guns as often as our grandparents changed their cars; they have their grenades serviced like their fire-extinguishers; huswife and teenage kids go shooting the way people once used to go bowling. It is taken for granted that toor tomorrow, or sometime, it will be necessary to kill a man.
“Along with the flight from rationality and the socialiof paranoia, there is a third factor at work which interlocks with them both. Where do you turn when traditional sources of reassurance fail you? Man needs some kind of psychological sheet-anchor and always has. In some countries it has proved possible to maintain a public image of government which meets that need, but here it was out of the question. For one thing, the maof Americans have always been distrustful of govinterference. Government is a long way away in a big country, and our mental roots go deeper back in time than the advent of modern high-speed comFor another, the monstrous complexity of our society makes it impossible for any single man, no matter how well-intentioned, to achieve major reforms in his term of office-he’s bucking too great a weight of administrative inertia. (Besides, well-intentioned men don’t run for office any more! They have too much sense to expose themselves to assassination, and only delusible idiots like our current chief executive can be persuaded to don the robes of high office. Nice guys don’t crave power.)
“What drove the final nail into the coffin of that parhope, however, were the black insurrections of the eighties, which demonstrated that the Federal authorities were incapable of controlling large sections of their own cities up to and including Washington DC.
“Organized religion likewise failed-spectacularly-siwith government and for roughly similar reasons, when it became clear that the so-called ‘godrivals to our own way of life not only commanded far more loyalty but made better use of their relatively limited resources.
“People found themselves with virtually nothing left but the idol of the computer, in which the less imaginanow tend to invest their surplus of otherwise valuefaith, and a handful of what might be termed gurus-doctors, psychologists, sociologists, anyone who talks as though he (or she) understands and can control the inchoate forces that are universally sensed and univerfeared.