Page 59 - The Drucker Lectures

40 [ The Drucker Lectures

wasn’t enough work to do and certainly not enough pay to be a
full-time governor. Perhaps there is something to be said for this
simple society.
My point to you is that we don’t see as a rule that all our so-
cial tastes are these days being discharged in and through large
organizations. I am sure, for instance, that when you read the
title of my talk today, you thought that I was going to talk about
business. But this managed organization is a general phenom-
enon. We just don’t yet see that way.
The only ones to understand our society fully are the “hip-
pies.” You may not particularly approve of them (and I am an
old-fashioned believer in soap and hot water), but at least they
realize that it isn’t this organization or that organization. They
realize that they are surrounded by organizations—and they are
against all of them. Philosophical anarchism is a defensible posi-
tion in theory. The only trouble with it is it never works. This
one isn’t going to work either. The reaction of the “hippies” is
purely negative, and it isn’t going to get them any place except
into trouble. Still, they at least see reality.
It is not coincidence that the rebellions against the organiza-
tion of the last few years have been against organizations that
nobody had seen before as big bureaucratic machines. I’m think-
ing of the rebellion of the bishops of the Catholic Church against
the Roman bureaucracy at the Vatican Council, which came
quite unexpectedly, and the rebellion of the students against the
University of California.
Nobody ever thought of those as “institutions” before. It was
always big business or big government that was considered the “oc-
topus,” depending on whether you are a Democrat or a Republican.
But we always saw one institution and believed the rest of society
was to be essentially free of them. This is not true anymore.
We have to learn to see the reality of a society in which even
the YMCA is a big institution, and a powerful one, and a bu-