'I never told her about the Depression. She would have worried.'
Amidst all the endlessly tedious media hoopla over Ted Kennedy’s death, I heard one good anecdote. During a period when Kennedy was being attacked by an opponent for never having worked a day in his life, he supposedly visited an ironworks factory where he was accosted by a labourer who asked him: “Is it true you’ve never worked a day in your life?” As Kennedy hemmed and hawed, the labourer said: “Believe me, you ain’t missed a thing.”
Which in turn reminds me of the anecdote about Queen Victoria, who supposedly said: “It must be fun to work, because it’s so much fun to watch other people work.”
Which reminds me yet further of an old New Yorker cartoon of an obviously wealthy woman lounging contentedly while, nearby, her husband (or perhaps lover) is telling a friend: “I never told her about the Depression. She would have worried.”
I don’t mean that it offers any deep moral or political message; it certainly doesn’t. But on the one hand, its relentless skewering of the corporate ethos will be welcome to mutualists and agorists; as one Amazon reviewer puts it:
Although the business world has changed quite a bit since 1967, SUCCEED is so dead-on with its attack that even modern corporate leaders will be bloodied from the fray. The company is just large enough so that no one knows what is actually going on, leadership cries out for creative solutions then promptly fires anyone who shows a talent for it, and promotion doesn’t hinge so much upon ability as it does upon sucking up, backstabbing, and looking like you know what you’re doing.
And on the other hand, the chief protagonist – an unscrupulous boyish charmer who oozes his way up the corporate ladder through a combination of flattery, dissimulation, and betrayal despite having no actual qualifications for any of the jobs he’s given – is such a perfect avatar of Ayn Rand’s Peter Keating that even the Randians should enjoy it. (Incidentally, Rand’s portrayal of the business world in The Fountainhead seems so much closer to Kevin Carson’s vision than to George Reisman’s that it’s a wonder the orthodox Randians haven’t denounced her as an anticapitalist.)
A few clips:
1. Here’s the head of the mail room explaining the secret to surviving in the corporate culture:
2. Here’s the sycophantic, Keatingesque protagonist trying to schmooze his boss by pretending to share his alma mater and knitting habit:
3. Here’s the protagonist giving himself a narcissistic pep talk in the executive washroom:
4. And here’s the finale, where the protagonist, reformed from his backstabbing ways, nevertheless manages to put his reformation over as though it were one more con, suggesting that the distinction between sincerity and marketing has become blurred even introspectively:
