Charles A. Reich
American legal and social scholar as well as author who was a Professor at Yale Law School when he wrote the 1970 paean to the 1960s counterculture and youth movement, The Greening of America.
Liberals placed an unreasonable amount of faith in large institutions: unions, foundations, big government, large corporations, and universities. These institutions are based on principles that are antithetical to democracy. They are not democratic, they are hierarchical: Someone is at the top and everybody else is at the bottom. Their policies are not made democratically, they are made at the top. These institutions are also not egalitarian. They operate by administrative discretion and authority, not the rule of law: There is no legislature, no group lawmaking body.
The individual in the large organization does not have the kind of constitutional rights that an individual in the society at large has. There are no protections of autonomy and free speech. Employees can be fired for many reasons. We need to constitutionalize large organizations to protect the people within them, to ensure that they can be politically outspoken.
I see self-destruction now on a grand scale. That is, the unwillingness to pay for the things society needs. That's the most basic kind of self-destruction. That we're not prepared to pay for schools, we're not prepared to pay for highways. That is self-destruction. What are we doing to ourselves? It is nuts.
The crucial fact to realize about all the powerful machinery of the Corporate State — its laws, structure, political system — is that it possesses no mind.
What we need is a concept of "gross national cost." Life is a balance sheet, not simply economic growth. It is income and outgo. And until we know what the cost of growth is we will continue to operate under an illusion. As long as we consider only the growth of goods and ignore the growth of personal and community well-being, we will be impoverished by growth. That is what is happening in our society today.
No person's gain in wisdom is diminished by anyone else's gain.
The machine itself has begun to do the work of revolution. The State is now generating forces that will accomplish what no revolutionaries could accomplish by themselves.
The logic and necessity of the new generation — and what they are so furiously opposed to — must be seen against a background of what has gone wrong in America. It must be understood in light of the betrayal and loss of the American dream, the rise of the Corporate State of the 1960's, and the way in which that State dominates, exploits, and ultimately destroys both nature and man. Its rationality must be measured against the insanity of existing "reason" — reason that makes impoverishment, dehumanization, and even war appear to be logical and necessary. Its logic must be read from the fact that Americans have lost control of the machinery of their society, and only new values and a new culture can restore control. Its emotions and spirit can be comprehended only by seeing contemporary America through the eyes of the new generation.
One of the problems with fame … is they try to pigeonhole you… like I’m stuck with The Greening of America for the rest of my life.
We seem to be living in a society that no one created and that no one wants.
Nothing makes us angrier than the fear that some pleasure is being enjoyed by others but forever denied to us.
Innocence and optimism have one basic failing: they have no fundamental depth.
The corporate state is an immensely powerful machine, ordered, legalistic, rational, yet utterly out of human control, wholly and perfectly indifferent to any human values.
Marx saw exploitation in terms of the rewards of human labor, but we can see it in terms of all the values of our society.
The great crime of our time, says Vonnegut, was to do too much good secretly, too much harm openly.
What is lacking today is that people are not in any way experimenting with a different way to live, a different way to feel, a different way to be.
The things that troubled young people in the '60s and the things that trouble young people today seem quite different, in the sense that the troubles today are mostly material trouble — I can't get a job; I can't support a family; whereas the complaints in the 1960s were more spiritual — I don't feel like a real person, or something like that. However, they are related.
Whether you're complaining about spiritual emptiness or material emptiness, you're ultimately complaining about the same system that's creating both kinds of emptiness. That's the link between The Greening of America of 40 years ago and the way young people are feeling today.
To the American people of 1789, their nation promised a new way of life: each individual a free man; each having the right to seek his own happiness; a republican form of government in which the people would be sovereign; and no arbitrary power over people's lives. Less than two hundred years later, almost every aspect of the dream has been lost.
It gave people a great leap of hope, made people feel good. This was a world that could get better, a whole lot better. I might say to those who stuck with it in some way or other they will still swear by the values of the '60s.
We do not see it because we can not afford to-because the truth is too explosive.
Technology has deprived the family of almost all its functions.
A work of art is not valued because it changes itself for each person who views it, it retains its own integrity and thus means something unique and marvelous to those who see it.