Word: bureaucrats
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...negotiator, Philip Charles Habib, 49, a career diplomat from Brooklyn who has been with the talks since they started. He bridges the shift from Averell Harriman to Lodge as head of the delegation and seems to have the right temperament for staying with the dull proceedings. "I am a bureaucrat," he says without apology. "I am supposed to implement directives...
...Ingmar Bergman awoke from a tortured sleep, seized a camera and began to film what he had just been dreaming. Reality is distorted and logic becomes madness in The Ritual, Bergman's most nightmarish fantasy since The Silence. In the claustrophobic office of some anonymous bureaucrat, three actors (Ingrid Thulin, Anders Ek and Gunnar Böornstrand) perform a bizarre masque, part psychodrama, part sexual charade. They are like the mummers from The Seventh Seal or the circus performers from The Naked Night imprisoned in an allegory of doom. Inevitably the object of the masque is death...
...inside job, done by a government's own members. It involves minimal manpower and bloodshed. As in judo, the secret is to use leverage and make a state overthrow itself. Bureaucracy facilitates this by severing the loyalties that once personally bound rulers and their servants. A modern bureaucrat follows impersonal orders; if his immediate boss is subverted, the bureaucrat tends to obey orders blindly, even orders designed to topple his own government...
MODERN BUREAUCRACIES, like modern factories, require workers who can be counted on to behave in certain ways. The bureaucrat must respect authority, be compulsively punctual, and conform easily to various standards of dress, speech and behavior. The bureaucrat's subservience to his superiors must be combined with an intense competitiveness in his relations with his peers. And most importantly, the bureaucrat must be motivated primarily by his desire for a reward (money, status, prestige) which is external to the work process itself. Like the industrial worker, the bureaucrat is useless to his masters unless he is economically "rational". This means...
...important problem, and one that is not yet near to being resolved. But there do seem to be some grounds for expecting that alienation is not a necessary feature of all industrial society. The various aspects of alienation all reflect the central fact that a modern industrial worker or bureaucrat performs his work for someone else's benefit. The work situation does not present him with a goal that he personally values. If a worker controlled his own equipment, if he knew that he was to receive the full value of his work, if he were permitted to determine...