The Organization Man

CHAPTER 19 Love That System

CHAPTER 19 Love That System IF YOU WANTED TO PUT IN FICfiON FORM THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE Protestant Ethic and the Social Ethic of organization life, you might, if you wanted to be extreme about it, come up with a plot situation something like this. A middle-management executive is in a spot of trouble. He finds that the small branch plant he's helping to run is very likely to blow up. There is a way to save it: if he presses a certain button the explosion will be averted. Unfortunately, however, just as he's about to press a button his boss heaves into view. The boss is a scoundrel and a fool, and at this moment he's so scared he is almost incoherent. Don't press the button, he says. The middle-management man is no rebel and he knows that the boss, stupid as he is, represents The Organization. Still, he would like to save everyone's life. Thus his dilemma: if he presses the button he will not be acting like a good organization man and the plant will be saved. If he doesn't press it he will be a good organization man and they will all be blown to smithereens. A damn silly dilemma, you might say. Almost exactly this basic problem, however, is the core of the biggest-selling novel of the postwar period, Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, and rarely has a novel so touched a contemporary nerve. Much of its success, of course, was due to the fact it is a rattling good tale, and even if the author had ended it differently it would still probably have been a success. But it is the moral overtones that have made it compelling . Here, raised to the nth degree, is the problem of the individual versus authority, and the problem is put so that no reader can duck it. There is no "Lady or the Tiger" ending. We must, with the author, make a choice, and a choice that is presented as an ultimately moral one. The boldness of it makes The Caine Mutiny something of a landmark in the shift of American values. Popular fiction in general, as I will take up in the next chapter, has been going in the same 24.'1 244 THE ORGANIZATION MAN direction for a long time, and The Caine Mutiny is merely evolutionary in this respect. But it is franker; unlike most popular fare, it does not sugar-coat the precept to adjustment by trapping it up with the words of individualism. It is explicit. Author Wouk puts his protagonist in a dilemma and, through rigorous plotting, eliminates any easy middle course. The protagonist must do what he thinks is right or do what the system thinks is right. The man caught in the dilemma is one the reader can identify himself with. He is Lieutenant Maryk, the executive officer of the mine sweeper Caine. Maryk is no scoffer, hut a stolid, hard-working man who just wants to do his job well. He likes the system and all his inclinations lead him to seek a career in the Regular navy. Ordinarily he would lead an uneventful, productive life. The ship of which he is executive officer, however, is commanded by a psychopath named Queeg. At first Maryk stubbornly resists the warnings about Queeg voiced by Lieutenant Keefer, an ex-writer. But slowly the truth dawns on him, and in a series of preliminary incidents the author leaves no doubt in Maryk's-or the reader'smind that Queeg is in fact a bully, a neurotic, a coward, and what is to he most important of all, an incompetent. In many similar instances subordinates have found ways to protect themselves without overtly questioning the system-they can make requests for mass transfer and thereby discipline the superior, control him by mass blackmail, and the like. Wouk, however, proceeds to build a climax in which such reconciliations are impossible . He places the Caine in the midst of a typhoon. Terrified, Queeg turns the ship south, so that it no longer heads into the wind. Maryk pleads with him to keep it headed into the wind as their only chance for survival. Queeg, now virtually jabbering with fear, refuses to tum the ship around into the wind. The ship is on the verge of foundering. What shall Maryk do? If he does nothing he is certain that they are all lost. If he...