Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

194 What To Make of Itexclusion of things of mind and spirit. To the classicalGreek values—the true, the good, and the beautiful—hegives hardly a thought, so fully engaging are his lesser andcorrupt materialistic values.He is small-minded, petty in calculation of advantage.He is more cunning than thoughtful or wise. He thinks invidiously.His moral code, insofar as he follows one, consistsless of the rules of good conduct derived from theGreek-Judeo-Christian or Eastern traditions than of theself-serving rules of an aggressive game.He is an egoist, yet not skillfully so. His narrow pursuitof market advantage makes him crass and shallow. He is insensitiveto the costs to himself and his family of the patternof living he has chosen or drifted into. He does not recognizehis loneliness, nor how difficult he finds it to think“we” instead of “I.” Of all participants in the market system,entrepreneurs most fully engage in it and hence mostfully take on these attributes of character. Who admires nottheir achievements but their character?I recognize the portrait. But granted that it is a face oftenencountered, is it typical? And if typical, typical of what?Not necessarily of the market system; perhaps typical ofthe urban man in industrialized societies, market system ornot. The portrait expresses the painters’ disdain for someugly aspects of modern life that they may not have carefullytraced to their sources.What the critics, for all their insights, do not know—andnobody yet knows—about the connection between theirportrait and the market system reduces my ambitions inthis chapter. We do not know enough to conclude that themarket system does or does not degrade personality or culture.But with a sample of allegations we can begin to showthat the critics have brewed an inconclusive mix of percep-