Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Personality and Culture 205quacy of law rather than the inadequacy of market system.One might also believe that we are seeing in these countriesnothing more than the displacement of elites, who practicedthese abuses quietly, by new elites, who are noisy inseizing places for themselves. Notwithstanding these andother reassuring interpretations of the sorry spectacle, wemay indeed now be seeing a sample of the worst consequencesof market life for personality and culture. In the establishedmarket systems, similar consequences may beobscured yet no less damaging. We do not know, but thepossibility is too dismaying to be ignored.Less flamboyant corruption in established market systems,some critics say, has come to be protected by an ethicalcode, a set of moral rules that tries to justify it. Marketsystems, they say, are governed by a code of conduct thatrepresents a constant attack on and erosion of those beliefsand attitudes necessary to humane civilized society. Fromancient Greece through the Judeo-Christian tradition, aswell as through other cultural traditions, the best mindshave taught the virtues of compassion, charity, conscientiousness,love, and social responsibility. Market ethics insteadapplauds gain, looking after only one’s self and family,competing and winning, with social responsibility and charityonly at one’s convenience. In the great tradition, goodsociety is a community. In the ethics of competition, it is acontest. In the former, one is asked to “love thy neighbor.”In the latter, one has no neighbors, not even the family inthe adjacent apartment on the same floor.The market ethic, so the argument goes, does not simplyjustify an indifference to the welfare of others. At leastsome of its adherents go further, as in the novels of AynRand, to celebrate the positive virtues of greed. It does notsimply justify an executive in firing employees in a down-