Buying In - (Page 31) buying in 31 lies on the wrong side of individuality: conformity. It is the dread thing. Nobody wants to be like the vacant man in the gray flannel suit of Sloan Wilson’s famous 1950s novel or one of the real-life conformists William Whyte fretted were being created by the “pressures of society against the individual” during the same period in his book The Organization Man. What’s odd about the ongoing resistance to gray flannel culture is that, as a practical matter, it disappeared long ago. As writer Alan Ehrenhalt has noted, The Organization Man “mistook the end of something for the beginning of something” and documented what was, in effect, “the last act in a long period of national cohesion.” And indeed, decades of the apparently societywide “togetherness” that Whyte described, from the Depression through World War II and into the 1950s, have been followed by decades of not-so-togetherness. In the influential 2000 book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam made the case that since the late 1960s there has been a marked decline of “social capital,” which he defined this way: “connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.” He argued that useful sites of social capital, such as civic groups and other forms of traditional community that were central to American life for much of the twentieth century—from Parent-Teacher Associations to casual card games among neighbors—have gradually and steadily withered away. On the very first page of Bowling Alone, the national membership director of one service organization sums it all up concisely: “Kids today,” he states, “just aren’t joiners.” Meanwhile, the veneration of the individual has been a major theme of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and, still, today. Each era makes the case in a slightly different way, while
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