But in the early 1920s, when Calvin Coolidge said, “The
business of America is business,” hardly anyone disagreed. The
idea of public virtue had been overtaken by special interests,
which today are often replaced by individual concerns. Some in
America have devolved into what Robert Bellah and his co-
authors describe in their book, Habits of the Heart, as “a permis-
sive, therapeutic culture... which urges a strenuous effort to
make our particular segment of life a small world of its own.”
Battered by the economic uncertainty of the last decade,
many people have retreated into their electronic castles, work-
ing at home and communicating with the world via computers
and cell phones. They mediate their human contacts through
their personal digital assistants, ordering movies from Netflix
and reheating take-out Thai in the microwave. Some would
rather Instant Message than speak. Some prefer virtual reality
to what lies outside the front door. A few spend so much time
romancing other people’s avatars in Second Life that their
spouses call their divorce lawyers. Many have two kinds of
friends—the ones they actually know and the ones ostenta-
tiously listed on their Facebook page. Cocooning has entered
the digital age.
The United States stock market has imploded twice in this
young century, erasing trillions of dollars of wealth in the
process. But the gap between the rich and the poor in the
United States remains dangerously wide. The American middle
class, which once trusted in its future because of swollen 401(k)s
and soaring home equity, has been devastated by the recent
crash. Growing numbers of have-nots and have-too- littles
worry daily about the skyrocketing cost of health care, ignoring
symptoms and splitting pills. Afraid of another Great Depres-
sion, some Americans cling to jobs they hate, fearful that their
On Becoming a Leader