376 Chapter Te nfered no solution, short of all-out attack on the north, or a level of
destruction in the south that would have destroyed most of the human
beings whose liberties the United States claimed to defend.
Moreover, as Vietnamese feeling solidified against the invaders,
American opinion at home divided more and more sharply as to the
justice and wisdom of armed intervention in Vietnam. Distrust of the
military, of high technology, and of the administrative-academic-
military-industrial elites that had guided the American response to
Sputnik became widespread. The high hopes and brash self-confidence
with which the American government had launched its adventure into
space in the 1960s evaporated, leaving a sour taste behind. Large
numbers of young people espoused some form of counterculture,
deliberately repudiating the patterns of social management that had
attained such heights during and after World War II.
In extreme forms, their rebellion was suicidal, as many drug-takers’
shortened lives showed. It was also ineffective in inventing viable
alternatives to bureaucratic, corporate management. Cheap, mass-
produced goods required flow-through technology which only large-
scale bureaucratically managed corporations could sustain; and a world
safe for such behemoths must presumably regulate their interactions
bureaucratically as well. Spontaneity, personal independence, and
small group solidarity against outsiders have very limited scope in such
a society. But the material impoverishment that thoroughgoing return
to any of these older values and patterns of behavior entailed was a far
higher price than most of the rebels were prepared to pay.
Nevertheless, flow-through technologies remained extremely vul
nerable to disruption. The factory efficiency that cheapened costs of
production required precise coordination of many subsidiary flows.
Interruptions anywhere along the line turned efficiency into its oppo
site very quickly. Discontented and disaffected groups, if appropri
ately organized, could therefore obstruct the industrial process easily
enough, as successful strikes since the 1880s had demonstrated more
than once.
On the other hand, the price of survival for even the most incandes-
cently revolutionary group was the generation of its own power-
wielding internal bureaucracy. And bureaucratically organized revo
lutionaries, if genuinely powerful, found themselves swiftly coopted
into the labyrinthine tasks of state management. The public life of
Germany and Great Britain since World War I exhibited these com
pulsions quite clearly; but the Soviet Union carried the bureaucratic
transmutation of protest into governance to a kind of logical comple-