Bug-Infested
IN twenty years it will be 1984. If Mr. Packard is to be believed it is already 1984 in the United States, with Big Brother, transistorised and micro- miniaturised, watching you and eavesdropping on you from the toilet-paper dispenser, from under- neath the restaurant table, and even through the olive in your Martini (with the stick as antenna!). Your business acquaintance may be photograph- ing you through the bottom of his cigarette- lighter as he puts it to the tip of the cigar you just bought him. Your high-school pupils may have 'bugged' your desk to record any contro- versial comments made in class. Your boss may have commissioned the Burns Agency to dig into your past, to make clandestine visits to your home, to investigate your family life, perhaps to give you a lie-detector test.
If this all sounds like a large-scale practical joke in slightly bad taste, or even just another piece of book-making by Vance 'Hidden Per- suaders' Packard. the Appendix on the Bill of Rights, the ten original amendments to the
American Constitution, restores the perspective. In spite of the somewhat lightweight treatment (the book cannot be accused of depth) and the journalistic documentation, or perhaps even be- cause of it, The Naked Society has an alarming authenticity.
But the agencies who install hidden television cameras in loading bays to watch for pilferage, who spy on business conferences with 'machine gun' microphones, who compile and sell elabor- ately detailed dossiers on prospective employees, who send teams of polygraph operators (lie- detectors) into firms and government offices to screen a sample of clerical 'workers or civil ser- vants are not criminal master-minds nor sinister government undercover officers, they are com- mercial organisations selling a service that Ameri- can society wants and is willing to pay for.
Rightly, Mr. Packard is concerned about the liberty of the individual which, apparently, is threatened as never before in the land of liberty itself. It is not simply that McCarthyism is not dead and that the gravest of social sins is to acquire the label of 'extreme liberal'; conformism and its cult go much further than that. In his chapter 'How to Strip a Job-Seeker Naked,' Mr. Packard demonstrates the narrow-mindedness of the big corporation .management in search of promising young executives.
True, as Vance Packard observes, such com- panies are liable to end up with an impressive collection of fatheaded yes-men. But US Govern- ment departments like the Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service are almost as importu- nate, impertinent and intrusive. What redress has the would-be private citizen got? In a melan- choly closing chapter the author instructs him to hold his confidential conversations beside a radio with the volume turned up, to band together with his fellow citizens to secure legislation out- lawing this organised spying, to refuse to talk to doorstep investigators, to send back question- naires and other reply-paid mail unopened. But it all seems mighty feeble alongside the great Constitution turned upside-down.
ANDREW ROBERTSON
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