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Corporate life can be traumatic sometimes. I can only imagine how employees at IBM felt and they were asked to sing one of these songs.

FooBarBizBazz 6y ago
Given that IBM had saved them from the Depression, and given the way people in those days formed voluntary civic associations -- probably a lot of them fell in earnestly with the crowd. I think company loyalty was real. You worked there your whole life and retired with a pension. (And things like forming a large congregation and singing were not alien to these people. Most of them did that every Sunday. Which itself is remarkable. The only other global religion that comes close to this level of collective mass-participation is Islam. It's built into the architecture of the different religions' temples! Who else has row upon row of pews?! I digress...) (Even sports teams! You see remnants of this too, with older people being avid fans of their city's baseball or football team... yet to a younger person this is at best a marker of low class and at worst a kind of prelude to authoritarian populism... The collective political protest is the one ritual coming-together we really have...) (Or college "fight songs" and the like? Most again are from, I'd say, 1920-1940...) Anyway... Surely there was, at the same time, self-interested scheming -- John goes home to his wife Betty, and they talk about how they really need to invite the Joneses over for dinner (because Mr. Jones is John's supervisor), and by the way you should really make sure your shoes are polished, John, because what will other people think? I don't know if the more cynical or at least individualistic mood really took off until after the war, with people like Vonnegut (Player Piano is basically about IBM), Heller, and so on. Mostly I think these were depression-era people, and depression-era people were grateful for a job. If you have relatives still around from that time (or who were children at the start of WW2), you might still see a little of this attitude.

FooBarBizBazz 6y ago

Given that IBM had saved them from the Depression, and given the way people in those days formed voluntary civic associations -- probably a lot of them fell in earnestly with the crowd. I think company loyalty was real. You worked there your whole life and retired with a pension. (And things like forming a large congregation and singing were not alien to these people. Most of them did that every Sunday. Which itself is remarkable. The only other global religion that comes close to this level of collective mass-participation is Islam. It's built into the architecture of the different religions' temples! Who else has row upon row of pews?! I digress...) (Even sports teams! You see remnants of this too, with older people being avid fans of their city's baseball or football team... yet to a younger person this is at best a marker of low class and at worst a kind of prelude to authoritarian populism... The collective political protest is the one ritual coming-together we really have...) (Or college "fight songs" and the like? Most again are from, I'd say, 1920-1940...) Anyway... Surely there was, at the same time, self-interested scheming -- John goes home to his wife Betty, and they talk about how they really need to invite the Joneses over for dinner (because Mr. Jones is John's supervisor), and by the way you should really make sure your shoes are polished, John, because what will other people think? I don't know if the more cynical or at least individualistic mood really took off until after the war, with people like Vonnegut (Player Piano is basically about IBM), Heller, and so on. Mostly I think these were depression-era people, and depression-era people were grateful for a job. If you have relatives still around from that time (or who were children at the start of WW2), you might still see a little of this attitude.