ABSTRACT
In Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, he reminds us of the passage in Plato where Socrates describes an apparition that appeared to him in a dream and said, “Socrates, practice music.” According to Nietzsche, this was a deathbed conversion for Socrates to a kind of wisdom different from the wisdom he had practiced all his life. Nietzsche thought that Socrates’ vision was of the “lyrical.” Once the necessity of cheating has insinuated itself into the thinking of capitalists, the image of businessman/citizen gives way to images of the businessman as warrior, as survivor in the jungle, and as ruthless competitor. The last thirty years of corporate excess, scandal, and destructiveness has led business schools and organizations like the Business Roundtable to try to promote business ethics. Economists claim that a competitive market provides for a “world of truth” because it makes clear basic information about taste, resource availability, and productive possibilities, and all through the mechanism of “price.”.
