ABSTRACT
The problem of the individual who loses his identity in the mass is a typical problem of the modern world. There is much talk of the huge overgrown institutions, of governments that are bureaucratic because they are too big, of corporations that are impersonal because their operations are so large. Historians and editorial writers indeed have long been busy recording and deprecating the submergence of the individual in the mass. In assembly lines, the advanced sectors of a rationalized and standardized economy, technology affects the individual as an added force, and a very impressive one, on the side of the impersonal, of the de-individualized, of the non-human. In any organization the function of the front-line leader is to mediate between the rigidities and impersonalities of command and the infinite variety of human nature. Those who experience compulsions which are non-human or mechanical are apt to accuse the agents of these compulsions of themselves being inhuman.
