[386] with respect to the time which is given to them and which now COULD be used by them. The industrial^a way has another side, namely the commercial side. This side has the problem of competition. When I spoke of objectivation, and mass society, I again come down to a question which is in all our minds, named competition. I don’t speak about competition in terms of the hostility which it produces--the Business School, which has asked me to have discussions with them about ethical problems in relation to business, they feel that the ethical

problem is only one of them--the hostility against the successful competitor, or the use of immoral means of competition, and all this. But there is another problem involved in it, namely the conformism, the mass society^b, which is created by competition. In order to be a successful seller, you must adapt yourselves to the rules of the game, namely to the customer who is "always right." And if you are a salesman, in the more noble sense of the chief executive of a big concern, or a salesman like the man whose death is described in this famous play [Death of a Salesman], who lives on the road all the time, and has only one principle: to play the customer in order to sell--then you are depersonalized. This depersonalization is the tragic implication of that play, whose tremendous success seems to me based on the fact that so many

people in our competitive society felt hit by it. Personality^c has to be sold, so to speak, in order to sell. You cannot sell as long as you have maintained your creative personality; the adaptation to the norms of the game, of competition, are tremendous. And this refers not only to the salesman on the street, it also refers to the four million chief executives who have to conform themselves like the man in Point of No Return. This famous novel, which also was in a movie--there you can