The History of Magnum Opus, Incorporated - Kurt Vonnegut

More gold from The Sirens of Titan. In this passage, Vonnegut chronicles the meeting between Noel Constant (father of Malaki Constant) and Ransom K. Fern. Plenty of choice quotes in here on all the bullshit in business with my favorite being, "Noel Constant was so impressed by this monument to hypocrisy and sharp practice that he wanted to buy stock in it without even referring to his Bible."

 I really dig the names he comes up with too.

"Ransom K. Fern is the name," he said. 

"I had a professor in the Harvard Business School," said young Fern to Noel Constant, "who kept telling me that I was smart, but that I would have to find my boy , if I was going to be rich. He wouldn't explain what he meant. He said I would catch on sooner or later. I asked him how I could go looking for my boy, and he suggested that I work for the Bureau of Internal Revenue for a year or so.  

"When I went over your tax returns, Mr. Constant, it suddenly came to me what it was he meant. He meant I was shrewd and thorough, but I wasn't remarkably lucky. I had to find somebody who had luck in an  astonishing degree — and so I have."

"Why should I pay you two thousand dollars a week?" said Noel Constant. "You see my facilities and my staff here, and you know what I've done with them."

"Yes — " said Fern, "and I can show you where you should have made two hundred million where you made only fifty-nine. You know absolutely nothing about corporate law or tax law — or even commonsense business procedure." 

Fern thereupon proved this to Noel Constant, father of Malachi — and Fern showed him an organizational plan that had the name Magnum Opus, Incorporated. It was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance.

Noel Constant was so impressed by this monument to hypocrisy and sharp practice that he wanted to buy stock in it without even referring to his Bible. 

"Mr. Constant, sir," said young Fern, "don't you understand? Magnum Opus is you, with you as chairman of the board, with me as president.  

"Mr. Constant," he said, "right now you're as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats — men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine. In the Magnum Opus Building, we will have thousands of them! And you and I can have the top two stories, and you can go on keeping track of what's really going on the way you do now." 

Just bought Hocus Pocus and I cant wait to tear through it. Should have plenty of time on the way to/from Philly. Got tickets to the Roots picnic!

The History of Tralfamadorians - Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is a satirical mad genius. Every time that I pick up one of his books, I find (with startling regularity) passages that sum up the insane structures we take for granted without a second thought. To use someone else's words; we have no choice, but to laugh in self-defense.

Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren't anything like machines. They weren't dependable. They weren't efficient. They weren't predictable. They weren't durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others. 

These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame. 

And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn't high enough. 

So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too. 

And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be. 

The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn't really be said to have any purpose at all. 

The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else. 

And they discovered that they weren't even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, "Tralfamadore."

- Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan (Ch. 12)