Modus operandi

“ It is, therefore, with no unwarranted fear of being taken for a madman at the outset, and before I can bring my propositions fairly to the eye of those who alone are competent to decide upon them, that I here declare the modus operandi of the Law of Gravity to be an exceedingly simple and perfectly explicable thing—that is to say, when we make our advances towards it in just gradations and in the true direction—when we regard it from the proper point of view. ”

“ It has, as a third matter, long been an article of faith that any hacker caught can escape serious punishment if he confesses HOW HE DID IT. Hackers seem to believe that governmental agencies and large corporations are blundering about in cyberspace like eyeless jellyfish or cave salamanders. They feel that these large but pathetically stupid organizations will proffer up genuine gratitude, and perhaps even a security post and a big salary, to the hot-shot intruder who will deign to reveal to them the supreme genius of his modus operandi. ”

“ Can any one give us any rational or philosophical explanation of the modus operandi? To suppose that they may be brought out some time or other and in some way or other, is scarcely less absurd than to suppose that a wolf may be changed into a lamb or a serpent into a dove. ”

“ In regard to this environment of secrecy, deceit and dishonesty, the attorneys in this office appear to merely be following the exampie that you have set. A few examples include: You continue to make statements to the office that you admit in private are not true. With many of the issues listed here, the modus operandi appears to be for you to make a statement at a meeting, pause, and when no one states a disagreement, assume that everyone is in agreement. ”

“ The rule of conduct among some powerful individuals and corporations is to “go on until you are stopped,” in other words, to do what you like until somebody objects, or until you are stopped by the law. ”

“ The conduct of all such enterprises requires the strictest discipline, the nicest accuracy in the apportionment of work under peril of damage to mechanism or product, or even the confusion and stoppage of the whole business. ”

“ The substitution of action based on knowledge for action based on feeling is made possible in the individual and in society by the development of higher centers of control and the power of choice through inhibition and legislation. ”

“ If an educated man is, as I said, a group of organized tendencies to conduct, what prompts the conduct is in every case the man's conception of the way in which to name and classify the actual emergency. The more adequate the stock of ideas, the more 'able' is the man, the more uniformly appropriate is his behavior likely to be. When later we take up the subject of the will, we shall see that the essential preliminary to every decision is the finding of the right names under which to class the proposed alternatives of conduct. ”

“ Third, we shall see in these theories a picture of a system of ordering human conduct and adjusting human relations resting upon the ultimate basis and derived therefrom by the absolute process. In other words, they all picture, not merely an ordering of human conduct and adjustment of human relations, which we have actually given, but something more which we should like to have, namely, a doing of these things in a fixed, absolutely predetermined way, excluding all merely individual feelings or desires of those by whom the ordering and adjustment are carried out. ”

“ The conditions so imposed on human conduct are as definitive as the laws and the order by force of which they are imposed; and the theoretical conclusions reached, when these laws and this order are known, are therefore expressions of absolute economic truth. ”

“ Back of every motion is an impelling power. Back of every individual action lies the basic principles of human conduct. Back of every manifestation of corporate activity may be found a pulsive social force. ”

“ But it is at the same time no less true that human conduct, economic or otherwise, is subject to the sequence of cause and effect, by force of such elements as habituation and conventional requirements. ”

“ To use the organic figure, we attend to the living body of society rather than to the dead corpse, thereby bringing to light not only the organs but their actual manner of operating. Hitherto the point of departure, in studying regulation, has been the visible agency such as government, press, or theater. The consequence has been that while the specific disciplines have been perceived we have overlooked that great portion of control which does not proceed from definite organizations, and which, by reason of its pervasiveness, supplies the moral groundwork of all the rest. ”

“ We consider discipline to be a private matter, to be settled between ourselves and the management; and thus the workings of the system have been arranged without any reference whatever to its effect on the interests of the millions of people whose lives are placed in jeopardy by its arrangements. As a matter of fact, then, the system of discipline which I have described is the result of long-continued pressure and consequent concessions by the management to the demands of employees. ”

“ To which there comes the undeniable corollary that every law which serves to alter men's modes of action—compelling, or restraining, or aiding, in new ways—so affects them as to cause in course of time an adjusted nature. ”

“ The motor of the social world is will. It is what I have called the dynamic agent in society. The full import of this truth will be brought out in the seventh paper. I have merely worked up to it here to show the direct manner in which sociology bears upon psychology. ”

“ The oldest but most persistent form of social technique is that of "ordering-and-forbidding"—that is, meeting a crisis by an arbitrary act of will decreeing the disappearance of the undesirable or the appearance of the desirable phenomena, and the using arbitrary physical action to enforce the decree. ”

“ When we reach the last historical stage, the action of independent wills disappears, and the whole of society resembles an organised body, working automatically; observers can then establish an economic science which appears to them as exact as the sciences of physical nature. ”

“ Whatsoever faults of management are properly attributable to them—and there are many—are easily traceable to that system itself, which, from its very nature, has always been, and must continue to be, inflexible. ”

“ All these forms, in their mutual interweaving and mutual struggle, in their constant changes, form a world organisational process, infinitely fragmented in its parts, continuous and indissoluble in its whole. ”

“ And it is, as far as I have been able to learn, the practice of all countries.' The same will, the same positive action, the same purpose, and, it may be added, the same predicament or position of the actors, must exist in each class of cases. There must be intent and act, prompted by, and tending to, a practicable, or at least a probable result, and not mere endurance or submission to uncontrollable necessity in either case. ”

“ The test of right and wrong conduct in business refers to this fundamental purpose,—that conduct only is praiseworthy which advances the time when every man capable of industry shall be rewarded for his labor, not only with a loaf of bread, but with hours of fruitful leisure. ”

“ Could some system be set in operation which should afford opportunity for the thoughtless and unwary criminal, who has heedlessly fallen into temptation, to retrace his steps and attain once more the height whence he has fallen, it would be a boon to society. ”

“ The use of human beings as automatic devices in a corporate machine—the social-structure of industry, in which the worker was caught and bolted down and expected to perform a single, highly specialized task. ”

“ It reconciles the actual conduct of the better sorts of men with rules derived from observed facts and laws in regard to the development of conduct, and would tend to reconcile their conduct with their words, if men in general would but recognize the folly and danger of a system by which they have one set of rules on their lips and another for their actual guidance. ”

“ We may state the law thus: 'Any habitual course of conduct changes voluntary actions into automatic or involuntary (i.e., reflex) actions.' By practice man forms habits, and habitual action is automatic action, requiring no exercise of will except at the beginning of the series of acts. The law of association does the rest. As voluntary acts are transformed into automatic, the will is set free to devote itself to higher efforts and larger attainments. After telling the truth a while by an effort, we tell the truth naturally, necessarily, automatically. ”

“ Bodies of men were collected and arrayed by signals, evidently directed by a system of organization in which many were combined, and such system was conducted in a manner which had hitherto set at defiance all the exertions of law and order. ”

“ Briefly, then, if the conduct is the best possible on every occasion, it follows that as the occasions are endlessly varied the acts will be endlessly varied to suit—the heterogeneity in the combinations of motions will be extreme. ”

“ There are in the world, in fact, two different laws of conduct each valid on its own plane, the rale principally dependent on external status and the rule independent of status and entirely dependent on the thought and conscience. ”

“ The prime difficulty, as we have seen, is that of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests. This discovery is necessarily precedent to any fundamental change in the machinery. ”

“ Method has a few comprehensive laws according to which details shape themselves, as one naturally shapes one’s behaviour to the acknowledged law that fire burns. System, on the contrary, has an infinity of rules and instructions as to what you are to do and how you are to do it. ”

“ They hint vaguely at a master mind, at a powerful organization run upon strictly business principles, if crime may be styled business or allowed any principles. There, having established a hypothesis that bears some claim to being logical, they stop. ”

“ Skill and sagacity in managing the affairs of common life, or wisdom in council and command, is nothing else than an extensive and ready knowledge of the intricate movements of the great machine of the social system; and the high price which this skill and wisdom always bears among men, may be held to represent two abstractions; first, the perplexing Irregularities of the system to which human agency is to be conformed; and then, the real and substantial Uniformity of the movements of that system. ”

“ Joined to the interest in making plans, and the constructive impulse, which are in themselves compelling forces, we have in the organization of a society in accordance with a preconceived outline, with fixed positions and ranks, the special stimulus of exercising a decisive influence over a future and ideally submissive circle of human beings. ”

“ In order that each workman should be given his proper implement and his proper instructions for doing each new job, it was necessary to establish a detailed system for directing men in their work, in place of the old plan of handling them in large groups, or gangs, under a few yard foremen. ”

“ Let us suppose you were the head of a great business firm controlling a thousand workmen, with rules and regulations for their guidance and a scale of fines and punishments for the preservation of discipline. ”

“ So that, if drastic measures are to be taken with these classes, surely such measures will proceed gradually from the mean to the extreme, and severe measures will not be employed until milder ones have failed. Where the question is one of environment it is the man's character and habits which have to be dealt with and not his [Pg 100] nature. ”

“ Thorough system in every detail will conserve the capacities of all his subordinates and leave him in a measure free to observe the actual conditions and to plan and to put into effect improvements along moral, industrial, physical and financial lines. ”

“ The effect of custom on habit, and of habit upon thought is enough to prove this statement. When we [pg 317] begin to forecast consequences, the consequences that most stand out are those which will proceed from other people. The resistance and the cooperation of others is the central fact in the furtherance or failure of our schemes. Connections with our fellows furnish both the opportunities for action and the instrumentalities by which we take advantage of opportunity. All of the actions of an individual bear the stamp of his community as assuredly as does the language he speaks. ”

“ On the other hand we are driven, by equally obvious empirical considerations, to interpret the social world as a realm of conscious voluntary processes, which occur because somebody finds it worth while that they should occur. ”

“ Their operations alone discover them; when unapplied, they lie hid even from the person to whom they pertain; and their action is so much a part of their nature, that the faculty itself, in many cases, is scarcely to be distinguished from a habit acquired in its frequent exertion. ”

“ As with the militant type, then, so with the industrial type, three lines of evidence converge to show us its essential nature. Let us set down briefly the several results, that we may observe the correspondences among them.
On considering what must be the traits of a society organized exclusively for carrying on internal activities, so as most efficiently to subserve the lives of citizens, we find them to be these: A corporate action, subordinating individual actions by uniting them in joint effort, is no longer requisite. ”

“ Give the system an opportunity of establishing good habits in this respect, and it will derive great advantage from them; but it is difficult for it to derive any benefit from a habit of irregularity, if such may be called a habit. ”