REAGAN'S AMERICA GARRY WILLS PENGUINCHAPTER 41 Original Sinlessnesshow man fell Degraded by himself, on grace depending. -Paradise Regained 4.311-12 At Disneyland, one can meet a real President, real as the racetrack on the TV spot was real, realer than the ordinary world. We enter through an anteroom of old clippings and photographs; curtains are drawn; we find Lincoln sitting at his ease, delivering immortal lines as in conver-sation; he rises, moves about, stands tall, his voice resonating from speakers around us. Technology has brought us living history, not bunk, its limbs disposed and moved artificially but realistically (under the right light), delivering an ancient and beautiful message. Who would have thought, until recently, that such a President was to be found outside Anaheim? The Reagan presidency is not a mere exercise in nostalgia. It must be modern as well. The message must travel to us by way of complex intermediation, labyrinthine as the electronics that work Lincoln's in-nards. Reagan must be not merely a laudator temporis acti, but a cele-brant of the future, both simultaneously and equally insistently. Only in this way can Reagan, simply by being who he is, where he is, alleviate a deep ideological contradiction in American life. According to the American myth he advances, capitalism is both individualistic and conservative, though the terms of that proposition are mutually contradictory. It is hard to understand why people should think capitalism is identical with, or even conduces to, individualism. The classic exponent of ORIGINAL SINLESSNESS 449 free markets, Adam Smith, argued that accumulation of a "store" (capital) left over from immediate use makes possible vaster projects than the individual can undertake, either as a matter of handicraft or of trade. The way to reach larger markets than the immediate use area is to specialize (making a surplus of, say, pins) by collaborative effort (a number of people dividing up the labor of making pins). After con-sumption of the first "store" that made possible the specialization in pins, the workers would be deprived of other products (neglected in their concentration on the pin) but for the goods obtained in the larger market reached by the pins' traveling agents (themselves part of the division of labor that makes pins for the multitudes).' Increased effi-ciency in the cooperative specializations, which produce all the traded goods, will produce the "wealth of nations" (not, primarily, of the individual). The leading note of the operation is, at every level, interde- , pendence-of the workers on each other as they make parts of the pin (each useless in itself), of the workers on their factors as the latter peddle the product in ever wider markets, of both makers and distributors on the specialists in other products. The first victim of this system would be the individual pin-maker, who tried to compete using his) slower process of manufacture and limited range of customers. Making his obsolete pin in the center of a community that turns out the things in quantity, he would be trying to sell coals in Newcastle. That is the story of the demise of individual handicraft (and individualism) before the division of labor based on capital. Once this operation is under way, individuals in the management, distribution, or ownership of materials and tools can try to get more than their share out of the vast cooperative venture. But that is not capitalism; it is theft (and very common). And even an individual parasite on the joint system must keep up the cooperative effort in order to reap an unfair share of its profits. He must keep the workers performing their converging tasks, and keep traders and stockers busy at their interlocking functions. To the extent that individuals try to divert the wealth of nations to their private use, they subvert the process that creates the wealth-Veblen's complaint against the wastefulness of merely pecuniary managers.2 It is true that other pin-making groups may try to supplant the first one with a better process. It must, usually, be a very much better process, to make up for the advantages the first pin factory has estab-lished in patterns of workmanship, supply, and trade, which have also created habits of buying and use in all the pins' customers. Smith's pin3 REAGAN'S AMERICA ORIGINAL SINLESSNESS 451 factory had "at least eighteen" separate operations. An individual might think of a way to cut the steps to fifteen, thus decreasing labor and lowering price; but he would still need the fifteen people in his plan. It would still be a cooperative project that prevailed, however equitably (or not) the advantages, gained in this way, were afterward divided. Modern technology has been created by the efforts of people using stores of abundance in increasingly complex patterns of interdepen-dence. Each time we use such a typical product of the system as (say) a jetliner, we are trusting a vast army of unseen collaborators in our journey-all those who designed, built, sold, service, fly, guard, and guide the plane. One slip in the huge operation, and it ends in disaster. We are depending on the social responsibility of others-that the main-tenance man was not doped up, the inspector was not lazy, the pilot is not hung over, the air controller is not too harried to see straight (or too tranquilized to resist the harassment). Any breakdown in this web of social links makes us vulnerable, no matter what our individual force of will or play of ingenuity. The self-reliant test pilot, strapped in his seat in the travel section of a jetliner next to the dimmest bureau crat, will die along with him if the maintenance people have not done their work properly. In fact, most of us will be happier with the individualistic test pilot sitting next to us in the travelers' section rather than at the controls of the plane. If Tom Wolfe (who spent a good deal of time with them) is to be believed, test pilots love risk, and try to give each flight an individ ual mark. They also like to drink and fly.' Daredevils are needed in the early tests of a product not yet reduced to rule; but the aim of the process that uses them is to make them obsolete as soon as possible, to make the finally tested function performable on a routine basis. After that, in a complex operation, individualism is irregularity, a nuisance and obstruction.' That is why the use of test pilots as astronauts was