Bethel Culture, 1969: Impressions of an Immigrant

Abstract

Some features of Bethel culture as seen by an "outsider" are reviewed. It is proposed that this culture alleviates basic personal and group anxieties by offering defensive satisfactions (love, closeness, the denial of conflict, mystical union). Strong social norms and the technical "designing" of the staff tend to maintain an artificially united "community," benevolently ruled. It is also suggested that Bethel culture serves to preserve American society from internal and external disruption. The article concludes with comments on the need for analysis of the functions which training (and applied social science in general) performs for society and, via some discussion of how "foreigners" are treated at Bethel, examines the problems of building an international community of social scientists. Fourteen years had passed since I had been to Bethel, or anywhere else in the United States. So my one month's experience of being on the staff of two Human Relations Laboratories was a renewed contact both with Bethel and with the American culture.