The coach of the New England Super Bowl winners, fittingly named the "Patriots," told the cheering crowd in front of Boston's City Hall of the six month "journey" that had led to this hard won, surprising victory over the highly favored St. Louis Rams. Bill Bellichick recalled that at the Patriots training camp last summer he had shown the team a film of the explorer Ernest Shackleton's rescue in 1914 of his marooned crew from an Antarctic island. The bond that was forged and the teamwork of the crew, together with Shackleton's leadership, made possible the miraculous survival of all twenty-eight men.

The nation was given the opportunity to witness the team spirit of the Patriots on and off the field. Introduced as a team, rather than individually, at the Super Dome they danced onto the field as one. When he was told after the game that, as MVP, he had been given a fancy new Cadillac S.U.V quarterback Tom Brady announced it would be "a team car." At the City Hall celebration star cornerback Troy Brown said they won because they were "unselfish and disciplined," and team owner Bob Kraft said several times that it was about "spirituality." As if to demonstrate their unity of spirit defense safety Ty Law led the team and everybody else, including Kraft, in a joyous victory dance.

The panel report, on the other hand, describes "a culture of self-dealing and self enrichment" at Enron in which a few individuals in leadership positions served their own interests at the expense of the company's investors and employees. The panel wrote of deception and manipulation by the company's top executives. None of these men seems willing to assume responsibility for the catastrophe, as they cast about for someone else to blame and deny that they knew what was going on. All of this is compounded by the insensitivity of political leaders to what is at stake. The U.S. Secretary of the Treasury dismisses the debacle, saying callously that "companies come and go," and the Vice President stirs suspicion by refusing to supply documents telling of his past dealings with Enron executives. Secrecy surrounding the whole affair deepens the nation's distrust of political and business leaders.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that the Enron scandal is primarily about our corporate system. It reflects, rather, a current that runs deep in our society, an ethos of unabashed greed and self aggrandizement. But this is not the only kind of relationship that we can look to in our collective life, even in the corporate world. Dee Hock, creator and former CEO of Visa, for example, has written of very different values that guided his leadership of this innovative company. It is possible, he says, to bring into being organizations that are "aligned with the higher aspirations of humanity," in which "all participants can have an active, creative, equitable role" (The Birth of the Chaortic Age).

I guess all this is really about alternative examples of individual and organizational relationship. The failure of Enron and the success of the Patriots highlight real choices. In the first the many have been abandoned in the interest of a few. In the second an entire group was enabled by its leaders to submerge individual egos in the service of a greater purpose. From Enron we may have discovered the tolerable limits of self interest. The Patriots have satisfied our hunger for genuine community. They have shown us it is possible.

John E. Mack, M.D., is a Pulitzer Prize-winning psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.

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