Leadership Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs frames Earth as a badly run business, then delivers the punchline with the deadpan entitlement of a disgruntled customer. The humor lands because it’s petty in scale but cosmic in scope: a whole planet reduced to a service complaint. That mismatch is classic Burroughs - the sneer of satire used as a scalpel, not a shrug.

The specific intent isn’t to marvel at alien life; it’s to indict human systems as if they’re not natural disasters but administrative failures. “Manager” implies hierarchy, policy, and culpability. Someone is in charge, someone could be held responsible, someone could be replaced. Burroughs has never been interested in comforting explanations for suffering; he’s interested in the machinery behind it - addiction, control, state power, corporate capture, the way language itself can operate like a virus. The joke is a trapdoor: laugh, then notice how quickly you start hunting for who’s “running” things.

Context matters. Burroughs wrote out of the Cold War’s managed paranoia, postwar consumer culture, and the rise of bureaucratic life as a kind of anesthesia. The line borrows a familiar retail phrase and turns it into sci-fi disgust, suggesting that modernity has made even apocalypse feel like a customer-service issue: no moral reckoning, just escalation.

Subtext: the alien’s complaint is our own. The fantasy of “the manager” is the fantasy that chaos is organized, that cruelty has an address. Burroughs needles that desire while exploiting it, exposing how badly we want the world to be legible - even if the legibility is only a target for blame.