Diagnostician Gibney, a LIFE staff writer and author (The Frozen Revolution, Five Gentlemen of Japan), warns earnestly: "Older powers than ours have been fatally undermined when the gap grew too great between the citizen's private sense of wrong and the public morality to which he and his fellows were pledged." To document the gap, Gibney attempts to chronicle every conceivable device of legal and illegal corner cutting, bunching them all into what might be termed Gibney's Unified Sociological Field Theory of the "Genial Society."

Nondeductible Sex. In the Genial Society, everybody is too genial about major and minor fraud. Parents are light fingered with the maid's social security payments; Dad might "gift" the cop on the beat with a fifth of whisky for overlooking his daily parking violation; the children, taking their cue from the elders, might crib on an exam or lie about a date.

From such "acceptable'' forms of petty larceny, Gibney moves on to the more spectacular types that pique the Internal Revenue Department. Among the intriguing cases are the undertaker who tried to deduct his wife's grocery bills because she met so many potential customers during her shopping trips, and the possibly legendary San Francisco taxpayer who deducted the cost of his love affairs as a medical expenditure because his physician advised him that sex would calm his nerves.