|
When Ulysses and his men were shipwrecked, they first lit a fire of driftwood
and cooked a meal. After they had eaten, they remembered their drowned
companions and wept. Homer's account rings true. Our physical needs take
priority over our emotional demands, but, once the former have been satisfied,
the profounder requirements of our humanity reassert them- selves. And what
happens on the personal scale can also happen on the world scale. The
industrialized nations have now managed, broadly speaking, to provide their citizens with food, shelter and clothing. As a result,
those citizens are becoming more aware of other and subtler needs. But a
society geared to the production of goods is precisely a society which is
poorly adapted to satisfying psychological needs. The very processes by
which we manufacture goods so effectively actually reduce psychological
satisfactions. Hence the further we push technological advance, the worse
the psychological environment becomes. We have scrambled out of physical poverty only to fall into psychological poverty. Indeed our condition is
worse than poverty; we live in a psychological slum.
In short, in the technological growth of any social organism, there is
a turnover point at which effort needs to be transferred from material to
non-material needs. This point we have now reached, or passed. This is
why we have to rethink our entire social technique. How can we satisfy our
psychological needs, in a technologically advanced society? That is the
central question.
When psychological needs are not met, people can be said to be
frustrated. Their efforts to attain some kind of psychological satisfaction
are in vain. (The word frustration comes from the Latin frustra, in vain.)
Now, as the American psychologists Dollard and Miller showed a quarter
of a century ago, frustration leads to aggression. When we cannot repair
our car, we feel like giving it a kick. (There is more to be said about the
origins of aggression, of course, and I shall say it later on: this is just a
preliminary sketch.) In short, it is the existence of widespread frustration
which is the prime cause of the mounting toll of violence which the world
is now witnessing. So, if that frustration can be shown to be caused by
industrial society and the conditions it imposes, then the violence must be
regarded as a cost of production. Frustration and violence are the price of
material affluence. |
