and sciences, numerous teachers are to be found everywhere.
Even young people believe that they have acquired these in
such a way, that they can teach them to others: throughout
the whole of life, one must continue to learn to live and, what
will amaze you even more, throughout life one must learn to
die.
That it is not a consequence of material poverty is clearly
evidenced by all figures. The poorest countries have the lowest
incidence of suicide, and the increasing material prosperity in
Europe was accompanied by an increasing number of suicides.'
As to alcoholism, there is no doubt that it, too, is a symptom of
mental and emotional instability.
Spinoza formulated the problem of the socially patterned
defect very clearly. He says: "Many people are seized by one and
the same affect with great consistency. All his senses are so
strongly affected by one object that he believes this object to be
present even if it is not. If this happens while the person is
awake, the person is believed to be insane. . . . But if the greedy
person thinks only of money and possessions, the ambitious one
only of fame, one does not think of them as being insane, but
only as annoying; generally one has contempt for them. But
factually greediness, ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity,
although usually one does not think of them as 'illness."'
His sense of self does not stem from his activity as a loving
and thinking individual, but from his socio-economic role. If
things could speak, a typewriter would answer the question
"Who are you?" by saying "I am a typewriter," and an auto-mobile, by saying "I am an automobile," or more specifically by
saying, "I am a Ford," or "a Buick," or "a Cadillac " If you ask a
man "Who are you?", he answers "I am a manufacturer," "I am
a clerk," "I am a doctor"—or "I am a married man," "I am the
father of two kids," and his answer has pretty much the same
meaning as that of the speaking thing would have. That is the way
he experiences himself, not as a man, with love, fear, convic-tions, doubts, but as that abstraction, alienated from his real
nature, which fulfills a certain function in the social system. His
sense of value depends on his success: on whether he can sell
himself favorably, whether he can make more of himself than he
started out with, whether he is a success. His body, his mind and
his soul are his capital, and his task in life is to invest it favorably,
to make a profit of himself. Human qualities like friendliness,
courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into
assets of the "personality package," conducive to a higher price
on the personality market. If the individual fails in a profitable
investment of himself, he feels that he is a failure; if he succeeds,
he is a success
But man can fulfill himself only if he remains
in touch with the fundamental facts of his existence, if he can
experience the exaltation of love and solidarity, as well as the
tragic fact of his aloneness and of the fragmentary character of
his existence. If he is completely enmeshed in the routine and
in the artefacts of life, if he cannot see anything but the man-made, common-sense appearance of the world, he loses his
touch with and the grasp of himself and the world. We find in
every culture the conflict between routine and the attempt to
get back to the fundamental realities of existence. To help in this
attempt has been one of the functions of art and of religion, even
though religion itself has eventually become a new form of
routine.
All
this fascination with competitive sports, crime and passion,
shows the need for breaking through the routine surface, but
the way of its satisfaction shows the extreme poverty of our
Each person is a "package" in which several aspects of
his exchange value are blended into one: his "personality," by
which is meant those qualities which make him a good salesman
of himself; his looks, education, income, and chance for
success—each person strives to exchange this package for the
best value obtainable. Even the function of going to a party, and
of social intercourse in general, is to a large extent that of
exchange. One is eager to meet the slightly higher-priced pack-ages, in order to make contact and possibly a profitable
exchange. One wishes to exchange one's social position, and
that is, one's own self, for a higher one, and in this process one
exchanges one's old set of friends, set of habits and feelings for
the new ones, just as one exchanges one's Ford for a Buick.
If a man goes to a concert or to the theater, he asks himself
more or less explicitly whether the show is "worth the money"
he paid. While this question makes some marginal sense, fun-damentally the question does not make any sense, because two
incommensurable things are brought together in the equation;
the pleasure of listening to a concert cannot possibly be
expressed in terms of money; the concert is not a commodity,
nor is the experience of listening to it. The same holds true
when a man makes a pleasure trip, goes to a lecture, gives a
party, or any of the many activities which involve the expend-iture of money. The activity in itself is a productive act of living,
and incommensurable with the amount of money spent for it.
The need to measure living acts in terms of something quantifi-able appears also in the tendency to ask whether something was
MAN IN CAPITALISTIC SOCIETY 145
"worth the time." A young man's evening with a girl, a visit
with friends, and the many other actions in which expenditure
of money may or may not be involved, raise the question of
whether the activity was worth the money or the time.' In each
case one needs to justify the activity in terms of an equation
which shows that it was a profitable investment of energy. Even
hygiene and health have to serve for the same purpose; a man
taking a walk every morning tends to look on it as a good
investment for his health, rather than a pleasurable activity
which does not need any justification.
A new question has arisen in
modern man's mind, the question, namely, whether "life is
worth living," and correspondingly, the feeling that one's life
"is a failure," or is "a success." This idea is based on the concept
of life as an enterprise which should show a profit. The failure is
like the bankruptcy of a business in which the losses are greater
than the gains. This concept is nonsensical. We may be happy or
unhappy, achieve some aims, and not achieve others; yet there isno sensible balance which could show whether life is worth
while living. Maybe from the standpoint of a balance life is never
worth while living. It ends necessarily with death; many of our
hopes are disappointed; it involves suffering and effort; from a
standpoint of the balance, it would seem to make more sense not
to have been born at all, or to die in infancy. On the other hand,
who will tell whether one happy moment of love, or the joy of
breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the
fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life
implies? Life is a unique gift and challenge, not to be measured
in terms of anything else, and no sensible answer can be given to
the question whether it is "worth while" living, because the
question does not make any sense.
Having fun consists mainly in the satisfaction of consuming
and "taking in"; commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes,
people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed.
The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big
bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant
ones, the hopeful ones—and the eternally disappointed ones.
Modern man does not know what
to do with himself, how to spend his lifetime meaningfully, and
he is driven to work in order to avoid an unbearable boredom.
But work has ceased to be a moral and religious obligation in the
sense of the middle-class attitude of the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries. Something new has emerged. Ever-increasing
production, the drive to make bigger and better things, have
become aims in themselves, new ideals. Work has become
alienated from the working person.
He is put in a certain place, has to carry
out a certain task, but does not participate in the organization or
management of the work. He is not interested, nor does he know
why one produces this, instead of another commodity—what
relation it has to the needs of society as a whole. The shoes, the
cars, the electric bulbs, are produced by "the enterprise," using
the machines. He is a part of the machine, rather than its master
as an active agent. The machine, instead of being in his service to
do work for him which once had to be performed by sheer
physical energy, has become his master. Instead of the machine
being the substitute for human energy, man has become a sub-stitute for the machine. His work can be defined as the performance of acts
which cannot yet be performed by machines.
Work is a means of getting money, not in itself a meaningful
human activity. P Drucker, observing workers in the automobile
industry, expresses this idea very succinctly: "For the great
majority of automobile workers, the only meaning of the job is
in the pay check, not in anything connected with the work or the
product. Work appears as something unnatural, a disagreeable,
meaningless and stultifying condition of getting the pay check,
devoid of dignity as well as of importance. No wonder that this
puts a premium on slovenly work, on slowdowns, and on other
tricks to get the same pay check with less work. No wonder that
this results in an unhappy and discontented worker—because a
pay check is not enough to base one's self-respect on.
Many a businessman feels himself the prisoner of
his business and the commodities he sells; he has a feeling of
fraudulency about his product and a secret contempt for it. He
hates his customers, who force him to put up a show in order
to sell. He hates his competitors because they are a threat; his
employees as well as his superiors, because he is in a constant
competitive fight with them. Most important of all, he hates
himself, because he sees his life passing by, without making any
sense beyond the momentary intoxication of success. Of course,
this hate and contempt for others and for oneself, and for the
very things one produces, is mainly unconscious, and only
occasionally comes up to awareness in a fleeting thought,
which is sufficiently disturbing to be set aside as quickly as
possible.
"Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from
King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is
it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any
political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a free-dom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We
are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost
defenses only of freedom. It is our children's children who may
perchance be really free. We tax ourselves unjustly. There is a
part of us which is not represented. It is taxation without repre-sentation. We quarter troops, we quarter fools and cattle of all
sorts upon ourselves. We quarter our gross bodies on our poor
souls, till the former eat up all the latter's substance .. .
One of the most penetrating diagnoses of the capitalist culture
in the nineteenth century was made by a sociologist, E. Durk-heim, who was neither a political nor a religious radical. He
states that in modern industrial society the individual and the
group have ceased to function satisfactorily; that they live in a
condition of "anomie," that is, a lack of meaningful and struc-turalized social life; that the individual follows more and more
"a restless movement, a planless self-development, an aim of
living which has no criterion of value and in which happiness
lies always in the future, and never in any present achievement."
The ambition of man, having the whole world for his customer,becomes unlimited, and he is filled with disgust, with the "futil-ity of endless pursuit."
Lewis Mumford, with whose writings my own ideas have
many points in common, says this about our contemporary
civilization: "The most deadly criticism one could make of
modern civilization is that apart from its man-made crises and
catastrophes, it is not humanly interesting .. .
"In the end, such a civilization can produce only a mass man:
incapable of choice, incapable of spontaneous, self-directed
activities: at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous
work to an almost pathetic degree, but increasingly irresponsible
as his choices become fewer and fewer: finally, a creature
governed mainly by his conditioned reflexes—the ideal type
desired, if never quite achieved, by the advertising agency and
the sales organizations of modern business, or by the propa-ganda office and the planning bureaus of totalitarian and quasi-totalitarian governments. The handsomest encomium for such
creatures is: 'They do not make trouble'. Their highest virtue is:
`They do not stick their necks out'. Ultimately, such a society
produces only two groups of men: the conditioners and the
conditioned; the active and the passive barbarians. The exposure
of this web of falsehood, self-deception, and emptiness is
perhaps what made Death of a Salesman so poignant to the
metropolitan American audiences that witnessed it.
A. R. Heron, a convinced supporter of Capitalism and a writerwith a much more conservative bent than the ones quoted so far,
nevertheless comes to critical conclusions which are essentially
very close to those of Durkheim and Mayo. In his Why Men Work, a
1948 selection of the Executive Book Club of New York, he
writes: "It is fantastic to picture a great multitude of workers
committing mass suicide because of boredom, a sense of futility,
and frustration. But the fantastic nature of the picture disappears
when we broaden our concept of suicide beyond the killing of
the physical life of the body. The human being who has resigned
himself to a life devoid of thinking, ambition, pride, and per-sonal achievement, has resigned himself to the death of attrib-utes which are distinctive elements of human life. Filling a space
in the factory or office with his physical body, making motions
designed by the minds of others, applying physical strength, or
releasing the power of steam or electricity, are not in themselves
contributions of the essential abilities of human beings.
In a short article, "Why Socialism," Einstein writes: "I have
now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me
constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the
relationship of the individual to society. The individual has
become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon soci-ety. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive
asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat
to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. More-over, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of
his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social
drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All
human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering
from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of
their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of
the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man
can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through
devoting himself to society.
"24
Whether we think of
Burckhardt or Proudhon, of Tolstoy or Baudelaire, of Marx or
Kropotkin, they had a concept of man which was essentially a
religious and moral one. Man is the end, and must never be
used as a means; material production is for man, not man for
material production; the aim of life is the unfolding of man's
creative powers; the aim of history is a transformation of
society into one governed by justice and truth—these are theprinciples on which explicitly and implicitly, all criticism of
modern Capitalism was based
The free man is the rich man, but not the man rich in an
economic sense, but rich in the human sense. The wealthy man,for Marx, is the man who is much, and not the one who has
much."
Hinne: 5/5
Hinne: 5/5
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