There is a widespread conviction that we are currently in the midst of one of the worst social crises in human history. Many diagnoses of the ills of society have been made and many remedies proposed. These have one common fault. The study of human affairs has become complex and subdivided into various air-tight compartments. We have many social sciences, but no science of society. Many of the remedies proposed bear the stamp of specialization, many are motivated by expediency, or by the tendency to treat symptoms and not diseases, and many are proposed by powerful and organized economic interests.

Psychiatry has been singularly silent on this social crisis, partly because it is likewise a specialty dealing with the limited field of personality disorders, partly because it has no authority as compared with the other social sciences and big business, and partly because everyone is his own psychologist. Nevertheless, psychiatry ought to be able to make some contribution, being the science of adaptation and motivation. There are indications that psychiatry has the ferment necessary to effect a synthesis of the social sciences; such efforts are now in progress and have even enjoyed some academic success. Yet, when it comes down to cases, to a diagnosis of the ills of society and the formulation of constructive proposals, psychiatry has been no less parochial than any of the other social sciences.

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One Psychiatrist’s Answer

One recent attempt to deal with the social crisis in psychiatric terms, made by G. B. Chisholm,¹ is worth examining. The causes of war, Dr. Chisholm tells us, are prejudice, isolationism, the excessive desire for material or power, belief in the destiny to control others, and the like. These are all neurotic traits and come from the failure to mature; this failure causes a feeling of inferiority, guilt, and fear. What we need is: maturity for the masses. The cause of our immaturity Dr. Chisholm finds in our morality—our concepts of right and wrong, and of sin. Our morality keeps children under arbitrary control and prevents free thinking. People must be taught to put rational thinking in place of obsolete concepts of right and wrong. This would remove emotional disabilities, guilts, fears, and inferiorities, and then there would be no more wars because we would all be mature. Dr. Chisholm does not say who are to be the teachers in this educational program.

Is this to be taken as psychiatry’s answer? I think not. I cannot subscribe to the idea—by no means limited to Dr. Chisholm or to psychiatrists—that neurosis is the cause of wars, nor can I agree that our morality is basically at fault, and I reject the idea that an educational program could create universal maturity. Psychiatry has made a signal contribution to the science of society, but not by discovering that we are all neurotic and need to discard our morality. Such ill-considered recommendations only compound confusion.

Besides, Dr. Chisholm is basically in error. Our mores (he surely does not mean morality, which means merely social traffic laws) create a specific type of human being with special values and a special pattern of development. These in turn give rise, in many individuals, to specific malformations of development that we call neuroses. If Dr. Chisholm thinks he can devise any system of mores that will obviate neurotic malformations, he goes counter to all evidence. The comparative study of society shows us that all societies need controls, and if we don’t have the pressure on the sexual impulse, which produces typical malformations in many individuals in our society, we are sure to have it elsewhere. But at any rate, neurosis, far from being a basic cause of war, is the sacrifice of the individual to the cause of social stability: it is the psychopath, much less common than the neurotic, who lacks the normal internalized controls, and who therefore contributes more to social disintegration than does the neurotic. Dr. Chisholm makes a further basic error in exonerating the social organization of production and distribution from any responsibility for social disintegration.

These are not purely personal animadversions on Dr. Chisholm’s position. The danger is that the concepts of psychiatry may be employed without reference to the total body of scientific knowledge, and that psychiatry’s contribution to the understanding of our situation may thus become one more easy formula without relation to the real world.

We must criticize Dr. Chisholm’s position from the broad viewpoint of a scientific conception of man, one that has been germinating since Darwin’s time but has only recently become sufficiently comprehensive to enable us to understand the complexity and variety of human beings.

For the first time in history, we have it in our power truly to understand our problems and perhaps even to discover what course of action would be effective in solving them. But we must avoid the simplified imperative—both the religious-ethical command: Be good! and Dr. Chisholm’s scientific-ethical command: Be mature!

Because of its knowledge of motivation, it is the function of psychiatry to demonstrate the role of anxiety and insecurity in creating the phenomena which the historian, economist, and sociologist study. Psychiatry need not treat social maladjustments in terms of a gross simplification based on a misleading analogy with the neurotic process in the individual. It has tools for a critique of social processes, can track down their origins, can describe both the pressures they create and the defensive processes they set in motion. In this way psychiatry, in its application to the social sciences, can guide us to an understanding of how we got where we are today and can furnish some rational directives.

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II Theology vs. Science

Three disciplines have made signal contributions to the scientific conception of man: biology, which has placed man in the flow of time and has established his relationship to the other inhabitants of the earth and to the earth itself; anthropology, which has invented the concept of culture and established the relativity of the ways of living and the environmental factors on which they are contingent; and finally, psychology, which is attempting to establish the minutiae and dynamics of adaptation within the life-span of the individual.

All the social sciences have been operating so far without benefit of psychology, employing instead that supremely prejudiced and culturally conditioned implement that is standard equipment for every human being: common sense. It is the possession of this crude implement which renders everyone his own psychologist, and makes him deaf to the plea to examine his prejudices and emotional responses in an empirical manner. Common sense is an adaptive, not an analytical tool, and hence useless for searching out the sources of disruptive social tensions.

The scientific conception of man is more an attitude and a method than a completed body of knowledge. It is known and held by a relatively small proportion of the people in the world. It is a disciplined and not a natural conception. Hence it has had a difficult time winning acceptance. It supplants an older and more natural pattern of thought, the theological conception of man.

The choice between these two conceptions does not rest on academic merits. It is a supremely practical issue, and reduces itself to the question: which conception gives us the best tools to work with? The vast majority of the people in the world still use the theological conception, sometimes tightly sealed off from their “scientific” knowledge. It is the practical basis of their day-to-day behavior.

The theological conception is based on certain assumptions. First, that each man has a sacred and indestructible aspect—his soul—that has on its side the boundless powers of the supernatural. Naive as this idea is, the theological conception gave each individual an inalienable dignity and placed any aggressor under direct surveillance of the deity. Hence it was able to exercise a strong though not entirely effective check on human aggressiveness and destructiveness. Thus the belief in the soul became a powerful source of social stability. This concept also gave man enormous patience to tolerate hardship, and wait for deferred gratifications. The theological conception also assumed that man’s character, disposition, and morality were all products of divine creation. To explain evil, another anthropomorphic figure had to be invented—the Devil (or devils). Within this frame of reference, a large variety of fanciful tales could be invented that were influential in intimidating human beings into the behavior and values their particular cultures had established as desirable.

Why do we consider this theological conception bad and the scientific conception superior? The theological conception is static and unmalleable when used to enforce social equilibrium; it is suited only to societies that do not require constant changes in organization and that exist in environments of relative plenty. This conception was successful for brief periods in societies that delegated to the arbitrary power of the deity all functions involved in maintaining social balance, on the guarantee that all members of society were equally loved by him. But even these societies and their religious sanctions fell apart when the conditions prescribed for obtaining divine help failed to get the desired results, or when urgent necessities compelled a new form of organization. The theological conception was then relegated to the “spiritual” phase of living, concerned largely with man’s fate after death; the political and utilitarian conception of man, his role as producer, consumer, soldier, or taxpayer, began to dominate his worldly existence.

This deterioration was fatal to the preservation of the dignity of the individual; for while half of him remained sacred and inviolable, the other half became a commodity like potatoes, a used object whose value fluctuated with demand. Man, as John Dewey has shown, became a means, not an end; the temporal laws governing the relations of man to man were polarized toward usefulness. This deterioration was naturally hastened by the machine, whose attributes man gradually assumed: man became a machine with a sense of responsibility; he still had a soul and a life beyond death—but only on Sundays.

The scientific conception of man, on the other hand, places man’s survival squarely on his own shoulders. It puts it up to man to find out about himself and to discover the laws that govern social organization. It invites man to form a picture of himself and his nature, as well as the phenomena of the outer world, on the basis of verifiable evidence, and thus it offers him an opportunity to fit his society and his behavior to the real conditions of nature. As empiricism, the scientific conception invites not only study, but change. And change is the most difficult problem of all.

The scientific conception of man is very new and wields no authority in crucial issues. This it will have to earn the hard way, just as did the natural sciences. But one thing seems clear: the matter of survival reduces itself to the question of whether the science of man can progress more rapidly than the tendency of man to destroy himself. At all events, we now know that we cannot entrust man’s survival to the intervention of any supernatural power, or to the conception of man of which the belief in such power is an integral part.

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III The Cost of Adaptation

Let us examine hastily some of the conclusions of the scientific conception of man as they relate to his social existence.

Comparative study of simple societies (erroneously called “primitive”) reveals that certain innate impulses of man must be controlled by sanctions of one kind or another in order to render the society capable of survival. For example, the sexual impulse has no automatic control. This has to be imposed from without. Why? Because the age of biological sexual maturity is ten to thirteen, and the age at which social usefulness as an adult begins is seventeen to twenty-two. If not controlled, a man might become a grandfather before he was economically mature, and this would lead to population increase at a geometric rate—if food were automatically available. But most of the time it isn’t; it requires human labor, and that would not be forthcoming because of lack of strength or experience on the part of the sexually mature but economically immature individuals.

What can one do? One can put a supernatural taboo on all women in the immediate social environment, and approve of sexual relations only with women outside (exogamy); one can hinder the development of the sexual drive by discouraging and punishing every manifestation of sexual growth; one can kill most of the newborn females. Those societies that control population growth by female infanticide do not need to impose sexual restrictions on the growing child (Marquesas Islands). Societies that live by cultivation of land need offspring to help in the economy—but they must make the offspring tractable and submissive. What they do is encourage population growth, but limit the privilege to the economically powerful, and maintain the strictest vigilance over the sexual activities of the young either by making the conditions for marriage very difficult or by direct or supernatural threats. These are all social expedients toward a rational goal of supreme interest to the community as a whole. Primitive societies, like more sophisticated societies, know what their immediate social objectives are, but they do not know what the full effects of their methods of control will be. They succeed in limiting the exercise of the sexual impulse until it suits the purposes of the community as a whole—but there the control ends. The institution of sexual suppression sets in motion new processes that cannot be foreseen and that pass out of control. The resulting new phenomena then seem to have no causal relation to anything.

The sexual impulse is natural, but it is also subject to integrated growth, a part of the total development of the human being. So that when you start putting restrictions on the earliest sexual manifestations of the child, you also interfere with his total development. The individual who grows up in a society that practices female infanticide but not sexual suppression will be entirely different from the individual who grows up under strict sexual control. Not only that—the two societies will present different social patterns. The society that kills its female infants will have the problem of regulating sexual jealousy between males. The status of the father and of the females will be different in each society. The folklore and religion will be different in each case, both being products of the fantasy of man that have not only an expressive function, but also the function of helping maintain social equilibrium.²

Let us now examine another important type of social expedient that fundamentally alters social structure and personality formation. There are communities in which the men have duties, like hunting, that prevent them from working in the fields, and consequently the women are charged with the task of raising food. The woman’s duties may be so onerous as to permit her to care for the children only at dawn and at sunset. True, growth is a natural process, and if the children get enough to eat they will surely enough grow up. But the child who is cared for only for a short period of the day will be a very different kind of individual from the one who gets constant care from its mother. In this instance, the consequences for the society as a whole are much more disastrous than when good parental care is associated with severe sexual restrictions. Here all growth is stunted; in the case of sexual restrictions, the stunting is relatively localized.

Now, if the community that found it necessary to make the women tend the fields moves to a new environment where the men are free to assume this work, it does not follow that they will do so; the original division of labor, once a necessity, will not change when new conditions arise; it is maintained by the persistence of emotional vested interests. This is a very important phenomenon, which we call cultural lag. The most blatant illustrations of cultural lag in our society are our sex mores and our stereotyped attitudes to “women.”

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IV Aggression

We have discussed the sexual impulse only as an example. It has made much noise in the history of human society because efforts to control it have led to perversities so extreme as to obliterate the procreative function almost entirely, or to perversions that defeated the same purpose. But the sexual impulse is not by far the most difficult to control. On the contrary, it is extremely tractable because it can be postponed and expressed in a great variety of ways.

The most elusive of all innate human tendencies to put under control are the aggressive impulses. Here every society has found itself between the Scylla of unbridled aggression that would destroy the society, and the Charybdis of excessive control that would render the individual ineffectual for survival. No known society has solved this dilemma to the advantage of both the individual and the society, except for brief periods.

Human beings tend to gravitate to the opposite poles of dominance or submission no matter what safeguards are invented to prevent either extreme. This polarization exists in overt and concealed forms—slavery, rank, status, prestige. Because of man’s need to cooperate for the sake of survival, the problem of controlling aggression is crucial.

Once this control was a purely local and intramural problem; now it has become a problem of regulating the relations between different large societies as well.

Now, the first point that strikes us is that we are confronted with the necessity of solving an international problem of controlling aggression among the United States, Great Britain, and Russia before we have learned to solve it within the limits of a single state. To be sure, these societies have successfully dealt with the problem of overt aggression; but none of them concerns itself with the covert aggression concealed in practices that are legally permissible.³

This crucial problem of aggression within societies is intimately connected with changes in social organization in Western society in the past six hundred years, and with consequent alterations in the goals of life. We can only understand aggression within society by examining these changes.

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The Bourgeois Revolution

When the goal of life was salvation, as it was in the so-called Dark and Middle Ages, society neither fostered nor gave opportunity for the expression of strong personal strivings. Status was frozen, life was chiefly agrarian, and the city did not yet exist as the place for the adventurous or dislocated individual. The desire for salvation as the chief goal of existence applied a powerful brake to certain types of striving—aggression being but a means toward the object striven for. If you were taught that your status was ordained by God, the tendency would be to accept it. If you were unfortunate, you could explain it on the basis of divine will, punishment, etc.—all of which put an end to any other striving.

Let us trace the anatomy of this powerful means for social stabilization. One thing about it is certain. It was not created by plan but as an accidental by-play of remote causes. Human beings do not invent aspirations; they seize upon them after they exist. We have previously stated that in societies where it is important to make the young submissive and curb their sexuality, the parent in some way disciplines the sexual and other impulses, generally by threats of punishment or abandonment. The child gradually gets to believe that his continued protection by the parent is the consequence of his (the child’s) impulse-control (good behavior). Eventually this control becomes automatized, that is, it is internalized and requires no further vigilance on the part of the parent. Every time the impulse to transgress arises, the child anticipates punishment. The next step is that when misfortune happens to the individual, he can “explain” it as a punishment for transgression. The only difference between this system and the religious sanction is the plane of operation; no longer is it the child against the father, but the adult against the deity. But it is actually the same pattern. One is an extension of the other.

That the religious sanction is derived in this way from the familial disciplines can be readily confirmed by comparing half a dozen religions with the childhood disciplines that coincide with them. In principle, they are precisely the same. But it doesn’t quite look that way when we learn it as children. We read in Genesis that God cast Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden because they ate of the tree of knowledge—i.e they transgressed sexually—therefore we may not do the same thing lest we be treated the same way. But the story of Adam and Eve is only a fanciful dramatization of the way every child in the community learns from its parents that it cannot exercise its sexuality on pain of punishment. This projection of actual experience—its transformation into an allegory—adds power and conviction to the original experience. Systematized, it becomes the text for argument and debate and ultimately takes the form of a doctrine. But the simple fact remains that these allegories and doctrines merely back up the practice that is their source.

But it is a characteristic of these dramatized projections of actual practices that the individual will accept the threat of punishment only up to a point. Then he begins to ask whether the deity or the church is holding up its end of the agreement. If not, the dogma is endangered or changed—viz., the book of Job, the rise of Christianity, the Reformation. This is why religions change.

When we watch changes in religion, we watch the projection on the screen that looks like a rabbit, and not the manipulations of the fingers in front of the light that really create the illusion of a rabbit. Religions are modified by changes in the conditions of life that demand new expression. In the absence of this insight, men were inclined to quarrel about dogma—the illusory projection—rather than about the stark social realities that created dogma.

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The State—A New Church

Thus, the Reformation was in fact largely a movement of the city class, which sought to throw off the inhibitions imposed by one religious doctrine and find expression for new creative impulses. The Reformation is of the highest importance for understanding some of our contemporary values. It gave an ideological framework to practices that had already acquired considerable momentum. In contrast to the escapist ideology of an oppressed people, promising boons to be enjoyed after death because they were unattainable on earth, the Reformation sought approval for the activities of an aggressive class of burghers who were creating a new style of living, new values, and the new social entity—that is, the secular state. It was the state that was ultimately to take away from the church the function of defining the goals of living, and to create a new value to replace salvation. It was to become the guardian of social efficacy and social well-being. The instrumentalities by which such a goal was to be realized already existed or were being created in the form of a very aggressive type of mercantilism, the introduction of colonization, easy profits, and a new form of social power—money. This movement won because it was effective, and the values it created spread like an epidemic.

Generally when a man has the choice between a remote goal realizable after death and one that can be realized here and now, he will choose the latter. This accounts for the abandonment of religious salvation in favor of economic salvation. Once the secular state began to support the goals and abet the instrumentalities of this new movement, its perpetuation was guaranteed. There remained only the formal task of reconciling the new values with religious dogma. Dogma yielded.

But in taking over the function of creating new values and providing for social well-being, the state also took over the unpleasant responsibility of shouldering the blame when things went wrong. No longer could social unrest be allayed by propagating illusions about benefits to be enjoyed after death. Hence, there have been no religious movements of any large consequence since the Reformation. The pressure was now concentrated on the apparatus of the state, and competing interests engaged in great struggles for its control.

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Salvation—Here and Now

The new movement placed a high premium on aggression, as expressed through the channels of economic enterprise. Salvation was transformed into a high standard of living, success, comfort, and well-being—here and now. The secular state was slowly but surely taken over by the burgher class, and the definition of social well-being and its realization had to be entrusted to “the people”—especially when each person could carry a gun. The secular concept of citizenship thus became legitimate heir to the theological concept of the soul—it was his secular status as member of a state that now gave value to the individual.

All was well so long as the new style of living created by the bourgeoisie could continue to expand and extend its benefits to more and more people. But if anything should halt this process of extension, a truly explosive situation would be created. Enterprise and aggression—the latter still confined to socially useful purposes—had become legitimized; standard of living, status, and prestige were the rightful claims of every individual, and were made possible by free social mobility. A social dynamism had been generated that could under unfavorable circumstances become highly dangerous.

How did this new system of values work out psychologically? Not very well. Under the old church the conscience of man was externalized: the church acted as mediator between man and the divine. Everyone was loved by God, and if you transgressed you could solicit the intervention of the church, which imposed a small punishment in lieu of a great one. But the new church internalized conscience—your fate was in your own hands. If you were enterprising you would succeed, and if you didn’t it was your own fault, so that instead of fearing punishment from the supernatural at some remote date, you now had to reproach yourself for being “no good,” a failure. A feeling of inferiority replaced the fear of punishment. If you were a success, it followed that you were one of the “saved.”

There was, however, a bit of renunciation demanded of you. You did have to renounce pleasure. The Calvinists were down on pleasure. One may ask whether there is any intrinsic and absolute connection between the goal of success and the restriction of pleasure. The answer is no. In fact the feeling of guilt rises with adversity, and in a culture in which sexual suppression is an important aspect of child discipline, sex is likely to be abandoned in adversity. The puritan character is essentially compulsive, i.e it is built around obedience constellations. This can be seen readily from the fact that the individual bases his highest self-esteem on the control (basically obedience) he exercises over his impulses, chiefly the pleasure-seeking impulses because they are most restricted in childhood. What we have therefore is a seeming paradox: a personality directed toward aggression and enterprise but based on obedience to discipline. Hence all energy that could be used in pleasure pursuits was channelized into competitive enterprise.

Renunciation of pleasure, and the exercise of thrift, unbridled aggression within the legitimized channels—this was the new formula for the perfect life.

The bourgeois style of living brought new and unpleasant responsibilities to the individual. Success was not divinely ordained; it was your own responsibility—no, your duty and obligation. If you failed, you suffered here and now. This is a formula for profound social unrest, the pressures of which would be exerted intra-socially by increasing the strenuousness with which one was compelled to engage in the “pursuit of happiness,” or in case of failure, by increasing one’s demands on the secular state, which had made itself the provider of the opportunities for self-realization.

Ultimately, such pressures could find their most convenient outlet in competition between the various secular states for greater opportunities.

To be sure, religious salvation was retained as a nominal goal. But it degenerated into a social routine without force and without influence on the other established goals of living. What was once conscience became more and more entrusted to the police. For conscience had been taught to operate chiefly on the pleasure drives and on certain gross forms of aggression, but not on those forms of aggression that were expressed in concealed forms or through competitive practice.

This was all on the expansive side. But there was still another process operating, and this process degraded man—it made him sell his labor as a commodity, and, with the invention of the machine, gradually subordinated him to it as a producing agent. Counter-movements were started both by labor and the bourgeois class for the defense of their respective interests—trade unions and cartels. But the division of society into “classes” was not in itself an inevitable cause of strife. It is mobility of class that more often caused social struggle. Where status is fixed you don’t strive to change it. If it is mobile, however, then you do try to change it. And once having experienced social mobility, you won’t readily accept the freezing of status afterwards; such freezing becomes synonymous with failure and perdition. And those who have superior status will do all they can to defend it against those lower in the hierarchy of status.

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V Failure of the Secular State

This, in the main, is how we got where we are. The crisis of the individual has to be defined in terms of our style of living, its goals, its values, and the strange impasse in which our culture finds itself today. We have much less to fear from atomic bombs than we have from the explosive ferments inherent in the structure of our society itself—that is, the explosive forces within the individual of no matter what status.

The individual is prepared to harness his aggression to achieve the goals that have come down to us as legitimate. But he will pursue these goals in all conscience and to the bitter end without compunction or scruple because he is driven by anxiety lest he lose either power (which in the middle class has become an emotional vested interest) or privilege, which he has come to regard as a right. Else he will be forced to accept lower status, as is the case with lower middle class and worker groups. This is the curtailment of “freedom” that everyone fears: curtailed freedom of opportunity, curtailed freedom of aspiration—and even curtailed freedom to fail on your own responsibility. For it is still a form of self realization to fail on your own rather than to be coerced into failing.

The fact that these anxieties are universal, and common to all the citizens of each state irrespective of status, reveals one of the fatal weaknesses in the structure of the democratic secular state: that it tends to be less a state, less a community, than a collection of individuals, each pursuing anarchic goals. There is no common goal, except the defeat of the enemy in time of war.

This was the oversight—shall we say—of the creators of the bourgeois secular state: they failed to create a community interest. Government is equally distrusted by all, because in its efforts to create a community interest, a common good, it must curtail privileges heretofore enjoyed without restriction by one class or another.

This is a new function of government that was not in its original charter. The state became the custodian of social wellbeing only incidentally to its role as promoter of the opportunities of the aggressive bourgeois group. The common good would take care of itself, they originally thought. It would balance out. Misfortune or failure that ended in poverty or misery, according to the prevailing ethic of bourgeois practice, was a personal responsibility, just as success was, and not a public care. The collective misery of many millions was socially disagreeable, but not important as a force so long as those who failed accepted it either as punishment or tough luck. “Economic laws” were invoked to add a slightly supernatural sanction to the practices that caused so much misery.

This could not last forever. For the feeling of inferiority, the feeling of being discriminated against, is a very different kind of social force from the notion of punishment, especially when the resentment created by the sense of inferiority is backed by an implement of political power that lies within everyone’s reach—citizenship.

Thus the Western nations are placed in a situation where they have created and given approval to certain values that were of great use in fostering the style of living we call bourgeois. But they now find themselves unable to satisfy the claims of all social groups, each of which is urged on by these same values, each of which is contending to extend or at least preserve its advantages, regardless of the effect on the community as a whole. This is the specific social framework in which the concept of “liberty” must be defined—for it has no meaning general to all kinds of social contexts. The “liberty” to pursue these values is being pushed hard in face of the fact that the instrumentalities for realizing these values are breaking down. And this is one of the fatal lacks of social insight—that values can persist long after the implements for their realization no longer exist.

The answer seems simple: change the values. But this is impossible, because, for the greater part, human beings are no more aware of values than they are of the circulation of their blood. You cannot change something that does not—for all practical purposes—exist. Therefore the only thing to do is to realize these values for yourself and your clique by hook or crook. Which is the formula for social anarchy. For values, to reiterate, are primarily end-products of the social order and not prime movers in it—and this means that in order to change them, you must change the institutionalized practices of which they are the expression and end-product.

All individuals in our society, driven by the same values, feel anxiety, and harness their aggression to the particular implements that will guarantee them some freedom from’ their anxiety. To be sure, the conscience of Western man is such that he must assure himself first that he is right before he can release aggression. Without this assurance he cannot act. But in practice this only means that everyone who opposes his interests is wrong; wicked or inferior.

The interests of all those who are wrong have no legitimacy; they can be removed from effective opposition with complete justification. What instrumentalities can be used to this end? Anything from intimidation and slander to murder. There is no end to the variations of this simple formula, from the blame psychology that carries out the mandate for self-justification, and of which anti-Semitism is a special case, to the attachment of anxiety symbols to every political belief that can be labeled “left.”

No one can foresee precisely how the social crisis, now far advanced, will end. Two expedients have been tried: the Nazi method, which preserved many of the values and practices of bourgeois culture but abrogated the concept of citizenship, and the Soviet experiment, which altered the implementations and hence the values of social life. We know how the Nazi experiment fared, but we do not know the inner dynamics of the Soviet system. Until this is known through a disinterested and empirical study, all conclusions about it can only rate as unproved opinion.

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VI The Question of Survival

The survival of any society depends, apart from military destruction by an external force, on the ability to modify its structure as new conditions arise. In order to do this, two things are necessary: insight into the structure of, and causal relations among, its various interacting fields—we can no longer think in terms of simple observable causes; and secondly, human consent to the cooperation needed to bring changes about. The society’s insight into the structure, history, and dynamics of its own social processes cannot be confined to a few “engineers”; it must be commonly known and understood before cooperation for change can be achieved. The only alternative is to enforce change without consent—a process commonly known as revolution and government by oligarchy.

In our present crisis we labor under two handicaps: we do not understand the structure of these social processes made up of complex interacting fields; and secondly, change is difficult because people cannot alter the objectives in which they have acquired a large emotional vested interest, no matter what their status. Unhappily, human beings do not act on insights; they act on emotional provocation. Besides, everyone thinks he knows precisely what is wrong and what he wants. No one is looking for insights. Everyone is calling everyone else stupid, obstinate, and wicked. Can we, in our race against time, obtain both the necessary insights and the consent to change? Let us assume for the moment that we could get consent once we had the insight.

The diagnosis of the interacting fields that make up the social process has become extremely difficult in our culture. These fields are three-dimensional, and some factors in the social process have their origin at different time levels, with some deeply rooted in the past, some fifty years old, and some only one year old. Furthermore, these interacting social fields also arise at different times in the life-cycle of the individual, and their operation is by and large unknown to the individual himself.

We now know, as we did not know in the days of Adam Smith, that the human motivational factor must be included in the structure of the social field. We have in recent years learned something about how to take this elusive factor into account. We have learned, for example, that there is an intimate tie between the personality created by the common experience of everyone in a given culture, and the institutions that this personality creates. We have also learned that the values, directives, and goals pursued by the individual are the product of this personality. We have illustrated how these values change, and why, and we have shown that certain values do not change, since the institutionalized practices from which they arise have not changed—for example, our sex mores.

If we are recommending social insight and change, we must still select the level on which these changes are to be sought. This puts us in a serious dilemma. In order to make the kind of human being you want, you must know what kind of society you want him to live in. If you want to have a certain kind of society, you must know how to encourage the growth of the kind of human being who will be able to make such a society work. In other words, you cannot train the human unit for submissiveness and then put him into a society that puts a premium on aggressiveness, courage, and enterprise. If you do this, no matter what your blueprint calls for, you will get a society in which the inevitable polarization will take place between a few dominants and many submissives.

On the other hand, if you train all individuals for dominance, will you not have inevitable strife in which all will kill each other off? Not necessarily. Dominants ultimately cooperate. Strife is mainly between dominants and submissives. This is certainly the history of big business: first struggle and competition, then the coalescing of dominants, the elimination of competition between dominants and the formation of a solid front (cartelization) against the submissives.

There are other dilemmas. Social change operates on different time levels. You can recommend changes that will affect the basic personality structure. This is not easy. Man is an integrative organism—which means he begins to build his adaptive resources at birth; once established, he can use them but he cannot change them. However, over a span of four to five generations he has plenty of elasticity and can effect great changes. Changes in basic personality, even if we knew exactly what we wanted, would take from seventy-five to a hundred years.

Surely that much time would be needed to correct those of our mores which have had disastrous consequences for the formation of the basic personality of our time. Again we may point to our sex mores. Our sex mores have been the same from the Essenes (a Hebrew sect) down to Calvin because the institutionalized practices from which they arise have been the same. Strict sexual discipline in childhood and the authoritarian position of the father in the patriarchal family have not changed in 4000 years—in Western society. The problem here is not alone to introduce a rational control over the sex impulse, but also to remove the disastrous effects our mores have in creating and accentuating spurious incompatibilities in the personality—for there the community pays a high price in comfort and effectiveness, without any gain whatever. The influence of our sex mores on the growing child takes the toll in happiness and effectuality represented by the common neuroses.

But, one may ask, what have our sex mores and the authoritarian father to do with the burning issues of our time—a contracting economy, class warfare, international anarchy? They have this much to do with it: our evaluation of the social crisis is colored by the psychological conflicts they create in us. Far more significant, however, is the fact that our sex mores lead to a high emphasis on potency and power, and this adds its force to the other incentives that in our culture have inflated power into a primary goal of existence.

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Can We Control Aggression?

Most important of all the foci of our problem is the control of aggression. This complex exists today in two ugly forms, equally pernicious and harmful to society. The first is the form in which the individual seeks pleasurable or agreeable ends through the medium of suffering pain first—this is commonly known as masochism and is socially inconspicuous. Its most common expressions are submissiveness, dependency, ingratiation, too great dependence on leadership, the wish to be led and protected. (What that has meant in molding a people we know from the example of Nazi Germany.) The other well known form is overt agression, the wish to subject others, or to make others suffer, and to accumulate power in the form of money or property.

Aggression is an innate human propensity that has a high survival value. It is a most socially useful trait. To it we owe the extraordinary adaptability that has gained us mastery over the outer world. Aggression becomes dangerous or harmful only when directed against human beings. Western man has a high aggression component—not all societies do—because the growth-process of Western society fosters it to a high degree. But our child training not only fosters it—it also simultaneously places great obstacles to its smooth and consistent development. Hence we have the many malformations of the aggressive impulses. Add to this the fact that since the rise of the bourgeois style of living, these aggressive impulses have been pushed at a tremendous rate into both constructive and destructive channels. Free social mobility and the loss of social control by the default of illusory goals like salvation have all done their part in encouraging universal aggression for the goals of power and well-being. The secular state has placed few restrictions on these aggressive impulses; it has not even succeeded in closing the numerous avenues through which even those few checks it did make could be evaded.

This unchecked aggression has, by now, assumed the gravity of a cancerous growth. This expresses itself through legally permissible channels. And for this there are only two remedies. One is long-term—to effect changes in basic personality. The other is short-term—to remove the opportunity for the unchecked exercise of aggression. The long-term process is practically hopeless, for in order to do that the whole fabric and structure of society would have to be altered. The second is dangerous, because when you remove the opportunity for the exercise of aggression through the channels now sanctioned, you also destroy all the objectives to which everyone in the Western world is attuned. A third alternative is the one currently being pursued: keep all the values and objectives of living as defined by the merchant class—and take the consequences, warfare within every national state and against every national state.

In all humility, however, we suggest that the community that can spend $2,000,000,000 to create a means of destruction so powerful as to guarantee the elimination of the population of this planet should it be used—that such a community devote one-fourth of that sum to the study of the science of society. (Unfortunately this is not the place to present a detailed plan about how such a study could be made.) Possibly some eleventh-hour expedients may come out of the research that might give pause to the “social engineers” who control our future and are rushing us to our destruction. Or should this fail, can we not afford to make this small contribution to the civilization that will follow?

¹ G. B. Chisholm, formerly Director-General of Medical Services for the Canadian Army and now Canada's Deputy Minister of National Health: “Re-establishment of Peacetime Society,” Psychiatry, February 1946. Also the Nation, “Can Man Survive?” July 20-27, 1946.

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² What we have discussed here is a theory of the origins of sexual suppression based on the total adaptation of a society. The more commonly known theory may be called the jealousy theory, which explains sex mores as originating in a desire on the part of the dominant members of a society to preempt the sexual privileges for themselves. It is this theory, when seen from the point of view of the growing child, that gives rise to the well-known concept of the Oedipus complex. But the jealousy theory is not necessary to explain the Oedipus complex, which would come into existence no matter what the particular motivations were, provided that the restrictions existed.

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³ The problem of international control is faced with two difficulties: cultural differences and clashes of interest. The end-product of every culture is the formulation of a series of values that act as social directives for the individual. Clashes of such values (“ideologies”) do indeed create great incompatibilities. But cultural differences become important in the international scene only when they can be translated into terms of interest clashes. We often hear about this or that nation: “We don't like their ideology.” The fact is, we do not care a hoot about their “ideology,” unless their example stirs up strife at home, or interferes with our interests.