Most Americans believe that our society of consumption-happy, fun-living, jet-traveling people creates the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Contrary to this view, I believe that our present way of life leads to increasing anxiety, helplessness and, eventually, to the disintegration of our culture. I refuse to identify fun with pleasure, excitement with joy, business with happiness, or the faceless, buck-passing “organization man” with an independent individual.
From this critical view our rates of alcoholism, suicide and divorce, as well as juvenile delinquency, gang rule, acts of violence and indifference to life, are characteristic symptoms of our “pathology of normalcy”. It may be argued that all these pathological phenomena exist because we have not yet reached our aim, that of an affluent society. It is true, we are still far from being an affluent society. But the material progress made in the last decades allows us to hope that our system might eventually produce a materially affluent society. Yet will we be happier then? The example of Sweden, one of the most prosperous, democratic and peaceful European countries, is not very encouraging: Sweden, as is often pointed out, in spite of all its material security has among the highest alcoholism and suicide rates in Europe, while a much poorer country like Ireland ranks among the lowest in these respects. Could it be that our dream that material welfare per se leads to happiness is just a pipe dream?
Certainly the humanist thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who are our ideological ancestors, thought that the goal of life was the full unfolding of a person’s potentialities, what mattered to them was the person who is much, not the one who has much or uses much. For them economic production was a means to the unfolding of man, not an end. It seems that today the means have become ends, that not only “God is dead” as Nietzsche said in the nineteenth century, but also man is dead; that what is alive are the organizations, the machines; and that man has become their slave rather than being their master.
Each society creates its own type of personality by its way of bringing up children in the family, by its system of education, by its effective values (that is those values that are rewarded rather than only preached). Every society creates the type of “social character” which is needed for its proper functioning. It forms men who want to do what they have to do. What kind of men does our large-scale, bureaucratized industrialism need?
It needs men who cooperate smoothly in large groups, who want to consume more and more, and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, yet who are willing to be commanded, to do what is expected, to fit into the social machine without friction; men who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without an aim except the aim to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.
1. The author uses the example of Sweden in the second paragraph to show that （ ）.
2. Compared with thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries, people today （ ）.
3. It can be inferred from the 3rd paragraph that （ ）.
4. According to the author, which type of individual might be most welcome in today’s society?
5. The author writes this article to （ ）.
