It sounds paradoxical, but we have seen many societies that have developed in one direction and then are so proud of the problems they have solved that they don't see the defects and dangers which have arisen after they have solved the problems of the previous century. You might say it is a kind of Maginot Line psychology--fighting the next war in terms of the previous war. I would say the dangers we are confronted with are no longer the dangers of the nineteenth century. We have solved most of these. But we have new ones. For instance, to speak generally, in the process of producing more and consuming more we have transformed--or are in the process of transforming--means into ends. {05} Once, more production was a means for more consumption and more consumption was a means for a more dignified, richer human life for the individual. Today, I am afraid, production and consumption have become ends in themselves. We pro- duce and consume more and more, and if we ask „why,“ „what for“ we don't quite know the answer.

"In our societies people compete primarily for material goods, which have no intrinsic worth. Without inequality—and without the false values it engenders—they could compete instead in excellence. They could strive to outdo each other in knowledge, discovery, or creative expression. Then their competitiveness, instead of hindering perfection, could spur them on. This is a further argument for distributive equality: By encouraging human competitiveness to aim at true goods, it makes an unattractive trait serve valuable ends."

Since our economic organization is based on continuous and ever-increasing consumption (think of the threat to our, economy if people did not buy a new car until their old one was really obsolete), contemporary industrial man is encour- aged to be consumption-crazy. Without any real enjoyment, he „takes in“ drink, food, cigarettes, sights, lectures, books, movies, television, any new kind of gadget. The world has become one great maternal breast, and man has become the eternal suckling, forever expectant, forever disappointed.
Sex, in fact, has become one of the main objects of consumption. Our news- stands are full of „girlie“ magazines; the percentages of girls having premarital sexual relations and of unwed mothers are on a steep incline. It can be argued that all this represents a welcome emancipation from Victorian morality, that it is a wholesome affirmation of independence, that it reflects the Freudian principle that repression may produce neurosis. But while all these arguments are true to some extent, they omit the main point. Neither independence nor Freudian principle is the main cause of our present-day sexual freedom. Our sexual mores are part and parcel of our cult of consumption, whose main principle was so succinctly expressed by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World: „Never put off till tomor- row the fun you can have today.“ Nature has provided men and women with the capacity for sexual excitement; but excitement in consumption, whether it is of sex or any other commodity, is not the same as aliveness and richness of experience.
In general, our society is becoming one of giant enterprises directed by a bureaucracy in which man becomes a small, well-oiled cog in the machinery. The oiling is done with higher wages, fringe benefits, well-ventilated factories and piped music, and by psychologists and „human-relations“ experts; yet all this oil- ing does not alter the fact that man has become powerless, that he does not wholeheartedly participate in his work and that he is {10} bored with it. In fact, the blue- and the white-collar workers have become economic puppets who dance to the tune of automated machines and bureaucratic management.
The worker and employee are anxious, not only because they might find themselves out of a job (and with installment payments due); they are anxious also because they are unable to acquire any real satisfaction or interest in life. They live and die without ever having confronted the fundamental realities of hu- man existence as emotionally and intellectually productive, authentic and independent human beings.
Those higher up on the social ladder are no less anxious. Their lives are no less empty than those of their subordinates. They are even more insecure in some respects. They are in a highly competitive race. To be promoted or to fall behind is not only a matter of salary but even more a matter of self-esteem. When they apply for their first job, they are tested for intelligence as well as for the right mixture of submissiveness and independence. From that moment on they are tested again and again--by the psychologists, for whom testing is a big business, and by their superiors, who judge their behavior; sociability, capacity to get, along, etc., their own and that of their wives. This constant need to prove that one is as good as or better than one’s fellow-competitor creates constant anxiety and stress, the very causes of unhappiness and psychosomatic illness.