The worker and employee are anxious, not only because they might find themselves out of a job; 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 human existence as emotionally and intellectually independent and productive 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 a matter of salary but even more a matter of selfrespect. When they apply for their first job, they are tested for intelligence as well as for the tight 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. 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 illness.
Am I suggesting that we should return to the preindustrial mode of production or to nineteenth-century “free enterprise capitalism”? Certainly not. Problems are never solved by returning to a stage which one has already outgrown. I suggest transforming our social from a bureaucratically managed industrialism in which maximal production and consumption are ends in themselves into a humanist industrialism in which man and full development of his potentialities—those of and of reason—are the aims of all social arrangements. Production and consumption should serve only as means to this end, and should be prevented from ruling man.
36. By “a well-oiled cog in the machinery” the author intends to render the idea that man is .
A)
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