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If you desire even modicums of fame you ought to kill someone.
Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as
capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong
and as capable as men
Words like
"self-confidence",
"self-reliance",
"initiative",
"enterprise",
"optimism", etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is
antiindividualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve every one's problems
for them, satisfy everyone's needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of
person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems
and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagohistic to the concept of competition
because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.
But for most people it is through the power process — having a goal, making an
AUTONOMOUS effort and attaining the goal — that self-esteem, self-confidence and
a sense of power are acquired. When one does not have adequate opportunity to go
through the power process the consequences are (depending on the individual and on
the way the power process is disrupted) boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem,
inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spouse
Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are
excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of
social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the
extended family, the village or the tribe.
It is well known that crowding increases stress and aggression. The degree of
crowding that exists today and the isolation of man from nature are consequences of
technological progress. All pre-industrial societies were predominantly rural. The
Industrial Revolution vastly increased the size of cities and the proportion of the
population that lives in them, and modern agricultural technology has made it
possible for the Earth to support a far denser population than it ever did before
First, there doubtless are differences in the strength of the drive for power.
Individuals with a weak drive for power may have relatively little need to go through
the power process, or at least relatively little need for autonomy in the power
process. These are docile types who would have been happy as plantation darkies in
the Old South. (We don't mean to sneer at the "plantation darkies" of the Old South.
To their credit, most of the slaves were NOT content with their servitude. We do
sneer at people who ARE content with servitude
In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one's
physical needs. It is enough to go through a training program to acquire some petty
technical skill, then come to work on time and exert the very modest effort needed to
hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of
all, simple OBEDIENCE. If one has those, society takes care of one from cradle to
grave. (Yes, there is an underclass that cannot take the physical necessities for
granted, but we are speaking here of mainstream society.) Thus it is not surprising
that modern society is full of surrogate activities. These include scientific work,
athletic achievement, humanitarian work, artistic and literary creation, climbing the
corporate ladder, acquisition of money and material goods far beyond the point at
which they cease to give any additional physical satisfaction, and social activism
when it addresses issues that are not important for the activist personally, as in the
case of white activists who work for the rights of nonwhite minorities. These are not
always PURE surrogate activities, since for many people they may be motivated in
part by needs other than the need to have some goal to pursue. Scientific work may
be motivated in part by a drive for prestige, artistic creation by a need to express
feelings, militant social activism by hostility. But for most people who pursue them,
these activities are in large part surrogate activities. For example, the majority of
scientists will probably agree that the "fulfillment" they get from their work is more
important than the money and prestige they earn.
The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is
human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has
nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the
technological system. It is not the fault of capitalism and it is not the fault of
socialism. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology
but by technical necessity. [18] Of course the system does satisfy many human needs,
but generally speaking it does this only to the extend that it is to the advantage of the
system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the
human being. For example, the system provides people with food because the system
couldn't function if everyone starved; it attends to people's psychological needs
whenever it can CONVENIENTLY do so, because it couldn't function if too many
people became depressed or rebellious. But the system, for good, solid, practical
reasons, must exert constant pressure on people to mold their behavior to the needs
of the system. To much waste accumulating? The government, the media, the
educational system, environmentalists, everyone inundates us with a mass of
propaganda about recycling. Need more technical personnel? A chorus of voices
exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force
adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate.
When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo
"retraining," no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in
this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity.
and for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would
be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of "mental
health" in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves
in accord with the needs of the system and does so withoutshowing signs of stress.
employees assemble only one section of a catalogue, had each assemble a whole
catalogue, and this was supposed to give them a sense of purpose and achievement.
Some companies have tried to give their employees more autonomy in their work, but
for practical reasons this usually can be done only to a very limited extent, and in any
case employees are never given autonomy as to ultimate goals — their "autonomous"
efforts can never be directed toward goals that they select personally, but only toward
their employer's goals, such as the survival and growth of the company. Any company
would soon go out of business if it permitted its employees to act otherwise.
Similarly, in any enterprise within a socialist system, workers must direct their
efforts toward the goals of the enterprise, otherwise the enterprise will not serve its
purpose as part of the system. Once again, for purely technical reasons it is not
possible for most individuals or small groups to have much autonomy in industrial
society. Even the small-business owner commonly has only limited autonomy. Apart
from the necessity of government regulation, he is restricted by the fact that he must
fit into the economic system and conform to its requirements. For instance, when
someone develops a new technology, the smallbusiness person often has to use that
technology whether he wants to or not, in order to remain competitive
