Society
Nature has designed man to be social, a state of affairs encoded early, on the instinctual level of our species as described above. Our minds and personalities could not possibly develop without contact and interaction with an ever-widening circle of people. Our mind receives input from others, whether consciously or unconsciously, in regard to matters of emotional and mental life, tradition and thought, by means of resonant sensitivity, identification, imitation, and by exchange of ideas, and permanent rules. The material we obtain in these ways is then transformed by our psyche in order to create a new human personality, one we call "our own". However, our existence is contingent upon necessary links with those who lived before, those who presently make up our society, and those who shall exist in the future. Our existence only assumes meaning as a function of societal bonds; hedonistic isolation causes us to lose our selves.
It is man's fate to actively cooperate in giving shape to the fate of society by two principal means: forming his individual and family life within it, and becoming active in the sum total of social affairs based on his - hopefully sufficient - comprehension of what needs to be done, what ought to be done, and whether or not he can do it. This requires an individual to develop two somewhat overlapping areas of knowledge about things; his life depends on the quality of this development, as does his nation and humanity as a whole.
If, say, we observe a beehive with a painter's eye, we see what looks like a crowding throng of insects linked by their species-similarity. A beekeeper, however, tracks complicated laws encoded in every insect's instinct and in the collective instinct of the hive as well; that helps him understand how to cooperate with the laws of nature governing apiary society. The beehive is a higher-order organism; no individual bee can exist without it, and thus it submits to the absolute nature of its laws.
If we observe the throngs of people crowding the streets of some great human metropolis, we see what looks like individuals driven by their business and problems, pursuing some crumb of happiness. However, such an oversimplification of reality causes us to disregard the laws of social life which existed long before the metropolis ever did, and which will continue to exist long after huge cities are emptied of people and purpose. Loners in a crowd have a difficult time accepting that reality, which - for them - exists in only potential form, although they cannot perceive it directly.
In reality, accepting the laws of social life in all their complexity, even if we find initial difficulties in comprehending them, helps us to come, finally, to a certain level of understanding that we acquire by something akin to osmosis. Thanks to this comprehension, or even just an instinctive intuition of such laws, an individual is able to reach his goals and mature his personality in action. Thanks to sufficient intuition and comprehension of these conditions, a society is able to progress culturally and economically and to achieve political maturity.
The more we progress in this understanding, the more social doctrines strike us as primitive and psychologically naive, especially those based on the thoughts of thinkers living during the 18th and 19th centuries which were characterized by a dearth of psychological perception. The suggestive nature of these doctrines derives from their oversimplification of reality, something easily adapted and used in political propaganda. These doctrines and ideologies show their basic faults, in regard to the understanding of human personalities and differences among people, all rather clearly if viewed in the light of our natural language of psychological concepts, and even more so in the light of objective language.
A psychologist's view of society, even if based only on professional experience, always places the human individual in the foreground; it then widens the perspective to include small groups, such as families, and finally societies and humanity as whole. We must then accept from the outset that an individual's fate is significantly dependent upon circumstance. When we gradually increase the scope of our observations, we also gain a greater pictorial specificity of causative links, and statistical data assume ever greater stability.
In order to describe the interdependence between someone's fate and personality, and the state of development of society, we must study the entire body of information collected in this area to date, adding a new work written in objective language. Herein I shall adduce only a few examples of such reasoning in order to open the door to questions presented in later chapters.
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Throughout the ages and in various cultures, the best pedagogues have understood the importance, regarding the formation of a culture and a person's character, of the scope of concepts describing psychological phenomena. The quality and richness of concepts and terminology mastered by an individual and society, as well as the degree to which they approximate an objective world view, condition the development of our moral and social attitudes. The correctness of our understanding of self and others characterizes the components conditioning our decisions and choices, be they mundane or important, in our private lives and social activities.
The level and quality of a given society's psychological worldview is also a condition of realization of the full socio-psychological structure present as a potential in the psychological variety within our species. Only when we can understand a person in relation to his actual internal contents, not some substituted external label, can we help him along his path to proper adjustment to social life, which would be to his advantage and would also assist in the creation of a stable and creative structure of society.
Supported by a proper feel for, and understanding of, psychological qualities, such a structure would impart high social office to individuals possessing both full psychological normality, sufficient talent and specific preparation. The basic collective intelligence of the masses of people would then respect and support them.
And so, in such a society, the only pending problems to be resolved would be those matters so difficult as to overwhelm the natural language of concepts, however enriched and qualitatively ennobled.
However, there have always been "society pedagogues", less outstanding but more numerous, who have become fascinated by their own great ideas, which might, sometimes, even be true, but are more often constricted or contain the taint of some hidden pathological thought processes. Such people have always striven to impose pedagogical methods which would impoverish and deform the development of individuals' and societies' psychological world view; they inflict permanent harm upon societies, depriving them of universally useful values. By claiming to act in the name of a more valuable idea, such pedagogues actually undermine the values they claim and open the door for destructive ideologies.
At the same time, as we have already mentioned, each society contains a small but active minority of persons with various deviant worldviews, especially in the areas treated above, which are caused either by psychological anomalies, to be discussed below, or by the long-term influence of such anomalies upon their psyches, especially during childhood. Such people later exert a pernicious influence upon the formative process of the psychological world view in society, whether by direct activity or by means of written or other transmission, especially if they engage in the service of some ideology or other.
Many causes which easily escape the notice of sociologists and political scientists can thus be broken down into either the development or involution of this factor, whose meaning for the life of society is as decisive as the quality of their language of psychological concepts.
Let us imagine that we want to analyze these processes: we would construct a sufficiently credible inventory method which would examine the contents and correctness of the area of world view in question. After subjecting the appropriate representative groups to such testing, we would then obtain indicators of that particular society's ability to understand psychological phenomena and dependencies within their country and other nations. This would simultaneously constitute the basic indicators of said society's talent for self-government and progress, as well as its ability to carry on a reasonable international policy. Such tests could provide an early warning system if such abilities were to deteriorate, in which case, it would be proper to make the appropriate efforts in the realm of social pedagogy. In extreme cases, it might be proper for those countries evaluating the problem to take more direct corrective action, even to isolating the deteriorating country until the appropriate corrections are well under way.
Let as adduce another example of a congenial nature: the development of an adult human's gifts, skills, realistic thought, and natural psychological world view will be optimal where the level and quality of his education and the demands of his professional practice correspond to his individual talents. Achieving such a position provides personal, material, and moral advantages to him; society as whole also reaps benefits at the same time. Such a person would then perceive it as social justice in relation to himself.
If various circumstances combine, including a given society's deficient psychological world view, individual's are forced to exercise functions which do not make full use of his or her talents. When this happens, said person's productivity is no better, and often even worse, than that of a worker with satisfactory talents. Such an individual then feels cheated and inundated by duties which prevent him from achieving self-realization. His thoughts wander from his duties into a world of fantasy, or into matters which are of greater interest to him; in his daydream world, he is what he should and deserves to be. Such a person always knows if his social and professional adjustment has taken a downward direction; at the same time, however, if he fails to develop a healthy critical faculty concerning the upper limits of his own talents, his daydreams may "fix on" an unfair world where "all you need is power". Revolutionary and radical ideas find fertile soil among such people in downward social adaptations. It is in society's best interests to correct such conditions not only for better productivity, but to avoid tragedies.
Another type of individual, on the other hand, may achieve an important post because they belong to privileged social groups or organizations in power while their talents and skills are not sufficient for their duties, especially the more difficult problems. Such persons then avoid the problematic and dedicate themselves to minor matters quite ostentatiously. A component of histrionics appears in their conduct and tests indicate that their correctness of reasoning progressively deteriorates after only a few years' worth of such activities. In the face of increasing pressures to perform at a level unattainable for them, and in fear of being discovered as incompetent, they begin to direct attacks against anyone with greater talent or skill, removing them from appropriate posts and playing an active role in degrading their social and professional adjustment. This, of course, engenders a feeling of injustice and can lead to the problems of the downwardly adapted individual as described above. Upwardly-adjusted people thus favor whip-cracking, totalitarian governments which would protect their positions.
Upward and downward social adjustments, as well the qualitatively improper ones, result in a waste of any society's basic capital, namely the talent pool of its members. This simultaneously leads to increasing dissatisfaction and tensions among individuals and social groups; any attempt to approach human talent and its productivity problematics as a purely private matter must therefore be considered dangerously naive. Development or involution in all areas of cultural, economic and political life depend on the extent to which this talent pool is properly utilized. In the final analysis, it also determines whether there will be evolution or revolution.
Technically speaking, it would be easier to construct appropriate methods that enable us to evaluate the correlations between individual talents and social adjustment in a given country, than to deal with the prior proposition of the development of psychological concepts. Conducting the proper tests would furnish us a valuable index that we might call "the social order indicator." The closer the figure to +1.0, the more likely the country in question would be to fulfill that basic precondition for social order and take the proper path in the direction of dynamic development. A low correlation would be an indication that social reform is needed. A near-zero or even negative correlation should be interpreted as a danger-sign that revolution is imminent. Revolutions in one country often cause manifold problems for other countries, so it is in the best interests of all countries to monitor such conditions.
The examples adduced above do not exhaust the question of causative factors influencing the creation of a social structure which would adequately correspond to the laws of nature. Our species-instinct level has already encoded the intuition that the existence of society's internal structure, based on psychological variations, is necessary; it continues to develop alongside our basic intelligence, inspiring our healthy common sense. This explains why the most numerous part of populations, whose talents are near average, generally accepts its modest social position in any country as long as the position fulfills the indispensable requirements of proper social adjustment and guarantees an equitable way of life no matter at what level of society the individual finds their proper fit.
This average majority accepts and respects the social role of people whose talents and education are superior, as long as they occupy appropriate positions within the social structure. The same people, however, will react with criticism, disrespect, and even contempt, whenever someone as average as themselves compensates for his deficiencies by flaunting an upwardly-adjusted position. The judgments pronounced by this sphere of average but sensible people can often be highly accurate, which can and should be all the more remarkable if we take into account that said people could not possibly have had sufficient knowledge of many of the actual problems, be they scientific, technical, or economic.
An experienced politician can rarely assume that the difficulties in the areas of economics, defense, or international policy will be fully understand by his constituency. However, he can and should assume that his own comprehension of human matters, and anything having to do with interpersonal relations within said structure, will find an echo in this same majority of his society's members. These facts partially justify the idea of democracy, especially if a particular country has historically had such a tradition, the social structure is well developed, and the level of education is adequate. Nevertheless, they do not represent psychological data sufficient to raise democracy to the level of a moral criterion in politics. A democracy composed of individuals of inadequate psychological knowledge can only devolve.
The same politician should be conscious of the fact that society contains people who already carry the psychological results of social maladjustment. Some of these individuals attempt to protect positions for which their skills are not commensurate, while others fight to be allowed to use their talents. Governing a country becomes increasingly difficult when such battles begin to eclipse other important needs. That is why the creation of a fair social structure continues to be a basic precondition for social order and the liberation of creative values. It also explains why the propriety and productivity of a structure-creation process constitute a criterion for a good political system.
Politicians should also be aware that in each society there are people whose basic intelligence, natural psychological world view, and moral reasoning have developed improperly. Some of these persons contain the cause within themselves, others were subjected to psychologically abnormal people as children. Such individuals' comprehension of social and moral questions is different, both from the natural and from the objective viewpoint; they constitute a destructive factor for the development of society's psychological concepts, social structure, and internal bonds.
At the same time, such people easily interpenetrate the social structure with a ramified network of mutual pathological conspiracies poorly connected to the main social structure. These people and their networks participate in the genesis of that evil which spares no nation. This substructure gives birth to dreams of obtaining power and imposing one's will upon society, and is quite often actually brought about in various countries, and during historical times as well. It is for this reason that a significant portion of our consideration shall be devoted to an understanding of this age-old and dangerous source of problems.
Some countries with a non-homogeneous population manifest further factors which operate destructively upon the formation of social structure and the permanent developmental processes of a society's psychological world view. Primarily among these are the racial, ethnic, and cultural differences existing in virtually every conquest-engendered nation. Memories of former sufferings and contempt for the vanquished continue to divide the population for centuries. It is possible to overcome these difficulties if understanding and goodwill prevail throughout several generations.
Differences in religious beliefs and the moral convictions related thereto continue to cause problems, albeit less dangerous than the above, unless aggravated by some doctrine of intolerance or superiority of one faith above others. The creation of a social structure whose links are patriotic and supra-religious has, after all, been demonstrated as possible.
All these difficulties become extremely destructive if a social or religious group, in keeping with its doctrine, demands that its members be accorded positions which are in fact upward-adjusted with relation to these people's true talents.
A just social structure woven of individually adjusted persons, i.e. creative and dynamic as a whole, can only take shape if this process is subjected to its natural laws rather than some conceptual doctrines. It benefits society as a whole for each individual to be able to find his own way to self-realization with assistance from a society which understands these laws, individual interests and the common good.
One obstacle to the development of a society's psychological world view, the building of a healthy societal structure, and the institution of proper forms for governing the nation, would appear to be the enormous populations and vast distances of giant countries. It is just precisely these nations which give rise to the greatest ethnic and cultural variations. In a vast spreading land containing hundreds of millions of people, individuals lack the support of a familiar homeland and feel powerless to exert an effect upon matters of high politics. The structure of society becomes lost in wide-open spaces. What remains is narrow, generally familial, links.
At the same time, governing such a country creates its own unavoidable problems: giants suffer from what could be called permanent macropathy (giant sickness), since the principal authorities are far away from any individual or local matters. The main symptom is the proliferation of regulations required for administration; they may appear proper in the capital but are often meaningless in outlying districts or when applied to individual matters. Officials are forced to follow regulations blindly; the scope of using their human reason and differentiating real situations becomes very narrow indeed. Such behavioral procedures have an impact upon the society, which also starts to think regulations instead of practical and psychological reality. The psychological world view, which constitutes the basic factor in cultural development and activates social life, thus becomes involuted.
It thus behooves us to ask: Is good government possible? Are giant countries capable of sustaining social and cultural evolution? It would appear, rather, that the best candidates for development are those countries whose populations number between ten and twenty million, and where personal bonds among citizens, and between citizens and their authorities, still safeguard correct psychological differentiation and natural relationships. Overly large countries should be divided into smaller organisms enjoying considerable autonomy, especially as regards cultural and economic matters; they could afford their citizens a feeling of homeland within which their personalities could develop and mature.
If someone asked me what should be done to heal the United States of America, a country which manifests symptoms of macropathy, inter alia, I would advise subdividing that vast nation into thirteen states--just like the original ones, except correspondingly larger and with more natural boundaries. Such states should then be given considerable autonomy. That would afford citizens a feeling of homeland, albeit a smaller one, and liberate the motivations of local patriotism and rivalry among such states. This would, in turn, facilitate solutions to other problems with a different origin.
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Society is not an organism subordinating every cell to the good of the whole; neither is it a colony of insects, where the collective instinct acts like a dictator. However, it should also avoid being a compendium of egocentric individuals linked purely by economic interests and legal and formal organizations.
Any society is a socio-psychological structure woven of individuals whose psychological organization is the highest, and thus the most variegated. A significant scope of man's individual freedom derives from this state of affairs and subsists in an extremely complicated relationship to his manifold psychological dependencies and duties, with regard to this collective whole.
Isolating an individual's personal interest as if it were at war with collective interests is pure speculation which radically oversimplifies real conditions instead of tracking their complex nature. Asking questions based on such schemes is logically defective, since it contains erroneous suggestions.
In reality, many ostensibly contradictory interests, such as individual vs. collective or those of various social groups and substructures, could be reconciled if we could be guided by a sufficiently penetrating understanding of the good of man and society, and if we could overcome the operations of emotions as well as some more or less primitive doctrines. Such reconciliation, however, requires transferring the human and social problems in question to a higher level of understanding and acceptance of the natural laws of life. At this level, even the most difficult problems turn out to have a solution, since they invariably derive from the same insidious operations of psychopathological phenomena. We shall deal with this question toward the end of this book.
A colony of insects, no matter how well-organized socially, is doomed to extinction whenever its collective instinct continues to operate according to the psychogenetic code, although the biological meaning has disappeared. If, for instance, a queen bee does not affect her nuptial flight in time because the weather has been particularly bad, she begins laying unfertilized eggs which will hatch nothing but drones. The bees continue to defend their queen, as required by their instinct; of course, and when the worker bees die out the hive becomes extinct.
At that point, only a "higher authority" in the shape of a beekeeper can save such a hive. He must find and destroy the drone queen and insinuate a healthy fertilized queen into the hive along with a few of her young workers. A net is required for a few days to protect such a queen and her providers from being stung by those bees loyal to the old queen. Then the hive instinct accepts the new one. The apiarist generally suffers a few painful stings in the process.
The following question derives from the above comparison: Can the human hive inhabiting our globe achieve sufficient comprehension of macrosocial pathological phenomenon which is so dangerous, abhorrent, and fascinating at the same time, before it is too late? At present, our individual and collective instincts and our natural psychological and moral world view cannot furnish all the answers upon which to base skillful counteractive measures.
Those fair-minded people who preach that all we have left is to trust in the "Great Apiarist in the sky" and a return to His commandments are glimpsing a general truth, but they also tend to trivialize particular truths, especially the naturalistic ones. It is the latter which constitute a basis for comprehending phenomena and targeting practical action. The laws of nature have made us very different from one another. Thanks to his individual characteristics, exceptional life-circumstances, and scientific effort, man may have achieved some mastery of the art of objectively comprehending the phenomena of the above-mentioned type, but we must underscore that this could only occur because it was in accordance with the laws of nature.
If societies and their wise people are able to accept an objective understanding of social and sociopathological phenomena, overcoming the emotionalism and egotism of the natural world view for this purpose, they shall find a means of action based on an understanding of the essence of the phenomena. It will then become evident that a proper vaccine or treatment can be found for each of the diseases scourging the earth in the form of major or minor social epidemics.
Just as a sailor possessing an accurate nautical map enjoys greater freedom of course-selection and maneuvering amid islands and bays, a person endowed with a better comprehension of self, other people, and the complex interdependencies of social life becomes more independent of the various circumstances of life and better able to overcome situations which are difficult to understand. At the same time, such improved knowledge makes an individual more liable to accept his duties toward society and to subordinate himself to the discipline which arises as a corollary. Better informed societies also achieve internal order and criteria for collective efforts. This book is dedicated to reinforcing this knowledge by means of a naturalistic understanding of phenomena, something heretofore comprehended only by means of excessively moralistic categories of the natural world view.
In a wider perspective, a constantly improving grasp of the laws governing social life, and its atypical secluded recesses, must lead us to reflect upon the failings and deficiencies of those social doctrines expounded to date, which were based on an extremely primitive understanding of these laws and phenomena. The distance is not far between such considerations and a better understanding of the operations of these dependencies in former and existing social systems; the same applies to substantive critiques thereof. A new idea is about to be born based upon this ever-deepening comprehension of natural laws, namely the building of a new social system for nations.
Such a system would be better than any of its predecessors. Building it is possible and necessary, not just some vague futuristic vision. After all, a whole series of countries is now dominated by conditions which have destroyed the structural forms worked out by history and replaced them with social systems inimical to creative functioning, systems which can only survive by means of force. We are thus confronted with a great construction project demanding wide-ranging and well-organized work. The earlier we undertake the job, the more time we will have to carry it out.
