The following excerpts are from Paul Goodman's contribution to a symposium on the H-Bomb, printed by Alternative (March 1950) and distributed free by the Committee for Non-Violent Revolution. Later that year the Korean War began and Alternative was banned from the mails for advocating draft resistance. Goodman's socio-psychological analysis of contemporary society is more fully developed in his contribution to Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (New York: Julian PPress, 1951), co-written with Frederick Perls and Ralph Hefferline, and Growing Up Absurd: Problems ofYouth in the Organized Society (New York: Random House, 1960).
WE HAVE IN AMERICA A COMBINATION OF unexampled general wealth and unexampled civil peace. Economically and sociologically these are beneficent causes of each other, the more civil order the more production, and the more wealth the less incentive to destroy the civil order. By civil order here is meant not the absence of crimes of violence, but the pervasive safety of both city and country. Compared with other ages, travel is without danger anywhere and at any hour; there are almost no brawls, riots, or armed bands. Madmen do not roam the streets, disease is quickly isolated in hospitals; death is never seen, childbirth rarely. Meat is eaten, but no one in the city ever sees an animal slaughtered. No such state of non-violence, safety, and sterility has ever before existed. Concerning our wealth, again, I need only point out that none of the debated economic problems has to do with subsistence; the unions demand better hours, wages, and security, the capitalists demand fewer controls and better conditions of reinvestment; a single case of starvation is a scandal for the press. Less than 1096 ofthe economy is concerned with elementary subsistence. Never in history have there been so many comforts, luxuries, and entertainments.
Psychologically the picture is more dubious. There is little frustration but there is little satisfaction. General bafflement and insecurity of individuals in the too-big society destroy self-confidence and initiative, and without these there cannot be active enjoyment. Sports and entertainments are passive; the choices on the mass-market are passive; people make nothing for themselves and do nothing for themselves. The quantity of sexuality is increasingly great and approaching adequacy, but the de-sensitization is extreme. It used to be felt that science and technology and the reform in mores */ou! d bring an age of happiness. This hope is disappointed; everywhere people are disappointed. Even so far, then, there is evident a reason to smash things, to destroy not this or that part of the system (e. g. the upper class), but the whole system en bloc; for it offers no promise, but only more of the same. And considered more deeply, we have here the condition almost specific for the excitement of primary masochism: continual stimulation and only partial release of tension, unbearable heightening of the unawares tension (unawares because people do not know what they want nor how to get it), and finally the desire for orgasm interpreted as a desire for total self-destruction. It is inevitable that there should be a public dream of universal disaster, with explosions, fires, and electric-shocks; and people pool their efforts to bring this apocalypse to an actuality.
At the same time, however, all overt expression of destructiveness, annihilation, anger, combativeness, murderousness, is suppressed, in the state ofcivil peace. To a large degree the feeling of anger is suppressed and even repressed. People are sensible, tolerant, polite, and cooperative in being pushed around. But the occasions of anger are not minimized. On the contrary, just the situation of substituting for the large movements of initiative the competitive routine of offices, bureaucracies, and factories, produces continual petty frictions, hurt feelings, being crossed. Small anger is continually generated and never really let out; big anger (that goes with big initiative) is repressed. The result is the projection of the angry situation afar; we find big distant causes adequate to explain the accumulated anger that is certainly not explicable by petty frictions (and that is largely self-hatred). In brief, one is angry with the enemy.
This enemy is also cruel and hardly human; there is no use in treating with him as tho he were a human being. Why is this? The aim ofAmerican love, as is proved by the content of all popular cinema and literature, is sado-masochistic; but the love-making itself is not, in general, sado-masochistic (for that would be anti-social and indecent). Therefore it must be “someone else” who is sadistic.
In civil society, the cluster of aggressive drives is “anti-social,” but fortunately in wars they are not “anti-social.” That is, one can wage wars against enemies who indeed anger, and fascinate, by their beastliness and sub-human strength. But it must be remembered that the ultimate aim of these wars is universal explosion and disaster, satisfaction at last, and the end of civil peace.
The mass-democratic army, further, is excellently apt for the needs of the people. It gives security, removes one from the jobs and homes that give no great pleasure and rouse feelings of inadequacy; and it organizes one's efforts more actively toward sadism and primary masochism.
People observe the catastrophe approaching: they receive rational warnings and make all kinds of resolutions. But energy is paralyzed for one is fascinated by and really desirous of the dangerous prospect. One is eager to complete the unfinished situation. People are bent on mass suicide, an outcome that solves most problems without personal guilt.
In these circumstances any pacifist propaganda without adventurous revolutionary social and psychological action is worse than useless: it solves no problems and increases personal guilt. To refuse war in a society geared to war is a salutacy shock, but the shock is useful merely as a means to further releases ofanxiety and aggression; as such a good fuck or a fist-fight is equally useful.
World History
