When Ulysses and his men were shipwrecked..........Frustration and violence are the price of material affluence.

When Ulysses and his men were shipwrecked, they first lit a fire of driftwood and cooked a meal. After they had eaten, they remembered their drowned companions and wept. Homer's account rings true. Our physical needs take priority over our emotional demands, but, once the former have been satisfied, the profounder requirements of our humanity reassert them- selves. And what happens on the personal scale can also happen on the world scale. The industrialized nations have now managed, broadly speaking, to provide their citizens with food, shelter and clothing. As a result, those citizens are becoming more aware of other and subtler needs. But a society geared to the production of goods is precisely a society which is poorly adapted to satisfying psychological needs. The very processes by which we manufacture goods so effectively actually reduce psychological satisfactions. Hence the further we push technological advance, the worse the psychological environment becomes. We have scrambled out of physical poverty only to fall into psychological poverty. Indeed our condition is worse than poverty; we live in a psychological slum.

In short, in the technological growth of any social organism, there is a turnover point at which effort needs to be transferred from material to non-material needs. This point we have now reached, or passed. This is why we have to rethink our entire social technique. How can we satisfy our psychological needs, in a technologically advanced society? That is the central question.

When psychological needs are not met, people can be said to be frustrated. Their efforts to attain some kind of psychological satisfaction are in vain. (The word frustration comes from the Latin frustra, in vain.) Now, as the American psychologists Dollard and Miller showed a quarter of a century ago, frustration leads to aggression. When we cannot repair our car, we feel like giving it a kick. (There is more to be said about the origins of aggression, of course, and I shall say it later on: this is just a preliminary sketch.) In short, it is the existence of widespread frustration which is the prime cause of the mounting toll of violence which the world is now witnessing. So, if that frustration can be shown to be caused by industrial society and the conditions it imposes, then the violence must be regarded as a cost of production. Frustration and violence are the price of material affluence.

Summary: Once his physical needs are satisfied, man seeks to satisfy the hitherto dormant psychological needs. What is true of an individual is true of society. Technology has abundantly satisfied physical needs while neglecting emotional demands. In fact the very process of manufacturing reduces psychological satisfaction. We have now reached or passed the stage when emotional needs cannot be held in check. Unsatisfied emotional needs lead to frustration. Frustration triggers aggression which finds expression in violence. Frustration and violence, therefore, are due to material affluence.