The workers and employees are anxious,not only because they might find themselves out of job;they are anxious also because they are unable to acquire any real satisfaction or interest in life.(1)_______________________.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 self-respect.(2)_______________________.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 anxiety and stress,the very causes of unhappiness and illness.Am I suggesting that we should return to the pre-industrial mode of production or to the nineteenth-century “free enterprises” capitalism?Certainly not.(3)_______________________.I suggest transforming our social system 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 love and of reason-are the aims of all social arrangements.Production and consumption should only be means to these ends,and should be prevented from ruling man.
