Psychology and Social Sanity

by Hugo Münsterberg

While such paralyzing influences were working from above, the changes from below would interfere no less with vigorous achievement. Every gateway would be wide open. Socialism would mean a policy opposite to that of the trade unions to-day. They are energetically excluding the unfit. Under the new order the fine day for the unfit would have dawned. At present the socialists feel at home in the system of the unions, because the firm organization of the workingmen through the unions is helpful for their cause. But if that cause wins, the barriers of every union must break down, and the industrial energies of the nation will be scattered in the unimportant work in order to give an equal chance to the unproductive.

Nobody doubts that socialism would overcome some of the obvious weaknesses of the capitalistic era, and those weaknesses may be acknowledged even if we are faithful to our plan and abstract from mere human happiness. If only the objective achievement is our aim, we cannot deny that the millionfold misery from sickness and old age, from accidents at work, and from unemployment through a crisis in trade, from starvation wages, and from losses through fraudulent undertakings, is keeping us from the goal. But has the groaning of this misery remained unheard in these times, when capitalism has been reaching its height? The last two decades have shown that the system of private ownership can be in deepest harmony with all those efforts to alleviate its cruelties in order to strengthen the efficiency of the nation at work. Certainly the socialists themselves deserve credit for much in the great international movement toward the material security of the workingman's social life. It is doubtful whether without her social democrats, Germany, the pioneer in the social insurance movement, would have given to the army of workingmen those protective laws which became the model for England and other nations, and which are beginning to be influential in American thinking, too. The laws against child labour, the efforts for minimum wage rates, and, most important, the worldwide tendency to secure a firm supervision and regulation of the private companies by the state, are characteristic features of the new period in which capitalism triumphs, and yet is freeing itself from cancerous growths which destroy its power for fullest achievement.

To work nine hours instead of ten, and eight instead of nine, was only apparently an encroachment on the industrial work. The worldwide experiment has proved that the shorter working hours allow an intensity of strain and an improvement of the workmen which ultimately heighten the value of the output. The safety devices burdened the manufacturer with expenses, and yet the economist knows that no outlay is more serviceable for the achievement of the factory. Unionism and arbitration treaties are sincere and momentous efforts to help the whole industrial nation. And all this may be only the beginning. The time may really come when every healthy man will serve his year in the industrial army. Man and woman and child may thus be more and more protected against the destructive abuses of our economic scheme. Their physical health and their mental energy may be kept in better and better working order by social reforms, by state measures and strong organization. The fear of the future, that greatest destroyer of the labourer's working mood, may be more and more eliminated. Extremely much still remains to be done, but the best of it can surely be done without giving up the idea of private capital. In the framework of the capitalistic order such reforms mean a national scientific management in the interest of efficiency and success. If that framework is destroyed, the vigour and the energy are lost, and no improvements in the detail can patch up the ruinous weakness in the foundation. If the goal is an increased achievement of the industrialized nation, socialism is bound to be a failure as long as human minds and their motives are what they are to-day and what they have been through the last five thousand years.

No doubt such arguments have little weight with the larger number of those who come to the defence of socialism. The purpose, they would say, is not at all to squeeze more work out of the nerves and muscles of the labourer, to fill still more the pocket of the corporations, to produce still more of the infernal noise in the workshops of the world. The real aim has nothing to do with the output and the muscle, but with the joy and happiness of the industrial workers, who have become slaves in the capitalistic era. It is quite true that if this is the end, the arguments which speak against the efficiency of socialism might well be disregarded. The mixing of the reasons can bring only confusion, and such chaos is unavoidable indeed, as long as the aims are not clearly discriminated. We may acknowledge frankly that the socialistic order may be a hindrance to highest efficiency, and yet should be welcomed because it would abolish the sources of unhappiness. Yet is there really any hope for such a paradise? The problem of achievement may stand nearer to the economist, but that of happiness and misery is thoroughly a question of the mind, and it is the duty of the psychologist to take a stand.

His issues, however, ought not to be confused by mixing in a side problem which is always emphasized when the emotional appeal is made and the misery of the workmen's fate is shown up. There is no unhappier lot than that of those healthy men who can work and want to work, and do not find a chance to work. But this tremendous problem of the unemployed is not organically connected with the struggle about socialism. As far as social organization and human foresight can ever be able to overcome this disease of the industrial body, the remedies can just as well be applied in the midst of full-fledged capitalism. It is quite true that the misfortune of unemployment may never be completely uprooted, but vast improvements can easily be conceived without any economic revolution; and, above all, no scheme has been proposed by the socialists which would offer more. As long as there is a market with its ups and downs, as long as harvests vary and social depressions occur, there will be those who have no chance for their usual useful activity. If the community of the socialistic state supports them, it will do no more than the capitalistic state will surely do very soon, too. If we want to see clean issues, we ought to rule out the problem of unemployment entirely.

The socialistic hope can be only that, through the abolition of capital, the average workman will get a richer share from the fruits of his industrial labour. In the programmes of the American socialists it has taken the neat round figure that every workingman ought to live on the standard of five thousand dollars yearly income. Of course the five thousand dollars themselves are not an end, but only a means to it. The end is happiness, and here alone begins the psychologist's interest. He does not discuss whether the five-thousand-dollar standard as minimum wage can really be expected. He asks himself only whether the goal can be reached, whether such a socialistic society would really secure a larger amount of human happiness. It is here that he answers that this claim is a psychological illusion. If we seek socialism for its external achievement we must recognize that it is a failure; if we seek it for its internal result, joy and happiness, it must be worse than a failure. The psychology of feeling is still the least developed part of our modern science of consciousness, but certain chief facts are acknowledged on all sides, and in their centre stands the law of the relativity of feeling. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction, content and discontent, happiness and unhappiness, do not depend upon absolute, but upon relative, conditions. We have no reason whatever to fancy that mankind served by the wonderful technique twenty centuries after Christ is happier than men were under the primitive conditions of twenty centuries before Christ. The level has changed and has steadily been raised, but the feelings are dependent, not upon the height of the level, but upon the deviations from it. Each level brings its own demands in the human heart; and if they are fulfilled, there is happiness; and if they are not fulfilled, there is discontent. But the demands of which we know nothing do not make us miserable if they remain unfulfilled. It is the change, and not the possession, which has the emotional value. The up and down, the forward and backward, are felt in the social world, just as in the world of space the steady movement is not felt, but only the retardation or the acceleration.

The psychologist knows the interesting psychophysical law according to which the differences in the strength of our impressions are perceived as equal, not when the differences of the stimuli are really equal, but when the stimuli stand in the same relation. If we hear three voices, the sound has a certain intensity; if a fourth voice is added, the strength of the sound is swelling; we notice a difference. But if there is a chorus of thirty voices and one voice is added, we do not hear a difference at all. Even if five voices are added we do not notice it. Ten new singers must be brought in for us to hear the sound as really stronger. And if we have a mighty chorus of three hundred singers, not even twenty or fifty or even eighty voices would help us to feel a difference; we need a hundred additional ones. In other words, the hundred singers which come to help the three hundred do not make more impression on us than the ten which are added to the thirty, or the one added to the three. Exactly this holds true for all our perceptions, for light and taste and touch. The differences upon which our pleasures and displeasures hang, obey this same law of consciousness. If we have three pennies, one added gives us a pleasure, one taken away gives us a displeasure, which is entirely different from the pleasure or displeasure if one penny is added or taken away from thirty or from three hundred pennies. In the possession of thirty, it needs a loss or gain of ten, in the possession of three hundred the addition or subtraction of a hundred, to bring us the same emotional excitement. A hundred dollars added to an income of five hundred gives us just as much joy as ten thousand added to fifty thousand dollars. The objective gain or loss does not mean anything; the relative increase or decrease decides human happiness.

Do we not see it everywhere in our surroundings? If we lean over the railing and watch the steerage in the crowded ship, is there really less gayety among the fourth-class passengers than among the first-class? Where are the gifts of life which bring happiness to every one? I have friends to whom a cigar, a cocktail, and a game of cards are delightful sources of pleasure, the missing of which would mean to them a real deprivation. I have never played cards, I have never touched a cocktail, and have never had a cigar between my lips; and yet I have never missed them. On the other hand, I feel extremely uncomfortable if a day passes in which I have not gone through three or four newspapers, while I have friends who are most happy if they do not have a printed sheet in hand for months. The socialists claim that the possession of one's own house ought to be the minimum external standard, and yet the number increases of those who are not happy until they are rid of their own house and can live in a little apartment. Of course it might be said that the individual desires vary from man to man, but that an ample income allows every one to satisfy his particular likes and to protect himself against his particular dislikes. But the situation is not changed if we see it under this more general aspect of the money as means for the satisfaction of all possible wishes. The psychological law of the relativity of consciousness negates no less this general claim. There is no limit to the quantity of desires. On the level of expensive life the desires become excessive, and only excessive means can satisfy them; on a lower economic level, the desires are modest, but modest means are therefore able to give complete satisfaction and happiness.

The greatest dissatisfaction, hopeless despair, expresses itself in suicide. Statistics show that those who sink to this lowest degree of life satisfaction are not the poorest. Not seldom they are the millionaires who have lost their fortune and kept only enough for a living which would still be a source of happiness to hosts of others. If the average wage were five thousand dollars, or, better said, the comfort which five thousand dollars can buy to-day, this standard would be taken as a matter of course like fresh air and fresh water. The same old dissatisfactions and discomforts would spring from the human heart, when it looked with envy on the luxuries of the ten-thousand-dollar men, or when by recklessness and foolishness or illness the habitual home life became suddenly reduced to a pitiable three-thousand-dollar standard, which would be the goal for the workingmen of to-day. We are too little aware that the average existence of the masses in earlier centuries was on a much narrower scale than the life of practically the poorest to-day, and that the mere material existence of those who to-day consider themselves as industrial slaves is in many respects high above that of the apprentices in the periods before the machine age. Even at present those who think that they are at the bottom of material life in one country often live much better than the multitudes in other lands in which fewer desires have been aroused and developed.

The individual may often alternate between different standards, just as any one of us when he goes out camping may feel perfectly happy with the most moderate external conditions, which would appear to him utter deprivation in the midst of his stylish life the year around. Many an Irish servant girl feels that she cannot live here without her own bathroom, and yet is perfectly satisfied when she goes home for the summer and lives with seven in a room, not counting the pigs. This dependence upon relative conditions must be the more complete the more the income is used for external satisfactions. As far as the means serve education and æsthetic enjoyment and inner culture, there remains at least a certain parallelism between the amount of supply and the enjoyment. But the average American of the five-thousand-dollar class spends four thousand nine hundred dollars on goods of a different order. Altogether his expenses are the house and the table, the clothes of the women, and his runabout. In all these lines there is no limit, and the house of to-day is no longer a pleasure if his neighbour builds a bigger one to-morrow. The man with the fifty-thousand-dollar expenditures feels the same dissatisfaction if he cannot have the steam yacht and the picture gallery which the multimillionaire enjoys.