Psychology and Social Sanity

by Hugo Münsterberg

The inner attitude, the temperament, the training, the adjustment of desires to the available means, is the only decisive factor in such situations. The trust magnate and the factory foreman have equal chances to feel happiness in the standard of life in which they live. If they compare themselves with those who are richer, and if their hearts hang on the external satisfactions, they both may feel wretched; and yet with another turn of mind they both may be content. Optimism and pessimism, contentment and envy, self-dependence and dependence upon the judgment of the world, joyfulness and despondency, are more decisive contrasts for the budget of happiness than the difference between fifteen dollars a week and fifteen dollars a minute. Some of my best friends have to live from hand to mouth, and some are multimillionaires. I have found them on the whole equally happy and equally satisfied with their position in life. If there was a difference at all, I discovered that those who ate from silver plates were sometimes complaining about the materialism of our time, in which so much value is put on money. I have never found their fate especially enviable, nor that of the others especially pitiable, and evidently they themselves have no such feelings. The general impression is much more as if actors play on the stage. The one gives the rôle of the king in purple cloak and ermine, the other plays the part of a beggar in ragged clothes. But the one rôle is not more interesting than the other, and everything depends upon the art of playing the character.

This whole scramble for money's worth is based on a psychological illusion, not only because pleasure and displeasure are dependent upon relative conditions, but also because the elimination of one source of feeling intensifies the feelings from other sources. The vulgar display of wealth which cheapens our life so much, the desire to seek social distinction by a scale of expenditure which in itself gives no joy, have in our time accentuated the longing for wealth out of all proportion. This is true of every layer of society. The clerk's wife spends for her frocks just as absurdly large a part of his income as the banker's wife. Every salesgirl must have a plume on her hat rather than a nourishing luncheon. Others must have six motor cars instead of a decent library in their palace. But this longing for useless display is still outdone by the hysterical craving for amusement. The factory girl must have her movies every night, and besides the nine hundred kino shows, a hundred and twenty theatres are needed to satisfy the amusement seeking crowd of New York, in addition to the half dozen which offer art. This mad race to outdo one another and this hunting after pleasures which tickle the senses have benumbed the social mind and have inhibited in it the feeling for deeper values. But if by a magic word extreme equality of material means were created and the mere sensuous enjoyments evenly distributed, in that moment all the other differences from individual to individual would be felt with heightened sharpness, and would be causes for much stronger feelings of happiness and unhappiness.

Men differ in their inborn mental powers, in their intelligence and talent, in beauty, in health, in honours and career, in family and friends. The contrasts which are created in every one of these respects are far greater and for the ill-fated far more cruel than those of the tax-payers. The beautiful face which is a passport through life and the discouraging homeliness, the perfect body which allows vigorous work and the weak organism of the invalid unfit for the struggle of life, the genius in science or art or statesmanship and the hopelessly trivial mind, the youth in a harmonious, beautiful family life and the childhood in an atmosphere of discord, the home full of love from wife and children and the house childless and chilly, the honours of the community and the disappointment of social bankruptcy—they are the great premiums and the great punishments, which are whirled by fate into the crowd of mankind. Even here most of it is relative. We rejoice in four-score years, but if we knew that others were allowed a thousand years of life, we should be despondent that hardly a short century is dealt out to us. We are happy in the respect of our social community simply because we do not desire the honours of the czar or of the mikado. But if we began to measure our fate by that of others, how could we ever be satisfied? Women might envy men and men might envy women, the poet might wish to be the champion of sport and the sportsman might be unhappy because he is not a poet. No one of us can have the knowledge and the technical powers which the child of the thirtieth century will enjoy. As soon as we begin to compare and do not find the centre of our life in ourselves, we are condemned.

Everybody's life is composed of joys and pains which may come from any of these sources. Where beauty is lacking, wit may brilliantly shine; where health is failing, a talent may console; where the family life is unhappy, the ambitions for a career may be fulfilled. Much inequality will thus result, but the chances for a certain evenness of human joy and sorrow will be the greater the more numerous the sources from which the joys and griefs of our days are springing. Add the inequalities of wealth, and you increase the chances that the emotional values in the lives of all of us will become more equal. The ugly girl may be rich and the poor one may be beautiful, the genius may hunger and the stupid man may marry the widow with millions, the healthy man may have to earn his scanty living and the patient may enjoy the luxuries of life. Their states of feeling will be more alike than if a socialistic order had put them all on the same economic level of philistine comfort. The joys of capital are after all much less deeply felt than any of those others, and the sufferings from poverty are much less incisive than those from disappointed ambition, from jealousy, from illness, or from bereavement. It is well known that many more people die from overfeeding than from underfeeding. We may feel disgusted that the luxuries so often fall to the unworthy and that the finest people have to endure the hardship of narrow means. But all those other gifts and deprivations, those talents and beauties and powers and family relations, are no less arbitrarily dealt out. We all may wish to be geniuses or radiant beauties, great singers or fathers of a dozen children; we have not chosen our more modest lot.

It might be answered that the poverty of the industrial masses to-day means not only the absence of the special comforts, but that it means positive suffering. Men are starving from want and are chained down like slaves to a torturing task. But let us discriminate. It is true in states of unemployment and illness the physical man may be crushed by naked poverty, but that has nothing whatever to do with socialism. We have emphasized before that it is the solemn duty of society to find ways and means to protect every one who is willing to work as long as he is healthy, against starvation in times of old age and sickness, and if possible in periods of market depression. The non-socialistic community has the power to take care of that, and it is entirely an illusory belief that socialism has in that respect any advantage. All the comparisons of the two economic orders ought to refer only to the variations rather high above the starvation line, even though the American must call starvation a standard which the coolie may think tolerable and to which the European poor in the Middle Ages were often accustomed. On the other hand, neither capitalism nor socialism can protect the reckless and the wasteful against economic suicide.

Much more important is the problem of suffering through the character of the work itself. That is the real fountainhead of the socialistic flood which threatens to inundate our present-day social structures. But is there not even here a psychological misunderstanding involved? It may be granted that many a man and many a woman stand in the factory day after day and year after year with the one feeling of distress and wretchedness at the hard work to which they are forced. But is their work really responsible for it, and is it not rather their personal attitude? Who is doing harder physical work than the sportsman? There is no more exhausting muscle strain than the climb over the glaciers of the Alps, which thousands pursue with passion. Analyze the profession of the physician. How many of his functions are in themselves of such a character that they might be denounced as the most humiliating slavery, if they were demanded from any man who could not see the aim and higher interest which they are serving! This is exactly the point where the leaders of labour are sinning unpardonably. They work with all the means of suggestion, until the workman, as if hypnotized, looks on the mere movements which he is to perform in the factory, and forgets entirely the higher interest and aim of civilization which he is helping to serve. The scholar in his laboratory has to do a thousand things which in themselves are ugly and dirty, tiresome and dangerous, uninteresting and exhausting, but which he is performing with enthusiasm because he knows that he is serving the great ideal of cultured life, to discover the truth and thus to help the progress of mankind. There is under no factory roof a workman so forlorn that the work of his hands is not aiding the fulfilment of an equally great and equally ideal purpose of civilized mankind, the development of economic civilization. As soon as his labour amidst the noise of the machines is felt as such a service to an ideal cultural purpose, the work is no longer dead, but living, interesting, significant, wonderful.

The mother who takes care of her little children has to go through a thousand tiresome actions which would be intolerable if they were meaningless, but which compose a beautiful life if they are held together by the aim which the motherly love sees before it. Whatever work a human being may perform, force on his mind the treacherous suggestion that it is meaningless, that it is slavery, that others seize the profit, and he must hate it and feel it an unbearable hardship. It has often been observed that the most bitter complaints have always come from those workers who are reached by the suggestions of theories and not from those who simply face practice, even though their life may be a much harder one. In Russia the workingmen of the city found their life so intolerable that revolts broke out, while the rural classes were satisfied with conditions of much more cruel deprivation. Our social reformers too easily forget the one great teaching of the history of mankind, that the most powerful factor in the world is the ideas. Surely there is some truth even in that one-sided picture of the history of civilization which makes everything dependent upon economic conditions, but the element of truth which is contained therein is due to the fact that economic conditions may influence the ideas. The ideas are the really decisive agencies. Only for ideas have men been ready to die, and for ideas have they killed one another. Give to the world the idea that earthly goods are useless and heavenly goods alone valuable, and in this kingdom of the religious idea the beggarly rags of the monk are more desired than the gold of the mighty. Religion and patriotism, honour and loyalty, ambition and love, reform ideals and political goals, æsthetic, intellectual, and moral ideas have turned the great wheel of history. Give to the workingman the right kind of ideas, the right attitude toward his work, and all the hardship becomes blessedness and the suffering glory. His best payment then will be the satisfaction of carrying his stone to the great temple of human progress, even though it may not be a cornerstone.

Even the complaint repeated without end that the workingman's task is unendurable because of its unceasing monotony is ultimately nothing but a psychological theory, and this theory is superficial and misleading. It is easy to point out to the suggestible mind that there is a wonderful enrichment of life in variety, and that uniformity must therefore be something ugly and discouraging and unworthy. But the real mental facts allow just as well the opposite argument. The mere change and variation, going from one thing to another, makes the mind restless and distracted, without inner unity and harmony. To be loyal to one task and to continue it faithfully and insistently, brings that perfect adjustment of the mind in which every new act is welcome because it has become the habit ingrained in the personality. To be sure there are individual differences. We have in political life, too, radicals who get more satisfaction from change, and conservatives who prefer continuity of traditions; and so the whole mental structure of some men is better adjusted to a frequent variation in work, and that of others better prepared for continuity. The one has a temperament which may lead him from one occupation to another, from one town to another, from one flat to another, from one set of companions to another. But there is the opposite type of minds. To them it is far more welcome to continue throughout life at the same work, in the same old home, in touch with the same dear friends. Many minds surely are better fitted for alternation in their activities, but many others, and they certainly are not the worst, are naturally much better adapted to a regular repetition. There are opportunities for both types of mental behaviour in the workshop of the nation, and the peaceful adjustment is disturbed only by the hasty theory that repetition is a lower class of work, which makes man a mere machine and that it is therefore to be despised. Change the theory about uniformity, and you remove monotony from the industrial world. Monotony is only the uniformity which is hated.

Do we not see that power of theories and ideas everywhere around us, even in the most trivial things? The most splendid gown is nothing but an object of contempt if it is the fashion of the day before yesterday. In lands where titles and decorations are a traditional idea, the little piece of tin may be more coveted than any treasures of wealth. Through ideas only can the great social question be solved. No distribution of income can change in the least the total sum of pleasure and displeasure in the world, and the socialistic scheme is of all the useless efforts to increase pleasure and to decrease displeasure the least desirable, because it works, as we have seen, at the same time against those mental functions which secure the most forceful progress of economic life. A true change can come only from within. The superficial, unpsychological theories of human happiness, which have been hammered into the working population of our age, have made true happiness more and more difficult to attain. There is small chance that this inner conversion will come in our day through religion, however much religion may help toward it. There is still smaller chance that philosophy can do it and that the average man will take the attitude of Antisthenes who claimed that it is divine not to need anything and that he who needs least is nearest to the ideal. But there is every chance that mankind will remember again more vividly the deeper lasting values of humanity. Society must be sobered after the frenzy of this present-day rush for external goods. The shallow disappointment is felt too widely already. The world is beginning to discover once more that this scramble for pearls and palaces and motor cars among the rich, and for their showy imitations among the middle class, and the envy of material profits and the chase for amusements even among the poorest, leave life meaningless and cold and silly. As soon as the industrial community turns to a new set of ideas and becomes inspired by the belief in the ideal value of the work as work and as a necessary contribution to the progress of mankind, the social question will be solved, as all the differences which socialism wants to eliminate then appear trivial and insignificant.

But on the other hand, this belief cannot grow, and cannot spread its roots deep in the soil of the industrial mind unless, as a necessary counterpart, the ideas of duties and obligations spread and enlarge among those who profit from the rights of capital. The capitalistic society must organize itself so that the sinking below the starvation line through illness, old age, or unemployment will be reduced to a minimum, so that the greatest possible participation in all which gives higher value to life will be secured for the worker and his family, and above all, so that the industrial control will be exerted by the best and the wisest. Nowhere is reform of ideals more needed. The brutality of capital is never felt more strongly than when the workingman suspects that those at the top are not selected on account of their stronger capacities. Only when capital is conscious of its duties can the belief in the ideal meaning of the workingman's function take hold of the masses and inhibit the suggestion of socialism. Merely granting the external claims, giving to the factory girls increasing chance for amusement, means to deceive them. The more such longings are satisfied, the more they must grow and become a craze which sharpens the feeling of dissatisfaction. This desire for superficial joys, for sensual amusements and cheap display is nothing but a suggested habit, which imitation creates in a period of waste. If a time of simplicity were to come, not only the longing for these prizes would become silent, but the prizes themselves would appear worthless. Liberate the workingman from his distrust of the present social order; let him feel deeply that his duties are not enforced slavery but a solemn offering to human progress, which he gives in glad coöperation in the spirit of ideal belief. At the same time stop the overestimation of the outer enjoyments, and cultivate the appreciation of the lasting values, and our time of unrest will come to inner harmony. But do not believe that this can ever be done, if those who are called to be the leaders of the social group are not models and do not by their own lives give the cue for this new attitude and new valuation. As long as they outdo one another in the wild chase of frivolity and seek in the industrial work of the nation only a stronghold for their rights and not a fountain spring of duties, as long as they want to enjoy instead of to believe, this inner change can never come in the community. The psychologist can do nothing but to predict that no other scheme, no outer reform, no new plan of distribution, can bring a real change, as every calculation which works with outer means to secure happiness must remain a psychological illusion. The change from within is the only promise and the only hope.