評論
打印
Certainly the humanist thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who are our ideological ancestors, thought that the goal of life was the full unfolding of a person’s potentialities; what mattered to them was the person who is much, not the one who has much or uses much. For them economic production was a means to the unfolding of man, not an end. It seems that today the means have become ends, that not only "God is dead", as Nietzsche said in the nineteenth century, but also man is dead; that what is alive are the 30 organizations, the machines, and that man has become their slave rather than being their master.
毫無疑問，18、19世紀的人本主義思想家——我們觀念形態方面的先賢——認為，生活的目的在于充分開發人的潛力。他們看重的是人自身的價值，而不是他擁有的財產或他的消費量。對他們來說，經濟生產是人類開發自身的一種手段，而不是目的。但今天這一手段似乎成了目的；不但如尼采在19世紀說的那樣，"上帝已經死了"，人類似乎也死了；活著的只剩那些組織、那些機器，人似乎成了它們的奴隸，而非主人。
Each society creates its own type of personality by its way of bringing up children in thefamily, by its system of education, by its effective values (that is, those values that arerewarded rather than only preached). Every society creates the type of "social character" which is needed for its proper functioning. It forms men who want to do what they have to do. What kind of men does our large-scale, bureaucratized industrialism need?
每個社會都借助它家庭撫育孩子的方式、它的教育制度及其有效價值觀念（即那些受到褒獎的而非僅僅宣揚一番的價值觀念)來塑造自己的個性類型。每個社會都塑造自身正常運作所需的"社會性格"類型，憑此造就自覺按照社會要求行事的人。那么，我們這個官僚機構管理下的大規模工業化社會體制需要何種類型的人呢？
It needs men who cooperate smoothly in large groups, who want to consume more and more, and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, yet who are willing to be commanded, to do what is expected, to fit into the social machine without friction, men who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without an aim except the aim to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.
它所需要的人能在大團體中合作愉快，熱衷于不斷增加消費，其口味按同一標準鑄成，而且易受影響，易于預料。它所需要的人自己覺得是自由獨立的，然而又甘愿受人指揮，叫做什么就做什么，毫無抵觸地納入社會機器，做到無須強迫就跟著走，沒有領袖也會跟著跑，沒有目標也會一推就動。要說目標，那只有一個：不停忙碌，行使職責，一直往前。
