Our direction of economic affairs is scarcely more
encouraging. We live in an economic system in which a particu-
larly good crop is often an economic disaster, and we restrict
some of our agricultural productivity in order to "stabilize the
market," although there are millions of people who do not have
the very things we restrict, and who need them badly. Right now
our economic system is functioning very well, because, among
other reasons, we spend billions of dollars per year to produce
armaments. Economists look with some apprehension to the
time when we stop producing armaments, and the idea that the
state should produce houses and other useful and needed things
instead of weapons, easily provokes accusations of endangering
freedom and individual initiative.
We have a literacy above 90 per cent of the population. We
have radio, television, movies, a newspaper a day for everybody.
But instead of giving us the best of past and present literature
and music, these media of communication, supplemented by
advertising, fill the minds of men with the cheapest trash, lack-
ing in any sense of reality, with sadistic phantasies which a
halfway cultured person would be embarrassed to entertain even
once in a while. But while the mind of everybody, young and
old, is thus poisoned, we go on blissfully to see to it that no
"immorality" occurs on the screen. Any suggestion that the gov-
ernment should finance the production of movies and radio
programs which would enlighten and improve the minds of our
people would be met again with indignation and accusations in
the name of freedom and idealism.
We have reduced the average working hours to about half
what they were one hundred years ago. We today have more free
time available than our forefathers dared to dream of. But what
has happened? We do not know how to use the newly gained
free time; we try to kill the time we have saved, and are glad
when another day is over.
Why should I continue with a picture which is known to