Human Traits and their Social SignificanceEdman, Irwin
Philosophy
Human Traits and their Social Significance
Edman, Irwin
Social psychology
Social conditions can thus be modified so as to give satisfaction
to a larger proportion of natural desires. On the other
hand, civilization in the twentieth century remains so divergent
from the mode of life to which man's inborn nature
adapts him that the thwarting of instincts becomes inevitable.
Impulses, in the first place, arise capriciously, and one
of the conditions of our highly organized life is regularity and
canalization of action. Our businesses and professions cannot
be conducted on the spontaneous promptings of instinct.
The engineer, the factory worker, the business man, cannot
allow themselves to follow out whatever casual desire occurs
to them whenever it occurs. Stability and regularity of procedure,
demanded in most professions, are incompatible with
random impulsive behavior. To facilitate the effectiveness
of certain industries, for example, it may be necessary to
check impulses that commonly receive adequate satisfaction.
Thus it may be essential to enforce silence, as in the case of
telephone operators or motormen, simply because of the demands
of the industry, not because there is anything intrinsically
deserving of repression in the impulse to talk.
Again, the mere fact that a man lives in a group subjects
him to a thousand restraints and restrictions of public opinion
and law. A child may come to restrain his curiosity when he
finds it condemned as inquisitiveness. We cannot, when we
will, vent our pugnacity on those who have provoked it; we
cannot be ruthlessly self-assertive in a group; or gratify our
native acquisitiveness by appropriating anything and everything
within our reach.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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