Key Arguments

• Technological ingenuity has eased toil to the point that eliminating labor from human activities is no longer utopian, yet 'laboring' is too lofty a term for current routines.
• The society of jobholders asks for automatic functioning, submerging individuality into species process and encouraging 'dazed, tranquilized' functional behavior.
• Behaviorism correctly conceptualizes these trends; the danger is not falsity but that such theories could become true.
• The modern age that began with an outburst of human activity may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity.

Source Quotes

For even now, laboring is too lofty, too ambitious a word for what we are doing, or think we are doing, in the world we have come to live in. The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life process of the species and the only active decision still required of the individual were to let go, so to speak, to abandon his individuality, the still individually sensed pain and trouble of living, and acquiesce in a dazed, “tranquilized,” functional type of behavior. The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism is not that they are wrong but that they could become true, that they actually are the best possible conceptualization of certain obvious trends in modern society.

The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life process of the species and the only active decision still required of the individual were to let go, so to speak, to abandon his individuality, the still individually sensed pain and trouble of living, and acquiesce in a dazed, “tranquilized,” functional type of behavior. The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism is not that they are wrong but that they could become true, that they actually are the best possible conceptualization of certain obvious trends in modern society. It is quite conceivable that the modern age—which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.

The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism is not that they are wrong but that they could become true, that they actually are the best possible conceptualization of certain obvious trends in modern society. It is quite conceivable that the modern age—which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known. But there are other more serious danger signs that man may be willing and, indeed, is on the point of developing into that animal species from which, since Darwin, he imagines he has come.

Key Concepts

• The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning
• acquiesce in a dazed, “tranquilized,” functional type of behavior.
• The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism is not that they are wrong but that they could become true
• the modern age—which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.

Context

Section 45 (lines 6281–6385); sociological prognosis of labor society’s endpoint and its alignment with behaviorism.