To this end society must offer the opportunity to fulfill human potentials as well as basic needs. For example, part of the human potential is striving for spirituality or transcendence, a seeking that goes beyond the material and visible and beyond the boundaries of the self. Transcendence can be sought through human connection and community. The more a society offers opportunities for transcendence by positive means, the less likely that it will be sought in destructive movements.
Even in the most benevolent society, the experience of frustration is inevitable. All of us suffer from external constraints, limitations in our abilities, or inner conflicts. All suffer injustice at times. All suffer the pain of separation or loss and experience threats to the psychological self. How people respond to this depends on past experience and present circumstance. Their response is more constructive if they trust their own capacities and the world. People can even take frustration as a positive challenge and proceed with constructive efforts to fulfill blocked goals – or relatively painlessly relinquish goals that are not in their power to fulfill.
Trust within a group does not necessarily lead to good relations with other groups. Trust and connectedness arise from “proximal” experiences. Members of different groups usually have no such direct, proximal ties. Trust must evolve through a history of contact, cooperation, and friendly relations.
Without it groups need power to feel secure and power often comes to be valued for its own sake. The “selection” of leaders contributes to this. Those who seek and succeed in achieving leadership tend to have stronger motivation for power than other group members. Because power strengthens feelings of security within the group (and possibly fulfills an ideal self-concept), leaders who successfully use or enhance the group’s power please members and strengthen their own leadership position. All this is not inevitable, and I will later discuss ways to strengthen the values of connection and cooperation between groups.
Relations between the individual and the group
Individuals often give up autonomy, responsibility, and decision making to their group and leaders. The group often helps people fulfill hopes and desires that they cannot fulfill in their individual existence. It hones desires for self-aggrandizement and its fulfillment through the group, partly because this enhances loyalty. Social identity often embodies hopes, desires, and ideals different from individual goals and identity. In addition, giving the self over to the group can diminish a burdensome identity and give people an oceanic feeling of connectedness, of breaking out of the confines of the individual self.
Can the relationship between individuals and the group change? It is important that people acquire a critical consciousness, the ability to see their group’s imperfections as well as strengths. Then their loyalty to the group may be expressed in attempts to improve it, rather than insistence on its virtues. Such critical loyalty may seem incompatible with the aim of strengthening the group as a community, but it is not. In well-functioning families the members can express their own needs and beliefs without rebellion, and conflicts can be resolved. The same can happen in larger groups. Close ties can provide the security to oppose potentially destructive ideas and practices. The group may come to regard such opposition not as disloyalty but as service to itself.
Important societal issues
Social justice and life problems
The awareness of injustice motivates people to seek justice, and sometimes also to take revenge. However, conditions that would be defined as cruelly unjust at one time are accepted as fair at another time. Besides, just-world thinking and other psychological processes may make both victims and bystanders see unjust suffering as fair or deserved. Depending on the culture and traditions of a society, what is regarded as the “right” input (contribution) and outcome (reward) of different parties greatly varies. If the culture regards inequality as natural and right, if the work expected of the less powerful is not unbearable, if their basic needs for food and shelter are met, and if the culturally accepted standards for their treatment do not permit excessive cruelty and the powerful party abides by them, the experience of injustice may never arise.
In times of severe and persistent life problems, the poor are often most affected. If they suffer greatly while others still seem to thrive, they are likely to feel a sense of injustice. Dislocation by rapid technological and social change may have a similar effect.
In all our instances of genocide and mass killing, disparities in the suffering of different groups under difficult life conditions were significant. In Germany, between the two world wars millions suffered great deprivation while some lived ostentatiously and well; Hitler used this to fan the dissatisfaction of the masses. He also fanned anti-Semitism by claiming that Jews profited from the suffering of Germans. In Argentina with its very rich elite and many poor, the decline in living standards severely affected many people but not the wealthy elite. This contributed to the violence of leftist groups, which provoked the military. In Cambodia the cities swelled with people who had lost their land or could not live off it, while corruption and profiteering were rampant.
Societies need institutions, both government agencies and citizen groups, that deal with the material and psychological effects of difficult life conditions and mitigate inequality in misfortune. Such institutions must offer material help, for example, through adjustments in welfare policies or through work programs like those in the United States during the depression. Added taxes on the rich may be needed to equalize the burden. Institutions are also needed to reduce isolation and to enhance feelings of community. The experience of shared suffering contributes to feelings of community and minimizes the psychological impact of material difficulties.
When facing adversity, people have a strong urge to protect their own privilege and resources, but their separateness makes them lonely and scared. As the bombing of London by the Germans in World War II and the Hungarian revolution of 1956 showed, people are greatly strengthened when they face adversity together. Joined in a
