Alienation and Social Trauma
by Del Castle

About 50,000 years ago, give or take a few, during the Stone Age, probably in Egypt, Africa or the Middle East, pasture grass underwent a genetic change. It developed a heavy seed that dropped to the ground instead of, as in the case of grass, blowing in the wind.

It settled and germinated close to its parent. The new seed, grain, in time was found to be edible and cultivatable. It provided an opportunity to grow food at one location instead of searching for it here and there. The result of this transformation was profoundly revolutionary.

Grain's on-the-spot cultivation allowed an escape from hit-and-miss, hunter-gatherer means of livelihood. No longer would tribes and families have to wander over the landscape pursuing the sometimes plentiful, sometimes elusive offerings of nature.

In addition, more significantly, it introduced systematic planning. Planning (a unique human trait) made it possible to develop cultivation. The ready seed was gathered, planted, cultivated, harvested, stored and cooked as grain required in limited space.

The second, and also profound revolutionary change accompanying the advent of grain was change in peoples relation to nature; that is, it introduced the practice of changing nature to fit human needs.

An ever increasing need to control grain production and increase yield brought better methods of cultivation. We entered social production. Tribes and families started settling at the developing sites of stable grain production. Stable communities evolved.

These change in human relation to nature has been of utmost significance. It brought to a higher level humanity's "species-being." By species-being is meant human essence. In other words, it answers the question: "What are humans for?"

We are here, it began to appear, to supply our material and intellectual needs by changing nature. A moment's thought confirms this almost obvious conclusion. Without this essence we would still be hunter gatherers.

Without this capacity we would not have seen the industrial and technological development we now enjoy. Now however, that capacity, for reasons which will be dealt with further on, is being turned into its opposite, creating critical environmental problems involving our survival.

The third revolutionary change, one of great impact, was quickening of knowledge. Entering into a new relation to nature, in which nature is directly changed by human intervention, by cultivation, required expanding language skills and knowledge; the repetitive craftsmanship of the old tribal order no longer sufficed.

Cultivating grain required new names, new images, new processes, new practices, new capacities, new understanding. And most important, people began to learn that changing nature brought the realization that humans could dominate nature.

With that development, human advances, both industrial and intellectual, slowly at first, but rapidly increasing. Possibly later encounters with changed nature would have offered other opportunities as evolution proceeded.

It becomes apparent that knowledge- advance in this instance and subsequent progress in industrial production, on which life depends, is integrally connected to human interaction with nature. The next great change brought about by the grain revolution was the development of a division of labor. While formerly there had been a rudimentary division of labor in which some were given status as shamans and tribal chiefs, etc., most shared the burdens of livelihood largely as equals. Each produced according to capacity and each received according to need.

There were undoubtedly those who, as in all groups, grasped the new knowledge more quickly than others. They naturally soon came to direct the less-skilled. Most saw the more skilled as better facilitators of production.

This view of differing capacities arose from general sensing that improving production offered continuing rewards. Nevertheless, labor was obviously a cardinal social necessity, a fact increasingly underrated as production came under control of ruling classes through the centuries.

Nevertheless, workers have accepted their social responsibility, recognizing that a division of labor, which included leaders, was the most efficient means of production. Control of production became control of society.

Thus came about class society, ruling classes, slavery, serfdom and wage-labor. Many workers who today are reluctant to enter the class struggle are harking back to the ancient recognition by labor of class control for increasing production.

Fortunately, the attitude of subservience to the boss is becoming recognized as self-defeating, not only by workers but by other sections of society. Now, corporate power, the modern ruling class, is seen as the source of society's problems.

Its curbing has come to be seen a matter of fairness as class division leads more and more to riches for some and social squalor for most. The origins of class divided society go back a long way.

Some assume it existed in the Bronze age. But it has some validity viewed historically. Production of bronze products no doubt gave rise to some sort of division of labor. Productive humans are the same wherever we look. We can go even further back by noting that in primitive families, Marx wrote, wives and children were 

slaves to the husband. If true, it accounts historically for male dominance down through the ages, as well as, the first example of crude division of labor. If speculation is allowed, it may be assumed that slavery in Ancient Greece most likely arose as primitive blood related people of the surrounding tribes and phratries emigrated to Athens looking to participate in its thriving economy.

They were at the mercy of the owners of Athens commerce; like Hispanics today who risk lives, jail and deportation in hopes of financial gain in the United States. This was philosophically justified by the Socratics, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

For instance, Ellen Meiskins Wood and Neal Woods in their book, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory - Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Basil Blackwood, Oxford. 1978. p. 3, wrote; "It must be stressed that Plato's primary object is not simply to establish that society is based on a division of labour, but to prove that the social division of labour must be hierarchical and that there must be a special class whose exclusive occupation is to rule."

Meiskins states further, p. 165: "In the historical reality of Greece, one class satisfies those conditions: a landed hereditary aristocracy which gains its livelihood from inalienable property acquired without effort according to the strict rules of inheritance, not by its own labour but by the labour of others to which that property entitles it, not by free disposable and exchange of property."

If this has resemblance to the 2000 U. S. election campaign and its three billion dollar profligacy which largely comes from corporations, it can be said the dead hand of history is with us even unto this day.

Accompanying this philosophical justification of rule by property ownership is a very revealing comment by Plato at Socrates funeral. It appears in On the Trial and Death of Socrates - Phaedo. Lane Cooper, translator. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press. 1941. p. 123; "And then it would seem we shall have that which we desire, that which we say we are in love with, wisdom; we shall have it when we are departed, so signifies the argument, and not while we are living; for it is impossible to have pure knowledge of anything whatsoever with the body present.

There are two alternatives. Either we can never attain to knowledge, or we can attain it after death; for then the soul will be alone and by itself, without the body, and before that it will not." This may be reminiscent of the Wobbly song.

Pie in the Sky, sung by workers everywhere in the modern world. The implication of Phaedo is that the desire to free the mind from the body is life's goal. This not only denied kite's worth, but life's essence, our "species-being" which is to change nature productively.

It is an ultimate in unreality. Human beings are as much body as mind; and both body and mind are part of nature. Obviously, both are essential to life and Plato's "wisdom." The Socratics, for all their philosophical posing, or because of it, worshipped death.

Plato's quote demonstrates necrophilia. It puts in doubt their philosophical justification of permanent class rule as well as their premise. Their faulty premise may have foretold the eventual demise of ruling classes.

Socrates, who called people an ignorant rabble, also showed the ultimate futility of upper class rule by submitting to the Hemlock. This again brings up the United States 2000 election with its bipartisan support of an obscenely bloated armaments budget.

After World War I Freud is said to have arrived at the concept of the "Death Wish." Contrarily, it is necessary to point out that for all the emotional frustration involved in class division, it nevertheless served an indispensable role by increasing productivity. It arose out of the capacity to plan; that ability to divide labor into simple, easier, more efficient methods as the famous "Taylor System" did in Ford factory assembly lines of the twenties. Planning was essential, a method of moving less efficient methods to a higher stage, as now in cybernetics.

Assuming it had rudimentary roots in the Bronze Age, productivity advanced by leaps and bounds with division of labor. The basic error of the Socratic philosophy of class rule was its assumption of eternal need for a ruling class.

All things change, including philosophy. Today's enduring questions of philosophy are not so much concerned with justifying class rule except as it brings more confusion than clarity, another tool of rule, but to our relation to the cosmos, anguish and death.

The subject will be approached later. If we examine the consequences of class division of labor as seen today our first conclusion is that things are getting out of hand. While productivity has been increased beyond anything envisioned, its rewards are turning into the opposite. Problems of production are clearly outweighing its benefits.

Without listing all its repercussions, now well known by most, it is possible to say that production under class rule is bringing us to the brink of environmental destruction, social decay and collapse.

This is clearly reflected in Barzun's recent book, From Dawn to Decadence - 500 years of Western Cultural Life. Harper Collins. 2000, p. 712: "It was not long after the end of the Great War [World War I] that far-seeing observers predicted the likelihood of another and it became plain that western civilization had brought itself into a condition from which full recovery was unlikely.

The devastation, both material and moral, had gone so deep that it turned the creative energies from their course, first into frivolity, then into the channel of self-destruction." Likewise, Eric Hobsbawm, a noted historian of i9th century labor has written a history of the 20th century out of a feeling that civilization is caught in a landslide. He writes in The Age of Extremes, A History of the World, 1914 - 1991- Vintage Books. 1995. p. 16-17: "... Capitalism was a permanent and continuing revolutionizing force. Logically, it would end by disintegrating those parts of the pre-capitalist past which it had found convenient, nay perhaps essential, for its own development.

It would end by sawing off at least one of the branches on which it sat. Since the middle of the century this has been happening. Under the impact of the extraordinary economic impact of the Golden Age [1947-1973] and after, with its consequent social and cultural changes, the most profound revolution in society since the stone age, the branch began to crack and break.

At the end of this century it has for the first time become possible to see what a world may be like in which the past, including the past in the present, has lost its role, in which the old maps and charts which guided human beings, singly and collectively, through life no longer represent the landscape through which we move, the sea on which we sail.

In which we do not know where our journey is taking us, or even where it ought to take us.... The old century has not ended well." It would not be a fair presentation of these writers of decline if a hopeful note on the part of each was not included.

For instance Barzun, while totally pessimistic about the near future, does register a possible late recovery. Ibid. p. 801: "After a time, estimated at a little over a century, the western mind was set upon by a blight: it was Boredom.

The attack was so severe that the over-entertained people, led by a handful of restless men and women from the upper orders, demanded reform and finally imposed it in the usual way, by repeating one idea.

These radicals had begun to study the old neglected literary and photographic texts and maintained that they see the record of a fuller life. They urged looking with a fresh eye at the monuments still standing about; they reopened the collections of works of art that had so long seemed so uniformly dull that nobody went near them.

They distinguished styles and the different ages of their emergence - in short, they found a past and used it to create a new present. Fortunately, they were bad imitators (except for a few pedants), and their twisted view of the their sources laid the foundation of our nascent - or perhaps one should say, renascent - culture. 

It has resurrected enthusiasm in the young and talented, who keep exclaiming what a joy it is to be alive." Apparently he still has hope for the future as there was at the beginning of 

the Renaissance when some felt an examination of Greek and Roman culture could be useful. However, Barzun's ghost of the future did predict that we would have to go through a century of the regression he describes.

Hobsbawm feels more hopeful than having to go through Barzun's neo- DarkAge. Ibid. p. 584: "Nevertheless, even a historian whose age precludes him from expecting dramatic changes for the better in what remains of his lifetime, cannot reasonably deny the possibility that in another quarter- or half-century things may look more promising.

In any case it is highly likely that the present phase of post-Cold War breakdown will be temporary, even though it already looks like lasting rather longer than the phases of breakdown and disruption which followed the two 'hot' world wars. ...

We live in a world captured and uprooted and transformed by the titanic economic and techno-scientific process of the development of capitalism, which has dominated the past two or three centuries we know, or it is at least reasonable to suppose, that it cannot go on ad infinitum.

The future cannot be a continuation of the past, and there are signs, both externally, and, as it were internally, that we have reached a point of historic crisis. ... However, one thing is plain.

If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness." Contrarily, it is necessary to point out that for all the above attack on class society, it nevertheless served an indispensable role by increasing productivity.

It was essential to find a method of moving old tribal methods to a higher stage. Assuming it had rudimentary roots in the Bronze Age, productivity advanced by leaps and bounds with division of labor.

The basic error of the Socratic philosophy of class rule was its assumption that rulers were made of better stuff than others. For instance Plato classified rulers as of gold, administrators as of silver, citizens as of copper and workers as too "occupied with a multiplicity of things." The above overview of the role of production leads us to an examination of the source of the social problems we face as stressed by Barzun and Hobsbawm. It can be found in alienation, resulting from production in class society. Alienation is a negative consequence of the division of labor which presents us with a basic contradiction.

Division of labor has been necessary to increase production and advance civilization; but it also brought human alienation. That is, it alienated workers from the product of their labor. By this is meant that workers have not and do not possess the product of their labor.

Very simply, the worker does not need his product. Instead it is needed by his employer for profit-making. This immediately reduces the worker to a producing thing. Instead of the unneeded product the worker gets a wage in order to prolong his "thingness" and procreate.

Here and there some workers get enough income to purchase middle class " stuff." And the value of that little benefit is being seriously questioned in the era of consumerism; not to mention that alienation is not assuaged by commodity ownership, it is aggravated as worker productivity increases. As a result great attention is paid to individual mental illness.

Less attention has been paid to social mental illness. The reason is that social illness requires social analysis. Social analysis gets into politics and power.

Social illness, as contrasted to individual mental illness, derives from problems of class rule, political and financial power, social status, the ills of prejudice, ignorance, violence, corruption, cultural problems, nationalism, warfare, decadence, and other complex, socially entrenched areas. All societies past and present have suffered collective mental illness.

Some analysts have generalized the problem as alienation. An examination of what is meant by alienation reveals two basic kinds: an all-embracing industrial alienation seen as the root of the problem, both personal and social, and the many forms of social alienation which derives from it. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1975 defines alienation as follows: "2: a withdrawing or separation of a person or his affections from an object or position of former attachment:

ISOLATION. EXILE."

Along with that definition we may include a closely related definition of "exploitation": "b. an unjust or improper use of another person for one's own profit or advantage." Marxists have long used the term exploitation in characterizing relations between workers and capitalists.

It is a worthy term in reference to material relations basic to a class analysis of society. Here, in dealing with the non-material side, alienation is the preferred term. It conveniently removes the anti-Marxist opprobrium of "economic determinism."

It is becoming clear that the root cause of personal mental illness lies in the pervasive social trauma of industrial alienation. The usual interpretation of trauma puts its source in traumatic emotional experience arising from dysfunctional family or social relations.

The question to be answered, unless we become lost on the regressive path of original sin, is what gives rise to continuing dysfunction from generation to generation?

The clear, uncomplicated answer, if we cut through upper class dominated ideology, is century after century and generation after generation of omnipresent industrial alienation.

While direct and indirect connections can be discerned between mental illness and personal trauma and treatment based on that assumption has proved valuable, nevertheless it has been largely a treatment of symptoms rather than cause in its failure to deal with alienation's first cause.

To illustrate industrial alienation, for instance, a Canadian retired worker recently introduced himself to a convention of retirees as one who comes before them suffering from "40 years of industrial abuse."

In this he was stating the basic nature of alienation which occurs when a person's existence is in conflict with his essence. Human essence (referred to here as a human being's "species-being") is human beings relating to nature in the process of creating a livelihood.

In this human beings change nature; detrimental evidence of which abounds today. If we grant humanity as part and parcel of nature, it inevitably follows that humanity changes as it changes nature.

If the relationship were left at that, we would have a simple, direct connection between nature, labor, production and use, a positive relationship. But the relation is not positive under class society. In class society the employer corrupts the process by taking possession of labor's product to use for profit. Labors' role in industry becomes production for profit, not use.

That is, put simply, the product of a worker's labor is stolen at the point of production. For their labor, workers receive a wage that provides subsistence and maybe a little more secondarily; much less any feeling of personal fulfillment.

And, as we are learning more and more nowadays, the few material possessions gained by the wages of a few workers are no substitute for life. Those possessions are becoming shoddier, more expensive and even dangerous, as we see in Firestone tires and bio-modified foods along with other adulterated and cheapened products.

In addition, it takes more than one job per family to survive; many single job families skirt the edge of poverty or are actually poverty-stricken; and many full-time workers earn less than poverty level incomes.

Women are joining the ranks of alienated workers as they enter the work force. This is not to say that non-employed women live a carefree life of fulfillment. The whole import of second class status of women in classsociety only adds to the overall problem of alienation. Fulfillment requires release from alienation, from tedium, boredom, stultification and exploitation. One important aspect of alienation is the monotonous waiting for "quitting time;" and the ubiquitous annoyance of time slowing down on the job.

It moves with leaden feet. One worker remarked that after checking his watch and waiting two hours, when checking his watch again, it had moved ahead only five minutes. The relief felt by workers at quitting time, with rare exceptions, is universal.

Life finds itself at home or away, depending, not on the job. Thus we note husband's and wives' wish to get away to one form or another of recreation. Such lives have been alienated long before it became a popular and different kind of complaint in the 1960s.

Still another, more insidious aspect related to alienation is coming to light - loss of leisure. Increasing hours of work per week, one person with two or more jobs, increasing stress, intensification of work routines through cybernetics, increasing congestion in transportation, increasing crime, both white collar and other, and on and on are examples.

It has been reported that Japanese employers deliberately seek ways to increasingly stress workers as a means of sapping any vitality that would allow them to resist.

One commentator has complained: (Seattle Times, Deborah Mathis, 10/13/00.) "The toll this has taken on the collective peace of mind is conspicuous. Where do we think 'road rage' came from? Is this the first generation to get riled by tailgaters and lane-switchers? "The stress accrued from the daily grind has become a health hazard, a home wrecker and a blood pressure accelerator.

Something has got to give. ... "Sooner or later, however, it's going to happen. The four- day work week. The extended vacation. The paid family leave. "No telling how many of the country's problems might vanish if we were all a little more rested and relaxed." Abstractly, alienation can be seen in separation between subject and object. For instance, in the case of a worker, the subject being the worker and the object, the product produced for the employer. The worker produces something not personally needed.

This in contrast to a person producing an object of self motivated effort, a common sense understanding. Doing something with one's own hands, however modest, for self or as a help or gift to another brings pride, contrasted to effort in a factory, mine, mill, farm or office.

A universal demand of trade union movements in industrial societies is for shorter hours, longer vacations, better recreation, etc. Most will agree that a worker's lot is diametrically the opposite of personal fulfillment.

But alienation is pervasive in life off the job. There is a less noted form called "commodification of leisure." This is the capacity of consumerism to create artificial leisure needs. Instead of using leisure to relax in a meaningful way, it is distorted into purchases for leisure activities. One must have all the latest gadgets for sports, entertainment, or any pursuit of pleasure or relaxation.

We also hear quite a bit nowadays about the problem of communication. Marital problems are laid at the door of "lack of communication" among others. Few doubt its fault. It is generally considered a fault of one or the other or both.

It is said the cause may be lack of love. Or it might be said the lack of love may be due to lack of communication. As a result, with exceptions, help is hard to come by as we see in the divorce rate. Communication is a basic human trait.

Ever since humans began to grunt they have communicated as a natural and necessary capacity. So why is it now becoming a lost art? The popular answer today is that electronic communication is replacing the personal. Families see it as a problem. Radio was a minor beginning, but TV's 500 channel reception, VCRs, and now video games, which are outselling TVs, cell phones, which in some cases are 

used when the callers are within a few steps distance, and finally "palm computers" are compounding the problem. These gadgets are heralded as a new and better form of communication; and in some cases, as in emergencies, they are no doubt helpful. But they substitute virtual communication for face-to-face communication. One can imagine the futility of using cell phones to solve family problems.

As most will agree, what is required for genuine communication is face-to-face encounters with all its overt and subliminal cues and visible personality. We need to seek the source of the problem.

Again we turn to the social atmosphere in which communication is hindered. The source again lies in social alienation. A quote from The Marxist Theory of Alienation by Ernest Mandel and George Novack, Pathfinder Press, 1970, Second Edition, pp. 26- 28, offers elucidation: "I now come to the ultimate and most tragic form of alienation, which is alienation of the capacity to communicate.

The capacity to communicate has become the most fundamental attribute of man, of his quality as a human being. Without communication, there can be no organized society because without communication, there is no language, and without language there is no intelligence. Capitalist society, class society, commodity- producing society tends to thwart, divert and partially destroy this basic human capacity.

"Anybody who has ever been present at wage bargaining where there is severe tension between workers' and employers' representatives ... will understand what I am referring to. The employers' side simply cannot sympathize with or understand what the workers are talking about even if they have the utmost good will and liberal opinions, because their material and social interests prevent them from understanding what the other side is most concerned with.

[A recent example is the two year strike of United Steel Workers Union against Kaiser Aluminum. The eventual settlement took outside arbitration.]

"Thus the Marxist notion of alienation extends far beyond the oppressed classes of society, properly speaking. The oppressors are also alienated from part of their human capacity through their inability to communicate on a human basis with the majority of society.

And this divorcement is inevitable as long as class society and its deep differentiations exist. ... Another terrible expression of this alienation on the individual scale is the tremendous loneliness which a society based on commodity production and division of labor inevitably induces in many human beings. Ours is a society based on the principle, every man for himself.

Individualism pushed to the extreme also means loneliness pushed to the extreme." In contrast to the above, while not in contradiction to overall alienation, it should be noted that workers in industry do take pride in acquiring skills.

That may come out of an attempt by workers to salvage some sense of personal worth. Maybe it arises from the culture of capitalist competition. It may also be felt as a hedge against layoff through exemplary service to the employer.

These rationalizations hardly lessen over-all alienation. An example of another form alienation, that of total divorce from production - to be separated from alienation through loss of a job.

That is to say that loss of a job puts a worker into a worse form of alienation - alienation from society, worthlessness. An example is today's Russia. Here we find devastating social trauma under the new private enterprise, neo liberal, capitalist democracy.

With few exceptions, Industry was totally privatized without any realistic plan of transition. Unemployment skyrocketed. Those working were not being paid for months, alcoholism became a national scourge, family life disintegrated, life became miserable for all but a few who became financial robber barons, known as the "oligarchs." The results have been catastrophic, bordering on criminal. 

A recent report covering statistics from Russia's Academy of Medical Science describes intolerable social misery: For instance, "...the number of normal births' declined from 45.3 percent in 1992 to 30 percent last year, attributed the decline to the spread or heavy drinking and drug use, complications caused by sexually transmitted diseases and the nation's overall worsening health.

Russia's population is also shrinking at an unprecedented rate for an industrialized country, from 148 million three years ago to slightly more than 145 million now, ... Most countries in Europe have a low birth rate, but in Russia it is combined with a staggeringly high death rate, which reached 14.7 per 1,000 people last year.

Unlike the rest of Europe, Russia's declining birthrate is a result of economic hardship. Many women decide they can't afford to have more than one baby, and Russia has the world's highest abortion rate.

Two in three pregnancies end in abortion, according to official figures. Russia's Health Ministry says 10 percent to 25 percent of Russia's couples are infertile, but no precise figures are available. While between 35 percent and 40 percent of infertility cases could be solved by modern treatment, the huge country has only a dozen clinics that specialize in the problem."

It may be argued separation from employment and its alienation would contradict the argument that fulfillment requires release from job related alienation. Alienation results from workers' products being taken from them for profit-making.

The only way to avoid job alienation is to suffer alienation from one's self as a result of unemployment's immiseration, purposelessness and ultimately starvation. The systems rule is to accept alienation or die.

A quote from the recent book on the reason for the above is to be found in Chrystia Freeland's book, The Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride From Communism to Capitalism. Crown Business, 2000, as Reviewed in New York Review of Books by Paul Klebnikov, 70/79/00; "This is how it worked, ["loans for shares" it is called.] At the end of 1995 the oligarchs banks had made loans to the government, in exchange for which they had taken temporary custody of state shareholdings in some of Russia's biggest and most valuable firms.

At the end of 1996 [note this was during Yeltsin's reelection campaign] the government chose not to repay the loans, so that Berezovsky [number one oligarch] and his allies could claim the shareholdings as their own.

Thus Berezovsky and his allies ended up paying $110 million for 51 percent of an oil company, Sibneft, that was worth almost $5 billion when the stock market boomed in 1997. Khodorovsky's Menateb group paid $160 million for a controlling stake in another oil firm, Yukos, that was valued at $6.2 billion in 1997. Potanin's Uneximbank group paid $250 million for control of Norilsk Nickel, one of the biggest metal producers, later valued at almost $2 billion in the stock market.

"Freeland argues that these loans-for-shares deals, the Sale of the Century,' marked the point at which Russian reform went irrevocably wrong. ... "If it does help to place the blame, then Freeland places it where it belongs.

The future oligarchs did what any red-blooded businessman would do,' she notes ..." At the risk of venturing into an area of less competence, a comparison of alienation with the problems of family relations, are offered.

An even more sensitive area in daily life is the effect of workplace alienation on marital relations. Complication is inevitable when we see the alienated husband's relation to his wife and vice-versa. 

The husband, no doubt with exceptions, views the wife through the lens distorted by alienation on the job. The wife thereby sees the husband-object as alienated. Intertwined is love and independent-dependent relations.

Thus marriage becomes a story of multiple, complicated, exchanged alienations. Divorce rates continue to rise. Strenuous efforts are made to prescribe increasingly complicated prescriptions for cure; almost daily media messages, studies, surveys, rules for saving marriages, marriage counseling, religious conversion, etc.