72 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the laws of the market, so as to know when to drop one fashion and take up the next one. In "mass society" it is noi man's talents or moral qualities that are valued but his effectiveness and business competence, not individuality but loyalty, not his originality but his capacity to conform. Ideally, in such a society men should become as interchangeable as parts of a machine. The well-known French sociologist, Jacques Ellul, sadly observed: "Only two possibilities are left to the individual: cither he remains what he was, in which case he becomes more and more unadapted, neurotic, and inefficient, loses his possibilities of subsistence, and is at last tossed on the social rubbish-heap, whatever his talents may be; or he adapts himself to the new sociological organism, which becomes his world and he becomes unable to live except in a mass society. And then he scarcely differs from a cave man." The ruling circles in the West are resorting in an increasingly wide scale to methods of social moulding like brain washing, relying on highly diversified arsenal of psychological weapons. The social goal that such manipulation is meant to serve is the stealthy inculcation of a specific type of behaviour, prejudices and reflexes that exclude any conscious resistance, so as to make men the obedient tools of the ruling class. It should be recalled that the cinema, radio, the periodic press and above all television really do place at the disposal of state-monopoly capitalism a powerful technical and social means of manipulation. However, insofar as brain washing of this kind is at odds with the actual living conditions and activity of the masses, it cannot, in the final analysis, serve as a remedy for the social and ideological crisis. In the long term, manipulative techniques, just as the "consumer society" itself, are no more than a palliative, a patent medicine which can temporarily relieve society's pain but not cure it of its fatal illness. Social value and incentives for social activities that correspond to the requirements of the technological revolution can take shape only under socialism. V A GAITONDE