You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The increasing rationing of foods and commodities as the war goes on, raises not only difficult economic problems, but also significant psychological ones. The latter are no less important than the former, and failure to solve them can seriously hamper our war drive. Thus the panicky hoarding and impulsive buying in which many people have been indulging, may, if unchecked, not only dangerously disrupt our war economy, cause shortages of vital commodities, and unfair and unequitable distribution of necessities, but may also seriously impair the morale of the men in the armed forces. For they, faced with the prospect of giving all they have, including their very lives, for the benefit of those who have remained at home, cannot but be resentful and bitter at the sorry spectacle of civilians balking at relatively minor sacrifices.
In the broadest sense, the psychological conflicts involved in the response to rationing may be said to be the outgrowth of a deep-seated inclination of most people in our competitive society to conceive of themselves as basically isolated rather than as integral parts of a collective group. From earliest childhood the individual in our culture finds himself in an isolated family unit, the security of which appears to be a thing apart from the rest of the world. The vast and complex interdependencies which keep our social machinery running, and without which the production and distribution of the barest necessities of life could not go on for even a day, are not easily apparent to the child (to say nothing of the average adult) and are simply taken for granted.
Moreover, very early in life he is thrown into intense competitive relationships, and tensions and hostilities in the outside world, against which the safety of his own home looms up as a comforting and protective haven.
A natural outgrowth of this has been the psychology of rugged individualism, which, at least up to very recently, has been so strongly fostered and eulogized in American l