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Doctor Sarnoff, Professor of Psychology at New York University, has, as he intended to do, written a Utopian essay, or sermon. A sermon starts out from a conviction; its style is not to explain but to persuade and inspire, and its aim is to induce a changed attitude in the reader.
Sarnoff's conviction is that our present societal arrangements are impossibly unsuited to the people who live under them. The goals and prizes offered by this society are almost exclusively those of egoistic 'self-aggrandizement'. The pursuit of prestige, power, and possession dominates the waking life of man in the 'developed' parts of the world, in a fashion that seemingly has no relation to man's biological needs and drives. Although the pursuit is theoretically open to all, satisfaction is actually available only to a few, the 'oligarchs' who control all the institutions designed to make actual the dream of self-aggrandizement. Sarnoff goes beyond the description of the inequities and inequalities of our social structure to insist that these pursuits are morally unacceptable. He states unequivocably that acquisition of power, prestige, and possession occurs only to the detriment of other human beings. He finds even more disturbing the fact that the quest for self-aggrandizement prohibits the search for 'self-realization'.
Sarnoff's Utopia is designed to favor 'self-realization'. Its dominant values are those of 'humanitarianism' and 'egalitarianism'; its most valued pursuits are intellectual and artistic. This Utopia is to come into being by nonviolent methods, employed by deeply committed and courageous humanists who are convinced that ideas of God, private property, and the state can now be seen as dangerous anachronisms. Legislative and educational techniques are to be used to overcome these anachronistic convictions.