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But the very fact that he has had to depend on his fellow man has made the problem of survival extraordinarily difficult. Man is not an ant, conveniently equipped with an inborn pattern of social instincts. On the contrary, he seems to be stubborly endowed with a fiercely self-centered nature. If his relatively weak physique forces him to seek cooperation, his untamed inner drives contantly threaten to disrupt his social working partnerships.
In primitive society, the struggle between aggression and cooperation is taken care of by the environment; when the specter of starvation looks a community in the face everyday - as with the Eskimos of the African hunting tribes - the pure need for self-preservation pushes society to the cooperative completion of its daily labors. But in an advanced community this tangible pressure of the environment is lacking. When men no longer work shoulder to shoulder in tasks directly related to survival - indeed when half or more of the population never touches the earth, enters the mines, builds with its hands, or even enters a factory - the perpetuation of the human animal becomes a remarkable social feat.
So remarkable, in fact, that society's existence hangs by a hair. A modern community is at the mercy of a thousand dangers: if its farmers should fail to plant enough crops, if its railroad men should take it into their heads to become bookkeepers or its bookkeepers should decide to become railroad men; if too few should offer their services as miners, puddlers of steel, candidates for engineering degrees - in a word, if any of a thousand intertwined tasks of society should fail to get done - industrial life would soon become hopelessly disorganized. Every day the community faces the possibility of breakdown - not from the forces of nature, but from sheer human unpredictability.
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