Anuraag Sharma’s Reviews > Civilization and Its Discontents > Status Update

Integration into a community, or adaptation to it, seems a scarcely avoidable condition; it has to be met if the goal of happiness is to be reached.

In other words, the development of the individual seems to be a product of the interaction of two trends – the striving for happiness, which we commonly call ‘egoistic’, and the striving for fellowship within the community, which we call ‘altruistic’.

If civilization is the necessary trend of development that leads from the family to humanity as a whole, it follows that the intensification of the sense of guilt, perhaps to a degree that the individual finds hard to endure, is indissolubly linked with it, as a consequence of the innate conflict of ambivalence, of the perpetual contention between love and the death-wish.

Presumably the founding of the family was linked with the fact that the need for genital satisfaction no longer made its appearance like a guest who turns up suddenly one day, then leaves and is not heard of again for a long time, but moved in as a permanent lodger.

What we call happiness, in the strictest sense of the word, arises from the fairly sudden satisfaction of pent-up needs. By its very nature it can be no more than an episodic phenomenon. Any prolongation of a situation desired by the pleasure principle produces only a feeling of lukewarm comfort; we are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition.