Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century Highlight

His theory: a free-market society treats its people as products, to be uprooted, moved, altered, according to economic need. “At the end of the 20th century, for rich and poor alike, jobs disappear on short notice, communities are weak and unstable, people routinely change families, occupation, technical skills, languages, nationalities, software and ideologies as their lives progress. Prices and incomes are no more stable than social life. Even the continued viability of crucial economic systems is in question. For rich and poor alike, dislocation plays havoc with the delicate interpenetrations of people, society, the physical world and spiritual values that are needed to sustain psychosocial integration.” In the absence of these things, says Alexander, we, like rats in cages, turn to substitutes, not because the substitutes are alluring in and of themselves, but because our circumstances are deficient, we without our gods.