[385] or even less, but who doesn't see what he does and has lost what I would like to call the creative eros^a--again I want to refer to Mr. Marcuse’s^b book on Civilization and Eros, who dwells on this. Now I come to another consequence, namely the reduction of working time. Nothing should be better than this. And it was a tremendous thing when this reduction took place, from sixteen to eight hours, step by step, and when children were excluded from participating in this kind of work. But now something else occurred, namely a lot of leisure time. The question now in the foreground of all social educators--social psychologists (social psychologists, if they are not only test psychologists but who deal with human beings), namely the question: how to form leisure time? What can be done about it?--Leisure time is largely commercialized too. To the degree in which it is commercialized, it has little to give in terms of creativity of one's own. And this

perhaps is the worse thing about the means of mass communication^c: they not only unify, but they make creativity^d impossible. If all your imagination is taken care of by television and similar things, then your own imagination dies off. The pictures which lie in your minds are given to you by the leaders of the mass means of communication, but there is no filled leisure time where there is no creativity. Man is essentially creative--for this he is created, as the Paradise story tells. If this creativity is taken away from him, if only a few participate in it and they, only under the

point of view of setting (I come to this immediately), then there is no possibility of a meaningful leisure time. And I think many ministers should work together here with the social psychologists, the politicians, the educators, in order to think about a nation which has managed to take away from most people most of the mechanical functions and which has thrown them into utter emptiness