"[Y]oung people are profoundly unhappy because they have lost a sense of gratitude. They can speak only of rights. Health is a right and sickness a frustration of this right. Healing, so quick now, thanks to our antibiotics, is no longer a gift from God. Happiness is a right. Since no one achieves it, despite all our modern conveniences, everyone is the victim of a frustration complex. No gift can bring joy to the one who has a right to everything. Even love has been devalued; it is but a commonplace convenience which the sexes render one another, without there being any deeper self-commitment. There is no real giving of the self!
"No giving. This word “giving” brings to mind the subtle transition from gift to trade. For it seems to me that it is in this profound human need to give that we need to give that we need to seek for the desire for trade, commerce, and even for farming and industry. For these “offer” men the goods which they need. That the pleasure of giving is reciprocal, that it is organized into exchange systems, that the invention of money has generalized it on a world-wide level has in no way changed its physiological meaning. The best businessmen, those who illustrate most truly the business mind, are men who like to give, who like to please the customer. They always feel as if they were bestowing a gift with their merchandise, adding again a kind word and a beautiful smile. They also feel that they are recipients of a gift when people pay them.
"Effective advertising has its roots in just such an attitude of mind. Because these men are themselves convinced that they are offering what the client needs, they are able to persuade him that it is so. . . . Is it not interesting to look upon the whole of economic life from this point of view? Not just as an instinctual need to procure for oneself the means of subsistence, but equally as a universal, spiritual need for exchanging with others: In other words, to see it as the need for interpersonal contact." (31-33)
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