TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 615
power which had possessed Man in Process of Civilization; for that cure
would be worse than the disease. The rebellious prisoner of 'Brave New
World' would be stultifying his own efforts and ideals if he sought to
make his escape by casting himself down the precipice which he had just
scaled at so great a cost. The only line of escape that would be worth
pursuing would be one leading, not downward, but upward. What up-
ward openings, then, were there within the prisoner's sight and reach ?
If the most promising prelude to action is a recourse to the oracle of
experience, the obvious first step for a hard beset twentieth-century
Homo Mechanicus to take was to look into the experience of the primitive
societies; for (strange though this might sound to twentieth-century
Western ears) the spiritual problem of unemployment arising from a
solution of the economic problem of scarcity had been encountered up
to date, not by societies in process of civilization, but by primitive
societies living on the margin of the Oikoumen^ where the pressure of
the struggle for existence had always been at its lowest.1 Primitive ex-
perience of a problem beyond Civilization's ken could be studied in the
legend of the Lotus-Eaters2 and in the fable of the Doasyoulikes3 and in
the true history of the * Argonauts of the Western Pacific'.4 Twentieth-
century Melanesians had found a solution for the problem of total leisure
by which their mythical counterparts had been worsted; and the ex-
perience and achievements of these primitive islanders were not without
interest for their sophisticated Western contemporaries now that the
same problem was overtaking these in their turn.

The Trobriand Islanders' first attempt to occupy an inordinately in-
creasing leisure had failed to keep pace with the progressive aggravation
of their problem.

1 The Australian Blackfellows, for example, had proved to be at an advantage in this
respect over the pioneers of Civilization who had eventually overtaken and all but
exterminated them in their antipodean Ultima ThulS—as had once been discovered, to
his surprise, by an airman who had fallen in with a vagrant food-gathering tribe of
aborigines as a result of having had to make a forced landing at a remote spot in the
interior of the Northern Territory. "Wishing to give his unsophisticated hosts an over-
whelming impression of his superiority in power and skill, the castaway took up his
rifle, which had come down with him intact, and picked off one of the innumerable
black swans that were riding on the waters of a lake on whose shore the wandering
Blackfellows were encamped. He had duly demonstrated Civilization's power of taking
life at long range, yet it was evident that the Blackfellows had not after all been impressed,
and his chagrin and bewilderment must have been manifest on his countenance, for his
considerate hosts lost no time in giving him a demonstration of the proper way to do the
job. As soon as the rest of the swans, who had risen in flight from the water at the sound
of the rifle-shot, had recovered from their alarm and had settled again, an aged Black-
fellow daubed his hair with mud, crowned the daub with a bunch of waterplants, stuck
a hollow reed into each of his nostrils, waded gently into the water, and disappeared
under the surface. All that was now visible was a bunch of water plants, apparently
drifting in the wind among the swans, with the ends of two broken reeds protruding
from the water a few inches away. The swans were not alarmed, nor did the survivors
take alarm when, one by one, some six or seven: of their number softly and silently
vanished under water and did not reappear. After a few seconds the old Bkckfellow
re-emerged from the lake bringing wititihim the six or seven swans iwhom he had caught
and killed by seizing their legs, pulling them down, and drowning them. The Black-
fellows* method of food-gathering was so crushingly superior to the rifleman's that,
after all, it was no wonder that his rifle-shot had failed to hit its intended psychological
mark. For this tribe, the problem of scarcity was non-existent so long as there was a
mud-banked, reed-fringed, swan-covered lake in their universe.

* See Odyssey* Book IX, 1L oa-ioz, quoted in II. ii. 22-33.

3 See II. ii. 25-31.

4 See Malinowski, B.: Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London 1922, Routledge),