p The set of anxieties may be conditionally divided into two groups. The first embraces threats to civilisation, and the character of the second is immediately social. In the first group attention is attracted by the warnings of anthropological, ecological, urbanistic and demographic threats, of the information explosion, of the threat of new discoveries in science and technology described in advance by futurologists.

p In its approach to these phenomena, especially when their causes have to be shown, the sense of contentedness finds it is helpless in its methods. It accentuates the minor aspects of threats, pushing their essential social aspect into the background.

While distorting the entire range of threats to civilisation by its non-class analysis, it makes haste to calm itself with the prospect that they will be removed by the bourgeois Establishment. Understandably, the socialist alternative to this reformism is completely ignored. The sense of contentedness thus performs a dual operation: it gives the impression that it is seriously alarmed and, at the same time, remains loyal to the conventional optimistic ideology.