Growth and Development of Soctal Groups 
These cargo cults, a special problem for administrators in New 
Guinea, have had their parallels in the rise of new religions, 
based on revelations, in more advanced cultures during times of 
stress, in the rise of Christianity and, even more clearly, in that 
of Islam. 
Another type of disturbance affects the vast populations of 
the so-called “developed”’ nations. Among them technological 
change has moved through time at a measurable and predictable 
rate of acceleration until now it marches too fast for the tolera- 
tion of the average individual human being in his lifetime. The 
consequent changes in institutional structure are too vast for 
many people to bear. 
Russia is a particularly vulnerable nation from the standpoint 
of brittleness, for several reasons. ‘The Russian empire includes 
large populations of Muslims and Buddhists as well as of 
Christians, which makes religion a divisive force. Therefore 
religion had to be downgraded if not abolished. In order to 
compete with America and Western Europe in agriculture and 
industry the rate of technological change had to be speeded to 
a maximum. To keep people quiet while going through such 
changes, communication had to be strictly controlled, parti- 
cularly international communication. To these ends the 
political institution had to be hypertrophied at the expense of 
all others, and the cushioning qualities of the other institutions 
have been correspondingly reduced or lost. 
But even in the most flexible of highly developed civilizations 
and governments, there is no time for natural selection to 
screen out those who can or cannot tolerate the disturbances 
attendant on technological acceleration alone, and the current 
population increase adds more to the spectre of chaos. In 
other words, disequilibrium is spreading from the peripheries 
of the world, where we carried it, to the centres of world 
civilization, in which we live. 
SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND ENVIRONMENT 
According to the calculations of physicists and generals 
dealing in the problems of atomic warfare, energy is becoming 
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