become ends without an ultimate end—they all agreed with this—and the advertisement situation and the selling situation, the problem of human relations only as a problem of selling. Then they said: “Now sum up what is the most important thing you would tell us.” Then I said: “What I told you about solitude is the most important thing, because only out of solitude the resistance against patternization on a level in which resistance is broken without pain—with amusing [oneself], with fun, with having a good time—but the resistance is broken—only in solitude can elements of human potentialities, of resistance against patternization, be saved.” I want to give you this answer too: I believe that the great danger in which the personality ideal (which we discussed before) and the working for a neo-collectivism in the whole Western civilization, has brought this country, is not so much the resistance against the external forms, enforced forms, of neo-collectivism, as we have them in the Communist countries, and had them (and may have them again) in the Fascist and Nazi countries, but is the process of patternization.

Now I think this should bring to an end these problems, but in any case, I must come now to other questions, and the next question I want to discuss is the problem of religion and economics. Perhaps I should conclude this statement about patternization by saying: Solitude, in relation to an ultimate concern, is the only power of resistance. Not an empty solitude (which then becomes loneliness and, with even stronger force, drives us back to the patterns of life, in the gang)—but I mean a loneliness in relationship to an ultimate concern: this is the only power of real resistance. And here I see the relationship of religion and the problems of cultural sociology today.