ABSTRACT
Many in the West have the good fortune to live in one of the most attractive countries in the world. Germany and Switzerland, for example, enjoy the blessings of security, widespread prosperity, excellent public infrastructures, respect for human rights and protection of basic freedoms. There is a relationship of reciprocal dependency between the normative culture of a society and the personalities of its members. The quality of the external order depends on the quality of the internal order, and vice-versa. A person's individual culture depends largely on the state of the external supra-individual culture of the groups in which he lives. The crisis of modern society is a crisis of its normative culture. Administration and technology function in a relatively ordered way in the domains of work and the economy. The crisis consists not in a lack of proven ideals, but rather partly in ignorance of valid norms and in the decline of understanding for their order-maintaining and support-giving powers.
