The relevance and importance of the question

With this chapter I would like to encourage humanities scholars to step up their intellectual efforts to understand the societal significance of people's ability to postpone the fulfilment of their needs and desires – except the sexual ones (see appendix B). Optimally, such a task should be a concerted undertaking by historians, psychologists, sociologists and others to advance our knowledge of both the long-term destiny of this faculty and the mechanisms behind its varying presence among different peoples and cultures.

The ability to postpone rewards or the fulfilment of needs and desires is essential for all human development – both at the individual and societal level. Otherwise, we would not survive, and no society would cohere without some balance between the fulfilment and postponement or suspension of some of our cravings or even definite abstention from some of our cravings. As stated by Roger Scruton in a little book about beauty, ‘desire […] is inherently bound by prohibitions’.

For the sake of our personal interests, we already have good reasons to resist and postpone some of our needs, either to forget them once and for all or to fulfil them at a point in the future when the opportunity cost of doing so is as low as possible. We only live once; true, but all our days, from the first to the last, are parts of that life – why each one of them deserve to be equally valued and enjoyed. Let alone the fact that such an even distribution of pleasure will never come true. In passing, the temptation to procrastinate (i.e. to delay what should be done at once) is just another aspect of the issue at stake in this chapter.

Furthermore, since most resources are scarce in relation to their overall attractiveness, all of us also have good reason to step back sometimes for the sake of other people's desires. Clearly, such deliberate willingness to suppress one's immediate impulses for the benefit of other people's access to muchwanted material or immaterial resources implies the presence of some sort of empathy among humans.