There has been an interesting parallel between the extraordinary growth of physics, mechanics, and mathematics in the post renaissance and the 20th century. Among many aspects that both of these periods have in common is the monistic and pantheistic conception of the universe as a whole, manifested by the universal application of its laws. This resulted in unprecedented scientific solutions of the emerging problems. One should not be surprised that it did not take too long and a corresponding logical implication was expressed by application of these solutions to the human society; thus introducing fields like social physics, social mechanics, social energetics, and so on.

Social and human sciences became a subset of the natural sciences. Laws of thermodynamics, conservation law, and entropy law, when applied to society, can give us concepts of the social conservation and social entropy law with its necessary dissipation of nonreturnable energy, social friction, and so social matter social energy equivalents. Within the concept of the quantification of the losses, in depth studies must lead to the determination of corresponding friction losses. Here we have to count on the unpredictability of human creativity and inventiveness to supply us with social lubrication to reduce the social friction. And it is here, at this juncture, that panetics enters the scene. The above mentioned social friction can be measured and defined by the quantitative measurement of the dukkha which represents the central concept of suffering and its measurement.

Up to now, more or less, suffering as a mass social phenomenon was regarded as a necessary social friction-loss. The question arises: how far can, or should, human society permit this social friction to remain uncontrolled? In other words how much suffering is permissible and tolerable as judged by our standards of humanity? The question itself is disheartening since it unintentionally implies playing the role of God. At this moment the questions of ethics and panetics merge as two complementary approaches which synthesize both the objective and subjective assessments into one. Perhaps the old utilitarian principle should now be slightly changed into: "... the greatest exercise of responsibility of the greatest number of people consists in a radical reduction of suffering, which then results in the reciprocal production of happiness of enlightened humanity."

Successful application of the above approach, will result in greater conservation of social energy and the slowing down of social entropy. For this we need to concentrate on some deeper grasp of our subjective-objective constructions and on the quantitative assessment of the social world. We have to hope that just as centuries ago, sophisticated application of thequantitative methods made the control of the physical world possible, it will enable us, in the not too distant future, to control the social human world as well.

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Notes (1) some modern thinkers along this line: H. C. Carey, T. N. Carver,A. J. Latka, W. Oswald, V. Pareto, and E. Solvay.

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