For a moment I felt an abrupt rush of countless points of white light sweep across the field of view, as if the unseen million of the Milky Way were to flow in a sparkling river before my eyes. Very bright colors, the wonderful loveliness of vivid colors gone before I could name them. The disappearance of overt authority is clearly visible in all spheres of life. Parents do not give commands any more; they suggest that the child “will want to do this.” Since they have no principles or convictions themselves, they try to guide children to do what the law of conformity expects, and often, being older and hence less in touch with “the latest,” they learn from the children what attitude is required. The same holds true in business and in industry; you do not give orders, you suggest; you do not command, your coax and manipulate. Even the American army has accepted much of the new form of authority. The army is propagandized as if it were an attractive business enterprise; the soldier should feel like a member of a team, even though the hard fact remains that one must be trained to kill and be killed. As long as there was overt authority, there was conflict, and there was rebellion—against irrational authority. In the conflict with the commands of one’s conscience, in the fight against irrational authority, the personality developed—specifically the sense of self developed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

I experience myself as “I” because I doubt, I protest, I rebel. Even if I submit and sense defeat, I experience myself as “I”—I, the defeated one. However, if I am not aware of submitting or rebelling, if I am ruled by an anonymous authority, I lose the sense of self, I become a “one,” a part of the “It.” The mechanism through which the anonymous authority operates is conformity. I ought to do what everybody does, hence, I must conform, not be different, not stick out; I must be ready and willing to change according to the changes in the pattern; I must not ask whether I am right or wrong, but whether I am adjusted, whether I am not peculiar, not different. The only thing which is permanent in me is just this readiness for change. Nobody has power over me, expect the herd of which I am part, yet to which I am subjected. It is hardly necessary to demonstrate to the reader the degree which this submission to anonymous authority by conformity has reached. However, I want to give a few illustrations taken from the very interesting and illuminating settlement in California.  In this upscale development in Roseville, California was made to house hundreds of people, partly in clusters of rental garden apartments at Pearl Creek Apartments rent for one-bedroom apartment from $1,630, partly in ranch-type houses in Rocklin, California at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails for sale starting at mid $400,000’s. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

The inhabitants of this community are mostly junior executives, with a sprinkling of chemists and engineers, with an average income of $62,748.05-$73,206.06, between 25 and 35 years of age, married, and with one or two children. What are the social relations, and the adjustment in this package community? Whole people move there mainly out of a simple economic necessity and not because of any yen for womb image, after exposure to such an environment some people find a warmth and support in it that makes other environments seem unduly cold—it is somewhat unsettling, for example, to hear the way residents of the new suburbs occasionally refer to “the outside.” This feeling of warmth is more or less the same as the feeling of been accepted: “I could afford another place than the development we are going to,” says one of the people, “and I must say it is not the kind of place where you have the boss or a customer dinner. However, you get real acceptance is indeed a in a community like that.” This craving for acceptance is indeed a very characteristic feeling in the alienated person. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Why should anyone be so grateful for acceptance unless one doubts that he or she is acceptable, and why should a young, educated, successful couple have such doubts, if not due to the fact that they cannot accept themselves—because they are not themselves. The only haven for having a sense of identity is conformity. Being acceptable really means not being different from anybody else. Feeling inferior stems from feeling different, and no question is asked whether the difference is for the better or worse. Adjustment begins early. One parent expresses the concept of anonymous authority quite succinctly: The adjustment to the group does not seem to involve so many problems for them [the children]. I have noticed that they seem to get the feeling that nobody is the boss—there is a feeling of complete co-operation. Partly this comes from early exposure to court play. The ideological concept in which this phenomenon is expressed here is that of absence of authority, a beneficial value in terms of twenty first century freedom. The reality behind this concept of freedom is the presence of anonymous authority and the absence of individuality. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

What could be clearer for this concept of conformity than the statement made by one mother: “Johnny has not been doing so well at school. The teacher told me he was doing fine in some respects but that his social adjustment was not as good as it might be. He would pick one or two friends to play with—and sometimes he was happy to remain by himself.” Indeed, the alienated person finds it almost impossible to remain by oneself, because one is seized by the panic of experiencing nothingness. That it should be formulated so frankly is nevertheless surprising, and shows that we have even ceased to be ashamed of our herdlike inclinations. The parents sometimes complain that the school might be a bit too permissive, and that the children lack discipline, but whatever the faults of Park Forest parents maybe, harshness and authoritarianism are not among them. Indeed not, but why would you need authoritarianism in its overt forms if the anonymous authority of conformism makes your children submit completely to the It, even if they do not submit to their individual parents? The complaint of the parents, however, about lack of discipline is not meant too seriously, for “What we have in Park Forest, it is becoming evident, is the apotheosis of pragmatism. It would be an exaggeration, perhaps, to say that the transients have come to deify society—and the job of adjusting to it—but certainly they have remarkably little yen to quarrel with society. They are, as one puts it, the practical generation.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Another aspect of alienated conformity is the leveling-out process of taste and judgment which describes “The Melting Pot,” or as some like to call it “The Smelting Pot.” “When I first came here I was pretty rarefied,” a self-styled “egghead” explained to a recent visitor. “I remember how shocked I was one day when I told the girls in the court how much I had enjoyed listening to The Magic Flute the night before. They did not know what I was talking about. I began to learn that diaper talk I lot more important to them. I still listen to The Magic Flute but now I realize that for most people other things in life seem as important.” Another woman reports that she was discovered reading Plato when one of the girls made a surprise visit. The visitor “almost fell over from surprise. Now all of them are sure I am strange.” Actually, the sensitive woman overestimates the damage. The others do not think her overly odd, for her deviance is accompanied by enough tact, enough observance of the little customs that oil court life, so that equilibrium is maintained. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

What matters is to transform value judgment into matters of opinion, whether it is listening to The Magic Flute as against diaper talk, or whether it is being a Republican as against being a Democrat. All that matters is that nothing is too serious, that one exchanges views, and that one is ready to accept any opinion or conviction (if there is such a thing) as being as good as the other. On the market of opinions everybody is supposed to have a commodity of the same value, and it is indecent and not fair to doubt it. The word which is used for alienated conformity and sociability is of course one which expresses the phenomenon in terms of a very beneficial value. Indiscriminating sociability and lack of individuality is called being outgoing. The language here becomes psychiatrically tinged with the philosophy thrown in for good measure. You can really help make a lot of people happy here. I have brought out two couples myself; I saw potentialities in them they did not realize they had. Whenever we see someone who is shy and withdrawn, we make a special effort with them. A poignant note comes into our discussion when we remind ourselves that this excessive concern for satisfying the partner is an expression, however perverted, of a sound and basic element in the sexual act: the pleasure and experience of self-affirmation in being able to give to the partner. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

The man is often deeply grateful toward the woman who lets herself be gratified by him—lets him give her an orgasm, to use the phrase that is often the symbol for this experience. This is a point midway between lust and tenderness, between sex and agape (or caritas as the Latins called it, the love which is devoted to the welfare of the other, the type of which is the love of God for humans)—and it partakes of both. Many a male cannot feel his own identity either as a man or a person in our culture until he is able to gratify a woman. The very structure of human interpersonal relations is such that the sexual act does not achieve its full pleasure or meaning if the man and woman cannot feel they are able to gratify the other. And it is the inability to experience this pleasure at the gratification of the other which often underlies the exploitative sexuality the compulsive sexuality of the Don Juan seduction type. Don Juan has to perform the act over and over again because he remains forever unsatisfied, quite despite the fact that he is entirely potent and has a technically good orgasm. Now the problem is not the desire and need to satisfy the partner as such, but the fact that this need is interpreted by the persons in the sexual act only a technical sense—giving physical sensation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

What is omitted even from our very vocabulary (and thus the words may sound square as I say them here) is the experience of giving feelings, sharing fantasies, offering the inner psychic richness that normally takes a little time and enables sensation to transcend itself in emotion and emotion to transcend itself in tenderness and sometimes love. It is not surprising that contemporary tends toward the mechanization of sex have much to do with the problem of impotence. The distinguishing characteristic of the machines is that it can go through all the motions but it never feels. A knowledgeable medical student, one of whose reasons for coming into analysis was his sexual impotence, had a revealing dream. He was asking me in the dream to put a pipe in his dead that would go down through his body and come out at the other end of his penis. He was confident in the dream that the pipe would constitute an admirably strong erection. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

What was entirely missing in this intelligent scion of our sophisticated times was any understanding at all that what he conceived as his solution was exactly the cause of his problem, namely the image of himself as a screwing machine. His symbol is remarkably graphic: the brain, the intellect, is included, but true symbol of our alienate age, his shrew system bypasses entirely the seats of emotions, the thalamus, the heart and lungs, even the stomach. Direct route from head to penis—but what is lost is the heart! Impotence is increasing these days despite (or because of) the unrestrained freedom on all sides. All therapists seem to agree that more men are coming to them with that problem—though whether this represents a real increase in the prevalence of sexual impotence or merely a greater awareness and ability to talk about it cannot be definitely answered. Obviously, it is one of those topics on which meaningful statistics are almost impossible to get. It is clear that men have an urge to get help on impotence. Whatever the reason, it is becoming harder for the young man as well as the old to take “yes” for an answer. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

To see the curious ways the new puritanism shows itself, you have only to pen an issue of Playboy, that redoubtable journal reputedly sold mainly to college students and clergymen. You discover the scantly clad girls with silicate breast side by side with the articles by reputable authors, and you conclude on first blush that the magazine is certainly on the side of the new enlightenment. However, you look more closely you see a strange expression in these photographed women: detached, mechanical, uninviting, vacuous—the typical schizoid personality in the negative sense of that term. You discover that they are not sexy at all but that Playboy has only shifted the fig lead from the genitals to the face. You read the letters to the editor and find the first, entitled “Playboy Priest,” telling of a priest who “lectures on Hefner’s philosophy to audiences of young people and numerous members of the clergy,” that “true Christian ethics and morality are not incompatible with Hefner’s philosophy,” and—written with enthusiastic approbation—that “most clergymen in their fashionable parsonages live more like playboys than ascetics.” You find another letter entitled “Jesus was a playboy,” since he loved Mary Magdalene, good food, and grooming, and castigated the Pharisees. And you wonder why all this religious justification and why people, if they are going to be “liberated,” cannot just enjoy their liberation? #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

Whether one takes the cynical view that letters to the editor are planted, or the more generous one that these examples are selected from hundreds of letters, it amounts to the same thing. An image of a type of American male is being presented—a suave, detached, self-assumed bachelor, who regards the woman as a “Playboy accessory” like items in his fashionable wardrobe. You note also that Playboy carries no advertising for trusses, bald heads, or anything that would detract from this image. You discover that the good articles (which, frankly, can be bought by an editor who wants to hire an assistant with taste and pay the requisite amount of money) give authority to this image. Harvey Cox concludes that Playboy is basically antisexual, and that it is the latest and slickest episode in man’s continuing refusal to be human. He believes the whole phenomenon of Playboy is only a part vividly illustrates the awful fact of the new kind of tyranny. The poet-sociologist Calvin Herton, discussing Playboy in connection with the fashion and entertainment World, calls it the new sexual fascism.  #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

Many people desire to live out of mind, to experience their nonrational or irrational selves. They want, out of curiosity, out of need, out of a feeling of incompleteness, to know the rest of themselves, the part of them that is usually hidden away, like the family of skeletons.  Playboy has indeed caught on to something significant in American society, it is believed to be the repressed fear of involvement with women. I go farther and hold that it, as an example of the new puritanism, gets its dynamic from a repressed anxiety in American men that underlies even the fear of involvement. This is the repressed anxiety about impotence. Everything in the magazine is beautifully concocted to bolster the Illusion of potency without ever putting it to the test or challenge at all. Noninvolvement (like playing it cool) is elevated into the ideal model for Playboy. This is possible because the illusion is air-tight, ministering as it does to men fearful for their potency, and capitalizing on this anxiety. The character of the illusion is shown further in the fact that the readership of Playboy drops off significantly after the age of thirty, when men cannot escape dealing with real women. This illusion is illustrated by the fact that Hefner himself, a former Sunday-school teacher and son of a devout Methodists, practically never went outside his large establishment in North Chicago. Ensconced there, he carries on his work surrounded by his bunnies and amidst his nonalcoholic bacchanals on Pepsi-Cola. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13