They will never believe him, and it was the smartest thing for him to do. He can repeat the confession until doomsday, but when you know more, you will understand. Another aspect of social adjustment is the complete lack of privacy, and the indiscriminate talking about one’s problems. Here again, one sees the influence of modern psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Even the thin walls are greeted as help from feeling alone. “I never feel lonely, even when Justin is away,” goes a typical comment. “You know friends are nearby, because at night you hear the neighbors through the walls.” Marriages which might break up otherwise are saved, depressed moods are kept from becoming worse, by talking, talking, talking. “It is wonderful,” says one young wife. “You find yourself discussing all your problems with your neighbors—things that back in Canada we would have kept to ourselves.” As time goes on, this capacity for self-revelation grows; and on the most intimate details of family life, court people become amazingly frank with each other. No one, they point out, ever need face a problem alone. We may add that it would be more correct to say that never do they face a problem. Even the architecture becomes functional in the battle against loneliness. Just as doors inside houses—which are sometimes said to have marked the birth of middle class—are disappearing, so are the barriers against neighbors.  #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

The picture in the picture window, for example, is what is going on inside—or, what is going on inside other people’s picture windows. The conformity pattern develops a new morality, a new kind of super-ego. However, the new morality is not the conscience of the humanistic tradition nor is the new super-ego made in the image of an authoritarian father. Virtue is so be adjusted and to be like the rest. Vice, to be different. Often this is expressed in psychiatric terms, where virtuous means being healthy, and evil, being neurotic. From the eye of the court there is no escape. Love affair are rare for that reason, rather than for moral reasons or the fact that the marriages are so satisfactory. There are feeble attempts at privacy. While the rule is that you walk into the house without knocking, or making any other sign, some people gain little privacy by moving the chair to the front, rather than the court side of the apartment, to show that they do not want to be disturbed. However, there is an important corollary of such efforts at privacy—people feel a little guilt about making them. Except very occasionally, to shut oneself off from others like this is regarded as either a childish prank or, more likely, an indication of some inner neurosis. The individual, not group, has been erred. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

So, at any rate, many errants seem to feel, and they are often penitent about what elsewhere would be regarded as one’s own business, and rather normal business at that. “I have promised myself to make it up to them.” One court resident recently told a confidant. “I was feeling bad and just plain did not make the effort to ask the others in later. I do not blame them, really, for reacting the way they did. I will make it up to them somehow.” Indeed, privacy has become clandestine. Again the terms which are used are taken from the progressive political and philosophic tradition; what could sound finer than the sentence “Not in solitary and selfish contemplation but in doing things with other people does one fulfill oneself.” What it really means, however, is giving up oneself, becoming part and parcel of the herd, and liking it. This state is often called by another pleasant word, “togetherness.” The favorite way of expressing the same state of mind is that of putting it in psychiatric terms: “We have learned not to be so introverted,” one junior executive, and a very thoughtful and successful one, describes in the lesson. “Before we came here we used to live pretty much to ourselves. On Sundays, for instance, we used to stay in bed until around maybe two o’clock, reading the paper and listening to the symphony on the radio. Now we stop around and visit with people, or they visit with us. I really think Cresleigh Homes at Rocklin Trails has broadened us.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Lack of conformity is not only punished by disapproving words like “neurotic,” but sometimes by cruel sanctions. Regatta Court is a case,” says one resident of the highly active block. “She was so excited to get in with the community when she moved in. She is a very warm-heated gal, and is always trying to help people, but she is well—sort of elaborate about it. One day she decided to win over everybody by giving an afternoon party for the gals. Poor thing, she did it all wrong. The girls turned up in their bathing suits and slacks, as usual, and here she had little dollies and silver and everything spread around. Ever sine then it has been almost like a planned campaign to keep her out of things. It is really pitiful. She sits there in her beach chair out front just dying for someone to come and kaffeeklatsch with her, right across the street four or five girls are yakking away. Every time they suddenly all laugh at some jokes she think they are laughing at her. She came over here yesterday and cried all afternoon. She told me she and her husband are thinking about inviting them over for dinner so they can make a fresh start.” Other cultures have punished deviants from the prescribed political or religious creed by prison or the stake. Here the punishment is only perceived ostracism which drives a poor woman into despair and an intense feeling of guilt. What is the crime? One act of error, one single sin toward the god of conformity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

It is only another aspect of the alienated kind of interpersonal relationship that friends are not formed on the basis of individual liking or attraction, but that they are determined by the location of one’s own house or apartment in relation to the others. This is the way it works. It begins with the children. The new suburbs are matriarchies, yet the children are in effect so dictatorial that a term like filiarchy would not be entirely facetious. It is the children who set the basic design; their friendships are translated into the mother’s friendships, and these, in turn, to the family’s. Fathers just tag along. It is the flow of wheeled juvenile traffic tat determines which is to be the functional door; i.e., in the homes, the front door; in the courts, the back door. It determines, further, the route one takes from the functional door; for when wives go visiting with neighbors they gravitate toward the houses within sight and hearing of their children and the telephone. This crystallizes into the court checkerboard movement (i.e., the regular kaffeeklatsch route) and this forms that basis of adult friendships. Actually, this determination of friendship goes so far that the reader of the article is invited by the author to pick out the clusters of friendship in one sector of the settlement, just from the picture of the location of the houses, their entrance and exit doors in this sector. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

What is important is this picture is not only the fact of alienated friendships, and automaton conformity, but the reaction of people to this fact. Consciously it seems people fully accept the new form of adjustment. Once people hated to concede that their behavior was determined by anything expect their own free will. Not so with the new suburbanites; they are fully aware of the all-pervading power of the environment over them. As a matter of fact, there are few subjects they like so much to talk about; and with the increasing lay curiosity about psychology, psychiatry, and sociology, they discuss their social life in surprisingly clinical terms. However, they have no sense of plight; this, they seem to say, is the way things are, and the trick is not to fight it but to understand it. This young generation has also its philosophy to explain their way of life. Not merely as an instinctive wish, but as an articulate set of values to be passed on to one’s children, the next generation of leaders are coming to deify social utility. Does it work, not why, has become the key question. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

With society having become so complex, the individual can have meaning only as one contributes to the harmony of the group, transients explain—and for them, constantly on the move, ever exposed to new groups, the adapting to groups has become particularly necessary. They are all, as they themselves so often put it, in the same boat. On the other hand, the value of solitary thought, the fact that conflict is sometimes necessary, and other such disturbing thoughts rarely intrude. The most important, or really the only important ting children as well as adults have to learn, is to get along with other people, which, if taught in school is called citizenship, the equivalent for outgoingness and togetherness as the adults call it. Are people really happy, are the as satisfied, unconsciously, as they believe themselves to be? Considering the nature of humanity, and the conditions for happiness, this can hardly be so. However, they even have some doubts consciously. While they feel that conformity and merging with the group is their duty, many of them sense that they are frustrating other urges. They feel that responding to the group mores is akin to a moral duty—and so they continue, hesitant and unsure, imprisoned in fraternity or sorority. When we pass beyond the range of our senses, we find evidence that both we and the World we live in have been given a specious appearance of self-completeness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

 The feeling of self-completeness does not merely mean that the human senses are limited; it means that the practical mind has been formed in such a way that it reinforces the impression given by the senses and takes for granted the things which are not true, but which make for implicity and efficiency in practical life. The great value of psychical research is that it has begun to put perspective into the Universe and to show us that neither we nor our World come to an end where we thought they did. “Every once in a while I wonder,” says one transient in an almost furtive moment of contemplation. “I do not want to do anything to offend the people here: they are kind and decent, and I am proud we have been able to get along with each other—with all our differences so well. But then, once in a while, I think of myself and my husband and what we are not doing and I get depressed. Is it just enough not to be bad?” Indeed, this life of compromise, this outgoing life, is the life of imprisonment, selflessness and depression. They are all in the same boats, but where is the boat going? No one seems to have the faintest idea; nor, for that matter, do they see much point in even raising the question. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

The picture of conformity as we have illustrated it with the outgoing inhabitants of Rocklin Trails is certainly not the same all over America. The reasons are obvious. These people are young, they are middle-class and upper middle-class and they move upwards, they are mostly people who in their work career manipulate symbols and people, and whose advancement depends on whether they permit themselves to be manipulated. There are undoubtedly many older people of the same occupational group, and many equally young people of different occupational groups who are less advanced, as for instance those engineers, chemists and physicists, more interested in their work than in the hope of jumping into an executive career as soon as possible; furthermore, there are millions of farmers and farm-hands, whose style of life has only been changed partly by the conditions of the twenty first century; eventually the industrial workers, whose income is not too different from the white-collar workers, but whose work situation is. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Although this is not the place to discuss the meaning of work for the industrial worker today, this much can be said here: there is undoubtedly a difference between people who manipulate other people and people who create things, even though their roles in the process of production is a partial and in many ways an alienated one. The worker in a big steel mill co-operates with others, and has to do so if one is to protect one’s life; one faces dangers, and shares them with others; one’s colleagues as well as the foreman can judge and appreciate one’s skill rather than one’s smile and pleasant personality; one has a considerable amount of freedom outside of work; one has paid vacations, one may be busy in one’s garden, with a hobby, with local and union politics. However, even taking into account all these factors with differentiate the industrial worker will escape being molded by the dominant conformity pattern. In the first place, even the most beneficial aspects of one’s work situation, like the ones just mentioned, do not alter the fact that one’s work is alienated and only to a limited extent a meaningful expression of one’s energy and reason; secondly, the trend for increasing automatization of industrial work diminishes this latter factor rapidly. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Eventually, one is under the influence of our whole cultural apparatus, the advertisements, movies, television, newspapers, just as everybody else, and can hardly escape being driven into conformity, although perhaps more slowly than other sectors of the population. What holds true for the for the industrial worker holds true also for the farmer. With the confusion of motives in sex that we have discussed in the past—almost every motive being present in the act except the desire to make love—it is no wonder that there is a diminution of feeling and that passion has lessened almost to the banishing point. This diminution of feeling often takes the form of a kind of anesthesia (now with no need of ointment) in people who can perform the mechanical aspects of the sexual act very well. We are becoming used to the plaint from the couch or patient’s chair that “We made love, but I did not feel anything.” In a World gone grey with market reports, time studies, tax regulations and path lab analyses, the rebel finds sex to be the one green thing. It is surely true that the zest, adventure, and trying out of one’s strength, the discovering of vast and exciting new areas of feeling and experience in one’s self and in one’s relations to others, and the validation of the self that foes with these are indeed frontier experiences. They are rightly and normally present in sexuality as part of the psychosocial development of every person. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Sex in our society did, in fact, have this power for several decades after 1920’s, when almost every other activity was becoming other-directed, jaded, emptied of zest and adventure. However, for various reasons—one of them being that sex by itself had to carry the weight for the validation of the personality in practically all other realms as well—the frontier freshness, newness, and challenge become more and more lost. For we are now living in the post-Riesman age, and are experiencing the long-run implications of Riesman’s other-directed behavior, the radar-reflected way of life. The last frontier has become a teeming Las Vegas and no frontier at all. Young people can no longer get bootlegged feeling of personal identity out of revolting in sexuality since there is nothing there to revolt against. Studies of medicine addiction among many young people report them as saying that the revolt against parents, the social kick of feeling their own oats which they used to get from sex, they now have to get from medication. One such study indicates that students express a certain boredom with sex, while certain medicines are synonymous with excitement, curiosity, forbidden adventure, and society’s abounding permissiveness. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

It no longer sounds new when we discover that for many young people what used to be called love-making is now experiences as a futile panting palm to palm. They tell us that it is hard for them to understand what the poets were talking about, and that we should so often hear the disappointed refrain, “We went to bed but it was not any good.” Nothing to revolt against, did I say? Well, there is obviously one thing left to revolt against, and that is sex itself. The frontier, the establishing of identity, the validation of the self can be, and not infrequently does become for some people, a revolt against sexuality entirely. I am certainly not advocating this. What I wish to indicate is that the very revolt against sex—this modern Lysistrata in robot’s dress—is rumbling at the gates of our cities or, if not rumbling, at least hovering. The sexual revolution comes finally back on itself not with a bang but a whimper. Thus it is not surprising that, as sex become more machines like, with passion irrelevant and then even pleasure diminishing, the problem has come full circle. And we find, mirabile dictum, a progression from an anesthetic attitude to an antiseptic one. Sexual contact itself then tends to get put on the shelf and to be avoided. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

This is another and surely least constructive aspect of the new puritanism: it returns, finally, to a new asceticism. This is said graphically in charming limerick that seems to have sprung up on some sophisticated campus: The word has come down from the Dean that with the assistance of the teaching machine, King Oedipus Rex could have learned about sex without every touching the Queen. Many people welcome this revolt against sex. Sex as we now think of it may soon be dead. Sexual concepts, ideas, and practices already are being altered almost beyond recognition. The foldout playmate in Playmate magazine—she of the outsize breast and buttocks, pictured in the sharp detail—signals the death of the throes of a departing age. It is predicted the eros will not be lost in the new sexless age but diffused, and that all life will be more erotic than now seems possible. This last reassurance would be comforting indeed to believe. However, as usual, it penetrates insights into present phenomena and is unfortunately placed in framework of history—pretribalism with its so-called lessened distinction between male and female—which has no factual basis at all. And we have not been given evidence whatever for this optimistic prediction that new eros, rather than apathy, will succeed the demise of vive la difference. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Indeed, there are amazing confusions about the worship of the new electric age. “And what does an X-ray of a woman reveal? Not a realistic picture, but a deep, involving image. Not a specialized female, but a human being.” Well! An X-ray actually reveals not a human being at all but a depersonalized, fragmentized segment of bone or tissue which can be read only by a highly specialized technician and from which we could never in a thousand years recognize a human being or any man or woman we know, let alone one we love. Such a reassuring view of the future is frightening and depressing in the extreme. Some people seem to believe that we are hurtling into, not a bisexual or multi-sexual, but an a-sexual society: the boys grow their hair and the girls wear pants. Romance will disappear; in fact, it has almost disappeared now. Given the guaranteed Annual Income and The Birth Patrol Pill, will women choose to marry? Why should they? What of the time when the fertilized ovum can be implanted in the womb of a mercenary, and one’s progeny selected from a sperm-bank? Will the lady choose to reproduce her husband, if there still are such things? No problems, no jealousy, no love-transference. And what of the children, incubated under glass? #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

In the future will communal love develop the human qualities that we assume emerge from the present rearing children? Will women under these conditions lose the survival drive and become as death-oriented as the present generation of American mortals? I do not raise the question in advocacy. I consider come of the possibilities horrifying. The real issue underlying this revolution is not what one does with sexual organs and sexual function per se, but what happens to mortal’s humanity. What disturbs me is the real possibility of the disappearance of our humane, life-giving qualities with the speed of developments in the life sciences, and the fact that no one seems to be discussing the alternative possibilities for good and evil in these developments. The purpose of this discussion is precisely to raise the questions of the alternative possibilities for good and evil—that is, the destruction or the enhancement of these qualities which constitute mortal’s humane, life-giving qualities. Our natural affections are planted in us by the Spirit of God, for a wise purpose; and the are the very main-springs of life and happiness—they are the cement of all virtuous and Heavenly society—they are the essence of charity, or love. There is not more pure and holy principle in existence than the affection which glows in the heart of a virtuous mortal for one’s companion. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

The fact is, God made mortals, male and female; he planted in their hearts those affections which are calculated to promote their happiness and union. Your love, like a tree, must be nourished. There will come a great love and interdependence between you, for your love is a divine one. It is deep, inclusive, comprehensive. It is not like that association of the World which is misnamed love, but which is mostly physical attraction. The love which the Lord speaks of is not only physical attraction, but spiritual attraction as well. It is faith and confidence in, and understanding of, one another. It is total partnership. It is companionship with common ideals and standards. One must be unselfish toward and sacrifice for one another and display cleanliness of thought and action and faith in God and is program. “I still think about you now. You are always with me in my mind. For this time, I still dream about the day that you return the meaning to this place. The Sun will rise for you and I. The distance between us was never far through the highways and time waits for no one, but I do because it is always you and I. Do you recall the meaning in those days, before we change? And I still dream about your face, but feeling that you are just one step away. Would never fade, like you and I,” reports Emma Hewitt (You and I). #RandolphHarris 17 of 17