Come on, let us pack up the suitcase and go down to the kitchen. Tell your people not to open all those boxes, just to move them to where they will be safe. I will make you some good coffee. I make the best coffee. I make better coffee than Reese Witherspoon or her mother Mrs. Betty. While immensely augmenting our comforts, our conveniences and our leisure, and disproportionately raisin the real income of the less affluent, industry has also impoverished life. Mass production and consumption, mobility, the homogenization of taste and finally of society were among the costs of higher productivity. They de-individualized life and drained each of our ends of meaning as we achieved it. Pursuit thus became boundless. The increased leisure time would hang heavy on our hands, were it not for the mass media and social media which help us burn it away like coal on the grill during Summer time. They inexorably exclude art anything of significance when it cannot be reduced to mass entertainment, but they divert us from the passage of the time they keep us from filling. They also tend to draw into the mass market talents and works that might otherwise produce new visions and they abstract much of the capacity to experience art or life directly and deeply. What they do, however, is what people demand. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

We scrutinized the causes, the effects and the general characteristics of popular culture and found them unavoidable in a mass-production economy. However, we have hardly touched on the contents of popular culture. Some work on this subject has been done and much remains. Limitations of scope also restricted us from stressing the many material advantages of industrialism. We do not intend to deny them. Finally, prophecy too is beyond our means. True, extrapolation of present trends makes a dismal picture. However, there is comfort in the fact that no extrapolation has ever predicted the future correctly. Elements can be forecast, but only prophets can do more (and they are unreliable, or hard to interpret). History has always had surprises up its sleeves—if it changed its ways, it would be most surprising. Our ignorance here leaves the rosy as well as the grim possibilities open for the future. However, this des not allow us to avert our gaze from the present and from the outlook it affords. Neither is cheerful. The gist of any culture is an ethos which gives meaning to the lives of those who dwell in it. If this be the purport of popular culture, it is foiled. We have suggested how it comes to grief in various aspects. What makes popular culture as a whole so disconcerting is best set forth now by exploring the relationship among diversion, art and boredom. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The gist of any culture is an ethos which gives meaning to the lives of those who dwell in it. If this be the purport of popular culture, it is foiled. We have suggested how it comes to grief in various aspects. What makes popular culture as a whole so disconcerting is best set forth now by exploring the relationship among diversion, art and boredom. Dr. Freud thought of art as a diversion, an illusion in contrast to reality, a substitute gratification like a dream. In this he fully shared what was and still is the popular view of art. It is a correct view—of popular art, of pseudo-art produced to meet the demand for diversion. However, it is a mistaken, reductive definition of art. Dr. Freud finds the dreamwork attempting to hide or disguise the dreamer’s true wishes and fears so that they may not alarm one’s consciousness. The substitute gratification produced by the dreamwork, mainly by displacements, helps the dreamer continue sleeping. However, one major function of art is precisely to undo this dreamwork, to see through disguises, to reveal to our consciousness the true nature of our wishes and fears. The dreamwork covers, to protect sleep. Art discovers and attempts to awaken the sleeper. Whereas dreamwork tries to assist repression, the work of art intensifies and depends perception and experience of the World and of the self. It attempts to pluck the heart of the mystery, to show where the actions is possessed in its true nature. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Though dreams and art both may disregard literal reality, they do so to answer opposite needs. The dream may ignore reality to keep the sleeper’s eyes closed. Art transcends immediate reality to encompass wider views, penetrate into deeper experience and lead to a fuller confrontation of being’s predicament. The dreamwork even tries to cover upsetting basic impulses with harmless immediate reality. Art, in contrast, ignores the immediate only to uncover the essential. Artistic revelation need not be concerned with outer or with social reality. It may be purely aesthetic. However, if it is art, it can never be an illusion. Far from distracting from reality, art is a form of reality which strips life of the fortuitous to lay bare its essentials and permit us to experience them. In popular culture, however, art is all that Dr. Freud said art is, and no more. Like the dreamwork, popular culture distorts human experience to draw substitute gratifications or reassurances from it. Like the dreamwork, it presents an illusion in contrast to reality. For this reason, popular art falls short of satisfaction. And all of popular culture leaves one vaguely discontented because, like popular art, it is only a substitute gratification; like a dream, it distracts from life and from real gratification. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Substitute gratifications are uneconomic, as Dr. Freud often stressed. They do not in the end gratify as much, and they cost more psychologically than the real gratifications which they shut out. This is why sublimation and realistic control are to be preferred to substitution and repression. That is why reality is to be preferred to illusion, full experience to symptomatic displacements and defense mechanisms. Yet substitute gratifications, habitually resorted to, incapacitate the individual for real ones. In part they cause or strengthen internalized hindrances to real and gratifying experience; in part they are longed for because internal barriers have already blocked real gratification of the original impulses. Though the specific role it plays varies with the influence of other formative factors in the life of each individual, popular culture must be counted among the baffling variety of causes and effects of defense mechanisms and repressions. It may do much damage, or do none at all, or be the only relief possible, however deficient. Yet, whenever popular plays a major role in life significant repressions have taken (or are taking) place. Popular culture supplants those gratifications, which are no longer sough because of the repression of the original impulses. However, it is a substitute and spurious. It founders and cannot succeed because neither desire nor gratification are true. “Nought’s had, all’s spent/ where desire is got without content.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

It may seem paradoxical to describe popular culture in terms of repression. Far from repressed, it strikes one as uninhibited. Yet the seeming paradox disappears if we assume that the uproarious din, the raucous noise and the shouting are attempts to drown the shriek of unused capacities, of repressed individuality, as it is bent into futility. Repression bars impulses from awareness without satisfying them. This damming up always generates a feeling of futility and apathy or, in defense against it, an agitated need for action. The former may be called listless, the later restless boredom. They may alternate and they may enter consciousness only through anxiety and a sense of meaninglessness, fatigue and nonfulfillment. Sometimes there is such a general numbing of the eagerness too often turned aside that only a dull feeling of dreariness and emptiness remains. More often, there is an insatiable longing for things to happen. The external World is to supply these events to fill the emptiness. Yet the bored person cannot designate what would satisfy a craving as ceaseless as it is vague. It is not satisfied by any event supplied. There are characteristics of the experience that are supposed to follow: there should be a suddenness of illumination; the insight may occur, and to some extent must occur, against what one has clung to consciously in one’s theories; there should be a vividness of the incident and the whole scene that surrounds it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

For art to satisfying a craving there should also be expressed brevity and conciseness of insight, along with the experience of immediate certainty. Continuing with the practical conditions which one cites as necessary for this experience are hard work on the topic prior to the breakthrough may occur (that could be in thought or visualization or interpretation), and keep in mind that the necessity of alternating work and relaxation, with the insight often coming at the moment of the break between the two, or at least within the break. This last point is particularly interesting. It is probably something everyone has learned: if they alternate the classroom with the beach, professors will lecture with more inspiration; when they write for two hours, then pitch quoits, and then go back to their writing, authors will write better. However, certainly more than the mere mechanical alternation is involved. I propose that in our day this alteration of the market place and mountain requires the capacity for the constructive use of solitude. It requires the capacity for the constructive use of solitude. It requires that we be able to retire from a World that is too much with us, that we be able to be quiet, that we let the solitude work for us and in its. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

It is a characteristic of our time that many people are afraid of solitude: to be alone is a sign one is a social failure, for no one would be alone if he or she could help it. It often occurs to me that people living in our modern, hectic civilization, amid the constant din of radio and TV subjecting themselves to every kind of stimulation whether the passive sort of TV or the more active sort of conversation, work, and activity, that people with such constant preoccupations find it exceedingly difficult to let insights from unconscious depths break through. Of course, when an individual is afraid of the irrational—that is, of the unconscious dimensions of experience—one tries to keep busiest, trues to keep most noise going on about one. The avoidance of the anxiety of solitude by constant agitated diversion is what we likened to the settlers in the early says of America who used to beat on pots and pans at night to make enough din to keep the wolves away. Obviously if we are to experience insight from our unconscious, we need to be able to give ourselves to solitude. What determines why a given idea comes through from the unconscious? Why this particular insight and not one of a dozen others? Is it because a particular insight is the is the answer which is empirically most accurate? No. Is It because it is the insight which will pragmatically work best? Again, no. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

The useful combinations [that come through from the unconscious] are precisely the most beautiful, I mean those best able to charm this special sensibility that all mathematicians know, but of which the profane are so unaware as often to be tempted to smile at it. Among the great numbers of combinations blindly formed by the subliminal self, almost all are without interest and without utility; but just for that reason they are also without effect upon the esthetic sensibility. Consciousness will never know them; only certain ones are harmonious, and, consequently, at once useful and beautiful. They will be capable of touching this special sensibility of the geometer of which I have just spoken, and which, one aroused, will call our attention to them, and thus give them occasion to become conscious. This is why the mathematicians and physicists talk about the elegance of a theory. The utility is subsumed as part of the character of being beautiful. The harmony of an internal form, the inner consistency of a theory, the character of beauty that touches one’s sensibilities—these are significant factors determining why a given idea emerges. As a psychoanalyst, I can only add that my experience in helping people achieve insights reveals the same phenomenon—that insights emerge not chiefly because they are rationally true or even helpful, but because they have a certain form, the form that is beautiful because it completes an incomplete Gestalt. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

When this breakthrough of a creative insight into consciousness occurs, we have the subjective conviction that the form should be this way and no other way. It is characteristic of the creative experience that it strikes us as true—with immediate certainty. And we think, nothing else could have been true in that situation, and we wonder why we were so stupid as not to have seen it earlier. The reason, of course, is that we were not psychologically ready to see it. We could not yet intend the new truth or creative form in art or scientific theory. We were not yet open on the level of intentionality. However, the truth itself is simply there. This reminds us of what the Zen Buddhists keep saying—that at these moments is reflected and revealed a reality of the Universe that does not depend merely on our own subjectivity, but is as though we only had our eyes closed and suddenly we open them and there it is, as simple as can be. The new reality has a kind of immutable, eternal quality. The experience that “this is the way reality is and is not it is strange we did not see it sooner” may have a religious quality with artists. This is why many artists feel that something holy is going on when they paint, that there is something in the act of creating which is like a religious revelation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

There are ways that can help society avoid the tragic effects of the aggressive instinct; indeed, in the nuclear age one is almost forced to look for possibilities for peace in order to make one’s theory of the innate destructiveness of beings acceptable. I do not mind admitting that I think I have something to teach humankind that may help it to change for the better. This conviction is not as presumptuous as it might seem. The most important precept is to know thy self. We must deepen our insight into the causal concatenations governing our own behavior—it is the laws of evolution. As one element in this knowledge to which we must give special emphasis is the objective, ethological investigation of all the possibilities of discharging aggression in its primal form on substitute objects. The psychoanalytic study of so-called sublimation also helps as it is a mature type defense mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse. There is also another method which will helps us live more productive lives and that is the promotion of personal acquaintance and, if possible, friendship between individual members of different ideologies or nations. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The fourth and perhaps the most important measure to be taken immediately is the intelligent and responsible channeling of militant enthusiasm—that is, to help the younger generation to find genuine cases that are worth serving in the modern World. Self-knowledge means that one becomes conscious of what is unconscious; this is a most difficult process, because it encounters the energy of resistance by which the unconscious is defended against the attempt to make it conscious. Self-knowledge is not an intellectual process alone, but simultaneously an affective process. It is not only knowledge by the brain, but also knowledge by the heart. Knowing oneself means gaining increasing insight, intellectually and affectively, in heretofore secret parts of one’s psyche. It is a process which may take years for a sick person who wants to be cured of one’s symptoms and a lifetime for a person who seriously wants to be oneself. Its effect is one of increased energy because energy is freed from the task of upholding repressions; thus the more beings are in touch with one’s inner reality, the more one is awake and free. Knowing thyself also involves theoretical knowledge of the facts of evolution, and specifically of the instinctive nature of aggression. If somebody who knows the laws of gravity finds oneself in deep water and cannot swim, one’s knowledge will not prevent one from drowning; reading prescriptions does not make one well. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Even air lines advertise international travel as serving the cause of peace; unfortunately this concept of the aggression-lowing function of personal acquaintance does not happen to be true. There is ample evidence for this. The British and the Germans were very well acquainted with each other before 1914, yet their mutual hatred when the war broke out was ferocious. There is even more telling proof. It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides. Does the fact of mutual intimate knowledge diminish the intensity of hate among members of a family? Acquaintance and friendship cannot be expected to lower aggression because they represent a superficial knowledge about another person, a knowledge of an object which I look at from the outside. This is quite different from the penetrating, empathic knowledge in which I understand the other’s experiences by mobilizing those within myself which, if not the same, are similar to one’s own knowledge. Knowledge of this kind requires that most repressions within oneself are lowered in intensity to a point where there is little resistance to becoming aware of the new aspects of one’s unconsciousness. The attainment of a nonjudgmental understanding can lower aggressiveness or do away with it altogether; it depends on the degree to which a person has overcome one’s own insecurity, greed and narcissism, and not on the amount of information one has about others. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

It is an interesting question why civil wars are in fact much fiercer and why they elicit much more destructive impulses than international wars. It seems plausible that the reason is possessed in that usually, at least as far as modern international wars are concerned, they do not aim at the destruction of extinction of the enemy. Their aim is a limited one: to force the opponent to accept conditions for peace which are damaging, but by no means a threat to the existence of the population of the defeated country. (Nothing could illustrate this better than that Germany, the country who conceded in two World Wars, became most prosperous after each concession than before.) Exceptions to this rule are wars which aim at the physical extinction or enslavement of the total enemy population, like some of the wars—although by no means all—which the Romans conducted. In civil war the two opponents have the aim, if not to destroy each other physically, to destroy each other economically, socially, and politically. If this hypothesis is correct, it would mean that the degree of destructiveness is by and large dependent on the severity of the threat. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Channeling of militant enthusiasm is essential to life; one of my special recommendations is athletics. However, the fact is that competitive sports stimulate a great deal of aggression. How intense this is was highlight recently when the deep feelings aroused by an international soccer match led to a small war in Latin America. If there is no evidence that sport lowers aggression, at the same time it should be said that there is also no evidence that sport is motivated by aggression. What often produces aggression in sports is the competitive character of the event, cultivated in a social climate of competition and increased by an overall commercialization, in which not pride of achievement but money and publicity have become the most attractive goals. Many thoughtful observers of the unfortunate Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro, 2016, have recognized that instead of furthering goodwill and pace, they furthered competitive aggressiveness and nationalistic pride. However, supposing that being a patriot of my home country (which I am), I felt an unmitigated hostility against another county (which I emphatically do not), I still could not wish whole-heartedly for its destruction if I realized that there were people living in it who, like myself, were enthusiastic workers in the field of inductive natural science, or revered Charles Darwin and were enthusiastically propagating the truth of his discoveries. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Or still others in these other who shared my appreciation of Michelangelo’s art, or my enthusiasm for Goethe’s Faust, or for Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, or the beauty of a rambling Victorian mansion, a coral reef, a love for a BMW, or for wildlife preservation or a number of minor enthusiasm I could name, then we would more than likely be able to see eye to eye and respect each other, and I could not wish for their destruction just because they are in another geographical location. I should find it quite impossible to hate, unreservedly, any enemy, if one shared only one of my identifications with cultural and ethical values. My denial of the wish for destruction of a whole country by the word “wholeheartedly,” and by qualifying hate by “unreservedly.” However, what is a “half-hearted” wish for destruction, or a “reserved” hate? More important, my condition for not wanting the destruction of another country is that there are people who share my particular tastes and enthusiasm (those who revere Darwin seem to qualify only if they also enthusiastically propagate his discoveries): it is not enough that they are human beings. In other words, the total destruction of an enemy is undesirable only if and because one is similar to my own culture, and even more specifically, to my own interests and values. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The character of these statements is not changed by my demand for a humanistic education, for instance, an education offering an optimum of common ideals with which an individual can identify. This was the kind of education current in German high schools before the first World War, but the majority of the teachers of this humanism were probably more war-minded than the average German. Only a very different and radical humanism, one in which the primary identification is with life and with humankind, can have an influence against war. How often have I heard, in talk or writing, that the philosophic requirements are set too high and are beyond average human compliance. My answer is that time and patience and work keep on pushing back the measure of what is possible to a being, that grace may fitfully bless one if one sustains effort and aspiration or recognizes opportunity and inspiration, and that these requirements are not set for immediate attainment but as an ultimate goal to be striven for little by little and to give correct direction to one’s life. “Hope on and old on,” I told Britney Spears at an outwardly dark moment in her life. She did!—and later found herself, her own peace, and became in turn through her performances and music a help to many fellow Christians. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The achievements of such personal self-sufficiency, of such detachment from the World of agitations and desires, is, one will say, something entirely superhuman preternatural. “Why ask frail mortals to look at such unclimbable peaks, such unattainable summits?” Philosophy answers, “Yes, the peaks are high, the summits do cause us to strain our necks upward. However, it is wrong to say that they are unclimbable. There is a way of climbing them, little by little, under competent guidance, and that way is called the Quest. True, it involves certain disciplines, but then, what is there in life worth getting which can be got without paying some price in self-discipline for it? The aim of these disciplines is to secure s better-controlled mind, a more virtuous life, and a more reverent fundamental mood. The sage is a being who lives in constant truth-remembrance. One has realized the existence of the Overself, one knows that one partakes of Its life, immortal and infinite. One has made the pilgrimage to essential being and returned again to walk amongst beings, to speak their language, and to bear witness, by one’s life amongst them, to Truth. “And I would that ye should behold that the more part of them are in the path of their duty, and they do walk circumspectly before God, and they do observe to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments according to the law of Moses,” reports Helaman 15.5. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

In Loving Memory of Sarah Winchester 22 April 1839 – 5 September 1922