The World is now yours. You must look at the larger movements of history. The state of the World will begin in time to oppress you, and you will find, as all immortals do, that you cannot simply shut your heart on it, especially not you. The study of painting will lead you to the study of humans, and the study of humans will lead you to the state of the World of humans.  With the invention of the mass media, a mass market for culture became possible. The economies yielded by the mass production of automobiles became available in the mass production of entertainment. Producers of popular culture supply this new mass market. Popular culture does not grow within a group. It is manufactured by one group—in Hollywood or New York—for sale to an anonymous mass market. The product must meet an average of tastes and it loses in spontaneity and individuality what it gains in accessibility and inexpensiveness. The creators of popular culture are not a sovereign group of unacknowledged legislators. They work for Hooper ratings to give people what they want. Above all, they sales people; they sell entertainment, they use the television to tell you a vision, and the produce with sales in mind. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The creators of high culture are no longer insulated from the demands of the mass market by an educated elite, as they still were during the nineteenth century (and there are no stable, isolated communities in which folk culture could grow). The creators of popular culture do not have personal relationships with patrons whom they can lead as a being may lead in a conversation. A personal tutor is much more dependent on a few persons than television lecturer. However, one’s influence on one’s pupil is also much greater than the influence of anyone television lecturer on any one pupil. Today’s movie producer, singer, or writer is less dependent on the taste of an individual customer, or village, or court, than was the artist of yore; but one does depend far more on the average of tastes, and one can influence it far less. He need not cater to any individual taste—not even one’s own. One caters to an impersonal market. One is not involved in a conversation. One is like a speaker addressing a mass meeting and attempting to curry its favor. All mass media in the end alienate people from personal experience and, though appearing to offset it, intensify their moral isolation from each other, from reality and from themselves. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

 One may turn to the mass media when lonely or bored. However, mass media, once they become a habit, impair the capacity for meaningful experience. Though more diffuse and not as gripping, the habit feeds on itself, establishing a vicious circle as addictions do. The mass media do not physically replace individual activities and contacts—excursions, travel, parties and so forth. However, they impinge on all. The portable radio and digital phone (with its social media) is taken everywhere—from under the sea to space—and everywhere it isolates the bearer from one’s surroundings, from other people, and from oneself. Most people escape being by themselves at any time by voluntarily tuning in on something or somebody. Anyway, it is nearly beyond the power of individuals to escape broadcast or a social media posting. Music, social media, and public announcements are piped into restaurants, bars, shops, cafes, and lobbies, into public means of transportation, and even taxis. You can turn off your radio or mobile phone but not your neighbor’s nor can you silence his or her portable or the set at the restaurant. #RandolpHarris 3 of 13

Fortunately, most persons do not seem to miss privacy, the cost of which is even more beyond the average income than the cost of individuality. People are never quite in one place or group without at the same time, singly or collectively, gravitating somewhere else, abstracted, if not transported by the mass media. The incessant announcements, arpeggios, croonings, sobs, bellows, brayings and jingles draw to some faraway Word at large and by weakening community with immediate surroundings make people lonely even when in a crowd and crowded even when alone. And social media has made it possible for people to conjure up the perfect life, summon a new relationship with photo engineering software, and they can even invoke the perfect family, car, house, and pets. We have already stressed that mass media must offer homogenized fare to meet an average of tastes. Further, whatever the quality of the offerings, the very fact that one after the other is absorbed continuously, indiscriminately and casually, trivializes all. Even the most profound of experiences, articulated too often on the same level, is reduced to a cliché. The impact of each of the offerings of mass media is thus weakened by the next one. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

However, the impact of the stream of all mass-media offerings is cumulative and strong. It lessens people’s capacity to experience life itself. Sometimes it is argued that the audience confuses actuality with mass-media fiction and reacts to the characters and situations that appear in soap operas or comic strips or tabloids as if they were real. For instance, wedding presents are sent to fictional couples. One fictional couple even got a brand-new BMW for an engagement gift just because she got engaged to a man with a good German name. It seems more likely, however, that the audience prefers to invest fiction with reality—as a person might prefer to dream—without actually confusing it with reality. After all, even the kids know that Reese Witherspoon is an Oscar Award winning actor and the adults know that “Big Little Lies” is fiction. Both, however, may attempt to live the fiction because they prefer it to their own lives. This is also why some people cyberstalk celebrities and act as if social media postings are truthful and happening in real time. They are so desperate to insert themselves into someone else’s life and feel special and important. The significant effect is not the (quite limited) investment of fiction with reality, but the de-realization of life lived in largely fictitious terms. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

 Art can deepen the perception of reality. However, popular culture veils it, diverts from it, and becomes an obstacle to experiencing it. It is not so much an escape from life but an invasion of life, first, and ultimately evasion altogether. Parents, well knowing that mass media can absorb energy, often lighten the strain that the attempts of their children to reach for activity and direct experiences would impose; they allow some energy to be absorbed by the vicarious experience of the televisions screen. Before television, the cradle was rocked, or poppy juice given, to inhibit the initiative and motility of small children. Television, unlike these physical sedatives, tranquillizes by means of substitute gratifications. Manufactured activities and plots are offered to still the child’s hunger for experiencing life. They effectively neutralize initiative and channel imaginations. However, the early introduction of de-individualized characters and situations and early homogenization of tastes on a diet of meaningless activity hardly foster development. Perhaps poppy juice, offering no models in which to cast the imagination, was better. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

The homogenizing effect of comic books or television, the fact that they neither express nor appeal to individuality, seems far more injurious to the child’s mind and character than the violence they feature, though it is the latter that is often blamed for juvenile delinquency. The blame is misplaced. Violence is not new to life or fiction. It waxed large in ancient fables, fairy tales, and in tragedies from Sophocles to Dynasty. Mom always knew that “her boy could not have thought of it,” that the other boys must have seduced him. The belief that viewing or reading about violence persuades children to engage in it is Mom’s ancient conviction disguised as psychiatry. Violence on television may actually allow kids to vicariously release their aggression. Children are quite spontaneously blood thirsty as vampires and need bot direct and fantasy outlets for violence. What is wrong with the violence of the mass media is not that it is violence, but that it is not art—that it is meaningless violence which thrills but does not gratify. The violence of the desire for life and meaning is displaced and appears as a desire for meaningless violence. However, the violence which is ceaselessly supplied cannot ultimately gratify it because it does not meet the repressed desire. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

We have hinted that the gratifications offered by popular culture are spurious and unsatisfactory. Most of us wish to be liked, gratefully enjoy the feeling that we are liked, and feel resentment if we are not. For a child the feeling of being wanted is, as we have said, of vital importance for one’s harmonious development. However, what are the particular characteristics of a need for affection that can be considered neurotic? It is my opinion that in arbitrarily calling this need infantile one not only wrongs children but forgets that the essential factors constituting the neurotic need for affection have nothing whatever to do with infantilism. The infantile and the neurotic needs have in common only one element—their helplessness—though this too has a different basis in the two cases. Apart from this, the neurotic needs grow under quite different preconditions. These are, to repeat: anxiety, feeling unlovable, inability to believe in any affection, and hostility against all others. The first characteristic, then, that strikes us in the neurotic need for affection is its compulsiveness. Whenever a person is driven by strong anxiety the result is necessarily a loss of spontaneity and flexibility. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

In simple terms this means that to a neurotic the gaining of affection is not a luxury, nor primarily a source of additional strength or pleasure, but a vital necessity. The difference is one between “I wish to be, and enjoy being, loved,” and “I must be loved at any cost”; or the difference between someone who eats because one has a good appetite, can enjoy one’s food and be discriminating about it, and another person who is near starvation, must take any food indiscriminately, pay any price for it. This attitude necessarily leads to an over-evaluation of the factual significance of being liked. It is, in reality, not so terribly important that people in general should like us. It may, in fact, be important only that certain persons like us—those whom we care for, those with whom we have to live or work, or those on whom it is expedient to make a good impression. Apart from such individual it is fairly irrelevant whether we are liked. (However, such a statement may meet with disagreement in America, where a cultural factor enters into the picture in so far as being popular has become one of the competitive aims, and has thereby gained a significance which it does not have in other countries.) #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

Neurotic persons, however, feel and behave as if their existence, happiness and security depended on being liked. Their desires may be attached to everyone without discrimination, from the hairdresser or the strangers they meet at a party to their colleagues and friends, or to all women, or to all men. Thus a greeting, a telephone call or an invitation, if more friendly or less, may change their mood and their entire outlook upon life. I should mention one problem in this connection: the incapacity to be alone, varying from a slight uneasiness and restlessness to a definite terror of solitude. I speak not of persons who are dull anyway, and easily bored by their own company, but of persons who are intelligent and resourceful and who could otherwise enjoy a number of things by themselves. Frequently, for example, one sees individuals who can work only if someone is around, and are uneasy and unhappy if they have to work alone. There may be other factors in this need for company, but the general picture is one of a vague anxiety, a need for affection or, more accurately, a need for some human contact. These persons have the feeling of drifting forlornly in the Universe, and any human contact is a relief to them. One can sometimes observe, as in an experiment, how the incapacity to be alone parallels the increase of anxiety. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Some patients are capable of being alone as long as they feel sheltered behind the protective walls with which they have surrounded themselves. However, as soon as their protective devices are effectively tackled by analysis, and some anxiety is stirred up, they suddenly find themselves unable to stand being alone any longer. This is one of the transitional impairments in a patient’s condition which are unavoidable during the process of analysis. The neurotic need for affection may be focused on a single person—husband, wife, physician, friends, shift manager at a café. If this is the case the devotion, interest, friendliness and presence of that person will acquire inordinate importance. This importance has a paradoxical character, however. On the one hand, the neurotic seeks the other’s interest and presence, fears to be disliked and feels neglected if the other is not around; and on the other hand, one is not at all happy when one is with one’s idol. If one ever becomes conscious of this contradiction one is usually perplexed about it. However, on the basis of what I have said it is evident that the wish for the presence of the other person is the expression not of genuine fondness, but only of a need for the reassurance supplied by the fact that the other is available. (Of course a genuine fondness and a need for reassuring affection may go together, but they do not necessarily coincide.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

However, during the process of enlightenment, although one holds to the apex of all human points of view to which philosophy brings one, one keeps open the doors of one’s mind to all sincere writers, to all good people, and to all lower points of view. To one every day is a school say and every meeting with other persons a class lesson, since everyone has something to teach—even if it is only what not to do, how not to think or to behave. When the ego willingly reties from all its Worldly concerns or intellectual preoccupations to the sanctuary of the heart to be alone with the Overself, it becomes not only wiser but more powerful. At moments when the divine influx blissfully invades a being, it will not be out of one’s ordinary self that one will speak or act, but out of one’s higher self. It is natural as well as inevitable that one who has entered into the larger life of the Overself should show forth some of its higher powers. Such an individual’s thoughts are informed by a subtler force, invested with diviner element, pointed by a sharper concentration, and sustained by a superior will than are those of the average person. They are in consequence exceedingly powerful, creative, and effective. That which the sage bears in one’s heart is for all beings. If few are willing to receive it, the fault does not lie with one. One rejects none, is prejudiced against none. It is the others who reject one, who are prejudiced against one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

Outwardly one appears to act as intensely or as vigorously as other beings. However, inwardly one will really be at rest in the Overself, which will lead one like a child into performing necessary actions. One’s mind is still, even though one’s body is busy. And because of this leading, one’s actions will be right and even inspired ones, one’s personal will will be expressive of a higher one. So wherever the illuminate goes, one immovable centered in truth. One may retire to the green quietudes of the countryside. One may meet in one’s wanderings with violence and accident or with flattery and fortune. Yet always and alike, one remains self-composed, calm, and king or queen-like in one’s mental grandeur. At long last, when the union of self with Overself is total and complete, some part of one’s consciousness will remain unmoving in infinity, unending in eternity. There, in that sacred glory, one will be preoccupied with one’s divine identity, held to it by irresistible magnetism, gladly, lovingly. “And it came to pass that the Lord said unto the brother of Jared: Behold, thou shalt not suffer these things which ye have seen and heard to go forth unto the World, until the time cometh that I shall glorify my name in the flesh; wherefore, ye shall treasure up the things which ye have seen and heard, and show it to no man or woman,” reports Ether 3.21. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

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