The old art of the churches and the monasteries would never have allowed such a thing. Indeed it had banished such carnality completely. Yet here in the Pope’s chapel were these damsels, one with her back to us, and the other facing us, a dreamy expression in her eyes. “Duchess Meghan,” I whispered. “I have found you here, found you in your youth and in your eternal beauty. Duchess Meghan, you are here on the wall.” I turned away from these frescoes. I paced the floor. Then I went back to them, studying them with my uplifted hands, careful not to touch them, studying them with my uplifted hands, careful not to touch them, just moving my hands over there, as if I had to look through my hands as well as through my eyes. I had to know who this painter was! I hat to see his work. I had fallen in love with him. I had to see everything ever done by him. Was he young? Was he old? Was he alive? Was he dead? I had to know. The structural trends of modern society and the manipulative character of its communication technique come to a point of coincidence in the mass society, which is largely metropolitan society. The growth of the metropolis, segregating men and women into narrowed routines and environments, causes them to lose any firm sense of their integrity as a public. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

The members of publics in smaller communities know each other more or less fully, because they meet in the several aspects of the total life routine. The members of masses in metropolitan society know one another only as fractions in specialized milieux: the being who fixes the car, the girl who serves your lunch, the sales persons, the person who takes care of your child at school during the day. Prejudgment and stereotype flourish when people meet in such ways. The human reality of others does not, cannot, come through. People, we know, tend to select those formal media which confirm what they already believe and enjoy. In a parallel way, they tend in the metropolitan segregation to come into live touch with those whose opinions are similar to theirs. Others they tend to treat unseriously. In the metropolitan society they develop, in their defense, a blasé manner that reaches deeper than a manner. They do not, accordingly, experience genuine clashes of viewpoint, genuine issues. And what they do, they tend to consider it mere rudeness. Sunk in their routines, they do not transcend, even by the discussion, much less by action, their more or less narrow society and of their role as a public within it. The city is a structure composed of such little environments, and the people in them tend to be detached from one another. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

The stimulating variety of the city does not stimulate the men and women of the bedroom belt, the one-class suburbs, who can go through life knowing only their kind. If they do reach for one another, they do so only through stereotypes and prejudiced images of the creatures of other milieux. Each is trapped by one’s confining circle; each is cut off from easily identifiable groups. It is for people in such narrow milieux that the mass media can create a pseudo-World beyond, and a pseudo-World within themselves as well. Publics live in milieux but they can transcend them—individually by intellectual effort; socially by public action. By reflection and debate and by organized actions, a community of publics comes to feel itself and comes in fact to be active at points of structural relevance. However, members of a mass exist in muieux and cannot get out of them, either by mind or by activity, except—in the extreme case—under the organized spontaneity of the bureaucrat on a motorcycle. We have not yet reached the extreme case, but observing metropolitan beings in the American mass we can surely see the psychological preparations for it. We may think of it in this way: When a handful of beings do not have jobs, and do not seek work, we look for the causes in their immediate situations and character. However, when twenty million people are unemployed, then we cannot believe that all of them suddenly got lazy and turned out to be no good. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Economist call this structural unemployment—meaning, for one thing, that the beings involved cannot themselves control their jobs chances. Structural unemployment does not originate in one factory or in one town, nor is it due to anything that one factory or in one town, nor is it due to anything that one factory or one town does or fails to do. Moreover, there is little or noting that one ordinary being in one town can do about it when it sweeps over one’s personal milieux. Now, this distinction, between social structure and personal milieu, is one of the most important available in the sociological studies. It offers us a ready understanding of the position of the public in America today. In every major area of life, the loss of a sense of structure and the submergence into powerless milieux is the cardinal fact. In the military it is most obvious, for here the roles beings play are strictly confining; only the command posts at the top afford a view of the structure of the whole, and moreover, this view is a closely guarded official secret. In the division of labor too, the jobs beings enact in the economic hierarchies are also more or less narrow milieux and the positions from which a view of the production process as a whole can be had are centralized, as beings are alienated not only from the product an the tools of their labor, but from any understanding of the structure and the process of production. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

In the political order, in the fragmentation of the lower and in the distracting proliferation of the middle-level organization, beings cannot see the whole, cannot see the top, and cannot state the issues that will in fact determine the whole structure in which they live and their place within it. This loss of any structural view or position is the decisive meaning of the lament over the loss of community. In the great city, the division of milieux and of segregating routines reaches the point of closet contact with the individual and the family, for, although the city is not the unit of prime decision, even the city cannot be seen as a total structure by most of its citizens. On the one hand, there is the increased scale and centralization of the structure of decision; and, on the other, the increasingly narrow sorting out of being into milieux. From both sides, there is the increased dependence upon the formal media of communication, including those of education itself. However, the being in the mass does not gain a transcending view from these media; instead one gets one’s experience stereotyped, and then one gets sunk further by that experience. One cannot detach oneself in order to observe, must less to evaluate, what one is experiencing, much less what one is not experiencing. Rather than that internal discussion we call reflection, one is accompanied through one’s life-experience with a sort of unconscious, echoing monologue. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

One had no projects of one’s own: one fulfills the routines that exist. One does not transcend whatever one is at any moment, because one does not, one cannot, transcend one’s daily milieux. One is not truly aware of one’s own daily experience and of its actual standards: one drifts one fulfills habits, one’s behavior a result of a planless mixture of the confused standards and the confused standards and the uncriticized expectations that one has taken over from others whom one no longer really knows or trusts, if indeed one ever really did. One takes things for granted, one makes the best of them, one tries to look ahead—a year or two perhaps, or even long if one has children or a mortgage—but one does not seriously ask, What do I want? How can I get it? A vague optimism suffuses and sustains one, broken occasionally by little miseries and disappointments that are soon buried. One is smug, from the standpoint of those who think something might be the matter with the mass style of life in the metropolitan frenzy where self-making is an externally busy branch of industry. By what standards does one judge oneself and one’s effort? What is really important to one? Where are the models of excellence for this being? #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

One loses one’s independence, and more importantly, one loses the desire to be independent: in fact, one does not have hold of the idea of being an independent individual with one’s own mind and one’s own worked-out of life. It is not that one likes or does not like this life; it is that the question does not come up sharp and clear so one is not bitter and one is now sweet about conditions and events. One thinks one wants merely to get one’s share of what is around with as little trouble as one can and with as much fun as possible. Such order and movement as one’s life possesses are in conformity with external routines; otherwise one’s day-to-day experience is a vague chaos—although one often does not know it because, strictly speaking, one does not truly possess or observe one’s own experience. One does not formulate one’s desires; they are insinuated into one. And, in the mass, one loses the self-confidence of the human being—if indeed one has ever had it. For life in society of masses implants insecurity and further impotence; it makes beings uneasy and vaguely anxious; it isolates the individual from the solid group, the being in the mass just feels pointless. The idea of a mass society suggests the idea of an elite of power. The idea of public, in contrast, suggests the liberal tradition of society without any power elite, or at any rate with shifting elites of no sovereign consequence. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

For, if a genuine public is sovereign, it needs no master; but the masses, in their full development, are sovereign only in some plebiscitarian moment of adulation to an elite as authoritative celebrity. The political structure of a democratic state requires the public; and, the democratic being, in one’s rhetoric, must asset that this public is the very seat of sovereignty. However, now, given all those forces that have enlarged and centralized the political order and more administrative; given the transformation of the old middle classes into something which perhaps should not even be called middle class; given all the mass communications that do not truly communicate; given all the metropolitan segregation that is not community; given the absence of voluntary associations that really connect the public at large with the centers of power—what is happening is the decline of the set of publics that is sovereign only in the most formal and rhetorical sense. Moreover, in many countries the remnants of such publics as remain are now being frightened out of existence. They lose their will for rationally considered decision and action because they do not possess the instruments for such decision and action; they lose their political belonging because they do not belong; they lose their political will because they see no way to realize it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

The top of modern American society is increasingly unified, and often seems willfully co-ordinated: at the top there has emerged an elite of power. The middle levels are a drifting set of stalemated, balancing forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top. The bottom of this society is politically fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly powerless: at the bottom there is emerging a mass society. One can likewise see the compartmentalization in the separation of art from the realities of life, the use of art in its prettified, romantic, academic forms as hypocritical escape from existence and nature, the art as artificiality against Cezanne. Van Gogh, the impressionists, and other modern art movement so vigorously protested. One can furthermore see the fragmentation in the separating of religion from weekday existence, making it an affair of Sundays and special observances, and the divorce of ethics from business. The segmentation was occurring also in philosophy and psychology—when Kierkegaard fought so passionately against the enthronement of an arid, abstract reason and pleaded for a return to reality, he was by no means tilting at windmills. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

The Victorian men and women saw themselves as segmented into reason, will, and emotions and found the picture good. Their reason was supposed to tell them what to do, then voluntaristic will was supposed to give one the means to do it, and emotions—well, emotions could be best be channeled into compulsive business drive and rigidly structuralized in Victorian mores; and the emotions which would really have upset the formal segmentation, such as pleasures of the flesh and hostility, were to be staunchly repressed or let out only in orgies of patriotism or on well-contained weekend binges in Bohemia in order that one might, like a steam engine which has let off surplus pressure, work more effectively on returning to one’s desk Money morning. Naturally, this kind of being has to put great stress on rationality. Indeed, the very term irrational means a thing not to be spoken of or thought of; and Victorian being’s repressing, or compartmentalizing, what was not to be thought of was a precondition for the apparent stability of the culture. The citizen of the Victorian period so needed to persuade oneself of one’s own rationality that one denied the fact that one had ever been a child or had a child’s irrationality and lack of control; hence the radical split between the adult and the child, which was portentous for Dr. Freud’s investigations. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

This compartmentalization went hand in hand with the developing industrialism, as both cause and effect. A being who can keep the different segments of one’s life entirely separated, who can punch the clock every day at exactly the same moment, whose actions are always predictable, who is never troubled by irrational urges or poetic visions, who indeed can manipulate oneself the same way one would the machine whose levers one pulls, is the most profitable worker not only on the assembly line but even on many of the higher levels of production. The corollary is likewise true: the very success of the industrial system, with its accumulation of money as a validation of personal worth entirely separate from the actual product of a being’s hands, had a reciprocal depersonalizing and dehumanizing effect upon beings in their relation to others and oneself. It was against these dehumanizing tendencies to make beings into a machine, to make one over in the image of the industrial system for which one labored, that the early existentialists image of the industrial system for which one labored, that the early existentialists fought so strongly. And they were aware that the most serious threat of all was that reason would join mechanics in sapping the individual’s vitality and decisiveness. Reason, was predicted, as becoming reduced to a new kind of technique. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Scientists in our day are often not aware that his compartmentalization, finally, was also characteristic of the sciences of the century of which we are heirs. This nineteenth century was the era of the autonomous sciences. Each science developed in its own direction; there was no unifying principle, particularly with relation to beings. The views of beings in the period were supported by empirical evidence amassed by the advancing sciences, but each theory became a Procrustean bed on which the empirical facts were stretched to fit a preconceived pattern…Owing to this development our modern theory of beings lost their intellectual center. We acquired instead a complete anarchy of thought. Theologians, scientists, politicians, sociologists, biologists, psychologists, ethnologists, economists all approached the problem for their own viewpoints…every author seems on the last count to be led by one’s own conception and evaluation of human life. In no other period of human knowledge have beings ever become more problematic to oneself than in our own days. We have a scientific, a philosophical, and a theological anthropology that knowing nothing of each other. Therefore, we no longer possess any clear and consistent idea of beings. The ever-growing multiplicity of the particular sciences that are engaged in the study of beings has much more confused and obscured than elucidated our concept of beings. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Now it is to be noted that the compartmentalization of the culture had its psychological parallel in radical repression within the individual personality. Dr. Freud’s genius was in developing scientific techniques for understanding, and mayhap curing, this fragmentized individual personality; but one did not see—until much later, when he reacted to the fact with pessimism and some detached despair—that the neurotic illness in the individual was only one side of disintegrating forces which affected the whole of society. The results of this disintegration upon the inner emotional and spiritual life of the individual; endemic anxiety, loneliness, estrangement of one being from another, and finally the condition that would lead to ultimate despair, being’s alienation from oneself. We live in a period of atoms, of atomic chaos, and out of this chaos we foresee, in a vivid prediction of collectivism in the twenty first century, the terrible apparition…the Nation State…and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether…Dr. Freud saw this fragmentation of personality in the light of natural science and was concerned with formulating its technical aspects. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

We must not underestimate the importance of the specific psychological analysis; but they were much more concerned with understanding humans as the being who represses, the being who surrenders self-awareness as a protection against reality and then suffers the neurotic consequences. The strange questions is: What does it mean that beings, the being in the World who can be conscious that one exist and can know one’s existence, should choose or be forced to choose to block off this consciousness and should not suffer anxiety, compulsion for self-destruction, and despair? Be keenly aware that the sickness of soul of Western beings is a deeper and more extensive morbidity than could be explained by the specific individual or social problems. Something is radically wrong in being’s relation to themselves; beings have become fundamentally problematic to themselves. This is Europe’s true predicament, together with the fear of beings we have lost the love of humanity, confidence in beings, indeed, the will to humans. Spiritual experiences that occur during adolescence are indications that one has possibilities of travelling on the spiritual quest. However, one must decide whether one prefers abnormal occult experiences or the less dramatic, slower growth in the cultivation of one’s divine soul. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

A beginner cannot mix the two goals safely. And if one seeks the higher goal, one can expect to have help of an advanced mystic. One would be a rash being who promised everyone who embarked upon this quest definite experiences of a mystical, occult, extraordinary, ecstatic, supernatural, or any such kind. Such results sometimes come, sometimes not; but the persons who follow the regimes or endure the disciplines chiefly in expectation of them may well be disappointed, may even end in distrust in their teachers and teachings. A wiser type of aspirant will not insist on such experiences but will understand that there are more important and more lasting things. The spiritual crisis of beings is harder and longer, in effort to redress the balance. “And ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit. And whoso cometh unto me with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, one will I baptize with fire and with the Holy Ghost, even as the Lamanites, because of their faith in me at the time of the conversion, were baptized with fire and with the Holy Ghost, and the knew it not. Behold, I have come unto the World to bring redemption into the World, to save the World from sin,” 3 Nephi 9.20-21. God is the ambassador from the infinite, an envoy to all beings from the higher plane of their own being, and is a link between the commonplace World of ordinary living and the sublime World of mystical being. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15