I sat there absorbing the fact that I now has a substantial income in my own right, some one hundred thousand dollars a month immediately available to me, though it came with a strict and nonbinding advice that I take guidance in everything. When regressive mass movements are activated, that is, when potential anxiety can be activated in such a manner that it can become a cruel weapon in the hands of irresponsible leaders. However, in order to get at this problem we must take into account the two other strata of alienation: the social and political. Alienation of labor: it is the separation of labor from the product of labor through hierarchical division of labor as well as the hierarchical organization of labor have shown a steady rise since the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. German romantic psychology of labor calls this the despiritualization of labor (Entseelung der Arbeit). This concept as well as the various remedies are dangerous—for they cover up the inevitability of this process of alienation which must be admitted, understood, and accepted. If this does not happen, if one refuses to take account of the inevitability of the division of labor and of the hierarchical ordering of the process of labor, and attempts to spiritualize labor instead of restricting it to a minimum, then social anxiety is deepened. The attitude of the so-called new middle class (salaried employees) can be understood from this process. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

While the so-called new middle class does labor which—to remain with the language of German psychology of labor—is more de-spiritualized than that of the industrial worker, and although one’s average income probably lies below that of the industrial worker, one yet holds fast to one’s middle class ideology and customs. Thus one refuses to take account of the inevitability of the process and—as in Germany before 1933—becomes the social stratum most susceptible to Caesarism. When one is competent, in a society which is constituted by competition, the competitor is supposed to be rewarded for one’s effort; that is, when one exerts one’s self, is intelligent, and accepts risks. There is little doubt that the principle of competition dominates not only the economy but all social relations. Karen Horney, a representative of Freudian revisionism, claims that the destructive character of competition creates great anxiety in neurotic persons. When genuine competition really prevails, that is competition in which relatively equally strong persons fight with fair methods, this is not convincing; that is, the kind of competition which Adam Smith defines in his Theory of Moral Sentiments as follows: “One individual must never prefer oneself so much even to any other individual as to hurt or injure that other in order to benefit oneself, though the benefit of the one should be much greater than the hurt or injury to the others.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

And again, “In the race for wealth and honours and preferments, each may run as hard as one can and strain every nerve and every muscle in order to outstrip all one’s competitors. However, if one jostle or throw down any of them, the indulgence of the spectator is entirely at an end. It is in violation of fair play, which they cannot admit of.” I cannot here undertake a social analysis to show that this ethically circumscribed competition does not exist and perhaps never has existed, that in reality a monopolist struggle hides behind it, that, in other words, the efforts of the individual, one’s intelligence, one’s vision, one’s readiness to take risks, are easily shattered by the constellations of power. Behind the mask of competition, which must not necessarily have destructive effects if it rationally organizes a society, there hide in fact relations of dependence. To be successful in present-day society, it is much more important to stand in well with the powerful than to preserve oneself though one’s own strength. Modern beings know this. It is precisely the impotence of the individual who has to accommodate oneself to the technological apparatus which is destructive and anxiety-creating. However, if crises ruin the merchant, even where genuine competition is effective, no effort will help. The inability to understand the process of crises, and the frequent need to ascribe blame for them to sinister powers, is an additional factor in the destruction of ego. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

This psychological process operated in the so-called old middle class of Germany before 1933. However—to repeat—it is hard to see why fair competition must have destructive functions. In every society that is composed of antagonistic groups there is an ascent and descent of groups. It is my contention that persecutory anxiety—but one that, as we said above, has a real basis—is produced when a group is threatened in its prestige, income, or even its existence; for instance, when it declines and does not understand the historical process or is prevented from understanding it. The examples are too numerous to be possibly mentioned here. German National Socialism and Italian Fascism are classical examples. However, not only social classes resist their degradation by means of such mass movements; religious and racial conflicts, too, frequently produce similar phenomena. The conflict between the Republicans and Democrats in the Untied States of America (in particular California), the contemporary struggles of the government of Venezuela against the natives, take place in accord with the following scheme: the anxiety of a dominant majority that it will be degraded through the economic and political rise of the oppressed is used propagandist fashion for the creation of affective mass movements, which frequently take on a fascist character. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Social alienation, for instance, the fear of social degradation, is not adequate by itself. The elements of political alienation must be added. Since I devote a separate essay to this phenomenon, I shall only point out briefly what I have in mind. As a rule one is satisfied (above all, in the American literature) with defining abstention from voting at elections as political apathy. However, I have pointed out elsewhere that the word apathy describes a few different political reactions: first, the lack of interest in politics, say, the opinion that politics is not the business of the citizen because it is, after all, only a struggle between small cliques and that therefore fundamentally nothing ever changes; then, the Epicurean attitude toward politics, the view that politics and state only have to supply the element of order within which beings devote themselves to their perfection, so that forms of state and of government appear as a secondary matter; and finally, as the third reaction, the conscious rejection of the whole political system which expresses itself as apathy because the individual sees no possibility of changing anything in the system through one’s efforts. Political life can, for example, be exhausted in the competition of political parties which are purely machines without mass participation, but which monopolize politics to such an extent that a new party cannot makes its way within the valid rules of the game. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

This third form of apathy forms the core of what I characterize as political alienation. Usually this apathy, if it operates within social alienation, leads to the partial paralysis of the state and opens the way to a caesarist movement which, scorning the rules of the game, utilizes the inability of the citizen to make individual decisions and compensates for the loss of ego with identification with a Caesar. The caesaristic moment is compelled not only to activate but to institutionalize anxiety. The institutionalization of anxiety is necessary because the caesaristic movement can never endure a long wait for power. This is precisely what follows from its affective basis. While the non-affective mass organization, such as a normal political party, can exist for a long time without disintegrating, the caesarist movement must hurry precisely because of the instability of the cement that holds it together: the libido-charged affectivity. After it has come to power it faces the need of institutionalizing anxiety as a means of preventing the extinction of its affective base by its bureaucratic structure. The techniques are familiar: propaganda and terror, for example, the incalculability of sanctions. I do not need to discuss here. Montesquieu, building on Aristotle and Machiavelli, distinguished between one tyrannical and three constitutional governmental and social systems. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

According to Montesquieu, monarchy rests on the honor of the monarch rests on the honor of the monarch; aristocracy, on the moderation of the aristocrats; democracy, on virtue (for example, with him, patriotism); but tyranny, on fear. It must, however, not be overlooked—and our introductory remarks about alienation and anxiety had no other meaning—that every political system is based on anxiety. However, there is more than a quantitative difference between the anxiety which is institutionalized in a totally repressive system and that which is the basis of a halfway liberal one. These are qualitatively different states of affairs. One may perhaps say that the totally repressive system institutionalizes depressive and persecutory anxiety, the halfway liberal system, true anxiety. Once the connection between anxiety and guilt is seen, it will at once become obvious that these are different states of affairs. In his Peloponnesian War, Thucydides reports the following about Sparta: “Indeed fear of their [The Helots’] numbers and obstinacy even persuaded the Lacedaemonians to the actions which I shall now relates. The Helots were invited by a proclamation to pick out those of their numbers who claimed to have most distinguished themselves against the enemy, in order that they might receive their freedom; the object being to test them, as it was thought that the first to claim their freedom would be the most high-spirited and the most apt to rebel. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

“As many as two thousand were selected accordingly, who crowned themselves and went round the temples, rejoicing in their new freedom. The Spartans, however, soon afterwards did away with them, and no one ever knew ow each of them perished.” With his customary psychological penetration this greatest of all historians saw clearly the connection of anxiety and collective guilt. And then we read Plutarch’s description of the terrible Cryptia, the Spartan secret police: “By this ordinance, the magistrates [for example, the Ephors] dispatched privately some of the ablest of the young men into the country, from time to time, armed only with their daggers, and taking a little necessary provision with them; in the daytime, they hid themselves in out-of-the-way places, and there lay close, but in the night issued out into the highways and killed all the helots they could light upon.” Here is a striking example of what we have in mind. Who does not here thin of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, when Stavrogin gives the following piece of advice: “All that business of titles and sentimentalism is a very good cement, but there is something better; persuade four members of the circle to do for a fifth on the pretence that he is a traitor, and you will tie the all together with the blood they have shed as though it were a knot. They will be your slaves, they will not dare to rebel or call you to account. Ha ha ha!” #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

This above is a famous passage in Dostoyevsky is important not only because it verifies our psychological theory, but also because it shows at the same time that the leader activates anxiety through guilt for one’s own advantage, not for the sake of the led. I do not wish here to discuss the psychological theory concerning the relation of anxiety and guilt. According to Dr. Freud, human’s feelings of guilt stems from the Oedipus complex. It is this aggression that the child represses and thus effects an unconscious feeling of guilt. The feeling of guilt is the superego, human’s conscience. However, that is precisely why the intensification of the unconscious feeling of guilt permits a being to become a criminal. If one examines the Spartan example, Stavrogin’s advice, the Fehme-murders, and the collective cries of the SS, one may perhaps undertake the following psychological analysis: There are anxiety and an unconscious feeling of guilt. It is the task of the leader, by creating neurotic anxiety, to bond the led so closely to the leader that they would perish without identification with one. Then the leader orders the commission of crimes; but these are, in accord with the morality that prevails in the group—with the Lacedaemonians, the Nihilists, the SS—no crimes, but fundamentally mortal acts. However, the conscience—the superego—protests against the morality of the crimes, for the old moral convictions cannot simply be extirpated. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The feeling of guilt is thus repressed and makes anxiety a nearly panicky one, which can be overcome only through unconditional surrender to the leader and compels the commission of new crimes. This is how I see the connection between anxiety and guilt in a totally repressive society. Hence this anxiety and guilt in a totally repressive society. Hence this anxiety is qualitatively different from the anxiety that is the basis of every political system. You will ask me, “What can be done to prevent anxiety—which cannot be eliminated—from becoming neurotic-destructive? Can the state accomplish this?” Schiller—and with this we return to our point of departure—denies this in his Seventh Letter. He asks and replies: “Should we expect this effect from the state? That is impossible, since the state, as at present constituted, has caused the evil, and the ideal state of reason cannot be the foundation of this improved humanity but must itself be founded thereon.” As educators we may thus perhaps say that education deserves the first rank. However, Schiller replies to this in the Ninth Letter with the question, “But are we not proceeding in a circle? Theoretical culture is supposed to induce the practical, and yet the latter is to be the condition of the former? All political improvements should result from education of character—but how can the character ennoble itself under the influence of a barbarous civil polity?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Surely there are also other individual solutions—such as love. However, it is, after all, accidental whether or not one experiences it, and the risk can be enormous with the loss of object. Hence there remains for us as citizens of the university and of the state the dual offensive on anxiety and for liberty: that of education and that of politics. Politics, again, should be a dual thing for us: the penetration of the subject matter of our academic discipline with the problems of politics—naturally not day-to-day politics—and the taking of positions on political questions. If we are serious about the humanization of politics; if we wish to prevent a demagogue from using anxiety and apathy, then we—as teachers and students—must not be silent. We must suppress our arrogance, inertia, and our revulsion from the alleged dirt of day-to-day politics. We must speak and write. Idealism, as it is expressed so nobly in Schiller’s Letters, must not be for us only a beautiful façade, it must not one more become that notorious form of idealism which in the past disguised the most reactionary and anti-libertarian aims. Only through our own responsible educational and political activity can the words of idealism become history. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Because neobehaviorism has no theory of humans, it can only see behavior and not the behaving person. Whether somebody smiles at me because he want to hide his hostility, or a salesgirl smiles because she has been instructed to smile (in the better stores), or whether a friend smiles at me because he is glad to see me, all this makes no difference to neobehaviorism, for a smile is a smile. That it should make no difference to Professor Skinner as a person is hard to believe, unless he were so alienated that the reality of persons no longer matters to him. However, if the difference does matter, how could a theory that ignores it be valid? Nor can neobehaviorism explain why quite a few persons conditioned to be persecutors and torturers fall mentally sick in spite of the continuation of positive reinforcements. Why does positive reinforcement not prevent many others from rebelling, out of the strength of their reason, their conscience, or their love, when all conditioning works in the opposite direction? And why are many of the most adapted people, who should be star witnesses to the success of conditioning, often deeply unhappy and disturbed or suffer from neurosis? There must be impulses inherent in beings which set limits to the power of conditioning; to study the failure of conditioning seems just as important, scientifically, as its success. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Indeed, beings can be conditioned to behave in almost every desired way; but only almost. One reacts to those conditions that conflict with basic human requirements in different and ascertainable ways. One can be conditioned to be a slave, but one will react with aggression or decline in vitality; or one can be conditioned to feel like part of a machine and react with boredom, aggression, and unhappiness. Basically, Skinner is a naïve rationalist who ignores being’s passions. In contract to Dr. Freud, he is not impressed by the power of passions, but believes that beings always behave as one’s self-interest requires. Indeed, the whole principle of neobehaviorism is that self-interest is so powerful that by appealing to it—mainly in the form of the environment’s rewarding the individual for acting in the desired sense—human’s behavior can be completely determined. Skinner’s extraordinary popularity can be explained by the fact that he has succeeded in blending elements of traditional, optimistic, liberal thought with the social and mental reality of cybernetic society. Skinner believes that beings are malleable, subject to social influences, and that nothing in their nature can be considered to be a final obstacle to development toward a peaceful and just society. Thus his system attracts those psychologist who are liberals and who find in Skinner’s system an argument to defend their political optimism. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Skinner appeals to those who believe that desirable social goals like peace and equality are not just rootless ideals, but can be established in reality. The whole idea that one can design a better society on a scientific basis appeals to many who earlier might have been socialists. Did not Marx, too, want to design a better society? Did he not call his brand of socialism scientific in contrast to Utopian socialism? Is not Skinner’s way particularly attractive at a point in history when the political solution seems to have failed and revolutionary hopes are at their lowest? However, if Skinner’s implied optimism alone would not have made his ideas so attractive were it not for his combining of traditional liberal view with their very negation? In the cybernetic age, the individual becomes increasingly subject to manipulation. One’s work, one’s consumption, and one’s leisure are manipulated by advertising, by ideologies, by what Skinner calls positive reinforcements. The individual loses one’s active, responsible role in the social process; one becomes completely adjusted and learns that any behavior, act, thought, or feeling which does not fit into the general scheme put one at a severe disadvantage; in fact one is what one is supposed to be. If one insists on being oneself, one risks, in police states, one’s freedom or ever one’s life; in some democracies, one risks not being promoted, or more rarely, one risks even one’s job, and perhaps most importantly, one risks feeling isolated, without communication with anybody. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

While most people are not clearly aware of their discomfort, they dimly sense their fear of life, of the future, of the boredom caused by the monotony and the meaninglessness of what they are doing. They sense that the very ideals in which they want to believe have lost their moorings in social reality. What relief it is for them to learn that conditioning is the best, the most progressive, and the most effective solution. Skinner recommends the hell of isolated, manipulated beings of the cybernetic age as the Heaven of progress. He dulls our fears of where we are going by telling us that we need not be afraid; that the direction our industrial system has taken is the same as that which the great humanists had dreamt of, except that it is scientifically grounded. Moreover, Skinner’s theory rings true, because it is (almost) true for the alienated being of the cybernetic society. Skinnerism is the psychology of opportunism dressed up as a new scientific humanism. I am not saying that Skinner wants to play this role of apologist for the technotronic age. On the contrary, his political and social naivete can make him write sometimes more convincingly (and confusedly) than he could if he were aware of what he is trying to condition us to.  In contemplating how badly neurotic persons need affection, but how difficult it is for them to accept it, one might assume that these persons would thrive best in emotional atmosphere of moderate temperature. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

However, here another complication enters: they are at the same time painfully sensitive to any rejection or rebuff, however slight. And a moderate atmosphere, although in one way reassuring, is felt as a rebuff. It is difficult to describe the degree of their sensitivity to rejection. Change in an appointment, having to wait, failure to receive an immediate response, disagreement with their opinions, any non-compliance with their wishes, in short, any failure to fulfill their demands on their own terms, is felt as a rebuff. And a rebuff not only throws them back on their basic anxiety, but is also considered equivalent to humiliation. Because a rebuff does have this content of humiliation it arouses a tremendous rage, which may emerge into the open; for example, a girl whose cats was not responsive to her caresses became furious and threw the cat against the wall. If they are made to wait they interpret it as being considered so insignificant that it is not necessary to be punctual with them; and this may stimulate outbreaks of hostility or result in a complete withdrawal of all feelings, so that they are cold and unresponsive, even though, a few minutes before, they may have been looking forward eagerly to the meeting. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

More often the connection between feelings rebuffed and feeling irritated remains unconscious. This happens all the ore easily since the rebuff may have been so slight as to escape conscious awareness. Then a person will feel irritable, or become spiteful and vindictive or feel fatigued or depressed or have a headache, without the remotest suspicion why. Moreover, the hostile reaction may occur not only to a rejection, or to what is felt to be a rejection, but also to the anticipation of rejection. A person may, for example, ask a question angrily, because in one’s mind one has already anticipated a refusal. One may refrain from sending flowers to his girl, because he anticipates her sensing ulterior motives in the gift. He may for the same reason be extremely afraid of expressing any beneficial feelings, a fondness, a gratitude, and appreciation, and thereby appear to oneself and others colder and more hard-boiled than be really is. Or he may scoff at women, thus taking revenge for an anticipated rebuff. The fear of rejection, if strongly developed, may lead a person to avoid exposing oneself to nay possibility of denial. This avoidance may extend from not asking for a straw when buying a soft drink to not asking for a job. Person who fear any possible rejection will avoid making advanced to a man or woman whom they like, as long as they are not absolutely certain of not meeting with a rejection. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

People of this type usually resent having to ask girls for a dance, because they are afraid the girl may accept only for the sake of being polite; and they think women are much better off in this regard, because they need not take the initiative. In other words, the fear of rebuff may lead to a series of severe inhibitions falling in the category of timidity. The timidity serves as a defense against exposing one’s self to rebuff. The conviction of being unlovable is used as the same kind of defense. It is as if persons of this type said to themselves, “People do not like me anyhow, so I had better stay in the corner, and thereby protect myself against any possible rejection.” The fear of rebuff is thus a grave handicap to the wish for affection, because it prevents a person from letting others feel or know that one would like to have some attention. Moreover, the hostility provoked by a feeling of being rebuffed contributes a great deal toward keeping the anxiety alert or even reinforcing it. It is an important factor in establishing a vicious circle which is difficult to escape from. “Awake; put on the armor of righteousness. Shake off the chains with which ye are bound, and come forth out of obscurity and raise from the dust,” reports 2 Nephi 2.23. Energy radiates, whether in the form of continuous waves or disconnected particles—moment to moment. It is this cosmic radiation which becomes matter. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18