A little country community in the valley, with a dozen or more subdivisions, most names long ago effaced, and the whole surrounded by a small iron fence and four immense oak trees, the kind weighed down by their dipping branches, and the sky the perfect color of lilacs, and the heat of the Summer sweet and caressing and—you bet I have got on my black velvet frock coat (close-up: tapered at the waist, brass buttons) and my motorcycle boots, and a brand-new linen shirt loaded with lace at cuffs and throat (pity the poor slob who snickers at me on account of that!), and I have not cut my shoulder-length blonde mane tonight, which I sometimes do for a variety, and I have chucked my violet glasses because who cares that my eyes attract attention, and my skin is still dramatically tanned from my years-ago suicide attempts in the raw Sun of the Gobi Desert, and I am thinking—what about the informants themselves? Did they too think themselves superior? Just as people were less ready to label themselves “unfriendly” than they were others, so they were less ready to admit they themselves felt superior. Not many showed their mind so clearly as Mrs. Abbott who said, “As soon as they get down here they get big ideas, and yet they are never used to it. They are nothing really.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Or as Mr. Haddon: “Some people are inclined to think they are better than some other people in the East End of London, but they are not. I have met them and mixed with them and I find that they are actually lower than others—they have not the ability to be sociable. That is why it is. So they put themselves a bit above others so as to give a let-out to feelings.” Yet we formed the strong impression that most of the critics of the “big-heads” did at least in part share the attitude they complained of. One key to this attitude, as we have said, is the house. When they compare it with the gloomy tenement or decaying cottage, is it any wonder that they should feel they have moved up in the World? “When people moved out here it was a big change for them,” said Mr. Adams. “In Bethnal Green the people were coped up in two rooms or something like that, and when they get here they think they have bettered themselves—and so they have bettered themselves. And they try to raise their standard of living.” A house is one bearer of status in any society—it most certainly is in a country where a semi-detached suburban house with a garden has become the signal mark of the middle class. When the migrants compare the new with the old, it is any wonder that they should for a time feel “big-headed”? #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

In their mind’s eye the people with whom they compare themselves may be less their fellow-residents at Greenleigh with their identical houses than their old neighbors of Bethnal Green, and, compared to them, they are in this one way undeniably superior. Mr. Berry, a milkman, was one of several who connected the “snobbishness” with the possession of a new house. “I deliver milk all over the estate so I think I know practically everybody on this estate. And I can tell you that when they move down here—I suppose it is just that they have got a new house—they just think they are a cut above everybody else.” Mrs. Allen, although rather more tentative, was of the same mind. “I do not like it, the atmosphere. People are not the same; I do not know if they get big-headed because they have got a house. Out here you just get a good morning.” The women most appreciate their new workshop and nursery. The man’s status is the status of his job; the woman’s status of her home. Since she has moved up most in the World, she is only being realistic to recognize it. “When I was in London I had a six-bedroom house on my own, but you get a few of them who some from, say, a two bedroom. Then they get a house. Well, they have worked hard—you must admit they have worked hard—they have got themselves a nice home, television and that. So you find this type of person temporarily gets a bit to thinking that they are somebody. You do find it with some people, and I think you find it more amongst the women than amongst the men.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

The house when the builders leave it is only a shell, unless you get one of those fully furnished model homes by Cresleigh. But anyway, the house when people move into it really comes to life. They bestow an authority upon it, even vest it with a kind of personality; up to a point it then decrees what they shall do within its walls. The house is also a challenge, demanding that their style of life shall accord with the standard it sets. When they make a first cup of coffee after the removal van has driven away and look around their mansion, they are conscious not only of all they have got which they never had before but also of all the things they need which they still lack. The furniture brought from Bethnal Green looks old and forlorn against the bright paint. They need carpets for the lounge, lino for the stairs and mats for the front door. They need curtains. They need another bed. They need a kitchen table. They need new lampshades, pot and pans, grass seed and spades, washer and dryer, sometimes they want a clothes line, and bath mats, Airwick and Jeyes, mops and pails—all the paraphernalia of modern life for a house two of three times larger and a hundred times grader than the one they life behind them. Then the women start wanting new dresses from Draper James, and a few Smash and Tess rompers. With the assistance of their belongings, they need somehow to live the kind of life, be the kind of people, that will fit into Forest Close or Cambridge Avenue. Then they, and the house, can at last be comfortable. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

They have to acquire new property. They have to acquire new habits. If they are to settle at Greenleigh, they have to make a profound adjustment in their lives: that is the challenge. The first essential is money for material possessions. When people move to Greenleigh the standard of life, measured by the quality of housing, is at once raised. They attempt to bring the level in other respects up to the same standard. Furniture and carpets have to be bought from Crate and Barrel, and although, with the assistance of the ever more ubiquitous hire purchase, this can be done without capital, it cannot be done without a burden on income. Moreover, the house is only the beginning. A nice house and shabby clothes, a neat garden box and an old box of a pram, do not go together. “My sister gave me a beautiful Dunkley pram,” said Mrs. Berry, “because I was going to such a beautiful new house.” Smartness calls for smartness. As well as appurtenances for the house, there is more need for the sort of possessions which will improve communications with the outer World. The Bethnal Greener’s society is close by. He does not need a telephone to make appointments to see his friends because they are only a few minutes away. He does not need a highly developed time sense (as we discovered to our cost when interviewing) because it does not matter greatly whether he goes round to Mum’s at 10 o’clock or 11. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

If Mum is not home, someone will explain where she has gone. He does not have to have a care or a motor cycle because relatives and friends, even work, are at a walking distance. At Greenleigh a person has to organize one’s life more closely, develop a more exact sense of time and be prepared to travel to avoid being cut off from social contact altogether. In some ways the more self-contained home is less self-contained than ever. Greenleigh is part of a larger World. A person’s shops are a mile off, one’s work six miles away and one’s relatives 10 or 20 miles away, some of them on the suburban circuit of housing estates—Oxhey, Debden, Harold Hill, Becontree—along which no buses ply. Distances to shops, work and relatives are not walking distances any more. They are motoring distances: a car, like a telephone, can overcome geography and organize a more scattered life into a manageable whole. With a car one can, without having to expose oneself to the wintry winds which blow over the fields, get to work, to one’s relatives in Bethanl Green Road or to one’s friends who have done over to Kent. “Now that we have got the car,” said Mr. Marsh, “we can see the wife’s sister at Laindon more often.” She was now seen every fortnight instead of every three or four months. Cares as beginning to move from luxury to necessity. “I do not want to win $750,000. I just want to win $5,000—so that I can get myself a little car. I could get a nice little car for that. You really need a car down here,” said Mr. Adams. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

One of the more fortunate, Mr. Berry, who had already achieved the two accomplishments of the complete man discoursed on their necessity. “When you live on the estate, there are two things that I think are essential. One is a telephone, the other is a car. I do not like having to pay my telephone bill, but I think it is worth it. It means my brother can ring me up on the estate any time he wants to. And if you are in any trouble—if there is anything wrong with one of the boys say—I can ring up a doctor if I need one. You do not need a telephone in Bethnal Green, because the doctor is on the doorstep. Practically anywhere you live in Bethnal Green there is a doctor near at hand. And you need a car for traveling about. We are so far away from everywhere out here that it is actually less expensive to run a car than it is to pay fares.” Greenleigh already had many more telephones than Bethnal Green, where you can do down the street to your relatives as quickly as you can phone them. Greenleigh though composed mainly of manual workers like Bethnal Green, has nearly seven times more telephones per head and, if our informants are any guide, at least one motive is to keep in touch with the kin left behind. “We cannot get up to see them very often,” said Mrs. Adams. “That is really why we had the phone put in here. If you can only hear each other it is something. It does keep you in touch with home.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

However, if telephones can be installed easily enough, garages cannot. When the architects made the future in County Hall, they were not a necessity. A garage, was once rare, as where indoor lavatories. However, many homes now have indoor lavatories and carriage houses attached to the house. Cars, telephones, telegrams, email, and text messages represent not so much a new and higher standard of life as a means of clinging to something of the old. Where you could walk, and public transport is inconvenient or too expensive, you need a care. This understandable urge to acquisition can easily become competitive. People struggle to raise their all-round standards to those of the home, in in the course of doing so, they look for guidance to their neighbors. To begin with, the first-comers have to make their own way. The later arrivals have their model at hand. The neighbors have put up nice curtains. Have we? They have got their garden planted with privet and new grass-seed. Have we? They have a John Deer lawn-mower and a Dunkley pram. What have we got? They have a new BMW M5 and a Ford F350. What about us? The new arrivals watch the first-comers, and the first-comers watch the new arrivals. All being under the same pressure for material advance, they naturally mark each other’s progress. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Those who make the most progress are those who have proved their claim to respectability, Greenleigh-style. The fact that people are watching their neighbors and their neighbors watching them provides the further stimulus, reinforcing the process set in motion by the new house, to conform to the norms of the estate. There is anxiety lest they do not fit. “People are not very friendly here. It is the same on all the estates. They have nothing else to do when they have finished work except watch you. It is all jealousy. They are afraid you will get a penny more than they have, In London people have other things to occupy their minds. Here they have done their work they have nothing to do. They are at the window and they notice everything. They say, ‘Mrs. Brown’s got a new hat on.’ They do not miss anything, but when something happens or goes wrong, no one know who done it. When they come from London they think they are high and mighty. If you have got something they will go into debt to get it themselves.” The Quest for affection is one way frequently used in our culture for obtaining reassurance against anxiety. The quest for power, prestige, and possession is another. Which of the goals prevails in the neurotic’s striving for reassurance depends on external circumstances as well as on differences in individual gifts and psychic structure. If I deal with them as a unity it is because they all have something in common which distinguishes them from the need for affection. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Winning affection means obtaining reassurance through intensified contact with others, while striving for power, prestige and possession means obtaining reassurance through loosening of the contact with others and through fortifying one’s own position. The wish to dominate, to win prestige, to acquire wealthy, is certainly not in itself a neurotic trend, just as the wish for affection is not itself neurotic. In order to understand the characteristics of the neurotic striving in this direction it should be compared with the normal. The feeling of power, for example, may in a normal person be born of the realization of one’s own superior strength, whether it be physical strength or ability, mental capacities, maturity or wisdom. Or one’s striving for power may be connected with some particular cause: family, political or professional group, native land, a religious or scientific idea. The neurotic striving for power, however, is born out of anxiety, hatred and feelings of inferiority. To put it categorically, the normal striving for power is born of strength, the neurotic of weakness. A cultural factor is also involved. Individual power, prestige and possession do not play a role in every culture. With Pueblo Indians, for instance, striving for prestige is definitely discouraged, and there is but little difference in individual possessions, and thus this striving too has little importance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

In that culture it would be meaningless to strive for any kind of dominance as a means of reassurance. That neurotics in our culture choose this way results from the fact that in our social structure power, prestige and possession give a feeling of greater security. Once people consented to live by the redistribution of life’s goods through a god figure who represented life, they had sealed their fate. There was no stopping the process of the monopolization of life in the king’s hands. It sent like this The king of ritual principal was in charge of the scared objects of the group and had to hold the prescribed ceremonies by a strict observance of the customs of the ancestors. This made one a repository of custom, an authority on custom. “Custom” is a weak word in English to convey something really momentous, as we saw; custom is the abstruse technical lord that runs the machinery for the renewal of nature. It is the physics, medicine, and mechanics of primitive society. Imagine our trying to fight a plague with faulty chemicals, and you can understand that custom equals life. The authority on custom, then, is the supreme regulator of certain departments of nature. However, this regulation is so useful to the tribe—in fact it is life itself—that it naturally comes to be extended to all departments. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Again, I think an analogy to modern life may convey some of the flavor: what first began as he miraculous harnessing of electric power in the electric bulb now extends to toothbrushes, razors, garden tools, typewriters, laptops, and so forth. What was at first limited to ritual and to the seat of ritual gradually spread to the whole of the king’s realm and the whole life of his subjects. After all, if you are going to be supreme regulator of the World, it is only logical that you should gradually encompass the whole World. If your invisible mechanics work in one area, there is no reason why it should not work in another, you have only to try it. And you try it by extending your ritual prerogative to cover the case: you extend the veil of your mana power over wider and wider jurisdictions. It seems like a benign and harmless enough process, one you might never even notice and in fact might want to happen—but what is happening is the complete entrenchment of social inequality. In searching for the conditions which produce a striving for these ends it becomes apparent that such a striving usually develops only when it has proved impossible to find reassurance for the underlying anxiety through affection. A girl was strongly attached to her brother who was four years older than she. They had a tenderness of more or less sexual character, but when the girl was eight years old her brother suddenly rejected her, pointing out that they were now too old for that sort of play. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Soon after this experience, the girl developed a sudden fierce ambition at school. It was caused certainly by a disappointment in her quest for affection and this was all the more painful as the child had not many people to cling to. The father was indifferent to his children, and the mother conspicuously preferred the brother. However, it was not only disappointment that she felt, but also a terrible blow to her pride. She did not realize that her change in the brother’s attitude was caused simply by his approaching puberty. Therefore, she felt ashamed and humiliated, and so much the more since her self-confidence had in any case stood on too insecure a basis. The mother had not wanted her in the first place, and she was made to feel insignificant because the mother, a beautiful woman, was much admired by everyone; besides, the brother was not only preferred by the mother but also enjoyed her confidence. The marriage of the parents was unhappy and the mother discussed all her troubles with the brother. Thus, the girl felt completely left out. She made one more attempt to get the affection she needed: she fell in love with a boy whom she met on a trip immediately after the painful experience with her brother, was quite elated and began spinning glorious fantasies about this boy. When he dropped out of sight she reacted to the new disappointment by becoming depressed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

As quite frequently happens in situations of this kind, the parents and the family physician are ascribed her condition to her being in too high a class at school. They took her out of school, sent her to a Summer resort for recreation, and then put her in a class a year below the one she had been in before. It was then, at the age of nine, that she showed an ambition of a rather desperate character. She could not endure being any but first in her class. At the same time her relations with other girls, which had formerly been friendly, became visibly impaired. This example illustrates the typical factors that combine to generate a neurotic ambition: from the beginning she felt insecure because she felt unwanted; considerable antagonism was created, which could not be expressed because the mother, the dominant figure in the family, demanded blind admiration; the repressed hatred generated a great deal of anxiety; her self-esteem had never had a chance to grow, she had been humiliated on several occasions, and she felt definitely stigmatized by the experience with her brother; attempts to reach out for affection as a means of reassurance had failed. The neurotic strivings for power, prestige and possession serve not only as a protection against anxiety, but also as a channel through which repressed hostility can be discharged. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

If we only could be certain that our bravery and patience with it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere in an unseen spiritual World, probably to almost every one of us here the most adverse life would seem well worth living. However, granting we are not certain, does it then follow that a bare trust in such a World is a fool’s paradise and lubberland, or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are free to indulge? Well, we are free to trust at our own risks anything that is not impossible, and that can bring analogies to bear in its behalf. That the World of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove; and that our whole physical life ay lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of being that we at present have no organ for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our human life but not of it. They witness hourly the outward body of events whose inner meaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to their intelligence, events in which they themselves often play the cardinal part. My terrier bites a teasing boy, for example, and the father demands damages. The dog may be present at every step of the negotiations, and see the money paid, without an inkling of what it all means, without a suspicion that it has anything to do with him; and he never can know in his natural dog’s life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Or take another case which used greatly to impress me in my medical-student days. Consider a poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a laboratory. He lies strapped on a board and shrieking at his executioners, and to his own dark consciousness is literally in a sort of hell. He cannot see a single redeeming ray in the whole business; and yet all these diabolical seeming events are often controlled by human intentions with which, if his poor benighted mind could only be made to catch a glimpse of them, all that is heroic in him would religiously acquiesce. Healing truth, relief to future sufferings of beast and beings, are to be bought by them. It may be genuinely a process of redemption. Lying on one’s back on the board there he may be performing a function incalculably higher than any that prosperous canine life admits of; and yet, of the whole performance, this function is the one portion that must remain absolutely beyond his ken. Now turn from this to the life of humans. In the dog’s life we see the World invisible to one because we live in both Worlds. In the human life, although we only see our World, and one’s within it, yet encompassing both these Worlds a still wider World may be there, as unseen by us as our World is by one; and to believe in that World may be the most essential function that out lives in the World perform. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

But “may be! may be!” one now hears the positivist contemptuously exclaim; “what use can a scientific life have for maybes?” Well, I reply, the ‘scientific’ life itself has much to do with maybes, and human life at large has everything to do with them. So far as beings stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, one’s entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes. Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, expect upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a scientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be a mistake. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successful make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. However, mist trust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss. In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. However, believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two possible Universes true by your trust or mistrust—both Universes having been only maybes, in this particular, before you contributed your act. Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living is subject to conditions logically much like these. It does, indeed, depend on you the liver. If you surrender to the nightmare view and crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed made a picture totally dismal. Pessimism, completed by your act, is true beyond a doubt, so far as your World goes. Your mistrust of life has removed whatever worth your own enduring existence might have given to it; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of that existence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power. Enlightenment comes by gaining knowledge and by applying its wisdom. This is why it was said that some were fed by eating brains of humans. The brains are symbolic of the knowledge and wisdom we seek. We are working with forces to master our own subjective reality, to exercise one’s own will to manifest a life in which we can thrive. “And he answered: Yes, Lord, I know that thou speakest the truth, for thou art a God of truth, and canst not lie,” reports Ether 3.12. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

The next great frontier! We have high hopes for this new community. Coming soon to Plumas Lake, CA. Stay tuned for updates along the way!

https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/