Individual success does not serve oneself but enables one to build up the greater good. Our relationship with the people around us has lasting significance. That same sociality which exists among us here in mortality will exist among us there in eternity, only it will be coupled with eternal glory. A community that strengthens itself has much more capacity to help other communities. There is no separation between you and your neighbour. Your well-being is tied to your neighbour’s well-being. Heaven’s essence is made up of relationships. The withdrawal of federal support, while a major blow, did not totally destroy the idea of new towns as an expression of the suburban dream. Several privately financed new towns managed to not only survive, but prosper. Perhaps the best known among these are Reston, Virginia, west of Washington, D.C.; Columbia, Maryland, south of Baltimore on the way to Washington; and Irving Ranch, in southern California. Reston was initiated by Robert E. Simon, who, having just sold Carnegie Hall in New York, had a dream of building an urbane community in the rural Virginia countryside. He wanted a place where people could enjoy both the cosmopolitan advantages of the city and the beauty of rural countryside. Both employment and recreational opportunities were to be found within the community. Mr. Simon purchases some eleven miles of Virginia country side (6,800 acres) west of Washington, D.C., near what was to be the new Dulles Airport. Mr. Simon was more a philanthropist and visionary than a developer, and he refused to sacrifice community planning or his dream of social diversity in order to sell more homes. From the first, Reston had architecturally interesting contemporary homes, something that was alleged to have slowed sales. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Mr. Simon was forced out by Gulf Corporation, which, in turn, sold out Mobil. Reston is now an economically successful town of over 61,150 with a substantial number of corporate offices and other “clean” industries. Where initially most residents had to carpool or take a long bus ride to Washington, today 40 percent of the residents work in the community. Residentially, Reston has a mix of free-standing homes, town houses, and condominiums facing Reston’s four artificial lakes. Reston has had a distinct upper-middle-class-but-involved character. Housing ranges from $800,000-plus homes to government-subsidized apartments. The average home buyer is between thirty and forty years old, has two children, and has an income considerably higher than the national average. (The median household income is $120,396.) Reston has several hundred units of federally subsidized housing, but attempts to place lower-income and high-income housing side by side were abandoned as not being economically sound. Mixed-income housing was a desirable social goal, but Reston is a profit-making enterprise. Columbia, Maryland, some twenty miles north of Washington, was developed by James Rouse, one of the nation’s most respected developers. Mr. Rouse managed quietly to buy or option some twenty-two square miles of land from 169 separate owners before plans for Columbia were revealed in 1963. Architecturally, Columbia looks more like a suburb than Reston, since builders of Columbia’s various sections were given a free hand to build their most popular home models. The community has some 104,726 persons living in eight villages, and Columbia is close to meeting is goal of housing some 110,000 people on its 15,600 acres. The investment in the community totals over $3 billion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Like most new towns, Columbia is organized into neighbourhoods of some 900 houses having their own elementary school, swimming pool, recreational center, and convenience store. Four neighbourhoods are combined to create a “village” of 3,500, which has an intermediate school and a small plaza including a number of shops and a supermarket. Wooded areas and pathways run throughout the village. Columbia is racially integrated, with over one-quarter of the residents being African America. Economically, although there are subsidized units, the community is middle-to upper-middle class. Irvine, California began in the 1960s with a dedication to create a new town of 100,000 on garden city principles around a new University of California campus. It was designed without a downtown, but rather, it was to have shopping centers and business parks intermixed within what is primarily a residential community of single-family homes. Irvine from the firs was o be a geographically dispersed community. The Irvine family owned some 64,000 acres of ranch land and orange groves, which meant Irvine would cover nine times the land space of Reston, or four times that of Columbia. All the land was owned by the Irvine family and is successor, the Irvine Company. The company had a strong commitment to architectural design, a high level of amenities, and controls over the use of the landscape. Irvine was incorporated as a city in 1971. However, Irvine, unlike its east coast siblings, had little interest in racial or income diversity. Simon and Rouse each had a strong personal and corporate commitment to creating communities with population diversity. Irvine executives and planners had no interest in proving subsidized or lower-income housing. From the first, Irvine was designed to be an expensive and elitist community. Low-income or even middle-income housing and residents have been rigorously excluded. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
In recent years Irvine residents have voted for controlled growth and to protect the coast from development. In this, residents were opposed by the Irvine Company. Rapid suburban growth is not welcomed by the existing homeowners. Irvine offers a high quality of life to is residents, but the benefits are restricted to those with substantially above-average income or wealth. As such, Irvine is not a reasonable new town model for the rest of the country. Some, in fact, argue that Irvine Ranch is not self-contained and self-sustaining new town, but rather simply a well-designed upper-income suburb. Regardless, problems of land acquisition coupled with now more restrictive environmental and planning regulations make it difficult to build new private projects of such size. Today the idea of the planned community is undergoing a bit of a renaissance. This is not occurring as a consequence of government policy or action. Rather, new communities are being developed that are essentially privatized communities. They are new suburban full-service communities. One version of this is the community designed to recreate the urban village. The ideal is to create a reasonable-cost community that is not just another subdivision, but has employment opportunities and a sense of place. One of these new communities is Rancho Santa Marguerita, in south California. Being able to live near one’s employment substantially cuts commuting time, which, in the Los Angeles basin, can take an hour and a half each way. The most discussed new communities are the so-called neotraditional new developments. These are contemporary communities that are being designed for both mixed usage and walking, rather than solely automobile usage. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Neotraditional planners design in both higher densities and mixed land usage in order to both reduce the need for auto travel and increase the sense of community. The developers consciously are trying to design in the advantages and mood of earlier eras. Their model for an ideal livable community is the nineteenth-century small town, with is dense intermixture of small shops and homes. Thus, some of the most commented upon, and debated, new community developments at the start of the twenty-first century are being built to approximate the character and amenities of the small town or village of over a century ago. Master plan codes that call for separate shopping and housing pods are discarded in favour of designing on a more intimate scale a community that is both comfortable and interesting to the local residents. Certainly there is something both inviting and comforting about towns like this. Seaside, Florida, Masshipee, on Cape Cod, and, less successfully, Princeton Forrestal Village, in Plainsboro, New Jersey, are examples of such attempts to repeat the nineteenth-century model of providing an inviting, livable, and walkable public environment, Forrestal Village is currently trying to recast itself as a factory outlet mall. The fastest growing type of new community now being built is the retirement community. This is not surprising since anyone who reads a newspaper or pays Social Security knows that elderly are the fastest growing segment of the population. Every day in the United States of America, some 10,000 people turn 65, and the number of older adults will more than double over the next several decades and represent over 20 percent of the population by 2050. The elderly currently constitutes 15.2 percent of the population. The population age 65 and over numbers more than 50 million in 2021. More than 50 percent of the elderly live in the suburbs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
More older Americans now live in suburbs than in central cities or rural areas. Some of the retirement communities are explicitly designed and advertised as such, while others are simply developments in recreational areas with lots of golf courses or a good fishing lake. Growth is taking place even in locations that are not true retirement areas. For example, Peachtree City, in fast-growing Fayette, Georgia grew from 2,000 residents to 22,000 in 1990 and now has a population of 114,421. The postwar assumption that suburbs were for young couples and their children is another out-of-date myth. The assumption long has been that as those who moved to the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s aged, they would sell their homes and move back into city apartments or condominiums. By and large, this has not occurred. The elderly are choosing to remain in the suburban homes they have occupied for decades. People are remaining in their suburban homes after the children leave, and even after their spouses die. This has resulted in suburbs being better integrated by age than anytime in the past fifty years. It also means that since most of the suburban elderly are not segregated in specific areas, it is more difficult to provide for their needs such as access to social services and public transportation. If an elderly widow or widower has restricted mobility and is no longer able to drive, one can become isolated. Retirement communites have a minimum age limit of fifty-five for buyers. Younger people are excluded. What retirement communities sell is far more than housing; it is a life of golf, bowling, and crafts that is literally walled off from outside problems. Resident status in retirement communities commonly is limited to couple where one spouse is at least fifty-five years of age. Young people are kept at a minimum by community regulations that ban other then short-term stays by adult children or other guests under the mandatory age. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
Young children or grandchild are not welcome on other than a visiting basis. They cannot reside in the community. Such regulations not only maintain the homogeneity of the community, they also keep taxes low, since by banning young people, homeowners ensure they will not have to pay for building or staffing local schools or other expensive public services usually found in similar-size communities. These communities, isolated from urban areas, are insulated both from urban problems and from the responsibility to pay taxes for services to those not within the walled community. Community homogeneity also includes race. Non-European American residents are a rarity in retirement homeowner communities. This secure and nonthreatening environment has a particular appeal to some fixed-income middle- or lower-middle-class retirees. Many of these communities offer their residents a predictable and safe World of golf and crafts free from the problems, confusion, and variety that is a part of life outside the entrance gates. Problems, and the cost of paying for them, are kept outside. While the number of such retirement communities is growing, they have an appeal only to a minority of all elderly. While retirees seek to limit their taxes, it is a mistake to think of areas with heavy retirement-age populations as areas of economic decline. Just the opposite is the case. Economically, places with fast growing elderly populations are often better-off and healthier markets than those with slow-growing elderly populations. Elderly in-movers may not be employed, but the average retirement migrant household’s overall impact on the local economy is $139,610.81. Retirees bring economic resources and create new jobs. Estimates of the new jobs created by each retired in-mover range from one-third to one for each newcomer. Retirement communities, in addition to having community centers, often include internal commercial districts that are designed to offer a range of products and services especially designed to fill the need of older buyers. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Oftentimes, extensive medical facilities are available, and one or more private hospitals is nearby the retirement community. Increasingly, retirement communities also include living environment for aging residents who can no longer independently manage a home and require assistance ranging from semi-independent to nursing home care. Continuing-care facilities are increasingly being built into new retirement developments. It is virtually certain that boomers will be less able to rely on Social Security than past generations of retirees. On the other hand, they will inherit from their parents more substantially than any generation in history. The ethnic and racial diversity of retirement communities probably will also increase, reflecting the increasing ethnic and racial diversity of the country. Boomer retirement communities might also carry forward their reputed competitiveness and status-seeking behaviour. This would result in retirement communities being far more competitively organized in terms of sports and even craft than is the case with current retirees who reflect more of the “togetherness” approach they practiced in the early postwar suburbs. In any case, it is highly likely that boomers, who in many ways throughout their lives have defined themselves as a separate group, are likely to have their own distinctive “sixty something” retirement communities. The recent decades have seen North American transformed into a suburban continent. Suburbia is not only where most of us live, it is also where most of us shop, go out to eat, and catch a movie. It is also where most of us work. Overall, these changes have been accepted and even celebrated by suburbanites and lamented by architectural and social critics. Regardless, the suburban transformation is now clearly a social fact. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Whatever one thinks about the suburbs is no longer sub. Outer cities may sprawl over the landscape, but they contain all the functions of the older downtowns. Although it twists the language a bit, they have become outlying “central places” in their own right. Whether the outer cities are called edge cities, polynucleated cities, or technoblurbs, these outlying “urbs” now house more shopping malls, manufacturing plans, and business offices than do the traditional central downtowns. The downtown retail outlets essentially suburbanized to the malls during the 1970s, leaving only skeletal remains in the once-dominant cores. The 1980s saw the dramatic proliferation of suburban office and manufacturing complexes—such that today, outer cities surpass most central cities in total business activity. Transportation, and especially communication technologies, no longer favour centralization over dispersion. FAX machines, the Internet, Email, Video calls, and text messages work equally well from suburban and urban locations. The reality is that the major action is in the suburbs. Suburbs will continually for the foreseeable future increase their dominance. In spite of the hopes of some, research has established that nationwide urban gentrification will be of the limited scope and, moreover, the much-discussed back-to-the-city movement is actually not occurring. The myth of a substantial back-to-the-city movement, and that of incipient massive central-city gentrification, were largely creations of the popular media. Census or other data do not support the thesis that either cities or rural areas are making a strong comeback. Both continue to lose both population and economic strength to suburban areas. Central cities and rural places have become the edges which are losing to the suburban middle ground. Suburbia has become the American Way of Life. It is already the life most of us live. And in spite of our laments for the central city, we do not want to give up the personal advantages of suburban living. The twenty-first century is the age of the suburb, and departing the city. North American is increasingly dominated by a pax suburbia. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Children, meanwhile, will also be likely to grow up differently in the electronic cottage, if for no one reason than that they will actually see work taking place. First Wave children, from their first blink of consciousness, saw their parents at work. Second Wave children, by contrast—at least in recent generations—were segregated in schools and divorced from real work life. Most today have only the foggiest notion of what their parents do or how they live while a work. One possibly apocryphal story makes the point: An executive decides to bring his son to his office one day and to take him out to lunch. They boy sees the plushy carpeted office, the indirect lighting, the elegant reception room. He sees the fancy expense-account restaurant with its obsequious waiters and exorbitant prices. Finally, picturing their home and unable to restrain himself, the boy blurts out: “Daddy, how come you are so rich and we are so poor?” The fact is that children today—especially affluent children—are totally divorced from one of the most important dimensions of their parents’ lives. In an electronic cottage kids not only observe work, they may, after a certain age, engage in it themselves. Second Wave restrictions on child labour—originally well-intentioned and necessary, but now largely an anachronistic device to keep young people out of the crowded job market-become more difficult to enforce in the home setting. Certain forms of work, indeed, might be specially designed for youngsters and even integrated with their education. (Anyone who underestimates the capacity of even very young people to understand and cope with sophisticated work has not run into the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boys who serve, probably illegally, as “salesmen” in California computer stores. I have had kids with braces still on their teeth explain the intricacies of home computing to me.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
The alienation of youth today flows in large measure from being forced to accept a nonproductive role in society during an endlessly prolonged adolescence. The electronic cottage would counteract this situation. In fact, integrating young people into work in the electronic cottage may offer the only real solution to the problems of high youth unemployment. This problem will grow increasingly explosive in many countries in the years ahead, with all the attendant evils of juvenile crime, violence, and psychological immiseration, and cannot be solved within the framework of a Second Wave economy except by totalitarian means—drafting young people, for example, for war or forced service. The electronic cottage opens an alternative way to bring youth back into socially and economically productive roles, and we may see, before long, political campaigns for, rather than against, child labour, along with struggles over the necessary measures to protect them against gross economic exploitation. To be sure, Dr. Freud was not the first to discover the phenomenon that we habour thoughts and strivings which we are not aware of—that is to say, which are unconscious—and live in a hidden life in our psyche. However, Dr. Freud was the first to have made this discovery the center of his psychological system and he investigated unconscious phenomena in the greatest detail, with astonishing results. Basically Dr. Freud dealt with a discrepancy between thinking and being. We think one thing, for instance that our behaviour is motivated by love, devotion, sense of duty, et cetera, and we are not aware that instead it is motivated by the wish for power, masochism, dependency. Dr. Freud’s discovery was that what we think is not necessarily identical with what we are; that what a person thinks of oneself may be, and usually is, quite different or even completely in contradiction to what one really is, that most of us live in a World of self-deception in which we take our thoughts as representing reality. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
In fact the historical importance of Dr. Freud’s concept of the unconscious is that in a long tradition thinking and being were supposed to be identical and in the stricter form of philosophical idealism only the though (the idea, the word), was real, while the phenomenal World had no reality of its own. There seems to be a good deal of evidence that the belief in the superiority of the idea and the thought over material reality was a result of the victory of the patriarchal over the matriarchal system. Since men cannot create naturally, that is to say give birth in a natural way as women can, they insist that they can also give birth, not by their wombs but by their brains. Dr. Freud, by reducing a great deal of conscious thought to the role of a rationalization of drives, tended to destroy the foundations of the rationalism of which he was himself such an outstanding exponent. With his discovery of the discrepancy between thinking and being, Dr. Freud not only undermined the Western tradition of idealism in its philosophical and popular forms, he also made a far-reaching discovery in the field of ethics. Until Dr. Freud, sincerity could be defined as saying what one believed. Since Dr. Freud, this is no longer the definition. The difference between what I say and what I believe assumes a new dimension, namely that of my unconscious belief or my unconscious striving. If in pre-Freudian time a man was convinced that he punished his child because it helped the child’s development he would have been quite honest, as long as he really believed that. After Dr. Freud the critical question has become whether his belief is not simply a rationalization of his sadistic wishes—that is to say, that he has pleasure in beating the child and only uses as a pretext the idea that such punishment is for the benefit of the child. In fact one might ethically prefer the one who is at least honest enough to admit one’s real motive; one would not only be more honest but less dangerous. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
There is no kind of cruelty and viciousness which has not been rationalized individually or in history as being motivated by good intentions. Since Dr. Freud, the sentence I meant well has lost its function as an excuse. Meaning well is one of the best rationalizations for acting badly, and nothing is easier than to persuade oneself of the validity of this rationalization. There is a third result of Dr. Freud’s discovery. In a culture like ours in which words play a tremendous role, the weight given to them often serves to neglect, if not to distort, experience. If somebody says, “I love you” or “I love God” or “I love my country,” one utters words which, in spite of the fact that one fully believe in their truth, may be utterly untrue and nothing but a rationalization of the person’s wish for power, success, fame, money or an expression of one’s own dependence on one’s group. There might not be—and usually there is not—any element of love involved. Dr. Freud’s discovery is not yet so generally accepted that people are instinctively critical of statements of good intentions or stories of exemplary behaviour, nevertheless the fact is that Dr. Freud’s theory is a critical theory, as Marx’s was. Dr. Freud did not accept statements at face value; he looked at them skeptically even when he did not doubt the conscious sincerity of the person speaking. However, conscious sincerity means relatively little within the whole of somebody’s personality structure. Dr. Freud’s great discovery, with its fundamental philosophical and cultural consequences, was that of the conflict between thinking and being. However, he restricted the importance of his discovery by assuming that essential what is repressed is awareness of immature desires and strivings and that the conflict between thinking and being is essentially that between thinking and immature desires of pleasures of the flesh. This restriction is not surprising. However, impulses for pleasures of the flesh very often do not owe their presence or intensity to the physiological substratum of sexuality, on the contrary, they are very often the product of entirely different impulses which in themselves are not sexual. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Thus a source of desires of pleasures of the flesh can be one’s narcissism, one’s sadism, one’s tendency to submit, plain boredom; and it is well know that power and wealth are important elements in arousing desires for pleasures of the flesh. In recent times, it has become obvious hat in the culture of the cities, sexuality is not the main object of repression. Since mass humans are dedicated to becoming a Homo consumnes, pleasures of the flesh have become one of the main articles of consumption (and in fact one of the cheapest) creating the illusion of happiness and satisfaction. The conflict o be observed in humans, between conscious and unconscious strivings, are diverse. “Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on Earth,” reports Colossians 3.2. Programming your mind for success involves choosing to expect good things to happen to you. When starting off your day, set your mind in a righteous direction. “Open my heart to Your law, O Lord God,” reports 2 Maccabi 1.4. Start your day with faith and determination to walk in God’s commandments. Appreciate the outrageousness that God wants to show you with blessings, and let your memory prompt you with the reminder to give God thanks. God wants you to get your hopes up. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for,” reports Hebrews 11.1. One definition of that sort of hope is confident expectancy. We can confidently expect the favour of God. Have the full knowledge and wherewithal to thank God for His gifts. The number of gifts God has blessed us with his overwhelming. Start anticipating doors of opportunity to open for you, and be ready to rise above life’s challenges. Everything we have in our souls and bodies and whatever we possess, exteriorly or interiorly, naturally or supernaturally, these are God’s gifts, and they reveal God as a generous, even an extravagant, giver. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
However, why should one be surprised? God usually meets our expectancy. Just about everything we have comes from God. One person may receive rather more and another rather less, but all the gifts are God’s. Without God not even the smallest gift can be given or gotten. Your expectations will set the boundaries for your life and that is why so many people try to belittle others. They want them to expect less from life and have less. Bullies exhibit a defensive, self-aggrandizing form of self-esteem. Those with genuine self-esteem—who feel secure self-worth without seeking to be the center of attention or being angered by criticism—are more often found defending the victims of bullying. When feeling securely good about ourselves, we are less defensive. We therefore nurture others’ growing by being genuine (open and honest regarding our own feelings), by being empathic (listening with a reflective understanding of others feelings), and by being accepting—by offering unconditional beneficial regard. What better definition of grace than the unconditional beneificial regard—knowing someone as one truly is and the person nonetheless. As persons are accepted and prized, they tend to develop a more caring attitude towards themselves. Stop looking at everything you have lost and start looking at all that you have. Believe that things are going to change for the better, not because you deserve it, but simply because God loves you that much! Self-acceptant is linked to low prejudice. Affirm people, and they will evaluate other groups more beneficially. Threaten their self-esteem, and they will seek to restore it by putting others down. Optimistic thoughts about one’s potential also pays dividends. Those who believe they can control their own destiny, who have what researchers in more than a thousand studies have called internal locus of control, achieve more, make more money, and are better able to cope with problems. Believe that things are beyond your control and they probably will be. Believe that you can do it, and maybe, just maybe, you will. #RandolphHarrs 15 of 17
Dwell on the goodness of God. Fill your mind with thoughts of hope, faith, and victory. Develop a fresh vision, and expect things to change for the better, and sure enough that will happen. Remember, your actions will follow your expectations. Low expectations will trap you in mediocrity; high expectations will motivate you and propel you to move forward in life. However, raising your expectations takes active work. You must be willing to challenge yourself and think optimistic thoughts. Believe that you will have an abundance of blessings, favour, and happiness. If you can see it, then you can be it. If you can visualize it in your heart and mind, seeing it through the screen of God’s Words with your “spiritual eyes,” it can become a reality in your life. God is extremely interested in what you see through your spiritual eyes. Oppressed people—and even people who passively receive well-intentioned nursing-home care—decline more rapidly than do those who are encouraged to exert personal control over their environment. If your mind can conceive it and your heart can believe it, know that you can achieve it. Additional studies indicate that when people undertake challenging tasks and succeed, their feelings of self-efficacy are strengthened. For example, people who are helped to conquer an animal phobia may subsequently become less timid and more self-directed and venturesome in other areas of life. The key to self-efficacy is not merely optimistic self-talk, but actual mastery experiences—tackling realistic goals and achieving them. It is a spiritual principle as well as a psychological fact: We move toward what we see in our minds. When you look into your future, what do you see? Do you see yourself getting stronger, healthier, and happier? Is your life filled with God’s blessings, favour, and victory? If you truly hope for it to come to pass, you must begin to see it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time. Advocates of cognitive behaviour therapy are even more optimistic about the power of optimistic thinking. Such therapy aims to reverse the negative, self-defeating thinking that underlies difficulties such as depression. It trains people to see how their negative interpretations make them depressed and to reserve their negative self-talk. Additional studies on intrinsic motivation, or achievement motivation, on the importance of perceived choice in studies of action produced attitude change, and on the phenomenon of reactance (a motive to restore one’s freedom when feeling coerced) further testify to the benefits of believing in our own possibilities. These studies also put the mainstream of recent psychological research squarely behind conceptions of human freedom, dignity, and self-control. The moral of all these research literatures is that people benefit from experiences of freedom and from being able to view themselves as free creatures rather than as pawns of external forces. Lord, please help me to see with my “spiritual” eyes, seeing not merely those things that currently exist, but those things that can become realities in my life. Why climb a mountain? Look! a mountain there. I do not climb mountain. Mountain climb me. Mountain is myself. I climb on myself. There is no mountain nor myself. Something moves up and down in the air. My words are tied in one with the great mountains, with the great rocks, with the great trees, in one with my body and my heart. Do you all help me with supernatural power, and you, Day and you, Night! All of you see me one with this World. Please save us, we beseech Thee. For Thy sake, our God, do Thou save us. For Thy sake, our Creator, O save us. For Thy sake, our Redeemer, O save us. For Thy sake, O Thou who seekest us, save us, we beseech Thee. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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Randolph Harris II International 