Thus far we have been using a fairly standard theory of delinquency, though better rounded, than the usual statement. Let us recapitulate it: The early childhood of juvenile delinquents is “permissive” or “neglected,” depending on the point of view. They play truant and quit school as soon as they can. This is not necessarily a failing in them, for the schools are poor, and the policy of keeping them there to educate them for some viable life or other in modern society, is benevolent but largely doomed. Such polluted sources issue in a muddy stream where only monsters can swim. Their escape from school proves that they are less supervised at home, and in turn it gives them more freedom, at first, to sharpen their wits on the streets. Less restricted, they probably have more elaborate early experience in pleasures of the flesh than less social boy or the more regulated boys. This may get them into early and repeated trouble, and it may, therefore, result in repression and becoming less adventurous in pleasure of the flesh than the average boy later. Such an outcome is common and when it occurs it is certainly disastrous, for repressed pleasures of the flesh will drive them to more and more frantic excitement to break through. (It is possible that the delinquent older adolescents who are active with the girls are not the lads who are caught and get counted. For one thing, important adventure in pleasures of the flesh is rarely a gang activity. For another, success in pleasures of the flesh diminishes the need to raise the ante and be punished. And it always gives “something to do.” It is likely that expression in pleasures of the flesh is compatible with, and perhaps favorable, to “delinquent acts”; but is incompatible with delinquency-in-order-to-get-caught. This is speculation; but consider the following two statements of F.M. Thrasher: Pleasures of the flesh “represent a decidedly secondary activity in the gang. In the adolescent group in particular it is subordinated to the primary interest of conflict and adventure.” However, “groups of this” [very active type in pleasures of the flesh] “are probably far more common the than is ordinarily supposed”—that is, such kids do not get caught and counted.) #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Mostly these kids have nothing to do and will have nothing worth while to do. They feel worthless and guilty, and these feelings are often enhanced by unusual hostility at home, both taken and given. (The psychological mechanism is that some of the child’s hostility against his parents turns against himself and is felt as guilt.) As a reaction to these feelings, they develop the characteristic conceited self-image that has to keep proving itself: proving that they are men and not boys, potent and not impotent, and that they are good as anybody else. It is this syndrome, of conceit and hostility, which then meets their social situation of being underprivileged and deprived, and finds it so insulting; whereas other less affluent boys—in a less hostile home, more tolerant of school, and perhaps more lucky in keeping out of trouble that involves intimate passions—make an easier adjustment. In the case of marginalized groups, there is certainly real insult as well as fantasy insult; and when a fresh kid is treated as a young punk, there is real insult. The combination of family hostility, conceit, and the insult of underprivilege now makes the kids disaffected, at war with ordinary society, and they have their sport and triumph by breaking the laws. They appoint themselves to a gang. Absolutely, this gives them pride and something to belong to; negatively, it protects each one’s conceit by conformity. The finding of the Gluecks and others that the delinquent juveniles are more unconventional than the average applies, of course, to their standard behavior and their disturbed personalities; but all the more they are undeviatingly conformist in their own groups. The gangs have highly satisfactory communal features: living and working together (exempli gratia, a boy angry at home can sleep at his friend’s), often sharing such intimate passions as there is, and as careless of one another’s property as they are of the World’s. However, it is a community, we have seen, that lacks personal affection and that stops abruptly at the adults, and therefore provides no grounds for growth. This abrupt divide is of course sharper in the usual case of people moving to a new community. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

In our model of the closed room and the rat race, we pointed to a clandestine alliance between juvenile delinquents and the middle status of the organized system, exchanging culture heroes, norms of cool behavior, and the values of cynicism, against the earnest boys in the upper echelon. This view seems more plausible than A. K. Cohen’s proposition that, whereas the nondelinquent “corner-boy culture temporizes with middle-class morality, the delinquent subculture does not: it permits no ambiguity in its negation of the respectable status-system, and so sets the delinquent above the most exemplary college boy.” On the contrary. It is likely, rather, that the nondeliquent corner boy, less conceited, has not cut himself off from ordinary poor satisfactions, and therefore does not need to run in gangs and get caught; he is not “temporizing” with middle-class morality but is not much bothering about it. Conversely, it is obvious that the juvenile delinquents, like the hustlers (men of the evening), fancy themselves as movie heroes in BMW i8 or Z4 sports cars, living in million-dollar Cresleigh homes; and it is importantly the inner conflict between their dreams of American glamour and their own impotent resources that exacerbates their resentment. However, some of these boys are making hundreds of thousands a year and some are even making millions doing what they do, and it comes at great risks. It is perhaps only the juvenile delinquents who take the American way of life fully earnestly. This is what is implicitly hinted at by those students, exempli gratia, Ken, who speaks of the juvenile in delinquent society: it is the hipster attitude of the organized system that provides the model for delinquent behavior: the short cut, the empty sensation, raising the ante, and contempt of honest effort and earnest goals. In sum, we have a picture of early freedom, underprivileged frustration, reactive conceit, and gang conformity. If we now consult the personality picture of caught delinquents given in—for instance, the painstaking study by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck—we see it is quite identical with that of the young hero of our story: #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

He is: vivacious, extroverted, less self-controlled, more manually inclined, more aggressive, less fearful of failure and defeat, more independent, more initiating, less submissive, less amenable to conventional expectations. These are beneficial powers and must therefore by early survivals, for only physical nature has such energies. However, the frustration appears in responses like “impulsive, oral, narcissistic,” and the reactive conceit appears as “hostile, resentful, defiant, suspicious, destructive, socially assertive, not feeling recognized or appreciated, defensive, unco-operative.” And he is more sociable in play in the sense of “needing supportive companionship,” which we can take as both beneficial and lossmaking. Many people who experiment with mind-manifesting barbiturates report that while under the influence they begin to “see” the World, especially the human-made technological forms that dominate cities, as absurd and alien. People who take these illegal substances commonly “freak out” in the presence of heavy traffic, sterile environments, abrasive sounds, or mechanical things and smells. They often describe these experiences of everyday life as “unreal.” (Many never come back down from their trips, and probably never realize they left.) It is part of the norm that bad trips are more likely to occur in urban than in natural environments. Setting around from which they gain feelings of comfort, to play music which has been familiar and friendly in the past, or to have close friends nearby and to stay in physical contact with them. If the friend is deeply trusted, hugging is highly recommended. So are warm baths and personal conversation. These elements can accomplish what is called “grounding,” meaning contact which is undeniably real, not abstract, not interpreted, not artificial, not open to question. The radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing, among others, has said that the growing incidence of mental illness these days may be explained in part by the fact that the World we call real and which we ask people to live within and understand is itself open to question. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

The environment we live in is no longer connected to the mix of planetary processes which brought us all into being. It is solely the product of human mental processes. It is real, but only in the way that a theatrical play or a fun house is real. Our artificial environment is there and we can experience it, yet it has been created on purpose by other humans. It is an interpretation of reality; it no longer reveals how nature works and it cannot provide much useful information to human beings who seek to see their own lives as part of some wider natural process. We are left with no frame of reference untouched by human interpretation. Living within this environment ultimately foists upon us a bizarre choice between equally disconnected realities. We may decide to accept as real our artificially reconstructed human environment, ignoring that it is an arbitrary re-creation, and accepting this interpretation of reality as our own. Or we may recoil from it, allowing ourselves to see our new environment as a stage set or a series of false fronts. This is the way the schizophrenic often describes the World. Those who make the latter choice risk the danger inherent in trying to understand the World solely through their own isolated internal mental process. Either choice, acceptance or rejection, separates us from the possibility of interacting with and learning from the organic reality which exists outside of human conception. However, what we call sanity lies in the first choice, acceptance of the arbitrary as real. Dr. Laing proposes, therefore, that the schizophrenic of today is not suffering a psychological problem with a personal cause so much as he or she is making an apt response to a true condition of the modern World that has a political or technological cause. The so-called sane are holding on by our teeth to an extremely flimsy and arbitrary framework of reality. Thus far, political theorists have failed to make very much of the effect our modern environments have on us. Failing to grasp that the physical World we live in is itself arbitrary, and thereby likely to be confusing to masses of people who seek solid ground on which to stand, political observers have not made some critical deductions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

When people cannot distinguish with certainty the natural from the interpreted, or the artificial from the organic, primary among these theories is that all of the ideal organization of life become equal. None of them can be understood as any more or any less connected to planetary truth. And so, if it is unrooted logic, the person or forces capable of speaking most loudly or most forcefully, or with some apparent logic, can become convincing within the void of understanding. Where political theorists have overlooked these phenomena, others have not. Looking at today’s Worlds from the outside in, as it were, and extrapolating from here into the future, science fiction writers have often been politically visionary. In their analyses and uses of the relationship between artificial environments, high technology, sanity and insanity, and, therefore, the inevitability—of more accurately—the fact of human mind control, some science fiction writers produce work that merges with political criticism. A second category of people who have noticed the modern human relationships with the environment is the leadership of the new popular philosophical-religious movements, such as Scientology, est, Arica, Mind Dynamics and others. Unfortunately these leaders do not warn us of the consequences of the confusion, but instead take advantage of it. Noting that reality and its definition have now entered the realm of game and are up for grabs, they become better at the game than anyone else, exploiting it, reshaping disordered, unrooted minds and tilling a new bed of mental soil from which monsters will inevitably grow. By looking at science fiction and the new philosophical-religions movements, we can develop a model which may indicate the likely result of the technological processes that are already very far along in our World. Music, as everyone experiences, provides an unquestionable justification and a fulfilling pleasure for the activities it accompanies: the soldier who hears the marching band is enthralled and reassured; the religious man is exalted in his prayer by the sound of the organ in the church; and the lover is carried away and his conscience stilled by the romantic guitar. Armed with music, man can damn rational doubt. Out of the music emerged the gods that suit it, and they educate men by their example and their commandments. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Plato teaches that, in order to take the spiritual temperature of an individual or a society, one must “mark the music.” The history of music is a series of attempts to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul—to make them serve a higher purpose, an ideal, to give man’s duties a fullness. Bach’s religious intentions and Beethoven’s revolutionary and humane ones are clear enough examples Such cultivations of the soul uses the passions and satisfies them while sublimating them and giving them an artistic unity. A man whose noblest activities are accompanied by a music that expresses them while providing a pleasure extending from the lowest bodily to the highest spiritual, is whole, and there is no tension in him between the pleasant and the good. By contrast a man whose business life is prosaic and unmusical and whose leisure is made up of coarse, intense entertainments, is divided, and each side of his existence is undermined by the other. Hence, for those who are interested in psychological health, music is at the center of education, both for giving the passions their due and for preparing the soul for the unhampered use of reason. The centrality of such education was recognized by all the ancient educators. It is hardly noticed today that in Aristotle’s Politics the most important passages about the best regime concern musical education, or that the Poetics is an appendix to the Politics. Classical philosophy did not censor the singers. It persuaded them. And it gave them a goal, one that was understood by them, until only yesterday. There is no need to fear that “the blonde beasts” are going to come forth from the bland souls of our adolescents. A glance at the videos that project images on the wall of Plato’s cave since MTV took it over suffices to prove this. Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his algebra assignment while wear Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to humankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide one with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction one is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

It is the youth culture and, as I have so often insisted, there is now no other countervailing nourishment for the spirit. Some of this culture’s power comes from the fact that it is so loud. It makes conversation impossible, so that much of friendship must be without the shared speech that Aristotle asserts is the essence of friendship and the only true common ground. None of this contradicts going about the business of life, attending classes and doing the assignments for them. However, the meaningful inner life is with the music. This phenomenon is both astounding and indigestible, and is hardly noticed, routine and habitual. Many people say that rock music has a different kind of soul. When you turn it on, even with be sober, it opens a gateway to another dimension, one of darkness and safety.  With rock, illusions of shared feelings, bodily contact and grunted formulas, which contain so much meaning beyond speech, are the basis of association. I used to watch videos on VH1 when I was in high school and my girlfriend could not stand the type of music I was listening to. However, one of my favorite songs of all times is by Metallica called Until it Sleep. I even got into The Wallflowers, and I think the lead singer is named Jakob Dylan, but I always call him Bob Dylan. I know Bob Dylan is really famous for something, but I honestly did not remember what. He is one of those big names like Mick Jagger. But anyway, I also grew to like other artists like Poe, The Pet Shop Boys, and Godsmack. Oh, and Korn is great, as well as Wayne Static, Marilyn Mansion (Cry for You is a great song. I think it was dedicated to Aaliyah as her music started to become more morbid, independent, unconventional and highly rated by urban youth and highbrow society. People saw a change in her as she was filming Queen of the Damned.) and there is even this German band called Rammstein I really like. I think all artists should be required to sing at least one song in another language, that is how they get noticed by the cultured types who have the power to make superstars. The continuing exposure to rock music is a reality, not one confined to a particular class or type of child. One need only ask first-year university students what music they listen to, how much of it and what it means to them, in order to discover that the phenomenon is universal in America, that it begins in adolescence or a bit before and continues through the college years. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

It is of historic proportions that a society’s best young and their best energies should be so occupied. People as we do the caste system, witch-burning, harems, cannibalism and gladiatorial combats. It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself. The child I described has parents who have sacrificed to provide him with a good life and who have a great stake in his future happiness. They cannot believe that the musical vocation will contribute very much to that happiness. However, there is nothing they can do about it. They family spiritual void has left the field open to rock music, and they cannot possibly forbid their children to listen to it. It is everywhere; all children listen to it; forbidding it would simply cause them to lose their children’s affection and obedience. Many people think that the parents’ loss of control over their children’s moral education has something to do with the music, at a time when on one else is seriously concerned with it. However, without Britney Spears growing from a cute high school girl, to a video girl, then becoming a Nazi Barbie with her mechanical allegiance to demanding the people work, as she performs more than any individual artist may be able to do in a short time, we would suppress that talent and the beneficial influences that she has had on humanity. It is true that Britney Spears and Beyonce may be too appealing for people to listen to because they are so overtly beautiful and just unreal, but that is where parental advisory comes in because even grown men and women idolize these women. Youth are one of the few groups in the country with considerable disposable income, in the form of allowance. Their parents spend all they have providing for the kids. Appealing to them over their parents’ heads, creating a World of delight for them, constitutes one of the richest markets in the World. The rock business is perfect capitalism, supplying to demand and helping to create it. It has all the moral dignity of the pharmaceutical (whichever way you want to look at it), but is new and unexpected that nobody thought to control it, and now it is too late. Rock is a very big business, bigger than movies, bigger than professional sports, bigger than television, bigger than the Internet, and this accounts for much of the respectability of the music benefits. Even as music videos are incline, without one of these forms of advertisement, it can weaken market demand for the artist. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

It is difficult to adjust our vision to the changes in the economy and to see what is really important. McDonald employs 200,000 people, with more employees than General Electric and Ford Motor Company, and likewise the purveyors of this delicious food for the soul have supplanted what still seems to be more basic callings. As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which has been put off for several centuries in favor of the pursuit of property, the means to leisure, finally began to be of primary concern, However, in the meantime, any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as humans’ tastes and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure became entertainment. If the means justified the ends, the end for which they had labored for so long has turned out to be amusement; a justified conclusion. The music business is peculiar only in that it caters almost exclusively to children, treating legally and naturally imperfect human beings as though they were ready to enjoy the final or complete satisfaction. It is perhaps thus reveals the nature of all our entertainment and our loss of a clear view of what adulthood or maturity is, and our incapacity to conceive ends. The emptiness of values results in the acceptance of the natural facts as the ends. Mick Jagger played the role in the lives of the youth that Napoleon played in the lives of ordinary young Frenchmen throughout the nineteenth century. Everyone else was so boring and unable to charm youthful passions. Jagger caught on. Michael Jackson, Prince, Boy George, George Michaels, Biggie, Tupac, Selena, Adolph Thornton, Pop Smoke, Left Eye, and Aaliyah are all superstars who have gone to Heaven. Superstars are so important because even if their genera is not Rock ‘n’ Roll, they are considered “Rock Legends.” Rock music itself and talking about it with infinite seriousness is perfectly respectful. The concern is not with the moral effects on this music. The issue is that music is equivalent to freedom and helps with brain development. Music is art and it is so important to keep art and music in the schools. Music instruction appears to accelerate brain development in young children, particularly in the areas of the brain responsible for processing sound, language development, speech perception and reading skills. And, art instruction helps children with development of motor skills, language skill, social skills, decision-making, risk-taking, and inventiveness. Visual arts teach learners about color, layout, perspective, and balance: all techniques that are necessary in presentations (visual, digital) of academic work. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The first sensuous experiences are decisive in determining the taste for the whole of life, and they are the link between the animal and the spirit (meaning an understanding with nature and the planet without being aware so much of the material World) in us. The period of nascent sensuality has always been used for sublimation, in the sense of making sublime, for attaching youthful inclinations and longings to music, pictures and stories that provide the transition to the fulfillment of human duties and the enjoyment of the human pleasures. Lessing, speaking of Greek sculpture, said “beautiful men made beautiful statues, and the city had beautiful statues in part to thank for beautiful citizens.” This formula encapsulates the fundamental principle of the esthetic education of man. Young men and women were attracted by the beauty of heroes whose very bodies expressed their nobility. The deeper understanding of the meaning of the meaning of nobility comes later, but is prepared for by the sensuous experience and is actually contained. What the sense long for as well as what reason later sees as good are thereby not at tension with one another. Education is not sermonizing to children against their instincts and pleasures, but providing a natural continuity between what they feel and what they can and should be However, this is not a lost art. Now we have come to exactly the opposite point. Rock music encourages passions and provides models that have no relation to any life the young people who go to universities can possibly lead, or to the kinds of admiration encouraged by liberal studies. Without the cooperation of the sentiments, anything other than technical education is a dead letter. Rock music provides premature ecstasy and. It artificially induces the exaltation naturally attached to the completion of the greatest endeavors—victory in a just war, consummated love, artistic creation, religious devotion and discovery of the truth. Without effort, without talent, without virtue, without exercise of the faculties, anyone and everyone is accorded the equal right to the enjoyment of their fruits. In my experience, students who have had a serious fling with barbiturates and contraband—and gotten over it—find it difficult to have enthusiasms or great expectations. It is as though the color has been drained out of their lives and they see everything in black and white. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The pleasures they experienced in the beginning was so intense that they no longer look for it at the end, or as the end. They may function perfectly well, but dryly, routinely. Their energy has been sapped, and they do not expect their life’s activity to produce anything but a living, whereas liberal education is supposed to encourage the belief that the good life is the pleasant life and that the best life is the most pleasant life. Students want to get ahead comfortably in life and live in luxury. But this life is as empty and false as the one they left behind. The choice is not between quick fixed and dull calculation. This is what liberal education is meant to show them. However, as long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf. There are also certain social consequences of particular kinds of television programs. It is worth noting here that one difference between Americans and Europeans is that the latter take television seriously. Europeans seem to understand that media change is ecological, not additive; that when a powerful new medium like television enters a culture, the result is not the old culture plus the new medium, but a new culture altogether. If you add a drop of red dye to a beaker of clear water, the effect is similar to what happens, you end up with a new color throughout. I have been close to obsessed about television, for it does not seem to me that my countrymen have yet taken its measure. As if television has merely been added to it and little else has changed, that is how we speak about America. Americans watch television, but we have not yet reached the point where we watch ourselves watch it. Television commercials are a form of religious literature. To comment on them in a serious vein to practice hermeneutics, the branch of theology concerned with interpreting and explaining the Scriptures. The heathens, heretics, and unbelievers may move on to something else. This in more reflective of the commercials with religious content. Just as in church the pastor will sometimes call the congregation’s attention to non-ecclesiastical matters, so there are television commercials tht are entirely secular. Someone has someone has something to sell; you are told what it is, where it can be obtained, and what it costs. Though these may be shrill and offensive, no doctrine is advanced and no theology invoked. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

However, the majority of important television commercials take the form of religious parables organized around a coherent theology. Like all religious parables, they put forward a concept of sin, intimation of the way to redemption, and a vision of Heaven. They also suggest what are the roots of evil and what are the obligations of the holy. Consider, for example, the Parable of the Ring Around the Collar. This is to television scripture what the Parable of the Prodigal Son is to the Bible, which is to say it is an archetype containing most of the elements of form and content that recur in its genre. To begin with, the Parable of the Ring Around the Collar is short, occupying only about thirty seconds of one’s time and attention. There are three reasons for this, all obvious. First, it is expensive to preach on television; second, the attention span of the congregation is not long and is highly vulnerable to distraction; and third, a parable does not need to be long—tradition dictating that its narrative structure be tight, its symbols unambiguous, its explication terse. The narrative structure of the Parable of the Ring Around the Collar is, indeed, comfortably traditional. The story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A married couple is depicted in some relaxed setting—a restaurant, say—in which they are enjoying each other’s company and generally having a wonderful time. However, then a waitress approaches their table, notices that the man has a dirty collar, stares at it boldly, sneers with cold contempt, and announces to all within hearing the nature of his transgression. The man is humiliated and glares at his wife with scorn, for she is the source of his shame. She, in turn, assumes an expression of self-loathing mixed with a touch of self-pity. This is the parable’s beginning: the presentation of the problem. The parable continues by showing the wife at home using a detergent that never fails to eliminate dirt around the collars of men’s shits. She profoundly shows her husband what she is doing, and he forgives her with a smile. This is the parable’s middle: the solution of the problem. Finally, we are shown the couple in a restaurant once again, but this time they are free of the waitress’s probing eyes and bitter social chastisement. This is the parable’s end: the moral, the explication, the exegesis. From this, we should draw the proper conclusion. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

As in all parables, behind the apparent simplicity there are some profound ideas to ponder. Among the most subtle and important is the notion of where and how problems originate. Embedded in every belief system there is an assumption about the root cause of evil from which the varieties of sinning take form. In science, for example, evil is represented in superstition. In psychoanalysis, we find it in early neurotic transaction with our parents. In Christianity, it is located in the concept of Original Sin. In television-commercial parables, the root cause of evil is Technological Innocence, a failure to know the particulars of the beneficent accomplishments of industrial progress. This is the primary source of unhappiness, humiliation, and discord in life. And, as forcefully depicted in the Parable of the Ring, the consequences of technological innocence may strike at any time, without warning, and with the full force of their disintegrating action. The sudden striking power of technological innocence is a particular important feature of television-commercial theology, for it is a constant reminder of the congregation’s vulnerability. One must never be complacent or, worse, self-congratulatory. To attempt to live without technological sophistication is at times dangerous, since the evidence of one’s naivete will always be painfully visible to the vigilant. The vigilant may be a waitress, a friend, a neighbor, or even a spectral figure—a holy ghost, as it were—who materializes in your kitchen, from nowhere, to give witness to your sluggardly ignorance. Technological innocence refers not only to ignorance of detergents, drugs, sanitary napkins, cars, salves, and foodstuffs, but also to ignorance of technical machinery such as savings banks and transportation systems. One may, for example, come upon one’s neighbors while on vacation (in television-commercial parables, this is always a sign of danger) and discover that they have invested their money in a certain bank of whose special interest rates you have been unaware. This is, of course, a moral disaster, and both you and your vacation are doomed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

As demonstrated in the Ring Parable, there is a path to redemption, but it can be entered only on two conditions. The first requires that you be open to advice or social criticism from those who are more enlightened. In the Ring Parable, the waitress serves the function of counselor, although she is, to be sure, exacting and very close to unforgiving. In some parables, the adviser is rather more sarcastic then severe. However, in most parables, as for example in all sanitary napkin, mouthwash, shampoo, and aspirin commercials, the advisers are amiable and sympathetic, perhaps all too aware of their own vulnerability on other matters. The Innocent are required to accept instruction in the spirit in which it is offered. This cannot be stressed enough, for it instructs the congregation in two lessons simultaneously: one must be eager to accept advice, and just as eager to give it. Giving advice is, so to speak, the principal obligation of the holy. In fact, the ideal religious community may be depicted in images of dozens of people, each in one’s turn giving and taking advice on technological advances. The second condition involves one’s willingness to act on the advice given. As in traditional Christian theology, it is not sufficient to hear the gospel or even preach it. One’s understanding must be expressed in good works. In the Ring Parable, the once-pitiable wife acts almost immediately, and the parable concludes by showing the congregation the effects of her action. In the Parable of the Person with Rotten Breath, of which there are several versions, we are shown a woman who, ignorant of the technological solution to her problem, is enlightened by a supportive roommate. The woman takes the advice without delay, with results we are shown in the last five seconds: a honeymoon in Hawaii. In the Parable of the Stupid Investor, we are shown a man who knows not how to make his money make money. Upon enlightenment, he acts swiftly and, at the parable’s end, he is rewarded with a car, or a trip to Hawaii, or something approximating peace of mind. Because of the compactness of commercial parables, the ending—that is, the last five seconds—must serve a dual purpose. It is, of course, the more of the story: if one will act in such a way, this will be the reward. However, in being shown the result, we are also shown an image of Heaven. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Occasionally, as in the Parable of the Lost Traveler’s Checks, we are given a glimpse of Hell: Technological Innocents lost and condemned to eternal wandering far from their native land. However, mostly we are given images of a Heaven both accessible and delicious: that is, a Heaven that is here, now, on Earth, in America, and quite often in Hawaii. However, Hawaii is only a convenient recurring symbol. Heaven, can, in fact, materialize and envelop you anywhere. In the Parable of the Man Who Runs Through Airports, Heaven is found at a car-rental counter to which the confounded Runner is shepherded by an angelic messenger. The expression of ecstasy on the Runner’s face tells clearly that this moment is as close to transcendence as he can ever hope for. Ecstasy is the key idea here, for commercial parables depict the varieties of ecstasy in as much detail as you will find in any body of religious literature. At the conclusion of the Parable of the Spotted Glassware, a husband and wife assumes such ecstatic countenances as can only be described by the word “beatification.” Even in the Ring Parable, which at first glance would not seem to pose as serious a moral crisis as spotted glassware, we are shown ecstasy, pure, and serene. And where ecstasy is, so is Heaven. Heaven, in brief, is any place where you have joined your soul with the Deity—the Deity, of course, being Technology. Just when, as a religious people, we replaced our faith in traditional ideas of God with a belief in the ennobling force of technology is not easy to say. Television commercials played no role in brining about this transformation, but they reflect the change, document it, and amplify it. They constitute the most abundant literature we possess of our new spiritual commitment. That is why we have a solemn obligation to keep television commercials under the continuous scrutiny of hermeneutics. During the second World War, researchers were able to crack the codes of Enigmas, the elaborate typewriter that the Nazis used to encipher and decipher military commands and other sensitive messages. The breaking of Enigma was an epic achievement that helped turn the tide of the war and ensure an Allied victory. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Consistency—this criterion is based on the assumptions that if a fact fits with other facts regarded as true, it too must be true. Detectives, lawyers, and courts lean heavily on consistency as the primary test of a witness’s truthfulness. In the World the Paris Hilton, millions of TV viewers around the globe were mesmerized for months as they found out she became a DJs and married the man of her dreams. Every bit of evidence was fine-tooth-combed for internal contradictions as though noncontradiction proved truthfulness. In business, too, consistency wins points, even thought it is quite possible to be consistently false. When a SWAT team of auditors descends on a firm to perform what is known as “due diligence” in preparation for a merge or acquisition, the first thing it looks for are inconsistencies. Do accounts receivable, reported in the “control ledger,” line up precisely with what the underlying subledgers show? Inconsistencies all raise suspicion that the truth is being massaged. Since the accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Tyco, FTE Networks, Nikola, Wirecard,  Luckin Coffee, and a host of other high-flying firms, the consistency criterion has been applied with greater consistency. In our daily lives, a great deal of accepted “truth” is based on authority—secular as well as divine. For years in the United States of America, if the famed investor Warren Buffett murmured so much as a syllable about where Wall Street was heading, it had to be true. For others, If the Bible or the Koran says so, it must assuredly be true. Authority is the test. Authority may be embodies in a Muslim imam or ayatollah. In other words of the Iraqi Shi’a leader, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, “You do what the [leader’s] expert opinion says you should do, and refrain from, without any research on your part.” Alternatively, authority can be located in the Vatican where, in 1870, the pope was declared “infallible.” Such religious worthies are presumed by their followers to have a profound understanding of the Koran or the Bible, both of which, in turn, are held to contain the views of an ultimate authority. For some, if leading news sources such as The New York Times, Le Monde or CBS News report it, it must be true. Of course, that was before President Trump called them out, and CBS admitted it hard broadcast a story about President Bush’s National Guard service was based on forged documents. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Before The Times publicly revealed that it has printed scores of stories by an up-and-coming staffer who had conned his editors into using lies and fiction. And before France made a smash best seller out of a book charging that the top editor of Le Monde planted stories that served their own private self-interests. Authority is also (often absurdly) attributed to media celebrities. Justin Bieber is taken for an authority on relevant award shows, Paris Hilton is an expert on foreign policy and Beyonce is an expert on Civil Rights—after all, she put on a display at the football Super Bowl, and she and her husband have dedicated millions of dollars to housing the less affluent, and paying for legal defense. Few, however, have been worshipped as blindly by executives as leading CEOs. For years the American businessperson’s authority-in-chief has been Mr. Lawrence Lui. Today so much knowledge is needed for good decision-making that the smartest people know what they do not know. Authority is, therefore, frequently shared or passed around. At a corporate board meeting, directors may follow the lead of one member on financial issues, turn to another on questions of executive compensation and to still another on matters of technology. We seldom in any cohere way test the actual capability of an authority, relying instead on the image of authority conferred by a title, a diploma, or an accreditation agency of some type. In which case we bow to the authority conferring the certification. It becomes the authority on authority. For some, truth is based on what is presumed by be mystical revelation. I cannot be question, it just is. Take it from me. (Of course, if you do take it from me,” and believe it because I say so, I become the trusted authority, and the criteria you rare relying on is that of authority.) Durability—here the test of truth is based on age and durability. Has the “truth” stood “the test of time”? Is it “tried and true,” or is it new, hence questionable? Here the authority is not a god, a book or a person but that immense slice of time called the past. Maybe chicken soup is good for curing colds, but does the fact that is has been passed down through a long lines of grandmas necessarily make it so? For most of us today it is hard to appreciate just how important inherited truth was before the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Historian Alan Kors of the University of Pennsylvania says that “the overturning of the presumptive authority of the past was one of the most profound developments in the entire history of the West. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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