The loves of childhood and of adolescence cannot be subtracted from us; they have become part of us. Not a discrete part that could be severed. It is as if they had entered our blood stream. Our eternal purpose is as simple as making sure anytime we do anything be sure that it helps someone. We must also make and keep our covenants. As we bind ourselves to our goals through covenants and ordinances, our lives are filled with confidence, protection, and deep and lasting joy. The best way for one to improve the World is let the deterministic forces in one’s experience take the place of self-awareness. It must be admitted that some tendencies in the older forms of psychoanalysis can be used to rationalize passivism. Every person is “pushed” by unconscious fears, desires, and tendencies of all sorts, and humans are really much less the masters in the household of one’s own mind than the nineteenth-century human of “will power” fondly believed. However, a harmful implication was carried along with this emphasis on the determinism of unconscious forces. One of the most striking principles in life is treating others with compassion. Compassion is rooted in charity, pure and perfect love. Many people keep busy all the time as a way of covering up anxiety; their activism is a way of running from themselves. They get a pseudo and temporary sense of aliveness by being in a hurry, as though something is going on if they are but moving, and as though being busy is a proof of one’s importance. Compassion is a fundamental character of those who strive empathy, mercy, and kindness. The expression of compassion for others is, in fact, the essence the human being’s development as a continuum of differentiation from the “mass” toward freedom as an individual. One’s development is blocked, and the surrendered freedom for growth turns inward and festers in resentment and anger when one does not have compassion. The World is twofold for humans in accordance with their twofold attitude. One perceives the being that surrounds one, plain things and beings as thing; one perceives what happens around one, plain processes and actions as processes, things that consist of qualities and processes that consist of moments, things recorded in terms of spatial coordinates and processes and capable of being measured against and compared with those others—an ordered World, a detached World. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

In our time the tendency to remain enchained is particularly strong, since when a society is so disrupted that it is no longer a “mother” in the sense of giving the individual minimal consistent support, one suffers from a lack of feeling. This World is somewhat reliable; it has destiny and duration; its articulation can be surveyed; one can get it out again and again; one recounts it with one’s eyes closed and then checks with one’s eyes open. If you think of it that way, or if you prefer, there is stands—right next to your skin, nestled in your soul: it is your object and remains according to your pleasure—and remains primally alien both outside and inside you. Have great compassion. The struggle for freedom is presented in one of the greatest dramas of all times. It is a sound hypothesis, based on a good deal of evidence in psychotherapeutic work, that the unconscious guilt which people carry leads then to be sensitive in life. This overemphasis on will, which blocks love, leads sooner or later to a reaction to the opposite error, love which blocks will. Victorian will power lacked the sensitivity and flexibility which goes with love. Not one of us is a stranger to this. It ends in something which is not fully personal because it does not discriminate. What is necessary for “resolutions” is a new consciousness in which the depth and meaning of personal relationships will occupy a central place. A place where measures and comparison have feld. It is up to you how much of the immeasurable becomes reality for you. The encounters do not order themselves to become a World, but each is for you a sign of the World order. They have no association with each other, but every one guarantees your association with the World. The World that appears to you in this way is unreliable, for it appears always new to you, and you cannot take it by its word. It lacks destiny, for everything it in permeates everything else. It lacks duration, for it comes even when not called and vanishes even when you cling to it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The slightest taint of corruption means that the other World would be neither incorruptible nor eternal. The tiniest flaw in a building, institution, code of character will inevitably prove fatal in the long run of eternity. Some conservatives are heartened by recent feminist discussion about the differences between men and women and about the special fulfillment of “parenting,” forbidden subjects at earlier stages of the movement, when equal rights were the primary theme. However, this discussion has really only been made possible by the success of those earlier stages. There may indeed be a feminine nature or self, but it has been definitively shaken loose from its teleological moorings. The feminine nature is not in any reciprocal relation to the male nature, and they do not define one another. The male and female essence have no more evident purposiveness than do the contrast in tones of skin. However, there always exists a dominant stand point and a submissive one, or so the legend goes. Women do have different physical structures, but they can make of them what they will—without paying a price. The feminine nature is a mystery to be worked out on its own, which can now be done because the male claim to it has been overcome. The fact that there is today a more affirmative disposition toward childbearing does not imply that there is any natural impulse or compulsion to establish anything like a traditional fatherhood to complement motherhood. The children are to be had on the female’s terms, with or without fathers, who are not to get in the way of the mother’s free development. Children have always been, and still are, more the mother’s anyway. Ninety percent or more children of divorced parents stay with their mothers whose preeminent stake in children has been enhanced by feminist demands and by a consequent easy rationalization of male irresponsibility. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

So, if family includes the presence of a male who has any kind of a definite function, we have reproduction without family. The return to motherhood as a feminist ideal is only possible because feminism has triumphed over the family as it was once known, and women’s freedom will not be limited by it. None of this means retuning to family values or even bodes particularly well for the family as an institution, although it does mean that woman have become freer to come to terms with the complexity of their situation. The uneasy bedfellowship of the revolution of the pleasures of the flesh and feminism produced an odd tension in which all the moral restraints governing nature disappeared, but so did nature. The exhilaration of liberation has evaporated, however, for it is unclear what exactly was liberated or whether new and more onerous responsibilities have not been placed on us. And this is where we return to the students, for whom everything is new. They are not sure what they feel for one another and are without guidance about what to do with whatever they may feel. The students of whom I am speaking are aware of all the alternative methods of pleasures of the flesh acts which do not involve real harm to others are licit. They do not think they should feel guilt or shame about pleasures of the flesh. They have had sex education in school, of “the biological facts, let them decide the values for themselves” variety, if not “the options and orientations” variety. They have lived in a World where the most explicit discussions and depictions of pleasures of the flesh are all around them. They have had little fear of venereal disease. Birth-control devices and ready termination of pregnancy have been available to them since puberty. For the great majority, pleasures of the flesh were a normal part of their lives prior to college, and there was no fear of social stigma or even much parental opposition. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Girls have had less supervision in their relationships with boys than at any time in history. They are not precisely pagan, but there is an easy familiarity with others’ units and less inhibition about using their own for a broad range of intimate passions. There is no special value placed on virginity in oneself or in one’s partners. It is expected that there were others before and, incredibly to older folks, this does not seem to bother them, even though it provides a ground for predictions about the future. They are not promiscuous or given to orgies or casual pleasures of the flesh, as it used to be understood. In general, they have one connection at a time, but most have had several serially. They are used to coed dormitories. Many live together, almost always without expectation of marriage. It is just a convenient arrangement. They are not couples in this sense of having simulacra of marriage or a way of life different from that of other students not presently so attached. They are roommates, which is what they call themselves, with pleasures of the flesh and utilities included in the rent. Every single obstacle to pleasures of the flesh relationships between young unmarries persons has disappeared, and these relationships are routine. To strangers from another planet, what would be the most striking thing are the intimate passions no longer includes the illusion of eternity. Men and women are now used to living in exactly the same way and studying exactly the same things and having exactly the same career expectations. No man would think of ridiculing a female premed or prelaw student, or believe that these are fields not proper for women, or assert that medical schools are full of women, and their numbers are beginning to approach their proportion in the general population. There is very little ideology or militant feminism in most of the women, because they do not need it. The strident voices are present, and they get attention in the university newspapers and in student government. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

However, again, the battle has been won. Women students do not generally feel discriminated against or despised for their professional aspirations. The economy will absorb them, and they have rising expectations. They do not need the protection of NOW any more than do women in general, who see they are doing at least as well with Obama as they did with Biden. Academically, students are comfortably unisexual; they revert to dual sexuality only for the act of pleasures of the flesh. Pleasures of the flesh no longer has any political agenda in universities except among homosexuals, who are not yet quite satisfied with their situation. However, the fact that there is an open homosexual presence, with rights at least formally recognized by university authorities and almost all students, tell us much about current university life. Students today understandably believe that they are the beneficiaries of progress. They have a certain benign contempt for their parents, particularly for their poor mothers, who were inexperienced and had no profession to be taken as seriously as their fathers’. Superior experience in intimate passions was always one of the palpable advantages that parents and teachers had over youngsters who were eager to understand the mysteries of life. However, this is no longer the case, nor do students believe it to be so. They quietly smile at professors who try to shock them or talk explicitly about the facts of life in the way once so effective in enticing more innocent generations of students to pay attention to the word of their elders. Dr. Freud and D. H. Lawrence are very old hat. Better not to try. Even less do students expect to learn anything about their situation from old literature, which from the Garden of Eden on made coupling a very dark and complicated business. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

On reflection, today’s student wonder what all the fuss was about. Many think their older brothers and sisters discovered intimate passions. I was impressed by students who, in a course on Rousseau’s Confessions, were astounded to learn that he had lived with a woman out of wedlock in the eighteenth century. Where could he have gotten the idea? There is, of course, literature that affects a generation profoundly but has no interest at all for the next generation because its central theme proved ephemeral, whereas the greatest literature addresses the permanent problems of humans. When syphilis ceased to be a threat, Ibsen’s Ghosts, for example, lost all its force for young people. Aristotle teaches that pity for the plight of others requires that the same thing could happen to us. Now, however, the same things that used to happen to people, at least in the relations between the genders, do not happen to students anymore. And one must begin to wonder whether there is any permanent literature for them. This is the first fully historical or historicized generation, not only in theory but also in practice, and the result is not the cultivation of the vastest sympathies for long ago and far away, but rather an exclusive interest in themselves. Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are adulteresses, but the cosmos no longer rebels at their deed. Anna’s son today would probably have been awarded to her in the amicable divorce arrangements of the Karenins. All the romantic novels with their depictions of highly differentiated men and women, their steamy, sublimated sensuality and their insistence on the sacredness of the marriage bond just do not speak to any reality that concerns today’s young people. Neither do Romeo and Juliet, who must struggle against parental opposition, Othello and his jealousy, or Miranda’s carefully guarded innocence. Saint Augustine, as a seminarian told me, had hang-ups with intimate passions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

When young people today have crushing problems in what used to be called pleasures of the flesh, they cannot trace them back to any moral ambiguity in one’s intimate passions nature. That was, of course, what was erroneously done in the past. Had John Ruskin lived in prerevolutionary France rather than Victorian England, his medical certified virgin wife Effie’s divorce petition might have forced him into proving his virility the hard way. That is to say, he would have had to demonstrate before court-appointed witnesses that he could indeed stand at “attention.” Almost from the beginning, the Catholic Church condemned marital pleasures of the flesh for any reason but procreation. It forbade eunuch to marry because they could not breed. It also granted annulments to husbands or wives who could prove nonconsummation of pleasures of the flesh of their marriage, with best proof being medically authenticated virginity or impotence. (An important female, defined as “so narrow that she cannot be rendered large enough to have carnal relations with a man,” was a virtually uninvoked category in canon law.) In Catholic France, up to the mid-sixteenth century, “fraternal cohabitation” was cause for divorce only as a last resort. Then, suddenly, Churchmen turned the screws on marriage and the heyday of the impotence trials was born. These trials, which sound like a Jonathon Swift farce, were designed by ecclesiastics obsessed by the notion that an impotent man who married committed “an attack upon the authority of the Church.” The marriage itself they condemned as “a mortal sin,” a “sacrilege,” and “an insult to the sacrament and a profanation of its sanctity.” As if he did not have enough trouble, the impotent man was widely reputed to be extraordinarily lustful, given to secret vices outlawed in Christianity. These men supposedly enjoyed bizarre positions involving pleasures of the flesh that defiled the marriage bed. Furthermore, they were so lascivious that nothing could defuse their burning passion, which pleasure of the flesh merely inflamed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

In 1713, the unfortunate Marquis de Gesvres was subjected to an impotence trial, which discovered no such passions and was public, acrimonious, and ended only when his wife, the complainant, died. The marquis allegedly cuddled throughout the night, whispering tender pledges of love, but even when the marquise summoned up the courage to touch him, he “did hide himself in his nightshirt,” and held her hands for fear she would molest him. After this encounter, he exiled his wife to the country for ten months, where she contracted “nettle rash, smallpox, measles, and fever together with an infinity of alarming symptoms sch as the vapors and fainting fits.” When she finally returned to Paris, she was “half-dying.” The trial, sensational in its testimony, also engendered “poetry,” or narrative limerick, titillatingly descriptive. A sample: “Of a certain young Marquis it’s said he did nothing but sleep when in bed.” These trials demanded inspection of the genitals to prove that the man could achieve “attention.” Sometimes judges insisted on more elaborate evidence that the couple could consummate their marriage and called for “trial by congress,” which forced a husband and wife to attempt to copulate in front of staring, note-taking witnesses.” The Marquis de Gesvres’s trial judges confined themselves to the issues of “attention” and climax. As was routine after an inconclusive physical examination, the marquis had to demonstrate his ability, but could choose the locale and time of the experiment. Like most men, he preferred his own house. He was given more chances. Once, his examiners noted harshly that they had observed him at “attention,” but because of some inconsistences they discounted it as evidence of the ability to procreate. The experts scorned a later attempt at “attention” on the same grounds: more inconsistencies and inadequacies. “Critical and superstitious experts, just looking at you makes me wilt,” the despairing marquis complained. Had his virginal wife not soon expired, the marquis was certainly headed for a verdict of “Impotent!” #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Similarly humiliating invasions performed on women also did not necessarily lead to a conclusive verdict. Too many plausible excuses could explain away lead to a conclusive verdict. Too many plausible excuses could explain away any number of suspicious findings. For example, a virgin’s cervix might have dilated if, for example, she had manipulated it. Her private hair might be matted because of her style of horseback riding. And a broken membrane could be an attempt to cover up an impotent husband or by the examiners themselves, who pocked too hard “out of spite or ignorance.” The competence of the midwife examiners to whom women complainants were entrusted was problematic. Ideally, they ought to have been old enough to have experience, but young enough to have a steady hand and good eyesight. Unfortunately, they often lacked these qualities. Women’s examinations, usually for the virginity that they charged their husbands were incapable of eradicating, were horrendous. They were first bathed, to dissolve any material used to simulate virginity. A male jurist described how the woman had to pose before the examining midwives, matrons, and physician. They spent considerable time prodding at her private area, their expressions so solemn that the judge was visibly amused. The doctor was the worst offender, his invasive weapon either a specially designed, mirrored instrument or a wax tool. His extensive probing alone would deflower a virgin, the jurist protested, even if she had been intact before the examination began. The French Revolution put an end to these risible trials. Married became a civil contract, divorce laws were instituted, and when impotence inspire separation proceedings, civil rather then religious authorities dealt with the petition, sparing both defendant and complainant the ordeal of a Church trial. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The impotence trials were horrendous procedures that masked the human tragedy of unconsummated marriages, broken promises, dashed hopes, and individual despair. The fraudulent cases—women who resorted to artifice to simulate virginity, men who pretended they could neither harden nor climax—were just part of the larger picture of misery in marriage. The genuine cases, which were legion, transformed human frailty into canonical absurdity with a nearly scatological veneer. In the cases, at least one partner was a bitter celibate longing for release from frustration and childlessness. The Catholic Church, through theology and legislation, transformed impotent celibacy int the cruelest of human conditions. The use of history, Benjamin Nelson used to say, is to rescue from oblivion the lost causes of the past. History is especially important when those lost causes haunt us in the present as unfinished business. I have often spoke in this essay of the “missed revolutions that we have inherited.” My idea is that it is not with impunity that fundamental social changes fail to take place at the appropriate time; the following generations are embarrassed and confused by their lack. This subject warrants a special study. Some revolutions fail to occur; most half-occur or compromised, attaining some of their objectives and resulting in significant social changes, but giving up on others, resulting in ambiguous values in the social whole that would not have occurred if the change had been more thoroughgoing. For in general, a profound revolutionary program in any field projects a new workable kind of behavior, a new nature of man, a new whole society; just as the traditional society it tries to replace is a whole society that the revolutionists think is out of state. However, a compromised revolution tends to disrupt the tradition without achieving a new social balance. It is the argument of this report that the accumulation of the missed and compromised revolutions of modern times, with their consequent ambiguities and social imbalances, has fallen, and must fall, most heavily on the young, making hard to grow up. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

A man who has attained maturity and independence can pick and choose among the immense modern advances and somewhat wield them as his way of life. If he has a poor society, an adult cannot be very happy, he will not have simple goals nor achieve classical products, but he can fight and work anyway. However, for children and adolescents it is indispensable to have a coherent, fairly simple and viable society to grow up into; otherwise they are confused, and some are squeezed out. Tradition has been broken, yet there is no new standard to affirm. Culture becomes eclectic, sensational, or phony. (Our present culture is all three.) A successful revolution established a new community. A missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. And a compromised revolution tends to shatter the community that was, without an adequate substitute. However, are we argued in a previous essay, it is precisely for the young that the geographical and historical community and its patriotism are the important environment, as they draw away from their parents and until they can act on their own with fully developed powers. Let us collect the missed or compromised fundamental social changes that we have had occasion to mention; calling attention to what was achieved and what failed to be achieved, and the consequence confused situation which then actually confronts the youth growing up. Now that we know how much our children’s dreams are plagued by fears of a nuclear holocaust, it is time we adults did something about it. Since it would be immature, not to mention irresponsible, to actually eliminate nuclear weapons, what is needed is a new vocabulary of nuclear war, a vocabulary uncluttered by the associations which generate fear and trembling. It is disconcerting and unnecessarily emotional to talk of millions of people, especially if they are going to die. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

What could be more objective and detached, and at the same time more calming, than the statement, “Ten megatons kills twenty anthromegs”? Ask any man if he is willing to lose, say, 65 anthromegs if he could thereby defeat his nation’s enemy, and he will immediately say “Yes.” If you ask him if he is willing to lose 65 million people, he will become confused and depressed. If our nation’s enemy attacks us, they will not come with ice pellets. “Attack” means “nuclear attack.” Why provide ourselves with a double reminder, especially one so anxiety-producing? “Aerial visitation” will help to eliminate unreasonable fears about the future and will do more to encourage us to plan ahead with enthusiasm. Who could possibly get upset by a sign which says: “In Case of Aerial Visitation, Drive over Bridge”? Tell a man that in the event of an aerial visitation his child will be kept at school, and he will probably ask, “And when may I come to get him?” Men have invented an illustrious list of technical words to describe with precision and detachment the various types of killing. “Thermalicide” extends the list by one by providing us with an unemotional, scientific denotation of a perfectly natural, albeit unpleasant, human activity. Besides, there are far too many disgusting associations attached to “genocide.” “To culminate” means to reach one’s highest point, a virtual certainty when one has been exploded by a nuclear weapon. “To experience” means to undergo actively, another certainty when within range of a nuclear explosion. “Culminating experience” is, therefore, a perfectly precise description of the process. Even if the effect is the same, who would not prefer being filterated as against radiated. One filters cigarette smoke or swimming pools or lubricating oil. The word forcefully suggests that the result of the process is some sort of purity, a most apt connotation. For, after all, it is not purifying to suffer?  #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Although not much has been said about it lately, when the subject of fallout shelters comes up there is usually a considerable amount of hysteria. It is to be expected. What man would desire to live in a “shelter” even for a day? The word ominous. It hints at alienation and ultimate isolation. “Protective residence” is another matter. The term suggests an extension of one’s home—comfy, warm, intimate, familiar. Moreover, the moral question of whether or not you are obligated to allow others entrance is easily settled. A “shelter” connotes public domain, but a man’s “residence” is his castle. That is that. Is there a more desperate-sounding word in our language than “survivors”? It conjures up visions of groping, disoriented people and surrounding chaos. “The unculminated” logically follows from “culminating experience” and at the same time suggests unfulfilled ambitions, unsatisfied desires; in short, the continuation of life. The vocabulary presented above is, of course, only beginning—basic talk, as it were. In order to suggest how such a vocabulary might be used to create a new rhetoric of reassurance. American scientists assure us that our capacity for thermalicide is the greatest in the World. This fact will, of course, deter our enemies from attempting it on us. However, should our enemies decide to make aerial visitations, we will persevere. If every family has provided itself with a protective residence, the extent of filteration will be sharply minimized. And even if our enemies should launch a 300-megaton aerial visitation, probably no more than 50 or 60 anthromegs will have a culminating experience. Those who are unculminated may remain in their protective residences until al danger of thermalicide is past. Sleep in peace, my children. Science, as we have already seen, is simultaneously under attack by elements of the environmental movement—a movement that itself is increasingly taking on a religious character. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

As the end of the 20^th Century approached, a religious vacuum in Western society existed. In this circumstance, the contemporary environmental movement emerged as one way to fill the vacuum. For many of its followers today, environmentalism has been a substitute for fading mainline Christian and progressive faiths. While environmentalists do, of course, rely on scientific data, environmentalism is possessed of a strong missionary spirit. Moreover, its very language is “overtly religious: ‘saving’ the Earth from being sheared of all-natural life and pillage of resources; building ‘cathedrals’ in the wilderness; creating a new ‘Noah’s Ark’ with laws such as the Endangered Species Act; pursuing a new ‘calling’ to preserve the remaining wild areas; and taking steps to protect what is left of ‘The Creation’ on Earth.” At the heart of the environmental message is a new story of the fall of humankind from a previous, happier, and more natural and innocent time—a secular vision of the biblical fall from the Garden of Eden. Despite its modern appearance, environmentalism is closer to an old-fashioned form of religious fundamentalism. Now, the Web combines the technology of hypetext with technology of multimedia to deliver what is called “hypermedia.” It is not just words that are served up and electronically linked, but also images, sounds, and moving pictures. Just as the pioneers of hypertext once believed that links would provide a richer learning experience for readers, many educators also assumed that multimedia, or “rich media,” as it is sometime called, would deepen comprehension and strengthen learning. The more inputs, the better. However, this assumption, long accepted without much evidence, has also been contradicted by research. The division of attention demanded by multimedia further strains our cognitive abilities, diminishing our learning and weakening our understanding. When it comes to supplying the mind with the stuff of thought, more can be less. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

In a recent study, researcher recruited more than a hundred volunteers to watch a presentation about the country Mali played through a Web browser on a computer. Some of the subjects watched a version of the presentation that included only a series of text pages. Another group watched a version that included, along with the pages of text, a window in which an audiovisual presentation of related material was streamed. The test subjects were able to stop and start the stream as they wished. After viewing the presentation, the subjects too a ten-question quiz on the material. The text-only viewers answered an average of 7.04 of the questions correctly, while the multimedia viewers answered just 5.98 correctly—a significant difference, according to the researchers. The subjects were also asked a series of questions about their perceptions of the presentation. The text-only readers found it to be more interesting, more educational, more understanding, and more enjoyable than did the multimedia viewers, and the multimedia viewers were much more likely to agree with the statement, “I did not learn anything from this presentation” than were the text-only readers. The multimedia technologies so common to the Web, the researchers concluded, “would seem to limit, rather than enhance, information acquisition.” In another experiment, a pair of Cornell researchers divided a class of students into two group. One group was allowed to surf the Web while listening to a lecture. A log of their activity showed that they looked at sites related to the lecture’s content but also visited unrelated sites, checked their e-mail, went shopping, watched videos, and did all the other things that people do online. The second group heard the identical lecture but has to keep their laptops shut. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Immediately afterward, both groups took a test measuring how well they could recall the information from the lecture. The surfers, the researchers report, “performed significantly poorer on immediate measures of memory for the to-be-learned content.” It did not matter, moreover, whether they surfed information related to the lecture of completely unrelated content—they all performed poorly. When the researchers repeated the experiment with another class, the results were the same. We are required to discover on a deeper level what it means to be human. Given how critical it is to keep the production-consumption process flowing smoothly, advertising obviously occupies a place of considerable importance. It has been assigned to the specific duty of keeping people buying, buying, and therefore working, working, working to get the money to do so. It is the system invented to break the skin barrier, as it were, by entering the human being to reshape feelings and create more appropriate ones as need be. If suburbs are capitalism’s ideally separated buying units, and suburbs can be built profitably, then we must create humans who like and want suburbs; suburb-people, advertising has the task of creating them, in body and mind. Since before the creation of electric shavers or hair dryers or electric carvings knives people felt no need for these things, the need was implanted into human minds by advertising. Advertising is the instrument of transmutation. It lays the standard-gauge railways track from wilderness to human feeling, assisting in the transformation of both into a unified commercial form. Unplugged from our natural connection to the environment, we are replugged into a new consumer environment. To the degree that advertising reaches us, occupying our time and thought, it keeps us vibrating within strict limits. If forty million people have seen a commercial for a BMW F87 M2 with five-link rear axle made from forged aluminum, then forty million people have a car commercial in their heads, all at the same time. This is bound to have more beneficial effect on the commodity system than if, at the moment, all these people were thinking separate thoughts which, in some cases, might not be about commodities at all. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Of course, advertising people will argue against the notion that the purpose and result of their activities is to unify and homogenize people and culture. They are forever speaking of the dazzling array of choices our market system provides and how advertising provides the information we need to make choices. It is an ominous sign that so many people can accept this argument, which confuses diversity of product choice with diversity of lifestyle or thoughts. It ought to be self-evident that if I choose a BMW and you choose a Ford, we are not expressing diversity, we are expressing unity. Moreover, if you and I at any one moment are both occupied with mental images and feelings related to products—any products—rather than some experience which is not connected to purchasing, then in terms of the commodity system, the gross national product, and the World of advertising, we are indistinguishable; we have merged as “market.” While it might matter to Upjohn or Cutter Laboratories which drug a consumer buys, both are in agreement that they benefit whenever people seek any drug rather than a nondrug solution to a problem. Advertising, then, serves to further the moment of humans into artificial environments by narrowing the conception of diversity to fit the framework of commodities while unifying people within this conception. The result is a singularly channeled mentality, nicely open to receiving commercial messages, ready to confuse brand diversity with diversity itself, and to confuse human need with the advertiser’s need to sell commodities. That is why the task is to unite love and will. They are not united by automatic biological growth but must be part of our conscious development. In society, will tends to be set against love, and focused on product, materialism, and gain. But then, we are also at union with the Universe, we are wedded to it and have the experience of “union with being.” This union yields a satisfaction, calm happiness, self-acceptance and elation. People do not simply want to live to work, they also want to enjoy instant gratification, which is the beauty of living in America. Where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness reigns. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Close Out!

Residence Four at Brighton Station is one of the largest homes available in the market! At 3,501 square feet we are sure you’ll have enough room for the entire family here! The open concept design includes four bedrooms, three and one half bathrooms and a three car garage. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-4/

When entering this expansive home, take note of the two story ceiling height at the entry. There is a bedroom on the first floor, located off the entry, with its own bathroom making it ideal for a guest suite or multigenerational living. The formal dining room provides ample space for entertaining and has convenient access to the kitchen via Butler’s Pantry.

The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters and opens onto the spacious great room.

Upstairs you’ll find the Owner’s retreat, two bedrooms, and the loft perfect for a game room or TV lounge. The Owner’s retreat is spacious and inviting with a large bedroom and spa like bathroom featuring a free-standing soaking tub, walk-in shower, dual vanities, and two walk-in closets.

#CresleighHomes