It is Necessary to Focus on the Boundless Inclusion of the Heart

In the movie The Manchurian Candidate, an American soldier is captured by the enemy and subjected to mind-control procedures that turn him into an assassin. The same theme—the brainwashing of the individual—forms the basis for the study of everything from consumer behavior and cults to suicide bombers. In brainwashing, it is far more effective to change why a person thinks the way he does than what he thinks. This means altering the filters he uses to determine truth. This applies not just to individual brainwashing, but to social and cultural brainwashing, as well. A large body of research examines the way advertisers and the media attempt to manipulate us all. A sizeable literature also exists describing the way dominant elites manipulated colonial populations psychologically and culturally to ensure their political passivity. What has been less noticed and studied, however, are the ways in which entire economies and cultures are affected by changes in their definitions of truth. One reason for this omission is that these changes occur over long stretches of time and often beneath awareness at the individual level. What we can say, however, is that each revolutionary wave was accompanied by significant changes in the filters people relied on to determine truth or falsity—and that these influenced the amount and types of wealth produced. During the Enlightenment and the early days of the industrial revolution, people in the West stopped believing in the divine right of kinds and proceeded to topple their monarchs. The subsequent rise of democracy, with its reliance on voting and majority rule, made large-scale consensus a more important truth-filter than ever before, and not just in politics. Later the introduction of mass education, sending uniform messages to the young, further favored consensus as a test of truth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

As living standards gradually improved and wealth spread, industrialization led to useful new products, from clocks and sewing machines to automobiles, and people came to value the new, not just the durable old. Beliefs were no longer necessarily true because they were ancient. They could, therefore, be challenged. The most important of these changes was the relative devaluation of religious authority that followed the rise of science. People did not easily or completely cast off their reliance on religious authority, but they increasingly turned elsewhere for answers when new problems arose. The priest or minister was no longer the only, or best, source of knowledge. Changes like these did not happen without conflict. It was a battle that science gradually won, not by eradicating religious authority but by overthrowing its claims to be the sole basis of universal, ultimate truth. This shift—narrowing the range of religious authority and widening that of science—contributed to the rise and predominance of secularism wherever the Second Wave brought an industrial economy, society and culture. Today once again a subtle battle over truth is taking place. As we move farther into the twenty-first century, and more societies develop economies based on ideas, culture, and wealth-relevant knowledge why we believe what we believe becomes more critical than ever. Every culture, at every moment, has a truth profile—the weights people assign to the different truth filters. As these weights shift, they influence decision-making at every level from the most personal to the political and corporate. Try talking a consensus-oriented CEO out of pursuing synergy when he or she sees competitors chasing the same greyhound around the track. Or, if you lack the paper credentials or plaque on the wall that supposedly make you one, try selling a new idea, no matter how good, to a boss impressed by authority. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

The revolutionary economy will carry many products and services beyond mass customization to full personalization—that is, even greater diversity. Similarly, job and work will follow a greater diversity of schedules in more dispersed locations. These changes will be paralleled by the growing diversity of family formats, implying that more individualized children, with different growing-up experiences, will have less in common. Such changes point to further de-massification of industrial mass society—making it harder for elites, or anyone else, to engineer consensus. Under these conditions, the belief that consensus validates truth seems likely to lose some of its validity. What about age or durability as a truth test—the conviction that any idea that has lasted for centuries or millennia must be true? The acceleration of change may induce nostalgia in many, and mind manipulators take advantage of it. However, the invasion of newness into the economy is inescapable, and the current generation, at least, wants not only what is new but the very latest. In earlier, relatively unchanging societies, the old were respected not, as we are so often told, because they knew the past but because they know the future—which, when it arrived, was little more than a replication of the past. Today, given the rate of change, a vast amount of old knowledge is obsoledge, unlikely to help the young make their way. And they treat it as such. The chicken-soup formula for testing truth may work. However, do not count on it. What about authority, then? Will generations to come slavishly genuflect to authorities? And, if so, what kind? Today wherever the knowledge-based economy spreads, expertise-based authority is being challenged as never before. Patients now question and sometimes contradict their doctors. Bloggers challenge the authority of professional journalist. Amateurs take on professionals—and not just on television shows. Celebrities run against, and increasingly beat, professional politicians. And amateurs with computers can now direct, produce and act in their own movies. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

At the same time, a long list of institutional failures, disasters and corporate scandals, along with nonconsensual abuse of pleasures of the flesh in Hollywood, all undermine confidence in established authority—and the truths that it supposedly validates. It is in light of this generalized revolt against industrial-era authority that today’s attack on the authority of science needs to be seen. The difference is that science remains the most potent mind tool we have for increasing prosperity and well-being. Science is key to designing better, smarter, safer technology, to mapping and solving environmental crises and to stopping pandemics like COVID-19. We will need science to lower our reliance on fossil fuels, to provide better security, to advance medicine and to reduce wealth disparities between city and country, nation and nation. Problems like these will be solved by decisions based no on lemming-like consensus, or religious revelation, or blind acceptance of authority but on truths observed, subjected to experiment and open to continual challenge and revision as additional knowledge is acquired. In short, the future of revolutionary wealth will depend more and more on how science is used—and respected—in society. Science and the basic method on which it relies will change as its practitioners tackle strange new and recalcitrant problems and profound ethical issues in genetics, biology and other fields, as they reach down beyond nanoscience to ever smaller phenomena and up to the expanding cosmos. However, those who wish to blindfold or silence science would not merely shrink tomorrow’s wealth and indirectly slow the alleviation of poverty but return humanity to the physical and mental poverty of the Dark Ages. We must not allow the end of the Enlightenment to be followed by an anti-science darkening. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

The United States of America is the most radical society in the World. It is in the process of conducting a vast, uncontrolled social experiment which poses the question, Can a society preserve any of its traditional virtues by submitting all of its institutions to the sovereignty of technology? Those of us who live in America and who are inclined to say “No” are therefore well placed to offer warnings to our European cousins—who are themselves wondering whether or not to participate fully in such an experiment. In order to give focus to our advice, we shall confine ourselves to the technology of television, which, at the moment, poses the most serious threat to traditional patterns of life in all industrialized nations, including your own. And, if we begin by questioning Karl Marx, we hope you will forgive us. Mr. Marx once wrote, “There is a specter haunting Europe.” The specter he had in mind was the rising up of the proletariat. The specter we have in mind is commercial television. Everywhere one looks in Europe—Germany, Sweden, France, Holland, Switzerland, Denmark—the ghostly form of commercial television is making its presence felt. That it threatens the foundations of each West European nation ought to be obvious, but, one fears, the possibility has not been sufficiently discussed. In Paris alone there are seven advertisers-supported television stations, and now an eighth one has been installed in three Paris subway stations. It consists of 150 closed-circuit units, each unit carrying thirty minutes of programming: four minutes of news about the subway system, sixteen minutes’ worth of programs, and ten minutes of advertising. The ads cost $104,700 for a thirty-second spot. In the understatement of the year, the marketing director of the Paris subway system said, “It’s a way of changing the ambience of the subway station.” Of course, this man has confused cause and effect. If the French require television entertainment when they go from one end of town to the other, then we may say that it is not the ambience of the subway that has changed but the ambience of French culture. We may take “ambience” to mean, here, the psychic habits of the people. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Commercial interests dominate television all around the World. However, some countries have state-controlled broadcasting. The United States of America used to have state-controlled broadcasting. Conservatives were rightly suspicious of state authority and therefore of state-controlled television, and they need not be so foolish as to supposed that the state is only antagonist of freedom of choice. If one asks the question, Does a state-controlled television system limit freedom of expression and choice?, the answer is, obviously, Yes, it does. However, it is extremely naïve to believe that a free-market television system does not also limit freedom. In the United States of America, where television is now controlled by advertising revenues, its principal function is, naturally enough, to deliver audiences to advertisers. The more popular a program is, the more money it can charge an advertiser for commercials. The popular television show Chicago PD costs approximately $5 million per episode and an ad 30 second ad costs about $169,506 per advertisement. What is popular pays and therefore stays; what is in arrears disappears. American television limits freedom of expression and choice because it is only criterion of merit and significance is popularity. And this, in turn, means that almost anything that is not action packed or too intellectual goes against the grain of popular prejudices and will not be seen. However, if you look at the history of television, all shows used to be much calmer and more peaceful and nonsexual. As times changes so does the TV. Commercial television increased the pressure to extend the number of hours of television broadcasting each day. There is simply too much money at stake to allow any part of the day to go unused. Where there is one fully functioning commercial channel, there will be pressure for others to emerge. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

When there are two or more fully functioning commercial channels, the channels will compete with each other for the audience’s attention, and for advertising money. This will lead to an increase in television programs—fast-paced, visually dynamic programs with an emphasis on interesting images mixed with serious content to draw the viewer in and hook them. This means an increase in comedy, car chases, violence, and blockbuster film type action. People are so busy that they need heart wrenching storylines to pull them in. Because the audience has such little time, due to their work and school schedules, many people are tuning into digital streaming, and that platform has most of the top-rated shows. So TV producers are doing whatever it takes to keep the consumer interested. As for other countries, to hold their audiences, state-controlled channels will be forced to compete with commercial-style programming, and will also become similar to America television. As audiences come to expect fast-paced, visually exciting programs, they will begin to find issue-oriented public-affairs and news programs dull. To compete with entertainment programs, news and public-affairs programs will become more visual and more personality-oriented. As a result, there will be a decline in the public’s capacity to understand and discuss events and issues in a serious way. Of course, television advertising will draw advertisers away from newspapers and magazines. Some newspapers and magazines will go out of business; others will change their format and style to compete with television for audiences, and to match the style of thought promoted by television. They will become more picture-oriented and will feature dramatic headlines, celebrities, and sensational stories. Of course, there will be less substantive and complex writing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

For some idea of that is going on, look at one of the most successful national newspapers, USA Today; you ought also to take note of the fact that one of America’s oldest and most distinguished literary magazines, Harper’s, has found it necessary to reduce attention span of its readers. The necessity for ever-growing markets, the need to create new need, the search for nuances of artificial discontent within previous artificial discontent have required delving ever more deeply inside the human psyche to root out more subtle aspects of the experience. Thousands of psychologists, behavioural scientists, perceptual researchers, sociologists, and others have found extremely high salaries and steady, interesting work aiding advertisers. Like miners seeking new deposits of coal in the mountains, these social scientists attempt to mine the internal wilderness of human beings. Once the most obvious feelings have been catalogued, reshaped and developed, these people advance inward to the more subtle veins. This delving can be amazingly thorough. Stanford Research Institute (SRI), one of the larger employers of social scientist doing marketing and advertising research, recently listed eighteen inner feelings of “an outdoor sportsman.” They ranged from “love of nature” to “a desire to put down one’s stay-at-home friends.” In its monthly publication, Investments in Tomorrow, Stanford Research Institute literally catalogs new areas where human feeling can be converted into needs. In the July 1975 issue, for example, it presents new opportunities to reach people who have pets, who do home handicrafts, or who see the wilderness experience. These are all interesting categories because they commercialize aspects of human experience which became packageable only when humans were separated from any direct experience of them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Handicrafts, animals and wilderness became advertisable at the time when they became scarce. Not too long ago they were the stuff of daily life. The fact that most of us are uncomfortable in nature, frightened of it, makes the sale of commodities to mediate the experience—chemicals to keep the bugs off, glasses for fifteen varieties of sunlight, shoes for one kind of walking and boots for another kind—far easier to accomplish then before. Fear is one of the most desirable emotions for advertisers. Loneliness and self-doubt are good ones. So is competition. One SRI category of market opportunity was particularly poignant: “self-discovery and inner exploration.” SRI lists some market opportunities and appropriate appeals for biofeedback machines, courses in self-improvement, books, workshops, gurus and meditation systems. These are all marketable now that humans have been separated from their inner experience was separable from “outer” experience was unknown. There was no such difference. The outer and the inner were one; if one did not take that attitude, there was not even the possibility of survival. Now, however, we are so outwardly focused that inner experience has itself entered the realm of scarcity, making it packageable and capable of being sold back to us as commodity. Our inner lives are now promotable as products. We get to buy back what we already had. There is an obscure movement of European intellectuals who call themselves “Situationists” and who have developed a comprehensive analysis of the process of removing inner life, in fact all human feeling, from one’s immediate experience of it and then reprocessing it and selling it back. Writers like Guy Debord depict capitalist society as consisting of creatures who are redesigned to live life as a representation of itself. He compares this society with others, which lack the profit motive and, therefore, does not need for find desirable the exportation of inner experience. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

The role of advertising, the Situationists say, is to create a World of mirrors in which people can obtain new images of themselves that fit the purposes of the overall system. Through this mirror function and by its expropriation of the inner experience, advertising makes the human into a spectator of his or her own life. It is alienation to the tenth power. Life itself becomes a spectacle. By entering the human being’s inner sanctum, our inner wilderness, advertising effectively pulls our feelings up out of ourselves, displays them and sells them back to us like iron from the ground. Our inner feelings are transmogrified into a new form—commodities. We desperately seek to get them back, and pay high prices for the privilege. The Situationists are correct. Whenever we buy a product, we are paying for the recovery of our own feelings. We have thereby turned into creatures who are the commodities we buy. We are the product we pay for and all life is reduced to serving this cycle. Life and commodity achieve absolute merger; the ultimate stage in the inexorable drive of the system to convert all raw material into “valuable” commercial form. Advertising is the internal delivery system for this bizarre process. There is one additional factor, however. Advertising itself requires a delivery system. This has been the role of the mass media. All the media have done an excellent job of placing advertising inside people’s heads, but some are better at it than others. The decay of the natural ground for the family relationships was largely unanticipated and unprepared for in the early modern thinkers. TV has been one of the catalysts. The early thinkers did suggest a certain reform of the family, reflecting the movement away from the constraints of duty, toward reliance on those elements of the family that could be understood to flow out of free expressions of personal sentiment. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

In Mr. Lock, parental authority is turned into parental authority, a rejection of a father’s and a mother’s right to care for their children as long as they need care, for the sake of the children’s freedom—which the child will immediately recognize, when he reaches majority, to have been for his own benefit. There is nothing left of the reverence toward the father as the symbol of the divine on Earth, the unquestioned bearer of authority. Rather, sons and daughters will calculate that they have benefited from their parents’ care, which prepared them for the freedom they enjoy, and they will be grateful, although they have no reciprocal duty, expect in so far as they wish to leave behind a plausible model for the conduct of their own children toward them. They may, if they please and if he has one, obey their father in order to inherit his estate, which he can dispose of as he pleases. From the point of view of the children, the family retains its validity on the basis of modern principles, and Mr. Locke prepares the way for the democratic family, so movingly described by Tocqueville in Democracy in America. So far, so good. The children are reconciled to the family. However, the problem, it seems to me, is in the motive of the parents to care for their children. The children can say to their parents: “You are strong, and we are weak. Use your strength to help us. You are rich, and we are poor. Spend your money on us. You are wise, and we are ignorant. Teach us.” However, why should mother and father want to do so much, involving so much sacrifice without any reward? Perhaps parental care is a duty, or family life has great joys. However, neither of these is a conclusive reason when rights and individual autonomy hold sway. The children have unconditional need for and receive unquestionable benefits from the parents; the same cannot be asserted about parents. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Mr. Locke believed, and the events of our times seem to confirm his belief, that women have an instinctive attachment to children that cannot be explained as self-interest or calculation. The attachment of mother and child is perhaps the only undeniable natural social bond. It is not always effective, and it can, without effort, be suppressed, but it is always a force. And this is what we see today. However, what about the father? Maybe he loves imagining his own eternity through the generations stemming from him. However, this is only an act of imagination, one that can be attenuated by other concerns and calculations, as well as by losing faith in the continuation of his name for very long in the shifting conditions of democracy. Of necessity, therefore, it was understood to be the woman’s job to het hold the man by her charms and wiles because, by nature, nothing else would induce him to give up his freedom in favor of the heavy duties of family. However, women no longer wish to do this, and they, with justice, consider it unfair according to the principles governing us. So the cement that bound the family together crumbled. It is not the children who break away; it is the parents who abandon them. Women are no longer willing to make unconditional and perpetual commitments on unequal terms, and no matter what they hope, nothing can effectively make most men share equally the responsibilities of childbearing and child-rearing. The devoice rate is only the most striking symptom of this breakdown. None of this results the sixties, or from any other superficial, pop-culture events. More than two hundred years ago Mr. Rousseau saw with alarm the seeds of the breakdown of the family in liberal society, and he dedicated much of his genius to trying to correct it. He found that the critical connection between man and woman was being broken by individualism, and focused his efforts, theoretical and practical, on encouraging passionate romantic love in them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

He wanted to rebuild and reinforce that connection, previously encumbered by now discredited religious and civil regulation, on modern grounds of desire and consent. He retraced the picture of nature that had become a palimpsest under the abrasion of modern criticism, and he enticed men and women into admiring its teleological ordering, specifically the complementarity between the two genders, which mesh and set the machine of life in motion, each differing from and needing the other, from the depths of the body to the height of the soul. Mr.Rousseau set utter abandon to the sentiments and imaginations of idealized love against calculation of individual interests. Mr. Rousseau inspired a whole genre of novelistic and poetic literature that lived feverishly for over a century, coexisting with the writings of the Benthams and the Mills who were earnestly at work homogenizing the genders. His undertaking had the heaviest significance because human community was at risk. In essence he was persuading women freely to be different from men and to take on the burden of entering a beneficial contract with the family, as opposed to a negative, individual, self-protective contract with the state. Tocqueville picked up this theme, described the absolute differentiation of husband’s wife’s functions and ways of life in the American family, and attributed the success of America democracy to its women, who freely chose their lot. This he contrasted to the disorder, nay, chaos, of Europe, which he attributed to a misunderstanding or misapplication of the principle of equality—only an abstraction when not informed by nature’s imperatives. This whole effort failed and now arouses either women’s anger, as an attempt to take from them rights guaranteed to all human beings, or their indifference, as irrelevant in a time when women do exactly the same things as men and face the same difficulties in ensuring their independence. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

Romantic love is now alien to us as knight-errantry, and young men are no more likely to court a woman than to wear a suit of armor, not only because it is not fitting, but because it would be offensive to women. As a student exclaimed to me, with approval of his fellow, “What do you expect me to do? Play a guitar under some girl’s window?” Such a thing seemed as absurd to him as swallowing goldfish. However, the parents of this same young man, it turned out, were divorced. He strongly, if incoherently, expressed his distress and performed the now ritualistic incantation for roots. Here Mr. Rousseau is the most helpful, for he honestly exposed the nerve of that incantation, whereas the discussion of roots is an evasion. There is a passage in Emile, his educational novel, which keeps coming back to me as I look at my students. It occurs in the context of the teacher’s arrangement with the parents of the pupil whose total education he is undertaking, and in the absence of any organic relation between husbands and wives and parents and children after having passed through the solvent of modern theory and practice: “I would even want the pupil and the governor to regard themselves as so inseparable that the lot of each in life is always a common object from them. As soon as they envisage from afar their separation, as soon as they foresee the moment which is going to make them strangers to one another, they are already strangers. Each set up his own little separate system; and both engrossed by the time they will no longer be together, stay only reluctantly.” That is it. Everyone has “his own little separate system.” The aptest description I can find for the state of students’ souls is the psychology of separateness. The possibility of separation is already the fact of separation, inasmuch as people today must plant to be whole and self-sufficient, and cannot risk interdependence. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

What would, in the case of union, be a building stones becomes a stumbling block on the path to secession. The goals of those who are together naturally and necessarily must become a common good; what one must live with can be accepted. However, there is no common good for those who are to separate. The presence of choice already changes the character of relatedness. And the more separation there is, the more there will be. Death of a parent, child, husband, wife or friend is always a possibility and sometimes a fact, but separation is something very different because it is an international rebuff to the demand for reciprocity of attachment which is the heart of these relations. People can continue to live while related to the dead beloved; they cannot continue to be related to a living beloved who no longer loves or wishes to be loved. This continual shifting of the sands in our desert—separation from places, persons, beliefs—produces the psychic state of nature where reserve and timidity are the prevailing dispositions. We are social solitaries. There is another source of the tragic aspect of love. This is the fact that we are created as male and female, which leads to perpetual yearning for each other, a thirst for completion which is doomed to be temporary. This is another source of joy and disappointment, ecstasy and despair. You can be too thin, there is something called anorexic celibacy. She is stick-thin, and if we could see under the baggy sweatshirt and pants, we would gasp at her withered thighs and bony rear end. I bet her flesh is cold with its furring of soft, fine hair. Sniff, and turn sharply from her. Observe and marvel at how this emaciated woman jogs with the dedication of a marathoner, then caps this feat with one hundred perfect sit-ups. Later, she sips spring water so sparingly that hours later, the small bottle is still nearly full. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Sometime that day she might eat—nibble is more exact. An apple perhaps, or a piece of dry bagel. This, in its way, is another miraculous performance, for whom could have imagined that one small apple could last three hours, then be stashed away in the fridge only half-gnawed, neatly wrapped in Saran Wrap, for tomorrow’s sustenance? What else do we see as we watch this gaunt young woman stalk through her day, minute by orchestrated minute? She sleeps rather a lot, for merely existing overtakes her meager resources, and she does not merely exist. She is a perfectionist whose life is geared to the mechanics of self-imposed starvation. She exercises relentlessly, working off bulges and softness only she perceives. She may continue with her studies, perhaps falling behind as her priorities subtly change and she devotes every iota of her energy to her brutal regimen. Oddly, she will hide her hard-won leanness under bulky clothing instead of flaunting it before her more voluptuous peers. In other ways, too, she is secretive. If she sometimes succumbs to an overwhelming urge to eat, she gobbles forbidden food, which is mostly everything but lettuce, raw vegetables, and unbuttered bread, wolfing it down into her deprived system. However, it will not stay there for long. Almost immediately she will panic at the crimes she has committed and remedy it. She will stuff herself with the laxatives she is never without or lock herself in the bathroom with the shower running full blast so nobody can hear her as she insets a practiced finger down her throat and efficiently vomits up every morsel she has just consumed. She no longer menstruates, and her body resembles that of a famished child. She is uninterested in pleasures of the flesh, for her little remaining strength is exhausted by her daily routine. She has nothing left to give and has withdrawn her carnality into herself, devouring it as she no longer devours nourishing food. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

However, you simply must eat, her horrified mother/doctor/sister implores her. She smiles beatifically, for she knows better. She has no intention of eating. She is, for the first time in her life, in utter control of every moment of each day, of every inch of her shrunken but obedient body. If she cannot be stopped, and if no medical intervention is made, she will often continue to refuse food and die. Sadly, this young woman is legion. She is the classic case of anorexia nervosa. She generally comes from a comfortable family whose high standards, like society’s expectations, she believes she fails to meet. The main theme [of the disease] is a struggle for control, for a sense of identity, competence, and effectiveness. The eminent psychiatrist Pierre Janet analyzed the stages and progress of the disease and concluded that anorexia nervosa is “due to a deep psychological disturbance, of which the refusal of food is but the outer expression.” One of its many consequences, apart from permanent infertility or even death, is asexual celibacy. As her chest and rear end shrivel and her energy flags, the starving woman is more concerned with her regimen of strenuous exercise than the disappearance of her menstrual periods. This amenorrhea is accompanied or followed by asexuality, a diminution or annihilation of pleasures of the flesh interests or desire. The full-fledged anorexic, secreting her ravaged body from prying eyes, is indifferent to her losses, having gained in their place near total control over her bodily functions. Here is the celibacy of starvation, and she experiences it with indifference, so obsessed is she with bodily self-control. The first documented case of anorexia nervosa was the thirteenth century’s Princess Margaret of Hungary, declared a saint in the twentieth century. So many medieval female saints fasted to the point of starvation, however, and from such vastly differ motives from today’s anorexics, that “holy anorexia” is considered a unique category. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Today, one theory is that, in general, the disorder “is a manifestation of anxiety over, and avoidance of, maturing sexuality.” It is equally true that the biochemical consequences of anorexia eventually dictate asexuality. These chicken-and-egg, egg-and-chicken scenarios apply in different measure to different people and underscore the strong link between sexuality and eating disorders. Even today, anorexic women and men are much less likely than their nonanorexic sisters and bothers to be involved in an erotic/romantic relationship or to be married. As the disease progresses to the acute stage, victims become asexual beings. The same biochemical imbalance that halts menstruation also impacts the drive for pleasures of the flesh. Whether at the outset or at the end of the journey, impaired sexuality is the handmaiden of anorexia nervosa. One must also remember that anorexic people are not always thin, especially in early stages of the disease. As anorexia proceeds inexorably through Western populations, consuming its victims, studies about it also proliferate—diagnosis, treatment, causes. Feminist psychologist often interpret it as a protest against patriarchal and misogynist society in the form of a refusal to participate in “adult” intimate passions. One version of this thesis maintains that anorexics equate food, with all carnality, which they strive to control by denying it. Anorexia is link with both feminine curves and menstruation, with a subversion of the traditional curvaceous female shape, totally obliterating the body to a childlike form. The anorexic is oddly desexualized and may be a symbolic of the confusing messages modern society sends its women: nurture and feed others, but restrain your own intake, lest you swell up and exceed the new standard of femineity as slenderly chic. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Other experts believe that for overstressed, overstretched women, food is both a symbol and actual substitute for pleasures of the flesh. This metaphor is extended with grotesque logic to jaw-wiring, a version of a chastity belt, which prevents the consummation of eating/pleasures of the flesh by damming shut the craving cavity. In this bleak parallel, food/pleasures of the flesh equals anorexia/celibacy, and the jaw-wiring is the chastity belt that guarantees its wearer will remain pure. As mentioned previously, although anorexia is primarily a female condition, males are not immune. German writer Franz Kafka is a famous example. Even as a youngster, Kafka had eating problems. He fasted rigorously, abstaining from meat and, later, alcohol, to ensure physical purity and strength his affinity with nature. At the same time, he fantasized about gluttonous binges, larded his writings with over five hundred food-related passages, and savored the sight of other people eating. He also flung himself into physical activities, notably swimming, gymnastics, and running. The result of this lifestyle was, of course, extreme thinness, which Mr. Kafka agonized over. “I am the thinnest human being I know,” he confided. Like most anorexics, Mr. Kafka suffered impaired pleasures of the flesh. From childhood, his psychosexual development was “disturbed” and the act of pleasures of the flesh appalled him. Several psychiatrists have attempted retroactive psychoanalysis. Among other factors, one psychiatrist mentions “the problematic development of his [Mr. Kafka’s] sexual identity,” another of his “simulated asceticism in the form of an aversion to filth.” The evidence of Mr. Kafka’s anorexia is overpowering, the suggestion that it had a quasi-sexual locus strong though unprovable. Ultimately, whether anorexics are female or male, the latter stage of their disease strips them of the physical powers of pleasures of the flesh. Their impotence probably reinforced their initial desire to stave off sexual maturity—most anorexics begin their tumultuous journey in adolescence or soon afterward. It also fulfills their ambivalence, fear, or outright loathing of pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Beyond the influx of person messages we get from TV and the Internet—not only e-mail but also instant messages and text messages—the Web increasingly supplies us with all manner of other automated notification, and some are desirable. Feed readers and news aggregators let us know whenever a new story appears at a favorite publication or blog. Social networks alert us to what our friends are doing, often moment by moment. Twitter and other microblogging services tell us whenever one of the people we follow online broadcasts a new message. We can also set up alerts to monitor shifts in the value of our investments, news reports about particular people or events, updates to the software we use, new videos uploaded to YouTube, and so forth. Depending on how many information streams we subscribe to and the frequency with which they send out updates, we may field a dozen alerts an hour, and for the most connected among us, the number can be much higher. Each of them is a distraction, another intrusion on our thoughts, another bit of information that takes up precious space in our working memory. Navigating the Web requires a particularly intensive form of mental multitasking. In addition to flooding our working memory with information, the juggling imposes what brain scientists called “switching costs” on our cognition. Every time we shift our attention, our brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources. The brain takes time to change goals, remember the rules needed for the new task, and block out cognitive interference from the previous, still-vivid activity. Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impending our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we will overlook or misinterpret important information. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

In one simple experiment, a group of adults was shown a series of colored shapes and asked to make predictions based on what they saw. They had to perform the task while wearing headphones that played a series of beeps. In one trial, they were told to keep track of the number of beeps. After each go through, they completed a test that required them to interpret what they had just done. In both trials, the subjects made predictions with equal success. However, after the multitasking trial, they had a much harder time drawing conclusions about their experience. Switching between the two tasks short-circuited their understanding; they got the job done, but they lost its meaning. If you learn them while you are distracted, our results suggest that learning facts and concepts will be worse. On the Net, where we routinely juggle not just two but several mental tasks, the switching costs are all the higher. It is important to emphasize that the Net’s ability to monitor events and automatically send out messages and notifications is one of its great strengths as a communication technology. We rely on that capability to personalize the workings of the system, to program the vast database to respond to our particular needs, interest, and desires. We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated. The near-continuous stream of new information pumped out by the Web also plays to our natural tendency to vastly overvalue what happens to us right now. Even when we know tht the new is more often trivial than essential, we still crave the new. And so we ask the Internet to keep interrupting us, in even more and different ways. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive. Tuning out s not an option many of us would consider. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21