We know that in the World, there is good and evil, and also Right and Wrong. Good usually has to deal with what is pure, peaceful, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and virtuous fruits, with out partiality, and without hypocrisy. We have a choice. We can seek for the bad in others. Or we can make peace and work to extend to others the understanding, fairness, and forgiveness we so desperately desire for ourselves. It is our choice; for whatever we seek, that we will certainly fine. Right and Wrong is concerned with its place in humans’ observation of the human World, Images with its place in the personal development of the individual human. The first deal with the apparent contradiction which holds sway in the soul. Here an answer is sought to the question, “Why is evil so powerful?”, there to the questions, “What is the origin of evil?” Evil usually has to deal with a bad state of affairs, wrongful action, or character flaw. A person with an impure will does not attempt to perform morally right actions just because these actions are morally right. Instead, one performs morally right actions partly because these are morally right and partly because of some other incentive, exempli gratia, self-interest. Someone with impure will performs morally right actions, but only partly for the right reasons. This form of defect in the will is worse than frailty, even though the frail person does wrong while the impure person does right. Impurity is worse than frailty because an impure person has allowed an incentive other than the moral law to guide one’s actions while the frail person tries, but fails, to do the right thing for the right reason. The final stage of corruption I perversity, or wickedness. Someone with a perverse will inverts the proper order of the incentives.

Instead of prioritizing the moral law over all other incentives, one prioritizes self-love over the moral law. Thus, if they are in one’s self-interest, one’s actions conform to the moral law. Someone with a perverse will need not do anything wrong because actions which best promote one’s self-interest may conform to the moral law. However, since the reason one performs morally right actions is self-love and not because these actions are morally right, one’s actions have no moral worth and, one’s will manifests the worst form of evil possible for a human being. Someone with a perverse will is considered an evil person. Thus one can describe Images of Good and Evil as an interpretation because it proceeds from several Old Israelitic and Persians myths. Right and Wrong is interpretation in another sense. However, everything depends on the inner change; when this has taken place, and only then, the World changes. The lie is the specific evil which humans have introduced into nature. All our deeds of violence and our misdeeds are only as it were a highly-bred development of what this and that creature of nature is able to achieve in its own way. However, the lie is the humans’ very own invention, different in kind from every deceit that the animals can produce. A lot was possible only after a creature, man, was capable of conceiving the being of truth. It was possible only as directed against the conceived truth. In a lie the spirit practices treason against itself. Therefore, every injustice is considered from its social aspect (in the widest sense), as injury done to the neighbour’s sphere of life, and not in itself, as injury done to the structure of the spirit. As a lie spreads and grows, the speaker no longer suffers merely lairs, but from a generation of the lie, and the lie in this generation has reached the highest level of perfection as ingeniously controlled means of supremacy.

When people lie, sometimes it becomes a habit, and they become so disappeared completely that the basis of human common life has been removed. The lie has taken the place, as a form of life, of human truth, that is, of the undivided seriousness of the human person with oneself and all one’s manifestations. Of this element of the lie which now dominates human intercourse three things are said, in relation to its effect, to its structure, and its purpose. First, one’s mind speaks “delusions”—which of course does not mean that one suffers from a vain in misconception and express it, but with their speech they breed “delusion” in their hearers, they spin illusions for them; in particular they spin a way of thinking for them which they themselves do not follow. Instead of completing their fellow humans’ experience and insight with the help of their own, as is required by humans common thinking and knowing, they introduce falsified material into one’s knowledge of the World and of life, and thus falsify the relations of one’s soul to being. Second, they speak with a double heart, literally “with heart and heart.” The duplicity is not just between heart and mouth, but actually between heart and heart. In order that the lie may bear the stamp of truth, the liars as it were manufacture a special heart, an apparatus which functions with the greatest appearance of naturalness, from which lies well up to the “smooth lips” like spontaneous utterances of experience and insight. Third, all this is the work of the mighty, in order to render tractably by their deceits those whom they have oppressed. Their tongues maintain them in their superiority. They “speak great things” and by the speaking bind their bondslaves still more to them. And if they guess that rebellion is stirring in the minds of the oppressed and the hope is awakening that “the Lord is with us!”, then they answer themselves “Our lips are with us, who is lord over us?”

Hopefully as the presumption is whispering in their secret hearts, one will hear God speaking. God says that seeing the oppression of the poor, and hearing the sighing of the needy, He will “now” arise. With this “now” there breaks out in the midst of extreme trouble the manifestation of a salvation which is not just bound to come some time, but is always present and needs only to become effective. This “now” is the decisive prophetic category. The “day on the Lord,” on which the enthroned One “arises,” and for terror and for rapture reveals His kingdom, which was the hidden meaning of creation from the beginning, is, in the power of the prophetic vision, this very present day. The heirs of this vision, know that the “arising” means both judgment and the freeing of all the oppressed of the Earth. They will dwell in a World of salvation. No judgment beyond this is needed. That generation of the lie is set, or will be set, in perdition. Where they are is unveiled as nothing, and that is all. Those who walk about in wickedness in this hour of the World in which vileness is exalted among the sons of men, have been revealed in their nothingness by the working of salvation; rather, their nothingness has become their reality, the only being they have is their nothingness. God’s truth is opposed in a grand antithesis to the lie of the wicked. Once more, and more deeply than before, we feel that this generation is not opposed to God as speaking lies but as being a lie. One must keep the truth so one will preserve from generation of the lie for the time of the World when the righteous, honest poor and oppressed will be set free. However, for all eternity, and also future periods of history a reappearance of the generation of the lie is again and again to be feared, but the word of God forever guarantees His existence to the human who is deceived and misused by this ever-recurring generation.

God will preserve one, as each time of need comes, from the power of the lie, by setting in freedom and salvation one who is devoted to the truth. The truth is God’s alone, but there is a human truth, namely, to be devoted to the truth. The lie is from time and will be swallowed up by time; the truth, the divine truth, is from eternity and in eternity, and this devotion to the truth, which we call human truth, partakes of eternity. Scientists signify their triumphs by almost daily announcements of new theories, new discoveries, new pathways to knowledge. The rest of us announce our failure by warring against ourselves and others. As time-binders, we can accumulate knowledge from the past and communicate what we know to the future. Science-fiction writers need not strain invention in their search for interesting time-transporting machinery: we are the universe’s time machines. Our principal means of accomplishing the binding of time is the symbol. The World is undergoing continuous change and no two events are identical. We give stability to our World only through our capacity to recreate it by ignoring differences and attending to similarities: although we know that we cannot step into the “same” river twice, abstracting allows us to act as if we can. We abstract at the neurological level as the physiological level, at the perceptual level, at the verbal level; all of our systems of interaction with the World are engaged in selecting data from the World, organizing data, and generalizing data. An abstraction, to put it simply, is kind of a summery of what the World is like, a generalization about its structure. The process can be explained like a “cup.” We must understand, first of all, that a “cup” is not a thing but an event; modern physics tells us that a cup is made of billions of electrons in constant movement, undergoing continuous change.

Although none of this activity is perceptible to us, it is importance to acknowledge it because by so doing we may grasp the idea that the World is not the way we see it.  If you will, what we see is a summary—an abstraction of electronic activity. However, even what we can see is not what we do see. No one has ever seen a cup in its entirety, all at once in space-time. We see only parts of wholes. However, if we know what we are dealing with, we usually see enough to allow us to reconstruct the whole and to act. Sometimes, such a reconstruction betrays us, as when we life a “cup” to sip our coffee and find that the coffee has settled in our lap rather than on our palate. However, most of the time, our assumptions about a “cup” will work, and we carry those assumptions forward in a useful way by the act of naming. Thus we are assisted immeasurably in our evaluations of the World by our language, which provides us with the names for the events that confront us, and by naming them tells us what to expect and how to prepare ourselves for action. The naming of things, of course, is an abstraction of a very high order (entirely beyond the capacity of animals) and of crucial importance. By naming an event and categorizing it as a “thing,” we create a vivid and more or less permanent map of what the World is like. However, it is a curious map, indeed. The word “cup,’ for example does not in fact dente anything that actually exists in the World. It is a concept, a summary of millions of particular things that have a similar look and function. The word “tableware” is at a still higher level of abstraction, since it includes all the things we normally call cups but also millions of things that look nothing like cups but have a vaguely similar function.

The critical point about our mapping of the World through language is that the symbols we use, whether “patriotism” and “love” or “cups” and “spoons,” are always at a considerable remove from the reality of the World itself. Although these symbols become part of ourselves—indeed, they become imbedded in our neurological and perceptual systems—we must never take them completely for granted. Whatever we say something is, it is not. Thus, we may conclude that humans live in two Worlds—the World of events and things, and the World of words about events and things. In considering the relationship between these two Worlds, we must keep in mind that language does much more than construct concepts about the events and things in the World; it tells us what sorts of concepts we ought to construct. For we do not have a name for everything that occurs in the World. Languages differ not only in their names for things but in what things they choose to name. Each language constructs reality differently from all the others. The semantics of this means: the study of the relationship between the World of words and the World of not-words, the study of the territory we call reality and how, through abstracting and symbolizing, we map the territory. Scientists may be more effective than the rest of us in solving problems because scientists tend to be more conscious of the abstracting process; more aware of the distortions in their verbal maps; more flexible in altering their symbolic maps to fit the World. The territory is always changing, especially over time, but our words tend to become static: as realities change, our descriptions of realities do not.

Moreover, the territory is not a World of “either-orness” or, for that matter, of “thingness.” Yet our language depicts it as such. The territory never presents itself in all of its detail, whereas our language creates the illusion that our descriptions are complete. Everything in the World is unique but our language forces us into categorical thinking. The World, in other words, is not an Aristotelian World where things are either A or not-A and where the syllogism reigns supreme. Aristotle’s “laws of thought” are rules for the clear, non-contradictory use of language (at least, Indo-European languages) but are not necessarily the best guide to grasping the nature of a process World. A word is either what it is or not what it is, and cannot be both at the same time. However, the thing itself—that is another matter. The thing is not even a thing but a complex process, changing from moment to moment. “It” may be called by many different names simultaneously and without contradiction, depending on the context in which it is experienced and the level of abstraction at which it is symbolized. In such a World, out language cannot even confidently label what is a “cause” and what is an “effect.” Scientists understand this, which explains why they now map the World almost entirely in the language of mathematics. Mathematics, particularly in its modern forms, has a greater correspondence to the structure of reality than does ordinary language, and, as a consequence, has made possible the development of non-Euclidean, Einsteinian, probabilistic, and indeterminate perspectives. Therefore, we need a new sematic cartography called non-Aristotelian, and which can be comparable in its impact of mathematics on the scientific community.

Non-Aristotelian perspective requires that we learn and internalize the most up-to-day assumptions and understandings about the structure of the World: the word, for example, is not the thing; no two events in the World are identical; no one can say everything about an event; things are undergoing continuous change; et cetera. In order for us to act as if we understand these ideas (they are usually labeled “obvious” by those whose behaviour shows the least evidence of their being understood), we must accustom ourselves to new ways of talking about the World, and put forward a set of practical modifications of our habitual patterns of speech. For example, it is important that we reduce as much as possible our uses of the verb “to be.” This verb, employed in about one-third of all English sentences, not only promotes the nation that the map is the territory but also encourages a false-to-fact kind of projection. When we say “Leo is smart,” we create the impression that “smartness” is a property of Leo, that Leo possesses “smartness.” However, in fact Leo’s “smartness” exists in the eyes of one’s beholder. Through a kind of grammatical alchemy, the real subject of this sentence—the person who makes the judgement—has disappeared, and Leo, who is in fact the object of someone else’s evaluation, is made to appear as the main “actor.” To help us understand this kind of sentence—to grasp that smartness is not “in” people, it is suggested that we frequently use “to me” phrases, exempli gratia, “It seems to me,” “From my point of view,” “As I see it,” et cetera. We must also make frequent use of time-makers, which are called “dating.” When we use a name, for example, we should accustom ourselves to affixing a date to it so that we will remember that people and things change over time, exempli gratia, The Supreme Court 2001, New York University 2015, the Winchester Mystery House Tour 2023, and so on.

To assist in helping ourselves remember that things with the same name are different, it is recommended that we employ a simple form of indexing, exempli gratia, Roman Catholic 1 is not Roman Catholic 2, German 1 is not German 2, and so on. In this way we discourage ourselves from speaking about “all professors, or “all students” or “all cups.” It is also recommended that we accustom ourselves to punctuating our assertions about the World with silent “et ceteras,” to remind ourselves that we have not said and cannot say everything that could be said. By studying general semantics deeply and by developing new language habits, we can re-educate our “neuro-semantic” systems and thus reduce social conflict and a variety of psychological disorders. Many people in the non-academic World—in business, government, social work, psychotherapy—employ these methods with great effectiveness and freely acknowledge the usefulness. If we now collect the actual, often ironical, results of so much noble struggle, we get a clear but exaggerated picture of our American society. It has: slums of engineering—boondoggling production—chaotic congestion—tribes of middlemen—basic city functions squeezed out—garden cities for children—indifferent workmen—underprivileged on a dole—empty “belonging” without nature or culture—front politicians—no patriotism—an empty nationalism bound for a cataclysmically disastrous finish—wise opinion swamped—enterprise sabotaged by monopoly—prejudice rising—religion otiose—the popular culture based—science specialized—science secret—the average man inept—youth idle and truant—youth –youth suffering over gender and oppressed because of gender—youth without goals—poor schools. This picture is not unjust, but it is, again, exaggerated. For it omits, of course. All the beneficial factors and the ongoing success.

We have a persisting grand culture. There is a steady advance of science, scholarship, and the fine arts. A steady improvement in health and medicine. An economy of abundance and, in many ways, a genuine civil peace and a stubborn affirming of democracy. And most of all there are the remarkable resilience and courage that belong to human beings. Also, the Americans, for all their folly and conformity, are often thrillingly sophisticated and impatient of hypocrisy. Yet there is one grim actuality that even this exaggerated picture does not reveal, the creeping defeatism and surrender by default to the organized system of the state and semimonopolies. International Business Machines and organized psychologists, we have seen, effectually determine the method of school examinations and personnel selection. As landlords, Webb and Knapp and Metropolitan Life decide what our domestic habits should be; and, as “civic developers” they plan communities, even though their motive is simply a “long-term modest profit” on investment while millions are ill housed. The good of General Motors and the nation are inseparable. Madison Avenue and Hollywood not only debauch their audiences, but they pre-empt the means of communication, so nothing else can exist. With only occasional flagrant breaches of legality, the increasingly interlocking police forces and the FBI make people cowed and speechless. That Americans can allow this kind of thing instead of demolishing it with a blow of the paw like a strong lion, is the psychology of missed revolutions. I believe that most interesting students are those who have not settled their gender problem, who are still young, even look young for their age, who think there is much to look forward to and must they must yet grow up to, fresh and naïve, excited by the mysteries to which they have not yet been fully initiated.

There are some men and women at the age of sixteen, who have nothing more to learn about adult relations. They are adult in the sense that they will no longer change very much. They may become competent specialists, but they are flat-souled. The World is for them what it presents itself to the sense to be; it is unadorned by imagination and devoid of ideals. This flat soul is what the wisdom of our time conspires to make universal. The easy pleasures of the flesh of teenagers snips the golden thread linking eros to education. And popularized Dr. Freud finishes it for good by putting the seal of significance on an unerotic understanding of pleasures of the flesh. A youngster whose longings for pleasures of the flesh the are consciously or unconsciously informed in one’s studies has a very different set or experiences from one in whom such motives are not active. A trip to Florence or to Athens is one thing for a young man who hopes to meet one’s Beatrice on the Ponte Santa Trinita or one’s Socrates in the Agora, and quite another for one who goes without such aching need. The latter is only a tourist, the former is looking for completion. Flaubert, a great expert on the fate of longing in the modern World, sends one’s awestruck Emma Bovary to a ball at the estate of decadent aristocrats where she sees: “At the head of the table, alone among all of these men and women, bent over, his full plate with his napkin knotted around his neck like a child, an old man ate, letting drops of gravy trickle from one’s mouth. He had bloodshot eyes and wore a little pigtail fastened with a black ribbon.

“It was the Marquis’ father-in-law, the old Duc de Laverdiere, the former favorite of the Comte d’ Artois at the time of the hunt at the Vaudreuil home of the Marquis de Conflans, and who had been, it was said, the lover of Queen Marie-Antoinette between M. de Coigny and M. de Lauzun. He had led a wil life of debauch, full of duels, wagers, abducted women, had devoured his fortune and terrified his whole family. A domestic, behind his chair, speaking loudly into his ear, named the dishes for him to which he pointed while stuttering. And constantly Emma’s eyes, of their own accord, returned to this old man with drooping lips as to something extraordinary and august. He had lived at court and slept in the bed of queens.” Others see only a repulsive old man, but Emma sees the ancient regime. Her vision is truer, for there were great lovers. The constricted present cannot teach it to us without the longing that makes us dissatisfied with the present. Such longing is what students most need, because the great remains of the tradition have grown senile in our care. Imagination is required to restore their youth, beauty, and vitality, and then experience their inspiration. The students who made fun of playing the guitar under a girl’s window will never read or write poetry under her influence. His defective eros cannot provide his soul with images of the beautiful, and it will remain coarse and slack. It is not that he will fail to adorn or idealize the World; it is that he will not see what is there. A significant number of students used to arrive at the university physically and spiritually virginal, expecting to lose their innocence there. Their lust was mixed into everything they thought and did. They were painfully aware that they wanted something but were not quite sure exactly what it was, what form it would take and what it all meant.

The range of satisfactions intimated by their desire moved from women of the evening to Plato, and back, from the criminal to the sublime. Above all they looked for instruction. Practically everything they read in the humanities and social sciences might be a source of learning about their pain, and a path to its healing. This powerful tension, this literal lust for knowledge, was what a teacher could see in the eyes of those who flattered him by giving such evidence of their need for him. His own satisfaction was promised by having something with which to feed their hunger, and overflow to bestow on their emptiness. His joy was in hearing the ecstatic “On, yes!” as he dished up Shakespeare and Hegel to minister to their need. Pimp and midwife really describe him well. The itch for what appeared to be only pleasures of the flesh was the material manifestation of the Delphic oracle’s command, which is but a reminder of the most fundamental human desire, to “know thyself.” Sated with easy, clinical and sterile satisfactions of the body and soul, the students arriving at the university today hardly walk on the enchanted ground they once did. They pass by the ruins without imagining what was once there. Spiritually detumescent, they do not seek wholeness in the university. These most productive years of learning, the time when Alcibiades was growing his first beard, are wasted because of artificial precociousness and a sophist wisdom acquired in high school. The real moment for sexual education goes by, and hardly anybody has an idea of what it would be. Reciprocally, the university does not see itself as ministering to such needs and does not believe the mummies on display in its museum can speak to the visitors or, horrors, go home to live with them. The humanists are old maid librarians.

As I reflect on it, the last fertile moment when student and university made a match was the fling with Dr. Freud during the forties and fifties. He advertised a real psychology, a version of the age-old investigation of the soul’s phenomena adjusted to the palate of modern man. Today one can hardly imagine the excitement. What a thrill it was when my fired college girl friend told me that the university’s bell tower was a phallic symbol. This was a real mix of my secret obsessions and the high seriousness I expected to get from the university High school was never like this. It was hard to tell what the meaning of all this was. An admirable confusion. At least everything was out on the table. The dirty things had disappeared from the philosophy of the mind, and Dr. Freud promised to restore the soul and take seriously what happened in it. He fancied himself a new and truer Plato and allowed us to Plato again as Dr. Freud’s precursor. However, it turned out to be psychology without the psyche, id est, without the soul. Dr. Freud just did not give a satisfying account of all the things we experience. Everything higher had to be a repression of something lower, and a symbol of something else rather than itself. The best a Freudian vision could do for man’s real intellectual longings was Death in Venice, clearly not a very rich row to hoe for the finer spirits. Aristotle said that man has two peaks, each accompanied by intense pleasures: pleasures of the flesh and thinking. The human soul is a kind of parabola, and its phenomena are spread between its two foci, displaying their tropical variety and ambiguity. Dr. Freud saw only one focus in the soul, that same one as the brutes have, and had to explain all psychology’s high phenomena by society’s repression or other such various of the Indian rope trick.

Dr. Freud really did not believe in the soul, but in the body, along with its passive instrument of consciousness, the mind. This blunted his vision of the higher phenomena, as is apparent from his crude observations about art and philosophy. It was not mere satisfaction in pleasures of the flesh students were seeking, whether they were aware of it or not, but knowledge of themselves and Dr. Freud did not provide it. People found that Dr. Freud’s “know thyself” led them to the couch, where they emptied their tank of the compressed fuel, which was intended to power them on their flight from opinion to knowledge. “know thyself” did not mean to Dr. Freud knowing man’s place within the order of the whole of things. It is long since that academic psychology has had any appeal for students who have a philosophic urge. Freudian psychology has become big business and entered into the mainstream of public life with a status equal to that of engineering and banking. However, it has no more intellectual appear than do they. We must look elsewhere for ourselves. In John Irving’s The World According to Garp, the mid-twentieth century’s Jenny Fields was a privileged young woman whose wealthy parents expected her to snare a suitable husband at her exclusive college. However, Jenny rebelled, dropped out, and entered the socially unsuitable profession of nursing. She also remained single and celibate. However, nobody seriously believed she had no lovers and assumed the Jenny’s pleasures flesh “activity was considerable and irresponsible.” This, of course, was why her mother presented her with an enema bag every time she visited home. The truth was, Jenny relished being “a long wolf” uninterested in either men or pleasures of the flesh—“she wanted as little to do with a peter as possible, and nothing whatsoever to do with a man.”

In her autobiography, Jenny described herself this way: “I want a job and I want to live alone. That made me a sexual suspect. Then I wanted a baby, but I did not want to have to share my body or my life to have one. That made me a sexual suspect, too.” Her scornful colleagues nicknamed her Old Virgin Jenny and asked mockingly, “Why not ask God for [a baby]?” However, Jenny persisted, a virgin determinedly scouting for a man to father her child. Technical Sergeant Garo’s shrapnel-smashed brain made him the perfect candidate. He could utter only one word—“Garp”—and his sole reaming pleasures were radio and self-love Even better, he was terminally injured, so would not be around to interfere in Jenny’s life. Jenny’s decision was made. She experienced pleasures of the flesh with Garp, just once, and conceived her son. When Garp died, Jenny “felt something,” but mainly that “the best of him was inside of her.” In keeping with her anti-pleasures of the flesh feelings, Jenny found compatible employment with Ellen Jamesians. These were a society of women who cut their own tongues to protest nonconsensual pleasures of the flesh of Ellen James, an eleven-year-old whose suspect had though they could prevent her from denouncing them by cutting out her tongue. Fortunately, she wrote out a detailed description that identified them. The guilt persons were caught, convicted, and murdered in prison. Jenny told the World about her aggressive feminism and her quest for celibacy in her book A Sexual Suspect. Finally she was assassinated, shot through the heart as she began a speech in a parking lot. She was buried in New York’s first feminist funeral, for women only. Afterward, her son, T.S. Garp, who could no longer hide behind her crisp, white nursing uniform with its little red heart stitched over the chest, took over the management of his own troubled life, and also of the novel.

In the 1960s, at the moment when our economic growth rate was near its highest point and the nation had been totally wired in to television, the trade of publication Advertising Age commented, “Network television, particularly, is largely the creature of the 100 largest companies in the country.” In the year, the one hundred largest advertisers in the country account for 83 percent of all network television advertising. The top twenty-five of these accounted for 65 percent of the 83 percent. Since that time, the ratio has scarcely altered. The domination of the one hundred largest is most apparent in network television, but it applies in other media. In 1974, for example, the top one hundred accounted for 55 percent of all advertising in all media, 59 percent of all network radio advertising, and 76 percent of network television ads. Since virtually all media in this country depend upon advertising for survival, it ought to be obvious that these one hundred corporations, themselves dominated by a handful of wealthy people, can largely determine which magazines, newspapers, radio stations and television stations can continue to exist and which cannot. Public television also fits the mold. During 1975, more than 40 percent of all public television programming was paid for by these same one hundred companies: mainly oil, chemical and drug companies. This is not quite the same level of domination that is found at the commercial networks, but the effect is the same. Survival depends upon them. For both commercial television and public television then it is absolutely necessary to create programs that these one hundred advertisers will support. They are where the action is. Given the costs of television, they are only action. We are speaking of control by 100 corporations out of 400,000 (in 2022, there are 1.7 million corporations). The interests of the other 399,900 are irrelevant as far as television is concerned.

As for the thoughts, wishes and feelings of the noncorporate segment of American society—nearly 333 million human beings whose perspectives are as varied at the 10,000 cable channels now available, the artistic, the humanistic, the ecological, the socialistic, to name a very few—these are not of the slightest importance. Broadcast television, like other monolithic technologies, from eight-row corn threshers and agribusiness to supertankers, nuclear power plants, computer networks, hundred-story office buildings, satellite communications, genetic engineering, international pipelines, and SSTs, is available only to monstrous corporate powers. What we get to see on television is what suits the mentality and purposes of the most powerful one hundred corporations. While purporting to be mass technology available to everyone, because everyone can experience it, television is little more than the tool of these companies. If four out of five dollars of television income derive from the, the obviously, without currying their favor the networks would cease to exist. The corollary is also true. Without such a single, monolithic instrument as television, the effect power and control of these huge corporations could not be harnessed as it presently is. Monolithic economic enterprise needs monolithic media to purvey its philosophy and to influence rapid change in consumption patterns. Without an instrument like television, capable of reaching everyone in the country at the same time and narrowing human needs to match the redesigned environment, the corporations themselves could not exist. The spread of television unified a whole people within a system of conceptions and living patterns that made possible the expansion of huge economic enterprise.

Because of it, our whole culture and the physical shape of the environment, no more or less than our minds and feelings, have been computerized, linearized, suburbanized, freewayized, and packaged for sale. It is a moot point whether those who control television knew what the outcome would be when they dusted it off after the war and sent it out to sell. Whether they invented television for that purpose or invented them, the relationship was symbiotic. Its use was predetermined by the evolution of economic and technological patterns that led up to it and that have since continued on their inevitable path. And its sue and effects were also determined by the nature and limits of television technology itself. Television technology produces neuro-physiological responses in the people who watch it. It may create illness, it certainly produced confusion and submission to external imagery. Taken together, the effects amount to conditioning for autocratic control. Not long after Nietzsche bought his mechanical writing ball, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at boosting the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the grudging approval of Midvale’s owners, Taylor recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement. By breaking down each job into a sequence of small steps and then testing different ways of performing them, he created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared. That is the same thing the television is programming humans to become—automatons who consume and work, but cannot think for themselves.

The assertion that the money economy could not survive ten minutes without inputs from the prosumer economy is not a wild exaggeration. “Ten minutes” may overstate the case. However, the basic point is valid. Every single day, some part of the workforce retires or dies and has to be replaced. One generation moves in as another exists the ranks of labor. Were this process ever to stop, the paid economy at some point would come to a screeching—or whining—halt. There would be no one left to work for pay, and what Marxist economists call economic “reproduction” would cease. Survivors would have to revert entirely to prosumming necessities, as our remote ancestors did. This explains why the money economy depends so completely on the most elemental form of prosuming in society: Parenting. Parents (or their surrogates) have always been the primary agents of socialization and acculturation preparing each new generation to fit into the existing social order and its economy. Employers rarely recognize how much they owe to the parents of their employees. We have often made this point to corporate managers by asking a simple, if indelicate, question: “How productive would your workforce be if someone hadn’t toilet-trained it?” We call it “the potty test.” Employers normally take this for granted, but, in fact, someone did that training. Almost certainly a mom. Of course, parents do more than merely housebreak their children. They spend years—and enormous amounts of caloric energy and brain effort—trying to ready their young for the years of toil that lie ahead. More broadly, they give children tools needed to work with other people, not the least of which is language.

How productive would workers be who could not communicate in words? Language is so basic a human skill that it, too, is taken for granted. It is particularly important in the money economy, doubly so in one based on knowledge. While we ma, as a species, be wired up to learn language, we actually acquire the necessary skills at home as children, by listening to and talking with out family members. Mothers and fathers are the first teachers. They are the primal prosumers—without whose contributions we can barely imagine an economy of paid producers. More broadly, if parents did not transmit culture—the rules of behavior that make it possible for humans to work together in teams, and communities, how productive would an economy be? Young people entering the labor force today typically need far more preparation than their predecessors, who worked mainly with their hands. Employers complain incessantly about the lack of appropriate workforce preparation. They demand more math and science, more standardized tests. Yet the main failure in the workplace is not just a result of inadequate job skills. It is a more general failure of culture—of confused and self-destructive values, lack of motivation, poor interpersonal skills, inappropriate images of the future. All these problems hamper the development of job skills. How much productivity in the money economy is lost when people fail as parents? That figure in California alone is $8.9 billion. Someday, if the economy ever attains the science-fictional capacity to operate autonomously with people, or humans attain immorality, parenting may become economically unnecessary. Until then, at the deepest level of production is life-and-death dependent on the unpaid exertions of billions of parent prosumers.

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Paging the ladies from The Home Edit – this closet has limitless potential! ✨ Can’t wait to see how you organize it when you move into your new home at #PlumasRanch!

So many neatly labeled bins in this closet’s future; fills us with a warm glow! 😂 There’s no such thing as too much closet space, that’s for sure!

Come and see how a Cresleigh Home can make everyday living much more relaxing.

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