God here stands in judgment upon gods, in respect of their judging. He is not concerned with Heaven but with the Earth, the Earth of man, and within this human World with the weak, the afflicted, the wretched and needy-and the concern that these receive justice in face of the wicked. God judges the “gods,” because in their function as judges they do not let the weak of the Earth receive justice. God clearly towers over those who stand in a circle around Him. And further, God’s presiding signifies a judgment. God endows people with divine power, that power it only lent to them by God, the only power giver. The National Anthem of the United States of America speaks of powerful mountains and of the fixed stars, in order to point to the divine dunamis  (inherent power, power residing in a thing by virtue of its nature, power for preforming miracles) from which their majesty springs. However, then those beings who have this power are themselves called “gods.” It is sufficiently clear from that God, who pronounces the judgement on the “gods” that they must die “like men,” that this description of them as gods is not to be understood as a metaphor for human authority. In order to grasp the nature and range of influence of those beings, we must look at their history and nations. Even the earliest writing prophets were faced with the fact that other nations possessed similar traditions of their wandering and their settlement to those of America, and that each of these nations worshipped its tribal god as the leader of those marches by means of which the tribe or association of tribes had grown and become a nation and had entered the history of nations.

The question which faced the prophets was, how are these traditions to be reconciled with the basic factor of America’s election, which presupposes the sovereignty of God over the nation from which He had made His choice? God who has led the other nations, as He has led America, in their history-making wandering and settling, whereas to America alone did God condescend to give His immediate company. This means that all the gods of the nations were characterized as being masks or caricatures of the one true Liberator of the nations, the God of history to whom America pays homage. However, now this exclusive faith is opposed by the experience of history that even in times when America has been loyal to its covenantal relation with God, one of those neighbouring nations which had been led to that place by God Himself, from time to time defeated America in battle—an experience which excited very serious doubts and produce many different answers. The Massachusetts Bay Colony flourished at first. The Puritans built a sound economy based on agriculture, fishing, timbering, and trading for beaver furs with local Indians. Even before leaving England, the directors of the Massachusetts Bay Company transformed their commercial charter into a rudimentary government and transferred the charter to New England. Once there, they laid the foundations of self-government. Free male Church members annually elected a governor and deputies from each town, who formed one house of a colonial legislature. The other house was composed of the governor’s assistants, later to be called councillors. Consent to both houses was required to pass laws.

The Puritans also established the first printing press in the English colonies and planted seed of a university, Harvard College, which opened its doors in 1636 for the training of prospective clergymen. The Puritan leaders also launched a brave attempt in 1642 to create a tax-supported school system so that all children might gain the “ability to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country.” In 1647, the government ordered every town with 50 families to establish an elementary school and every town with 100 families a secondary school as well, open to all who wished to take advantage of this education. In spite of these accomplishments, the Puritan colony suffered many of the tensions besetting people, bent on perfecting the human condition. Also, its inhabitants proved no better than their less religious countrymen on the Chesapeake in reaching an accommodation with the Native Americans. Surrounded by seemingly boundless land, the Puritans found it difficult to stifle acquisitive instincts and to keep families confined in compact communities. Restless souls looked to more distant valleys. “An over-eager desire after the World,” wrote an early leader, “has no seized on the spiritis of many as if the Lord had no farther work for his people to do, but every bird to feather his own nest.” Others, remaining at the nerve center in Boston, agitated for broader political rights and even briefly ousted John Winthrop as governor in 1635. For Mr. Winthrop the English gentry who joined the Puritan movement looking for a new life in the 1620s, and was the reason for most of their success. If you recall, in 11 ships, about a thousand Puritans set out from England in 1630 for the Promised Land. They were the vanguard of a movement that by 1642 had brought about 18,000 colonizers to New England’s shores. Mr. Winthrop was a talented Cambridge-educated member, and they operated under a charter from the king to the Puritan-controlled Massachusetts Bay Company.

The Puritans set about building their utopia with the fervor of people convinced they were carrying out a divine task. “God hat sifted a nation,” wrote one Puritan, “that He might send choice grain into the wilderness.” Their intention was to establish communities of pure Christians who collectively swore a covenant with God to work for his ends. To accomplish this, the Puritan leaders agreed to employ sever means. Civil and religious transgressors must be rooted out and severely punished. Their emphasis was on homogenous communities where the good of the group outweighed individual interests. “We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together,” counseled Mr. Winthrop. To realize their utopian goals, the Puritans willingly gave up freedoms that their compatriots sought. An ideology of rebellion in England, Puritanism in North America became an ideology of control. Much was at stake, for as Mr. Winthrop reminded the first settlers, “we shall be as a city upon a hill [and] the eyes of all people are upon us.” That visionary sense of mission would help to shape a distinctive America self-image in future generations. As in Plymouth and Virginia, the first winter tested the strongest souls. More than 200 of the first 700 settlers perished, and 100 others, disillusioned and sickened by the forbidding climate, returned to England the next spring. However, Puritans kept coming. They “hived out” along the Back Bay of Boston, the port capital of the colony, along the rivers that emptied into the bay, south into what became Connecticut and Rhode Island a few years later, and north along the rocky Massachusetts coast. Motivated by their militant work ethic and sense of mission, led by men experienced in local government, law, and the uses of exhortation, the Puritans thrives almost from the beginning.

The early leaders of Virginia were soldiers of fortune or roughneck adventurers with predatory instincts, men who had no families, or had left them at home. The ordinary Chesapeake settlers were mostly young men with little stake in English society who sold their labor to cross the Atlantic. In Massachusetts, experienced members of lesser gentry, and men with a compulsion to fulfill what they knew was God’s prophecy for New England. Most of the ordinary settlers came as freemen in families. Trained artisans and farmers from the middling rank of English society, they established tight-knit communities in which, from the outset, the brutal exploitation of labor rampant in the Chesapeake had no place. Therefore, it was shocking that the colony’s ousted John Winthrop, when in 1635 the colony’s clergy backed the stiff-necked Thomas Dudley. After a few years, Governor Winthrop wondered if the Puritans had not gone “from the snare to the pit.” Mr. Winthrop’s troubles multiplied in 1633 when Salem’s Puritan minister, Roger Williams, began to voice disturbing opinions on church and government policies. Now the colony’s leaders faced a contentious and visionary young man who argued that the Massachusetts Puritans were not truly pure because they would not completely separate themselves from the polluted Church of England (which most Puritans still hoped to reform). Mr. Williams also denounced mandatory worship, which he said “stinks in God’s nostrils,” and argued that government officials should not interfere with religious matters but confine themselves to civil affairs. “Coerced religion,” he warned, “on good days produces hypocrites, on bad days rivers of blood.” Later to be celebrated as the earliest spokesman for the separation of church and state, Williams seemed in 1633 to strike at the heart of the Bible commonwealth, whose leaders regarded civil and religious affairs as inseparable. Mr. Williams also charged the Puritans with illegally intruding on the land.

Mr. Winthrop and others spent two years plying Williams alternately with sweet reason and threats, but they could not quiet the determined young man. Convinced that he would split the colony into competing religious groups and undermine authority, the magistrates vowed to deport him to England. Warned by Mr. Winthrop, Mr. Williams fled southward through winter show with a small band of followers to found Providence, a settlement on Narragansett Bay in what would become Rhode Island. Even as they were driving Mr. Williams out, the Puritan authorities confronted another threat. This time it was a magnetic woman of extraordinary talent and intellect. Anne Hutchinson was as devoted a Puritan as any who came to the colony. Arriving in 1634 with her husband and seven children, she gained great respect among Boston’s women as a practiced midwife, healer, and spiritual counselor. She soon began to discuss religion, suggesting that the “holy spirit” was absent in the preaching of some ministers. Before long Mr. Hutchinson was leading a moment labeled antinomianism, an interpretation of Puritan doctrine that stressed the mystical nature of God’s free gift of grace while discounting the efforts the individual could make to gain salvation. By 1636, Boston was dividing into two camps, those who followed the male clergy and those who cleaved to the theological vies of a gifted though untrained woman with no official standing. Her followers included most of the community’s malcontents—merchants who chafed under the price controls the magistrates imposed in 1635, young people resisting the rigid rule of their elders, women disgruntled by male authority, and artisans who resented wage controls designed to arrest growing inflation.

Mrs. Hutchinson doubly offended the male leaders of the colony because she boldly stepped outside the subordinate position expected of women. “The weaker gender” set her up as a “priest” and “thronged” after her, wrote one male leader. Another described a “clamour” in Boston that “New England men..usurp over their wives and keep them in servile subjection.” Determined to remove this thorn from their sides, the clergy and magistrates put Mrs. Hutchinson on trial in 1637. After two long interrogations, they convicted her of sedition and contempt in a civil trial and banished her from the colony “as a woman not fit for our society.” Six months later, the Boston church excommunicated her for preaching 82 erroneous theological opinions. She had “highly transgressed and offended and troubled the church,” intoned the presiding clergyman, and “therefore in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, I do cast you out and deliver you up to Satan and account you from this time forth to be a heathen and a leper.” In the last month of her eighth pregnancy, Mrs. Hutchinson, with a band of supporters, followed the route Roger Williams to Rhode Island, the catch basin for Massachusetts Bay’s dissidents. However, ideas proved harder to banish than people. The magistrates could never enforce uniformity of belief. Neither could they curb the appetite for land. Growth, geographic expansion, and commerce with the outside World all eroded the ideal of integrated, self-contained communities filled with religious piety. Leaders never wearied of reminding Puritan settlers that the “care of the public must oversway all private respects.” However, they faced the nearly impossible task of containing land-hungry immigrants in an expansive region.

By 1636, groups of Puritans had swarmed not only to Rhode Island, but also to Hartford and New Haven, where Thomas Hooker and John Davenport led new Puritan settlements in what became Connecticut. Some believed that Anne Hutchinson’s God removed the God of the colonies, who had been Sovereign over the World of nations, Who possessed the inalienable right of decisions as to which of them is right and which is wrong, and Who gave judgment in accordance with His decision: that is, He determines the history of nations, He is the Judge. Each colony was represented by an angel prince, and because of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, Boston lost its angel and so it no longer had its direct relation to the Lord of the colonies. In order to pass judgment on the Heavenly princes of the colonies God the judge had entered their assembly, which He had summoned. This was not the cosmic circle of a Heavenly host, such as surrounds the supreme throne in the prophet’s vision, and from which cosmic powers are commissioned to lead human rulers astray in foolish historical actions. Now, modern democracy was, of course, the target of Nietzsche’s criticism. Is rationalism and its egalitarianism are the contrary of creativity. Its daily life is for him the civilized rewilding of man. Nobody really believes in anything anymore, and everyone spends one’s daily life in frenzied work and frenzied play so as not to face the fact, not to look into the abyss of what happened from believing that God is dead, not obeying the laws and worshipping idols. Nietzsche’s call to revolt against liberal democracy is more powerful and more radical than is Marx’s. And Nietzsche adds that the Left, socialism, is not the opposite of the special kind of Right that is capitalism, but is its fulfillment.

The Left means equality, the Right means inequality because they believe that there is no free lunch, while the left believes in stealing from wage earners to support others, and this theft goes beyond just taxes. It means if you get a discount here, the city or state can later come and take money from you and use it how they please regardless of your budget. Or, if you earned a larger home, the city or state does not have to pay you money that is owed to you because someone else has less than you and they feel it could be better applied to help that person get ahead in life. However, Nietzsche’s call is from the Right, but a new Right transcending capitalism and socialism, which are the powers moving in the World. Yet, in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, the latest models of modern democratic or egalitarian man find much that is attractive in Nietzsche’s understanding of things. It is the sign of the strength of equality, and of the failure of Nietzsche’s war against it, that he now far batter known and really influential on the Left than on the Right. This may at first appear surprising, inasmuch as Nietzsche looks toward the extraordinary, not the ordinary, the unequal, not the equal. However, the democratic man requires flattery, like any ruler, and the earliest versions of democratic theory did not provide it. They justified democracy as the regime in which very ordinary people were protected in their attempt to achieve very ordinary and common goals. It was also the regime dominated by public opinion, where the common denominator set the rule for everyone. Democracy presented itself as decent mediocrity as over against the splendid corruption of older regimes. However, it is quite another thing to have a regime in which all the citizens can be thought to be at least potentially autonomous, creating values for themselves.

A value-creating man is a plausible substitute for a good man, and some such substitute becomes practically inevitable in pop relativism, since very few persons can think of themselves as just nothing. The respectable and accessible nobility of man is to be found not in the quest for or discovery of the good life, but in creating one’s own “life-style,” of which there is not just one but many possible, none more comparable to another. One who has a “life-style” is in competition with, and hence inferior to, no one, and because one has one he or she can command one’s own esteem and that of others. All this had become everyday fare in the United States of America, and the most popular schools of psychology and their therapies take value positing as the standard of healthy personality.  Woody Allen’s comedy is nothing but a set of variations of the theme of the man who does not have a real “self” or “identity,” and feels superior to the inauthentically self-satisfied people because one is conscious of one’s situation and at the same time inferior to them because they are “adjusted.” This borrowed psychology turns into a textbook in Zelig, which is the story of an “other-directed” man, as opposed to an “inner-directed” man, terms popularized in the 1950s by David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, borrowed by him from his analyst, Erich Fromm, who himself absorbed them (exempli gratia, innige Mensch) from a really serious thinker, Nietzsche’s heir, Martin Heidegger. I was astounded to see how doctrinaire Woody Allen is, and how normal his way of looking at things—which has immediate roots in the most profound Germany Philosophy—has become in the America entertainment market. One of the links between Germany and the United States of America, the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, actually plays a cameo role in Zelig.

Zelig is a man who literally becomes whoever or whatever is expected of him—a Republican when with the rich; a gangster when with Mafiosi; black, Chinese or female, when with blacks, Chinese or females. He is nothing in himself, just a collection of roles prescribed by others. He inevitably enters into psychiatric treatment, where we learn that he was once “tradition-directed,” id est, from a family of silly, dancing rabbinic Jewish people. “Tradition-directed” means to be guided by old values, received from old beliefs, usually religious, which gave a man a role that he takes to be more than a role and a place in the World. It goes without saying that a return to that old mode of adjustment and apparent health is neither possible nor desirable. One is supposed to laugh at the dancing Jewish person, although it is not clear whether from the point of view of alienation or health It is sure that, in this situation, the Jewish person is a pariah, Max Weber’s category given special notoriety by Hannah Arendt, here meaning interesting only as an outsider who has a special insight into the insider, but whose Jewishness has no merit in itself. His value is defined by the World currently of interest to him. His health is restored when he becomes “inner-directed,” when he follows his real instincts and sets his own values. When Zelig hears people say that it is a nice day, when it manifestly is, he responds that it is not a nice day. So he immediately clapped back into a mental institution by those whom he previously tried to imitate and with whose opinions he is now at war. This is the way society imposes its values on the creator. At the end he gets around, on his own, to reading Moby Dick, which he had previously discussed without having read, in order to impress people. His health is a mixture of petulance and facile, self-conscious smugness.

Woody Allen’s haunted comedy diagnoses our ills as stemming from value relativism, for which the cure is value positing. And his great strength is in depicting the self-conscious role-player, never quite at home in his role, interesting because he is trying so hard to be like the others, who are ridiculous because they are unaware of their emptiness. However, Mr. Allen is tasteless and superficial in playing with his Jewishness, which apparently has no inner dignity for him. And where he fails completely is in his presentation of the healthy inner-directed man, who is neither funny nor interesting. This is the figure against which the others are understood and judged, as misers are ridiculous only compared to the mand who knows the real value of money. However, Mr. Allen’s inner-directed man is simply empty or nonexistent, forcing one to wonder how profound his creator’s understanding can be. Here is where we confront the nothing, but it is not clear that Mr. Allen knows it. Inner-directedness is an egalitarian promise that enables us easily to despise and ridicule “the bourgeois” we actually see around us. This is all terribly lightweight and disappointing, for it really tries to assure us that the agonies of the nihilism we are living stiffening of our backs. Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom is just Dale Carnegie with a bit of middle-European culture whipped cream on top. Get rid of capitalist alienation and Puritan repression, and all will be well as each man chooses from oneself. However, Woody Allen really has nothing to tell us about inner-directedness. Nor does Mr. Riseman nor, going back further, does Mr. Fromm. One has to get to Mr. Heidegger to learn something of all the grim facts of what inner-directedness might really mean. Mr. Allen is never nearly as funny as was Mr. Kafka, who really took the problem seriously, without the propagandistic reassurance that Left progressivism would solve it.

Zelig has a flirtation with Hitler—whose appeal, it almost goes without saying is to “other-directed persons,” or to use an equivalent expression popularized by another German psychosociologist, Theodore Adorno, to “authoritarian personalities” (exactly the same point, but without Mr. Allen’s saving wit, is stressed by Bertolucci in The Conformist)—but is rescued by his psychiatricus ex machina. (Flirtation with Stalin never needs explanation in this intellectual universe.) Woody Allen helps to make us feel comfortable with nihilism, to Americanize it. I’m O.K., thou art O.K too, if we agree to be a bit haunted together. It is the missed revolutions of modern times—the fallings-short and the compromises—that add up to the conditions that make it hard for the young to grow up in our society. The existing local community, region, and nation is the real environment of the young. Conversely, we could define community spirit and patriotism as the conviction in which it is possible to grow up. (An independent and not too defeated adult confronts a broader historical, international, and cosmic scene as his environment for actions.) Modern times have been characterized by fundamental changes occurring with unusual rapidity. These have shattered the tradition but often have not succeeded in creating a new whole community. We have no recourse to going back there is nothing to go back to. If we are to have stable and whole community in which the young can grow to manhood, we must painfully perfect the revolutionary modern tradition we have. This stoical resolve is, paradoxically, a conservative proposition, aiming at stability and social balance. For often it is not a question of making innovations, but of catching up and restoring the right proportions. However, no doubt, in our runaway, one-sided way of life, the proposal to conserve human resources and develop human capacities has become a radical innovation.

Right proportion cannot be restored by adding a few new teachers formally equivalent to the growth in population. Probably we need a million new minds and more put to teaching. Even Dr. Conant says that we must nearly double our present annual expenditure on education for teaching alone, not counting plant and the central schools he wants. And this does not take into account essentially new fields such as making sense of adult leisure. It might also help to have a few psychologists on campuses to talk to students and get them to realize how serious their education is and even break up groups of students who are in clicks so they can better focus on the enrichment material. It must be understood that with the increase in population and crowding, the number and variety of human services increase disproportionately, and the laissez-faire areas, both geographical and social, decrease. Therefore the units of human service, such as school classes or the clientele of a physician (and even political districts?), ought to be made smaller, to avoid the creation of masses: mass teaching, mass medicine, mass psychotherapy, mass penology, mass politics. (However, sometimes mass medicine is good. For example, the Kaiser Hospital in South Sacramento has everything in one location from primary care physicians, pharmacy, Urgent Care, Emergency Room, Head, Neck and Ear Surgery, Neurosurgery, therapy, pediatricians, Cardiovascular medicine, optometry and all kinds of other care, including labs. The only think I think they are missing is dentistry and orthodontics, and once they add that, you will get all your services at one location. Therefore, also buying a house near this mass medical facility is a great investment because there is also a college just a mile away. It is good for property values, and a about five miles down the road, a casino is under construction, which will increase home values and is supposed to be a boom for the local economy.)  Yet our normal schools and medical schools cannot cope with even the arithmetic increase.

Right proportion requires reversing the goal in vocational guidance, from fitting the human to the machine and chopping one down to fit, to finding the opportunity in the economy that brings out the man, and if you cannot find such an opportunity, make it. This involves encouraging new small enterprises and unblocking and perhaps underwriting invention. Also, in the Sacramento County area, many architects and builders would like 22-year-old housing codes to be update so they can build more innovative homes, with features that are popular in other states. For example, homes with taller garages so people can park the recreational vehicle inside of the garage. And perhaps create interlocking neighbourhoods, so they can build the houses closer to the street, with smaller lawns (to conserve water), larger backyards, thus reducing traffic flow so roads are not used like interstates.  Again, if at present production is inhuman and stupid, it is that too few minds are put to it: this can be remedied by giving the workman more voice in production and the kind of training to make that voice wise. Probably, right proportion involves considerable decentralizing and increasing the rural-urban ratio. Certainly it involves transforming the scores of thousands of neglected small places, hopelessly dull and same, into interesting villages that someone could be proud of. A lot of the booming production has got to go into publicly useful goods, proportionate to the apparently forgotten fact that it is on public grounds, because of public investment, and the growth of population, that private wealth is produced and enjoyed. We have to learn again, what city man always used to know, that belonging to the city, to its squares, its market, its neighbourhoods, and it high culture is a pubic good; it is not a field for “investment to yield a long-term modest profit.”

A proportionate allocation of public funds, again, is not likely to devote more money to escape roads convenient for automobiles than to improving the city center. (If I may make a pleasant suggestion, we could underwrite a handsome program for serious adult leisure by a $10 luxury tax on Congressional income, investments, cars, houses and endorsements per $1,000; it would yield billions a year.) Since prosperity itself has made it more difficult for the underprivileged American and immigrant to get started, right proportion requires devoting all the more money and ingenuity to helping them find oneself and get started. (In such cases, by the way, ingenuity and friendly assistance are more important than money, as some of our settlement houses in New York has beautifully demonstrated.) And some way will have to be found, again, for a human to be decently less affluent, to work for a subsistence without necessarily choosing to involve oneself in the total high-standard economy. One way of achieving this would be directly producing subsistence goods in distinction from the total economy. In arts, and letter, there is a right balance between the customary social standard and creative novelty, and between popular entertainment and esthetic experience. Then, to offset Hollywood and Madison Avenue, we must have hundreds of new litter theaters, little magazines and journals of dissenting opinion with means of circulation; because it is only in such that new things can develop and begin to win their way in the World. It is essential that our democratic legislatures and public spokesmen be balanced by more learned and honorable voices that, as in Britain, can thoughtfully broach fundamental issues of community plan, penal code, morality, cultural tone, with some certainty of reaching a public forum and some possibility of being effective. For there is no other way of getting the best to lead, to have some conviction and even passionate intensity, to save America from going to managers, developers, and politicians by default.

Certainly right proportion, in a society tightly organized and conformist, requires a vast increase in the jealous safeguard of civil liberties, to put the fear of God back into local police, district attorneys, and judges. Here is a program of more than a dozen essential changes, all practicable, all difficult. A wiser and more experienced author could suggest a dozen more. In a groundbreaking paper as far back as 1965, thirty-four-year-old Gary Becker pointed out that “non-working time may now be more important to economic welfare than working time; yet the attention paid by economists to the latter dwarfs any paid to the former.” Analyzing the allocation of time between the two, he calculated that the value of non-work activities such as getting an education. He quantified its value by assuming that each hour spent in the classroom was an hour that might have been devoted to paid work instead, the toted up the earnings forgone. Far more complicated than this simple description suggests, his work was a brilliant advance in economic theory, presented in mathematical terms that economists could respect. Yet it took twenty-seven years before Becker, in 1992, was awarded the Nobel Prize, in part because of this work. Today, despite many studies, prosuming and unpaid work, especially that of women, remain far outside the main concerns of everyday, conventional economics. Efforts have also been made by sociologists and social-policy experts to calculate the value of prosuming. By estimating hours spent doing unpaid labor and asking what having it done by paid employees would cost, some have come up with startling conclusions. They echo Mr. Becker’s assumption that the household is a “small factory” and that actual paid working time may be less important to the overall economy than it appears.

Stein Ringen, writing in 1996, concludes, “The material standard of living would be more than halved if it were not for the effects of living in household. In the national economy, households contribute as much as market institutions. This is an astonishing result,” he writes, considering that “the family is often believed to have become marginal in economic terms.” That family output is almost entirely a result of prosuming. Even if such numbers are only fractionally correct, we are still looking at an enormous, gaping black hole in standard economics, which partially explains why even top-league economists and scholars have so poor a record in forecasting. By failing to take prosuming adequately into account, they rely heavily, almost cultishly, on measures that misled them—and us. Conventional economists and their “true believer” followers tend to brush aside this hidden economic activity as inconsequential, despite the real-life evidence to the contrary. By essentially defining economic “value” as something created only when money changes hands, economists often wind up focusing on easily measure superficialities. Thus, just as the deep fundamentals of time, space and knowledge—those most crucial to advanced economies—are the least studied by economists, so, too, their insistence on the traditional definition of “economic value” blinds them to the approaching drama of tomorrow. They cling to this core definition in part because money is easy to count and lend itself to mathematization and modeling. Unpaid activity does not. And in a profession obsessed with metrics, that puts prosuming outside the perimeter of central concern. Little effort is made to create a parallel metric for prosuming and to systematically track the many pathways through which the paid and unpaid system interact.

Without money as a tool of measurement, one must find other ways of quantifying value, and one must identify the different systems of ascribing value and exchange rates between them. However, some people mainly focus on unpaid work done by software prosumers as distinct from unpaid contributions in many other fields. If prosuming were, in fact, inconsequential—or if it had little impact on the money economy, our ignorance about prosuming might be acceptable. However, neither is true. The result is that a basic tool like the gross domestic product, on which so many businesses and government decisions are based, would more accurately be named grossly distorted product. Given how little attention is still paid to this huge underlying force in wealth creation, and how little data about it are available, we are reduced to speculation. However, that is better than ignoring so massive a factor in wealth creation. If the value of prosuming is, in fact, roughly equal to the output of the money economy that economists measure, it is the hidden half. Applied to the World as a whole—taking into account the output of the teeming millions of less affluent people who live only by prosuming—we perhaps do wind up with a missing $100 trillion. What makes this so important today is that as we move into the next phase of revolutionary wealth, the prosumer sector of our economies is poised for tremendous change, including a striking historical turnabout. Amazingly, even as millions of peasants in the poor World are being gradually absorbed into the money economy, millions of people in the rich World are doing the exact opposite: They are rapidly expanding their activity in the non-monetized half—the prosumer part—of the World economy.

In fact, as we see next, we are laying the base for a veritable explosion of prosuming in the richest countries—and not just of the Home Depot variety. Completely new markets will open before us as others slam shut. The role of the consumer will be transformed as the role of the prosumer expands. Healthy care, pensions, education, technology, innovation, and government budgets will all be heavily impacted. Do not think of hammers and screwdrivers. Think of biology, nanotools, desktop factories and fantastic new materials that will permit all of us, as prosumers, to do things for ourselves that we could never have imagined. Even as freedom and fate belong together, caprice belongs with doom. However, freedom and fate are promised to each other and embrace each other to constitute meaning; caprice and doom, the spook of the soul and the nightmare of the World, get along with each other, living next door and avoiding each other, without connection and friction, at home in meaninglessness—until in one instant eye meets eye, madly, and the confession erupts from both that they are redeemed. How much intellectual eloquence and artistry is used today to prevent or at least conceal this occurrence! Free is the human that wills without caprice. One believes in the actual, which is to say: one believes in the real association of the real duality, I and You. One believes in destiny and also that it needs one. It does not lead one, it waits for one. One must proceed toward it without knowing where it waits for one. One must go forth with one’s whole being: that one knows it. If one resolves to do that which one can will, it will not turn out the way one’s resolve intended it; but what wants to come will come. One must sacrifice one’s little will, which is unfree and ruled by things and drives, to one’s great will that moves away from being determined to find destiny. Now one no longer interferes, nor does one merely allow things to happen. One listens to that which grows, to the way of Being in the World, not in order to be carried along by it but rather in order to actualize it in the manner in which it, needing one, wants to be actualized by one—with human spirit and human deed, with human life and human death. One believes, I said; but this implies: one encounters.

Cresleigh Homes

Might never recover from the laugh we got when one of the kiddos called the pergola a “parugala”! 😂 Hey – maybe it works? Arugula salad 🥬 and seating in the shade ☂️ sound like a great combo to us!

The outdoor living spaces at our #Havenwood home are just as thoughtfully designed as the indoor ones; we just can’t get enough fresh air!

Cresleigh Homes features thoughtfully designed architecture, open living areas, pleanty of storage, beautiful backyards, and sizable primary suites.

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