Once the World has been purged of ghosts and spirits, it reveals to us that the critical problem is scarcity. Nature is a stepmother who has left us unprovided for. However, this means we need have no gratitude. When we revered nature, we were poor. Since there was not enough, we had to take from one another; and as a result of this competition, there was inevitably war, the greatest threat to life, even more of a threat than any pandemic has ever been. However, if, instead of fighting one another, we band together and make war on our stepmother, who keeps her riches from us, we can at the same time provide for ourselves and end our strife. The conquest of nature, which is made possible by the insight of science and by the power it produces, is the key to the political. The old commandment that we love our brothers made impossible demands on us, demands against nature, while doing nothing to provide for real needs. What is required is not brotherly love or faith, hope and charity, but self-interested rational labor. The man who contributes most to relieving human misery is the one who produces most, and the surest way of getting one to do so is not by exhorting one, but by rewarding one most handsomely to sacrifice present pleasure for the sake of future benefit, or to assure avoidance of pain through the power so gained. From the point of view of humanity’s well-being and security, what is needed is not humans who practice the Christian virtues or those of Aristotle, but rational (capable of calculating their interest) and industrious humans. Their opposite numbers are not the vicious, wicked or sinful, but the quarrelsome and the idle. This may include priests and nobles as well as those who most obviously spring to mind.

This scheme provides the structure for the key term of liberal democracy, the most successful and useful political notion of our World: rights. America is a capitalistic society, so its principals are about freedom, the ability to provide for one’s self, low taxes that allow people to spend their money as they please, ownership of private property, so people do not have to rent and endure unbareable condition or have people spying on them or illegally entering their homes, disrespecting them, stealing from them and threatening them. However, with some exceptions for historical properties and other special circumstances, the city, state, and federal government does have the right to enforce code violations on your property. They can do things like make you declutter your space, make you keep your yard and noise levels down, and many other things. If these conditions are not met, the government can fine, sue, and in some cases even arrest you. Private property is a right and a privilege. Yet, even if you are a renter, The Constitution of the United States of America, Amendment IV states: “The right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Meaning, you cannot just search someone’s home because you want to. You cannot steal from someone’s home. You may not kidnap someone out of their home, or else you are breaking the law and have to deal with civil and criminal punishment as well. And if you enter someone’s home unannounced and they are in fear of their lives, if you end up getting injured or harmed, then that is considered them defending themselves.

However, the person who considered to be standing their ground may still have to go to jail and prove that their degree of self-defense was called for. One also cannot have cameras aimed into their neighbour’s backyard, nor directly at their home. That is illegal and considered an invasion of privacy. Your neighbor can report you to authorities and sue you in a court of law. Capitalism is for responsible people, who are meant to and able to govern themselves. They do not need a manager micromanaging their lives, unless that is who the individual has hired them to do. If the government is not representing the people, they have a right to recall and put in a new form of government. Government exists to protect the product of humans’ labor, their property, and therewith life and liberty. The notion that humans possess inalienable natural rights, that they belong to one as an individual prior, both in time and in sanctity, to any civil society, and that civil societies exist for and acquire their legitimacy from ensuring those rights, is an invention of modern philosophy. Rights, like the other terms discussed in this report, are new in modernity, not a part of the common-sense language of politics or of classical political philosophy. Hobbes initiated the notion of rights, and it was given its greatest respectability by Locke. Unlike the other terms, however, we understand rights perfectly and have immediate access to the thought underlying them. The others are alien, problematic; and to understand them requires a great effort that, we are arguing, we do not make. However, rights are ours. They constitute our being; we live them; they are our common sense. Right is not the opposite of wrong, but of duty. It is a part of, or the essence of, freedom. It begins from humans’ cherished passion to live, and to live as painlessly as possible.

Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments, never finds oneself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when one contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. One will not fail therefore to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which one is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice and confusion introduced into the public councils, have in truth been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations. The valuable improvements made by the American Constitutions on the popular models, both ancient and modern, cannot certainly be too much admired; but it would be an unwarrantable partiality, to contend that they have as effectually obviated the danger on this side as was wished and expected. Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty. There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects. There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests. An analysis of universal needs and their relation to nature as a whole demonstrates that this passion is not merely an imagination. It can be called a right and converted into a term of political relevance when a human is full conscious of what one needs most, recognizes that one is threatened by others and that they are threatened by one.

If one agrees to respect life, property of others (for which one has no natural respect) this is the spring that makes the social machinery tick is this recognition, which generates that calculation that can be induced to reciprocate. This is the foundation of rights, a new kind of morality solidly grounded in self-interest. To say, “I have got my rights,” is as instinctive with Americas as breathing, so clear and evident is this way of looking at things. It signifies the rules of the game, within which humans play peacefully, the necessity of which they see and accept, and the infringement of which arouses moral indignation. It is our only principle of justice. From our knowledge of our rights flows our acceptance of the duties to the community that protects them. Righteousness means for us respect for equal rights equally guaranteed by the force of government. Everyone in the World today speaks of rights, even the communists, the heirs of Marx, who ridiculed “bourgeois rights” as a sham and in whose thought, there is no place for rights. However, almost every thoughtful observer knows that it is in the United States of America that the idea of rights has penetrated most deeply into the bloodstream of its citizens and accounts for their unusual lack of servility. Without it we would have nothing, only chaotic selfishness; and it is the interested source of a certain disinterestedness. We feel people’s interests should be respected. The coming prosumer explosion is underestimated not only in the media that cover business and finance but in academia and government as well. Prosumers are not going to run the World. However, they are going to shape the emerging economy. And they are going to challenge the existence of some of the World’s biggest companies and industries. In fact, they are already doing so. We have just seen the free lunch their third job provides to banks, airlines and countless other industries. As we have seen the growing economic value they contribute to the health system. However, the prosumer story is just beginning.

If prosumers today are buying up tools and technologies to increase their “output” of health, they are doing the same in other fields as well. As of 2022, Home Dept is the World’s largest home improvement retailer. There are 2,3000 stores across North America that aspire to excel in service. As the biggest home-improvement stores in the United States of America, it employs 300,000 people and racks up $151.2 billion in annual sales, an increase of $19.0 billion, or 14.4 percent, from fiscal 2020. Its stores stock up to forty thousand items, mainly for the do-it-yourselfer. Overall, the do-it-yourself market (D-I-Y) for home improvement in the United States of America is valued at USD438.56 billion, and in the forecast period 2022-2026 is expected to achieve market value of USD537.47 billion by 2026. In Germany, D-I-Y companies, led by Obi, Praktiker and Bauhaus, ring up $48.2 billion on home renovations sales. Europe Home Improvement Market size crosses USD245 billion. All this activity is spurred by a rapidly growing audience for home improvement programs on television. In Britain, shows such as Changing Rooms and Ground Force, which offer hands-on, how-to advice to D-I-Yers, were among the most watched shows on the BBC. And the HGTV and DIY Network channels are seen in more than 100 million U.S. homes and twenty-nine countries from Japan, Australia and Thailand to the Czech Republic and Hungary. If that is not enough advice, prosumers can go online to RepirClinic.com, which sells replacement parts for appliances, or to its “RepairGuru” for how-to instructions. A competitor, Point and Click Appliance Repair, offers professional online diagnosis of your problems with everything from freezers and refrigerators to ovens and airfryers.

The Sears Web page provides D-I-Yers with access to over 4.5 million parts for your appliances, lawn equipment, power tools, and home electronics. Prosumers buy supplies from these companies, then apply their own sweat equity—that is, unpaid labor—to create economic value whether by adding a room to the house, extending the life of a washing machine or beautifying a property. A parallel investment of unpaid labor can be found in do-it-yourself auto repair, as a visit to any big auto-parts store suggests. The Global Automotive Aftermarket size is expected to hit USD950.1 billion by 2027. Moreover, nearly 89 percent of U.S. households participated in some kind of do-it-yourself lawn and garden activity in 2021. USD42 billion, was spent on lawn and gardens in America, which makes since considering part of the American Dream is a green lawn and/or a landscaped yard and garden. Landscaping can have up to a 77 percent boost in home values. In much smaller England, gardening-mad Britons, spend up to $7 billion. German green-thumbers spend $9 billion. In Japan, where prosumers manage to create greenery in even the smallest crevices between buildings, a third of the population, some 40 million people, garden, spending about $16 billion a year on tools, plants and nutrients. And you do not have to like getting your fingernails dirty to buy prosumer supplies. Sewing remains more than just a hobby for 33 million U.S. women, mostly college-educated and young—nearly one-third of America’s adult female population. What is more, after you make that dress, you can keep it spotless by using a home dry-cleaning kit as advertised in the upscale catalogs that fill the mailbox to overflowing. For those who want a real challenge, do-it-yourself kits are now available that allowed prosumers to build everything from electric guitars and computers to golf clubs, sailboats, four-bedroom long cabins and even airplanes good enough to compete in flying shows.

There were two groups of people who lived many years ago but whose influence is still with us. They were very different from each other, representing opposite values and traditions. The first group lived about 2,500 years ago in the place which we now call Greece, in a city they called Athens. We do not know as much about their origins as we would like. However, we do know a great deal about their accomplishments. They were, for example, the first people to develop a complete alphabet, and therefore they became the first truly literate population on Earth. They invented the idea of political democracy, which they practiced with a vigor that puts us to shame. They invented what we call philosophy. And they also invented what we call logic and rhetoric. They came very close to inventing what we call science, and one of them—Democritus by name—conceived of the atomic theory of matter 2,300 years before it occurred to any modern scientist. They composed and sang epic poems of unsurpassed beauty and insight. And they wrote and performed plays that, almost three millennia later, still have the power to make audiences laugh and weep. They even invented what, today, we call the Olympics, and among their values none stood higher than that in all things one should strive for excellence. They believed in reason. They believed in beauty. They believed in moderation. And they invented the word and the idea which we know today as ecology. About 2,000 years ago, the vitality of their culture declined and these people began to disappear. However, not what they had created. Their imagination, art, politics, literature, and language spread all over the World so that, today, it is hardly possible to speak on any subject without repeating what some Athenian said on the matter 2,500 years ago.

The second group of people lived in the place we now call Germany, and flourished about 1,700 years ago. We call them the Visigoths, and you may remember that your sixth- or seventh-grade teacher mentioned them. They were spectacularly good horsemen, which is about the only pleasant thing history can say of them. They were marauders—ruthless and brutal. Their language lacked subtlety and depth. Their art was crude and even grotesque. They swept down through Europe destroying everything in their path, and they overran the Roman Empire. There was nothing a Visigoth liked better than to burn a book, desecrate a building, or smash a work of art. From the Visigoths, we have no poetry, no theater, no logic, no science, no humane politics. Like the Athenians, the Visigoths also disappeared, but not before they had ushered in the period known as the Dark Ages. It took Europe almost a thousand years to recover from the Visigoths. Now, the Athenians and the Visigoths still survive, and they do so through us and the ways in which we conduct our lives. All around us—in this hall, in this community, in our city—there are people whose way of looking at the World reflects the new way of the Athenians, and there are people whose way is the way of the Visigoths. I do not mean, of course, that our modern-day Athenians roam abstractedly through the streets reciting poetry and philosophy, or that the modern-day Visigoth are killers. I mean that to be an Athenian or a Visigoth is to organize your life around a set of values. An Athenian is an idea. And a Visigoth is an idea. To be an Athenian is to hold knowledge and, especially, the quest for knowledge in high esteem. To contemplate, to reason, to experiment, to question—these are, to an Athenian, the most exalted activities a persona can perform. To a Visigoth, the quest for knowledge is useless unless it can help you to earn money or to gain power over other people.

To be an Athenian is to cherish language because you believe it to be humankind’s most precious gift. In their use of language, Athenians strive for grace, precision, and variety. And they admire those who can achieve such skill. To Visigoth, one word is as good as another, one sentence indistinguishable from another. A Visigoth’s language aspires to nothing higher than the cliché. To be an Athenian is to understand that the thread which holds civilized society together is thin and vulnerable; therefor, Athenians place great value on tradition, social restraint, and continuity. To an Athenian, bad manners are acts of violence against the social order. The modern Visigoth cares very little about any of this. The Visigoths think of themselves as the center of the Universe. Tradition exists for their own convenience, good manners are an affection and a burden, and history is merely what is in yesterday’s newspaper. To be an Athenian is to take an interest in public affairs and the improvement of public behavior. Indeed, the ancient Athenians had a word for people who did not. The word was idiotes, from which we get our word “idiot.” A modern Visigoth is interested only in one’s own affairs and has no sense of the meaning of community. And, finally, to be an Athenian is to esteem the discipline, skill, and taste tht are required to produce enduring art. Therefore, in approaching a work of art, Athenians prepare their imagination through learning and experience. To a Visigoth, there is no measure of artistic excellence except popularity. What catches the fancy of the multitude is good. No other standard is respected or even acknowledge by the Visigoth. Now, it must be obvious what all of this has to do with you. Eventually, like the rest of us, you must be on one side or the other. You must be an Athenian or Visigoth.

Of course, it is much harder to be Athenian, for you must learn how to be one, you must work at being one, whereas we are all, in a way, natural-born Visigoths. That is why there are so many more Visigoths than Athenians. And I must tell you that you do not become an Athenian merely by attending school or accumulating academic degrees. My father-in-law was one of the most committed Athenians I have ever known, and he spent his entire adult life working as a dress cutter on Seventh Avenue in New York City. On the other hand, I know physicians, lawyers, and engineers who are Visigoths of unmistakable persuasion. And I must also tell you, as much in sorrow as in shame, that at some of our great universities, perhaps even this one, there are professors of whom we fairly say they are closet Visigoths. And yet, you must not doubt for a moment that a school, after all, is essentially an Athenian idea. There is a direct link between the cultural achievements of Athens and what the faculty at this university is all about. I have no difficulty imagining that Plato, Aristotle, or Democritus would be quite at home in our classrooms. A Visigoth would merely scrawl obscenities on the way. And so, whether you were aware of it or not, the purpose of your having been at this university was to give you a glimpse of the Athenian way, to interest you in the Athenian way. We know on this day how many of you will choose that way and how many will not. You are young and it is not given to us to see your future. However, I will tell you this, I can never wish for your no higher compliment than that in the future it will be reported that Athenians mightily outnumber the Visigoths. Now, when you are watching television and believe you are looking at pictures, you are actually looking at the phosphorescent glow of three hundred thousand tiny dots. There is no picture there. These dots seem to be lit constantly, but in fact they are not. All the dots go off thirty times per second, creating what is called the flicker effect of television, which is similar to strobe or ordinary fluorescent light.

For many years conventional wisdom held that since this flickering happens at a rate beyond the so-called flicker-fusion rate of the human eye, we do not consciously note it, and we presumably are not affected by it. However, recent discoveries about the biological effects of very minor stimuli, and the growing incidence of television epilepsy among those particularly sensitive to flicker, have shown that whether we consciously note flicker or not, our bodies react to it. A second factor is that even when the dots go “on,” not all of them are lit simultaneously. Which dots are on determines the picture. In a sense, the television screen is like a newspaper photograph or the image on a film, which are also comprised of dots, except that the television dots are lighted one at a time according to the scanning system that starts behind the screen. Proceeding along a line from the upper-right-hand portion of your screen across the top to the left, the scan lights some dots and skips others, depending upon the image to be conveyed. Then the scan goes down another line, starts at the right again and goes across to the left and so on. What you perceive as a picture is actually an image that never exists in any given moment but rather is constructed over time. You perception of it is as an image depends upon your brain’s ability to gather in all the lit dots, collect the image they make on your retina in sequence, and form a picture. The picture itself, however, never existed. Unlike ordinary life, in which whatever you see actually exists outside you before you let it in through your eyes, a television image gains its existence only once you have put it together inside your head. As you watch television you do not “see” any of this fancy construction work happening. It is taking place at a rate faster than the nerve pathways between your retina and the portion of your brain that “sees” can process them.

You can only see things happening within a range of speeds. This is because five million years of human evolution developed our eyes to process only that data which were concretely useful. Until this generation, there was no need to see anything that moved at electronic speed. Everything that we humans can actually do anything about moves slowly enough for us to see. Even though you do not see every dot go on and off in sequence, these events are happening. Your retina receives the light continuously and your brain cells record their reception. The only thing that does not happen continuously is the translation of the energy into images inside your head. That happens only at about ten times per second. Television is sending its sequential images at thirty times per second. A few years ago, there was a big fuss about advertisers exploiting the differential in these rates. A technique called subliminal advertising places images within the dot-scan sequence at a speed which is faster than sight. You get hit with the ad, but you cannot process this fast enough, so you do not know the ad is registering. Your seeing process are plodding along at noneletronic speed while the advertisers have access to electronic speed. Your brain gets the message, but your conscious mind does not. According to those who have used the technique, it communicates well enough to affect sales. For entire hours or more per day that the average person is watching television, the repetitive process of constructing images out of dots, following scans, and vibrating with the beats of the set and the exigencies of electronic rhythm goes on. It was this repetitive, nonstop requirement to reconstruct images that are consciously usable that caused McLuhan to call television “participatory,” another unfortunate choice of words. It suggests exactly the opposite of what is going on.

I wish he has said “overpowering.” The word “participatory” has been passed around at thousands of cocktail parties, misleading people to assume if they only could have managed to get through McLuhan’s books, they would have discovered that their innate feeling (anecdotal evidence) that the experience is passive and that is “deadens my mind” was somehow wrong. In fact, watching television is participatory only in the way the assembly line or a hypnotist’s blinking flashlight is. Eventually, the conscious mind gives up noting the process and merges with the experience. The body vibrates with the beat and mind gives itself over, opening up to whatever imagery is offered. The Net, much like the TV, always provides a bounty of useful information and research tools, but its constant interruptions scatter some people’s thoughts and words. This may cause some to write in disconnected spurts. This makes it clear that big changes are in order. It may be good to take a vacation and disconnect and enjoy nature. However, the dismantling of one’s online life is always painful. For months, some experience how their synapses howls for their Net fix. Many will sneak back on and click the “check for new mail” button. Occasionally, some will go on a daylong Web binge. However, in time the cravings will subside, and one will find one’s self able to type at one’s keyboard for hours on end or to read through a sense academic paper without their mind wandering. Some old, disused neural circuits will spring back to life, some newer, Web-wired ones were quieting down. Then one will feel generally calmer and more in control of one’s thoughts—less like an animal in a lab pressing a lever and more like, well, a human being. One’s brain will be able to breathe again. For many people who are self-employed and have returned to the electronic cottage, they have the option of disconnecting. However, most people do not.

If they wanted to escape the network, the Web is so essential to their work and social lives that they could not. The internet, as its proponents rightly remind us, makes for variety and convenience; it does not force anything on you. Only it turns out it does not feel like that at all. We do not feel as if we had freely chosen our online practices. We feel instead that they are habits we have helplessly picked up or that history has enforced, that we are not distributing our attention as we intend or even like to. The question, really, is not whether people can still read or write the occasional book. Of course they can. When we begin using a new intellectual technology, we do not immediately switch from one mental mode to another. The brain is not binary. An intellectual technology exerts its influence by shifting the emphasis of our thought. Although even the initial users of the technology can often sense the changes in their patterns of attention, cognition, and memory as their brans adapt to the new medium, the most profound shifts play out more slowly, over several generations, as the technology becomes ever more embedded in work, leisure, and education—in all the norms and practices that define a society and its culture. How is the way we read changing? How is the way we write changing? How is the way we think changing? Those are the questions we should be asking. So many people love the Net because it keeps their e-mail running all the time. They play around with a few new social-networking services and they post entries into the electronic diary. There are also Blu-ray players with built-in Wi-Fi connections. It lets one stream music from Pandora, movies from Netflix, and videos from YouTube (the New MTV) through one’s television and stereo. One has to confess: it is cool. And most of us could not live without it.

As priests wrench off their collars in record numbers, so do monks and other religious, in particular nuns. Since the revolution of pleasures of the flesh, over three hundred thousand nuns have quit their orders, about one in five Worldwide, a breathtaking statistic people in Catholic circles call “the bleeding.” Interviews and surveys coincide in reporting that the vow of chastity is one of the main causes, just as it is among young Catholic women who decide not to join the convents they would have filled decades earlier. This, despite the fact that nuns rank their vows of chastity as “the most meaningful and least difficult of the vows.” Nunly life today is vastly different from in the Middle Ages, when wretched nuns were crammed into convents by harsh families or harsher circumstances. Then, they could never break out of the confines of their cloistered prisons. By the twentieth century, convents were populated primarily by women who had chosen the religious life as a vocation, though a small but constant contingent was composed of the one daughter that parents had promised to God. Mercifully, convents seldom accepted overtly mutinous or obviously unsuitable novices, so as a general rule, nunneries were overwhelmingly populated by dedicated nuns. Until Vatican II, convent life was rigidly structured, censored, and chaperoned. Its inmates, visibly distinguished from the outside World by their ungainly and anachronistic medieval vestments, lived sternly segregated from all outside influences, from the media to their own families. Many congregations banned newspapers and magazines, and a select radio or television program was a rare, supervised treat. Contacts with the World were always monitored, so that even relations had to tolerate another nun’s presence as they chatted with their daughter/sister/niece/aunt/cousin. The same protocol applied to dental, medical, and shopping expeditions, and to visits “home,” which were limited to intervals of five of six years.

The returning nun was accompanied to her parents’ house by a sister from the local convent, and both returned to that convenient to sleep at night. These regulations ensured celibacy and protected nuns from the contamination of any but churchly influences. The rewards of this tightly controlled, celibate life were not just spiritual. Nuns were respected and honored in their communities. They were educated (though usually with no consideration for individual vocational proclivities) for whatever professions their order directed: teaching and nursing were the most common. Most orders were financially successful and many actually wealthy. In sickness and old age her order’s resources assured a nun total security. It is possible that out of a bodily embrace between two creatures a remarkable entity can be born—the human mind with all its qualities and attribute and spiritual possibilities? Pleasures of the flesh are not only something operative on the physical plane, but also on the psychic plane. This psychical union may be harmful to the high-bred person of the two who are engaged in pleasures of the flesh. And maybe that is why some people are into it, but then choose to withdraw their consent. The desire to avoid the sufferings of pregnancy and childbirth may become so strong in a woman that in a further rebirth the pleasures of the flesh may be channeled into desire for celibacy. Many speak of oppression from above and set their mouths to Heaven. People must set out to cultivate impersonal intuition and impartial conscience control of all the functions and keep them in equilibrium. Since most people have had again and again to endure, side by side, one’s own suffering and their grinning well-being, one is overcome: it is not fitting that one such make such comparisons, as one’s own heart may not be pure. Therefore, one must proceed to purify it. Even when one succeeds in being able to wash one’s hands in innocence (which does not mean an action or feeling of self-righteousness, but the genuine second and higher purity which is won by great struggle of the soul), the torment continues. To let go of it, do not contrast between the horrible enigma of the happiness of the wicked and one’s own suffering. Clear reasoning will wipe that slate clean.

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