Historians study the paths that have led from paths that have led from paradise or fearful despair to the present; futurists study the paths that lead from the present to a promised paradise or fearful despair. We will find out the results of some of our choices because we will live through them, but we will never know for sure what we missed. America faces a convergence of crises unmatched since its earliest days. Its family system is in crisis, but so is its health system, its urban systems, its vale system and above all, its political system, which for all practical purposes has lost the confidence of the people. How can we know what is true when it is difficult to tell fact from lies, when social media replicate unverified assertions and imagined truths a thousand-fold, when lies interfere with decision making, when popular opinion and democratic voting lead to answers that are unappealing or demonstrably wrong? History shows that propaganda can be based on lies masquerading as facts. Social media provide a new way to disseminate stories and amplify them, whether true or false. Confirmation basis is a quirk of human thinking that tends to make us more readily accept stories that confirm beliefs we already hold and reject those that challenge those beliefs. The consequences as we have seen can be catastrophic. The intensity and apparent validity of falsehoods will make them more dangerous in the future and camouflaging technology will become even better so the falsehoods will be better masked and harder to detect. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Why should these—and many other crises—all strike at approximately the same time in our history? Are they evidence of terminal decay in America? Are we at the “end of history”? Curing the problem may compromise freedoms that are basic to free societies. The longer we wait, the more difficult the resolution. America’s crises stem not from its failure but from its earlier success. Rather than the end of history, we are at the end of pre-history. Our smokestack industries have been laying off masses of manual workers. Our family structure has fractured, our mass media have de-massified, and our life styles and values have diversified. America has become a radically different place. This explains why all the old forms of political analysis no longer apply. Terms like “right-wing” and “left-wing” or “liberal” and “conservative” are drained of their familiar meanings. In Russia these days, we speak of Communists as “conservatives” and reformers as “radicals.” In the U.S.A., economic liberals may be social conservatives and vice versa. “Left-wing” Ralph Nader unites with “right-wing” Pat Buchanan to oppose NAFTA. Even more jarring and significant, however, is the growing transfer of political power away from our formal political structures—the Congress, the White House, the government agencies and political parties—to electronically-linked grassroots groups and to the media. These and other massive changes in American political life cannot be explained in political terms alone. They are related to equally deep changes in family life, in business, in technology, culture and values. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

To govern in this period of high-speed change, disillusionment, and almost fratricidal conflict in society, we need a coherent approach to the twenty-first century. A defining characteristic of change today is its pace. Events move swiftly, and acceleration affects everything—even, it seems, the fate of books. Currently, the confusion between what is really happening or has happened and what might have been or might be, is enveloping us in a fog of artificial truth and we have to ask is it really a thunderstorm or is it the stroke of an artist’s digital brush? Is the boarder really overrun by people immigrating illegally, or are the images manipulated. As the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels taught the World in the Second World War, lies repeated with emphasis and insistence come to be believed by listeners; the illusion of truth can be constructed. Psychologists have shown that lies can come to be believed even when the true facts are generally known; repetition makes lies seem more believable and generally accepted as truth. It worked for Barak Obama; it continues to work for politicians and even in democracies. The state of the art of artificial realis is so now advanced that human sense can no longer determine whether pictures are real and untouched, real but manipulated or wholly artificial. Truths can be half-truths or of the “it depends” type. Faces can also be sketched from DNA fragments. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Voices can be modified and constructed to fool friends, relatives, and even one’s self. Machines looking for telltale signs of manipulation can sometimes pick up subtle clues to artificiality, but the modification techniques are improving and it will not be long before all traces of manipulation are invisible to humans and sensors alike. When an image is captured in digital form, it is relatively easy to change its shape and color, to shrink it or enlarge it, to move it to another place in the frame, to another picture entirely, or to save it for future use. When an old image is moved to a new frame, it is not just “pasted on” but rather is integrated electronically with the original picture so that pixels that comprise the image flow continuously. Who needs witchcraft when you have technology? Aaliyah Haughton was killed in a plane crash during the shoot of The Queen of the Damned. The movie was completed anyway, by inserting digitized images of Aaliyah into the incomplete scenes. Virtually anything can be done these days and made to look authentic. The time has come for the next great step forward in American politics. We must recognize that all markets will not succeed unless they are supported by adequate governance institutions. What is needed is a clear distinction between rear-guard politicians who wish to preserve or restore an unworkable past, and those who are ready to make the transition to what we call a “Third Wave” information-age society. If nothing else, global competition means we cannot go back to the conformity, uniformity, bureaucracy and brute force economy of the assembly-line era. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

However, the Third Wave is not just a matter of technology and economics. It involves mortality, culture and ideas as well as institutions and political structure. It implies, in short, a true transformation in human affairs. Just as the industrial revolution destroyed or rendered irrelevant many of the political structures that preceded it, the knowledge revolution—and the Third Wave of change it has launched—will do the same to America and many other countries. Political parties and movements that recognize this historical fact will survive and shape the future for our children. Those that fail to do so will swirl down the storm drain of history. A lower level of state social spending and foreign aid will result not only in a better state of public finance, but also in a much stronger link between people’s incomes and their work effort, skills, and productivity. In this regard, labor motivation will be significantly higher. Western societies need to provide stronger incentives for individuals to take their lives into their own hands. This is how conventional capitalist system work. Making people work under stronger market pressures requires demonstrating higher ability to accommodate them: in other words, to make citizens accept and tolerate those pressures without social turmoil. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

America must have a higher degree of tolerance for the pains the market economy is causing: income disparities, low pay for a large numbers of workers, cuts of the excessive labor force by companies, unemployment, and underemployment. When signs of social unrest appear, it is suppressed by the regime. There is a lot of talk about America’s increasing income disparities as one of its major social problems and challenges. No doubt, it is a problem. However, let us not forget that expanding income gaps—or shall we say income differentiation?—stem from a low degree of the state’s involvement in the labor market and a small scale of income redistribution through social transfers. In this regard, they stimulate labor effort, providing a very strong incentive for the capable and talented—and this provides a strong impetus for economic growth. There are two patterns of the increase of income gaps. The first one, both socially explosive and economically detrimental, is the rise of absolute incomes of high-income families on the one hand and the fall of those of low-income families on the other. The rich become richer, and the poor poorer. The second pattern is fundamentally different: Absolute incomes of both high-income and low-income households are rising, but the former’s rise faster. Of course, it makes people, especially those belonging to the low-income group, frustrated with increasing income inequality, which is often perceived as social injustice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

It may cause social tensions. However, at the same time this pattern provides a very strong stimulus for economic growth: first, because it encourages the work effort, as the prospect of a higher income and better life is there for the households of all income groups; and second, because low-income families are also improving their living standards and becoming increasingly active consumers. Because some people wish to raise their incomes, some turn to prostitution. It is important to emphasize that the paradox of involvement in prostitution occurs because there is a fundamental discontinuity between the effects of engagement in prostitution that the women, in our study, recalled and the stories they told about such engagement. Hence, the women claimed that involvement in prostitution alleviated their poverty, provided them with housing, helped them to live independently and gave them a means to fashion better lives for themselves. Yet, they also claimed that involvement in prostitution created their poverty, generated their housing difficulties, make them more dependent on men and/or families and jeopardized their social and material survival. However, in their recollections, the women indicated that as they could see no alternative to their current lifestyle, they had to live within that contradiction (id est, they had to make sense of their lives within prostitution). It is argued here that prostitution comes to make sense (id est, is rendered plausible and coherent) by, and within, the construction of a specific “prostitute-identity” which is underpinned by a shifting set of meanings for men, money, and violence. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

There are six contingent elements of the “prostitute-identity.” They have been characterized as contingent because each element was made possible by the social and material context in which the women inhabited. Thee six elements are described in contradictory pairs. Following these descriptions, the shifting set of meanings of “men,” “money” and “violence” that underpin each pair is also outlined. The first contingent element is the “prostitute-as-worker” identification in which all the respondents talked about themselves in relation to a generalized imaginary notion of “johns.” Within this identification, prostitute-women were constructed primarily as rational economic agents pursuing monetary goals and, more specifically, as workers doing a job and getting paid for it. Prostitution was discussed as though it was simple economic contract between prostitutes and their johns. This is evidenced in the euphemistic phrases used (id est, “just making money,” “doing business”) and in the way the women described their involvement in prostitution, more generally. Lost (aged 21) said: “I’m doing a job. I was doing a job. Like any other person who goes out in the morning, goes to work, gets paid for it and goes home. That’s what I do.” Christina (aged 23) agreed: “It’s a job. That’s what you class it as—a job.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Interestingly, the identification of prostitutes—as—workers is also seen in the way that the women described their involvement in prostitution as having nothing to do with sex. The interviewees could make such statements because they denuded their involvement in prostitution of its social setting. Such decontextualization permitted them to reduce their engagement in prostitution to only a set of episodic, economic moments in a series of individual exchanges between men and women. As Janet (aged 37) said: “You don’t have sex with [johns]! F*ck no! That’s not sex, you don’t even think of it as sex. That’s money. It’s a job. We calling it ‘working.’” Others, such as Jasmine (aged 30) and Ingrid (aged 44) put it more succinctly: “It’s not sex, it’s work” and “You don’t think it’s sex with [johns]. You don’t think of that as sex.” The second element in the “prostitute-identity” is a “prostitute-as-commodified-body” identification (as evident in sixteen respondents narratives). In this identification, the women talked about themselves in relation to particular (and anonymous) johns and a notion of “pimp-as-owner” and defined their bodies (especially their privates) as rentable objects. This was a subtly nuanced identification; the women also talked about both controlling and not controlling their rentable private parts. The prostitute-as-commodified-bodies identification occurred primarily in relation to an understanding of johns as anonymous men who were interested only in gratifying their own sexual desires and were willing to pay money to do so. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

This is in direct contrast to the prostitutes-as-workers identification where the respondents talked about themselves in relation to a generalized, imaginary and decontextualized notions of “johns” as one part of a simple economic exchange. The prostitute-as-commodified-bodies identification was constructed within a specific definition of what was being sold to johns. Instead of selling skill, expertise, time or companionship, these women talked about themselves as being providers of rentable women’s private parts. “It hit me when I was 19 that I was actually a prostitute. I didn’t really think about it before—it was just work. But then it hit me. I was actually selling myself. I was just a hole. I was nothing more than a body men paid to f*ck. I was a prostitute.” (Lois, aged 21) The first nuance was in relation to a notion of owning and controlling the commodity (id est, the rentable women’s private part) which was possible through a symbolic separation of women’s bodies from their (assumed) selves. Other researchers have understood this separation as evidence of the emotional and psychological harm of involvement in prostitution and as specific strategies used by prostitutes to distance themselves from the socially stigmatized label “prostitutes” and this refuse the negative personal characteristics associated with the label. However, I argue that it is through the symbolic separation of their bodies and selves that the women were able to discuss themselves as owning and controlling (id est, being ultimately able to dispose of) their rent-able private parts. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Ingrid (age 44) and Patsy (age 42) claimed, respectively: “The way I see it, there’s me and my body’s just there to be sold” and “When I’m here, I’m me. But when I’m out there, I’m not there. I’m not there. I’m something else. I’m just a prostitute—I’m something I can sell.” The second nuance that occurred was in relation to a notion of owning, but not controlling their rentable private parts. This second nuance was made possible by the dissolution of symbolic separation of body and self so that eight of the prostitute-women imagined that their selves had been lost to their continuously rented private part and via that, their johns had control over them. Witness Sammy’s remarks: “In the end, you hate yourself for selling your body. They do what they want to you. Your body’s an object and you’ve got no control over it.” The third nuance is noted in relation to a contextualized understanding of pimping practices. There was an unstated acceptance of one of the more “feudal” pimping practices—id est, the buying and selling prostitutes between different pimps. Such an acceptance opened a space for four respondents in which they discussed themselves, in relation to a notion of pimps as owners. Th fact that they had each been sold or traded at some point during their involvement in prostitution does not demonstrate this identification; nor do their comments that such practices were common place. However, their reactions to and remarks about when they had been sold do. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Each of the four women took issues, not with being treated like chattel property, but rather with how much money they had been sold for. The amount obtained represented to these women a symbolic measure of their worth as commodified bodies and rentable private parts. As Barbara (age 24) said: “Can you believe it? Kevin sold me to Steve for just fifty dollars! Fifty dollars! I was worth more than that!” The individual, who trades sex for money, often times consents to a perpetual condition of weakness, under the false conception that it is a necessary state for the manifestation to survive in the capitalistic market. However, when one is weak, that is often the prime time to find God’s strength and let that be sufficient for accomplishing His will—and keep in mind, it is not an exhortation to God’s children deliberately to will to be weak. This would make a person unfit for service in many ways. Instead, one should say, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthen me.” That “willing to be weak” so as to “have a claim on Christ’s strength” is a wrong attitude can readily be seen. Such a “weakness” is not in accord with God’s plan and provision. It actually hinders God’s strengthening; and by this subtle deception of the enemy in the minds of many, God is robbed of much active service for Him. Christianity is the purifying, prophetic power. This theology lets the judgment of the unconditionally transcendent God fall upon every attempt of culture and religion to claim value before him. In its conception the only relation which the World has to God is that the World stands in the divine negation, in the crisis, in the shaking of time by eternity. Religion is the substance of culture and culture is the form of religion. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Family functions have often been transferred to other institutions, not because of their failure of the family to do its duty, but because another institution could realize the values involved even more fully. Recreation is an example of this. Occasionally a transfer of function has had the unwanted effect of weakening the family for the performance of some of its remaining tasks. Homes for the aged, for instance, cannot conserve the emotional value of the grandparent-grandchild relations. Such cases raise the question whether retransfer, though desirable, is possible in certain instances. This problem, for example, is reflected in discussions about the use of foster-homes rather than institutional care for the aged. The personnel of certain institutions, which began by being able to offer superior realization of certain family values, have so vigorously sought to enhance their institutions by usurping additional family functions that they have at times endangered other values of the family. Thus higher education may alienate children from parents, just as commercial services can weaken the housewife’s raison detre. This sort of thing has happened more often under the stimulus of commercial than professional considerations, yet certain agencies, which were originally set up to help families in need, have sometimes unduly prolonged the families’ dependence on outside help. Agency programs whilst intending rehabilitation or improvement have nonetheless at times produced unintended negative (and positive) side effects. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

The ambiguous consequences of professionalization. –The growth of specialized agencies for remedying deficiencies in family functioning is a potent condition for the evolution of professional technique and the scientific analysis and codification of the factors at work in family life situations. The same process operates here as can be witnessed throughout all other institutions of industrial, urban society: the more refined the division of labor, the more likely the generalization of subtle differences and associations, with consequent innovation in practice and understanding. Here lies no doubt the major positive benefit to be derived from the transfer of functions from families to family agencies. On the other hand, as already suggested, such transfers may come to seem not only inevitable under certain historical conditions, but irreversible, due to the fact that the layman can never hope to appropriate the knowledge and skill of the professional. Probably the majority of family-serving processionals hold this point of view, either unreflectively or deliberately. Only a minority relish the notion of prolonging or enlarging the dependence of their clients; the majority take the rueful view that the transfer of functions to professionals, despite its liabilities, is a net gain for family welfare, and thus justified. Moreover, it is easy to point out that not all transfers of function have been to responsible agencies devoted to family welfare; it transfers there must be, it is better that they should be professional rather than commercial hands. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

The process of professionalization need not halt, however, with the emergence of the certified family-serving professions. It can move on to encompass the commercial and the irresponsible, raising their standards of ethics and performance. More important still, it can work backward to professionalize the layman, in terms of one’s knowledge and self-conscious standards of application. Every agency and profession can readily adopt the objective of building the confidence and competence of its clients as family members. Some family agencies already disavow a vested interest in client dependency; a few are actively seeking to professionalize their clients in the sense just outlined. These we call the planning agencies. Historically, the development of family agencies can be schematized, with the usual gains and losses of simplification, into three stages: charity, therapy, and planning. At each stage there have been corresponding private and public forms, the one supported by voluntary contributions or dues, the other by taxation. Thus at the stage of charity there is private assistance to the afflicted by specialized persons and groups other than kin or neighbours, and public assistance in the form of country farms and state institutions. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

In the second stage there are the various voluntary benevolent and charitable associations dispensing assistance in organized and professional but still rather uneven manner; and on the public side, the conduct of regular, wide-scale services like home relief. Emphasis at this stage tends to be upon professionalization and rehabilitation through treatment of individuals. In the third stage, the emphasis shifts still further from the alleviation of distress and emergencies arising in families unequipped to cope with them, to the concerted achievement of more positive goals for organized publics, or for the community as a whole. Not boards of philanthropists but the affected people themselves form voluntary associations of various kinds, where their members participate directly in the planning and execution of programs. Such voluntary associations may be self-help agencies like insurance societies and co-operatives, or the public affected by the operation of some government executive agency, like the Farm Bureau in relation to the Department of Agriculture. Taking a round average, most family agencies in the United States of America may be said to have evolved to a point somewhere between the second and third stages. Some of the newest, however, are only commencing at the first stage; some, like the public-school systems in a number of states, have reached very advanced forms of planning, and furnish standards for judging others. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

At this third stage, it becomes less and less possible to distinguish family agencies from the other institutions of the community, because they are all embraced in a conscious, collective responsibility for the welfare of families and family members in the community. Yet charity and therapy may continue to be required indefinitely, though in changing proportions. Just as the inadequacies of charity has led to therapy, so the inadequacies of therapy are leading to planning. These inadequacies are relative to the increasing scope of the problems, and to the increasing scope of the opportunities for improvement as the evolution of the community continues. Where once, for example, cases of mental breakdown were simply confined in a country asylum (often run in conjunction with the poorhouse), there have since then developed a number of family agencies offering psychiatric care aimed at rehabilitation; but the volume of mental breakdown, despite psychiatric progress, still runs far ahead of the volume of cures. This has forced attention on the need for the prevention and early detection of mental breakdown. Many thinkers have also become aware of the need for broad positive programs of social change which would create a more definitely beneficial psychological environment for the entire population. Some commentators on the problems of mental health have become fixated, to borrow one of their own concepts, at the stage of psychiatric cure, and seem to desire nothing better than the multiplication of therapists, clinics, and mental hospitals. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

It would appear invidious to quote an example of this view, because its advocates are many. While it is perhaps most common among those who are explicitly concerned with psychotherapy, it dogs all other family agencies. It is closely allied with the functionalist view which aims to regain or restore some putatively healthy status quo ante. The extreme case may be those decentralists who would restore everyone to the family farm of the nineteenth century. The torrent of changes affecting the family as a consequence of science and industrialization during the past century is like the flood unleashed by the sorcerer’s apprentice. The effects of the transfer of the production of goods from the home to the factory, which converted children from assets to financial liabilities, have far from run their course. The resulting decline of fertility has meant that there are more people with no children to support them in age or infirmity, and older people find it more difficult to support themselves since there are no longer family enterprises to which they can make a contribution. At the same time, from the point of view of the community as a while, lengthened life expectancy and lower fertility have meant a declining number of working people is maintaining an increasing number of nonworking older people. Because the smaller family is less and less able to care for its aged, pension systems, both public and private, have been spreading quite spectacularly, and these in turn have the effect of further diminishing the function and responsibility of the family in caring for aged parents. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Each sequence of change had inevitably forced another, and no resting place appears in sight. It is not to be wondered at that some people, including a number of serious thinkers, are beginning to experience the same mounting anxiety that gripped the desperate little apprentice, and like him are praying for the sorcerer to give them respite. Through they may get the sorcerers, they will get no respite. Those who are fearful of the unanticipated consequences of purposive social action may succeed in handing over their responsibility to someone who promises order and stability, but they are not likely thereby to escape other consequences which may be both less easy to anticipate and more fearful to contemplate. The promise which the situation holds out to them is wiser anticipation and greater competence in making their hopes prevail. If a father left the family farm to work in a factory or office, it was probably to achieve a higher standard of living for his family. If old people live longer, it is because everyone want it that way. If child labour outside the home is forbidden, it is because of long campaigns of moral reform against it. If children are fewer per family, this is manifestly the choice of parents, abetted somewhat by landlords and proponents of the sales tax. These historic developments were responses to previous problematic situations, but they were never the only possible responses. And if things do not always turn out as expected, there is no reason to suppose people will be less competent to handle any new problem than they were to handle the prior situation which instigated it. Nor does the future offer fewer alternatives among which creatively to form a pattern of choice; indeed, it does just the opposite. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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