The task of appraisal always to some degree involved the technical problem of modifying and applying indices of progress, and there is no end to the improvements that can be made in this process. The task of index construction, however, is only part of the larger activity of evaluation. Are the indices applied actually valid. To illustrate, an adult education office may report that it has mailed out many thousands of pieces of literature, although these may be quite unreadable and unread. Or a health clinic may publicize how many free physical examinations or inoculations it has given, without disclosing whether it has demonstrated any effect upon morbidity in a community. Often the most accessible quantitative data have the least validity as indices of progress; massive effort is proffered as a substitute for results. Efficiency is the ratio of effect to effort, and indices of effect are the harder to come by. The problem of developing valid indices is frequently a very difficult one. Professional statisticians, incidentally, have been of meager help, since they tend to concentrate on the manipulation of indices, once derived, rather than on their progressive validation. To be sure, they are in part excused by the uniqueness of the goals of each agency, yet it remains puzzling that theoretical contributions to such a basic feature of social statistics as index construction should remain almost primitive. Why should each family agency be left to struggle in an amateurish way with the technical problems of indexing? #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The statistical expert cannot rule with propriety upon questions of policy. However, where objectives are not clear or consistent, or where wishful or defeatist thinking prevails in the evaluation of results, the determined statistician makes a signal contribution to objectivity by insisting upon definitions of aims which one can convert into quantitative expressions. One calls loose talk to account. Also, by the same insistence upon converting goals and ideals into standards for measurement of change in desired directions, one promotes thinking about self-evaluation by comparison of achievement in one planning period with that in another, rather than by reference to implied rivals. By such objective comparisons of self with self, over time, the identity and direction of development of a group (or a person) is confirmed, stimulated, and fortified against external counterinfluences. In addition to descriptions and measures of achievement, annual reports usually include statements of the original objectives and goals of a program, names of leading personnel, jurisdiction, financial accounts, table of organization, and varying amounts of background information (history, maps, illustrations) and propaganda. The precise functions which the report is supposed to perform will regulate the inclusion of exclusion of such minor data. Where the annual report goes beyond the reporting of progress for the previous cycle, and becomes also the bearer of definitions of new problems and proposals for action in ensuing cycles, there is, of course, no ready way of determining in advance what further material will prove relevant. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Limiting ourselves to the annual report which is primarily a record of progress, it is still possible to extract a few general rules or criteria for the evaluation of annual reports themselves. Examination of even a limited sample of annual reports issued by planning agencies (and there are differences in quality) reveals a pressing need for greater standardization in annual reporting. For a start, annual reports ought to be issued annually, and certainly no more than a year after the period which they cover. Second, they ought to be reports, that is, they should record the degree of success or failure an agency has experienced in pursuing its goals. Not until an agency begins to appraise its achievement objectively can there by any possibility of cumulative improvement in the construction and validation of its indices of progress. These are the fundamentals, yet they are not so obvious that their regular observance can be presupposed. For example, the parks and forest department of a certain great state—employing hundreds of personnel, caring for thousands of square miles, and controlling millions in budget and facilities—issued its only annual report in 1934, and that was a campaign pamphlet for the incumbent governor! In judging the planning practice of many an agency, one cannot begin with the niceties of index validation. Perhaps it may seem superfluous to urge that annual reports should be veracious, but the exhortation is too often needed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

One way of getting veracity might be to adopt the same means normally employed to assure honesty in financial accounting, id est, the employment of outside, disinterested, presumably incorruptible auditors. For special purposes of increased assurance, resolution of intra-agency conflicts, fresh viewpoints and special expertness, outside audits of operations are to be recommended. However, such audits ought to be viewed as supplementary only, and the main task of preparing annual reports be kept within the hands of the agency personnel itself. Otherwise much of the utility and regenerative function of annual reports in the planning process is necessarily lost. Sometimes actual preparation of the basic data is delegated to an internal policy-appraisal or progress-reporting unit. However, an agency and its administrative chief ought to feel that the document by which their work is made known periodically is their report. And if the agency grasps the fact that its annual report can become a powerful instrument working for the success of its programs, the strong identification of the personnel with the showing it makes in print can support and augment the veracity of its annual reports. For the declared purpose of the periodic appraisal is to assess the successes and failures of the program, and if the failures are concealed, little or no profit can be derived from them. Incentives to distort facts, to engage in judicious selection and emphasis, to offer tendentious interpretations and gratuitous justifications, will no doubt continue as long as rivalry for position persists, but they can be diluted and countered progressively by strengthening the experimental attitude inherent in planning as science. Professional societies as independent bodies may also eventually assist in raising the standards of program audits. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

If plans are construed as hypotheses, to be confirmed or refuted by experience, there is no reason to review results in the spirit of praise and blame. There will, no doubt, be gratification or disappointment over the outcome of each cycle of planning, but the important consideration is that each round of experience and its meaning for the next round will be evaluated objectively. Unless critical appraisal of success and failure occurs, the agency will go on repeating undiagnosed mistakes or ascribing efficacy to the wrong causes. Instead of progressive reduction of error and reliable achievement of intention, affairs will degenerate into a stabilized routine which evokes little enthusiasm for anyone concerned. The systematic scrutiny of experience can be a provocative stimulus to progress. Unless this is grasped, neither personnel nor clientele realize how much they have been robbed when their agency fails to publish regular, thorough, and veracious annual reports. Some of the less obvious functions of an annual reports when properly utilized are their respective consequences for administrators, rank-and-file personnel, clientele, and similar agencies in other communities. Many instances of the different methods of protection can be observed in reality. Even in modern states with well-functioning governments, private protection supplements or replaces official policing: firms have private security guards, and homeowners have neighbourhood-watch organizations and gated communities with private guards. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

In countries where the rule of law does not run very well, private protection become even more important. Theorists have also studied alternative methods of private protection: the owner spending one’s own time and effort on protection, hiring specialized protector who may be individuals or organizations like the Mafia, and so on. In these games, predator choose their targets knowing the form of protection that prevails in equilibrium, and the guards choose their strategies of pricing, entry, collusion, et cetera. This creates many complex interactions. We have to consider the optimal allocation of a property-owner’s effort between producing output using one’s own property on one hand, and fighting over one’s own or another’s property or the output produced using such property on the other hand. We must consider the interaction of a private mafia and the government in providing enforcement of property rights, but our government is also a profit maximizer, so the basic effect of the mafia is to increase competition in the protection industry. The effect of predation—whether by private bandits or by kleptocratic government and its agents—on the incentives to produce and invest, therefore on overall economic performance, depends crucially on the time-horizon of the predator. This dichotomy can involve “roving bandits” and “stationary bandits.” A roving bandit has a short time-horizon, perhaps because he or she faces strong competition from others who want to take one’s place. Such a bandit will grab as much as one can as fast as one can, destroying all incentives for one’s victims. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

A stationary bandit expects to prey on the same victim for a long time. One will find it in one’s own long-term interests to establish and maintain the reputation that one leaves individuals some of the fruits of their investments or efforts. The resulting incentives will generate more output and growth, and therefore more for the predator to take in the future. One’s optimal strategy will balance at the margin the gains from short-run grabbing and long-run cultivation and harvesting. Can an economy under a station bandit be efficient? It is in the bandit’s own interest to control one’s victim population so as to maximize economic efficiency; this will maximize one’s own take, after one has given the victims just the amount needed to keep them alive and to stop them revolting against one’s rule. We assumed that the bandit can only choose proportional taxation, and it is well known that such a tax inflicts an unavoidable distortion or dead-weight loss on the economy. However, a smarter bandit might try a less-distorting instrument, for example lump-sum taxation or more general nonlinear taxation. The feasibility of such mechanisms depends on the information available to the bandit. The theory of mechanism design under incomplete information is well established in microeconomies. Even though an economy ruled by a stationary bandit may fall considerably short of full efficiency, it will perform much better than that under a roving bandit. Under a regime that has reasonable institutional stability and is not completely dysfunctional, a rapidly increasing level of GDP per capita is possible up to semi-industrialization. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

At their best, these types of regimes, while they tolerate high level of corruption, also demand some performance such that corruption does not become absolutely disorganized. Disorganization becomes likely if a number of bandits compete with each other for the resources available for extraction, because this adds a common-resource-pool problem to the short-horizon problem. Marxists have usually assumed that what works behind humans’ backs and directs them are economic forces and their political representations. Psychoanalytic study shows that this is much too narrow a concept. Society consists of people, and each person is equipped with a potential of passionate strivings, from the most archaic to the most progressive. This human potential as a whole is molded by the ensemble of economic and social forces characteristic of each given society. These forces of the social ensemble produce a certain social unconscious, and certain conflicts between the repressive factors and given human needs which are essential for sane human functioning (like a certain degree of freedom, stimulation, interest in life, happiness). In fact, revolutions occur as expressions of not only new productive forces, but also of the repressed part of human nature, and they are successful only when the two conditions are combined. Repression, whether it is individually or socially conditioned, distort humans, fragments them, deprives them of their whole humanity. Consciousness represents the “social man” determined by a given society; the unconscious represents the universal human in us, the good and the bad, the whole human who justifies Terrence’s saying, “I believe that nothing human is alien to me.” (This was incidentally was Mr. Marx’s favorite motto.) #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Depth psychology also has a contribution to make a problem which plays a central role in Mr. Marx’s theory, even though Mr. Marx never arrived at its satisfactory solution: the problem of the essence and nature of humans. On the other hand Mr. Marx—especially after 1844—did not want to use a metaphysical, unhistorical concept like the “essence of man,” a concept which had been used for thousands of years by many rulers in order to prove that their rules and laws corresponded to what each declared to be the unchangeable “nature of man.” On the other hand, Mr. Marx was opposed to a relativistic view that humans are born a blank piece of paper on which every culture writes its text. If this were true, how could humans ever rebel against the forms of existence into which a given society forces its members? How could Mr. Marx use (in Capital) the concept of the “crippled man” if he did not have a concept of a “model of human nature” which could be crippled? An answer on the basis of psychological analysis lies in the assumption that there is no “essence of man,” in the sense of a substance which remains the same throughout history. The answer, in my opinion, is to be found in the fact that humans’ essence lies in the very contradiction between one’s  being in nature, thrown into the World without one’s will and taken away against one’s will, at an accidental place and time, and at the same time transcending nature by one’s lack of instinctual equipment and by the fact of one’s awareness—of oneself, of others, of the past and the present. Humans, a “freak of nature,” would feel unbearably alone unless one could solve their contradiction in human existence forces one to seek a solution of this contradiction, to find an answer to the question which life asks one from the moment of one’s birth. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

There are a number of ascertainable but limited answers to the question of how to find unity. Human beings can find unity by trying to regress to the animal stage, by doing away with what is specifically human (reason and love), by being a slave or a slave driver, by transforming oneself into a thing, or else by developing one’s specific human powers to such an extent that one finds a new unity with one’s fellow humans and with nature by becoming a free human—free not only from chains but free to make the development of all one’s potentialities the very aim of one’s life—a human who owes one’s existence to one’s own productive effort. Humans have no innate “drive for progress,” but they are driven by the need to solve their existential contradiction, which arises again at every new level of development. This contradiction—or, in other words, humans’ different and contradictory possibilities—constitutes their essence. This is a plea to introduce a dialectically and humanistically oriented psychoanalysis as a significant view point into Marist thought. I believe that Marxism needs such a psychological theory and that psychoanalysis needs to incorporate genuine Marxist theory. Such a synthesis will fertilize both fields. Leisure, just as family life, should serve labour training. It should not serve “idle pleasure,” but it should make humans better fitted for their social integration and for better work habits. “With the expansion of free time under socialism, each working person receives greater opportunity to raise one’s cultural level, to perfect one’s knowledge; one can better fulfill one’s social obligations and raise one’s children, better organize one’s rest, participate in sports, and so on. All this is necessary for the all-sided development of a human being. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Simultaneously, free time…serves a powerful factor in raising labour productivity It was in the sense that Mr. Marx called free time the greatest productive force exerting an influence in turn on the productive force of labour. Thus free time and working time are interconnected and interdependent. (It should be noted in passing that this reference to Mr. Marx is cynical falsification; Mr. Marx speaks of free time precisely as the true realm of freedom, which begins when work ends, and in which humans can unfold their own powers as an aim in itself, and not as a means for the end of production.) How far a Soviet leader like Khrushchev has even ideologically moved away from the Marxist concept of socialism becomes very clear from a conversation between President Sukarno and Mr. Khrushchev. Mr. Sukarno stated, in a simple yet essentially correct way, the traditional socialist concept way, the traditional socialist concept: “Indonesian socialism…aims at a good life for all without exploitation.” Mr. Khrushchev: “No, no, no. Socialism should mean that every minute is calculated, a life built on calculation.” Mr. Sukarno: “That is the life of a robot.” He might have added: and your definition of socialism is actually the definition of the capitalist principle. In some respects, as Mr. Marcuse has pointed out, Soviet morality is similar to Calvinist work morale: they both “reflect the need for the incorporation of large masses of ‘backward’ people into a new social system, the need for the creation of a well-trained, disciplined labour force, capable of vesting the perpetual routine of the working day with ethical sanction, producing every more rationally, ever-increasing amounts of goods, while the rational use of these goods for individual’s needs is every more delayed by circumstances.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

At the same time, however, Russia makes use of the most modern technology, machinery and production methods, and hence has to combine the need for intelligent imagination, individual initiative and responsibility, with the needs of an old-fashioned, traditional labour discipline. The Russian system is its organization methods as well as in its psychological aims combines (or “telescopes,” as Mr. Marcuse aptly says) older with the new phases, and it is precisely this telescoping which makes the understanding of it so difficult for the Western observer—not to speak of the added difficulty that this system is expressed in ideological terms of Marxist humanism and eighteenth-century enlightenment philosophy. While Russian ideology pays lip service to Mr. Marx’s ideal of the “all-rounded personality” who is not shackled to one and the same occupation all one’s life, Russian education places all the emphasis on Training—the training of “specialists on the basis of a close co-operation between studies and production” and calls for “strengthening [of] the ties of the country’s scientific establishment with production, with the concrete demands of the national economy.” Russian culture is centered around intellectual development, while it neglects the development of the affective side of humans. This latter fact finds it expression in the standards of Russian literature, painting, architecture and moving pictures. In the name of “socialist realism” a reasonable level of Victorian bourgeois taste is cultivated, and this in a country that, especially in literature and films, was once among the most creative in the World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

While in certain traditional arts like the ballet and the performing of music the Russian people show still the same gifts they had for many generations, the arts that are related to ideology and that influence people’s minds, especially films and literature, show nothing of this creativeness. They breathe the spirit of extreme utilitarianism, are valuable exhortations to work, discipline, patriotism, et cetera. The absence of any authentic human feeling, love, sadness, or doubt, betrays a degree of alienation that is hardly surpassed anywhere else in the World. In these films and novels, men and women have been transformed into things, useful for production, and alienated from themselves and one another. (Of course it remains to be seen whether the change from Stalinism to Khruschchevism had lead to a marked improvement in the artistic standard of Russian culture, and that means in the degree of alienation existing now; such a development seems possible only if very fundamental changes were to take place in the social system of Russia.) These facts seem perhaps to be contradicted by another set of facts, namely the large amount of “good” literature (Dostoevisk, Tolstoi, Balzac, et cetera), which is published and presumably read in Russian. A number of authors who believe that the Khrushchev system might be the basis from which a genuine humanistic socialism will develop have often quoted this aspect of Russian book-publishing as an argument for their hopes. If people are imbued with this kind of literature to the degree that they are in Russia, their human development will be molded by the spirit of this literature. The population is being driven into a state of ever-increasing alienation and is working to produce more genuine human experience, as it is represented in “good” literature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

However, the very fact that the novels by Mr. Dostoevski, Balzac, or Jack London take place in foreign countries or in cultures entirely different from Russian reality makes them serve as high-class escape literature; this literature satisfies the unquenchable thirst for authentic human experience which remains unsatisfied in the contemporary Russian practice, and yet, being completely disconnected from this practice, also does not endanger it. If we want to look for a parallel phenomenon in the Western culture one has only to remember that the Bible is still the most widely sold and presumably most widely read book in the West, and yet that this same book fails to have any marked influence on the real experience of modern humans, either on their feelings or on their actions. The Christian Bible has become escape literature, needed to save the individual from facing the abyss of emptiness that one’s mode of life opens up before one, yet without much effect because no connection is made between the Christian Bible and their real life. The assumption that the “normal” way of overcoming aloneness is to become an automaton contradicts one of the most widespread ideas concerning humans in our culture. The majority of us are supposed to be individuals who are free to think, feel, act as they please. To be sure this is not only the general opinion on the subject of modern individualism, but also each individual sincerely believes that one is “one” and that one’s thoughts, feelings, wishes are “one’s.” Yet, although there are true individuals among us, this belief is an illusion in most cases and a dangerous one for that matter, as it blocks the removal of those conditions that are responsible for this state of affairs. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Ewe are dealing here with one of the most fundamental problems of psychology which can most quickly be opened up by a series of questions. What is the self? What is the nature of those acts that give only the illusion of being the person’s own acts? What is spontaneity? What is an original mental act? Finally, what has all this to do with freedom? Feelings and thoughts can be induced from the outside and yet be subjectively experienced as one’s own, and one’s own feelings and thoughts can be repressed and thus cease to be part of one’s self. When we say “I think,” this seem to be a clean and unambiguous statement. The only question seems to be whether what I think is right or wrong, not whether or not I think it. Yet, one concrete experimental situation shows at once that the answer to this question is not necessarily what we suppose it to be. Let us attend an hypnotic experience. Here is the subject A whom the hypnotist B puts into hypnotic sleep and suggests one will want to read a manuscript which one will believe one has brought with one, that one will seek it and not find it, that one will then believe that another person, C, has stolen it, that one will get very angry at C. One is also told that one will forget that all this was a suggestion given one during the hypnotic sleep. It must be assed that C is a person toward whom the subject has never felt any anger and according to the circumstances has no reason to feel angry; furthermore, that one actually has not brought any manuscript with one. What happened? A awakes and, after a short conversation about some topic, says, “Incidentally, this reminds me of something I have written in my manuscript. I shall read it to you.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

He looks around, does not find it, and then turns to C, suggesting that he may have taken it; getting more and more excited when C repudiates the suggestion, he eventually bursts into open anger and directly accuses C of having stolen the manuscript. He goes even further. He puts forward reasons which should make it plausible that C is the thief. He has heard from others, he says, that C needs the manuscript very badly, that he had a good opportunity to take it, and so on. We hear him not only accusing C, but making up numerous “rationalizations” which should make one’s accusation appear plausible. (None of these, of course, are true and A would never have thought of them before.) Let u assume that another person enters the room at this point. He would not have any doubt that A says what he thinks and feels; the only question in his mind would be whether or not his accusation is right, that is, whether or not the contents of A’s thoughts conform to the real facts. We, however, who have witnessed the whole procedure from the start, do not care to ask whether the accusation is true. We know that this is not the problem, since we are certain that what A feels and thinks now are not his thoughts and feelings but are alien elements put into his head by another person. The conclusion to which the person entering in the middle of the experiment comes might be something like this. “Here is A, who clearly indicates that he has all these thoughts. He is the one to know best what he thinks and there is no better proof than his own statement about what he feels. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

“There are those other persons who say that his thoughts are superimposed upon him and are alien elements which come from without. In all fairness, I cannot decide who is right; any one of them may be mistaken. Perhaps, since there are two against one, the greater chance is that the majority is right.” We, however, who have witnessed the whole experiment would not be doubtful, nor would the newcomer be if he attended other hypnotic experiments. He would then see that this type of experiment can be repeated innumerable times with different persons and different content. The hypnotist can suggest that a raw potato is a delicious pineapple, and the subject will eat the potato with all the gusto associated with eating a pineapple. Or that the subject cannot see anything, and the subject will be blind. Or gain, that he thinks that the World is flat and not round, and the subject will argue heatedly that the World is flat. What does the hypnotic—and especially the post-hypnotic—experiment prove? It proves that we can have thought, feelings, wishes, and even sensual sensations which we subjective feel to be ours, and yet that, although we experience these thoughts and feelings, they have been put into us from the outside, are basically alien, and are not what we think, feel, and so on. What does the specific hypnotic experiment with which we started show? The subject wills something, namely, to read his manuscript, he thinks something, namely, anger against C. We have seen that all three mental acts—his will impulse, his thought, his feeling—are not his own in the sense of being the result of his own mental activity; that they have not originated in him, but are put into him from the outside and are subjectively felt as if they were his own. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

He gives expression to a number of thoughts which have not been put into him during the hypnosis, namely, those “rationalizations” by which he “explains” his assumption that C has stolen the manuscript. However, nevertheless these thoughts are his own only in a formal sense. Although they appear to explain the suspicion, we know that the suspicion is there first and that the rationalizing thoughts are only invented to make the feeling plausible; they are not really explanatory but come post factum. This hypnotic experiment shows in the most unmistakable manner that, although one may be convinced of the spontaneity of one’s mental acts, they actually result from the influence of a person other than oneself under the conditions of a particular situation. The phenomenon, however, is by no means to be found only in the hypnotic situation. The fact that the contents of our thinking, feeling, will, are induced from the outside and are not genuine, exists to an extent that gives the impression that these pseudo acts are the rile, while the genuine or indigenous mental acts are the exceptions. As to “guidance,” the believer should understand that when there is no action in one’s spirit, one should use one’s mind. If in everything there must be there is no use for the brain at all, but the spirit does not always speak. There are times when it should be left in abeyance. In all guidance the mind decides the course of action—not only from the feeling in the spirit but by the light in the mind. I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, One Nation under God, with liberty and justice for all. And please seeing in your heart as a God loving Christian to donate to the Sacramento Fire Department, for they are not receiving all of their resources. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD

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No appointment needed! Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,377 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms.  Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more! Get the most out of your new home with Cresleigh’s All Ready smart home featuring all the connectivity needed to keep your house running. Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes with owned solar included! 

Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand new neighborhood in the charming City of Lincoln. Palo Verde Park, is  just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/

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