It is a general assumption that most men marry voluntarily. Certainly there are those cases of men consciously marrying on the basis of a feeling of duty or obligation. There are cases in which a man marries because “he” really wants to. However, there are also not a few cases in which a man (or a woman for that matter) consciously believes that he wants to marry a certain person while actually he finds himself caught in a sequence of events which leads to marriage and seems to block every escape. All the months leading up to his marriage he is firmly convinced that “he” wants to marry, and the first and rather belated indication that this may not be so is the fact that on the day of his marriage he suddenly gets panicky and feels an impulse to run away. If he is “sensible” this feeling last only for a few minutes, and he will answer the questions whether it is his intention to marry with the unshakable conviction that it is. We could go on quoting many more instances in daily life in which people seem to make decisions, seem to want something, but actually follow the internal or external pressure of “having” to want the thing they are doing to do. As a matter of fact, in watching the phenomenon of human decisions, one is struck by the extent to which people are mistaken in taking as “their” decision what in effect is submission to convention, duty, or simple pressure. It almost seems that “original” decision is a comparatively rare phenomenon in a society which supposedly makes individual decision the cornerstone of its existence. Pseudo willing can frequently be observed in the analysis of people who do not have any neurotic symptoms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

In conjunction with the operation of unconscious forces, there is an additional opportunity to become acquainted with this phenomenon. Moreover, this example that we are considering stresses one point which, though being implicitly made already, should be brought forward explicitly: the connection of repression with the problem of pseudo acts. Although one looks at repression mostly from the standpoint of the operation of the repressed force in neurotic behaviour, dreams, and so on, it seems important to stress the fact that every repression eliminates parts of one’s real self and enforces the substitution of a pseudo feeling for the one which has been repressed. The case I wish to present now is one of a twenty-two-year-old medical student. He is interested in his work and gets along with people pretty normally. He is not particularly unhappy, although he often feels slightly tired and has no particular zest for life. The reason why he wants to be analyzed is a theoretical one since he wants to become a psychiatrist. His only complaint is some sort of blockage in his medical work. He frequently cannot remember things he had read, gets inordinately tired during lectures, and makes a comparatively poor showing in examinations. He is puzzled by this since in other subjects he seems to have a much better memory. He has no doubts about wanting to study medicine, but often has very strong doubts as to whether he has the ability to do it. After a few weeks of analysis, he relates a dream in which he is on the top floor of a skyscraper he had built and looks out over the other buildings with a slight feeling of triumph. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Suddenly the skyscraper collapses and he finds himself buried under the ruins. He is aware of efforts being made to remove the debris in order to free him, and can hear someone say that he is badly injured and that the doctor will come very soon. However, he has to wait what seems to be an endless length of time before the doctor arrives. When he eventually gets there, the doctor discovers that he has forgotten to bring his instruments and can therefore do nothing to help him. An intense rage wells up in him against the doctor and he suddenly finds himself standing up, realizing that he is not hurt at all. He seers at the doctor, and at that moment he awakes. He does not have many associations in connection with the dream, but these are some of the more relevant ones. Thinking of the skyscraper he has built, he mentions in a casual way how much he was always interested in architecture. As a child his favourite pastime for many years consisted of playing with construction blocks, and when he was seventeen, he had considered becoming an architect. When he mentioned this to his father, the latter had responded in a friendly fashion that of course he was free to choose his career, but that he (the father) was sure that the idea was a residue of his childish wishes, that he really preferred to study medicine. The young man thought that his father was right and since then had never mentioned the problem to his father again, but had started to study medicine as a matter of course. His associations about the doctor being late and then forgetting his instruments were rather vague and scant. However, while talking about this part of the dream, it occurred to him that his analytic hour had been changed from its regular time and that while he had agreed to the change without any objection, he had really felt quite angry. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

He can feel his anger rising now while he is talking. He accuses the analyst of being arbitrary and eventually says, “Well, after all, I cannot do what I want anyway.” He is quite surprised at his anger and at this sentence, because so far he had never felt any antagonism toward the analyst or the analytic work. Some time afterwards he has another dream of which he only remembers a fragment: his father is wounded in an automobile accident. He himself is a doctor and is supposed to take care of the father. While he is trying to examine him, he feels completely paralyzed and cannot do anything. He is terror-stricken and wakes up. In his associations he reluctantly mentions that in the last few years he has had thoughts that his father might die suddenly, and these thoughts have frightened him. Sometimes he had even thought of the estate which would be left to him and of what he would do with the money. He had not proceeded very far with these phantasies, as he suppressed them as soon as they began to appear. In comparing this dream with the one mentioned before, it strikes him that in both cases the doctor is unable to render any efficient help. He realized more clearly than ever before that he feels that he can never be of any use as a doctor. When it is pointed out to him that in the first dream there is a definite feeling of anger and derision at the impotence of the doctor, he remembers that often when he hears or reads about cases in which a doctor has been unable to help the patient, he had a certain feeling of triumph of which he was not aware at the time. In the further course of the analysis other material which had been repressed comes up. He discovers to his own surprise a strong feeling of rage against his father, and furthermore that his feeling of impotence as a doctor is part of a more general feeling of powerlessness which pervades his whole life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Although on the surface he thought that he had arranged his life according to his own plans, he can feel now that deeper down he is filled with a sense of resignation. He realizes that he was convinced that he could not do what he wanted but had to conform with what was expected of him. He sees more and more clearly that he had never really wanted to become a physician and that the things which had impressed him as a lack of ability were nothing but the expression of passive resistance. This case is a typical example of the repression of a person’s real wishes and the adoption of expectations of others in a way that makes them appear to be his own wishes. We might say that the original wish is replaced by a pseudo wish. This substitution of pseudo acts for original acts of thinking, feeling, and willing, leads eventually to the replacement of the original self by a pseudo self. The original self is the self which is the originator of mental activities. The pseudo self is only an agent who actually represents the role a person is supposed to play but who does so under the name of the self. It is true that a person can play many roles what he believes he is expected to be, and for many people, if not most, the original self is completely suffocated by the pseudo self. Sometimes in a dream, in phantasies, or when a person is inebriated, some of the original self may appear, feelings and thoughts which the person has not experienced for years. Often they are bad ones which he has repressed because he is afraid or ashamed of them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Sometimes, however, they are the very best things in him, which he has repressed because of his fear of being ridiculed or attacked for having such feelings. The psychoanalytic procedure is essentially a process in which a person tries to uncover this original self. “Free association” means to express one’s original feelings and thoughts, telling the truth; but truth in this sense does not refer to the fact that one says what one thinks, but the thinking itself is original and not an adaptation to an expected thought. Dr. Freud has emphasized the repression of “bad” things; it seems that he has not sufficiently seen the extent to which the “good” things are subjected to repression also. The loss of the self and its substitution by a pseudo self leave the individual in an intense state of insecurity. He is obsessed by doubt since, being essentially a reflex of other people’s expectation of him, he had in a measure lost his identity. In order to overcome the panic resulting from such loss of identity, he is compelled to conform, to seek his identity by continuous approval and recognition by others. Since he does not know who he is, at least the others will know—if he acts according to their expectation; if they know, he will know too, if he only takes their word for it. The automatization of the individual in modern society has increased the helplessness and insecurity of the average individual. Thus, one is ready to submit to new authorities which offer one security and relief from doubt. Among the ideas which Bertrand Russell embodies in his life, perhaps the first one to be mentioned is human’s right and duty to disobedience. By disobedience I do not refer to disobedience of the “rebel without cause” who disobeys because one has no commitment to life except the one to say “no.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

This kind of rebellious disobedience is as blind and impotent as its opposite, the conformist obedience which is incapable of saying “no.” I am speaking of the human who can say “no” because one can affirm, who can disobey precisely because one can obey one’s conscience and the principles which one has chosen; I am speaking of the revolutionary, not the rebel. In most social systems obedience is the supreme virtue, disobedience the supreme sin. In fact, in our culture when most people feel “guilty,” they are actually feeling afraid because they have been disobedient. They are not really troubled by a moral issue, as they think they are, but by the fact of having disobeyed a command. This is not surprising; after all, Christian teaching has interpreted Adam’s disobedience as a deed which corrupted him and his seed so fundamentally that only the special act of God’s grace could save man from this corruption. This idea was, of course, in accord with the social function of the Church which supported the power of the rulers by teaching the sinfulness of disobedience. Only those humans who took seriously the Christian biblical teachings of humility, brotherliness, and justice rebelled against secular authority, with the result that the Church, more often than not, branded them as rebels and sinners against God. Mainstream Protestantism did not alter this. On the contrary, while the Catholic Church kept alive the awareness of the difference between secular and spiritual authority, Protestantism allied itself with secular power. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Mr. Luther was only giving the first and drastic expression to this trend when he wrote about the revolutionary German peasants of the sixteenth century, “Therefore let us everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel.” In spite of the vanishing of religious terror, authoritarian political systems continued to make obedience the human cornerstone of their existence. The great revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fought against royal authority, but soon humans reverted to making a virtue of obedience to the king’s successors, whatever name they took. Where is authority today? In the totalitarian countries it is of respect for authority in the family and in the school. The Western democracies, on the other hand, feel proud at having overcome nineteenth-century authoritarianism. However, have they—or has only the character of the authority changed? This century is the century of the hierarchically organized bureaucracies in government, business, and labour unions. These bureaucracies administer things and humans as one; they follow certain principles, especially the economic principle of the balance sheet, quantification, maximal efficiency, and profit, and they function essentially as would an electronic computer that has been programmed with these principles. The individual becomes a number, transforms himself into a thing. However, just because there is no overt authority, because one is not “forced” to obey, the individual is under the illusion that one acts voluntarily, that one follows only “rational” authority. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Who can disobey the “reasonable”? Who can disobey the computer-bureaucracy? Who can disobey when one is not even aware of obeying? In the family and in education the same thing happens. The corruption of the theories of progressive education have led to a method where the child is not told what to do, not given orders, nor punished for failure to execute them. The child just “expressed himself.” However, from the first day of his life onward, he is filled with an unholy respect for conformity, with the fear of being “different,” with the fright of being away from the rest of the herd. The “organization man” thus reared in the family and in the school having one’s education completed in the big organization has opinions, but no convictions; one amuses oneself, but is unhappy; one is even willing to sacrifice one’s life and that of one’s children in voluntary obedience to impersonal and anonymous powers. One accepts the calculation of deaths which has become so fashionable in the discussions on thermonuclear war: half the population of a country dead—“quite acceptable”; two-thirds dead—“maybe not.” The question of disobedience is of vital importance today. While, according to the Christian Bible, human history began with an act of disobedience—Adam and Eve—while, according to Greek myth, civilization began with Prometheus’ act of disobedience, it is not unlikely that human history will be terminated by an act of obedience, by the obedience to authorities who themselves are obedient to archaic fetishes of “State sovereignty,” “national honour,” “military victory,” and who will give the orders to push the fatal buttons to those who are obedient to them and to their fetishes. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Disobedience, then, in the sense in which we use it here, is an act of the affirmation of reason and will. It is not primarily an attitude directed against something, but for something: for man’s capacity to see, to say what he sees, and to refuse to say what he does not see. To do so he does not need to be aggressive or rebellious; he needs to have his eyes open, to be fully awake, and willing to take the responsibility to open the eyes of those who are in danger of perishing because they are half asleep. Karl Marx once wrote that Prometheus, who said that he “would rather be chained to his rock than to be the obedient servant of the gods,” is the patron saint of all philosophers. This consists in renewing the Promethean functions of life itself. Mr. Marx’s statement points very clearly to this problem of the connection between philosophy and disobedience. Most philosophers were not disobedient to the authorities of their time. Mr. Socrates obeying by dying, Mr. Spinoza declined the position of a professor rather than to find himself in conflict with authority, Mr. Kant was a loyal citizen, Mr. Hegal exchanged his youthful revolutionary sympathies for the glorification of the State in his later years. Yet, in spite of this, Prometheus was their patron saint. It is true, they remained in their lecture halls and their studies and did not go to the marketplace, and there were many reasons for this. However, as philosophers they were disobedient to the authority of traditional thoughts and concepts, to the cliches which were believed and taught. They were bringing light to darkness, they were waking up those who were half asleep, they “dared to know.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Mr. Marx’s concepts are rooted in Prophetic Messianism, in Renaissance to individualism, and in enlightenment humanism. The philosophy underlying his concepts is that of the active, productive, related individual, a philosophy of which the names of Mr. Spinoza, and Mr. Goethe and Mr. Hegal are most representative. That Mr. Marx’s idea was deformed and corrupted into its very opposite, both by the communists and by the capitalist opponents of socialism, is a remarkable—though by no means unique example of human’s capacity for distortion and irrationality. However, in order to understand whether Russia and China represent Marxist socialism, and what might be expected from truly socialist societies, it is important that we have an idea of what Marxism means. That Mr. Marx himself would not have considered Russian or China a socialist state follows from the following statement: “This [vulgar] communism, which negates the personality of man in every sphere, is only the logical expression of private property, which is this negation. Universal envy setting itself up as a power is only a camouflaged form of cupidity which re-establishes itself and satisfies itself in a different way. The thoughts of every individual private property at least directed against any wealthier private property, in the form of envy and the desire to reduce everything to a common level; so that this envy and leveling fact constitutes the essence of competition. Crude communism is only the culmination of such envy and leveling-down on the basis of a preconceived minimum. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

How little this abolition of private property represents a genuine approbation is shown by the abstract negation of the whole World of culture and civilization, and the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and wantless individual who has not only not surpassed private property but has not yet even attained to it. The community is only a community of work and of equality of wages paid out by the communal capital, by the community as universal capitalist. The two sides of the relation are raised to a supposed universality; labor as a condition in which everyone is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.” It was not Mr. Marx who believed in the negation of personality, and that socialism meant the leveling of all men. His errors are of a different kind, and have nothing to do with the underestimation of individuality. He underestimated the complexity and strength of human’s irrational passions and their readiness to accept systems that could relieve them of the responsibility and burden of freedom. Humans underestimated the resilience of capitalism and the many new forms into which this system could evolve and thus avoid the necessarily catastrophic results, as assumed by Mr. Marx, of its inner contradictions. Another error Mr. Marx was that he could not free himself sufficiently from the decisive importance nineteenth-century thought gave to legal property. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Legal ownership then was identical with management and social control. Hence Mr. Marx concluded that if legal ownership were taken away from the private capitalist and vested in society the workers would direct their own affairs. Little did he see that a change in ownership may only be a change in control, from the owners to bureaucracy acting in the name of the stockholders or of the state, and that this change may have little or no effect on the real situation of the worker within the system of production. Generations later nationalized industries in England, France, and Russia have shown this very clearly. Theoretically the Guild socialists in England and, both theoretically and practically, the Yugoslav Communists, have recognized the ambiguous character of the state ownership, and have built a system based on the ownership and control of factories by the workers, rather than by the state and its bureaucracy. The threat to property rights was assumed to come from other private individuals. However, in many countries, the supposed protectors of property rights, namely the government and its agents, are themselves the predators; Olson, Shleifer and Vishny, and others have emphasized this problem. If the state predators are short-lived “roving bandits,” the incentives to produce and invest may be destroyed completely. However, longer-lived “stationary bandits” will recognize that they stand to gain over the long run by committing themselves not to steal too much at any one time. If people perceive a threat to their property rights, whether from the government or form any other source, one of their responses will be to conceal their assets to the extent possible. They will hide tangible property. They will deny the existence of intangible property; for example, highly productive individuals will pretend to have low productivity because they know that if the truth is revealed, the government will simply force them to work harder. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

If they know that the government will take away most or even all of the output, another response will be to shrink in their efforts. The government, in turn, can spend resources to monitor and audit the people’s activities and abilities in its attempt to extract more from them. However, the cost of achieving perfect revelation by direct supervision or observation is likely to be prohibitive. Therefore the government will find it desirable to supplement direct auditing or monitoring policies with others that offer the people material incentives to expend effort and to reveal their assets and skills. Stated thus, the interaction between a predatory government and its public is simply another instance of the general problem of mechanism design that has been studied extensively in economic theory over the last six decades. The standard theory of optimal income taxation by a benevolent government comes from Mirrlees (1971). It fundamental and realistic assumption is an information constraint on the government. The population has a continuous distribution or skills or productivities. Each citizen knows one’s own skill, but the government cannot directly or costlessly observe the skill of any individual. If the government could not identify high-skilled individuals, it would try to extract more effort from them: a benevolent government would do this to increase its own take. The government will anticipate such behaviour, and will find it optimal to commit itself to giving the high-skilled people enough incentives to induce them to reveal the information. This means promising people of successively higher skills successively and sufficiently higher utility levels, by keeping the marginal tax rates sufficiently low. Of course the promise has to be credible, and in practice such credibility; in the case of a kleptocratic government this means assuming a stationary bandit. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Through periodic reports and appraisals, the reflexive thrust of self-analysis can potentially be intensified to a far higher degree than is usual in the community self-survey. Also, periodic self-appraisal can be varied and adjusted for maximum effect, as well as being handled in a less amateurish and more scientific manner, with each cycle of experience. As annal reports become more and more like the records of statistical and historical surveys and comparisons, research by a group upon itself becomes more and more an instrument of self-conscious self-change. Just as the conduct of social action has evolved in the direction of scientific procedure, so research in some of the social sciences—notably social psychology—has as the result of a series of important discoveries been approaching a model of social action. One of the most striking of these discoveries was what has been called by Mr. Dewey and others the Heisenberg effect in social science research. In physics, the Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy is the finding that in making minute measurements, the effect of the measuring instrument upon the phenomenon measured under certain conditions distorts the phenomenon so substantially that measurement is possible. In some cases this effect can be prevented by use of more delicate measuring instruments, but in other cases the dilemma is theoretically insoluble. In social science there are countless expressions of analogous dilemma. If a person is interviewed about one’s occupational aspirations, for example, these are quite frequently changed, or new ones are created, in the course of the interview. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Voters when canvassed on their political opinions often find these opinions altered by having attention directed to them—the alterations sometimes being differentially affected by the status of interviewers, even when the latter make every effort not to influence respondents. One of the writers early in the war had to interview diary farmers regarding their plans for increasing milk production, and despite a carefully followed sampling procedure decided that the answers were unrepresentative, because they were the only farmers in their counties who had been interviewed. The mere asking of questions, as Mr. Socrates found long ago, can have reorganizing and occasionally distressing consequences. Indeed, mere listening may have profound effects upon the person listened to, as psychotherapists have learned recently. A second kind of repercussion to social research is the oft noted episode in which people of some group or category react to predictions of their behaviour in such a way as to falsify the prediction or to knowledge of trends. A companion phenomenon—the way in which some attribution or prediction made known to a group by its attribution or prediction made known to a group by its author will cause them to behave in a way to validate it—as been called by Robert K. Merton “the self-fulfilling prophecy” and also was designated earlier by Gunner Myrdal as “the principle of cumulation.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

The success of the technique of psychoanalysis may be taken as still another instance of the reflexive influence of inquiry upon the characteristic behaviour of the person studied, since in accomplished desirable changes in personal integration by causing the subjects to raise to conscious recollection the meaning of past acts and relations. The effects of books of history on the further course of history illustrates almost the identical phenomenon; rewriting history books is always a necessary instrument of any revolution. Though there is as yet no systematic review of this phenomenon, various other illustrations of it could be given, but these should suffice to demonstrate that the findings of social science have as definite impact upon the subjects of the research as do the methods employed. Are the concepts of social science to be included among its findings or its methods? If neither, their popular adoption may be added as a third channel through which social science alters the character of the phenomena it studies. For as long ago as 1927 Morris R. Cohen noted that “the invention of a technical term often creates facts for social science. Certain individuals become introverts when the term is invented, just as many persons begin to suffer from a disease the moment they read about it…” The burden of certain criticisms of the Warner scheme for analysis of social classes is that by becoming generally know his six-level concept tends to intensify or to create the phenomenon which it purports to describe. That is, the mere sociological concept of class—if widely employed—may have a normative effect upon popular behaviour, just as the Marxian concept of class struggle is said to encourage class struggle. And so there may be some genuine rather than sentimental justification for those professing equalitarians who do not want the existence of social classes to be discussed. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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