The Requirement is Emotional Maturity

There is one requirement that is absolute in money managing, as well as in life, and you have already learned it with the first Irregular Rule: If you do not know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out. The requirement is emotional maturity. You have to use your emotions in a useful way. Your emotions must support the goal you are after. You cannot have any conflict about what you are after, and your emotional needs must be gratified by succeeding at what you are doing. You have to be able to handle any situation without losing your cool, or letting your emotions take over. You must operate without anxiety. The crowd always loses because the crowd is always wrong. It is wrong because it behaves normally. What the crowd—or the public—or the market is up to is always a subject of speculation, for the crowd, according to investment mythology, must always be wrong. (The believers in this rule are numerous enough to constitute a crowd, but of course anyone speaking of the crowd believes oneself to be outside of it.) A crowd is not merely a number of people assembled in one place; it could be thousands of isolated individuals. This is called a psychological crowd, subject to the disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings and thoughts in a different direction. Whoever be the individuals that compose the crowd, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were one in a state of isolation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

An individual in a crowd acquires—just from being in a crowd—a sentiment of invincible power which allows one to yield to instincts which, had one been alone, one would perforce have kept under restraint…the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely. Another element of the crowd is suggestibility—the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds oneself in the hands of the hypnotizer. Once we have dissolved responsibility, we are ripe for contagion and suggestibility and acts of “irresistible impetuosity.” A crowd is not something one should spend one’s time in; an individual, upon becoming a member of a crowd, descends several rungs in the order of civilization because the mind of the crowd is not an average but a new common denominator, mindless in the sense that it has surrendered to its own unconscious impulses. While the crowd would be intellectually inferior to the isolated individual, the crowd could be better or worse than an individual, depending on the nature of the suggestion to which it has been exposed. The crowd is suggestible to images, and what produce these images is the judicious employment of words and formulas. Handled with art, they possess in sober truth the mysterious power formerly attributed to them by the adepts of magic. A crowd can run a relationship, a business, and economy, or even a country much like in 1965 when Admiral, Motorola, Zenith and Magnavox collapsed like a souffle on which the oven door has been untimely slammed. All that is necessary is to recognize the magical power attached to those short syllables, as if they contained the solution of all problems. They synthesize the most diverse unconscious aspirations and the hope of their realization. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

We see the social engineering propaganda used on the masses to get them to accept illegal immigration, which is a threat to national and economic security, when people say, “This is a country of immigrants.” Okay, that may have been true at one time, but a lot of people have been here for generations and we are now a country of citizens and no longer a population building nation. We are also a nation of law and order, and no one is above the law. Also, is it not fascinating that even a president of a country could be charged with crimes, but we are willing to let people invade America and pay them to? People teach their children not to steal, but what kind of message are we sending them when we allow a group of people to break the law and support these law breakers by saying, “They are women and children looking for a better life.” When in fact that is not true. Since President Biden has been in office more than 11,000,000 undocumented people have come into this country. That is more people than the population of South Dakota. At least 200 of them were on the terror watch list, and many of those who are illegally entering America are young males of military age. If we are going to allow illegal immigration, why not just continue to allow Black Lives Matter to infiltrate businesses, break laws, embezzle and discriminate and terrorize people on the basis of their skin colour, in acts of revenge for the past? Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: it is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychological or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, maybe you have not heard the news. Crowds begin to stay from all our board room watchers, because here we need an organized structure within the crowd and maybe even a rival crowd. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

The force in the crowd, not surprisingly, is libido, the energy of the instincts that go under the name of “love.” Love here is not only for valentines, it is all forms of love—Eros, the force that holds things in the World together, and hence can also include the devotion to concrete objects and abstract ideas. In Dr. Freud’s crowd, the individuals fasten on an object, substitute it for their ego ideal, and all those with the same ego ideal identify themselves with each other in their ego. Remove the object, and you get anxiety. The suggestion is that in the fusing of the ego and ego ideal, the person, in a mood of triumph and self-satisfaction, disturbed by no self-criticism, can enjoy the abolition of one’s inhibitions, one’s feelings of consideration for others, and self-reproaches. The primal crowd, with the hero leader, and the sons who skill the hero leader make it hard to make any neat application. The group is the inherited deposit from the phylogenesis of the human libido. No one, after these remarks, will ever want to be part of a crowd again, and yet the fact is that it is really quite comfy to be part of the crowd. (It has to do with individuals being part of a multicellular mass. And it is certainly better to be comfy, everybody will agree, than not be. When it comes to investment, eighty percent of the market is psychology. Investors whose actions are dominated by their emotions are most likely to get int trouble. However, that goes for any area of life. If a crowd is so fickle, feminine, and irrational, then does success follow from simply staying out of the crowd? Perhaps sticking to one’s knitting, the balanced following of rational choices? Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be; and this national weakness finds its nemesis in the propaganda in most TV news media. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

The power which impressed Mr. Hitler probably more than God, Providence, and Fate, is Nature. While it was the trend of the historical development of the last four hundred years to replace the domination over humans by the domination over Nature, Mr. Hitler insisted that one could and should rule over humans but that one could not rule over Nature. Mr. Hitler believed that the history of mankind probably did not start with the domestication of animals but with the domination over inferior people. He ridiculed the idea that human could conquer Nature and made fun of those who believed to become conquerors of Nature “whereas they have no other weapon at their disposal but an ‘idea.’” He says that man “does not dominate Nature, but that, based on the knowledge of a few laws and secrets of Nature, he has risen to the position of master of those other living beings lacking this knowledge.” There again we find the same idea: Nature is the great power we have to submit to, but living beings are the ones we should dominate. There are two trends that dominated Mr. Hitler, which are fundamental for the authoritarian character: the craving for power over men and the longing for submission to an overwhelmingly strong outside power. Workers and farmers went from being socialists in 1919 to becoming some of the earliest and most passionate Nazis. People watched the shadows descend as the red, black, and gold flags of Social Democracy that once fluttered in windows turned communist red and then Nazi black, and the clergy enthusiastically embraced fascism. Some were even locked up by the Gestapo, mostly for refusing to look the other way about local party machinations. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

The Nazi party seized power. All of a sudden, overnight, perfidy and malice rules and anyone who did not want to get in line became the subject of infamous intrigues and ore or less open threats. The popular terrors about witches and antisemitism were linked. People were looking for someone to blame when something went wrong. There was a sinister desire to blame someone for misfortune, rather than try to understand its true sources. Those who feared witchcraft feared hidden evil, murky conspiracies, and demonic alliances. Antisemites had similarly insisted that Jewish people were secretly behind every problem, every trauma, every loos. They believed that Jewish people had influence out of all proportion to the relative numbers in Germany society, derived from an international plot working remorselessly, in stealth, to control the levers of global power. Not only did witchcraft accusations and “Jew-bating” work the same way, by casting blame on “others”—who might appear outwardly innocuous, but were surreptitiously in league with nefarious, World-dominating forces—but the two beliefs also had structural similarities. Mr. Hitler’s ideas were more or less identical with the ideology of the Nazi party. The ideas expressed in his book are those which he expressed in the countless speeches by which he won mass following for his part. This ideology results from his personality which, with its inferiority feeling, hatred against life, asceticism, and envy of those who enjoy life, is the soil of sado-masochistic striving; it was addressed to people who, on account of their similar character structure, felt attracted and excited by these teachings and became ardent followers of the man who expressed what they felt. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

However, it was not only the Nazi ideology that satisfied the lower middle class; the political practice realized what the ideology promised. A hierarchy was created in which everyone has somebody above hum to submit to and somebody beneath him to feel power over; the man at the top, the leader, has Fate, History, Nature above him as the power in which to submerge himself. Thus the Nazi ideology and practice satisfies the desires springing from the character structure of one part of the population and gives direction and orientation to those who, though not enjoying domination and submission, were resigned and had given up faith in life, in their own decisions, in everything. Do these considerations give any clue for a prognosis with regard to the stability of Nazism in the future? I do not feel qualified to make any predictions. Yet a few points—such as those that follow from the psychological premises we have been discussing—would seem to be worth raising. Given the psychological conditions, does Nazism not fulfill the emotional needs of the population, and is this psychological function not one factor that makes for its growing stability? From all that has been said so far, it is evident that the answers to this question is in the negative. The fact of human individuation, of the destruction of all “primary bonds,” cannot be revered. The process of the destruction of the medieval World has taken nearly five hundred years and is being completed in our era. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Unless the whole industrial system, the whole mode of production, should be destroyed and changed to the preindustrial level, man will remain an individual who has completely emerged from the World surrounding one. We have seen that man cannot endure this negative freedom; that he tries to escape into new bondage which is to be a substitute for the primary bond which he has given up. However, these new bonds do not constitute real union with the World. One pays for the new security by giving up the integrity of one’s self. The factual dichotomy between one and these authorities does not disappear. They thwart and cripple one’s life even though consciously they may submit voluntarily. At the same time, one lives in a World in which one has not only developed into being an “atom” but which also provides one with every potentiality for becoming an individual. The modern industrial system has virtually a capacity to produce not only the means for an economically secure life for everybody but also to create the material basis for the full expression of man’s intellectual, sensuous, and emotional potentialities, while at the same time reducing considerably the hours of work. The function of an authoritarian ideology and practice can be compared to the function of neurotic symptoms. Such symptoms result from unbearable psychological conditions and at the same time offer a solution that makes life possible. Yet they are not a solution that leads to happiness or growth of personality. They leave unchanged the conditions that necessitate the neurotic solution. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

If there is a possibility of attaining them, the dynamism of man’s nature is an important factor that tends to seek for more satisfying solutions. The aloneness and powerlessness of the individual, one’s quest for the realization of potentialities which developed in one, the objective fact of the increasing productive capacity of modern industry, are dynamic factors, which constitute the basis for a growing quest for freedom and happiness. The escape into symbiosis can alleviate the suffering for a time but it does not eliminate it. The history of humankind is the history of growing individuation, but it is also the history of growing freedom. The quest for freedom is not a metaphysical force and cannot be explained by natural law; it is the necessary result of the process of individuation and of the growth of culture. The authoritarian system cannot do away with the basic conditions that make for the quest for freedom; neither can they exterminate the quest for freedom that springs from these conditions. In Russia, Mr. Stalin’s attempt to arrive at an anti-Nazi condition with the Wet were supported by new order to the foreign Communist Parties. They were told to take the line of co-operation with liberal and democratic elements in their respective countries, and to form a united front with all “anti-fascist” elements, including the Social Democrats. This policy was officially sanctioned at the VIII (and last) Comintern Congress, 1935. Mr. Stalin’s foreign policy did not succeed, in spite of the new Comintern line. “In many capitals, and not least in London, there were serious inhibitions about any policy of collaboration with Soviet Russia, even for the containment of fascism. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

“The League of Nations, reflecting these inhibitions, proved a feeble and ineffective reed. The final language of the Franco-Soviet Pact was complicated and vague, and its operation was made extensively contingent on prior action by the League of Nations. It was not followed up (until 1939, when it was much too late) by any concrete military discussions. The French government, finally, delayed so long with its ratification, and exhibited so many hesitations in the process, that its value as a political demonstration was reduced to almost negligible proportions. The contempt of the Germans for its existence was clearly demonstrated by the reoccupation of the Rhineland in March 1936; and the failure of the western powers to react with any strong measures showed how ineffective was the Pact for the purposes Moscow had had in mind in concluding it.” The Spanish Civil War, in which the West helped in the defeat of the Republican government by an arms embargo while at the same time not seriously interfering with the military aid sent to Mr. Franco by Mr. Hitler and Mr. Mussolini, could not encourage Mr. Stalin’s hope. Yet even after his actions were far from revolutionary. After some hesitation at the beginning of the Franco rebellion, the Russians decided to intervene, since Mr. Franco’s victory “would have meant the encirclement of France by the fascists, the probable triumph of fascist tendencies within France herself, and the further weakening of Western resistance to Mr. Hitler. The way would then be clear for German aggression toward the East.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Russia sent military help, but reconciled herself to the Republic’s defeat when it became clear that only a much larger amount of Russian assistance could counteract the Italian-German support. While Soviet military aid began to taper off in 1937, Mr. Stalin continued to exterminate his socialist and anarchist rivals in Spain. When the destruction of his political rivals (who—against the Russian view—wanted to transform the civil war into a fight for socialism), conflicted with the demands of the war effort, “precedence was given quite ruthlessly by the Kremlin to the first of these two requirements, to the embitterment of the Spanish Republican leaders.” Most of these Communist generals and functionaries who had fought in Spain were executed in Russia soon after their return. Mr. Stalin wanted to eliminate all elements who by their acquaintance with Western revolutionary ideas stood in the way of the final liquidation of the revolutionary tradition which he undertook in those years of the purges. In short, Mr. Stalin’s attitude toward Mr. Franco was similar to his attitude toward Mr. Hitler. He would have preferred the downfall of Mr. Franco, but not at the price of a popular revolution in Spain, which might have become the signal for revolutionary uprisings in other European countries. When Mr. Stalin’s attempts to come to an arrangement with the West had failed (and it is not too far-fetched to speculate that his destruction of almost all of the leading Communist of the Lenin era was his final attempt to show the West that he was not encumbered by his revolutionary past), Mr. Stalin changed his course again, this time by concluding a pact with the Nazis. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Immediately, the Communist Parties followed suit. Mr. Molotov had given the cue with his statement that “Nazism was a matter of taste.” The Communists changed their anti-fascist line and began to attack the “Western imperialists.” As a gesture of friendship toward Nazism, German Communists refugees in Russia were delivered to Mr. Hitler’s Gestapo, if there were any doubts about their loyalty to the new party line. The Comintern took a line of neutrality toward the two camps. The core of this new Comintern policy between the Soviet-Nazi pact and the German attack on Russia has been described very succinctly by Deutscher: “Both belligerent camps, it was not said, pursued imperialist aims, and there was nothing to choose between them. The working classes were called upon to resist war and fight for peace. Outwardly these appeals resembled the policy of revolutionary defeatism which Mr. Lenin had pursed in the First World War. The resemblance was deceptive. In Mr. Lenin’s opposition to war there was revolutionary integrity and consistency, while the policy of the Comintern merely suited the temporary convenience of Mr. Stalin’s diplomacy and was as tortuous as that diplomacy. At times the opposition to war had an unmistakably pro-German twist as, for instance, in October 1939, when the Comintern echoed Mr. Molotov’s and Mr. von Ribbentrop’s call for a negotiated peace and blamed France and Britain for the war. The effect of that policy, especially in France, was merely defeatist, not revolutionary. It supplemented the defeatism that corroded the top of French society with a quasi-popular brand of defeatism coming from below. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

“Only after the harm had been done, when Moscow, alarmed by Mr. Hitler’s victories, bean to encourage resistance to Nazi occupation, did the French Communist Party switch over to a new policy. Less obvious, though not unimportant, was the effect of the von Ribbentrop-Molotov pact upon anti-Nazi elements in Germany; it made their confusion wore confounded, it deepened their senses of defeat and induced some of them to reconcile themselves to Hitler’s war.” When the medieval World was torn wide open, Western man seemed to be headed for the final fulfillment of his keenest dreams and visions. He freed himself from the authority of a totalitarian Church, the traditional thought, the geographical limitations of a half-discovered globe. He discovered nature and the individual. He became aware of his own strength, of his capacity to make himself the ruler over nature and over traditionally given circumstances. He believed that he would be capable of achieving a synthesis between his newborn sense of strength and rationality and the spiritual values of his humanistic-spiritual tradition, between the prophetic idea of the messianic time of peace and justice to be achieved by mankind in the historical process and the Greek tradition of theoretical thoughts. In the centuries following the Renaissance and the Reformation, he built a new science which eventually led to the release of hitherto unheard-of productive powers and to the complete transformation of the material World. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

He created political systems which seem to guarantee the free and productive development of the individual; he reduced the time of work to such an extent that Western man is free to enjoy hours of leisure to an extent his forefather had hardly dreamed of. The World is divided into two camps, the capitalist and the communist camp. Both camps believe that they have the key to the fulfillment of the human hopes of generations past; both maintain that, while they must coexist, their systems are incompatible. Are they right? Are they not both in the process of converging into a new industrial neo-feudalism, into industrial societies, led and manipulated by big, powerful bureaucracies—societies in which the individual becomes a well-fed and well-entertained automaton who loses one’s individuality, his independence and his humanity? Have we to resign ourselves to the fact that we can master nature and produce goods in an ever-increasing degree, but that we must give up the hope for a new World of solidarity and justice; tht this ideal will be lost in an empty technological concept of “progress”? Is there no other alternative than that between capitalist and communist managerial industrialism? Can we not build an industrial society in which the individual retains one’s role as an active, responsible member who controls circumstances, rather than being controlled by them? Are economic wealth and human fulfillment really incompatible? #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

These two camps not only compete economically and politically, they are both set against each other in deadly fear of an atomic attack which will wipe out both, if not all civilization. Indeed, man has created the atomic bomb; it is the result of one of his greatest intellectual achievements. However, he has lost the mastery over his own creation. The bomb has become his master, the forces of his own creation have become his most dangerous enemy. Is there still time to reverse this course? Can we succeed in changing it and becoming the masters of circumstances, rather than allowing circumstances to rule us? Can we overcome the deep-seated roots of barbarism which makes us try to solve problems in the only way in which they can never be solved—by force, violence, and killing? Can we close the gap between our great intellectual achievement and our emotional and moral backwardness? To most Americans the case for the success of our mode of industrial organization seems to be clear and overwhelming. New productive forces—steam, electricity, oil, and atomic energy—and new forms of organization of work—central planning, bureaucratization, increased division of labour, automation—have created a material wealth in the most advanced industrial countries which has done away with the extreme poverty in which the majority of their populations lived a hundred years ago. Working hours have been reduced from seventy to forty hours per week in the last hundred years, and with increasing automation an ever-shorter working day may give man an undreamed-of amount of leisure. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Basic education has been brought to every child; higher education to a considerable percentage of the total population. Movies, radio, television, sports, and hobbies fill out the many hours which humans now have for their leisure time. Indeed, it seems that for the first time in history the vast majority—and soon all human—in the Western World will be primarily concerned with living, rather than with the struggle to secure the material conditions for living. It seems that the fondest dreams of our forefathers are close to their realization, and that the Western World has found the answers to the question what the “good life” is. While the majority of humans in North America and western Europe still share this outlook, there are an increasing number of thoughtful and sensitive persons who see the flaws in this enticing picture. They notice, first of all, that even within the richest country in the World the U.S.A., about 20 percent of the population does not share in the good life of the majority, that a considerable number of our fellow citizens have not reached the material standard of living which is the basis for a dignified human existence. They are aware, furthermore, that more than 66 percent of the human race, those who for centuries were the object of Western colonialism, have a standard of living from ten to twenty times lower than ours, and have a life expectancy half that of the average human. They are truck by the irrational contradictions which beset our system. While there are millions in our own midst, and hundreds of millions abroad, who do not have enough to eat, we restrict agricultural production and, in addition, spend hundreds of millions each year in storing our surplus. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

We have affluence, but we do not have amenity. We are wealthier, but we have less freedom. We consume more, but we are emptier. We have more atomic weapons, but we are more defenseless. We have more education, but we have less critical judgment and conviction. We have more religion, but we become more materialistic. We speak of the America tradition which, in fact, is the spiritual tradition of radical humanism, as we call “un-American” those who want to apply the tradition to present-day society. However, even if we comfort ourselves, as many do, with the assumption that it is only a matter of a few generations until the West and eventually the whole World will have reached economic affluence, the question arises: If we continue on the road our industrial system has taken what will become of man and where is he going? The seeker of such truths seeks at bottom only the metamorphosis of the World into man; he strives for an understanding of the World as a human thing and gains, in the best case, the feeling of an assimilation. Like the astrologer who views the stars as in the service of human beings and as tied to their fortune and suffering, so, too, such a seeker views the entire World as bound to man, as the infinitely splintered echo of a primal sound, that of man, or as the reduplicated copy of a primal image, that of man. His procedure is to hold man up as the measure of all things, but in doing so he sets out from the error of believing that he has these things directly before him as pure objects. And so he forgets that the original metaphours of intuition were metaphours and takes them as the things themselves. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17