Money Has a Mystical Quality

It is great to be here surrounded by so many friends and close partners. This is my thirteenth straight year participating in this program and it strikes me that, in many ways, our partnerships are stronger today than ever. The reason our relationships are so strong among the agencies we represent is because we share the same values and commitment to working tirelessly and selflessly to understand World cultures. Through our partnerships, we are constantly looking for better ways to fulfill our critical, shared mission. However, we are not just bound by a common mission, we also face similar challenges that bring us even closer together. Whether it is the budget constraints we all face from time to time, the recruiting challenges so many departments continue you to deal with, or the recent attacks on our institutions and, worse yet, our people. Although the challenges we face may take different forms, in today’s World, no agency or department is immune. In that too, there is no doubt that we are all in this together. And I am confident that through the partnerships we have built over decades—relationships that are stronger now than ever—we can tackle any threat and overcome any challenge working together. Before we get into ways we are doing that work together, I want to take a moment to offer my heartfelt condolences to the people of Chicago, and share the outrage that I know we all feel at the sheer brutality and disregard for innocent lives there. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Violence is infecting so many of our communities. One of the most heartbreaking cases of sextortion recently took place. 17-year-old Jordan DeMay of Marquette, Michigan was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in March of last year. His case led to the FBI’s Detroit office identifying an increase in incidents of financially motivated sextortion, where abusers tricked or coerced child sexual abuse material out of their victims, and then extorted money from those kids—mostly young boys, threatening to tell others what they had done or make their pictures public. If they could not pay, even going so far as to push these young victims to take their own lives –some of whom, like Jordan, ultimately, and tragically did. As difficult as it is for them, Jordan’s family wants people to be aware of his case, to help educate other families and prevent more victims. The FBI’s Detroit office has started a national campaign to warn children about these dangers. That effort has led to a joint operation with one of the counterparts—the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. And in August, that team successfully extradited two men from Nigeria to face prosecution for sexually extorting numerous young men and teenage boys across the U.S.A.—including Joran DeMay. That work not only put criminals behind bars, it also sent a message that the FBI is going to tenaciously pursue those who prey on kids—event leveraging their international relationships to bring them back here to the U.S.A. from overseas to face justice. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

My friend and I were having a discussion about how expensive things are and how many of the new things like cars constantly need maintenance and it is not necessarily because everything breaks, in many cases, it is due to vandalism. I am the type of person who likes to save money. Although I keep having to be responsible for things that others damage, I do look for sales. I will sometimes even spend half an hour looking at the different prices of items online just to say a few dollars. However, I also compare the estimated time of arrival with the price of the good and services. If something costs a couple of dollars more, but will arrive sooner, it is worth purchasing. Gratification is very important. Nonetheless, I also got to thinking about how useless money is. It is useless because you have to have skills to earn money. If you have skills, you have value and do not necessarily need money. Bartering is another medium of exchange, much like money. For instance, if I have a friend who is an auto science engineer and I am an architect, we can exchange the value of our skills and take money out of the equation. He or she can work on my car, and I can design and build projects for his or her house. If you have enough people with valuable skills, you can actually earn more benefits by exchanging services because you do not have to pay taxes and insurance on labour and skills. Sometimes the best way to save money or value is by leaving money out of the equation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Learned scholars think money is more than just that green stud in your wallet. Money has a mystical quality; the markets of antiquity were sacred places, the first banks were temples, and the money-issuers were priests and priest-kings. Gold and silver held a stable relationship through antiquity, based, says one authority, on the astrological ratio of the cycles of their divine counterparts, the sun and the moon. The point learned scholars such as Alfred North Whitehead, Emile Durkheim, Claude Levi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Dr. Freud, Mr. Marx, M.J Herskovits, Mr. Laum, Mr. Ruskin, and Mr. Nietzsche are making is that money is useless; that is, it must literally be useless in order to be money, whether money is the stone cartwheels of Yap island, shells, vampires’ teeth, gold stored in Fort Knox, or East African cattle which cannot be eaten because that would be—literally—eating up capital. The thread of thought here goes directly against Adam Smith the First, who postulated that money was useful and men rational. The invisible hand of the market brought the cobbler’s boots to market in exchange for the farmer’s cabbages so that, efficiently, the cobbler did not have to farm nor the farmer to cobble. Adam Smith the First’s economic man was a rational man, and much of economics assumes that men will always go in the direction of the maximization of profit or of production. However, since we are skittering over the idea that men are not always rational, we have to see where the idea that money is useless, or why it is useless, will lead us. At the root of the impulse to pile this useless money is “the compulsion to work.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

This compulsion to work subordinates man to things…it reduces the drives of the human being to greed and competition (aggression and possessiveness)…the desire for money also takes the place of all genuinely human needs. Thus the apparent accumulation of wealth is really the impoverishment of human nature, and its appropriate morality is the renunciation of human nature and desires—asceticism. The effect is to substitute an abstraction, Homo economicus, for the concrete totality of human nature, and this to dehumanize human nature. Wealth is useless stuff that can be condenses and stored. Sandor Ferenczi, a member of Dr. Freud’s Wednesday Evening Psychological Association, went about as far as you can go in an essay called “On the Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money,” in which he equates money with body wastes—“nothing other than odorless dehydrated filth that has been made to shine”—presumably gold, in this case. Mr. Aristotle said money-making was an unnatural perversion. Money has always had overtones of the mystical; for Mr. Luther this become secular, and therefore demonic—Satan’s work. Why pile up this useless stuff? The surplus labour that produces surplus wealth is form the dammed-up or mischanneled libido (Dr. Freud again). Norman Brown goes Dr. Freud one further: “The whole money complex is rooted in the psychology of guilt,” and gold is the absolute symbol of sublimation. Money is “condensed wealth; condensed wealth is guilt. But guilt is essentially unclean.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Thus Christmas gift-giving is a partial expiation for piling up all that condensed guilt during the year. Guilt here is not for anything in particular; it is part of the personality structure. Back to Dr. Freud: “One must…never allow oneself to be misled into applying to the repressed creations of the mind the standard of reality; this might result in underestimating the importance of fantasies in symptom-formation on the ground that they are not actualities…one is bound to employ the currency that prevails in the country one is exploring; in our case it is the neurotic currency.” To which Norman Brown adds, “all currency is neurotic currency.” Now it may seem a far cry from the kind of money being cited here to the total wealth of all those liquid pieces of paper, say some $700 billion in common stocks and $600 billion in bonds. That money, clearly, is not useless, it is out there building new plants and paying payrolls, and producing widgets and so on. However, Norman Brown, trying to work interest (id est, return on capital) into his scheme, even cover this: “Things become the god (the father of himself) that he [man] would like to be; money breeds…thus money in the civilized economy comes to have a psychic value it never had in the archaic economy. And this is a true infantile wish: to become a father to oneself. All of this leads Norman Brown on into a discussion of the city as related to all that piled-up wealth, and the city as an attempt at immortality, an attempt to beat death. (The inability to accept death is the woof of Mr. Brown’s fabric.) All this may seem like peculiar stuff, especially taken cold, but it is provocative. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Certain factors in the modern industrial system in general and in its monopolistic phase in particular make for the development of a personality which feels powerless and alone, anxious and insecure. However, is our own democracy threatened only by Fascism beyond the Atlantic or by the “fifth column” in our own ranks? If that were the case, the situation would be serious but not critical. However, although international and internal threats of Fascism must be taken seriously, there is no greater mistake and no graver danger than not to see that in our own society we are faced with the same phenomenon that is fertile soil for the rise of Fascism anywhere: the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual. This state challenges the conventional belief that by freeing the individual from all external restraints modern democracy has achieved true individualism. We are proud that we are not subject to any external authority, that we are free to express our thoughts and feelings, and we take it for granted that this freedom almost automatically guarantees our individuality. The right to express our thoughts, however, means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own; freedom from external authority is a lasting gain only if the inner psychological conditions are such that we are able to establish our own individuality. Have we achieved that aim, or are we at least approaching it? Economic conditions make for increasing isolation and powerlessness of the individual in our era; this powerlessness leads either to the kind of escape that we find in the authoritarian character, or else to a compulsive conforming in the process of which the isolated individual becomes an automation, loses one’s self, and yet at the same time consciously conceives of oneself as free and subject only to oneself. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

It is important to consider how our culture fosters this tendency to conform, even though there is space for only a few outstanding examples. The suppression of spontaneous feelings, and thereby of the development of genuine individuality, starts very early, as a matter of fact with the earliest training of a child. (Rorschach tests of three- to five-year-old children have shown that the attempt to preserve their spontaneity gives rise to the chief conflict between the children and the authoritative adults.) This is not to say that training must inevitably lead to suppression of spontaneity if the real aim of education is to further the inner independence and individuality of the child, its growth and integrity. The restrictions which such a kind of education may have to impose upon the growing child are only transitory measures that really support the process of growth and expansion. In our culture, however, education too often results in the elimination of spontaneity and in the substitution of original psychic acts by superimposed feelings, thoughts and wishes. (By original I do not mean, let me repeat, that an idea has not been thought before by someone else, but that it originates in the individual, that it is the result of one’s own activity and in this sense is one’s thought.) To choose one illustration somewhat arbitrarily, one of the earliest suppressions of feelings concerns hostility and dislike. To start with, most children have a certain measure of hostility and rebelliousness as a result of their conflicts with a surrounding World that tends to block their expansiveness and to which, as the weaker opponent, they usually have to yield. It is one of the essential aims of the educational process to eliminate this antagonistic reaction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

The methods are different; they vary from threats and punishments, which frighten the child, to the subtler methods of bribery or “explanations,” which confuse the child and make him or her give up the expression of one’s feeling and eventually gives up the very feeling itself. Together with that, one is taught to suppress the awareness of hostility and insincerity in others; sometimes this is not entirely easy, since children have a capacity for noticing such negative qualities in others without being so easily deceived by words as adults usually are. They still dislike somebody “for no good reason”—except the very food one that they feel the hostility, or insincerity, radiating from the person. This reaction is soon discouraged; it does not take long for the child to reach the “maturity” of the average adult and to lose the sense of discrimination between a decent person and a scoundrel, as long as the latter has not committed some flagrant act. On the other hand, early in one’s education, the child is taught to have feelings that are not at all “his” or “hers”; particularly one is taught to like people, to be uncritically friendly to them, and to smile. What education may not have accomplished is usually done by social pressure in later life. If you do not smile you are judged lacking in a “pleasing personality”—and you need to have a pleasing personality if you want to sell your services, whether as a waitress, a salesman or woman, or a physician. Only those at the bottom of the social pyramid, who sell nothing but their physical labour, and those at the very top do not need to be particularly “pleasant.” Friendliness, cheerfulness, and everything that a smile is supposed to express, become automatic responses which one turns on and off like an electric switch. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

To be sure, in many instances the person is aware of merely making a gesture; in most cases, however, he or she loses that awareness and thereby the ability to discriminate between the pseudo feeling and spontaneous friendliness. It is not only hostility that is directly suppressed and friendliness that is killed by superimposing its counterfeit. A wide range of spontaneous emotions are suppressed and replaced by pseudo feelings. Dr. Freud has taken one such suppression and put it in the center of his whole system, namely the suppression of sex. Although I believe that the discouragement of sexual joy is not the only important suppression of spontaneous reactions but one of many, certainly its importance is not to be underrated. Its results are obvious in cases of sexual inhibitions and also in those where sex assumes a compulsive quality and is consumed like liquor or a drug, which has no particular taste but makes you forget yourself. Regardless of the one or the other effect, their suppression, because of the intensity of sexual desires, not only affects the sexual sphere but also weakens the person’s courage for spontaneous expression in all other sphere. In our society emotions in general are discouraged. While there can be no doubt that any creative thinking—as well as any other creative activity—is inseparably linked with emotion, it has become an ideal to think and to live without emotions. To be “emotional” has become synonymous with being unsound or unbalanced. By the acceptance of this standard the individual has become greatly weakened; one’s thinking is impoverished and flattened. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

One the other hand, since emotions cannot be completely killed, they must have their existence totally apart from the intellectual side of the personality; the result is the cheap and insincere sentimentality with which movies and popular songs feed millions of emotion-starved customers. There is one tabooed emotion that I want to mention in particular, because its suppression touches deeply on the roots of personality: the sense of tragedy. The awareness of death and the tragic aspect of life, whether dim or clear, is one of the basic characteristics of man. Each culture has its own way of coping with the problem of death. For those societies in which the process of individuation has progressed but little, the end of individual existence is less of a problem since the experience of individual existence itself is less developed. Death is not yet conceived as being basically different from life. Cultures in which we find a higher development of individuation have treated death according to their social and psychological structure. The Greeks put all emphasis on life and pictured death as nothing but a shadowy and dreary life was indestructible. The Jewish people admitted the fact of death realistically and were able to reconcile themselves with the idea of the destruction of the individual life by the vision of a state of happiness and justice ultimately to be reached by humankind in this World. Christianity has made death unreal and tried to comfort the unhappy individual by promises of a life after death. Our own era simply denies death and with it one fundamental aspect of life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Instead of allowing the awareness of death and suffering to become one of the strongest incentives or life, the basis for human solidarity, and an experience without which joy and enthusiasm lack intensity and depth, the individual is forced to repress it. However, as is always the case with repression, by being removed from sight the repressed elements do not cease to exist. Thus the fear of death lives an illegitimate existence among us. It remains alive in spite of the attempt to deny it, but being repressed it remains sterile. It is one source of the flatness of other experiences, of the restlessness pervading life, and it explains, I would venture to say, the exorbitant amount of money this nation pays for its funerals. In the process of tabooing emotions modern psychiatry plays an ambiguous role. On the one hand its greatest representative, Dr. Freud, has broken through the fiction of the rational, purposeful character of the human mind and opened a path which allows a view into the abyss of human passions. On the other hand, psychiatry, enriched by these very achievements of Dr. Freud, has made itself an instrument of the general trends in the manipulation of personality. Many psychiatrists, including psychoanalysts, have painted the picture of a “normal” personality. Many psychiatrists, including psychoanalysts, have painted the picture of a “normal” personality which is never too sad, too angry, or too excited. They use words like “infantile” or “neurotic” to denounce traits or types of personalities that do not conform with the conventional pattern of a “normal” individual. This kind of influence is in a way more dangerous than the older and franker forms of name-calling. Then the individual knew at least that there was some person or some doctrine which criticized one and one could fight back. However, who can fight back at “science”? #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

With the German attack against Russia, the line of the Communist Parties shifted again to give support to Russia. The French Communists were told to join the resistance movement, and the slogans of the period after 1933 were revived. Clearly, Mr. Stalin did not try to use the war as a springboard for a revolution in the West. Quite the contrary, especially in Italy and France, where the Communists by their participation in the resistance movement had gained general prestige and influence, Mr. Stalin did everything to prove that these Communist Parties had no revolutionary aim. They surrendered their arms and “for the first time in their history, disregarding their own programs, which forbade them to take part in bourgeois administrations, they joined in governments based on broad national coalitions. Although they were then the strongest parties in their countries, they contented themselves with minor positions in those governments, from which they could not hope to seize power either nor or later and from which they were eventually to be ousted, almost without effort, by the other parties. The army and the police remained in the hands of Conservative or, at any rate, anti-Communist groups. Western Europe was to remain the domain of Liberal capitalism.” In Italy even much later the Communist deputies, against the Socialist and Liberal votes, voted for the renewal of the Lateran pacts, which Mr. Mussolini had concluded with the Vatican. In Greece, during the uprising of 1944-48, Mr. Stalin upheld the Yalta decision according to which Greece was to remain in the Western sphere of interest, and in consequence he did not assist the Greek Communists by military intervention. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Those who claim that Mr. Stalin wanted to conquer the World for the Comintern could hardly answer the question why after the way, with armed and enthusiastic Communists in Italy and Fance, he did not issue the call for revolution and support it by an invasion of Russian troops; why, instead, he proclaimed a period of “capitalist stabilization” and had the Communist Parties follow a policy of co-operation and a “minimum program,” which never had as its aim a Communist revolution. George Kennan arrives basically at the same conclusion when he writes that Mr. Stalin “was generally hesitant to encourage foreign Communist Parties to attempt to seize power,” although he arrives at this conclusion on different grounds—which I also subscribe to—namely, Mr. Stalin’s fear that domestic rivals could make common cause against him with the leaders of strong foreign Communist Parties. In order to understand how elements by which the American system succeeded in solving some of its economic problems are leading to an increasing failure to solve the human problem, it is necessary to examine the features which are characteristic of twenty-first century capitalism. Concentration of capital led to the formation of giant enterprises, managed by hierarchically organized bureaucracies. Large agglomerations of workers work together, part of a vast organized production machine which, in order to run at all, must run smoothly, without friction, without interruption. Their individual worker and clerk become a cog in this machine; their function and activities are determined by the whole structure of the organization in which they work. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

In the large enterprises, legal ownership of the means of production has become separated from the management and has lost importance. The big enterprises are run by bureaucratic management, which does not own the enterprise legally, but socially. These managers do not have the qualities of the old owner—individual initiative, daring, risk-taking—but the qualities of the bureaucrat—lack of individuality, impersonality, caution, lack of imagination. They administer things and persons, and relate to persons as to things. This managerial class, while it does not own the enterprise legally, controls it factually; it is responsible, in an effective way, neither to the stockholders nor to those who work in the enterprise. In fact, while the most important fields of production are in the hands of the large corporations, these corporations are practically ruled by their top employees. The giant corporations which control the economic, and to a large degree the political, destiny of the country constitute the very opposite of the democratic process; they represent power without control by those submitted to it. Aside from the industrial bureaucracy, the vast majority of the population is administered by still other bureaucracies. First of all, by the governmental bureaucracy (including that of the armed forces) which influences and directs the lives of many millions in one form or another. More and more the industrial, military and governmental bureaucracies are becoming intertwined, both in their activities ad, increasingly, in their personnel. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

With the development of ever greater enterprises, unions have also developed into big bureaucratic machines in which the individual member has very little to say. Many union chiefs are managerial bureaucrats, just as industrial chiefs are. All these bureaucracies have no plan, and no vision; and due to the very nature of bureaucratic administration, this has to be so. When man is transformed into a thing and managed like a thing his or her managers themselves become things; and things have no will, no vision, no plan. With the bureaucratic management of people, the democratic process becomes transformed into a ritual. Whether it is a stockholders’ meeting of a big enterprise, a political election or a union meeting, the individual has lost almost all influence to determine decisions and to participate actively in the making of decisions. Especially in the political sphere, elections become more and more reduced to plebiscites in which the individual can express preference for one of two slates of professional politicians, and the best that can be said is that one is governed with one’s consent. However, the means to bring about this consent are those of suggestion and manipulation and, with all that, the most fundamental decisions—those of foreign policy which involve peace and war—are made by small groups which the average citizen hardly even knows. The political ideas of democracy, as the founding fathers of the United States of America conceived them, were not purely political ideas. They were rooted in the spiritual tradition which came to us from prophetic Messianism, the gospels, humanism, and the enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

All these ideas and movements were centered around one hope: that humans, in the course of their history, can liberate themselves from poverty, ignorance and injustice, and that they can build a society of harmony, peace and union between human and human and between human and nature. The idea that history has a goal and the faith in humans’ perfectibility within the historical process have been the most specific elements of Occidental thought. They are the soil in which the American tradition is rooted and from which it draws its strength and vitality. What has happened to the idea of the perfectibility of humans and of society? It has deteriorated into a flat concept of “progress,” into a vision of the production of more and better things, rather than standing for the birth of the fully alive and productive human. Our political concepts have today lost their spiritual roots. They have become matters of expediency, judged by the criterion of whether they help us to a higher standard of living and to a more effective form of political administration. Having lost their roots in the hearts and longing of humans, they have become empty shells, to be throw away is expediency warrants it. Only by forgetting that primitive World of metaphour, only by the hardening and stiffening of a mass of images that originally flowed forth hot and liquid from the primal power of human imagination, only by the unconquerable faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself—only by humans’ forgetting themselves as subjects, indeed as an artistically creative subject, does one life with some degree of peace, security, and consistency. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

If human beings could escape from the prison walls of that faith for just a moment, one’s “self-confidence” (Selbstbewusstsein) would be crushed instantly. It even requires some effort for one to admit to oneself that an insect or a bird perceives a World utterly differ from humans, and that it is senseless to ask which of the two perceptions of the World is correct, since that would have to be measured against a standard of correct perception, which is a nonexistent standard. Generally, however, correct perception—that is to say, the adequate expression of an object in a subject—strikes me as something contradictory and impossible; for between two such absolutely different spheres as subject and object there is no causality, no correctness, no expression, but at most an aesthetic comportment, by which I mean a suggestive rendering, a stammering translation into an altogether foreign language. Though even that would require a freely poetic and freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. The word appearance contains many seductions, which is why I avoid it as much as possible; for it is not true that the essence of things appears in the empirical World. A painter with no hands who wants to express the image hovering before one in song will always reveal more with this transposition of spheres than the empirical World reveals of the essence of things. Even the relation of a nerve stimulus to the image it produces is in no way necessary. If, however, they very same image is produced millions of times and handed down through many generations and, finally, in each case appears to all humankind as the effect of the same cause, then ultimately it acquires the same meaning for humans. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

It is as if that relation of the original nerve stimulus to the produced image were a strict causal relation; just as a dream, endlessly repeated, would be felt and judged to be thoroughly real. However, the hardening and stiffening of a metaphour says nothing at all for the necessity and exclusive justification of that metaphour. Anyone accustomed to such considerations has surely felt a deep suspicion of this kind of idealism whenever one has convinced oneself of the eternal consistency, ubiquity, and infallibility of the laws of nature. Here, one concludes, as far as we can penetrate, from the heights of the telescopic to the depths of the microscopic, everything is certain, complete, infinite, lawlike, without gaps; science will be able to dig into these shafts forever with success, and all its findings will harmonize and not contradict one another. How little this resembles a product of imagination, for if it were that, it would have to betray the illusion and the unreality at some point. Against this, it must be said, first, that if each of us had a different kind of sensory experience; if we ourselves could perceive now only as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant; or if one of us saw the same stimulus as red, another as blue, and if a third even heard it as a sound, no one would talk about the supposed lawlike uniformity of nature but would instead conceive of it only as a highly subjective construct. However, always remember, goodness is no guarantee of protection from deception. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18