Where Have All Those Years Gone?

The goal in America is to build generational wealth and it is possible no matter what race you are. Many loans, including automobile, mortgage, and small business loans are conducted over the Internet, so you do not even have to meet with a banker in person. Therefore, race is not as likely to be a factor in the decision being made. Have you heard the story about Mr. Smith? Mr. Smith was so astute that many, many years ago he invested in a company called International Tabulator, which was the predecessor of IMB. Mr. Smith had great faith in the company, which in due course became IBM, waxed fat, and prospered. Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith had issue, and the children grew up to be nice children. Mr. Smith said to them, “Our family owns IBM, which is the greatest growth company in the World. I invested twenty thousand dollars in IBM and that twenty thousand has made me a millionaire. If something happens to me, whatever you do, don’t sell the IBM.” Mr. Smith himself never sold a share of IBM. Its dividends were meager, naturally, and so Mr. Smith had to work hard at his own business to provide for his growing family. However, he did create a marvelous estate. Eventually he became a grandfather, and he made gifts of the stock dividends of IBM to his grandchildren. And at family Thanksgivings, he counseled: “If anything happens to me, whatever you do, don’t sell IBM.” Mr. Smith died; the IBM was divided among his children. The estate sold only enough IBM to pay the estate taxes. Otherwise the children—now grown, with children of their own—followed their father’s dictum, and never sold a share of IBM. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

The IBM grew again, made up for what had been amputated to pay estate taxes, and each of the children grew as rich as Mr. Smith had been because the IBM kept growing and growing. They had to work quite hard at their own businesses, because their families were growing and their only money was in IBM. Only one of them even borrowed on his IBM, to get the down payment for a heavily mortgaged house. And the faithful children were rewarded by seeing IBM multiply and grow. Mr. Smith’s original $20,000 has become millions and millions. The Smiths are now in their third generation of IBM ownership, and this generation is telling the next, “Whatever you do, don’t sell IBM.” And when someone dies, only enough IBM is sold to pay the estate taxes. In short, for three generations the Smithers have worked as hard as their friends who had no money at all, and they have lived just as if they had no money at all, even though the various branches of the Smith family all put together are very wealthy indeed. And the IBM is there, nursed and watered and fed, the Genii of the House, growing away in the early hours of the morning when everyone is asleep. IBM has been so good to them that even after divisions among children and rounds of estate taxes they are all millionaires or nearly so. Presumably the Smiths will go on, working hard, paying off their mortgages, and watching their IMB grow with joy, always blossom, never fruit. It is a parable of pure capitalism, never jam today and case a jam tomorrow; but as any of the Smiths will tell you, anyone who has ever sold IBM has regretted it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

The absolute mobility in this country is wonderful, but it does leave its mark in pressures. For if our neighbours are growing rich, then should we not also? And if we are not, why are we not? In capitalism there are some serious dangers. These are not new, and in fact they are probably inherent in a work-oriented society where identities are supposed to come from occupations and senior identities from achievements. If the occupation is money-making in its pure raw white form, then anxiety must always be present, almost by definition, because there is always a threat that the money which represents the achievement can melt away. The strongest emotions in the marketplace are greed and fear. In rising markets, you can almost feel the greed tide begin. Usually it takes from six months to a year after the last market boom even to get started. The greed itch begins when you see stocks move that you do not own. Then friends of yours have a stock that has doubled; or, if you have one that has doubled, they have one that has tripled. That is what produces bull market tops. Obviously no one rationally would want to buy at the top, and yet enough people do produce a top. No matter what role the investor has started with, in a climax on one side or the other the role melts into crowd role of greed of fear. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

The same distortion happens to original thinking as happens to feelings and emotions. From the very start of education original thinking is discouraged and ready-made thoughts are put into people’s heads. How this is done with young children is easy enough to see. They are filled with curiosity about the World, they want to grasp it physically as well as intellectually. They want to know the truth, since that is the safest way to orient themselves in a strange and powerful Word. Instead, the are not taken seriously, and it does not matter whether this attitude takes the form of open disrespect or of the subtle condescension which is usual towards all who have no power (such as children, aged or sick people). Although this treatment by itself offers strong discouragement to independent thinking, there is a worse limitation: the insincerity—often unintentional—which is typical of the average adult’s behaviour toward a child. This insincerity consists partly in the fictitious picture of the World which the child is given. It is about as useful as instructions concerning life in the Arctic would be to someone who has asked how to prepare for an expedition to the Sahara Desert. Besides this general misrepresentation of the World there are the many specific lies that tend to conceal facts which, for various personal reasons, adults do not want children to know. From a bad temper, which is rationalized as justified dissatisfaction the child’s behaviour, to concealment to the parents’ sexual activities and their quarrels, the child is “not supposed to know” and one’s inquiries meet with hostile or polite discouragement. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

The child thus prepared enters school and perhaps college. There are also some educational methods used today which in effect further discourage original thinking. One is the emphasis on knowledge of facts, or rather on information. The pathetic superstition prevails that by knowing mor and more facts one arrives at knowledge of reality. Hundreds of scattered and unrelated facts are dumped into heads of students; their time and energy are taken up by learning more and more facts so that there is little left for thinking. To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but “information” alone can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it. Another closely related way of discouraging original thinking is to regard all truth as relative. Truth is made out to be a metaphysical concept, and if anyone speaks about wanting to discover the truth one is thought backward by the “progressive” thinkers of our age. Truth is declared to be an entirely subjective matter, almost a matter of taste. Scientific endeavour must be detached from subjective factors, and its aim is to look at the World without passion and interest. The scientist has to approach facts with sterilized hands as a surgeon approaches one’s patient. The result of this relativism, which often presents itself by the name of empiricism or positivism or which recommends itself by its concern for the correct usage of words, is that thinking loses its essential stimulus—the wishes and interests of the person who thinks; instead it becomes a machine to register “facts.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Actually, just as thinking in general has developed out of the need for mastery of material life, so the quest for truth is rooted in the interests and needs of individuals and social groups. Without such interest the stimulus for seeking the truth would be lacking. There are always groups whose interest is furthered by truth, and their representatives have been the pioneers of human thought; there are other groups whose interests are furthered by concealing truth. Only in the latter case does interest prove harmful to the cause of truth. The problem, therefore, is not that there is an interest at stake, but which kind of interest is at stake. As there is some longing for the truth in every human being, it is because every human being has some need for it. This holds true in the first place with regard to a person’s orientation in the outer World, and it holds especially true for the child. As a child, every human being passes through a state of powerlessness, and truth is one of the strongest weapons of those who have no power. However, the truth is in the individual’s interest not only with regard to one’s orientation in the outer World; one’s own strength depends to a great extent on one’s knowing the truth about oneself. Illusions about oneself can become crutches useful to those who are not able to walk alone; but they increase a person’s weakness. The individual’s greatest strength is based on the maximum of integration of one’s personality, and that means also on the maximum of transparence to oneself. “Know thyself” is one of the fundamental commands that aim at human strength and happiness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

In addition to the factors just mentioned there are others which actively tend to confuse whatever is left of the capacity for original thinking in the average adult. With regard to all basic questions of individual and social life, with regard to psychological, economic, political, and moral problems, a great sector of our culture has just one function—to befog the issues. One kind of smokescreen is the assertion that the problems are too complicated for the average individual to grasp. On the contrary it would seem that many of the basic issues of individual and social life are very simple, so simple, in fact, that everyone should be expected to understand them. To let them appear to be so enormously complicated that only a “specialist” can understand them, and one only in one’s own limited field, actually—and often intentionally—tends to discourage people from trusting their own capacity to think about those problems that really matter. The individual feels helplessly caught in a chaotic mass of data and with pathetic patience waits until the specialists have found out what to do and where to go. The result of this kind of influence is a twofold one: one is a scepticism and cynicism towards everything which is said or printed, while the other is a childish belief in anything that a person is told with authority. This combination of cynicism and naivete is very typical of the modern individual. Its essential result is to discourage one from doing one’s own thinking and deciding. Another way of paralyzing the ability to think critically is the destruction of any kind of structuralized picture of the World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Facts lose the specific quality which they can have only as parts of a structuralized whole and retain merely an abstract, quantitative meaning; each fact is just another fact and all that matters is whether we know more or less. Radio, moving pictures, and newspapers have a devastating effect on this score. The announcement of the bombing of a city and the death of hundreds of people is shamelessly followed or interrupted by an advertisement for soap or dog food. The same speaker with the same suggestive, ingratiating, and authoritative voice, which one has just used to impress you with the seriousness of the political situation, impressed now upon his or her audience the merits of the particular brand of soap which pays for the news broadcast. Newsreels let picture of torpedoed ships be followed by those of a fashion show. Newspapers tell us the trite thoughts or breakfast habits of a debutante with the same space and seriousness they use for reporting events of scientific or artistic importance. Because of all this we cease to be excited, our emotions and our critical judgment become hampered, and eventually our attitude to what is going on in the World assumes a quality of flatness and indifference. In the name of “freedom” life loses all structure; it is composed of many little pieces, each separate from the other and lacking any sense as a whole. The individual is left alone with these pieces like a child with a puzzle; the difference, however, is that the child knows what a house is and therefore can recognize the parts of the house in the little pieces one is playing with, whereas the adult does not see the meaning of the “whole,” the pieces of which come into one’s hands. One is bewildered and afraid and just goes on gazing at one’s little meaningless pieces. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

The individual is managed and manipulated not only in the sphere of production, but also in the sphere of consumption, which allegedly is the one in which the individual expressed one’s free choice. Whether it is the consumption of food, clothing, juice, soap, movies, or television programs, a powerful suggestion apparatus is employed with two purposes: first, to constantly increase the individual’s appetite for new commodities, and second, to direct these appetites into the channels most profitable for industry. The very size of the capital investment in the consumer-goods industry and the competition between a few giant enterprises make it necessary not to leave consumption to chance, nor to leave the consumer a free choice of whether one wants to buy more and what one wants to buy. One’s appetites have to be constantly whetted, tastes have to be manipulated, managed, and made predictable. Man is transformed into the “consumer,” the eternal suckling, whose one wish is to consumer more and “better” things. While our economic system has enriched man materially, it has impoverished him humanly. Notwithstanding all propaganda and slogans about the Western World’s faith in God, its idealism, its spiritual concern, our system has created a materialistic culture and a materialistic man. During his working hours, the individual is managed as part of a production team. During his hours of leisure time, one is managed and manipulated to be the perfect consumer who likes what one is told to like and yet has the illusion hat one follows one’s own taste. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

All the time one is hammered at by slogans, by suggestions, by voices of unreality which deprive one of the last bit of realism one may still have. From childhood on, true convictions are discouraged. There is little critical thought, there is little real feeling, and hence only conformity with the rest can save the individual from an unbearable feeling of loneliness and lostness. The individual does not experience oneself as the active bearer of one’s own powers and inner richness, but as an impoverished “thing,” dependent on powers outside oneself into which one has projected one’s living substance. Humans are alienated from themselves and bow down before the works of one’s own hands. One bows down before the things one produces, before the State and before the leaders of one’s own making. One’s own act becomes to one an alien power, standing over and against one instead of being ruled by one. More than ever in history the consolidation of our own product to an objective force above us, outgrowing our control, defeating our expectations, annihilating our calculations, is one of the main factors determining our development. One’s products, one’s machines, and the State have become the idols of modern humans, and these idols represent one’s own life forces in alienated form. Indeed, Mr. Marx was right in recognizing that “the place of all physical and mental sense has been taken by self-alienation of all these senses, by the sense of having. Private property has made us stupid and impotent that things become ours only if we have them, that is, if they exist for us as capital, and are owned by us, eaten by us, drunk by us; that is, used by us. We are poor in spite of all our wealth because we have much, but we are little.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

As a result, the average person feels insecure, lonely, depressed, and suffers from a lack of joy in the midst of plenty. Life does not make sense to one; one is dimly aware that the meaning of life cannot lie in being nothing but a “consumer.” One could not stand the joylessness and meaninglessness of life were it not for the fact that the system offers one innumerable avenues of escape, ranging from television to tranquilizers, which permit one to forget that one is losing more and more of all that is valuable in life. In spite of all slogans to the contrary, we are quickly approaching a society governed by bureaucrats who administer a mass-human, well fed, well taken care of, dehumanized and depressed. We produce machines. That which was the greatest criticism of socialism one hundred years ago—that it would lead to uniformity, bureaucratization, centralization, and a soulless materialism—is a reality of today’s capitalism. We talk of freedom and democracy, yet an increasing number of people are afraid of the responsibility of freedom, and prefer the slavery of the well-fed robot; they have no faith in democracy and are happy to leave it to the political experts to make the decisions. We have created a widespread system of communication by means of radio, Internet, mobile phone, television and newspapers. Yet people are misinformed and indoctrinated rather than informed about political and social reality. In fact, there is a degree of uniformity in our opinions and ideas which could be explained without difficulty if it were the result of political pressure and caused by fear. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

The fact is that all agree “voluntarily,” in spite of the fact that our system rests exactly on the idea of the right to disagreement and on the predilection for diversity of ideas. Doubletalk has become the rule in the free-enterprise countries, as well as among their opponents. The latter call dictatorship “people’s democracies,” the former call dictatorships “freedom-loving people” if they are political allies. Of the possibility of fifty million Americans being killed in an atomic attack, one speaks of the “hazards of war,” and one talks of victory in a “showdown,” when sane thinking makes it clear that there can be no victory for anyone in an atomic holocaust. Education, from primary to higher education, has reached a peak. Yet, while people get more education, they have less reason, judgment, and conviction. At the best their intelligence is improved, but their reason—that is, their capacity to penetrate through the surface and to understand the underlying forces in individual and social life—is impoverished more and more. Thinking is increasingly split from feeling, and the very fact that people tolerate the threat of an atomic war hovering over all humankind, shows that modern humans have come to a point where their sanity must be questioned. Humans, instead of becoming the master of the machines they have built, have become their servant. However, humans are not made to be things, and with all the satisfactions of consumption, the life force in humans cannot be held in abeyance continuously. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

We have only one choice, and that is mastering the machine again, making production into a means and not an end, using if for the unfolding of humans—or else the suppressed life energies will manifest themselves in chaotic and destructive forms. Humans will want to destroy life rather than die of boredom. After 1946 the relations between the East and the West began to freeze. The West had disarmed and became suspicious of aggressive Russian designed on the whole Western World when Mr. Stalin, violating the Yalta agreements, installed his regimes in Poland, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria. Mr. Churchill, in his Fulton, Missouri, speech, voiced this Western apprehension and this, apparently, Mr. Stalin understood to be the spectrum of a new Western alliance against the Soviet Union. This fear of a Western alliance against the Soviets had always dominated Mr. Stalin’s mind. It was by no means only a tactical excuse, nor was it entirely unrealistic; although in 1946 it was much greater than the facts warranted. On the other hand, the West was always suspicious of Russian schemes for World revolutionary conquests, and Mr. Stalin’s actions after the war seemed to confirm the worst. Thus, based on mutual suspicious, which were mainly unrealistic at the time, the cold war started. Mr. Stalin reacted to the stiffening attitude of the West by an aggressive Russian strategy in 1947-48 (the establishment of the Cominform in 1947, the coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin blockade, and the break with Tito in 1948). However, at the same time, the chief Soviet economic theoretician, Varga, was permitted to publish his analysis of the development of capitalism, in which he recognized in a cautious way the stabilizing and productive functions of capitalism. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Even though his theories were rejected, their publication in the highly controlled Stalinist system was a straw in the wind. Since then, Soviet ideology has reemphasized (both in 1956 and in 1958) the older theory that the inherent contradictions with in the capitalist system are the determining factors in the evolution of capitalism. This theory implies that there is no reason for serious revolutionary activities in the Western countries since they will eventually fall under the weight of these inherent contradictions. (The operative part of this formulation is that there is no need for revolutionary action while the ritualistic part is the hope for Communist revolution.) The principles of the 1956 liberalization were repeated and reinforced in the statement of the representatives of 81 Communist Parties, Moscow, November 1960. This statement, which bears the imprint of Khrushchev’s views in all essential questions rather than those of the Chinese Communist declares: “The course of social development proves right Lenin’s prediction that the countries of victorious socialism would influence the development of World revolution chiefly by their economic construction. Socialism has made unprecedented constructive progress in production, science and technology and in the establishment of a new, free community of people, in which their material and spiritual requirements are increasingly satisfied. The time is not far off when socialism’s share of World production will be greater than that of capitalism. Capitalism will be in the decisive sphere of human endeavor, the sphere of material production. The consolidation and development of the socialist system exert an ever-increasing influence on the structure of the peoples in the capitalist countries. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

“By the force of this example, the World socialist system in revolutionizing thinking of the working people in the capitalist countries, it is inspiring them to fight against capitalism, and is greatly facilitating that fight.” The statement declares furthermore that “In a World divided into two systems, the only correct and reasonable principle of international relations is the principle of peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems advanced by Lenin and further elaborated in the Moscow Declaration and the Peace Manifesto of 1957, in the decisions of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Congress of the C.P.S.U., and in the documents of other Communist and workers’ parties.” And another time, Mr. Khrushchev’s argument is repeated: “Peaceful coexistence of countries with different systems or destructive war—this is the alternative today. There is no other choice. Communists emphatically reject the U.S. doctrine of cold war and brinkmanship, for its is a policy leading to thermonuclear catastrophe. By upholding the principle of peaceful coexistence, the Communists fight for the complete cessation of the cold war, dismantling of military bases, for general and complete disarmament, under international control, the settlement of international disputes through negotiation, respect for the equality of states and their territorial integrity, independence and sovereignty, non-interference in each others’ internal affairs, extensive development of trade, cultural and scientific ties between nations.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Clearly we find here the same phenomenon that has taken place again and again since the 1920s. Mr. Khrushchev wants peace with the Wet, and Communists policies are geared to this Russian policy. However, there is one fundamental difference between the period before the Second World War and the 1960s. Mr. Stalin reigned supreme over foreign Communists, and gave them his orders. With the rise of Communist China, Mr. Khrushchev has to reckon with an influential rival, for whom revolutionary slogans and aggressive aims are more than mere ritualistic declarations. This rival has its own allies within the international Communist movement, and probably also within the Society Union. Mr. Khrushchev’s peace policy must succeed—or he will lose out against his rivals. This leads some to wonder what is law of nature for us, anyway? It is not known to us in itself but only in its effects, that is, in relation to other laws of nature, which are again known to us only as relations. All these relations in turn refer only to one another and are therefore thoroughly unintelligible to us in their essence; all we really know is what we bring to them—time, space, hence relations of succession and number. Everything wondrous that we marvel at in the laws of nature, that demands explanation and could lead us to a distrust of idealism, however, lies precisely and exclusively in the mathematical rigour and inviolability of the representations of time and space. This, though, we produce in ourselves and out of ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins its web. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

If we are constrained to conceive all things only under these forms, then it is no wonder that we do in fact conceive of all things in just these forms, for they must bear in themselves the laws of number, and number is precisely what is most astonishing in things. The lawlike uniformity that so impresses us in the orbits of stars and in chemical processes ultimately coincides with those properties we ourselves bring to things, so that it is we who are impressing ourselves. From this, however, it follows that that artistic formation of metaphour, with which every sensation in us begins, already presupposes those forms and so find completion in them; only the persistence of these primal forms explains the possibility of a structure of concepts subsequently being constituted from out of those metaphour themselves. For this is nothing but an imitation of the relations of time, space, and number on the basis of metaphours. It is language, in later ages science, that works originally at the construction of concepts. Just as the bee builds the cells and at the same time fills them with honey, so science works inexorably at that great columbarium of concepts, of burial sites of intuition, builds ever new and higher stories, props up, cleans, renews the old cells, and above all strives to fill that colossal, towering framework and fit the entire empirical word, that is, the anthropomorphic World, into it. And if the human of action binds one’s life to reason and its concepts in order not to be swept away and lose oneself, the scientists builds one’s hut close to the tower of science in order to assist it and find shelter for oneself under the existing bulwark. And one needs shelter, for there are terrible forces constantly impinging upon one, holding out against scientific truth, “truths” of an entirely different kind, with the most diverse insignia. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17