With the record deficits, high inflation, cost of food and housing, Americans are looking for not only a way to save money, but also to make money. This drive for success and desire to make money has pushed many people to invest in the stock market. And the only real protection against all the vagaries of identity-playing, and against the final role of being part of the crowd when it stampedes, is to have an identity so firm it is not influenced by all the brouhaha in the marketplace. Mr. Linheart Stearns, a New York investment counselor now deceased, wrote a very provocative essay on investing and anxiety, for anxiety is the threat to identity. Mr. Stearns evidently had some clients who were every bit as wacky and the Loony Toons. One of them would not buy bonds because bonds reminded him of death, an observation perhaps not so far wrong in the light of the discussions of Dr. Freud’s Wednesday Evening Psychological Association in Vienna. A dress manufacturer insisted stocks were no different from dresses, to be sold at a profit, if possible, but “marked down and sold regardless before the end of the season.” Mr. Stearns must have been a soothing investment counselor to know, for his thesis is that the end object of investment is serenity, and serenity can only be achieved by the avoidance of anxiety, and to avoid anxiety you have to know who you are and what you are doing. You can see that all this is leading to another of Adam Smith’s Irregular Rules, this one that the identity of the investor and that of the investing action must be coldly separate. If you have been a brilliant decision-maker, it can be granted right away that over a long period of time, maybe that is who you are, and it will not hurt you to walk around feeling brilliant. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

However, it is a dangerous procedure, for the market has a way of inducing humility in even its most successful students. If you think of Comcast as a baby, or even think “That is mine, and I bought it a lot lower,” it is dangerous because to know what you are doing, you do have to be able to step outside yourself and see yourself objectively, and this is very tough. A stock is for all practical purposes, a piece of paper that sits in a bank vault. Most likely you will never see it. It may or may not have an Intrinsic Value; what it is worth on any given day depends on the confluence of buyers and sellers that day. The most important thing to realize is simplistic: The stock does not know you own it. All those marvelous things, or those terrible things, that you feel about a stock, or a list of stocks, or an amount of money represented by a lit of stocks, all of these things are unreciprocated by the stock or the group of stocks. If you want to, you can be in love, but that piece of paper does not love you, and unreciprocated love can turn into masochism, narcissism, or, even wore, market losses and unreciprocated hate. It may sound a little silly to have a reminder saying The Stock Does Not Know You Own It were it not for all the identity fuel provided by the market these days. You could almost sell these identities as buttons: I Am the Owner of IBM, My Stocks Are Up 80 Percent; Flying Tiger Has Been So Good to Me I Love It; You All Laughed When I Bought Solitron and Look at Me Now. Then there is a great big master button called I Am a Millionaire, or I Am So Shrewd My Portfolio Has Come into Seven Figures. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

The magic of this million-dollar number, and of its accessibility to Everyman, is so great that books sell with titles like How I Made a Million or You Can Make Millions, with very little content at all. They are the most dangerous of all the things written on the market because (and I collect them as a hobby) inevitably there is some mechanical formula somewhere within. Never mind who you are or what your capacities are, just charge in with the book open to chapter three. If you know that the stock does not know you own it, you are ahead of the game. You are ahead because you can change your mind ad your actions without regard to what you did or thought yesterday; you can start out with no preconceived notions. Every day is a new day, providing, in the Game, a new set of continuously measurable options. You can live up to all those old market saws, you can cut your losses and let your profits run, and it does not even make your scar tissue itch because, being selfless, you are unscarred. It has been my fate to know people who have made considerable amounts of money, sometimes millions, in the market. One is Randolph, who made it and blew it and made it again. Randolph really wanted to make a million dollars, and he did. When Mr. Linheart Stearns said, the end object of investment ought to be serenity, I think he had a very good point. Now if you think making a million dollars will give you serenity, there are two thing you can do. One is to find a good head doctor and see if you can discovery why you think making a million dollars will give you this serenity. This will involve lying on a couch, remembering dream, talking about your mother, and paying one hundred and forty dollars an hour. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

If your course is successful, you will realize that you do not want a million dollars but something else which the million dollars represents to you, such as love, potency, parenthood, or what you have. Released, you can go off about your business and not worry any more, and you will be poorer only by the number of hours you spent in accomplishing this times one hundred and forty dollars. The other thing you can do is to go ahead and make the million dollars and be serene. Then you will have both a million dollars and serenity, and you do not have to deduct the number of hours times one hundred and forty dollars, unless you feel guilty about make it. Of course, you know the first million goes quick and is never usually enough. To be comfortable, one needs to have five million dollars on hand at all times. Then one is ready for anything. It seems simple, and there is indeed a catch. If the million dollars arrives and serenity does not, what do you do? Aha, you say, you will worry about that when you get to it, you are sure you can handle it. Perhaps you can. Money, contrary to popular myth, does help people more than it spoils them, simply because it opens up more options. The danger is that when you have your million, you then want two, because you have a button saying I Am a Millionaire and that is who you are, and there are, all of a sudden—as you will notice—so many people with buttons saying I am a Double Millionaire. Randolph, I should tell you, is not a real person, or rather, he is a blend of observed characteristics. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

I mention this because when this cautionary tale frit appeared a number of guesses at Randolph’s identity were made, using the old device that The Portfolio Is Mirror to the Man. Two different Randolphs called me. One said I had gotten his stocks right but his domestic situation wrong, and the other aid I was a cad to put in all his leisure-time activities and anyway he had never owned any of those stocks. Recently I was having a premium cranberry juice with a corporate executive in an expensive mid-Manhattan watering hole and he said, “You know, Randolph’s made it all back again.” He had somebody else entirely in mind, but when I checked around I realized that that was what time of market it was, all the Randolphs had made it all back again. There are new Randolphs all the time, and the thing that distinguishes them is that their identities are the sum of a set of numbers. The trouble with Randolph is not just the trouble with one man who made and lost a lot of money, nor even that there are hatching, at this very instant, other Randolphs who will play out this role next month and next year. The trouble goes beyond Randolph, beyond Wall Street; it is a kind of virus in the whole country, when the cards of identity say not how well the shoe is cobbled or the song is sung, but are a set of numbers from an adding machine. Usually we hear only the triumphs by adding machine, but those who live by numbers can also perish by them, and it is a terrible thing to have an adding machine write an epitaph, either way. Perhaps measuring men by the marketplace is one of the penalties of our age, but if some scholar would tell us why this must be, we would all know more about ourselves. What has been said about the lack of “originality” in feeling and thinking holds true also of the act of willing. To recognize this is particularly difficult; modern man seems, if anything, to have too many wishes and his only problem seems to be that, although he knows what he wants, he cannot have it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

All our energy is spent for the purpose of getting what we want, and most people never question the premise of this activity: that they know their true wants. They do not stop to think whether the aims they are pursuing are something they themselves want. In school they want to have good marks, as adults they want to be more and more successful, to make more money, to have more prestige, to buy a better car, to go places, and so on. Yet when they do stop to think in the midst of all this frantic activity, this question may come to their minds: “If I do get this new job, if I get this better Ultimate Driving Machine, if I can take this trip to Utah—what then? What is the use of it all? Is it really I who wants all this? Am I not running after some goal which is supposed to make me happy and which eludes me as soon as I have reached it?” These questions, when they arise, are frightening, for they question the very basis on which man’s whole activity is built, his knowledge of what he wants. People tend, therefore, to get rid as soon as possible of these disturbing thoughts. They feel that they have been bothered by these questions because they were tired or depressed—and they go on in the pursuit of the aims which they believe are their own. Yet all this bespeaks a dim realization of the truth—the truth that modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own. Modern man is ready to take great risks when he tries to achieve the aims which are supposed to be “his”; but he is deeply afraid of taking the risk and the responsibility of giving himself his own aims. Intense activity is often mistake for evidence of self-determined action, although we know that it may well be no more spontaneous than the behaviour of an actor or a person hypnotized. When the general plot o the play is handed out, each actor can act vigorously the role one is assigned and even make up one’s lines and certain details of the action by oneself. Yet one is only playing a rile that has been handed over to one. The particular difficulty in recognizing to what extent our wishes—and our thoughts and feelings as well—are not really our own but put into us from the outside, is closely linked up with the problem of authority and freedom. In the course of modern history the authority of the Church has been replaced by that of the State, that of the State by that of conscience, and in our era, the latter has been replaced by the anonymous authority of common sense and public opinion as instruments of conformity. Because we have freed ourselves of the older overt forms of authority, we do not see that we have become the prey of a new kind of authority. We have become automatons who live under the illusion of being self-willing individuals. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

This illusion helps the individual to remain unaware of one’s insecurity, but this is all the help such an illusion can give. Basically the self of the individual is weakened, so that one feels powerless and extremely insecure. One lives in a World to which one has lost genuine relatedness and in which everybody and everything has become instrumentalized, where one has become a part of the machine that one’s hands have built. One thinks, feels, and wills what one believes one is supposed to think, feel, and will; in this very process one loses one’s self upon which all genuine security of a free individual must be built. The loss of the self has increased the necessity to conform, for it results in a profound doubt of one’s own identity. If I am nothing but what I believe I am supposed to be—who am “I”? We have seen how the doubt about one’s own self started with the breakdown of the medieval order in which the individual had had an unquestionable place in a fixed order. The identity of the modern philosophy since Descartes. Today we take for granted that we are we. Yet the doubt about ourselves still exists, or has even grown. In his plays Mr. Pirandello has given expression to this feeling of modern man. He starts with the question: Who am I? What proof have I for my own identity other than the continuation of my physical self? His answer is not like Mr. Descartes’—the affirmation of the individual self—but its denial: I have no identity, there is no self excepting the one which is the reflex of what others expect me to be: I am “as you desire me.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

 This loss of identity then makes it still more imperative to conform; it means that one can be sure of oneself only is one lives up to the expectations of others. If we do not live up to this picture we not only risk disapproval and increased isolation, but we risk losing the identity of our personality, which means jeopardizing sanity. By conforming with the expectations of others, by not being different, these doubts about one’s own identity are silenced and a certain security is gained. However, the price paid is high. Giving up spontaneity and individuality results in a thwarting of life. Psychologically the automation, while being alive biologically, is dead emotionally and mentally. While one goes through the motions of living, one’ life runs through one’s hands like sand. Behind a front of satisfaction and optimism modern humans are deeply unhappy; as a matter of fact, they are on the verge of desperation. One desperately clings to the notion of individuality; one wants to be “different,” and one has no greater recommendation of anything than that “it is different.” We are informed of the individual name of the railroad clerk we buy our tickets from; handbags, playing cards, and portable radios are “personalized,” by having the initials of the owner put on them. All this indicates the hunger for “difference” and yet these are almost the last vestiges of individuality that are left. Modern man is starved for life. However, since, being an automaton, one cannot experience life in the sense of spontaneous activity one task as surrogate any kind of excitement and thrill: the thrill of drinking, of sports, of vicariously living the excitement of fictitious persons on the screen. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

What then is the meaning of freedom for modern humans? One has become free from the external bonds that would prevent one from doing and thinking as one sees fit. If one knew what one wanted, thought, and felt, one would be free to act according to one’s own will. However, one does not know. One conforms to anonymous authorities and adopts a self which is not his or hers. The more one does this, the more powerless one feels the more one is forced to conform. In spite of a veneer of optimism and initiative, modern humans are overcome by a profound feeling of powerlessness which makes one gaze toward approaching catastrophes as though one were paralyzed. Looked at superficially, people appear to function well enough in economic and social life; yet it would be dangerous to overlook the deep-seated unhappiness behind that comforting veneer. If one loses its meaning because it is not lived, humans become desperate. People do not die quietly from physical starvation; they do not die quietly from psychic starvation either. If we look only at the economic needs as far as the “normal” person is concerned, if we do not see the unconscious suffering of the average automatized person, then we fail to see the danger that threatens our culture from its human basis: the readiness to accept any ideology and any leader, if only one promises excitement and offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give means and order to an individual’s life. The despair of the human automaton is fertile soil for the political purposes of Fascism. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Can we make our mode of social and economic organization responsible for this state of man? As was indicated, our industrial system, its way of production and consumption, the relations between human beings which is fosters, creates precisely the human situation which has not been described. Not because it wants to create it, not due to evil intentions of individuals, but because of the fact that the average humans’ character is formed by the practice of life which is provided by the structure of society. No doubt the form which capitalism has taken in the twenty-first century is very different from what it was in the nineteenth century—so different, in fact, that it is doubtful whether even the same term should be applied to both systems. The enormous concentration of capital in giant enterprises, the increasing separation of management from ownership, the existence of powerful trade unions, state subsidies for agriculture and for some parts of industry, the elements of the “welfare state,” elements of price control and a directed market, and many more features radically distinguish twenty-first century capitalism from that of the past. Yet whatever terminology we choose, certain basic elements are common to the old and the new capitalism: the principle that not solidarity and love, but individualistic, egotistical action beings the best results for everybody; the belief that an impersonal mechanism, the market, should regulate the life of society, not the will, vision and planning of the people. Capitalism puts things (capital) higher than life (labour). Power follows from possessions, not from activity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Contemporary capitalism creates additional obstacles for the unfolding of humans. It needs smoothly working teams of workers, clerks, engineers, consumers; it needs the because big enterprises, ped by bureaucracies, require this kind of organization and the “organization human” who fits into it. Our system must create people who fits its need; it must create people who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; people who want to consume more and more; people whose tastes are standardized and can be easily anticipated and influenced. It needs people who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle of conscience, yet who are willing to be commanded to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; it needs people who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim—except the aim to make good, to be on the move, to go ahead. Production is guided by the principle that capital investment must bring profit, rather than by the principle that the real needs of people determine what is to be produced. Since everything, including radio, Internet, mobile phones, digital streaming, television, books, and medicines, is subject to the profit principle, the people are manipulated into the kind of consumption which is often poisonous for the spirit, and sometimes also for the body. The failure of our society to fulfill the human aspirations rooted in our spiritual traditions has immediate consequences for the two most burning practical issues of our time: that of peace and that of the equalization between the wealth of the West and the poverty of two-thirds of humankind. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

The alienation of modern man with all its consequences makes if difficult for him to solve these problems. Because of the fact that he worships things and has lost the reverence for life, his own and that of his fellow men, he is blind not only to moral principles, but also to rational thought in the interest of his survival. It is clear that atomic armament is likely to lead to universal destruction and, even if atomic is likely to lead to universal destruction and, even if atomic war could be prevented, that it will lead to a climate of fear, suspicion, and regimentation which is exactly the climate in which freedom and democracy cannot live. It is clear that the economic haps between poor and rich nations will lead to violent explosions and dictatorships—yet nothing but the most half-hearted and hence futile attempts are suggested to solve these problems. Indeed, it seems that we are going to prove that the gods blind those whom they want to destroy. Thus far goes the record of capitalism. Even though the Soviet Union may not be a revolutionary power yet, she is not an imperialist power and as such is not her aim one of World domination? The conquest of the satellite states is referred to as the first step toward such designs. (Clearly, the conquest of the satellite states can hardly be considered a revolutionary accomplishment. They were won not by workers’ revolutions, but by Russian military occupation. They were, especially at first, nothing but conquered states forced to adopt the conqueror’s social and political system.) The only satellite state that was the result of an authentic Communist-national revolution and not of Russian occupation, Yugoslavia, asserted its complete independence from Russia in 1948. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Indeed, at Yalta, Mr. Stalin had approved the common declaration which stipulated: “To foster the conditions in which the liberated peoples may exercise these rights, the three governments will jointly assist the people in any European liberated state of former Axis satellite state in Europe where in their judgment conditions require (a) to establish conditions of internal peace; (b) to carry out emergency measures for the relief of distressed peoples; (c) to form interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population and pledge to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of government responsive to the will of the people; and (d) to facilitate where necessary the holding of such elections.” Mr. Stalin broke his promise, and made these states his sphere of interest. What were his reasons? The immediate objectives dictating the Soviet policy in East Europe during the war and immediately afterwards, and affecting the pattern of Soviet relations with it, may be broken down into five major areas of presumed Soviet interest. The first involved the desire to exert influence on the lands immediately west of the Russian frontier in order to deny the area to Germany—in the past a source of major threat to Russian security. There is no doubt that from the perspective of the prenuclear age of the Soviet leaders could not feel certain that the mere defeat of Germany would ensure Soviet security and that the post-World War I situation would not be repeated. Moscow’s emphasis on security was readily understood by the Western powers, especially in view of Russia’s war effort. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

The Prime Minister, at the time, Winston Churchill frequently stated in the Commons during the war that the West was willing to go to some lengths to guarantee Soviet security from Germany on terms satisfactory to the Russians. As a result, the Western leaders were also inclined to grant the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt insofar as the second broad Soviet objective was concerned: to ensure that East Europe would not be controlled by domestic elements which, while hostile to Germany, would also be hostile to the Soviet Union. Mr. Stalin encountered little difficulty in demonstrating that East Europe could not shield the USSR against a resurgent Germany is simultaneously it was unwilling to collaborate very closely with the USSR. Hence, he argued, it is essential that East Europe not only be denied to Germany but also that it be governed by regimes which were purged of all opponents of USSR. Given the prevailing power balance, it was up to Mr. Stalin to decide what criteria would determine just who was an enemy of the USSR. The remaining three probably Soviet objectives for East Europe seemed at the time less apparent to the West; or perhaps it was that the West simply felt unable to oppose them. The first of these was to use the area for purposes of Soviet economic recovery. The war damages inflicted on the USSR by the Germans could be healed much more rapidly by extracting capital from East Central Europe through the removal of enterprises and resources. Insofar as the former Axis power were concerned—that was Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania as well as Germany—the Western powers concurred and a policy of reparations was endorsed. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

The situation differed sharply in the case of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, all Allied powers. There could be no question of direct reparations, but at least in the case of Poland and Yugoslavia the Soviet Union extracted some economic advantages. In Poland there was the matter of the incorporation of eastern Poland into the USSR and the removal of industrial equipment from those parts of Germany assigned to Poland as compensation for the German occupation and for the loss of territory to the USSR. In the case of Yugoslavia joint companies were established which, according to the Yugoslavs, the USSR found profitable. The fourth objective was to deny the area to the capitalist World since it was likely to plot hostile moves against the USSR. No doubt the Soviet leaders, even at the height of the Grand Alliance, must have considered the possibility that some day after the conclusion of the war the capitalist World would again be arrayed against the USSR, which is kind of what we are seeing with Russians war against Ukraine. The United States of America has given Russia the cold shoulder and is sending billions to Ukraine. Many of the wartime Soviet suspicious about alleged British or American contacts with German anti-Nazi groups were derived from such general ideological assumptions about capitalist behaviour. As a result, Anglo-American declarations to the effect that postwar governments in East Central Europe must be democratic were presumably viewed in Moscow with a great deal of mistrust. The Kremlin undoubtedly suspected that such governments were meant to be the springboard for an eventual capitalist onslaught against the USSR. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

The fifth probably objective was related to the preceding one. If ideological assumptions played a role in the crystallization of Soviet defensive interests in East Europe, then it is likely that the other part of the ideological orientation, namely its offensive component, was also present. Leninist-Stalinist strategic concepts have always emphasized the importance of a strong basis for expansive operation, and it is inevitable that any accretion of territory to the base of socialism in itself was regarded as reflecting the march of socialism towards its eventual victory. It would be impossible not to relate the new political situation in East Europe to this historical process, especially since the prevailing situation was already clearly suggesting that the area had become divorced from capitalist domination in space and from the capitalist era in time. It would be inconceivable not to consider the establishment of Soviet power in East Europe as another revolutionary turning point in a process which must go forward. There is no doubt that Mr. Stalin wanted to show himself, true to the ideology, as the revolutionary successor of Mr. Lenin, and as a successful stateman, but it is equally clear that in the case of the satellites he was a successor of the Czars, rather than the of Mr. Lenin and Mr. Trotsky. Aside from this, the first four points are quite sufficient to explain Mr. Stalin’s conquests of these states, and the fact that they were objectives which as such had nothing to do with communism, World revolution, et cetera. The wish to make these states a part of the Soviet sphere of interest would have existed equally in a Czarist or in a liberal government. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

In the West this breach of promise was generally interpreted not only as a sign of Mr. Stalin’s untrustworthiness, but also as a proof of his intention to conquer Europe, and later the World. Actually his action was, in principle, not different from the attitude of the British, French, and Italian leaders after the First World War at Versailles. In spite of having accepted Mr. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, they insisted, under various rationalizations, on territorial acquisitions agreed on during the war in secret treaties, which made a mockery of Mr. Wilson’s principles of self-determination. They wanted their spoils of war and they defeated Mr. Wilson. What Mr. Stalin did was essentially the same, and he too used various tricks to rationalize his breach of promise. He may, in fact, have thought that Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill had not meant the Yalta declaration to be entirely serious, and he may have been surprised when he discovered their genuine indignation. The question is: If the seizure of the satellite states was not a revolutionary action, was it an act of Russian imperialism, indicating a Russian desire for World conquest? What nation does not want to conquer the World? No doubt the Soviet Union is the heir to Czarist Russian.  The industrial development of a potentially rich country like Russia must have led to the emergence of a strong, industrial Russia under any ideology provided she were led by a government capable of choosing adequate methods for its economic development. Czarist Russian was an imperialist power, as were Great Britian, France, and Germany. Her main aspirations were to gain a warm water port (preferably through control of the Dardanelles), control of Persia (in 1907 Czarist Russia agreed to share with Great Britain the control of Persia), and sphere of influence in the Near, Middle, and Far East. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The Russian government was not particularly successful in its attempts for territorial aggrandizement, especially after the loss of the war against Japan in 1905. However, quite aside from this, Czarist imperialism was bound by the same limitations as that of other European countries. That drive to the formation of metaphour, that fundamental drive of humans that cannot be written off even for a moment, since one would thereby be writing off humans themselves, is in truth not overcome, indeed hardly even subdued, by the fact that it builds as a stronghold for itself out of it own fleeting products, namely, concepts, a regular and rigid World. It seeks out a new realm for its effects, another channel, and finds it in myth and in art generally. It constantly confounds the rubrics and cells of concepts by arranging new figurations, metaphours, metonymies, constantly exhibiting the desire to make and remake the existing World of waking humans as colourful, irregular, inconsequential, incoherent, charming, and eternally new as the World of dreams. Indeed, waking humans themselves are clear that they are awake thanks only to the rigid and regular web of concepts and, for that reason, occasionally comes to believe that one is dreaming when that web od concepts is torn apart momentarily by art. If we had the same dream every night, we would be as engaged by it as we are by the things we see every day. If an artisan were sure of dreaming every night a full thirteen hours that one was king, I believe, he would be just as happy as a king who dreamed every night for thirteen hours that he was an artisan. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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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

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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

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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

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