Although Joseph Stalin was considered a tyrant and slave driver by many, he is the reason for much of Russia’s current and past economic prosperity, success, recognition, and beauty. The White Sea-Baltic Canal is a testament to the genius of Mr. Stalin and Soviet engineering and to the hardiness of its workers. It stretches 141 miles from the White Sea in far northern Russia, traverses through the dense forest along the shores of Lake Onega, and empties into the Gulf of Finland at the eastern edge of the Baltic Sea. The canal was built to make sure that Moscow would not suffer from drought. Much of it was actually constructed by men and women, which includes the digging, and pouring of concrete. The project took for years to build. Construction on the Moscow Canal started in 1932 and was completed by 1936. An estimated of 100,000 inmates worked in frigid waters to create this waterway. It also contributed to economic success by allowing ships to important and export supplies. The Mayakovskaya Metro Station opened in 1938 and was also built by the Stalinist Empire. It is considered one of the most beautiful subway stations in the World being constructed of marble, with marble columns, u marble floors. The ceiling contains beautiful mosaic tiles, there are gorgeous circular lamps which gives the impression of a magnificent chandelier. The Moscow Metro Subway is one of the biggest and busiest systems in the World today. Mr. Stalin’s place was to sit atop the subway system. It was to be a skyscraper over 650 feet tall, with 42 floors, in a Gothic architecture style and on top there was going to be a giant 328-foot statue of Mr. Stalin. Construction on the building started, but it was never completed because World War II broke out and the steel was, instead, used to make tanks. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Another one of Mr. Stalin’s masterpieces is the seven towering skyscrapers known as The Seven Sisters. They are one of the leading architectural legacies of the Stalinist period. After World War II, the Communists had to rebuild large portions of their cities and villages. The Seven Sisters skyscrapers were built in Moscow between 1947 and 1957. Their construction was not just functional, but had ideological and political importance. They were intended to show the accomplishment and regeneration of the USSR in the post-war period, and provide exclusive residence for the Soviet and elite and international visitors. The Soviet Baroque architecture of the Seven Sisters are characterized by their wedding-cake shape intricate architectural and decorative details, and luxurious interiors. The Seven Sisters reflected the modernity, ambition and triumph of Soviet Russia. For years the tallest buildings in Europe, these seven commanding skyscrapers are significant monuments of architecture and urban planning which draws the eyes of admirers from all over the World. Many people compare President Trump to Mr. Stalin. They believe that he could achieve the same kind of prosperity for America because he loves the country and believes that he can “Make American Great Again.” President Trump has many prestigious infrastructure plans for the future, which even include affordable housing and brining manufacturing back to America so that America can again become a prosperous creditor nation, which no longer needs to borrow from China. Mr. Stalin also had ambitions plans to dominate the World. Cuba is no better proof of Russian plans to dominate the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The Cuban revolution was neither instigated by Moscow nor by the Cuban Communists, who had been collaborating with Batista until his downfall was near. Mr. Castro was never a Communist, but he planned a revolution which transcended the purely political limits of freeing the country from dictatorship. He started a social revolution, expropriating land owners and industry. United States of America’s government and public opinion started to turn against him, and forced Mr. Castro step by step to seek help, economically and politically, from the Soviet Union, and to accept the help of the Cuban Communist Party which had been held in contempt by the Castristas because of its obvious opportunism and corruption. Mr. Khrushchev threatened once to defend Cuba with nuclear bombs against American military intervention, when he knew quite well that the United States of America would not intervene in such a direct fashion. To make sure, he later withdrew this threat by declaring it was meant only symbolically. He has given only the minimum assistance and loans to the Cubans, and it seems that he exercised a restraining influence on Castro, which, after Mr. Guevara’s return from Moscow, led to repeated—though rejected—bids for a “new beginning” in Cuban-American relations. In Cuba too, Mr. Khrushchev has to cope with Chinese competition, which deprives him of some freedom of action. However, the total picture shows that Mr. Castro’s alliance with the Soviet Union was furthered more by United States of America’s action than by Mr. Khrushchev’s wish to penetrate Latin America. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

No doubt Mr. Khrushchev wanted to keep the Communist Parties in Latin America alive for their nuisance value against the United States of America. He had to give some support to them because of his position as a leader in the Communist camp, (especially in view of the Chinese competition), but there is no evidence that Mr. Khrushchev had a serious wish to destroy all possibilities of an understanding with the United States of America by trying to make Latin America part of his empire. The cliché of the Soviet offensive against the United States of America in Berlin, Laos, the Congo, and Cuba was not based on reality but was rather a convenient formula to support further armament and the continuation of the cold war. It corresponds to the Chinese cliché that pictures the United States of America as seeking World domination by the support of Chiang Kai-shek, by the domination of Southern Korea and Okinawa, by the SEATO pact, et cetera. All these mutual accusations could not stand up to sober and realistic analysis. Mr. Kissinger expressed the view that it did not really matter whether the Soviet Union wanted to undermine all non-Communist countries for reasons of security the result would have been the same. Such a view led from the realm of analysis of political reality to the realm of fantasy. It remains a mystery why, considering the relative equality of power now, the Soviet Union would have to conquer the rest of the World in order to be secure, especially when it was clear that before she took the first steps on that road a nuclear war would break out which would be the end of all “security.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Considering the Soviet Union’s very limited form of imperialism, several considerations must be considered. It has become customary to prove the Soviet Union’s unlimited imperialism by counting China with her 600,000,000 inhabitants (at the time) as another proof of Russian aggrandizement. Anybody familiar with the facts knows, of course, that this is sheer nonsense. The Chinese revolution was authentically Chinese; it triumphed in spite of Mr. Stalin’s conviction that it could not do so, and China received only a limited amount of assistance from Russia, even after the Communists had won. The Chinese-Russian alliance was logical for both sides, but it had also its serious problems, especially for the Russians. To consider China a “conquest” of Russia was nothing but a demagogic formula. What about the attitude of the Soviet Union toward the Communist Parties and toward national revolutions in the underdeveloped countries other than the nations we have already discussed? As far as the Communist Parties in the underdeveloped countries are concerned, part of their function is to serve as auxiliary forces for Russian foreign policy just as the Communist Parties do in the West. However, as far as revolutions in the underdeveloped countries are concerned, there is a considerable difference. While Mr. Stalin definitely did not want Communist revolutions in the West, he, just as Mr. Khrushchev was, was in favour of national revolutions in Asia and Africa. These national revolutions in underdeveloped countries are not a threat to the conservative Soviet regime, as Western workers’ revolutions would be. However, they are a very important political support for the Soviet policy, since they bring to power regimes that are not part of the Western Camp. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

The West, and especially Great Britain, have now to pay for past mistakes. They often supported the reactionary upper-class regimes in Asia and Africa. The result is that now, whenever such a regime is overthrown, the new rulers will take an anti-British and often an anti-Western attitude. Naturally, the Soviet Union exploits this fact to her own advantage by playing the role of the anti-colonialist power for which it has the ideological tools. It does not, however, insist that the new powers become integrated into the Soviet bloc and are stratified with their neutrality. The encouraging trend in the Kennedy administration is that it also tends to accept neutrality as a satisfactory stance; there is no doubt that the United State of America has more of a historical tradition behind the ideas of anti-colonialism and national independence than the Soviet Union. What happened to socialism? The Cold War era saw a renaissance in the scientific study of parapsychology—clairvoyance, Extra Sensory Perception (ESP), second sight, and parakinesis, among other phenomena. By the latter half of the 1950s, the field was being rapidly institutionalized in West Germany, as in other parts of Europe and the United States of America. Socialism eventually succumbed to the spirit of capitalism which it had wanted to replace. Instead of understanding it as a movement for the liberation of man, many of its adherents and its enemies alike understood it as being exclusively a movement for the economic improvement of the working class. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The humanistic aims of socialism were forgotten, or only paid lip service to, while, as in capitalism, all the emphasis was laid on the aims of economic gain. Just as the ideals of democracy lost their spiritual roots, the idea of socialism lost its deepest root—the prophetic-messianic faith in peace, justice, and the brotherhood of humans. Thus socialism became the vehicle for the workers to attain their place within the capitalistic structure rather than transcending it; instead of changing capitalism, socialism was absorbed by its spirit. The failure of the socialist movement became complete when in 1914 its leaders renounced international solidarity and chose the economic and military interests of their respective countries as against the ideas of internationalism and peace which had been their program. The misinterpretation of socialism as a purely economic movement, and of nationalization of the means of production as its principal aim, occurred both in the right wing and in the left wing of the socialist movement. The reformist leaders of the socialist movement in Europe considered it their primary aim to elevate the economic status of the worker within the capitalist system, and they considered as their most radical measures the nationalization of certain big industries. Only recently have many realized that the nationalization of an enterprise is in itself not the realization socialism, that to be managed by a publicly appointed bureaucracy is not basically different for the worker than being managed by a privately appointed bureaucracy. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

The leaders of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union interpreted socialism in the same purely economic way. However, living in a country much less developed than western Europe and without a democratic tradition, they applied terror and dictatorship to enforce the rapid accumulation of capital, which in western Europe had occurred in the nineteenth century. They developed a new form of state capitalism which proved to be economically successful and humanly destructive. They built a bureaucratically managed society in which class distinction—both in an economic sense and as far as the power to command other is concerned—is deeper and more rigid than in any of the capitalists societies of today. They define their system as socialistic because they have nationalized the whole economy, while in reality their system is the complete negation of all that socialism stands for—the affirmation of individuality and the full development of humans. In order to win the support of the mases who had to make unendurable sacrifices for the sake of the fast accumulation of capital, they used socialistic, combined with nationalistic, ideologies, and this gained them the grudging cooperation of the governed. Thus far the free-enterprise system is superior to the communist system because it has preserved one of the greatest achievements of modern humans—political freedom—and with it a respect for the dignity and individuality of humans, which links us with the fundamental spiritual tradition of humanism. It permits possibilities of criticism and of making proposals for constructive social change which are practically impossible in the Soviet police state. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

It is to be expected, however, that once the Soviet countries have achieved the same level of economic development that western Europe and the United States of America has achieved—that is, once they can satisfy the demand for a comfortable life—they will not need terror, but will be able to use the same means of manipulation which are used in the West: suggestion and persuasion. This development will bring about the convergence of twenty-first century capitalism and twenty-first century communism. Both systems are based on industrialization; their goal is ever-increasing economic efficiency and wealth. They are societies run by a managerial class and by professional politicians. They are both thoroughly materialistic in their outlook, regardless of lip service to Christian ideology in the West and secular Messianism in the East. They organize the masses in a centralized system, in large factories, in political mass parties. In both systems, if they go on in the same way, the mass-man, the aliened man—a well-fed, well-clothed, well-entertained automaton-man governed by bureaucrats who have as little a goal as the mass-man has—will replace the creative, thinking, feeling man. Things will have the firs place, and man will be dead; he will talk of freedom and individuality, while he will be nothing. Where do we stand today? Capitalism and a vulgarized, distorted socialism have brought human to the point where one is in danger of becoming a dehumanized automaton; one is losing one’s sanity and stands at the point of total self-destruction. Only full awareness of one’s situation and its dangers and a new vision of a life which can realize the aims of human freedom, dignity, creativity, reason, justice, and solidarity can save us from almost certain decay, loss of freedom, or destruction. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

We are not forced to choose between a managerial free-enterprise system and a managerial communist system. There is a third solution, that of democratic, humanistic socialism which, based on the original principles of socialism, offers the vision of a new, truly human society. Once upon a time there was a little boy who lived in Chicago named Max Palevsky. His father had come to this country because the streets were paved with gold, but the were not, and so to support his family he became a painter. Houses, not canvas. Max grew up and went to the University of Chicago and studied philosophy. His father said, “Philosophy?” Max did not know, but he wanted to study philosophy, and so he went right on studying philosophy. In graduate school he was still studying philosophy, notably logic. After eleventy-seven years in graduate school he got a bit fatigued with the academic environment, and so one day he went to work for Bendix as a logician. Bendix was trying its hand at computers and Max was there to tell the computer how to think, since the computer did not know what was logical. One day Max moved on to Packard-Bell, which was also trying its hand at computers, and one day after that Max decided to start his own company. IBM dominates the computer field, but even IBM cannot do absolutely everything well at all times, and Max thought there was a niche in the computer field that IBM was not covering, in the area of small computers. So Max got together with Art Rock, who had some money and some friends at Hayden, Stone. Art had moved to San Francisco and formed a firm, Davis and Rock, to invest venture capital in ideas such as Max’s. Max put up $80,000 and Art Rock’s people put up $920,000, and from a sheet of yellow paper Scientific Data Systems was born. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

The idea was right and people were able and Scientific Data Systems began to make money on its small computers. A group of underwriters sold some stock to the public and the market on the first day capitalized—id est, decided—that the earnings of SDS were worth a paper value of $50 million. That made Max’s piece worth a little less than $10 million. At the time, after some notable triumphs, the market said SDS was worth about $540 million, and that made Max’s price worth about $50 million. You cannot do that in the stock market unless you start with a lot in the first place and have trusted financial advisors. One spring evening I was sitting in Max’s hotel room on Central Park South and we were watching the lights go on in Central Park and I asked him what difference the $50 million made. Max thought for s minute and then he said it had not made any difference. He still lived in the same house and had the same friends. He did have a problem, because every once in a while, his children would read in the paper that their father had $50 million and he did not want them to grow up with any false values. And of course, he did have the fund and the satisfaction of creating a company and beating IBM. Then he added one footnote. “It has made one difference,” he said. “It made my father happy. My father said, ‘I did the right thing. I was right after all.’” And Max said, ‘I did the right thing. I was right after all.’” And Max said, “Right about what?” And his father said, “I was right what I thought before I came, about the streets, and the gold.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

So if we are talking about real big money, forget the stock market. Max’s story, in varying degrees, of course, has been duplicated by the principals of a hundred other companies. That $240 million may be a paper value, but if you own a piece of it, you can trade the paper in for all the nice tangible thing you can think of, and even after they get the carpeting in on your yacht, you will have a lot left. Engineers know this well; they follow the trial of the stock options. You have stock and as long as there are buyers for it that currency is just as good as greenbacks. You can whisk engineers out of RCA and Sperry Rand and General Electric because the engineers there are too far from the top and if they have options, they are small in relation to the size of the company. So if you have a device or a process for which there is a ready market, and you can corral some engineers, that is the way to big money. If an individual realized one self by spontaneous activity and thus relates oneself to the World, one ceases to be an isolated atom; one and the World become part of one structuralized whole; one has one’s rightful place, and thereby one’s doubt concerning oneself and the meaning of life disappears. This doubt sprang from one’s separateness and from the thwarting of life; when one can live, neither compulsively nor automatically but spontaneously, the doubt disappears. One is aware of oneself as an active and creative individual and recognizes that there is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself. If the individual overcomes the basic doubt concerning oneself and one’s place in life, if one is related to the World by embracing it in the act of spontaneous living, one gains strength as an individual and one gains security. This security, however, differs from the security that characterizes the preindividualist state in the same way in which the new relatedness to the World differs from that of the primary ties. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

The new security is not rooted in the protection which the individual has from a higher power outside oneself; neither is it a security in which the tragic quality of life is eliminated. The new security is dynamic; it is not based on protection, but on humans’ spontaneous activity. It is the security acquired each moment by humans’ spontaneous activity. It is the security that only freedom can give, that needs no illusions because it has eliminated those conditions that necessitate illusions. Positive freedom as the realization of the self implies the full affirmation of the uniqueness of the individual. Humans are born equal but they are also born different. The basis of this difference is the inherited equipment, physiological and mental, with which they start life, to which is added the particular constellation of circumstances and experiences that they meet with. This individual basis of the personality is as little identical with any other as two organisms are ever identical physically. The genuine growth of the self is always a growth, the unfolding of a nucleus that is peculiar for this one person and only for one. The development of the automaton, in contrast, is not an organic growth. The growth of the basis of the self is blocked and a pseudo self I superimposed upon this self, which is—as we have seen—essentially the incorporation of extraneous patterns of thinking and feeling. Organic growth is possible only under the condition of supreme respect for the peculiarity of the self of other persons as well as of our own self. This respect for and cultivation of the uniqueness of the self is the most valuable achievement of human culture and it is this very achievement that is in danger today. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

The uniqueness of the self in no way contradicts the principle of equality. The thesis that humans are born equal implies that they all share the same fundamental human qualities, that they share the basic fate of human beings, that they all have the same inalienable claim on freedom and happiness. It furthermore means that their relationship is one of solidarity, not one of domination-submission. What the concept of equality does not mean is that all humans are alike. Such a concept of equality is derived from the role that the individual plays in one’s economic activities today. In the relation between the human who buys and the one who sells, the concrete differences of personality are eliminated. In this situation only one thing matters, that the one has something to sell and the other has money to but it. In economic life one man is not different from another; as real persons they are, and the cultivation of their uniqueness is the essence of individuality. Positive freedom also implies the principle that there is no higher power than this unique individual self, that humans are the center and purpose of one’s life; that the growth and realization of humans’ individuality is an end that can never be subordinated to purposes which are supposed to have greater dignity. This interpretation may arouse serious objections. Does it not postulate unbridled egotism? Is it not the negation of the idea of sacrifice for an ideal? Would its acceptance not lead to anarchy? These questions have actually already been answered, partly explicitly, partly implicitly, during our previous discussion. However, they are too important for us not to make another attempt to clarify the answers and to avoid misunderstanding. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

To say that humans should not be subject to anything higher than oneself does not deny the dignity of ideals. On the contrary, it is the strongest affirmation of ideals. It forces us, however, to a critical analysis of what an ideal is. One is generally apt today to assume that an ideal is any aim whose achievement does not imply material gain, anything for which a person is ready to sacrifice egotistical ends. This is a purely psychological—and for that matter relativistic viewpoint—concept of an ideal. From this subjectivist viewpoint a Fascist, who is driven by the desire to subordinate oneself to a higher power and at the same time to overpower other people, has an ideal just as much as the human who fights for human equality and freedom. On this basis the problem of ideals can never be solved. We must recognize the difference between genuine and fictitious ideals, which is just as fundamental a difference as that between truth and falsehood. All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purposes of the growth and happiness of the individual. We may not always know what serves this end, we may disagree about the function of this or that ideal in terms of human development, but this is no reason for a relativism which says that we cannot know what furthers life or what blocks it. We are not always sure which food is health and which is not, yet we do not conclude that we have no way whatsoever of recognizing poison. In the same way we can know, if we want to, what is poisonous for mental life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

We know that poverty, intimidation, isolation, are directed against life; that everything that serves freedom and furthers the courage and strength to be oneself is for life. What is good or bad for humans is not a metaphysical question, but an empirical one that can be answered on the basis of an analysis of humans’ nature and the effect which certain conditions have on one. However, what about “ideals” like those of the Fascists which are definitely directed against life? How can we understand the fact that humans are following these false ideals as fervently as others are following true ideals? The answer to this question is provided by certain psychological considerations. The phenomenon of masochism shows us that humans can be drawn to the experiencing of suffering, submission, or suicide is the antithesis of positive aims of living. Yet these aims can be subjectively experienced as gratifying and attractive. This attraction to what is harmful in life is the phenomenon which more than any other deserves the name of a pathological perversion. Many psychologists have assumed that the experience of pleasure and the avoidance of pain is the only legitimate principle guiding human actions; but dynamic psychology can show that the subjective experience of pleasure is not a sufficient criterion for the value of certain behaviour in terms of human happiness. The analysis of masochistic phenomena is a case in point. Such analysis shows that the sensation of pleasure can be the result of a pathological perversion and proves as little about the objective meaning of the experience as the sweet taste of a poison would prove about its function for the organism. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

We thus come to define a genuine ideal as any aim which furthers the growth, freedom, and happiness of the self, and to define as fictitious ideals those compulsive and irrational aims which subjectively are attractive experiences (like the drive for submission), but which actually are harmful to life. Once we accept this definition, it follows that a genuine ideal is not some veiled force superior to the individual, but that it is the articulate expression of utmost affirmation of the self. Any ideal which is in contrast to such affirmation proves by this very fact that it is not an ideal but a pathological aim. Those enormous beams and planks of concepts to which humans cling needily one’s whole life to save oneself are for the liberated intellect merely a scaffolding and plaything for its most daring feats; and in smashing it, mixing it up, reassembling it ironically, combining the most alien elements and separating those most closely connected, it demonstrates that it has no need of such makeshifts of neediness and will from now on be led not by concepts but by intuitions. There is no regular path leading from those intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, of abstractions: there are no words for them; humans fall silent when one sees them or speaks in strictly forbidden metaphous and egregious combinations of concepts in order to correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition, at least by demolishing and ridiculing the old conceptual restraints. There are ages in which the rational humans and the intuitive humans stand side by side, the one fearful of intuition, the other scornful of abstraction; the latter as irrational as the former is inartistic. Both desire to rule over life: the former by knowing how to meet the most pressing needs with foresight, intelligence, and regularity, the latter, as an “over-joyous hero,” by not seeing those needs and regarding life as real only when it feigns semblance and beauty.  #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Where the intuitive human, as, for instance, in ancient Greece, brandishes one’s weapons more formidably and victoriously than one’s opponent, in favourable conditions a culture can emerge and art can establish dominion over life; all outward manifestations of that life are accompanied by that dissimulation, that denial of neediness, the radiance of metaphorical intuitions, and, above all, the immediacy of deceit. Neither such a humans’ house nor one’s way of walking nor one’s clothing nor one’s earthen jug look as if they were invented by need; everything in them seems to express a sublime happiness and an Olympian clear blue—and yet a playing at seriousness. Whereas the human led by concepts and abstractions uses them merely to ward off misfortune, deriving no happiness from the abstractions and seeking out the greatest possible freedom from misery, the intuitive human, standing in the midst of a culture, reaps from one’s intuitions not only a defense against evil but a continuous influx of illumination, cheerfulness, redemption. Of course, when one suffers, one suffers more intensely; one even suffers more often, since one does not know how to learn from experience and keeps falling into the same ditch one has fallen into before. One is then just as irrational in one’s sorrow as one is in one’s happiness; one cries out and has no consolation. How different things are for the Stoic suffering the same misfortune, instructed by experience and ruling oneself by means of concepts! Usually aspiring only to sincerity, truth, freedom from deception, and protection against beguiling attack, now, in misfortune, one delivers one’s masterpiece of dissimulation, just as the human of intuition did in happiness; one’s visage is not a wincing and expressive human face but like a mask with features of dignified symmetry; one does not cry out or even change one’s time of voice. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

If a dark storm cloud bursts upon one, one wraps oneself up in one’s cloak and slowly walks out from under it. Consciousness of appearance.—How wonderful and new and yet how eerie and ironic my knowledge makes me feel toward the whole of existence. I have discovered for myself that the old humanity and animality, indeed the entire primal age and past of all sentient beings, goes on composing, loving, hating, inferring—I awoke suddenly in the midst of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am still dreaming and that I must go on dreaming in order not to perish: just as the sleepwalker must go on dreaming in order to keep from falling down. What is “seeming” (Schein) to me now! Certainly not the opposite of some kind of being (Wesen)—what could I possibly say of any such being, other than the predicates of its seeming! Certain not a dead mask that one could put on some unknown X, and indeed take off! For me, seeming is what is truly effective and alive, going so far in its self-mockery as to make me feel that here there is seeming and ghost lights and spirits dances, and nothing more—that among all those dreaming, I, too, the “knower,” dance my dance; that one who knows is a means of drawing out the Earthly dance and in this way belongs among the masters of ceremony of existence; and that the sublime consistency and interconnectedness of all knowledge is and will be perhaps the highest means of sustaining the universality of dreaming and the understanding all these dreamers have among themselves, and so, too, even the duration of the dream. This holiday season, please open your hearts, and donate to the Sacramento Fire Department, for the are not receiving all of their resources. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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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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