If you considered that around three thousand years ago our precious planet Earth was infected with only fifty million copies (while, certainly, a single specimen would already have been too many) of the unfortunate human species; if you imagine having had at that time a pile of good H-bombs at your disposal and having used them to crumble the crust of this damned planet Earth and possibly to convert it into a second chain of asteroids, a first large ring of such little celestial bodies being located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter; and if you considered then what a litany of unspeakable horrors which still continue and are synonymous with humanity would not have occurred!! What philosopher would have dreamed, thirty-five years ago, of thus attacking the so sick matter which we all are? What philanthropist? What man of good will? However, now we absolutely must not miss the chance—and to have such a chance is too good to be true—finally to bring an end at last this infamous litany of abominations that we all are (collectively and individually); and I mean by that, obviously, in a complete atomic-nuclear way! The tragedy, the true catastrophe—is that humanity continues while the divine benediction would be qualified as thermonuclear or some equivalent thereof. If not stark mad, not to be of this opinion is to be selfish, criminal, monstrous. Now, Rousseau, for all the adaptations made by the legislator, in order for his legislation to sit particular times and places, was still pursuing the same universal goal as were the thinkers of the Enlightenment: to secure the equal natural rights of all men within civil society. He simply argued that Hobbes and Locke did not succeed in doing so, that self-interest is not enough to found political morality on. The political solution was more complicated and demanding.

Kant, who invented culture as part of a historical teaching, also had a similar universal goal. Although natural rights had become human rights in his teaching, those rights were the same ones, founded on a new basis; and the historical process he discerned in Rousseau’s teaching moved toward the effective establishment of those rights in civil society. Universality and rationality were the hallmarks of all these teachings. However, very quickly culture—which was for Kant and, speaking anachronistically, for Rousseau, singular—became cultures. That there were Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Chinese was clear. That there is a cosmopolitan culture, either existing or coming into being, is unclear. The various unions of nature with the acquisitions of civilization are rare and difficult enough; that they should tend to the same end is improbable; we should cherish these creations and be happy that there is any culture at all. A charm was discovered in this diversity. Rousseau introduced rootedness as a condition of attaining the simple rational human goal. His historicist and romantic successors argued that such a goal undermined rootedness; rootedness became the goal. Here again we live with two contradictory understandings of what counts for man. One tells us that what is important is what all men have in common; the other that what men have in common is low, while that they have from separate cultures gives them their depth and their interest. Both agree that life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, id est, the interests of health and preservation, are what men share. The difference between them is the weight they give to being French or Chinese, Jewish or Catholic, or the rank order of these particular cultures in relation to the natural needs of the human body. One is cosmopolitan, the other is particularistic.

Human rights are connected with one school, respect for cultures with the other. Sometimes the United States of America is attacked for failing to promote human rights; sometimes for wanting to impose “the American way of life” on all people without respect for their cultures. To the extent that it does the latter, the United States of America does so in the name of self-evident truths that apply to the good of all humans. However, its critics argue that there are no such truths, that they are prejudices of American culture. On the other hand, the Ayatollah was initially supported by some here because he represented true Iranian culture. Now he is attacked for violating human rights. What he does is in the name of Islam. His critics insist that there are universal principles that limit the rights of Islam. When the critics of the U.S.A in the name of culture, and of the Ayatollah in the name of human rights, are the same persons, which they often are, they are persons who want to eat their cake and have it, too.  Why, it might be asked, cannot there be a respect for both human rights and culture? Simply because a culture itself generates it own way of life and principles, particularly its highest ones, with no authority above it. If there were such an authority, the unique way of life born of its principle would be undermined. The idea of culture was adopted precisely because it offered an alternative to what was understood to be the shallow and dehumanizing universality of rights based on our animal nature. The folk mind takes the place of reason. There is a continuing war between the universality of the Enlightenment and the particularly that resulted from the teachings of Enlightenment and the particularity that resulted from the teachings of Enlightenment’s critics. Their criticism appealed to all the old attachments to family, country and God that were uprooted by Enlightenment, and gave them a new interpretation and a new pathos. Such criticism provided a philosophic basis for resisting philosophy.

The questions is whether reasonings really take the place of instincts, whether arguments about the value of tradition or roots can substitute for immediate passions, whether this whole interpretation is not just a reaction unequal to the task of stemming a tide of egalitarian, calculating individualism, which the critics themselves share, and the privileges of which they would be loath to renounce. When one hears newly divorced persons extolling the extended family, unaware of all the sacred bonds and ancestral tyranny that it required in order to exist, it is easy to see what they think is missing form their lives, but hard to believe they are aware of what they would have to sacrifice to achieve it. When one hears men and women proclaiming that they must preserve their culture, one cannot help wondering whether this artificial notion can really take the place of the God and country for which they once would have been willing to die. The “new ethnicity” or “roots” is just another manifestation of the concern with particularity, evidence not only of the real problems of community in modern mass societies but also of the superficiality of the response to it, as well as the lack of awareness of the fundamental conflict between liberal society and culture. This attempt to preserve old cultures in the New World is superficial because it ignores that fact that real differences among men are based on real differences in fundamental conflict between liberal society and culture. This attempt to preserve old cultures in the New World is superficial because it ignores the fact that real differences among men are based on real differences in fundamental beliefs about good and evil, about what is highest, about God. Differences of dress or food are either of no interest or are secondary expression of deeper beliefs.

The “ethic” differences we see in the United States of America are but decaying reminiscences of old differences that caused our ancestors to kill one another. It has been thought throughout time that man is a killing organism. He must kill to survive. He must kill to advance for one must show the World who is the natural elite. Who is the World’s greatest killer? Man. Eve knew this when she described that aftermath of the Fall and Abel’s death. There was also a link between Eden and the Flood, a connection that is both moral and historical, as well as a symbol of the fate of humanity in the years to come. The animating principle, their soul, has disappeared from them. The ethnic festivals are just superficial displays of clothes, dances and foods from the old country. One has to be quite ignorant of the splendid “cultural” past in order to be impressed or charmed by these insipid folkloric manifestations (which, by the way, unite the meanings of culture—people an art). And the blessing given the whole notion of cultural diversity in the United States of America by the culture movement has contributed to the intensification and legitimization of group politics, along with a corresponding decay of belief that the individual rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence are anything more than dated rhetoric. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear; for fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever is terrible, therefore, with regard to sight, is sublime, too. This is the age in which our triumphant politicians and hopeful students boast of “slow but steady progress through science and education.” Thanks very much for such “progress!” The very sight of it is enough to confirm us in our belief in the immoral cyclic theory of history, illustrated by the myths of all ancient, natural religions (the Christians—borrowed the story of the Garden of Eden; perfection at the beginning of Time.)

It impresses upon us the fact that human history, far from being a steady ascension towards the better, is an increasingly hopeless process of bastardization, emasculation and demoralization of humankind; an inexorable “fall.” It rouses in us the yearning to see the end—the final crash that will push into oblivion both the worthless “isms” that are the product of decay of thought and character, and the no less worthless religions of equality which have slowly prepared the grounds for them; the coming of Kalki, the divine Destroyer of evil; the dawn of a new Cycle opening, as all time-cycles ever did, with a “Golden Age.” Never mind how bloody the final crash may be! Never mind what old treasures may perish for ever in the redeeming conflagration! The sooner it comes, the better. We are waiting for it—and for the following glory—confident in the divinely established cyclic Law that governs all manifestations of existence in Time: the law of Eternal Return. We are waiting for it, and for the subsequent triumph of the Truth persecuted today; for the triumph under whatever name, of the only faith in harmony with the everlasting laws of being; of the only modern “ism” which is anything but “modern,” being just the latest expression of principles as old as the Sun; the triumph of all those men who, throughout the centuries and today, have never lost the vision of the everlasting Order, decreed by the Sun, and who have fought in a selfless spirit to impress that vision upon others. We are waiting for the glorious restoration, this time, one a Worldwide scale, of the New Order, projection in time, in the next, as in every recurring “Golden Age,” of the everlasting Order of the Cosmos. The end of the World does not come suddenly and without warning. To imagine it does is to be fooled by popular misconception and thus fail to recognize the larger picture.

The end of the World is an ongoing process. It starts slowly, imperceptibly, and blossoms unnoticed in our very midst, until it has engulfed all that there is and none is free from its grasp. If life is to continue, all that humankind thinks is great and mighty is but a disease upon the life and must be made to perish. That which modern man has worshipped as being grand and noble is but an affliction. All that has given the appearance of granting freedom to humankind, has in fact ordained its enslavement, impairing and crippling from within while outwardly bearing the banner of liberty. The body of humanity has been poisoned, and even more as it strives for new horizons and constant advancement, rigor mortis has preceded the approach of death and the lives of men are dragged into the grave along with it. Seek now those motions that sow for humanity the seeds of death as they harvest for you the bounty of life. And man, self-castrated and self-frustrated, flees down the corridors of nightmares, pursued by monstrous machines, overwhelmed by satanic powers, haunted by vague guilts and terrors all created of his own imagination. He escapes into absurdity, drowns his spirit in pretence, worships tin gods of success. Then, shamed by his pretenses and frustrated by his self-denial, he frenziedly projects his horror on imagined enemies, seeks release in scapegoats and false issues, and propitiates anthropoid gods, the blacked and shattered eidolons of his spirit, with sacrifices of blood. Humanity is mean and corrupt, a liar blinded by its own deception, yet cunning within the confines of its ignorance. And humanity is weak, and yet strong in its weakness, for humanity by its cunning can suck the strength from the truly strong and bring them down with it. And humanity breeds death, the death of the soul, and gives life to the torturous conflicts of the mind in which the soul has trapped itself.

And humanity destroys all that promises to bring the spirit of purity and oust corruption. And humanity charms with a sweet façade which hides a treacherous heart. And humanity talks of love, and leaves the scars of hatred in its wake. And humanity cries peace, and brings war. And humanity speaks of glory and a magnificent destiny, and leads deeper into death and degradation. And humanity is brimful of promises and so-called good intentions, yet behind it is a trail of abject failure and betrayal. And humanity is afraid for it and is steeped in evil. And as with all things, by its fruits shall we know humanity. And humanity’s fruits are foul, bruised and bitter, and rotten to the core. And humanity’s home is the Earth, and the Earth is Hell. Now there is nothing more evil in the Universe than man. His World is Hell, and he himself is the Devil. Children’s games are largely based on their experiences. If they live in the country, their games will involve animals. If they go to movies, their games will reflect that. If they watch television, you can see it in their games. In all cases, the characters and creatures they are imitating are based upon the pictures of them which they carry in their minds. I have watched my kids after they have seen Star Trek on TV. Leo, the older, becomes Captain Kirk—efficient, “manly,” determined, in charge, unafraid, coplike. Annie, the younger, is second in command. She plays Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, affecting her behaviour: quick, intelligent, highly efficient, caring, and reasonable. The games continue for hours. Often they replay the same story a few times, as though they were rehearsing it or attempting to memorize it. This, of course, is exactly what they are doing—rehearsing it, to ingrain it in themselves.

Another day, I noticed that Leo was taking giant leaps around the garden and making a clicking sound with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. I realized that his noise was one he made frequently while doing something active and that it was an imitation of the electronic sound that accompanies all of the bionic acts of the Bionic Man. Later that week I watched the program with my kids. During one sequence the Bionic Man is shown running at bionic speed across a field, to the accompaniment of the clicks. The movements are shown in slow motion, so they become especially vivid. I asked my kids about this. Leo said that he runs around imagining that he is the Bionic Man and tries to run like him. Annie said she does, too. She also wanted to know if that was bad. How to answer that? Is it bad? It is bad for kids to do a natural thing—emulation, imitation—which is how children for millions of years have learned about the World? That is certainly not bad. However, in this case, they were imitating a mechanical person. I cannot tell them that it is bad because I do not want them to doubt their own learning processes, and yet the more they practice and maintain their bionic images, the more they imitate them. Slowly, they assume the role in real life. The role in real life. The Bionic Man slowly becomes real in the person of….my kids! I told them it was not bad and changed the subject. Emulation is a method used by human beings to understand and integrate nature into themselves. To get an idea of the naturalness of the process, just think of way in which you are like your parents or your children are like you. I believe that a parent may have less to do with the characteristics a child picks up from the parent than the kid does, because of simple evolutionary emulation processes that continue constantly.

We attempt to train children in one area, only to discover that they have picked up parts of ourselves that we had rather they had not noticed. My daughter Annie has begun to walk with her toes spread slightly outward, ducklike, as I do, and also as my father does. I can remember the moment as a child when I chose to imitate my father’s walk, out of a simple desire to be closer to him, to know how he is inside. Now, twenty-two years later, I walk exactly as he did at this age, even though it is not a desirable way of walking. One’s balance is not ideal, physical spontaneity is limited and movement possibilities narrow. The manner of walking amplifies a certain static emotional condition that my father had to struggle with and which, finding it also in myself, I do not much like. In retrospect, I can see that this way of walking is illustrative of an instinct to “hide” rather than “act,” and perhaps its roots go all the way back to his childhood in the Warsaw ghetto. Who knows? It hardly matters by now. And yet the walk has passed through four generations and is beginning to reappear in Annie. Therefore, imitation from generation to generation is automatic. The tool used is the image of the person being imitated. As I walk, I imagine my father’s walk. This makes it possible for me to repeat it. Without the image I could not repeat it. After many years, of course, the image has submerged though the walk remains. We tend to speak of image emulation as applicable only to children, as though at some fixed age one ceases to learn in this way. This is absurd. As there are way in which my children imitate me, there are also ways in which I imitate them. Annie, for example, has a gentle and efficient ways of speaking and moving, and I have often caught myself copying. Leo has an energy and enthusiasm—a brightness—which I have learned to call upon myself. He teaches me how by merely being that way. I copy him as the student copies the teacher. I become more like both of my children just as they also become more like me.

The same applies to husband and wife. It is a subject of scholars that husbands and wives (and even pets) begin to resemble each other after years together. I have seen countless examples of it, and I believe my wide and I are such an example. After living with someone over a decade, one picks up his or her mannerisms, facial expressions, even lines on the face and body attitudes. There is no way to avoid doing this. It is automatic. Humans are hopeless emulators. If we wish to, we cannot stop. We look around us, and whatever is there day after day becomes the environment for our ingestion whether it is the Bionic Man or one’s own family. We absorb it, take it into ourselves, turn into it. We become each other’s mirrors or reflections or mandalas. Slowly we turn into what we see. It is a basic way of learning how to be. The process goes on for our whole lives. San Francisco, unlike New York, achieves its primary cultural influence not from Europe but from Asia. An example of this occurs in many city parks from about six A.M. daily to eight A.M. I walk through one such park each day about seven-thirty A.M. The scene is this: about forty people, half of them Western, half Chinese, are facing a mature Chinese man who is doing Tai Chi. I have watched the way he teaches. He never speaks (he knows no English). He merely faces his “class” and moves. They copy his movements. If there is something particularly difficult, he does it several times. There is no discussion of theory; the movement itself is the theory. Once you have absorbed the movement inside yourself, the meaning of the movement invades your consciousness. So the teaching method is 100 percent imitation. After the class is over, the students practice with the image of him in their minds. The idea of culture was established in an attempt to find the dignity of humans within the context of modern science. That science was materialistic, hence reductionist, and deterministic. If their status is not special, if they are not essentially different from the brutes, humans can have no dignity.

There must be something else in humans to account for the fullness of their being and prevent political and economic arrangements that presupposed their brutishness from reducing one to it. Those who attempt to establish the dignity of humans did not hope of try to transform the new from natural science. It was a question of coexistence. They invented dualism with which we still live—nature-freedom, nature-art, science-creativity, natural science-humanities—in which the latter term of the pair is supposed to be of higher dignity, but the groundedness of which has always turned out to be problematic. Freedom is a postulate, a possibility in Kant, not a demonstration; and that remains the difficulty. Culture, although it claims to be comprehensive, to include all of man’s higher activities, does not really include natural science, which did not need the notion, which was doing just fine in the older democratic arrangement it has helped to found, and by which it was encouraged. Psychology today includes an important school for which man is nothing other than a brute, exempli gratia, B. F. Skinner’s behaviouralism; another in which the fact that man is an animal practically disappears, exempli gratia, Dr. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, which wants to found itself on biology and at the same time to account for spiritual phenomena, to the detriment of both. In general, everyone wants to be scientific and at the same time to respect the dignity of man. Therefore, may your refuge for “safety” in your Lord—you are sheltered in Him. And now, still turned to God, you will speak word about the task which is joined to all this, and which one has set oneself, which God has set him—“To tell of all Thy works.” Formerly one was provoked to tell of the appearance, and one resisted. Now one knows, one has the reality to tell of: the works of God. The first of one’s telling, the tale of the work which God as preformed with you.

The entire World watched awestruck as a half-century-old empire based on Soviet power in Eastern Europe suddenly came unglued in 1989. Desperate for the Western technology needed to energize its rust-belt economy, the Soviet Union itself plunged into a period of near chaotic change. Slower and less dramatically, the World’s other superpower also went into relative decline. So much has been written about America’s loss of global power that it bears no repetition here. Even more striking, however, have been the many shifts of power away from its once-dominant domestic institutions. Nearly forty years ago, General Motors (GM) was regarded as the World’s premier manufacturing company, a gleaming model for managers in countries around the World and a political powerhouse in Washington. Today, says a high GM official, “We have made a strong comeback.” Shares of General Motors Co. GM slipped 2.90 percent to $37.10 on Monday, May 16, 2022, and this proved to be an all-around mixed trading session for the stock market, with the Down Jones industrial Average DJIA rising 0.08 percent to 32,223.42 and the S&P 500 Index SPX falling 0.39 percent to 4,008.01. General Motors Co. closed $30.11 short of its 52-week high ($67.21), which the company reached on January 5^th, 2022. The stock demonstrated a mixed performance when compared to some of its competitors Monday, May 16, 2022, as Tesla Inc. TSLA fell 5.88 percent to $724.37, Toyota Motor Corp. ADR TM fell 1.13 percent to $159.21, and Honda Motor Co. Ltd. ADR HMC fell 3.86 percent to $24.64. Trading volume (16.3 M) remained 1.9 million below its 50-day average volume of 18.2 M. GM still have a market value of $55.7 billion; shares outstanding, 1.46 billion. GM sold 512,846 vehicles in the United States of America in the first quarter of 2022, with improved semiconductor supplies supporting higher production and market share in key truck segments. “Our ability to meet pent-up demand improved dramatically thanks to a tremendous effort by our supply chain and manufacturing teams to keep our plants operating at close to normal levels,” said Steve Carlisle, executive vice president and president, GM North America. “Supply chain distributions are not fully behind us, but we expect to continue outperforming 2021 production levels, especially in the second half of the year.”

According to GM Chief Economist Elaine Buckberg, industry light vehicle volumes will grow this year and top 2021 levels, thanks to a strong labour market, higher vehicle production and pent-up demand. “Ordinarily, a U.S. economy this strong would translate into light vehicle sales in the 17-million range,” she said. “Improvements in the supply chain should lift auto sales as the years progresses, despite headwinds from higher inflation and fuel prices.” About forty years ago, IBM had only the feeblest competition and the United States of America probably had more computer than the rest of the World combined. Today computer power has spread rapidly around the World, the U.S. share has sagged, and with its annual revenue decline of 6 percent since 2011, IBM faces stiff competition from companies like NEC, Hitachi, and Fujitsu in Japan; Groupe Bull in France; ICL in Britain, and many others. Industry analysts speculate about the post-IMB era. Nor is all this a result of foreign competition. Forty years ago, three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, dominated the American airwaves. They faced no foreign competition at all. Yet today they are shrinking so fast, their very survival is in doubt. Forty years ago, to choose a different kind of example, medical doctors in the United States of America were white-coated gods. Patients typically accepted their word as law. Physicians virtually controlled the entire American health system. Their political clout was enormous. Today, by contrast, American doctors are under siege. Patients talk back. They sue for malpractice. Nurses demand responsibility and respect. Pharmaceutical companies are less deferential. And insurance companies, “managed care groups,” and government doctors, who now control the American health system.

Across the board, then, some of the most powerful institutions and professions inside the most powerful of nations saw their dominance decline in the same twenty-year period that saw America’s external power, relative to other nations, sink. Lest these immense shake-up in the distribution of power seem a disease of the aging superpowers, a look elsewhere proves otherwise. While U.S. economic power faded, Japan’s skyrocketed. However, success, too, can trigger significant power shifts. Just as in the United States of America, Japan’s most powerful Second Wave or rust-belt industries declined in importance as new Third Wave industries rose. Even as Japan’s economic heft increased, however, the three institutions perhaps most responsible for its growth saw their own power plummet. The first was the governing Liberal-Democratic Party. The second was the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), arguably the brain behind the Japanese economic miracle. The third was Keidanren, Japan’s most politically potent business federation. Today the LDP is in retreat, its elderly male leaders embarrassed by financial and sexual scandals. It is face, for the first time, by outraged and increasingly active women voters, by consumers, taxpayers, and farmers who formerly supported it. To retain the power it has held since 1955, it will be compelled to shift its base from rural to urban voters, and deal with a far more heterogenous population than ever before. For Japan, like all the high-tech nations, is becoming a de-massified society, with more actors arriving on the political scene. Whether the LDP can make this long-term switch is at issues. What is not at issues is that significant power has switched away from the LDP. As for MITI, even now many American academics and politicians urge the United States of America to adopt MITI-style planning as a model. Yet today, MITI itself is in trouble.

Today MITI is a fast-fading power as the corporations themselves have grown strong enough to thumb their noses at it. Japan remains economically powerful in the outside World but politically weak at home. Immense economic weight pivots around a shaky political base. Even more pronounced has been the decline in the strength of Keidanren, still dominated by the hierarches of the fast-fading smokestack industries. Even these dreadnoughts of Japanese fiscal power, the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance, whose controls guided Japan through the high-growth period, the oil shock, the stock market crash, and the yen rise, now find themselves impotent against the turbulent market forces destabilizing the economy. Still more striking shifts of power are changing the face of Western Europe. Thus power has shifted away from London, Paris, and Rome as German economy has outstripped all the rest. Today, as East and West Germany progressively fuse their economies, all Europe once more fears German domination of the continent. To protect themselves, France and other West European nations, with the exception of Britain, are hastily trying to integrate the European community politically as well as economically. However, the more successful they become, the more of their national power is transfused into the veins of the Brussels-based European Community, which has progressively stripped away bigger and bigger chunks of their sovereignty. The nations of Western Europe thus are caught between Bonn or Berlin on the one side and Brussels on the other. Here, too, power is shifting rapidly away from its established centers. The list of such global and domestic power shifts could be extended indefinitely. They represent a remarkable series of changes for so brief a peacetime period. Of course, some power shifting is normal at any time. Yet only rarely does an entire globe-girdling system of power fly apart in this fashion. When all the rules of the power game change at once, and they so very often do, it is an even rarer moment in history.

Yet that is exactly what is happening today. Power, which to a large extent defines us as individuals as nations, is itself being redefined. As we have have seen, there are at least a dozen important channels through which prosumers and prosuming interact with the money economy, shifting value back ad forth. They will be more and more important in the days ahead. It helps, therefore, to recap them here, starting with the simplest. Prosumers perform unpaid work through “third jobs” and self-service activities. By using an ATM or checking themselves out in the supermarket, they reduce labour cost—and the number of entry-level jobs—in the money economy. The same, with minor adjustment, is true when they personally care for the ill or elderly or when they cook, clean house, home school and perform other tasks themselves, instead of paying others to do them. Prosumers buy capital goods from the money economy. They purchase everything from chain saws to computers and digital cameras that help them create value for themselves and others in the non-money economy. In doing so, they themselves constitute a market within the money economy. Prosumers lend their tools and capital to users in the money economy–another dish of free lunch. Examples, as we have seen, include allowing other the free use of excess computer capacity for medical and environmental research, astronomical observation and many other socially important purposes. Prosumers improve the housing stock. They raise its value in the national money economy. They do this every time they paint, reshingle their roof, make their lawns green, groom their yards, add rooms or plant trees, substituting their own labour for jobs in the construction industry. The value of the housing stock, in turn, affects mortgages, interest rates and other variables in the money economy.

Prosumers “marketize” products, services, and skills. They do this when, having developed a skill, a product or a services for their personal use, they put it up for sale—sometimes creating new companies and business sectors in the process. Linux, created by prosumers outside the market, generates important commercial piggyback products inside the for-pay marketplace. Prosumers also “de-marketize” products or services. They drive existing goods and services out of the marketplace by offering users all-but-free alternatives. The very threat from outside the money economy leads to new, often less expensive, products inside it. Check VoIp calling, iPods, and the like. Prosuming can accelerate the cycle of de-marketization and marketization. Prosumers create value as volunteers. They offer free help in emergencies. Less dramatically, on a day-to-day basis they work in senior centers, provide medical care and many other services to society. They fight youth gangs, for or maintain neighbourhood associations, churches and other groupings that contribute to social cohesion—the absence of which imposes huge money costs for additional police, prisons, and the like. Prosumers provide valuable free information to for-profit companies. Prosumers do this by beta-testing new products, by filling out surveys, by helping businesses identify new customer needs, by “viral marketing” and by performing other unremunerated services for them. Prosumers increase the power of consumers in the money economy. They do this by sharing information about what to buy or not buy. They share experiences with respect to various health problems and medications, for example, often empowering patients in their relationships with doctors.

Prosumers accelerate innovation. Serving as unpaid gurus, teachers, and consultants, prosumers train one another to use the latest technologies as quickly as they appear, thus increasing the rate of technological change and raising productivity in the paid economy. They are not merely productive but productive. Prosumers rapidly create knowledge, disseminate it and store it in the cybersphere for use in the knowledge-based economy. Much of the data, information and knowledge available in cyberspace has been contributed for free by software writers, financial experts, sociologists, anthropologists, scientists, technicians and others in all walks of life. The accuracy of this content varies widely, and much of it may someday be marketized, but it is routinely drawn upon by investors, businesspeople, managers and others at work in the money economy—another free input. Prosumer raise children and reproduce the labour force. Prosumers provide monumental contributions as parents and caregivers, dwarfing all these other interactions. By socializing their children, giving them the gift of language and by including values consonant with those demanded by the dominant economy, they prepare generation after generation to create wealth. Without the free lunch they provide, there would soon be no paid economy. In addition to this, it is not always clear, at least in the early stages of technology’s intrusion into a culture, who will gain most by it and who will lost most. This is because the changes wrought by technology are subtle if not downright mysterious, one might even say wildly unpredictable. Among the most unpredictable are those that might be labeled ideological. When he warned that writers will come to rely on external signs instead of their own internal resources, and that they will receive quantities of information without proper instruction, this is the sort of change Thamus had in mind.

Thamus meant that new technologies change what we man by “knowing” and “truth”; they alter those deeply embedded habits of thought which give to a culture its sense of what the World is the natural order of things, of what is reasonable, of what is necessary, of what is inevitable, of what is real. For example, if a number can be given to the quality of thought, then a number can be given to the qualities of mercy, love, hate, beauty, creativity, intelligence, even sanity itself. When Galileo said that the language of nature is written in mathematics, he did not mean to include human feeling or accomplishment or insight. However, most of us are now inclined to make these inclusions. Our psychologists, sociologist, and educators find it quite impossible to do their work without numbers. They believe that without numbers, they cannot acquire or express authentic knowledge. That is peculiar. What is even more peculiar is that so many of us do not find the idea peculiar. To say that someone should be doing better work because he has an IQ of 134, or that someone is a 7.2 on a sensitivity scale, or that this man’s essay on the rise of capitalism is an A- and that man’s is a C+ would have sounded like gibberish to Galileo or Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson. If it makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers so that we see the World differently than they did. Our understanding of what is real is different. Which is another way of saying that embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the World as one thing rather than another, to value one thing other another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another. This is what Marshal McLuhan meant by his famous aphorism “The medium is the message.” This is what Marx meant when he said, “Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with nature” and creates the “conditions of intercourse” by which we relate to each other.

 It is what Wittgenstein meant when, in referring to our most fundamental technology, he said that language is not merely a vehicle of thought but also the driver. And this is what Thamus wished the inventor Theuth to see. This is, in short, an ancient and persistent piece of wisdom, perhaps most simply expressed in the old adage that to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Without being too literal, we may extend the truism: To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data. And to a man with a grade sheet, everything looks like a number. This represents a kind of prejudice. There is a simple way to represent these types of situations that give rise to real problems. This is to use a particular kind of game called the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. The game allows the players to achieve mutual gains from cooperation, but it also allows for the possibility that neither will cooperate. As in most realistic situations, the players do have strictly opposing interest. This approach differs from sociobiology. Sociobiology is based on the assumption that important aspects of human behaviour are guided by our genetic inheritance. Perhaps so. However, the present approach is strategic rather than genetic. It used an evolutionary perspective because people are often in situations where effective strategies continue to be used and ineffective strategies are dropped. Sometimes the selection process is direct: a member of Congress who does not accomplish anything is interactions with colleagues will not remain a member of Congress.

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One of the most extraordinary examples of prosumer power in modern history has literally changed how people around the World work, play, live, and think. And almost no one has noticed it. So far we have shown how prosumers feed free lunch to the money economy by creating wealth in the non-money economy. However, prosumers sometimes do more than that. They pump growth hormone into the money economy so it grows faster. Put more formally, they add not only to production but to productivity. There is scarcely a mainstream economist who would not agree that increased productivity is good medicine for most economic ills. Few, however, have traced the impact of prosuming on productivity. In fact, because almost no one pays attention to it, there is, in this most jargon-laden of professions, no adequate word for this phenomenon. So, to coin one, we can call it “productivity”—the extra kick prosumers provide when, beyond creating unpaid value and channeling it into the money economy, they actually increase its growth rate as well. Most businesspeople and economists would agree that improving the education of the workforce is likely to increase its productivity. Yet, as we have seen, no supposedly “modern” institution is more dysfunctional and obsolete than what passes for public education even in countries with advanced economies. Moreover, most so-called reforms accept the hidden assumption that factory-style mass education is the only way to go. Most are still unconsciously designed to make the school/factory run more efficiently—rather than to replace it with a post-factory model. And most share the built-in assumption that only teachers teach. Thus one of the most extraordinary events in the recent history of education has been virtually overlooked.

That event began in 1977 in a most unlikely way. At that time there were, for all practical purposes, zero personal computers (PC) on the planet. By the year 2003, however, there were 190 million in use in the United States alone. That was surprising. However, more surprising is the fact that more than 150 million Americans knew how to use them. Even more astounding is how they learned. PCs, from the time the first Altair 8800s and Sol-20s appeared, have been cantankerous little devices, much balkier and more complicated to use than any previous household appliance. They had buttons and diskettes, and software (a concept only a relative handful of Americans had ever encountered) and manuals and a strange vocabulary of DOS commands. So how did so many millions of people—half the entire nation—master these complexities? How did they learn? We know what they did not do. The overwhelming majority, especially in the early says, did not go to computer school. In fact, with minimal exceptions, they had little or nor formal instruction at all. Their learning began when they walked into a Radio Shack store, one of the first retail chains to begin selling PCs. Radio Shacks at the time were tiny shops jammed with jangles of wires and electronic gadgets and a sales force of enthusiastic sixteen-year-old boys with pimple on their cheeks. The kind who read science fiction and became “geeks.” When a customer showed interest in the TRS-80 one of the primordial PCs, a clerk would show him (rarely a her in those days) how to turn it on and hit a few keys. The purchaser would hurry home to unwrap the $599 machine and plug it in. He would then follow the instruction—and soon discovered that at best he could do very little with his computer.

Not surprisingly, he went back to the store and asked the clerk a few more questions. However, soon it became apparent that he needed more than the clerk. What he needed was a computer guru. However, who was a guru? What followed was a frantic search for someone—neighbor, friend, colleague, happy-hour acquaintance—who might help. Anyone would do who knew even a bit more than he did about how to use a computer. A guru, it turned out, was anybody who had bought a computer a week earlier. Next came a cascade of information exchange about PCs, spilling, sloshing, splashing through American society, creating a learning experience in which millions participated. Today some might term it peer-to-peer learning. However, in fact, it was more complicated than Napster-like trading of music. For the guru and the learner were not peers. One had more knowledge to impart than the other did. It was precisely the knowledge edge, not the equivalence, that brought them together. That in itself is interesting, but even more so is the fact that, in time, the roles might reverse. The later learner often became the guru and the original guru the learner, as they traded experiences and information back and forth. Since those days, prosumers have become more and more sophisticated about computers. As W. Keith Edwards and Rebecca E. Grinter of the famed Palo Alto Research Center write, the average PC user today deals with chores that would only “seem familiar to a mainframe system operator from the days of the high priesthood: upgrading hardware, performing software installation and removal, and so on.” This progressive learning process was controlled by nobody, led by nobody. Organized by nobody. With almost nobody getting paid, an immense social process got under way that, largely unnoticed by educators and economist alike, changed the American money economy, radically altered corporate organization and affected everything from language to life style.

Only much later did corporations train large numbers of computer users. Guru prosumers were the indispensable, yet unrecognized, drivers of the PC revolution. This process is still going on, accelerated and dwarfed by the learning exchanged among Internet users and their gurus. Around the World, people are teaching one another to use the most complex personal appliance in history. And often it is kids teaching grown-ups. Take a PC with a touch pad and a fast Internet connection and embed it in a stone wall near an unaffluent apartment complex or small neighborhood. Mount a camera opposite it so you can observe it from your office, and watch what happens. That is exactly what physicist Sugata Mitra of NIIT, a New Delhi-based software maker and computer school, did. There were no instructions and no adults to turn to. It was not long before it was discovered by kids from the Sarvodaya Camp, the adjoining unaffluent community. Instead of looting it, Guddu, Satish, Rajender and the others—mostly six- to twelve-year-olds—began playing with it. Within a day or two, they had learned and taught one another to drag, drop, create files and folders, perform other tasks and to navigate the Internet. Again, no classrooms. No tests. No teachers. In three months they had created more than a thousand folders, accessed Disney cartoons, played online games, drawn digital pictures and watched cricket matches. At first individually, then sharing what they learned, they developed what Mitra, who dreamed u the experiment and has repeated it elsewhere, calls “basic computer literacy.” He believes that making use of the curiosity and learning ability of kids could drastically reduce the cost of crossing the digital divine. In turn, that could help life millions out of misery—and dramatically increase the growth rate and potential of the Indian economy by applying the principle of productivity.

In defense of obsolete formulas and definitions, come economists and statisticians may contribute to quibble. However, only perverse dogma would deny that the free sharing of PC skills was (and still is) productive—that it improves productivity in the everyday operations of the money economy. Of course, education should be more than occupational. However, if increasing the skill base of an economy can, along with other changes, expand both its output and productivity, and we pay teachers to teach those skills, why do we equally value the contribution of the gurus? Assuming the same set of skills is transferred by the teacher and the guru, why is one worth more than the others? Pushed still further, what if the same set of skills is self-taught—as in fact is the way legions of Web-page designers, programmers, video-game developers and others mastered the talents they later marketed. Self-teaching and guru teaching are especially productive when the skills they develop are at the leading edge of new technologies, before formal, paid courses become widely available. If PC beginners had had to wait for schools to buy computers, develop curricula, reorganize schedules, train teachers and raise funds for all this, the entire process by which this technology diffused through business and the economy would have been significantly delayed. What they did, therefore, was truly producive: By voluntarily spreading knowledge and short-circuiting the delay, they greatly sped technological advance in the paid economy. This wave of people-to-people learning changed our relationships to many of the deep fundamentals of wealth. It changed when and how people spend their time. It changed our relationship to space, shifting the locations where work is done. It changed the nature of shared knowledge in the society.

Prosumers are not merely productive. They are producive. And they are driving the growth of the revolutionary wealth system of tomorrow. However, watching television, while it can be entertaining, it is not really productive. Images carried within human beings have a definite evolutionary and biological role. Like light, of which they are constructed, images are concrete. Images are the things. We see something in the World, a river, and this river image enters our bodies through our eyes, becoming ingrained in our brain cells. The proof that the river is ingrained is that we can remember it. The image held in our mind produces physiological as well as psychological reactions. We slowly evolve into the image we carry, we become what we see, in this case, more riverlike. Today we are still recovering from the work of such men as behavioral psychologist John Watson. He achieved prominence early in this century by pioneering and popularizing the notion that if you could not test a phenomenon and measure it, then it did not exist. Psychology, in those days, was eager to gain the admiration of the more respectable sciences and thus confined itself to measuring whatever could be quantified, duplicated and predicted. In the U.S., psychology became so overwhelmingly behaviorist-oriented, that virtually no works were published on mental imagery for fifty years. Even today there are school of psychological thought which hold that imagery itself is fictional. In a way this point of view represents the ultimate denial of human experience. All humans carry images in their heads, yet some scientists can say these images have no power or do not exist. In turn, this denial of human imagery laid the groundwork for the common notion, held even today, that surrogate images, implanted from television, have little or no effect.

Many earlier cultures recognized the enormous power of images that are held in the mind. Images we carry have something important to do with who we individually become. Thoughts have characteristics similar to the physical World. Thoughts have vibrational levels and energy levels which bring about changes in the physical Universe. From a Hermetic point of view, the person who holds a sacred image in one’s mind experiences the effects produced by the specific energy of that image. Similar notions were expressed among the Sumerians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians, dating as far back as 4000 B.C. Included among these notions were that there are concrete powers inherent in color and form. If a thing was shaped a certain way, its image was ingested in that form and was retained in the body as a system of energies. (A merger with modern photobiology is coming up.) Sculptures were thought of essentially as energy organizers. The very sight of them was believed to create states of mind and systems of beliefs. Specific sculptural forms were chosen for the benefit that would accrue from seeing them, or ingesting their image. This would explain the wide variety of what we have since called “gods” or “goddesses” in the form of animals, supernatural creatures, Heavenly bodies. These offered a way of integrating nature into oneself, similar to what Indians did by imitating animals. The sculptures encouraged knowledge of natural processes. Now we say that these images were worshipped. This is probably wrong. They were not worshipped any more than the Eskimo today worships the sculpture of the walrus-ness, and so does the viewer. The Hebrews, emerging between 3000 to 2000 B.C., won an important political victory by denouncing what they called the “worship of graven images.”

By destroying the power of the sculptures of the Sumerians and others who preceded them, they effectively destroyed nature-based religion and the veracity of images. This made possible the substitution of an abstract, single, male, human all-powerful God. Because it was a sin to create any sculpture of it, it maintained its abstract nature. Although they absorbed God, the Christians somewhat overcame this problem. They created images of Jesus, a step backward (or forward) toward paganism. Many Western religions, and all non-Western religions, were unaffected by the Judeo-Christian slaughter of diverse, nature-based imagery. They continued to inform their universal understanding through image representing virtually every natural form and tendency. This continues to apply to the great majority of people in the World today. It even applies, of course, to those Hebrews who followed the teachings of the Cabbala, which represented a kind of underground among Hebrews for centuries. Today’s yogic disciples are rooted in the belief that focusing one’s mind upon objects, either outside the body or inside it, affects one’s entire physical nature. Samadhi, a much-sought yogic state, is the union that one experiences with an object or image that one looks upon—the form of an egg, or a mandala, for example. Union in this case means that the image itself is a concrete energy which travels between the object and the brain of the viewer. The image becomes a kind of solder that merges the three previously separated entities: sculpture (or form), person, image. Unlike solder the image—made up of a thing we call light—can enter all the way into the cells. When you or I look at a sculpture or painting or, for that matter, an igloo or high-rise building, the image enters us in the form of light rays. This is concrete, not metaphoric.

 The form of the sculpture, artwork or structure determines the quality of the experience, what you can learn from it, what feelings you derive from it, and what image you retain inside your body/mind/cells. The image becomes part of your image vocabulary. It remains in your mind. That is, it remains in the cells of your brain. It has physical character. The astonishing Renaissance sculpture of Michelangelo’s David was created between 1501 and 1504. It is a 14-foot marble statue depicting the Biblical hero, David. Michelangelo was only 26 years old when he made the masterpiece. This sculpture of David was created to instill in the person who views it the attitude of the David figure, representing standing nude. It is a revolutionary interpretation of the account between David and Goliath as told in Book 1 Samuel, when the much smaller David takes down the giant Goliath who had been terrorizing their village. David was depicted nude because it represents the purity of his ability to use natural resources to overcome a powerful source. Showing that size does now matter more than ability and determination. This is David’s information content—shape, color, weight, height, attitude, relation to gravity. The person who contemplates the sculpture of David for long hours becomes more like the David figure. It is just a question of time. No thought is necessary. The image does in and does its thing. The person who observes the David literally ingests this image, slowly absorbing it, remembering it, becoming it; adopting its character. The person who observes his muscular body, symmetrical face, and luxurious curly hair consumes this image; its shape has power. The person who devours the “perfect” body, face, hair, and height of the man, becomes perfection. No other artwork is equal to it in any respect, with such proportion, beauty and excellence. The viewing of a perfect being produces perfect beings. The viewing of Christ on the cross instills the experience. The view of birds in flight creates bird-flight in the mind of the viewer.

Much like viewing fictional comic book character The Flash means absorbing his character and his way of being. As one reviews non-Western cultures and their religious expressions, certain forms keep from repeating themselves. They are said to represent universal energy formations. I have already mentioned the egg and the mandala. Consider the Winchester Mystery House, for example. You find Victorian elegance, beauty and life reproduced in thousands of ways. It is claimed that the image of the most expensive window in the house enters the mind and body of the viewer. The spellbinding work of art brilliantly illuminates the space, it is one of the most beloved features in the architecture of the mansion. With its different chromatic tones, it is a thing of great beauty, prominence, exclusivity and power. If the owner permits, the design of this window, its centeredness, and perfection instill themselves in the observer. The window is the blessing of a wedding, being bestowed on Earth by God, indicating that marriage is sacred and enchanting. This window was the heart of many meditation practices for Mrs. Winchester, which employed imagery. Modern physics is now finding that the mansions form is quite literally a reproduction of an essential organizing shape in the Universe. The nucleus being the most expensive window in the mansion with stars feeling outward from the center forms a mandala. The contemplation of the mandala form—whether via Tibetan thankas, Hebrew Stars of David, Indian sand paintings, Tantric visualizations, Hopi sun images—exists in virtually every culture of the World. Is it an accident? Or is everyone onto something? By now, the power of images seems transparent and obvious to me. I am furious at the unconscious years I spent considering such beliefs as I heard of them, as bizarre, weird, unscientific, or superstitious.

Now sensitized largely though my own research and what I have discovered of other people’s, as I walk around I literally feel assaulted by the images that are offered by the artificial World we live in whether they are buildings or signs or fire hydrants or television. I was talking about this to a young woman friend who told me about a time when, nearing a nervous collapse, she was confined to a mental institution. “It was the most awful experience of my life,” she told me. “I was placed in an empty room with padded walls and a steel door. I have felt troubled and confused until that point, but right then and there I really cracked. I went nuts. Seeing that, the doctors fed me with drug after drug. I could not keep track of what they were giving me. I went from one wild state into another, just trying to get on top of the drugs. I begged them not to drug me. I tried to escape. It seemed that they were trying to drive me insane. I felt like I’d been put into a sensory-deprivation chamber, locked up without anything to touch or smell or fell. The thing that got me out of there was this one woman, a nurse, sixty years old or so. She would come visit me, ostensibly to check me, but what she would do is get me to visualize beaches, the moon, nature. She would describe sunsets in a really intimate detail. I would get all the way into these descriptions and though it sort of tore me up to be locked in this steel room, drugged, often bound up, she was able to take me out of that space and bring visions into my mind. It re-created old feelings in me. My heart felt like bursting at the sight of these imagined sunsets, but most of all these visions created a calm that allowed me to beat those drugs. I learned how to let them by, and then I figured out that what those doctors wanted was for me to submit, so I faked submission. I stopped fighting and struggling and they let me out. It was the images of the sunsets, and the calm they created in me, which were my secret weapon. By holding those images, I could hold into by sanity.”

Can you remember your childhood well enough to recall that you have certain favorite objects? Lately, in watching my own children, seeing that there are certain objects they seem to love for reasons which are totally beyond my ken, I have begun to remember similar objects from my own life. There was a particular stone, for example, very dark in color with a few yellowing lines running through it. I kept it under my pillow, and when I was alone, I would look at it for amazingly long periods of time. I would caress it. Even now as I put it into writing, a flood of feeling invades me. I realize now that I had a physical relationship with that stone; I literally loved it. I loved its shape, its color, the way it felt. It also stimulated me, and does even now as I remember it. It made me think. And yet this is nonsensical. There was also a small furry ball, and a kind of silly drawing of a bear on the wall. I do not remember where it came from, but even now I can picture it in my mind. I remember it had voluptuous shapes, a round head, a large ovalish body. There was something profoundly comforting in that image. How could this be so? Culture is almost identical to people or nations, as in French culture, German culture, Iranian culture, etcetera. Furthermore, culture refers to art, music, literature, educational television, certain kinds of movies—in short, everything that is uplifting and edifying, as opposed to commerce. The link is that culture is what makes possible, on a high level, the rich social life that constitutes a people, their customs, styles, tastes, festivals, rituals, gods—all that binds individuals into a group with roots, a community in which they think and will generally, with the people a moral unity, and the individual united within oneself. A culture is a work of art, of which the fine arts are the sublime expression.

From this point of view, liberal democracies look like disorderly markets to which individuals bring their produce in the morning and from which they return in the evening to enjoy privately what they have purchased with the proceeds of their sales. In culture, on the other hand, the individuals are formed by the collectivity as are the members of the chorus of a Greek drama. A Charles de Gaulle or, for that matter, an Alexander Solzhenitsyn sees the United States of America as a mere aggregate of individuals, a dumping ground for the refuse from other places, devoted to consuming; in short, no culture. Culture as art is the peak expression of a man’s creativity, his capacity to break out of nature’s narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of humans in modern natural and political science. Culture founds the dignity of humanity. Culture as a form of community is the fabric of relations in which the self, but also its product. It is profounder than the modern state, which deals only with humans’ bodily needs and tends to degenerate into mere economy. Such a state is not a forum in which humans can act without deforming oneself. This is why in the better circles it always seems in poor taste to speak of love of country, while devotion to Western, or even American, culture is perfectly respectable. Culture restores “the unity in art and life” of the ancient polis. The only element of the polis absent from culture is politics. For the ancients the soul od the city was the regime, the arrangements of and participation in offices, deliberation about the just and the common good, choices about war and peace, the making of laws. Rational choice on the part of citizens who were statesmen was understood to be the center of communal life and the cause of everything else.

The polis was defined by its regime. Nothing of the kind is to be found in culture, and just what defines a culture is extremely difficult to discern. Today we are interested in Greek culture, not Athenian politics. Thucydides’ version of Pericles’ Funeral Oration is taken to be an archetypal expression of that culture, a splendid evocation—in the context of a religious ceremony—of Athenian love of beauty and wisdom. This interpretation makes some sense; but it is nonetheless a misreading; it is supposed to enrich us but it only confirms us in our prejudices, typical of our utter dependence on German interpretations of Greek things. Actually Pericles says nothing about the gods, or the poetry, history, sculpture or philosophy of which we think. He praises Athens’ regime and finds beauty in its political achievement—its regime, and particularly its tyrannically held empire. The Athenians are the political heroes who surpass those in Homer, and the arts are implicitly understood to be imitations and adornments of that heroism. However, we find what we look for, and do not see any of this. A Pericles thus interpreted would be too superficial for us. Morality messages about chastity undoubtedly have more impact than legal threats, and True Love Waits is the foremost example. BAVAM (Born-Again Virgins of America)!, a society of recovering Worldly people appeals to a different constituency, but it, too, is grounded in a moral imperative: “to help regain the moral fiber America was once built upon, and recognized as, and do it with a sense of humor.” BAVAM! Was founded by twenty-five-year-old West Coast American landscape gardener Laura Kate Van Hollebeke, who was very shaky with importuning men. To address this weakness, she took a vow of abstinence. The goal was to challenge people to reassert power over their body, to gain self-respect; to really exhibit respect for others, for love, for commitments. As a result, the nonprofit organization BAVAM! has become really popular.

BAVAM! is an attitude and a behavior of one who wants to start over and does just that—starts over. In psychological and religious circles, it is known as secondary virginity. There is a pledge, and a “Certified Born-Again Virgin” membership and “Certificate of Virginity,” both excellent props to ward off pleasures of the flesh. This is an organization of like-minded young adults who have fixed on celibacy in reaction to unpleasant, unsettling, and unhealthy experiences with pleasures of the flesh. Children should not be having pleasures of the flesh, nor should they be groomed or sexualized. Information is essential in guiding or shaping the target audience’s future conduct. Chastity is a state physically free from need of passion and emotionally secure from disturbance of fantasy. The battle is usually hard and long, but the Quester has no other option than to fight for self-mastery here as in other passional spheres. Are there not dwellers in monasteries tempted, tormented, wrestling with phantoms created by their lusts? Pleasures of the flesh are only a crude, groping, and primitive way. The experience it yields is but a faint distorted echo of love. The confusion of the original sound with its echo leads to delusion about both. Pleasures of the flesh has the desire to possess its beloved, even to enslave him or her. Love is willing to let one stay free. This is not an argument against marriage, for both pleasures of the flesh and love can be found inside as well as outside marriage. It is an attempt to clear confusion and remove delusion. While the sexual revolution may be good for some, unlimited freedom will destroy the possibility of higher attainment. There are physical, mental, and emotional disciplines to bring it under control. However, to defeat it, the constant looking away, with joy, at the divine beauty, and frequent surrender to the divine stillness must complete them.

One must find a solution for pleasures of the flesh. Along with physical regimes, one must have cold reasoning, austere disciplining, trained imagining, deep meditating, and devotional aspiring—a solution which must free one from the common state of either unsatisfied or over-satisfied desires. Only by probing to the very root of this love and these desires, can one hope to bring them into accord with the philosophic ideal. If it arises from time to time, when the disciple has reached a certain stage, one will become clearly aware that the feeling of lust for pleasures of the flesh is at times something out of one’s own past, not out of one’s present state, or an inheritance from parental tendencies embedded in the body’s nervous structure, or at other times something unconsciously transferred to one by another person. One will perceive vividly that what is happening is an invasion by an alien force—so alien that it will actually seem to be at some measurable distance from one, moving farther off as it weakens or coming closer as it strengthens. Therefore one will realize that the choice of accepting it as one’s own or rejecting it as not one’s own, is presented to one. By refusing to identify oneself with it, one quickly robs it of its power over one. Declare and repeat, “This is not I. This is not mine.” Even if one feels no personal inclination to take the vow of chastity or see no theoretical necessity to do so, one ought to respect that state. The faded and fleeting glimpse of the love that gratification of lust fulfils is merely a tool to torment one by its brevity and tantalizes one with its limited, faulty character. Only higher impersonal love is eternal, unlimited, and supremely satisfying: it is indeed perfect love. A truly philosophic attitude is neither ascetic nor hedonistic. It takes what is worthy from both—not by arithmetical computation to arrive at equal balance but by wise insight to arrive at harmonious living. It respects the creative vitality of humans as something to be brough under control, and thereafter used conservatively or consciously sublimated. In this way the extreme points of view associated with fanaticism are rejected.

The ridiculous results of such fanaticism can be heard in the nonsense talked equally by those who measure a humans’ spirituality by one’s monastic celibacy as well as by those who consider all celibacy unnecessary. In our description of humans, it is not enough to mention one’s intellectual feelings, one’s intuition and will; we must not leave out one’s instincts and impulses. The human who prefers the freedom but loneliness of celibacy to the companionship but chains of matrimony is entitled to do so. One who can keep one chastity in thought and feeling not less than in conduct has reached a worthwhile achievement. One need not be ashamed of it nor hesitate to preserve it because of contrary counsel. It will do one no harm but can provide one with the power to sustain one’s highest endeavours. Not many can do this, it is true, and those whose physical continence is continually sapped by mental and emotional unchastity, might to better to follow Saint Paul’s advice and marry rather than burn. There is something terrifying in the mesmeric spell cast by pleasures of the flesh, this cast universal power which lets the individual keep an illusion of personal initiative when all the time one is merely obeying its blind will. The disillusionments about pleasures of the flesh as it reveals the pain behind its pleasure, the ugliness behind its beauty, and the degradation behind its refinements mean nothing to the ordinary mind but must create a retreat from its urges in the superior mind. All indulgence of this instinct for pleasures of the flesh, beyond that needed for the deliberate procreation of wanted children, is really overindulgence. Every such expenditure of vital energy, which is the concentrated essence of physical life, is a wasting one. The necessity of satisfying lust of pleasures of the flesh—so prevalent in the ordinary human—disappears in the liberated person.

If being and becoming, the World’s inner reality and its outer appearance, are indeed one in the final ultimate view, then how can we cast out some functions of Nature as evil and yet retain others as good? If both are judged not by activity of pleasures of the flesh or inactivity, why should the passionless celibate be put on the highest grade of spirituality and the married human denied any entry? One simplistic approach was Maryland’s billboard Campaign for Our Children, which featured slogans such as “Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder,” and “You can go further when you do not go all the way.” The goal of this sustained media blitz was “to extend the period of abstinence” to older teenagers into adulthood. Various sex-education programs are more sophisticated, though not necessarily more effective. Many rely simply on grindingly accurate information about the physiology but not the tumultuous emotions surrounding pleasures of the flesh. The hope is that the enlightened student, understanding the mechanics of one’s body, will then make appropriate decisions about one’s personal path. Britney Spears even made a song about it called The Touch of My Hand. The group Postponing Sexual Involvement (PSI) is an American community-based program that invites girls to meet in small groups. They target vulnerable teenagers and invite frank discussions of their problems, temptations, and the pressures of their peers to exert on them to experience life’s sexual dimension. The goal is to postpone sexual activity, not disrupt marriages. 84 percent of the girls wanted to know how to say no to someone pressuring them for sex-and to say no without hurting their feelings. PSI uses celibate teens first to communicate its message that abstinence can be cool and then, through role-playing, to suggest realistic ways to deal with social situations that too often lead to coerced sexual relations. Over against the realm of nothing there is God. The “wicked” have in the end a direct experience of their non-being, the “pure in heart” have in the end a direct experience of the Being of God. One does not aspire to enter Heaven after death, for God’s home is not in Heaven, so that Heaven is empty. However, one knows that in death one will cherish no desire to remain on Earth, for now one will soon by wholly with God.

Cresleigh Homes

Residence Three is the largest of the single story homes offered in Cresleigh Havenwood. At 2,827 square feet you’ll be hard pressed to a contemporary floorplan that offers this much space. There are four bedrooms, two and one half bathrooms, and a three car garage.

If desired, utilize the den as your own private study or convert into an optional fifth bedroom. The Dining Room and Kitchen are well situated to make entertaining a breeze. The location of the Owner’s Suite makes it feel like a separate wing from the rest of the home allowing for maximum privacy and retreat.

Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier.

Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Home Mini!

#CresleighHomes

When Rosalyn Bettiford, a forty-seven-year-old editor, arrived at her weekend house in Washington, Connecticut—a two-hour drive from Manhattan—the July night had turned chilly. Her teenage son was asleep in his bedroom. The living room was dark. As her eyes adjusted, she noticed that one of the big sliding-glass windows was wide open. She reached for its handle and—as the heavy window suddenly slipped out of its track—she plunged, screaming, glass and all, to a flagstone terrace twelve feet below. In that fall, Rosalyn (her name has been changed here for privacy reasons, but the story is true) fractured her skull, cracked a number of vertebrae, broke an arm and smashed all her toes. Her terrified son found her moaning and semi-conscious, with colorless fluid seeping out of her ears. The young men who arrived only minutes later quickly splinted her arm and drove her madly over country roads to the nearest hospital. They saved her life and vanished quietly into the night when doctors came to her side. The next day they turned up at her bedside in the hospital to see how she was doing. They were volunteers at the local firehouse. Rosalyn and her family did not need the horrors of 9/11 to remind them of the range of emergency services volunteer firefighters provide—and not just in the United States of America. Japan in 2022, there are approximately 900,000 men as members of shobodan—local volunteer firefighter associations. Similar groups exist in Austria, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, South Africa and other countries. Their member risk—and all too often lose—their lives. In economic terms, volunteers are prosumers, delivering valuable services without remuneration for their time, skills and risks. The scale of volunteer work in the United States of America is huge with something like 84 million people devoting at least a few hours a week to unpaid volunteer work, contributing an estimated 8.8 billion hours, valued at $195.0 billion—additional “free lunch” for the visible economy.

In 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated American’s Gulf Coast, destroying hundreds of thousands of homes and jobs, and led to an almost total breakdown of government emergency assistance efforts. By contrast, volunteers all over the South opened their homes and offered food, medical care and other necessities to the stricken population. In Japan, domestic energy services were seriously underdeveloped until the Great 2011 Tohoku Earthquake with a magnitude 9.0-9.01 struck in the Pacific Ocean, 72 km east of the Oshika Peninsula of the Tohoku region, and lasted six minutes causing a tsunami. This disaster destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and jobs, killed 15,899 people, and cost $360 billion USD. That catastrophe galvanized the nation, and 960,000 volunteers rushed to help with construction, medical care, food and water supplied and counseling services. What was the monetary equivalent of their services to the Japanese economy? Was any of it counted as part of Japan’s GDP? More important, what was its human value? In South Korea, an estimated 6.5 million residents serve as volunteers. They provide relief after typhoon flooding. They help build homes for Habitat for Humanity. They teach refugees from North Korea how to adapt to life in the south. In Italy, volunteers help care for cancer patients and work in hospices. And when unprecedented floods struck Germany in 2002, tend of thousands of volunteers traveled cross-country to battle the rising waters. All these activities are part of the hidden half-the largely off-the-books part—of each country’s wealth system. If their full value were properly calculated, it would change many of the decisions now made by business leaders and politicians.

When economies were local and decentralized, prosuming, too, remained a strictly local phenomenon. With the rise of national markets and the nation-state, helping hands reached beyond the village or neighborhood. Recently, as economies have globalized or re-globalized, many volunteer organizations have gone global as well—expanding their definition of community to embrace the entire human race, and extending their operations accordingly in every field. Examples of international volunteering abound. In 1989, after the San Francisco earthquake, the Japan Emergency Team flew student volunteers across the Pacific to help the victims. When thousands of horses were left to starve in Zimbabwe in 2002 as farmers were ordered off the land, volunteers from as far away as Scotland, Switzerland and South Africa rushed in to rescue the emaciated animals. On a far larger scale, the Red Cross and Red Crescent operate Worldwide. They claim 105 million volunteers in 178 counties and, like other global non-governmental organizations (NGOs), send doctors, nurses, teachers, agronomists and other specialists all over the planet to perform professional services. Almost invariably, these volunteers are assisted by local “amateurs” who pitch in during crises or emergencies. Nothing compared with the outpouring of volunteer assistance after the great tsunami of December 2004. If it ever did, government and organizations publicly pledged huge amounts of emergency assistance money, much of which took a long time to materialize. By contrast, volunteers quickly came from everywhere. The government of Australia closed down an overloaded hotline for volunteers after ten thousand calls “exceeded all expectations.” Aid organizations around the World found themselves so flooded with volunteers they had to turn them away. Amateur radio operators, pilots, nurses, teachers, construction workers, and truck drivers freely applied their skill to the common good.

Here we saw invisible wealth, over and above monetary contributions, being transferred from one country to another, from one end of the Earth to another. The domain now supervised by psychiatrists, as well as other specialists in the deeper understanding of man, is the self. It is another one of the discoveries made in the state of nature, perhaps the most important because it reveals what we really are. We are selves, and everything we do is to satisfy or fulfill ourselves. If not the earliest, Locke was one of the early thinkers, to use the word in its modern sense. From the very beginning it has been difficult to define; and so Woody Allen helped teach us, it has become ever more difficult to do so. We are suffering from a three-hundred-year-long identity crisis. We go back and back, ever farther, hunting the self as it retreats int the forest, just a step ahead of us. Although disquieting, this may, from the point of view of its latest interpretation, be the essence of the self: mysterious, ineffable, indefinable, unlimited, creative, known only by its deeds; in short, like God, of whom it is the impious mirror image. Above all, it is individual, unique; it is me, not some distant man in general or man-in-himself. As Ivan Llyich in Tolstoy’s story explains, “All men are mortal,” in the famous syllogism that guarantees Socrates’ death cannot apply to this Ivan Llyich who had a striped leather ball when he was a child. Everyone knows that the particular as particular escapes the grasp of reason, the form of which is the general or the universal. To sum up, the self is the modern substitute for the soul. All of this goes back to that audacious innovator Machiavelli, who spoke admiringly of men who cared more for their fatherland than for the salvation of their souls. The higher demand made on humans by the soul inevitable lead them to neglect this World in favor of the other World.

Millennia of philosophizing about the soul had resulted in no certitude about it, while those who pretended to know it, the priests, held power or influenced it, and corrupted politics as a result. Princes were rendered ineffective by their own or their subjects’ opinions about the salvation of their souls, while men slaughtered each other wholesale because of differences of such opinion.  The care of the soul crippled men in the conduct of their lives. Machiavelli dared men literally to forget about their souls and the possibility of eternal damnation, to do so in theory as well as in practice, as did those men whom he praised. Hobbes, among others, took him up on the dare with a very new interpretation of the old Delphic inscription “Know thyself!,” which Socrates had interpreted as an exhortation to philosophize, and Dr. Freud was to interpret as an invitation to psychoanalysis. Dr. Freud was unknowingly following in the line of Hobbes, who said that each man should look to what he feels—feels, not thinks; he, not another. Self is more feeling than reason, and is in the first place defined as the contrary of the other. “Be yourself.” Astonishingly, Hobbes is the first propagandist for bohemia and preacher of sincerity or authenticity. No wanderings to the ends of the Universe on the wings of imagination, no metaphysical foundations, no soul ordering things as well as men. Man is perhaps a stranger in nature. However, he is something and can get his bearings by his most powerful passions. “Feel!,” Hobbes said. In particular you should imagine how you feel when another man holds a gun to your temple and threatens to shoot you. That concentrates all of the self in a single point, tells us what counts. At that moment one is a real self, not a false consciousness, not alienated by opinions of the church, the state or the public. This experience helps much more to “set priorities” than does any knowledge of the soul or any of its alleged emanations such as conscience.

Throughout the whole tradition, religious and philosophic, man had two concerns, the care of his body and the care of his soul, expressed in the opposition between desire and virtue. In principle he was supposed to long to be all virtue, to break free from the chains of bodily desire. Wholeness would be happiness; but it is not possible, at least in this life. Machiavelli turned things upside down. Happiness is indeed wholeness, so let us try the wholeness available to us in this life. The tradition viewed man as the incomprehensible and self-contradictory union of two substances, body and soul. Man cannot be conceived as body only. However, if the function of whatever is not body in him is to cooperate in the satisfaction of bodily desire, then man’s dividedness is overcome. Simple virtue is not possible, and love of virtue is only an imagination, a kind of perversion of desire effected by society’s (id est, others’) demands on us. However, simple desire is possible. This absoluteness of desire uninhibited by thoughts of virtue is what is found in the state of nature. It represents the turn in philosophy away from trying to tame or perfect desire by virtue, and toward finding out what one’s desire is and living according to it. This is largely accomplished by criticizing virtue, which covers and corrupts desire. Our desire becomes a kind of oracle we consult; it is now the last word, while in the past it was the questionable and dangerous part of us. This unity of man in desire is fraught with theoretical difficulties, but it is, as we would say, existentially persuasive because, unlike the incomprehensible and self-contradictory union of body and soul, it is affirmed by powerful experiences, such as fear of violent death, that do not require abstract reasonings or exhortations.

Kathleen Norris, the Protestant author of The Cloister Walk, was so drawn to monastic life that she became a Benedictine oblate attached to St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota. This involved pledging to abide by the Rule of St. Benedict insofar as her personal situation permitted. Because Norris is married, she observes her vows by frequent visits to the monastery, by assiduous and contemplative reading of the Scriptures, and by learning from the wisdom of St. John’s religious residents. The Benedictine nuns’ reflections on celibacy are so grounded in love that Norris titles one chapter in The Cloister Walk “Learning to Love: Benedictine Women on Celibacy and Relationship.” Older sisters recall the days when they were taught to avoid thoughts of pleasures of the flesh and, of course, actual pleasures of the flesh itself. Surprisingly, several sisters confided that falling in love is an essential element of celibacy. One nun told Norris that she first realized what celibacy really meant when she fell in love with a priest. A prioress elaborated publicly on this theme: “The worst sin against celibacy is to pretend to not have any affections at all. To fall in love is celibacy at work. Celibacy is not a vow to repress our feelings. It is a vow to put all our feelings, acceptable or not, close to our hearts and bring them into consciousness through prayer.” Another nun explained to Norris that when a nun falls in love—a common occurrence—she can use the occasion to shed her romantic images and develop her understanding of what being a nun is really about. The Benedictines also realize that nuns and monks define celibacy differently. The men think of it as abstaining from pleasures of the flesh, the women more as living together in a community and as a way to manage affective relationships. Celibate monks believe their celibacy conserves vital energy, which they divert into church service or expend in consuming food and alcohol, playing sports, and working.

Nuns, on the other hand, deal with their celibacy more directly, thinking, talking, and praying about it. Above all, they must accept it as a personal commitment. “It is a daily choice to live as a celibate,” one nun concluded. Norris extrapolates from nunly meditations on celibacy, particularly its roots in religion and love, to her own state of matrimony and its vow of fidelity. Like Benedictine celibacy, marriage begins as a sacred lifetime commitment that requires self-transcendence. Both celibacy and matrimony “are a discipline. Both can be a form of asceticism,” Norris quotes one nun approvingly. She worries, however, that today’s culture promotes an incompatible view of true love, equating it with possessing and being possessed, whereas the nature of the celibacy she celebrates is precisely the opposite because it “seeks to love non-exclusively, non-possessively.” Indeed, mature Benedictine celibates often speak about their freedom “to love many people without being unfaithful to any of them.” Simply put, their deepest wish is that celibacy will give them “an undivided heart.” It is not that pleasures of the flesh in itself is a sin, but that self-respect demands it should be an expression of something finer than mere barter. It is more satisfactory in the end to establish yourself materially through determination and courage than to yield to temptation. Another point is that promiscuous pleasures of the flesh not infrequently leads to disagreeable entanglements of the universal law which has to be disentangled at the price of suffering. That is one of the several reasons why marriage has been laid down as the normal path for humanity. From a certain time onwards, greater asceticism may be necessary. Dietary changes, with which the individual may experiment, are one step in the right direction.

One should strive to improve one’s whole general condition. All matters involving self-restraint where diet, drinking, smoking, and so on, are concerned should be watched and inner promptings carefully followed. It is also advisable to have regular periods of complete chastity—partly to exercise and develop the will and partly to prepare oneself for the practice of higher meditation. Although a philosophic discipline rejects permanent and exaggerated forms of asceticism, it both accepts and uses occasional and intelligent ones. It remains merely an animal act, an expression of the body’s lust, an nothing more. The reasons are obvious and have prompted many spiritual aspirants, both Asiatic and Christian, to become celibates and monks. These reasons may not be so obvious to those who are obsessed by pleasures of the flesh, as so many modern writers have been who have influenced the younger generations, who are stupefied by the sense-pleasure of it, who are slaves to its recurring habit-forming urges and understanding nothing of the need for its discipline. The philosophers have long known that there is a higher view of pleasures of the flesh, and some among them know that there is even a higher practice of it which eliminates the spiritual obstacle and raises it to the level of spiritual co-operation. This is brought about by substituting stillness for passion. Such a change cannot be achieved without the practice of physical, nervous, emotional, and mental self-control. Just as the high point of meditation provides its glorious result under the condition of a thought-free stillness, in the same way raising pleasures of the flesh to his immeasurably higher octave requires the condition of an inward and outward immobilization. That this can be reached, that the coupling of the two genders could possibly have any relationship with the higher development of man, may seem incredible to those who know only its true purpose.

That inferior tantric sects have eagerly used the teaching to make their desires for pleasures of the flesh appear as holy aspirations is quite true. This is part of the danger in such methods and why they are held in ill repute by many Christian authorities. Pleasures of the flesh must be controlled. It may be conquered, but its strength differs at different stages of the fighter’s life. Chastity is a mind that is completely free from all image making, all the pictures, sensations, which thought has built in its search for pleasure through intimate passions. Then you will find an abundance of energy. Man and woman, having the power between them to create another human being, may use this power either in submission to animal urges or in consonance with their highest ideals. In the former case, only physical or social penalties will keep them from being unrestrainedly self-indulgent. In the latter case, only the serious decision by both parties to provide a bodily vehicle for a higher type of reincarnating ego will bring them together in the procreative act. Children will then owe their birth to the serious act and deliberate purpose of two calm, mature persons, not to the chance union and ungoverned passion of two drifting ones. A substance so valuable that it can create another human being, must be used in accordance with its value, not squandered in unthinking indulgence. History gives enough evidence to show that too many stern attempts to impose celibate ways of living unloosed some of the lusts and monsters they seek to bind. They could not be enforced on the unready. Yet, humans still need to be taught how they can be lifted up to the Heavens. They can be brought to dismiss their ancient enmity towards spiritual aspiration, to unite and work together for humans’ redemption, their enlightenment, and their salvation.

When he tried to eradicate all desires for pleasures of the flesh, Tolstoy took long cross-county walks and bicycle rides in the early period. Those who have no desire to go to the extreme length to which his highly ascetic turn took him, may nevertheless find cycling a helpful and healthy exercise. When this process of balancing the two forces comes to an end, the male-female consciousness of the real human being will be established at last. The person who is pure of heart, experiences that God is good to one. One does not experience it as a consequence of the purification of one’s heart, but because only as one who is pure in heart is one able to come to the sanctuaries. This does not mean the Temple precincts in America, but the sphere of God’s holiness, they holy mysteries of God. Only to one who draw near to these is the true meaning of the conflict revealed. However, the true meaning of the conflict, is the wicked, for the pure in heart is not only too easily misled into thinking—that the present state of affairs is replaced by a future state of affairs of a quite different kind, in which in the end things go well with the good and badly with the bad; in the language of modern though the meaning is that the bad do not truly exist, and their end brings about only this change, that they now inescapably experience their non-existence, the suspicion of which they had again and again succeeded in dispelling. Their life was set in slippery places; it was so arranged as to slide into the knowledge of their own nothingness; and when this finally happens, in a moment, the great terror fall upon them and they are consumed with terror. Their life has been a shadow structure in a dream of God’s. God awakes, shakes off the dream, and disdainfully watches the dissolving shadow image.

Speaking of images, there has been so little research on the neurophysiology of television viewing. However, TV viewing is known to affect children’s verbal abilities and other physical, cognitive, and emotional development in psychological studies. However, the brain structural development associated with TV viewing has never been investigated. Here we examined cross-sectional correlations between the duration of TV viewing and regional gray/white matter volume (rGMV/rWMV) among 133 boys and 143 girls as well as correlations between the duration of TV viewing and longitudinal changes that occurred a few years later among 111 boys and 105 girls. After correcting for confounding factors, we found positive effects of TV viewing or rGMV of the frontoplar and medial prefrontal areas in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, positive effects of TV view on rGMV/rWHV of areas of the visual cortex in cross-sectional analyses, and positive effects of TV viewing on rGMV of the hypothalamus/septum and sensorimotor areas in the longitudinal analyses. These anatomical correlates may be linked to previously known effects on TV viewing on verbal competence, aggression, and physical activity. In particular, the present results showed effects of TV viewing on the frontopolar area of the brain, which has been associated with intellectual abilities. Nonetheless, when we watch television, our usual processes of thinking and discernment are semifunctional at best. While television appears to have the potential to provide useful information to viewers—and is celebrated for its educational function—the technology of television and the inherent nature of the viewing experience actually inhibit learning as we usually think of it. Very little cognitive, recallable, analyzable, thought-based learnings takes place while watching TV.

TV viewing can lead to reduced amounts of cranial gray matter—home to the neurons that perform the bulk of our mental processing. Individuals who watched, on average, about an hour and a half more daily television than their peers throughout mid-to-late adulthood saw their brain volume reduced by approximately .5 percent. That percentage may seem small, but prevailing scientific thought indicates that preserving our brain integrity can prolong the time until we notice age-related cognitive decline. Longitudinal study data points to a correlation between excessive TV viewing and poorer performance on cognitive tests. The evidence is that television not only destroys the capacity of the viewer to attend, it also, by taking over complex of direct and indirect neural pathways, decreases vigilance—the general state of arousal which prepares the organism for action should its attention be drawn to specific stimulus. The individual therefore may be looking at the unexpected or interesting but cannot act upon it in such a way as to complete the purposeful processing gestalt. The continuous trance-like fixation of the TV viewer is then not attention but distraction—a form akin to daydreaming or time out. Since television information is taking place where the viewer is not, it cannot be acted upon. The viewer must deliberately inhibit the neural pathways between visual data and the autonomic nervous system, which stimulate movement and mental attention. To do otherwise than inhibit the process would be ridiculous. The viewer is left in a passive but also frustrated state. The nature of the processes carried out in the left cortex and particularly area thirty-nine [the common integrative area] are those unique to human as opposed to other mammalian life. It is the center of logic, logical human communication an analysis, integration of sensory components and memory, the basis of humans’ conscious, purposeful, and time free abilities and actions. It is the critical function of humans that makes one distinctively human.

The evidence shows that human beings “habituate” to repetitive light-stimuli (flickering light, dot patterns, limited eye movement). If habituation occurs, then the brain has essentially decided that there is nothing of interest going on—at least nothing that anything can be done about—and virtually quits processing the information that goes in. In particular, the left-brains common integrative area goes into a kind of holding pattern. Viewing is at the conscious level of somnambulism. The right half of the brain, which deals with more subjective cognitive processes—dream images, fantasy, intuition—continues to receive the television images. However, because the bridge between the right and the left brains has been effectively shattered, all cross-processing, the making conscious of the unconscious data and brining it into usability, is eliminated. The information goes in, but it cannot be easily recalled or thought about. Therefore, television information enters unfiltered and whole, directly into the memory banks, but it is not available for conscious analysis, understanding or learning. It is sleep teaching. All of this helps to explain recent findings that children, after watching television, have difficulty recalling what they have just seen. Whatever “knowledge” they gain is the sort that passes through the conscious regions where it would be available for recall and use. Television a sleep teaching would also help explain other observations, from political work, that the more that public issues are confined to television, the less knowledgeable the public seems to be about them. The voter cannot process information, or is apparently receiving. When Carter and Ford made their implicit agreement to avoid content and concentrate on style, they were right on the mark. Brain activity during television viewing, no matter what program it is, human brainwave activity enters a characteristic pattern.

The response is to the medium, rather than to any of its content. Once the set goes on, the brain waves slow down until a preponderance of alpha and delta brain waves become the habitual pattern. The longer the set is on, the slower the brainwave activity. As a universal medium, a supremely versatile extension of our senses, our cognition, and our memory, the networked computer, which is another electronic device that takes up our time and alters the way the brain works, serves as a particularly powerful neural amplifier. Its numbing effects are equally strong. The computer extends the processing capabilities of our central nervous system and in the process also alters it. Electronic media are so effective at altering the nervous system because they both work in similar ways and are basically compatible and easily linked. Thanks to its plasticity, the nervous system can take advantage of this compatibility and merge with the electronic media, making a single, larger system. There is another, even deeper reason why our nervous systems are so quick to “merge” with our computers. Evolution has imbued our brains with a powerful social instinct, which is a set of processes for inferring what those around us are thinking and feeling. Recent neuroimaging studies indicate that three highly active brain regions—one in the prefrontal cortex, one in the parietal cortex, and one at the intersection of the parietal and temporal cortices—are specifically dedicated to the task of understanding the goings-on of other people’s minds. Out innate ability for mind reading has played an important role in the success of our species, allowing us to coordinate large groups of people to achieve goals that individuals could not.

As we have entered the computer age, however, our talent for connecting with other minds has had an unintended consequence. The chronic overactivity of those brain regions implicated in social thought can lead us to perceived minds where no minds exist, even in inanimate objects. There is growing evidence, moreover, that our brains naturally mimic the states of the other minds we interact with, whether those minds are real or imagined. Such neural mirroring helps explain why we are so quick to attribute human characteristics to our computers and computer characteristics to ourselves—why we hear a human voice when a digital assistant speaks. Our willingness, even eagerness, to enter into a single, larger system with our data-processing devices is an outgrowth not only of the characteristics of the digital computer as an informational medium but of the characteristics of our socially adapted brains. While this cybernetic blurring of mind and machine may allow us to carry out certain cognitive tasks far more efficiently, it poses a threat to our integrity as human beings. Even as the larger system into which our minds so readily meld is lending us its powers, it is also imposing on us its limitations. To put a new spin on the idea that we program our computers and thereafter they program us. Even at a practical level, the effects are not always as beneficial as we want them to be. As the many studies of hypertext and multimedia show, our ability to learn can be severely compromised when our brains become overloaded with diverse stimuli online. More information can mean loess knowledge. While the computer may show some benefits in the beginning with software programs that can help solve puzzles, calculate equations, and correct spelling, in the end there are declines in the ability to use these functions when software is not available.

However, people who use their own brains to solve puzzles, calculate equations, dictionaries to check their spelling may start off slower, but build up enough cognitive ability to become more proficient and quicker at dealing with these tasks. Those who use their own brains are better able to plan ahead and plot strategy, while those using the helpful software tend to rely on simple trial and error. Often, in fact, those with the helpful software are shown to become so dependent that they no longer rely on their brain, they may even trust their own intellectual ability less, which decreases their confidence and brain functioning. Eight months after the study, people who use their own brains more frequently, instead of depending on computer software some more confidence and quicker intellectual abilities, they tend to be twice as fast as those who relay on computer software. People who use their own brains consistently demonstrate more focus, more direct and economical solutions, better strategies, and better knowledge. The more that people depend on explicit guidance from software programs, the less engaged they are in the task and the less they end up learning. The findings indicate that as we externalize problem solving and other cognitive chores to our computer, we reduce our brain’s ability to build stable knowledge structures—schemas. The brighter the software, the dimmer the user. That is why old fashion men are always planning for a time when the lights go out. They always want to make sure they know how to drive and park their own cars, to use their own brains to think, write by hand, and make sure they know how to build things and repair stuff without waiting on a machine or another person.

Cresleigh Homes

Three cheers for a morning routine that gets you up, gets you pumped, and gets you ready for the day! 🎉

When you’ve got a bathroom as pretty as ours at our #MillsStation home, you can turn up the tunes and enjoy the morning for all its worth!

Mills Station displays beautiful, spacious floorplans, with alluring architectural detailing and more.

#CresleighHomes