The Curse of Bigness

Approximately sixty six percent of Americans report that high inflation has made their financial situation worse. Families with lower incomes are especially suffering. Another twenty percent of Americans have reported that the rising prices have made their financial health much worse. Housing costs in California have long been higher than the national average. In recent years, these costs have grown substantially—in some cases, growing at historically rapid rates. California’s home prices have far exceeded the rest of the country and the state is about thirty three percent more expensive than a mid-tier home in the rest of the country—a gap that has widened over the last decade. Monthly payments for a newly purchased mid-tier home—including mortgage, taxes, and homeowners’ insurance—have increased dramatically over the last couple of years. Payments for a mid-tier home were over $5,000 a month in March 2024—an eighty percent increase since January of 2020. Payments for a bottom-tier home versus renting are near levels that have not been seen since the housing bubble in the mid-2000s. This rapid increase in monthly costs for homebuyers was driven by higher home prices and increasing mortgage rates. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Costs of buying a home have grown by more than median income. Affordability depends on both the costs of the housing, as well as the income and/or wages of households. Annual household income needed to qualify for a mortgage on a mid-tier California home in March 2024 was about $235,000—over two times the median California household income in 2022 ($85,300). For a bottom-tier home, about $140,000 in annual income is required to qualify for a mortgage—more than 50 percent higher than median household income in 2022. Furthermore, rental prices are unaffordable for a record number of American with half of all renters paying more than thirty percent of their income on rent and utilities. In New York, rent for a 1-bedroom apartment is $4,300 a month; Santa Clara the number is $3,290 per month; and in Sacramento the average 1-bedroom apartment is $2,135 per month. If it were true that the terrible results of the degrading conditions forced upon the dwellers in the slums were transmitted to their children by heredity, and within few generations they become fixed character, the hope for a regenerated society would be much more difficult to realize. If that were the case, these unfortunate creatures would continue to act in the same way for several generations, no matter how their environment had been transformed by the corporate actions of society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The poverty line for a family of four is $62,300. Many of the people who make this amount of money are those with high school diplomas and graduate degrees as well as blue-collar and white-collar workers who live in both rural and urban American. Also, about 4o percent of Americans are unable to plan beyond their next paycheck, while nearly fifty percent of them said they do not have $500 saved for emergencies. Price increases are devasting for lower-income Americans because they tend to spend more their paychecks on necessities and have less money to save. The typical American household needed to pay $227 more a month in March to purchase the same goods and services it did one year ago because of still-high inflation. Americans are paying on average $784 more each month compared with the same time two years ago and $1,069 compared with three years ago. For those on Social Security retirement, cost of living adjustments are not helping them much. Our affair is not with the evolution of life and its adaptation to the natural environment, but with the evolution of man, and the adaptation of life to his purposes. And even the control of life around us matters less than that of our psychological evolution and of social progress. If no Utopia is in the making, at least, some believe there should be a shift away from the free competitive order. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Capitalism is beginning to turn into the welfare capitalism; the frustrations of the middle class and the needs of the poor are accelerating the change. Men sense that a different order is slowly arising. Although they can seldom describe it, they have expressed it variously in their slogans and titles: they speak of the New Nationalism, the Square Deal, the New Nationalism, the Square Deal, the New Freedom, the New Competition, the New Democracy—and, in time, of the New Deal. Previous reform and protest movements have been disjointed and uncoordinated uprisings of workers and farmers; now the middle class is drawn into the fray. The middle-class citizen, as producer and consumer, is beginning to feel the growth of inflation and fears that he will be grounded between large combinations of capital, labour, and Artificial Intelligence. As the standard of living, the figure of the great capitalist entrepreneur, hitherto heroic, lost much of his glamour. He is condemned as an exploiter of labour and an extorter from the consumer, pilloried as an unfair competitor, and exposed as a corrupter of political life. In a society of great collective aggregates, the traditional emphasis upon the exploits of the individual lost much of its appeal. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

 The old problem of defending competition from critics on the left now pales as people are forced to face “the curse of bigness,” the more imminent threat to competition from the offspring of competition itself. Our industry is a fight of every man for himself. The prize we give the fittest is monopoly of the necessary life, and we leave these winners of the powers of life and death wield them over us by the same “self-interest” with which they took them from us. “There is no hope for any of us, but the weakest must go first,” is the golden rule of business. There is no other field of human associations in which any such rule of action is allowed. The man who should apply in his family or in his citizenship this “survival of the fittest” theory as it is practically professed and operated in business would be a monster, and would be speedily made extinct. It is laissez faire as policy that is most completely discredited. While the old, simple apotheosis of competition has faded, few have ceased altogether to believe in it. One of the primary aims, indeed, of the middle-class revolt is to restore so far as possible the pristine conditions of competitive business. However, even if the supposed benefits of competition were to be retained, some form of government regulation is needed to restrain monopoly. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

American industry is not free, as once it was free. The man with only a little capital is finding it harder to get into the field, more and more impossible to compete with the big fellow. Why? Because the laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak. This the small entrepreneur and his sympathizers are trying to change the laws because the middle class is grasping for life and capital and many fear becoming homeless. The little individualist, recognizing his individual impotence, realizing that he does not possess within himself even the basis of a moral judgement against his big brother, begins to change his point of view. He no longer hopes to right all things by his individual efforts. He has turned to the law, to the government, to the state. The right of competition must be limited to preserve it. For instance, the American Automobile industry produces some of the best designed and best performing vehicles in the World, but when Japanese automobiles flooded the markets back in the 1970s and 80s, during the gas crisis, people got hooked on them and have yet to return to their roots. To encourage people to buy American cars, we need to put tariffs on Japanese cars to not kill the American automobile industry. For excesses of competition leads to monopoly, as excesses of liberty lead to absolutism. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The issue therefore is: Regulated competition versus regulated monopoly. In the past, as serious attempts to alter the business structure through legislation increased, there came a flood of laws to relieve the working class. Intellectuals, humanitarians, and social workers threw themselves on the side of labour, and drew support from a middle class which had no desire to see industrial oppression bring collectivism from the left. In increasing numbers, state legislatures adopted laws increasing minimum wage, limiting worker’s compensation, and similar measures of reform. Sympathy for union activity grew stronger among intellectuals. If we are not careful, with the amount of inflation we are experiencing today, Americans could return to child labour, more people may engage in selling pleasures of the flesh and peddling contraband. We could see comfort stations popping up in suburban communities and becoming as popular as liquor stores in the cities. We already have drug shops peddling illegal drugs to anyone who walks through the doors. And 65,000 catalytic converters were stolen in 2022. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Women have been convinced that their place is no longer in the home. They are encouraged to hire nannies and order already prepared meals kits. They are sent the message that they are no longer homemakers and care givers to their families. If there is a “housing shortage” and people cannot afford the supply of housing, means that there is too much demand from overpopulation. The masses as well the classes must be judged impartially through the arbitrament of the universal struggle. The state is conceived by all reformers to be an indispensable instrument of the new reconstruction. We must have a fervent plea for the abandonment of the traditional American mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism in favour of a more positive attempt to realize the national promise. Americans must learn to think in terms of purpose rather than destiny, and, without fear of the centralizing powers of government, to realize their purpose through a national policy. We can no longer treat life as something that has trickled down to us. We must deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization, alter its tools, formulate its method, educate and control it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

In endless ways we put intention where custom has reigned. We break up routines, make decisions, choose our ends, select means. The managed society which we anticipate must become a reality. If our children are to survive, the state of intervention must come of age. Despite the interruption of the Obama administration, the trend toward social cohesion must keep growing so the sons of the generation can witness the creation of a state machinery as great as any that could have appeared in the Victorian individualist’s worst nightmares. Whatever the human potentialities of this apparatus, for good or evil, the ideals of a cohesive and centralized society will become increasingly triumphant over those of the heyday of the age of information. While individualism has by no means disappeared, it is increasingly on the defensive. The religious keynote, the economic keynote, the scientific keynote of the twenty first century must be the overwhelming realization that mankind has such a mental and spiritual powers and such control over nature that the doctrine of the struggle for existence is definitely outmoded and placed by the higher law of cooperation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

We live in a consumer drive economy, and the attempt to question the pattern of unlimited consumption meets with a difficulty. Compulsive consumption compensates for anxiety.  The need for this type of consumption stems from the sense of inner emptiness, hopelessness, confusion, and tension. By “taking in” articles of consumption, the individual reassures himself that “he is,” as it were. If consumption were to be reduced, a good deal of anxiety would become manifest. Resistance against the possible arousal of anxiety would result in an unwillingness to reduce consumption. The most telling example of this mechanism is to be found in the public’s attitude toward cigarette consumption. In spite of the well-known dangers to health, the majority goes on consuming cigarettes. It is because they would rather take a chance of earlier death than forgo pleasure? An analysis of the attitude of smokers shows that this is largely a rationalization. Cigarette consumption allays hidden anxiety and tension, and people would rather risk their health than to be confronted with anxiety. Yet, once the quality of the process of living becomes more important than it is now, many people will stop smoking or overconsuming, not for the sake of their physical health but because only when they face their anxieties can they find ways to more productive living. (If they are compulsive, most urges for pleasures, including pleasures of the flesh, are not caused by the wish for pleasure but by the wish for avoidance of anxiety.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The problem of limits to consumption is so difficult to assess because, even in the affluent society of the United States of America, not all unquestionably legitimate needs are fulfilled. This holds true for at least 52 percent of the population. When the optimum consumption level has not been reached, how can we even think of reduced consumption? First, in the affluent sector, we have already reached the point of harmful consumption; second, the aim of ever-increasing consumption creates, even before the optimal consumption level is reached, an attitude of greed in which one wishes not only to have one’s legitimate needs fulfilled but dreams of a never-ending increase in desires and satisfactions. In other words, the idea of the limitless rise of production and consumption curve greatly contributes to the development of passivity and greed in the individual, even before peak consumption is reached. Despite these considerations, the transformation of our society into one which serves life must change the consumption and thereby change, indirectly, the production pattern of present industrial society. Such a change would obviously come not because of bureaucratic orders but of studies, information, discussion, and making on the part of the population, educated to become aware of the problem of the difference between life-furthering and life-hindering kinds of needs. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Awareness of illusions is the condition for freedom and human action. Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless World, just as it is the spirit of an unspiritual situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation, but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been disillusioned and has come to reason, so that he will revolve round himself and therefore round his true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun, which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself. How can man attain the goal of freeing himself from illusions? The behaviourists try to explain human activity without recourse to terms referring to consciousness, such as reward or satisfaction. #Randolphharris 12 of 18

Instead, behaviourists invoke a circular argument, stating that behaviour is “shaped” (into skills, or patterned habits) by reinforcers. A reinforcer is any consequence to action which strengthens, that is, increases the probability of the recurrence of, a response. To an observer who is not a behaviorist, the “reinforcing stimulus” may look suspiciously like a reward or a pleasant experience; the behaviourist prefers to avoid such subjectivistic terms. Skinner and his followers have been consulted by officials concerned with the management of prisoners’ behaviour in prisons and the behaviour of patients in mental hospitals, and by administrators of school systems who wish to make teaching and learning more efficient. There is considerable controversy between humanistic and behaviouristic psychologists about the issue of behaviour control, and the student should become familiar with the points of debate. Healthy personality, according to a behaviouristic view, calls for competence and self-control—the ability to suppress action that no longer yields positive reinforcers, and to learn action that is successful in attaining the good things. Such rapid adaptability is mediated by the ability to discern the contingencies, or rules implicit in nature or in society, according to which needs are gratified and dangers averted. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

I have always been uneasy about the behaviouristic approach to human nature, because it appeals to the power motive in the behaviour scientist. Moreover, research in behaviourism is frequently funded by agencies interested in controlling the behaviour and experience of other persons for the institution rather than the person. If a definite distinction is thus established between freely associating and understanding, when does one stop associating and try to understand? Fortunately, there are no rules whatever. If thoughts flow freely there is no sense in arresting them artificially. Sooner or later, they will be stopped by something stronger than themselves. Perhaps the person arrives at a point where he feels curious about what it all may mean. Or he may suddenly strike an emotional chord that promises to shed light on something that is troubling him. Or he may simply run out of thoughts, which may be a sign of resistance but also may indicate that he has exhausted the subject for the time being. Or he may have only a limited time at his disposal and still want to try himself at interpreting his notes. As the understanding of associations, the range of themes and combinations of themes that they may present is so infinite that there cannot possibly be any fixed rules regarding the meaning of individual elements in individual contexts. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

When a person stops associating and begins to go over his notes to understand them, his method of work must change. Rather than being entirely passive and receptive to whatever emerges, he becomes active. Now his reason comes into play. He no longer excludes reason. Even now he does not use it exclusively. It is difficult to describe with any accuracy the attitude he should adopt when he tries to grasp the meaning of a series of associations. The process should certainly not degenerate into a mere intellectual exercise. If he wants, he will do better to play chess or predict the course of World politics or take to crossword puzzle. An effort to figure out completely rounded interpretations, not missing any possible connotation, may gratify his vanity by proving the superiority of his brains but will scarcely take him much closer to a real understanding of himself. Such an effort entails a certain danger, for it may hamper progress by engendering a smug know-it-all feeling while he has only catalogued items without being touched by anything. The other extreme, a merely emotional insight, is far more valuable. If it is not further elaborated this is not ideal either, because it allows many significant leads, not yet altogether lucid, to drop out of sight. However, as we have seen from Clare’s analysis, an insight of this kind may set something going. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Early in her work, Clare experienced an intense lost of feeling in connection with her dream of the foreign city; it was mentioned than that although it is impossible to prove whether this emotional experience had any effect upon the further analysis, through its disquieting nature it may well have loosened her rigid tabu against touching any of the complex ties that fastened her to Peter. Another instance occurred during Clare’s final battle with her dependency, when she felt her defiance against taking her life into her own hands; she had then no intellectual grasp of the meaning of this emotional insight, yet it helped her to get out of a state of lethargic helplessness. Instead of wanting to produce a scientific masterpiece, the person who is working alone should let his interpretation be directed by his interest. He should simply go after what arrests his attention, what arouses his curiosity, what strikes an emotional chord within him. If he is flexible enough to let himself be guided by his spontaneous interest, he can be reasonably certain that he will intuitively select those subjects which at the time are most accessible to his understanding, or which fall in line with the problem on which he is working on. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

When I first learned to read, I was absorbed in the joy of my learning. At the same time, it is true that until I could read for myself, I was dependent on my mother’s time: I had to wait for her to read to me. That could be called a problem. However, when I was eight and went to German school on Saturday mornings, I was lost in the enchantment of writing German script, the light lines up, the heavy lines down. It was utter fascination to find that a completely different set of sounds and “pictures” (letters)—like frau—meant in another part of the World what my mother was. To discover that kindergarten, to which I had gone, was a German word, not an English one, was like discovering that I had been in Germany instead of America. Then there were the words that were same as ours, and others that were nearly the same, which brought together what had seemed so far apart. I do not think I had a problem that led to my learning German. I did have some familiarity with it, to begin with. My German grandfather still spoke German when he had someone to speak it with. German was in this sense already a part of my life. However, what did my love of Latin in high school have to do with my life? The only connection that I can find is that I liked words, and the meaning of words, and the derivations of words. However, after a year I had got the hang of that and could look up the rest for myself when I needed. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

No one can be devoid of feeling, and the philosopher will not be exempt from this rule. However, whereas the ordinary man’s feelings are transient emotions, passions, stresses, or moods, the philosopher’s feelings nourish a sustained, elevate state. The mistake of taking personal feelings as fit judges of truth or reality is a grave barrier which often lies across the portal of philosophy. People put a grossly exaggerated value on them and are thus led astray from the true knowledge of a fact or a situation. Without changing a person’s feelings, no change for the better in his own life, in himself, and in his relationship with other persons can be stable. When his feelings are really a conscious or subconscious cover for other feelings, nothing will help, save the uncovering of what the ego has hidden. Generous feeling must be directed by sound judgment, fervent devotion must be led by wise discrimination. The longing for inward security and invulnerable peace is one which a man can certainly satisfy. However, he cannot satisfy it on his own terms. Life has always and inseparably dictated the price which must be paid for it. It is easy to talk vaguely of lofty ideas, hard to put them where they belong—in our personal relationships. The line of conduct which impulse suggests is often different from that which deliberate reflection or deeper intuition suggests. Only when a man so develops himself that the two lines harmoniously coincide will he know the peace of never being torn in two—either mentally or emotionally. Then only, when desire and duty agree perfectly with one another, will he be happy. For, when reason approves what feeling chooses, and the inner balance is perfect, the resulting decision is more likely to be a right one than not. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

The Winchester Mystery House

In 1890, there was an abundance of evidence concerning unspeakable horror lurking in the blackness beyond. The butler was sleeping in the front left bedroom on the second floor, and he felt that something was in there; he could hear someone breathing. He got up and turned the light on, and at that every moment he saw something go up the wall and up the fireplace. He did not know what it was. He could hear the noise, and saw it go up the chimney and then take off. That scared him. He sat up the rest of the night. Other times he has heard something walking behind him. Four or five different servants had the same experience.

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