#and has to do with nebulous concepts that are merely terms given to things that don't exist (like time. and possible electrons)

[lesenbyan]

Sometimes I get the Urge to make a Big explanation about my view and thoughts on the universe, like, metaphysically and then like. Remember it doesn't matter and no one cares.

[thewillowbends]

So I'm rewatching the first season and reading the book, and I've got Thoughts (TM)

And I've got a LOT of thoughts about what exactly Leigh Bardugo was doing here in terms of the moral and ethical statements of the narrative, so I'm putting it under the cut.

Something that's really glaring on the rewatch is just...the complete lack of compassion every character outside Aleksander has for the plight of the Grisha. The army treats treats them with reciprocal dislike, despite the fact that they couldn't even cross the Fold with the Inferni or Squallers. The tsar and tsarita treat them with condescension and disdain, clearly valuing them mainly as a utility that, historically, they've happily turned on when they felt they were growing too powerful. Baghra has just given up on trying to protect other Grisha who aren't immortal like her or Aleksander. Even Alina is guilty of othering them and has to be told off by multiple characters (Ivan, Aleksander, Baghra) to stop treating her power like a yoke instead of a responsibility and opportunity to help others.

We get this big, bad, armor-piercing line from her to Aleksander about how he doesn't care who suffers as long as he wins. Which is true to some extent, but...where is her compassion? Didn't we just spend a hefty portion of the narrative wanting to give her power away to somebody else so she can, what, be with her bestie? Meanwhile, there's, you know, an actual war going on. This isn't small stakes shit she sees going on around her. People are dying. We literally have an entire plot where we see a Grisha kidnapped, enslaved, and then sent to be put to death...who was given to the enemy by her own people!

And then we get that line from her in 1x07, only to have it followed up by her running away at the end of 1x08 for....why? Most people on the ship are dead or those that survived weren't his supporters. The people on the docks were killed, and most of them actually were traitors trying to kill Alina. Aleksander didn't lie about that. So she's running away to take the blame for some nebulous reason that's not really well explained, which is...well, what the fuck happens to the rest of the Grisha? Do we not care about how Aleksander's actions are going to reflect back on them and cause a potential backlash or something? Not to mention, nobody is on the other side to warn them that Aleksander is a threat to begin with. Even if you assumed he was dead, you'd definitely want to assume he likely had supporters back at the palace, too!

From a character writing perspective, I find it stupid that Aleksander doesn't tell her certain things because if he's such a big, bad, clever manipulator, he would absolutely be weaponizing his own pain and experiences to make her stumble in empathy. That's bad character writing to me when you're telling me somebody's an abusive villain but actually isn't using very real and effective abuser tactics. But then you also have Alina who refuses to even point out...Aleksander, I get it! I've talked to other Grisha! I see what you're going through! But this can't be the answer. You have to see this won't end well for you! Like, her own arguments make no sense to me. They're so myopic and self-involved.

One of the big things that bothers me that gets folded into Aleksander's other manipulations is this idea that he primarily associates and values her for her power, in contrast to Mal who primarily sees her for being herself. While I get the intent of that on a narrative level, in the scope of the wider story...it just literally makes no sense for Aleksander to parse those two as separate. Not when the whole reason Grisha are hunted down and killed is because they don't get the privilege of being people outside of their power. Aleksander doesn't get to be General Kirigan without also being the Darkling. Therefore, Alina doesn't get to be Sankta Alina without also being the Sun Summoner. Not a single other character gets to be relevant without being powerful.

Even on a narrative level, it makes no sense. One, it's frankly kind of sexist (when are male protagonists ever expected to be segregated from their power) and two...that's the whole reason we're telling her story! That's why she's the protagonist! She is special. She can't be separated from this unique power destiny has handed her. We don't tell stories about common, boring people; we tell stories about people who incite conflict or change. So even the mere concept to me of basing a character's identity or value around not wanting value is frankly kind of ridiculous.

There's just this strangely insidious underpinning to the story that power is inherently dangerous, even as it acknowledges that people who are NOT in power can very much suffer at the hands of those who do. So where's the moral and ethical reflection about what this means for the rest of us? What does that mean for minorities?

Think of the scene on the boat where Aleksander has Ivan kill off the nobility. The narrative wants you to see this moment as blackly humorous and awful, but stop for a moment and think about what happened there from his perspective. This is a man who spent centuries watching his people get killed and enslaved, and that isn't a false representation or manipulation from him, either. His statement is backed up both by what we see in the flashbacks and by other Grisha. Nobody created a safe haven for him and his people - he did that! He had to claw his way to the top, flatter, kill, and fuck his way through god knows how many noble houses, just to get to this moment where he could build a Little Palace. And it took him four hundred years just to get that! All while Grisha are dying!

And nobody did anything about it. Not the king, not the landholders, not even the peasantry. They were happy taking advantage of the Grisha's powers, of course, when Aleksander helped raise them up into a position of prominence, making them soldiers and enchanters. And even then, they're mocked! The army can't wait to get rid of them!

And then some noblewoman, who has enjoyed the benefits of her wealth and power, some of which were built on the backs of your people, sits there and tells you, the moment you take hold of the power everybody else has been grabbing for centuries, has the audacity to sit there and tell you that the world will hate Grisha and view him as a heretic?? When less than twenty years ago, your people were being killed right and left? When the enemy is still kidnapping and enslaving your people? When your own countrymen view you with fear and intrigue already? The audacity to sit there and frame it as a hypothetical when it's very much an actual reality still going on. Just look at the barely hidden seething rage and contempt on Barnes face when he delivers that quip about "needing to do that speech again." Motherfucker has been waiting YEARS for this moment, this revenge. And really, who can blame him...if you aren't wrapped up in the narrative wanting you to focus on just what he's doing to poor Alina.

The way the Grisha's situation is framed along with how the Darkling's descent into villainy is handled is so just incongruent to me. The pieces don't fit. You're asking me to see this man as completely irredeemable after you just showed me six episodes of Grisha being killed both for being what they are in the hopes of protecting Alina, after you showed me that Aleksander had already TRIED appealing to the protection of the crown by lending it his power, after making us see that lies and manipulation are the only way he and his mother have been able to survive as long as they have in a world that eradicated them. Where is the compassion in the narrative for that?

And okay, fine, you can do an irredeemable villain. You can do a Kilmonger-esque story with the Darkling, but that requires forcing your protagonists to empathize with the villain and change from it. But then I read ahead and...that doesn't happen?? She winds up walking away from it all at the end?? In fact, she even loses her power. And that's supposed to be a HAPPY ending? After we just saw how badly this minority was treated for how many centuries??

You know what it feels like? It feels like Leigh Bardugo read The Hunger Games, tried to replicate a Katniss, and then completely failed to understand the profound situational differences between her protagonist and that one. Katniss is a girl made extraordinary by her circumstances. She's not special herself other than the fact that she did the right thing at the right place at the right time and helped create the tipping point for a revolution that was already in the works before her. Katniss walking away from the world after makes sense because she's burned out after the war, but it also got its use from her. She helped make the revolution work; she showed up for the event while it was happening and did what she could. The situation was out of her control and power for the most part, and she still managed to rise the occasion.

Alina is NOT Katniss. She is inherently special. She is inherently powerful. She has the ability to create change and bring a new perspective that Aleksander has long given up on and which her country desperately needs. We know the world of the Hunger Games will be better because the creators of real change were always working behind the scenes behind Katniss. She was just their propaganda, their symbol. Alina is a symbol, but she is also a very real power. It's not an act of moral celebration for her to walk away from power at the end, namely because there's a whole minority class of people we still have to worry about. Putting a Grisha on the throne is no promise the country won't turn against them eventually, nor does that protect the hundreds of Grisha at the mercy of a superstitious peasantry and countries that will likely continue to invade them.

It's just...I dunno guys. It's frustrating because all the compelling elements are there in the characters and storyline, but it's like the author had a set of characters telling one story and then she had an entirely different plot in mind, and they just clash all over the place for me and become thematically inconsistent. But what really gets me is that she had seven years to think this shit over...and we're looking to get the same story all over again. Usually, it's a great thing to have an author involved in the show. This is a rare situation where I wonder if it hurts the chances of it improving.

[the-blue-fairie]

I sometimes feel like being in fandoms makes people see things in black and white. Everything becomes an “either/or” situation. You are either for something or against something, pro a storytelling aspect or character or anti a storytelling aspect or character. The nature of fandom tags on tumblr kind of cultivates this attitude. In order to categorize your thoughts on your blog, you need simple phrases that help with easy categorization, so that’s why we get things like “pro-this movie” or “anti-this movie” or “pro-this character” or “anti-this character.” But the simplistic quality of such categorizations kills nuanced analysis - or makes it more difficult to enunciate one’s thoughts when they fall into a grey zone.

I’ve written a fair number of analyses of Frozen on this blog and they’ve been met with a lovely and positive reception. But because, as I’ve said in the past, I have mixed feelings about F2, I always worry about how other people will read my posts. Will they think I am being too negative about the film and then question me when I profess to like it? Will they feel I’m being too positive and call into question my critiques? Depending on their perspectives, how will other people try to categorize me?

It’s not merely anxiety on my part - although anxiety makes it worse. In the past, sometimes my words have been misconstrued by others or, in other cases, I’ve not explained myself clearly enough and so they’ve been taken for something outside my intent. This has exacerbated my anxiety at times because I feel I walk a fine line where I both agree and disagree with all sides in the fandom to a certain degree. But that nebulousness defies easy categorization, so I always worry people will look and my posts and think things like...

Oh, you feel F2 didn’t  reflect enough on how Agnarr and Iduna’s actions hurt their daughters? Does that mean you’re anti Agnarr and Iduna? No. I love Agnarr and Iduna dearly. I think they are incredibly rich and compelling characters. I also think that the backstory F2 gives them only makes them more interesting characters, giving them layers that go beyond the layers they already had from their limited presence in the first film. I also think that Agnarr and Iduna are good people and that they loved their daughters dearly, that they were caught in a terrible position and did everything to protect their daughters. And I further think that, given the time to come to terms with their parents’ actions, it’s perfectly valid for Elsa and Anna to still love them. As I said before, they are good people with their own fears for the future, wanting to protect their children. But I also feel that, by ignoring Agnarr’s and Iduna’s role in the sisters’ separation as children (and actually, by avoiding discussion the childhood events altogether), F2 never allows Elsa and Anna to come to terms with their parents’ actions. It never acknowledges their parents’ part in the hurt the sisters experienced as children (and, of course, it never acknowledges the trolls’ part in it either, even though the trolls were acting as guides for the king and queen and all their choices impacted the lives of these two children negatively.) It never acknowledges that people can love you - and still hurt you. And it never gives the sisters’ closure for that even though the narrative of F2 is all about their parents and (Elsa, at least) finding some form of closure with Iduna. But, in spite of my issues with the narrative, I like Agnarr and Iduna as characters - ESPECIALLY Iduna, whose backstory in F2 makes her fascinating.

Oh, you feel Elsa’s arc in F2 could have been written better? Does that mean you’re anti-Elsa/”Elsa-critical?” No. When I say that Elsa’s arc could have been written better, I am criticizing the structural elements that make up her arc, not criticizing Elsa herself. In fact, it’s my love for the character of Elsa that inspires my meditation on her arc. I’ve loved and deeply related to Elsa since the first film. Even when people got to rolling their eyes at the oversaturation of Let it Go, I’ve always kept the song close to my heart because it means something to me. I actually don’t particularly care for the tag “Elsa critical” because I think people using that tag are sometimes too quick to condemn Elsa for things when they should be condemning pacing issues in F2 or writing issues that made the writers’ intent unclear or moments that feel slightly OOC for Elsa compared to the first film.

And keep in mind, when I say “moments that feel slightly OOC for Elsa,” I’m not saying that Elsa feels “completely OOC” the way some people do or trying to dismiss what the writers were trying to do for her character. There are actually elements in F2 with Elsa that I feel are great character elements and they should not be disregarded - but there is also a dubious focus on her connection to the abstract concept of magic instead of her connection to other people. This undercuts some of the strong character moments that do exist in the film. 

And again, keep in mind, when I say, “a focus on the abstract concept of magic rather than her connection with other people,” I’m not saying that Elsa loses her humanity in F2. She doesn’t. There are still moments that show her humanity and her human connections with other people. What I’m saying is that those human elements take a backseat to her connection to Ahtohallan, which does a disservice to her arc and its emotional impact, in my opinion.

Oh, you feel that aspects of the ending of F2 feel unearned to a certain degree? That sounds like you dislike F2. Didn’t you say you liked F2? Which is it? Are you just trying to confuse people? No, I’m not trying to confuse people. It’s just that you can like certain aspects of a film and dislike others, feel parts of a film were well-done and other parts less so. My feelings on F2 are... complicated. I love Anna as queen of Arendelle, I think she makes an amazing queen. A part of me wants Elsa to stay in Arendelle because I like the idea of the sisters being physically together and I feel the films and shorts have built a better connection between Elsa and the people of Arendelle than Elsa and the Forest. BUT, at the same time, I deeply love the Northuldra and want to see both Elsa and Anna bond with their mother’s people more and I love the idea of Elsa living with the Northuldra and connecting with them. My issue is the film doesn’t emphasize building Elsa’s connection with the Northuldra when that is the most emotionally resonant human element that connects her to the Forest. I actually want to see more of the Northuldra in F2′s narrative to give the ending greater depth.

(Also, I think it’s a shame that the film kind of brushes aside Anna’s connection to the Northuldra and her making bonds with her mother’s people. I know the film wants to set up Anna’s connection to Arendelle to foreshadow her taking the queenship but... both is good, as I’ve said in other posts.)

And I guess that’s what separates me from other people who dislike the ending. Yes, I’ve said that I prefer the sisters being physically together, but I’m not against F2′s ending on principle the way some people are. F2′s ending could work perfectly with a few rewrites to the narrative. I like it in concept, but not execution. I love Anna’s arc and Elsa’s arc has beautiful elements, conceptually at least. I love the idea of her being able to broaden her horizons and meet new people. The trouble is, the film doesn’t emphasize her bonding with those new people and writes them out of the narrative for no good reason for the second half of the film. And because I feel that Elsa’s connections with other human beings are what help me relate to her, more than the abstract concept of her individuality and abstract connections to magic and the spirits, that makes the ending of the film ring a little hollow for me. Especially when the sense of emotional connection I feel to the sisters reconnecting in Frozen Fever is so much stronger to me on a personal level than F2. (That last sentence I mentioned is personal feeling, but I hope that otherwise, I have supported my perspective with references to the text that readers feel are valid.)  

Again, I’m not trying to take anything away from people who love Elsa’s arc and the film in general. There are many things I love about it. myself I recognize the beauty they see in it and I value that beauty.

I apologize. Maybe this is just rambling born of my anxiety - or reiteration of points I’ve made before. But I hope, if you read this, you feel I discuss these things with clarity, respect, and fairness for different perspectives. Thank you.

[caughtontape3-blog]

The certainty concerning the Supernatural

Cochise What is actually the "The supernatural"? The idea means from the Latina: super- "above" nature concerns entities, forces or trends which are regarded by simply a number of as beyond mother nature, for the reason that they cannot become explained in the notions as well as laws from the everyday globe.

Cochise

Supernatural topics are frequently WRONGLY associated with marvelous and occult ideas and are generally a classification for reasons which invoke explanatory constructs that in principle are generally beyond human conception, knowing or verification. A the greater part of super-naturalists of just about any given religion merely think in a very filter subdivision, subgroup, subcategory, subclass of all unnatural explanations involving reality whenever all the great thinking of all religions, prior and present, are this.

Instances of super naturalization; From the Hebrew Bible, effects and also other misfortunes are defined as indications of God's fury or vengeance. All way too often in theological posts, I hear the phrase mysterious bandied about, and also most men and women on both equally sides of the discussion tend to accept typically the nebulous term as the sensible idea (whether or maybe not they recognize which supernatural events perform exist).

Miracles such as walking around water are first looked at as impossible by the nonbeliever given that they violate the rules connected with physics; then often the believer guards the assert by labels the celebration supernatural as if this kind of magically transforms into explanation for unbeliever, From generally there the topic turns to no matter if or not that wonderful event actually occurred.

Exactly what does someone mean if they call something super-natural. This means that any event that may transpire is natural; within fact, issues can end up being said to simply along with the category of the actual earlier this means of unnatural given earlier mentioned.

The solely thing left for great events to be usually are points which could by no means be observed, could possibly certainly not in any way influence us all. We can existing countless, in fact infinite, feasible supernatural items (for instance, that our whole world is available as the super-fast blink of a subatomic molecule in most other unreachable meta-universe you can never interact along with; or that many subatomic chemical in our market composes an entirely separate world itself), but we get zero reason to feel any of them applies, and such views tend to be not the slightest bit verifiable, along with so they are unreadable.

Creation is in by itself magic of planing in addition to input of God. Typically the only chance I notice left is that particular number of absolute natural physical legal guidelines to our universe (whether not really we know associated with them for sure correct now), and supernatural occasions are events that carry out the truth is happen (hypothetically visible in order to us) but that contradict these absolute regulations.

Which suggests all evidence inside favor of any mysterious event is always circumstantial. And in my watch, circumstantial evidence is in no way adequate to be able to validate wonderful events. I truly do concede that will there must be many point where a human body of circumstantial evidence may be so great, in which perhaps accepting that some sort of unnatural event happened may be fair.

Are great events popular. John Wesley: An innately honest male, retained a new child-like visibility to all varieties of organic and supernatural probability. Human being Curiosities, Natural Curiosities, All-natural Events, Supernatural Situations, Individual Curiosities.

It was expected that one who came while extensively as Wesley might encounter unusual persons, their very own achievements, and all their eccentricities. (Journal, 1790) With regard to Wesley, the particular natural as well as the supernatural were being a good extension of each various other, and never hesitated for you to assign, to divinity activities this individual knew were component of the normal purchase as well. (Journal, 1773) Some experiences were, naturally , beyond scientific explanation.

WHAT / THINGS WE DO ABOUT Haunted houses and places? Have you considered Ghosts?

Conjuring and secret HAVE ALWAYS BEEN VIEWED AS supernatural along with a remaining form of magic, the fact remains that conjuring and miraculous are using God developed issues called "WORDS" sprained like a curse. Words are usually the standard formula this God employed to create typically the universe, phrases are often the framework by which as much as possible consist which is the actual REAL EXPLANATION SATAN change and pervs the ideas of conversation and precisely what we hear in your day-to-day lives!

Believers fight further more that just as scientific research has evolved from beginning, puny attempts to make clear natural situations (such seeing that spontaneous technology and the particular doctrine of humors) straight into a much more reputable modern-day science, religion offers evolved through early weak attempts to elucidate supernatural functions (such because animism) in the much more trustworthy modern religions.

Believers be aware that the vast majority regarding humanity, of all competitions, religions, and ages, consider and have always assumed in mysterious phenomena involving one form or any other.

Believers conclude that while a lot of people have invented religions to help these groups cope with frightening and also inexplicable phenomena, others include come to rely on wonderful phenomena through intellectually trustworthy means, having been asked by reason, evidence, along with experience that the galaxy should not be explained by naturalistic explanations on your own, but will be best understood by means of recognizing the Supernatural.

Believers likewise note that while a few many people denied the presence of supernatural craze by way of intellectually honest signifies, obtaining been persuaded by explanation, evidence, and experience that this supernatural does not can be found, other people have denied typically the unnatural out of the deep worry that great forces may possibly exist in addition to have a real as well as tangible impact on each of our lives, and also a fear which the universe could possibly be much more complex than their hypotheses allow.

By its individual classification, science is unable to function properly of looking at or examining for the lifestyle connected with the supernatural. Thus, believers in supernatural phenomenon carry that scientific methods may not detect them; therefore often the insufficient evidence does not really matter.

Scientists counter-top that will if this is and so, subsequently believers in excellent naturalism themselves would always be incapable of seeing almost any supernatural phenomenon, since man senses themselves run in the laws of physics, and can only feeling events developing in the actual natural, physical planet... However our senses were created to help commune with a mysterious God so it is usually possible that people can see as I possess EACH super and UN-natural occasions.

John Drane publishes articles in which "science is perpetuating "intellectual arrogance" when it is not going to accept the possibility associated with supernatural activities and miracles"

But what regarding A short while ago and Haunted Residences?

The haunted house can be a constructing that is a facility with regard to supernatural occurrences as well as paranormal phenomena, but precisely why? Effectively, The bible tells you regarding demonic strongholds THE TWO in Spots and Men and women throughout it's internet pages and also their is NO unknown in order to why these spots and the ones are "Haunted" together with a profile from the particular past, if you recognize the full story behind the idea!

Often the supernatural can send to cognizant magical witchcraft's, religious awareness or unfamiliar forces (Familiar Spirits) this cannot normally be observed except by their consequences in the all-natural world.

Some examples of "supernatural phenomena" are miracles executed by God, ghosts that happen to be merely Demons IMPERSONATING THE ACTUAL PERSONS THEY ONCE LIVED IN IN LIFE in buy to deceive the human race concerning life in the hereafter; psychic abilities like psychokinesis and telepathy are a great deal better classified as paranormal when compared with supernatural because they bargain with "the mental realm" BUT there are actually spiritual pushes at work RIGHT BEHIND ALL THESE SO-CALLED ABILITIES. Just how do i learn?

I spent 6 decades involved in Wicca then as a black witch doing many evils when all those I hated along with about myself untold strain.

As a result experience I right now believe that Husfader in addition to Eve had selected mind and physical capabilities CONSIDERABLY BEYOND those we now have these days but lost a chance to employ them over time SOON AFTER the tumble. This really does not mean that all of us are likely to use these people today, only why these skills are under the exterior waiting to be INDUCED BY SIMPLY SPIRITUAL MANIPULATIONS VIA VICES IN ORDER IN ORDER TO DECEIVE AND TRICK ALL OF US.

The term supernatural is definitely contrasted with the expression healthy, which presumes which several events occur regarding to attract wealth, and other folks do not, because that they are a result of forces outer to dynamics. But the item must be understood that will Satan and all vices will UNDER THE AFFECT OF THE SPIRITUAL REGION, THEY ARE "DEAD SPIRITS" can not draw from The lord's highly effective realm so many people do the things we do when we all find ourselves in a situation involving lacking abilities... THAT THEY SIT ABOUT THEIR REAL ELECTRICAL POWER WHICH IS SIMPLY "DECEPTION". Vices simply use typically the "Natural Laws" of often the Universe which Satan has learned BETTER that any kind of people scientist because having been presently there as God's proper side angel at the development.

The demonic realm bottoms it's existence upon the actual natural laws of design as well as "twists and forms this to form whichever will con and operate human facts weather in which is "Spiritual or even Natural" in manifestation.

Various other persons assert that situations this appear to us to become supernatural occur according to be able to attract wealth which we accomplish not yet comprehend (This is just what My spouse and i have simply said, Satan will use ATTRACT WEALTH IN WHICH SCIENCE HAS NOT STILL FOUND OUT ABOUT TO BE ABLE TO DECEIVE THE PARTICULAR WEAK ORIENTED TO BELIEVE ALONG WITH PROCESS FALSE WORSHIP. ).

Throughout contrast to super- naturalists, naturalists assert that almost all things work according for you to a law connected with evolutionary nature not seeing that Our god created these laws and regulations to help work with Spiritual rules of religion. In contrast in order to atheists, super-naturalists announce which God, miracles, or perhaps different supernatural phenomena are generally actual, verifiable, and portion of the legal guidelines of nature that individuals complete not yet understand, (this is true to any point since it would possibly be silly for ANY RESEARCHER TO SAY THAT SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH POSSESSES ALL THE ADVICE. After all, using savoir record of injuries and also down right silly statements of the past what makes they?

O. K. can your supernatural be seen basically as being a human coping process? A number of believe that human being beings ascribe wonderful qualities to purely organic functions in an attempt to be able to cope with concern along with ignorance.

Since the perception in magic is really outdated and held some sort of great electrical power over the particular minds and creative imagination associated with earlier generations before typically the concept of experimental scientific disciplines which you'll only believe in case you don't observe a number of evidence out there with regards to forbidden scientific finds amid so-called ignorant savages in the past. He BELIEVES often the supernatural does not are present, while most people regarding most ethnic categories with most points in record have got claimed otherwise, is actually merely for you to perpetuate the actual intellectual cockiness of past generations involving Western thinkers, and far coming from delivering an answer to the particular inquiries raised by story that merely begs much larger and even more important questions in relation to the character of European intellectual traditions. Much connected with what we call technology nowadays was once presumed to be supernatural.

The actual control of electricity, typically the make of steel, stereo swells, all were as soon as viewed as beyond the court associated with nature, and consequently supernatural, through conventional researchers. As such, what on earth is considered to be supernatural right now might be completely explained another day.

A lot of claimed supernatural occasions might be studied by often the scientific process; however, when the physical regulations simply by which an event happens grow to be known, the affair is no longer grouped as 'supernatural'. Fundamental unnatural hypotheses are difficult to help specify, let alone analyze. Where research is ready to address issues throughout dispute, to correct issues regarding fact, or in order to call in to question promises of power grounded with history, it has from time to time been able to ease antagonisms based on rivalling supernatural states.

Otherwise, (for example) the actual politics in addition to morality of the scientist usually are as opinion-based or while reliant on assumptions regarding the supernatural seeing that these of anyone else -- and lastly, individuals may make a decision to remain sometimes passively agnostic about each and every problem that cannot be screened or actively hostile to be able to claims of authority that will cannot be scientifically warranted.

There are many attempts for you to validate claims of great tendency scientifically. Many activities after accepted as mysterious are understood as indications of your natural, explainable characteristics which are misinterpreted. People in which believe in wonderful situations accuse those who usually do not of naturalizing genuinely unnatural events; people that perform not trust supernatural functions accuse who have do involving super-naturalizing honestly natural occasions.

Believers can easily rightly act in response to the many cases of super-naturalization by arguing the fact that super-naturalization usually takes place does not refute the existence of the particular supernatural any more in comparison with the fact that experts often make errors refutes the existence of typically the natural whole world.

The principle of the supernatural provides intrigued people of just about all cultures for hundreds of years. Most instructors of the normal savoir such as biology, physics, or neuro-science would almost certainly state, if asked, this there was not a such issue as the great. Just what is it about often the natural savoir that potential buyers people to deny the presence of the supernatural.

The saying of modern science, by simply indicating that ALL conduct conforms on the laws connected with nature, absolutely rules away all probability of a mysterious even to help occurring within the natural entire world. Along with what would a wonderful being be if the idea endured but could PERFORM very little (I'll tell anyone, it would be demonic, since they CAN CARRY OUT NOTHING BUT DECEIVE).

Cases of the effect associated with scientific research on mysticism as well as miracle abound; eventually the item is luring to think that ALL testimonies regarding the supernatural can become defined scientifically. Therefore, regarding not enough proof otherwise, many of us must let the possibility which a supernatural occasion might take place. We may possibly ask yourself what, if certainly not the laws and regulations of mother nature, might cause a new unnatural event to occur.

Organic beef wonder whether a sealed group of laws exists this kind of that inside supernatural activities these rules are never ever violated. The problem on this idea is that, hoping this sort of set of "supernatural laws" is present, there will be nothing that prevents the actual grouping together of the particular attract wealth with the meant supernatural legal guidelines to application form a closed pair of regulations to which all behaviour in the universe adheres. Normally stated, a fixed of "supernatural laws", when it existed, would assist the central axiom involving science rather than contradict this. This does not necessarily, however, mean that great events as observed throughout the information world cannot end up being caused.

The particular Bible educates that The almighty (who is usually of course the mysterious being) always will keep The promises, so many connected with the incredible things They has done via Christ Himself and throughout the bienheureux may be said in order to adapt to a pattern with that context. However, that will does not mean in which every single supernatural occurrence is definitely an "act of God", nor would it mean this every"act of God" is actually done according to any assurance He has created.

There are outwardly by no means ending arguments among a lot of theologians, mystics, parapsychologists, non secular leaders and the loyal with regards to Supernatural Manifestations, Clairvoyant Power, Prophecies, etc. Regarding those who tend not to trust in supernatural events for those who doubt typically the truth on the Scriptures.

Possibly if we would will not recognize the Sacred Scriptures as Divine Revelations automatically merits, then, through often the extremely laws proposed by means of Parapsychology to explain apart supernatural déclaration, the truth of the Sacred Scriptures would then be validated and confirmed.

Rational gentleman is quick to lower price any supernatural manifestation INVOLVING ANYTHING BECAUSE IF THIS INDIVIDUAL CONFESSES THAT THE MYSTERIOUS EXISTS HE OR SHE MUST ADMIT THIS GOD IS OUT THERE AND HE OR SHE CANNOT DO THAT, HENCE THE ONLY OUT IS Any ALL-NATURAL EXPLANATION.

Let you explore what exactly may always be behind these rejects associated with supernatural manifestations. In the event that guy cannot deal with wonderful manifestations, man will neglect them. So what is right behind the much spoke about, and sometimes denied, unnatural events with the evil dynamics.

To the start eyesight and observant head that should be evident which there is some sort of coherent relationship between the first teachings of the Religious Scriptures and Miracles, which usually are the legit marque of the supernatural, to be able to wit: The infinite strength of God may be seen through man, through trust since accordance to the actual Will regarding God, for you to over come virtually any thought of or real limit within whatever circumstance he might get himself.

1: The reason why right now there such an insistent to be able to secularize and/or deny amazing things and other supernatural symptoms to the issue of attempting to help neutralize the particular Divinity

only two: Do the adversaries involving the supernatural and, as a result, of true mysticism have got a vested interest in typically the throughout the world consequences that their own ideas, philosophies, and theological instruction will have? Models in the great sector are closely linked to principles in religious spiritualty, metaphysics. The supernatural strategy will be generally identified with certitude or other belief methods - though there is usually very much debate as in order to whether a mysterious is definitely necessary for religion, or maybe that religion is needed intended for holding a notion of the wonderful because religion is merely men made reflection of exactly what God intended and NOT NECESSARILY the truth reality of their presence.

Individuals denying often the plausibility from the supernatural normally claim that really the only situations which cannot be analyzed scientifically are those which often are not perceived by just about any means.

If an function claimed to be unnatural genuinely has happened, the idea can as a result be researched scientifically and is definitely not supernatural. Some examples connected with great phenomena are products and also ghosts. The Holy bible is rife with descriptions of mysterious functions and divine remedy inside human affairs.

For you to a super-naturalist, the place is not whether wonders are supernatural or not really, however whether they happen at all. You will need to be aware that no matter which will philosophical predictions one decides to read the seen scientific data, either naturalism or super-naturalism, are every bit as unscientific. But for the concern of whether science makes it possible for for intelligent cause away from nature itself rather compared to the impaired process associated with naturalistic evolution, Could scientific disciplines explain phenomena with regards to smart agents. Can the wonderful can be observed as well as not.

Evidently, the Holy book is full of webpage of supernatural events along with experiences. That is certainly not to say that unnatural beings or occasions tend to be observable. But it will mean that the simple fact that some great activities are observable presents all of us reason to believe that will supernatural beings exist, and also the fact that we can not view them is a new consequence of the limitations, quite than any incompetency upon their part.

This is actually clinically, scientifically documented throughout various reports and information, and is a great visible change brought on simply by opinion (or appeal to) mysterious causes. Yet possibly this may suggest that, beneficial or damaging, prayerful elegance to the wonderful, Lord or Satan possesses seen results. Life by the unnatural, or by way regarding a naturalistic mechanism to get evolution, are generally equally untestable, and unobservable.

Other Arguments are that particular supernatural reason cannot be famous via another. This presupposes in which all supernatural explanations are indifferent. It implies that invoking the actual supernatural is the blanket clarification (An explanation for popular ignorance).

In which supposition presents another capability of the doubt alone: it is based in materialistic naturalism, which thinks a previous that no great celebration can ever take place by any means. While for any single event it can be difficult to distinguish between distinct supernatural explanations, the similar thing will also apply to natural details. Distinguishing involving different information, whether all-natural or mysterious, requires frequent events consequently that a style could be observed (Isn't this particular the job of technology? ).

In this situation there are different sightings that match each hypothesis for instance studying a ghost's habits so we recognize between 2 different wonderful explanations with regard to ghosts (An intelligent haunting or 1 that seems to complement the living surroundings as though to interact with individuals who are living there as opposed to. a continuing haunting or even one that takes on the particular same thing over in addition to over as if reliving a life that features transferred.... Both can possibly be explained by demonic activity).

There are difficulties with generalizing supernatural explanations yet that does not indicate that it is extremely hard. Difficulties in generalizing unnatural explanations can result by numerous causes: Rarity involving a great event will be one such as typically the Reed sea parting regarding Moses.

Some supernatural situations never happen frequently plenty of (maybe only once) to be able to make a generalization achievable, but the same matter can occur with healthy functions, if similar occasions will not occur frequently ample to look at more than some sort of few occurrences. If identical supernatural events are not necessarily effectively observed then generalizations could be impossible because connected with the lack of data. Many supernatural events evidently involve intelligent entities as well as the behavior of intelligent choices would be hard, nevertheless not necessarily impossible, for you to generalize, particularly when interacting with one or more nonhuman clever entity. Many events the moment thought to be mysterious are now known to help be natural. This sort of activities were deemed to get wonderful because nature ended up being terribly understood by those that produced such claims. On the other hand a new scientific application of unnatural explanations concludes that organic process are inadequate, definitely not because of lack associated with knowledge although because regarding the actual inability involving chance and natural legislation to provide an satisfactory explanation for example the creation connected with the Universe compared to Progression.

It is possible this a great explanation could possibly be replaced by way of a normal one if a lot more files becomes available (i. electronic Proof of the contrary having occurred), but often the reverse is also probable. Finding the natural leads to of stuff, does not really totally negate mysterious will cause and purposes (For illustration God can and contains EMPLOYED the Natural to provide concerning his plans my spouse and i. at the. Jesus' death about the get across to deliver salvation to man). A few aspects of Quantum physics suggest that even all-natural reasons have underlining wonderful brings about.

A supernatural description can simply be postulated by simply eliminating most possible healthy explanations. This particular objection presupposes that unnatural explanations are usually magical just as if simply invoking the great is a explanation; this is certainly not the lens case. A proper mysterious explanation would certainly explain precisely how the event took place, however simply not be limited by the natural laws associated with our actual universe. With other words creationists are generally quick to point out there that the wonderful is usually the cause for the actual existence of lifestyle as well as natural laws to retain it.

However simply simply because the particular supernatural has produced life it will not mean which it cannot supersede typically the natural laws governing generation. He might conclude, given that this actions violates organic law, that will something through outside place time (supernatural by definition) is triggering the space time period fold.

If a supernatural affair is studied long sufficient or perhaps multiple supernatural situations ended up studied, some specifics about often the supernatural lead to might be deduced, merely as is done having silent and invisible natural objects similar to subatomic particles. This resistance leads the supernatural in order to irrational belief, but the a couple of are not similar. Quite a few events in World's historical past require a super-naturalistic notion system before they can certainly be accurately interpreted or maybe understood. Wear them in the actual definition of science in which precludes a supernatural speculation.

In fact, many regarding the scientific daddies who all created the very research still in use currently conuted on God or the supernatural keen force this created initial and endured that formation with normal laws of physics, hormone balance and mathematics to oversee it.

The denial in the supernatural that is portion of naturalism is any purely philosophical and also primarily atheistic position. By simply eliminating supernatural hypotheses coming from thought, materialists eliminate out of control some sort of large body of likely answers for past, current along with future phenomena. Within beginning and historical study, an overall denial of the particular supernatural will result in grave fault where unnatural events get indeed taken place; therefore great explanations needs to be considered exactly where appropriate.

Eventhough it might look obvious flood which these kinds of an event had happened whether you believe within super-naturalism or not, the item is important to acknowledge typically the depth and width on the strata covering often the Earth ahead of a man or woman can understand the dependence with this interpretation upon one particular presupposition belief system as well as the some other. Given the actual volumes involving rock concerned, it simply will not become possible for any territory animal to survive a new ton able to make the entire geologic section without supernatural treatment, in addition to yet the world is definitely filled with various vulnerable lifeforms. I believe that will supernatural events are all-natural events that we usually are not sophisticated enough to be able to explain in the perception a supernatural God employs his or her advanced knowledge connected with natural regulation to carry out something in our sphere that seems at the particular time for you to beyond character but is basically just ahead of time of our know-how about all these things.

If we had been to go back again 3, 000 years ago as well as clone a sheep, it could be considered a supernatural occasion by many of typically the people as a result time interval would it not? Many of us by natural means survive death and also the just supernatural point about it is actually most of us don't fully understand this yet but when all of us get at this time there we will certainly automatically know even as tend to be known by Jesus today. I think the skeptic calls them supernatural as it helps them to independent these matters from the healthy order of things and this also protects their belief technique, after all its all of about whatever you work therefore hard to tell yourself NOT THE FACTS THROUGHOUT FRONT OF PEOPLE WHICH MATTER..... RIGHT?. Really the only mysterious thing about clairvoyant potential and life soon after loss of life is that we no longer fully understand them. That they normally are not being debated below along with can't be as opposed to supernatural functions individuals claim to observe.

Fundamentally: 1. ) Supernatural occasions are excluded deliberately inside science. Originally the basic principle could very well have been implemented (in early Greece) due to the fact it was a considerably more fruitful way to realize the universe than super-naturalism. This does not signify supernatural events may not necessarily be looked at as scientific research. "Supernatural" activities can end up being either subsumed underneath people ultimate laws, or even scientific disciplines cannot be fruitfully given to them at all.

two. )Those asserting the happening associated with supernatural events in addition to agencies usually describe these individuals as and have been observed or perhaps experienced revolutionary, a verificationwitness being so exclusive in which they cannot deny it took a little time for place as in this circumstance having experienced situations so deep in witchcraft that no person can convince us otherwise instead of the Atheists who else have experienced SIMPLY REFUTE EVERYTHING.

Those question often the plausibility of wonderful functions typically define all of them because events which can not be recognized by natural or maybe scientific senses, and as their comprehending may be said to help sit with religious, enchanting, or mysterious explanation-yet is still tightly outside of the actual realm of technology. Yet we can only be aware that a supernatural event will be impossible if we understand before hand that materialism is usually the appropriate world-view that it is not. Their one thing to propose that idea in the particular supernatural is false (as Hume said), yet we all must agree that that is feasible. Once many of us accept that unnatural causing is logically achievable, typically the question is whether we certainly have evidence for the living with the supernatural. The debate contrary to the supernatural becomes naturally poor when a straightforward believer from the supernatural converts into a lifestyle personalized testimony to the great upon witnessing something these people truly know to always be "supernatural". The genuine watch to the mysterious may make his case with the detail in which he or she talks about his account regarding that which usually he absolutely knows being supernatural.

Typically the problem of the condition becomes clear when most of us find out personal testimony involving an bank account of the event which with their surface can only possibly be classified as supernatural. This specific description of the wonderful recommends the following inquest: if this is definitely not supernatural what is the idea, natural? In case so.... SHOW IT while using same efervescencia you point out I have to prove God for being genuine. Remember that all opinions are open to argument UNTIL EVENTUALLY REAL EVIDENCE IS USUALLY DO, THEN IT'S "PUT YOUR DOLLARS WHERE YOUR JAWS IS" TIME PERIOD which is definitely where all Atheists as well as Skeptics must UPLOAD OR MAYBE SHUT UP! It is just a effectively known fact that values DEMONSTRATE NOTHING without Data in order to back them upwards and also God has granted a whole lot Evidence to backside up his says this it is sheer folly to be able to deny it's ordinary lifetime before our vision.

[badmousestuff-blog]

Caela’s Report

The Reactionary Nightmare of the CPGB-ML

Prelude: A Flawed Declaration

MOTION 8: “Identity politics are anti-Marxian and a harmful diversion from the class struggle”

Motion 8, passed by the CPGB-ML, is thoroughly anti-materialist and profoundly reactionary. In this, the party dogwhistles at “LGBT ideology” being harmful to the working class, who are nebulously defined. This motion says nothing but declares loudly a lack of solidarity with struggles of gender and sexuality, alienating not only those oppressed on those grounds but those who are allied with them. The party seems unconcerned with allying with those masses concerned with the wellbeing of LGBT people, instead using the language of conservatism (“identity politics”) to signal this message:

There Are No Gays In The USSR!

“Why gay rights is not a class issue”

If we are to believe the party, the question of gay rights is not only “not a class question”, but also solvable by the communist revolution in itself. When class antagonism ends, the line goes, then LGBT people will be liberated by proxy. These two statements, however, carry an internal contradiction: if LGBT people are not an oppressed class, as people of colour and women are, then the antagonism towards them will not be resolved by revolution. If they are an oppressed class, then the CPGB-ML is failing in its duty to support all classes oppressed by capitalism, and is thus not only failing tactically but theoretically.

However, this contradiction is not resolved with self-criticism, or improvement of the party line, but through dismissal and ignorance – the worst failure of any communist party. Instead, the party chides LGBT people, and the activists supporting their rights, not merely as reactionaries (as they continue to go on later), but are contrasted against the ultimately nebulous term “ordinary people” - the framing of this implying that abnormality and difference is in itself harmful – consciously or not, the party has taken the conservative line of ignorance and repulsion. This does nothing to improve the lives of LGBT people, many of whom are working class precisely because they are discriminated against by capitalists, many, especially trans people, taking up sex work as the only available option. To stand in solidarity with all oppressed classes means to stand for LGBT rights and liberation, and if one ignores the problem it does not go away. “There are no invalids in the USSR!” means nothing to those disabled people specifically oppressed by bad, exclusionary and anti-materialist policy.

The Root of Left Reaction: The Worker as Biotruth

“The reactionary nightmare of ‘gender fluidity’”

Here we find the largest flaw in CPGB-ML’s ideology, in fact, the one from which myriad other flaws originate – the worker, “ordinary”, is not allowed to be corrupted by the outsider, the abnormal. This takes the class status of the worker and turns it into a crude biopolitics, in which the body of the worker, not their status, is at the forefront. In that sense, though they take some token stand against racism, their assertion that “class is the primary struggle” (said directly to a person of colour asking about racial oppression) makes sense. To the CPGB-ML, all oppression consists of class oppression, and everything else is a corruption, a “harmful distraction.” There is a preference for immediate physicality over psychology – which is why, in part, the party denounces trans people.

In this article, the party demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the material conditons not only of LGBT people, but all those who are not oppressed strictly along economic lines. There is a preference given to immediate physicality – the worker’s arm over the worker’s mind. Ultimately, the line on which the CPGB-ML stand is “the worker”, those who are producing in some capacity. Placing the ability to work at the forefront of one’s politics, especially in an age where so many cannot work, is a privilege only the able-bodied can afford. A Communist revolution, without a plan for those most marginalised by capital and thus the least likely to work, is doomed to fail. A politics that does not take into account the mental health of the masses is a rejection of materialism and thus counter- revolutionary in one of its core ideas. Disregarding the importance of mental health, the article states:

There is even a movement termed ‘ableism’ or ‘trans-ableism’. There exist people who say: “I look as if I’ve got two arms and two legs, but actually in reality, I feel like I was born disabled.”

The writer simply cannot comprehend that there exist invisible disabilities, and things that prevent work that aren’t removed limbs. To the party, the worker is thus conceived as machinery – something whose value lies in working at peak efficiency. This is capitalist logic and should be stamped out of any revolutionary theory, instead valuing people inherently as members of a communist society.

On gender, the writer of this article uses vague truisms to point to what may seem like intuitive answers – however, in simplifying the argument so much, it becomes easy to rebut. Geometry and biology are entirely seperate fields, let alone geometry and psychology – the attempt to say “why can’t a circle self-identify as a square” falls flat, because a circle is not an organism. Thus, the question of “is there a material reality” is a thinly-veiled attempt to get the reader to agree to their conception of reality, and what is material. The hammer does not operate without an arm to drive it, and the arm does not operate without a mind to will it. Creating a staw opponent who argues that “there is no material reality” is a fundamental failure in understanding anything outside of the writer’s experience. In that sense, the writer, and by proxy the party, places the individual conception of reality above the masses – they are not following the research, not conducting their own, and thus relying solely on prejudice. Again, this returns to the hand and the mind – both need each other, and the party disregards one, failing to see an entire side of the process. The article proceeds not dialectically, but via assertion – though the writer brags about being an adherent to the dialectical process, they do not practice it. Similarly, just as the party states their anti-racism, their members cannot avoid white chauvinism and pushing people of colour away from the party. For example, this excerpt:

It’s very useful not to trust muslims or not to trust Pakistanis or not to trust Afro-Americans, or “I don’t really like that Nigerian who lives next door to me, they’re a bit different aren’t they?” Well, if people rub along with each other, they get over that don’t they?

The writer goes on to assert that race itself is a construction of the bourgoisie, and should thus be disregarded in revolutionary movements for a unified class line. However, if one were to conceive of capital itself in the same way, then the logic becomes apparently flawed; constructions of the bourgeoisie need to be acknowledged and worked through, not discarded on the altar of progress. Every time a movement fails to acknowledge this, it fails the masses.

Thus, onto gender, a construction of the modern era. Countless examples of non-binary genders have existed in pre- modern societies, especially outside of Europe and its empire; I need not list them here, but examples include Two- Spirit people of First Nations descent, the Waria of Indonesia, the Hirja of India, etc. - all of these conceptions arose independently of one another, long before capital established itself. If we are searching for material reality, the gender binary seems to fly in the face of it – it arises as the Other of the dominant class (men). Gender is a historically contingent category, and is a process of becoming (as Simone de Beauvoir describes) a gender, rather than being born it. Even the sex binary is fundamentally flawed and ideological, as intersex people are routinely violated at birth to enforce it. This binary is purely in the realm of ideas, and as such is anti-materialist. To embrace gender divergence, even gender fluidity, as the title of the article states but does not elaborate on, aligns perfectly with a historically materialist conception of history. The writer accuses trans people of being purely idealist – I have demonstrated that it is in fact the opposite – enforcing the gender and sex binaries are firmly anti-materialist. The division of the working class is not in the removal of these binaries, they are those binaries.

So, I ask, when you routinely ask why women and people of colour do not come to your side, and when you’re constantly accused of queerphobia, do you not perform the self-criticism necessary to grow, and realise that your policies are alienating the masses? Why do you meet the idea of the number of trans people being ten percent, not with engagement, but with rejection and incredulity, inventing some narrative that trans people are telling gay people that they are trans?

There are two answers to this question: one, that your party is ignorant of the facts, and has not done the research necessary to engage with this issue, and has regardless written an article and held a party congress on the issue. The other option is that your party holds a resentment to queer people (thinly veiled over with empty statements of acceptance) many of whom are working-class specifically by modes of capitalist oppression. Both of these solutions render the CPGB-ML unable to represent the masses, and thus unfit to call itself a party of the proletariat.

[theculturedmarxist]

The Problem

In the late afternoon of 10 February 2015, local police in Chapel Hill responded to a report of fired shots. They entered a Finley Forest condominium to find the lifeless bodies of three young Arabs. The first, Deah Barakat, lay dead in the front doorway. The others, his wife Yusor and her sister Razan Abu-Salha, had been slain in the kitchen. All three had been killed with gunshots to the head in an execution-style murder. Over the coming hours and days, as details emerged on social media, it became clear that these young Muslims had been murdered in a hate crime. Seeing this in the context of state-sponsored islamophobia, which had fuelled a growing climate of harassment and hate-crimes against Muslims in the US, as well as the mass slaughter of civilians in drone attacks across the Middle East, activists online started using #MuslimLivesMatter, which was tweeted over one hundred-thousand times, to challenge the lack of coverage.[1]

The outcry surrounding the use of #MuslimLivesMatter came swiftly.[2] Those outraged onlookers, drawing on the language of the most visible movement for racial justice in the United States at the time, #BlackLivesMatter, were met with charges of reductiveness, appropriation and – most potently – anti-blackness. As one contributor to muslimgirl.com wrote:

The pattern of violence against Black people – specifically Black people – is a unique one, with both history and implications that will never be comparable to the struggles of other communities of color in the United States. Institutional racism and discrimination against Black people is evident in our courts, our prisons, our entire justice system.[3]

We have seen this pattern emerging for some time: on one hand, the exceptionalisation of a thing referred to as ‘anti-blackness’; and on the other, the mobilisation of this charge against ‘non-black people of colour’ who attempt to draw comparison between black struggles and their own. In a 2016 lecture, entitled ‘Irreconcilable Anti-Blackness’, Frank B. Wilderson III explicitly sets out to dis-analogise the violence of white supremacy and that of anti-blackness. While his argument – counter-posing the logical nature of racism experienced by so-called ‘non-black people of colour’ to the supposed gratuity and incoherence of violence directed at black people – is central to the relatively small but growing body of literature within the theoretical frame of Afro-pessimism, echoing this broader set of trends. Entrenched in anti-racist theory and practice today is the belief that all racial and ethnic domination is structured around a global hierarchy, with ‘white’ people at the top and ‘black’ people at the bottom. [4] This shift has necessarily coincided with the increasing purchase of the notion of an historically coherent ‘ethnic blackness’ in theoretical and political spaces.

Together, this set of beliefs, as in Wilderson’s earlier-mentioned title, has been given voice through the increasing prevalence of the concept of ‘anti-blackness’. Thus, the tension between the presumptions of this universalising analysis of racial categories and the as-yet unresolved question of blackness, what it is and who possesses it, plagues anti-racist politics and organising. Consequently, the limitations of popular theories of race are becoming increasingly apparent. Indeed, ‘blackness’ can be conjured in a myriad of curious ways, and there remains a conceptual confusion around this term which deserves more attention than it is currently given. This article will therefore show the necessity of interrogating this increasingly dominant conception of blackness and the assumptions it invests in correlating theories of anti-blackness.

The exceptionalism with which ‘anti-black’ racism is treated, along with the territoriality over what are deemed particularly black registers of resistance, in this increasingly powerful assemblage of analyses stands in stark contrast to the most prevalent traditions of black anti-imperialist organising of the 1960s and 1970s. The Black Panther Party lent both their name and Ten Point Programme model to various anti-imperialist groups including the Dalit Panthers, the ‘politically-black’ British Black Panther movement and the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party. Indeed, the Party was among the first political groups in the US to attempt to integrate the antagonism between blackness and whiteness into a broader theory of racial dynamics through Minister for Defense Huey P. Newton’s concept of intercommunalism. Huey took the question of race in the USA and framed it as merely one iteration of America’s incursions on collective self-determination. By reframing the black/white antagonism within the context of a broader critique of the USA’s imperialism, intercommunalism conceived of blackness as historically contingent and aspired to the abolition of race altogether.[5]

Where has this newer politics come from? I argue that these political impulses arise from an increasing disconnection from the intellectual history of the last period of anti-colonial insurgency. The radical politics of the 1960s has been recast within the anti-racist frame – the genesis of a New Left from which identitarianism can ostensibly trace its roots. This is no accident. As Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor stressed, there has been a concerted effort on the part of the political establishment to obscure the history of the last era of black insurgency in the US.[6] Indeed, there have been three central tenets of this erasure. First, the collapsing of the hugely-diverse political traditions represented in the Black liberation struggles of the 1960s and ’70s into a nebulous concept of a Black Power era.[7] Second, the extraction of this period of insurgency from its international context. The meme of militant Black America has been allowed to cannibalise the broader traditions of resistance within which those militants were situated. The 1960s and ’70s were a buoyant period for the oppressed and exploited – as Huey Newton characterised it, Afro-Americans were in fact ‘late to the party’.[8] Third, the conceptual separation between domestic and international resistance. This has facilitated the replacement of anti-imperialist (transnational) frames of thinking with anti-racist (national) ones. The revival of racialism has been the death of genuine solidarity, shaping the political imagination of this generation of theorists and activists for the worse.

Curiously, while the framework has become pervasive in structuring thought on the question of race, no concerted effort has been made to establish what ‘anti-blackness’ means. Embedded in the vagueness of this ethical critique of racism is a set of myths and mystifications around the nature of race. Crucial to this is the absence of a coherent and historically informed definition of ‘black’. In many ways, the recent theoretical interventions of the ‘movement of thought’ termed Afro-pessimism have both shaped, and been shaped by these developments.[9] Thus, this article seeks to intervene in contemporary debates around the nature of race, racism and racial liberation through a sustained critique of the growing Afro-pessimism literature. I will first address the emergence of Afro-pessimism, indexing it to particular developments in anti-racist organising. Then I will provide a critique of two key premises of Afro-pessimist literature: a) the subsumption of the world by the slave relation; and b) the subsumption of ‘Africanness’ by an Americanised conception of Blackness. In my conclusion, I assess the implications of these assumptions for contemporary politics, and point to an engagement with the radical politics of The Black Panther Party and its contemporaries as a possible route towards more-productive thinking.

Something in the Water

In Badagry, Nigeria – a slave town built by a former slave turned slaver – between the barracoon on the mainland and the Point of No Return beyond a small body of water, where slaves became cargo on ships, lies the ‘spirit attenuation’ well which provided the final source of water for hundreds of thousands of slaves who were destined for the Americas. Following reports of slave rebellions on the earliest ships which killed several European slavers, Yoruba slavers responded by charming the water. Today, local legend still holds that to drink from the well will result in memory loss, a complete dislocation one’s history. It is believed that this powerful charm left slaves ready to be remade as the slaver desired because it took from them the memory of freedom. In many ways, the slave in this carefully-kept local history resembles the remaking of blackness itself in Afro-pessimist literature.

Here, we find blackness unmoored from time and space by a ruthless disregard for material historical processes; when read with Fanon, the ‘psycho-affective’ quagmire from which the colonised intellectual must wrench himself: ‘individuals without anchorage, without borders, colorless, stateless, rootless, a body of angels’.[10] At the heart of this blackness, which both preceded the transatlantic slave trade and is created by it, there is no memory before the slave ship. Those various socio-political formations on the African continent, documented locally, which both predated and gave life to the transfer of people across the Atlantic Ocean on an industrial scale cannot and do not exist. In other words, to be racialised as black and to be a slave are treated as one and the same.

Afro-pessimism, as Jared Sexton has pointed out, has largely developed through the ‘proliferation of social media platforms in the same moment when the professoriate groans under the intensified administrative command to turn research into output with eventual market value’.[11] Thus, the position that leading Afro-pessimist scholars – such as Frank B. Wilderson III and Sexton – hold within the academy is in large part dependent on the following that they have garnered among organisers. This in part explains the ascendency of what was once ‘a highly technical dispute in a small corner of the American academy’ to a structuring logic of various political formations in the era of #BlackLivesMatter. Afro-pessimism is a crucial literature to engage with, precisely because it has both shaped and been shaped by the organisational impulses of Afro-American and Black British activists in particular.

To engage Afro-pessimism is, in many ways, to take aim as a moving target. On one hand, the body of literature which Sexton describes as a ‘movement of thought’ sprawls in multiple directions.[12] Culture, society and political struggle have all had the Afro-pessimist gaze turned on them, churning out articles and citations in large numbers. In explaining the increasing organisation of far-right groups, as demonstrated by events in Charlottesville, one prominent British commentator mused that ‘Afro-pessimism is the best history of America.’ The breadth of analyses that it has inspired is certainly striking. On the other hand, much of the literature itself is near impenetrable for the layperson. It rests on both the peculiar invocation of various canonical figures in the Black Liberation tradition, and the collectivisation of various registers of blackness. This has meant that the literature is typically mediated through reductive simplification, and its sometimes-contradicting conclusions taken at face value.

Some points of clarification are therefore necessary. First, though the literature of Afro-pessimism is broad, these texts are, and often confess to be, largely derivative of the parameters set out in ‘the announcement and enactment of Afro-pessimism in the work of Frank B. Wilderson III and Jared Sexton’.[13] To this end, I will primarily be engaging their work. Second, my thoughts on Afro-pessimism are structured by a distinction between those who identify themselves as Afro-pessimists (Sexton, Wilderson, et cetera) and those whose work has been retrospectively drafted by Afro-pessimists into their project (Frantz Fanon, Hortense Spillers, Steve Biko, James Baldwin, et cetera). This distinction is especially important in the case of Afro-pessimism because the framework of thinking developed by the former often relies on partial and self-serving readings of the latter. Third, I seek to engage the theoretical structure and premises of Afro-pessimism, beginning with its conception of blackness.

In this, I mean to distinguish my contribution from Fred Moten’s Black Optimism, in which Afro-pessimism has found a comfortable antagonist.[14] Against the space that Moten opens between ‘the fact of blackness and the lived experience of the black’ – ‘the irreducible and impossible sociality’ of Black life, I posit a re-interrogation of the very notion of Blackness as a fissure whose character we can easily assume.[15] Indeed, Moten accepts Wilderson’s claim that ‘the bridge between blackness and antiblackness is “the unbridgeable gap between Black being and Human life”’, but neither attempt to elaborate the meaning of Blackness beyond the assumption of a coherence between Africa and her slave diasporas.[16]

Upon interrogation, Sexton’s assumption that ‘the slave is paradigmatically black’ brings two axioms to the fore.[17] The first, the insistence that the position of the slave is necessarily black. Black, here, is to be understood in a morphological sense. However, this must be taken with the second axiom in order that the implicit biological definition of ‘black’ cohere; slaveness links the Negro and the African. Wilderson articulates it thus: ‘slaveness is something that has consumed Blackness and Africanness, making it impossible to divide slavery from Blackness’.[18] The manner in which Africanness disappears into Blackness ought to be suspect: it suggests that slaveness is the thing which connects the Negro to the African with no move to elaborate the causal logic. And yet, it is from these, seemingly incontestable, assumptions that the Afro-pessimist imaginary springs forth.

The following takes aim at these twin axioms in turn because the stakes are so high. As I will show, the veiled interlocutor of Afro-pessimism is not the ‘White Master’ but what has in recent times been termed the ‘non-Black person of colour’. The paradigmatic blackness of the slave in Afro-pessimism acts not to establish the anti-blackness of white supremacy but the supposed anti-blackness of the ‘non-Black person of colour’. The white must challenge her racism, but the Native American, Arab, Asian or Latino must root out the anti-blackness which is surely inscribed in the shadiest corners of their mind. Indeed, both Sexton and Wilderson explicitly take aim at ‘non-black people of colour’.[19]

We saw this in action when the York University Black Graduate Students Collective called on all people to boycott a 2016 Israeli Apartheid Week event on campus which featured journalist Rania Khalek. In an ‘Anti-Black Racism Bulletin’, they denounced her as ‘notoriously anti-Black’ with no elaboration of her apparent offences.[20] Twitter was far more vocal in its charges. On the one hand, a previous questioning of what she referred to as ‘segregated organising’, when #BlackLivesMatter asked white people not to attend a Cleveland gathering, was taken as an offensive appropriation of a painful chapter of Afro-American history. On the other, the deeper charge was her attempts to analogise Black and other anti-imperialist struggles – framed by many popular bloggers as ‘appropriation’. This had come to a head through her consistent critique of the Obamas as symbols of racial justice while US drone-strikes waged destruction on Pakistan and Yemen.

In the debate that ensued, juju jones, a blogger, invoked Frank Wilderson ‘on ahistorical comparisons between Black struggle & the fight to free Palestine’.[21] Commenting on comparisons between the plight of Palestinians and Afro-Americans, Wilderson says, ‘That’s just bullshit. First, there’s no time period in which Black police and slave domination have ever ended. Second, the Arabs and the Jews are as much a part of the Black slave trade – the creation of Blackness as social death – as anyone else.’[22] Here, Wilderson’s work is not to situate the European settler-colonial project given life through Israel within a broader anti-imperialist frame. Instead, he makes two theoretical moves: first, to reject the analogy between the carceral violence of two settler-colonial states; second, to place Palestinians (equated in his comments with Arabs) and their colonisers (equated in his comments with Jewishness) in a solidarity of anti-blackness through a significant role in the ‘Black slave trade’. The historical conflations of Wilderson’s claim, and the contortions that are required to for him find himself there, notwithstanding, he goes on to tie this to the impossibility of true contemporary solidarity: ‘As I told a friend of mine, “yeah we’re going to help you get rid of Israel, but the moment that you set up your shit we’re going to be right there to jack you up, because anti-Blackness is as important and necessary to the formation of Arab psychic life as it is to the formation of Jewish psychic life.” … we know, once they get over [their own hurdles], the anti-Blackness that sustains them will rear its ugly head again against us. So that we don’t fall into a sort of genuine bonding with people who are really, primarily, using Black energy to catalyze and energize their struggle.’[23]

This saga, and Wilderson’s referenced comments, rest on a set of four intertwined logics: a) ‘race’ is necessarily globally consistent, a science of continental bloodwork; b) blackness is a stable category referring to a historically coherent people whose experiences of violence are necessarily tied by a common ethnicity – there is a clearly identifiable ‘us’; c) the phenomenon of anti-blackness is exceptional, existing in a register of experience that is essentially different to all other experiences of racism; and d) the analogisation (by people of colour) of various manifestations of racism and imperialism, insofar as it draws on black experiences and therefore ‘black energy’, is tantamount to anti-blackness.

No doubt, the institution of ‘chattel slavery’, along with all the material processes for which the phrase stands has become a shorthand, has a palimpsestic afterlife.[24] The conjuring of racialism to salvage the practice of slavery has left an indelible mark, underwriting the script of the repressive state-apparatuses of the US state. However, Afro-pessimism has mistaken a single frame for ‘the afterlife of slavery’, and a partial frame at that. Central to this project is an ambivalence concerning the success of liberatory struggles of anti-colonial insurgency in forcing the subject of racial domination to hurriedly scrawl all over the script to salvage the political order that he had created throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Wilderson and Sexton are therefore holding up fading polaroids and asking us to see a panoramic tapestry. Through this elucidation, I argue that the debate around political blackness raging in the United Kingdom is not so parochial after all, thus setting the stage for crucial questions about the intramural dynamics of anti-racist political formations today.

The Master and Slave Transformed

Like Marxism, Black Consciousness was also hobbled in an essential way. Fundamental to Marxism is the notion that the world is unethical due to its subsumption by relations of capital. What we learn from Fanon and others is that the world is unethical due to its subsumption by the slave relation.

— Frank B. Wilderson III[25]

Out of slavery the Negro burst into the lists where his masters stood. Like those servants who are allowed once every year to dance in the drawing room, the Negro is looking for a prop. The Negro has not become a master. When there are no longer slaves, there are no longer masters. … But the Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom, for he has not fought for it.

— Frantz Fanon[26]

There is a long (and justifiably) maligned reductionist line that posits racism as simply a ‘seed of division sown by the bosses to divide the workers’. This line, both when it is used to argue that calls to combat racism among workers are unnecessarily divisive, and when it is used to argue that challenging racism is necessary for revolutionary politics, treats ‘race’ as significant only insofar as it is an obstacle to class unity. As noted by contributors to the Racism Research Project in 1975, we continue to lack a distinctively Marxist account of ‘racialisation’.[27] In the absence of a coherent theoretical framework which roots the superstructural phenomenon of racialisation in the economic processes that demand it, many Marxists have succumbed to this essentially conspiratorial account of racism, or have been content to allow this crucial theoretical gap to fester.[28]

Seemingly without an economic base, racism has increasingly been treated as a purely social relation; distinct and extricable from class. Consequently, Marxist scholars have instead typically approached the question of ‘race’ through resistance, emphasising solidarity as instances in which the barrier of ‘race’ has been overcome to achieve working-class unity. This has meant that an interrogation of the crises to which racialisation responds has been largely left by the wayside.

It is into this conceptual space that Afro-pessimist literature inserts itself. The mistake of this Marxist orthodoxy, Afro-pessimists argue, is in its attempt to subsume an ostensibly ‘different’ phenomenon of white supremacy under the banner of capitalism. Thus, it argues, race belongs to the realm of the structurally determined, a global juggernaut organised around a hierarchy of morphological groups which provides the ‘real’ antagonism of modernity. As Frank B. Wilderson III intimates, ‘the black subject reveals marxism’s inability to think white supremacy as the base and, in so doing, calls into question marxism’s claim to elaborate a comprehensive, or in the words of Antonio Gramsci, “decisive” antagonism’.[29] The United States, he argues, ‘is constructed at the intersection of both a capitalist and white supremacist matrix��� but Marxism is impotent in the face of the latter.[30] It is taken for granted that this can be generalised globally.

The notion, advanced by Afro-pessimists, that to be ‘ethnically’ black is paradigmatically different from any other racial group rests primarily on the presumption that the master–slave dynamic is essentially racialised. A tension emerges as Sexton and Wilderson go further. For them it is neither race, nor racism, which structures white supremacy; rather, White Supremacy is just one iteration of a global anti-black solidarity. Black is not a race, since blacks are the antagonist of the very category of human, and yet it is. Indeed, the category of ontological non-being, which Sexton and Wilderson identify, relies heavily on the assumptive logic of ‘Race’ – following from Patrick Wolfe’s paradox, this is in itself a powerful sign of the extent to which racial ideology has embedded itself in our capacity to conceptualise difference.[31]

Thus, the purportedly distinctive dynamic between ‘the Human and the Black’ is widely articulated through ‘anti-blackness’ and its contemporary accoutrements. Today, the concept of ‘anti-blackness’ has come to signify, not only the particularity of racism against those deemed black, but also the centrality of such racism to all paradigms of racial domination. In this sense, Afro-pessimism emerges from a tradition of ethnocentric analyses, which focuses on the particular intensity of systemic white domination of black people. However, Afro-pessimism marks a departure from this tradition through a theorisation of anti-blackness that takes aim at other racially dominated groups as fundamentally and irredeemably implicated in the domination of black people.

Afro-pessimists want us to think through these relationships as existing on different planes. Between the poor white and the white master, and between the ‘non-black person of colour’ and the white, there is a sort of reasoned violence. For the black, on the other hand, there is primarily gratuitous violence – existing in a state of incomprehensible ‘external superviolence’ and internalised self-hatred.[32] Wilderson renders this logic explicit when he asserts, ‘every other group lives in a context of violence which has what I would call a sort of psychological grounding wire, which means that they can write a sentence about why they are experiencing that violence. … For a Black person to try and emulate that kind of interpretive lens, the problem becomes a lot bigger. For us this is the ongoing tactic of a strategy for human renewal.’[33]

This emerges from a reading of Fanon that begins from the points where he seems ‘at a loss’ to explain what he is confronted with.[34] Contrasting Fanon to Marx, Wilderson comments that ‘[the] slave relation … relegates the capital relation … to a conflict, and not the antagonism that Marx … thought it to be’.[35] Crucial to his argument is the idea that Fanon’s critique of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic sets out to show some essential difference between the worker/capitalist relation and the Negro/White master relation. Wilderson goes on to assert that ‘were [the worker/capitalist relation] to be “solved” (were it to cease to exist as a relation, after the victory of the proletariat), the world would still be subsumed by the slave relation: an antagonism not between the position of the worker and that of the boss, but between the Human and the Black’.[36]

This reading treats Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as a series of independent moments, disregarding his emphasis on temporality in the introduction.[37] In a lecture, titled after one of his articles, Sexton argues that these moments are in tension, constituting ‘a slippage between the universal denunciation of all exploitation, and the conceptual conflation of all such suffering under the broadest heading’.[38] It therefore effaces the relationship between these moments of complete despair and his moments of clarity – where these mystifications of ‘race’, the burden of incomprehensibility that they impose, and the nihilism which they invite, are turned on their head within the same text through the illuminating capacity of struggle. Turning, for example, to Fanon’s essay on ‘The Negro and Recognition’, embedded in his critique of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic is a striking demystification. Clarifying his motivations, Fanon writes:

I hope I have shown that here the master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work. In the same way, the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation. The Negro wants to be like the master. Therefore, he is less independent than the Hegelian slave. In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object. Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object.[39]

What does Fanon mean when he says that what the master ‘wants from the slave is not recognition but work’? Against Hegel’s ‘absolute reciprocity’, Fanon advances a conception of the negro slave as the alienated epitome of exploitation; which is to say that the master and the slave in Fanon’s account are not produced by a relation of anti-blackness (in the new life that this term has taken on) but by exploitation. This harkens back to Wilderson’s earlier misunderstanding of the base in Marxist theory. Fanon, in contrast to Wilderson, gives ontological priority to the exploitative relation of production between master and slave. This priority is reiterated elsewhere, when Fanon takes aim at attempts to assert a global blackness: ‘“Negroes” are in the process of disappearing, since those who created them are witnessing the demise of their economic and cultural supremacy.’[40]

Fanon is less concerned with the slave as an opposing pole from which ‘Man’ has built community – he has no such illusions about the material existence of white fraternity.[41] Culture, he argues, is first and foremost national in nature.[42] Instead, Fanon is concerned with how the profits from her labour finance society. We might then think of the position of the slave as the capitalist aspiration for all workers – stripped of all that which renders her recognisable, the worker as ‘a mere mechanism’, but possible only through the mystification of race.[43] In contrast to Wilderson’s assertion that ‘an ensemble of ontological questions that has as its foundation accumulation and fungibility as a grammar of suffering’ exclusively marking the black as outside of ‘[a humanist] discourse that has as its foundation alienation and exploitation as a grammar of suffering’, the master–slave relation which Fanon proposes upsets this binary.[44]

Fanon’s elucidation exposes the slave as contingently black, not ‘paradigmatically black’. What is the difference? The Afro-pessimist sees the world as structured by a non-black solidarity in preventing the ontological possibility of black life. Were ‘black’ meant as a metaphor for the condition of total alienation from self, this might make sense.[45] However, because the Afro-pessimist imaginary ties itself to a morphological account of blackness, this leads us to a theoretical dead end. In this world-view, it therefore becomes necessary to begin by treating ‘race’ as a problem fundamentally rooted in the formation of sociality – in which the Black precedes the historical order and the processes, both violent and mundane, which create her. By contrast, to think through the implications of contingency is to confront the reality that these racial categories – categories that Wilderson and Sexton treat as absolute – are actually unstable as evidence that something else is afoot. It is to see ‘race’ not as an anchor, but as a mystification conjured to weather crises of legitimacy.

For example, we can examine how Sexton links the condition of the Afro-American slave, the free black and the African thus: ‘because blackness serves as the basis of enslavement in the logic of a transnational political and legal culture, it permanently destabilises the position of any nominally free black population’.[46] The presumption of a shared (presumably global) legal and political culture within which the assertion that blackness was a basis of enslavement might be made is quite mistaken. Even in the US, the centralisation of the legal and political status of blacks only emerged at the moment of formal abolition following the American Civil War. Prior to this, the internal border system of the US produced divergent rationales and attendant juridical technology for enslavement.

The South might be considered to fit the relationship that Sexton suggests. For example, Supreme Court judges in Georgia argued that the free black was ‘associated still with the slave in this State’.[47] However, the North tells a different story, wherein free blacks were likened to ‘white women and children … denied many political rights but did not therefore forfeit their basic status as citizens’.[48] In any case, the debates within slave states in the late antebellum period included the proposition of ‘forcing their free black populations to elect between re-enslavement and leaving the state’.[49] The concerns of legislators and judges in the South, that free black populations might inspire slave revolts and undermine the racial order, indicate that their motivations were not paradigmatic but pragmatic. This is to say that these political and legal elites were well aware of the fragility of the racial order that they had created.

Indeed, on the relationship between the free black and the slave, a sketch of the thinking of legislators in the Northern and Southern states offers a radically different picture to Sexton’s. Rather than being a given, the position of the free black was both contested and geographically dependent. Interestingly, during an 1820 Congressional debate regarding a clause in Missouri’s proposed constitution which would bar free blacks from entering the state, it was the condition of Native Americans which structured the logic regarding the position of free blacks: ‘the Indians born in the states continue to be aliens and so, I contend, do the free negroes’.[50]

Contrary to Sexton’s assertion of the exceptional nature of the Afro-American experience in this regard, legislators consciously rooted their position in a nexus of other ‘undesirables’ which included both Native Americans and white ‘paupers’. The preoccupation with the condition of ‘poor whites’ is certainly not a new phenomenon. Legislators in the antebellum South were consumed with the implications of (white) pauperism which meant that, ‘the adjudged pauper is subordinated to the will of others, and reduced to a condition but little removed from that of chattel slavery, and until recently, by statute of 1847, c. 12, like the slave, was liable to be sold upon the block of the auctioneer, for service or support.’[51] Moreover, it is important to note that the Northern and Southern states proffered different rationales for the contested status of free blacks, and that, at this time, the federal government’s role in determining the parameters of the claimable rights of individuals ‘was largely restricted to establishing the requirements for naturalization and the requirements for alien ownership of federal lands’.[52]

The fragility of hierarchies of race is inherent to the project of racialism. Rather than emanating from some assuredness regarding the morphological provenance of racialised ‘personhood’ and ‘unpersonhood’, what we see here is the adoption of specific policy-practices in order to construct a world in which the insurrection against domination that the American Revolution represented could co-exist with the continued brutal exploitation that slavery represented. And so, the slave was not created so that the American might exist; instead, the black was created so that slavery might survive republican fervour. Indeed, we must be careful about operating at a level of abstraction which would enable the post hoc justifications of enslavement concocted by Southern slave owners embattled by a crisis of legitimacy to shape the historiography of chattel slavery.

Wilderson and Sexton want us to believe both that the myriad forms of exploitation – indentured servitude, ghettoisation, mass incarceration, police brutality et cetera – which followed the formal abolition of slavery constitute a continuation of enslavement (or its ‘afterlife’), and that the position of the slave is fundamentally different from the position of the ‘white’ or ‘Indian’ indentured servant who often performed similar labour and whose resistance incurred violent repression. Such a framework mystifies three crucial facts: first, that the ‘blackness’ of the category of slave was both contingent and unstable;[53] second, that to exceptionalise African enslavement obscures the many categories of ‘alien’ which were comparable to the negro in the US context; third, that natal alienation was not from some African collectivity but from specific and diverse social formations in Western Africa.[54]

Between the Nigger and the Kaffir

There can be no such thing as rigorously identical cultures. To believe one can create a black culture is to forget oddly enough that ‘Negroes’ are in the process of disappearing, since those who created them are witnessing the demise of their economic and cultural supremacy.

— Frantz Fanon[55]

Thus, we return to the second premise of Afro-pessimist theory – a necessary conceptual convergence between the African and the Negro. Wilderson parses this logic flippantly: ‘slaveness is something that has consumed Blackness and Africanness, making it impossible to divide slavery from Blackness’.[56] This convergence is developed in greater depth by Sexton: ‘As in the case of black immigrants to the United States, the movements for decolonization in Africa encounter the “racial calculus and political arithmetic” … of slavery as an internal limit on their capacity to claim (national or regional or continental) sovereignty and independence in the manner of their Asian and Latin American comrades.’[57] The manner in which Africanness disappears into Blackness is indeed suspect: it distorts the conceptual space between the Negro and the African which Fanon elaborates. In short, the Afro-American scholar’s desire for an American genealogy of slaveness to overwhelm the complex encounters between Africans and imperialism alone, however fierce his intuition, cannot make it such.

In large part, the problem for Wilderson and Sexton is that their analysis takes for granted the salience of a phenotypical register of blackness. They read Fanon, presuming that his different registers of ‘black’ are one and the same. This can be addressed by a return to his more resonant text of the period – The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon explicitly argues that the relationship between national consciousness on the African continent and a shared African consciousness ‘does not rest upon a metaphysical principle’, but on the mindfulness to the rule that a colonialism which ‘lingers’ anywhere poses a threat to freedom everywhere.[58] In his essay on national culture, he addresses these different registers head on. Transformed by his experience as part of the Algerian Revolution, he revisits negritude, which he had previously described as his ‘last chance’.[59] He argues that, ‘once the concept of negritude had been elaborated’, the project of establishing the ‘existence of an African culture’ with the ‘inner dynamism’ of distinctive national cultures faced serious problems.[60] He goes on:

[Gradually] the black Americans realized that their existential problems differed from those faced by the Africans. … But once the initial comparisons had been made and subjective feelings had settled down, the black Americans realized that the objective problems were fundamentally different. The principle and purpose of the freedom rides whereby black and white Americans endeavor to combat racial discrimination have little in common with the heroic struggle of the Angolan people against the iniquity of Portuguese colonialism.[61]

This point can be elaborated through a comparison of the impulses that distinguish processes of racialisation in the antebellum US from those in colonial Africa. Orlando Patterson’s ‘social death’ thesis, which Wilderson and Sexton take as inherent to the black condition, posits three elements of coercive power in slavery: violence, dishonour and natal alienation. It is easy to see all three manifested in the condition of the black slave in the Americas. Dislocated from kinship relations and subjected to brutal relations of force, ‘their political existence [had] been destroyed’.[62] Try as they might, Sexton and Wilderson’s generalisation of natal alienation as embedded in the black condition cannot stand against the empirical evidence that we now have regarding the technologies of colonial rule.

In colonial southern Africa, the need for labour to service the farms, mines and industries – set up by settlers for the purposes of capital accumulation – necessitated interventions in the pre-capitalist social formations that still existed in the periphery.[63] On one hand, labour needed to be geographically mobile: this meant that the formal, predominantly male workforce needed to spend increasing periods of time away from the homestead. On the other hand, labour migrancy presented the possibility of ‘detribalisation’, disrupting birthrates and the possibility of ‘full proletarianisation’.[64]

Consequently, urban centres and the rural periphery had an interdependent but contradictory relationship in which the colonial administrations required both the integration of the native into capitalistic wage labour and the maintenance of ‘elements of pre-existing relationships’ to preserve the ability to reproduce the workforce.[65] The contradiction between legitimacy and accumulation meant that colonial authorities frequently intervened to strengthen the hold of kinship bonds, in order to secure young men’s labour in a system of indirect rule. Wage labour was ethnicised, with ethnic identity often determining which forms of labour were performed. Workers were often employed through ‘tribal’ authorities. Thus, the African’s primary relationship to the state was neither as a worker, nor as a black, but as Xhosa, Zulu, et cetera. These cultural identities were in turn stabilised as ‘biological’ lineages. This fragmentary worker status, in which an interaction between the urban mining and cash-crop areas and the (ethnicised) homestead was institutionally mandated, refracted relations of super-exploitation.[66]

This phenomenon of ‘class-ethnic structures’ stands in stark contrast to the technologies of the transatlantic slave trade. Without a steady stream of slave labour from across an ocean, colonial authorities had to consider the long-term reproduction of the workforce. Without the complete dislocation from traditional hierarchies of authority that the transatlantic passage represented, colonial authorities found themselves competing with pre-existing loyalties and political obligations. Thus, these problems were incorporated and transformed by administrators who sought to stabilise and absorb these pre-colonial socio-political formations.[67] Thus, while it is understandable that the ‘blacks who lived in the United States, Central, and Latin America in fact needed a cultural matrix to cling to’, the phenotypical register of blackness obscures much more than it illuminates regarding the various technologies mobilised to violently incorporate Africans into global capitalism.[68]

Were we to think of these two cases in conjunction, without the baggage of a mystifying search for a programmatic ‘anti-blackness’, we see a different set of similarities. Consider, for example, Steve Biko’s claim that ‘being black is not a matter of pigmentation’, which is elaborated in the logic he advances in addressing the unity, under the banner of blackness, of those designated as ‘Africans’, ‘Indians’ and ‘Coloureds’ by Apartheid:

What we should at all times look at is the fact that:

We are all oppressed by the same system.

That we are oppressed to varying degrees is a deliberate design to stratify us not only socially but also in terms of the enemy’s aspirations.

Therefore it is to be expected that in terms of the enemy’s plan there must be this suspicion and that if we are committed to the problem of emancipation to the same degree it is part of our duty to bring to the black people the deliberateness of the enemy’s subjugation scheme.[69]

Biko’s second point is crucial. Afro-pessimism treats the distinction between morphological blackness and non-blackness as simply social (which is to say that it conceives of race as a hierarchy of stigma, in which the permanently dishonoured state of blacks places them outside of humanity); Wilderson and Sexton relegate dynamics of exploitation as incidental to blackness. Biko’s point is a corrective to this, opening the door to an exploration of the manner in which the class-ethnic structure, and its afterlife in post-colonial states, mirrors in many ways the class-racial structure of US slave society, and its afterlife.[70] These structures act to mystify relations of production. We see class relations materially refracted through ethnic and racial lines. Relatedly, the division of labour along racial and ethnic lines. In colonial southern Africa, white and Indian workers were incorporated into this structure through the reservation of specific, often skilled, roles for these groups.[71] In the US, this manifested first in hierarchies of unwaged labour, then in the active exclusion of blacks from various industries and skilled positions.

Thus, when Sexton describes the position of the Black thus – ‘A slave is one without standing anywhere, no matter how elevated in role or material circumstance. … Even the enslaved state functionary or military conscript. Even the manumitted slave gainfully employed, awaiting recapture’ – we must see this move for what it is, an abdication on the part of Afro-pessimism of a responsibility to contend with both the divergent processes of racialisation and ethnicisation in colonial and slave contexts, and the material reorientation of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ spearheaded by the National Liberation tradition, in which both Fanon and Biko situate their work. Indeed, in this light, the incomprehensibility of ‘external superviolence’ which characterises Blackness for Wilderson is exposed as a mystification produced by his own loaded problematic.

Can’t Fight, Won’t Fight

To educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act.

— Frantz Fanon[72]

So I think that what I have to offer is not a way out. What I have to offer is an analysis of the problem.

— Frank Wilderson[73]

It is often taken for granted that movements which resist dominant forms of exploitation and oppression have the capacity to reproduce themselves in different forms, at different points in history. As a result, we are liable to appropriate the language and heroes of past political insurgency and imagine ourselves the bearers of their traditions. This presumption, which unthinkingly ties political traditions of the past to contemporary politics, is quite mistaken. Of course, Marx has a line about tragedy and farce which is now clichéd. As a consequence, the political salience of historical retrieval is not always immediately obvious, both to organisers who often relate to political tradition through a series of canonical memes, and to historians for whom the task of reclaiming context usually serves to trap political logics in the past.

It is easy to imagine why, in the context of a global shift in the balance of forces, when revolution seemed imminent, the Panthers were able to construct an integrative theory of racial solidarity between people of colour. Where today we have seen the privatisation of various crucial functions of the state’s repressive apparatus, for them, the enemy was visibly unified; the troops on the ground in Vietnam bore the same stars and stripes as the police forces which terrorised black communities within the US. Thus, the literature of the Party is replete with striking analyses which are attentive to our capacity to redefine which communities of resistance we see ourselves as part of. The Party was able to attend to the particular struggles of Afro-Americans whilst maintaining that the subject of revolution was universal, thus asserting the necessary interdependence of human freedom. Consider, for example, these comments from the Party’s International Co-ordinator Connie Matthew’s speech at the Vietnam Moratorium demonstration, and Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Chapter and founder of the famous Rainbow Coalition in Chicago:

We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.

(Fred Hampton)[74]

Now whenever the Vietnamese fight, and they are fighting, and they have won the war, they are fighting for you here. … Now, I am saying you have had what is known as group freedom and you are trying to find individual freedom. We are all one people, this is all one country, in fact in the world we are all one people, so until everyone has known what group freedom is you are not going to be able to exist in your hippy and yippie societies with individual freedom. 

(Connie Matthews)[75]

These in turn echo Bobby Seale’s mantra that ‘the best care package we can send to the other liberation struggles around the world is the work that we do at home.’ [76]

The Black Panther Party had developed towards this politics of intercommunalism through sustained contact with the national-liberation movements of the global South, most notably through Algiers. This engagement opened up the space for the articulation of a universalist politics through the particularity of localised forms of domination. It is no wonder, then, that a surviving Party reading-list includes Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Studies on a Dying Colonialism, written through the transformative experience of participation in the Algerian Revolution, rather than the Afro-pessimist-favoured Black Skin, White Masks.[77] This stands in stark contrast to theoretical tendencies in contemporary ‘anti-blackness’ theory. Today, the prevalent engagement with the latter, instead of the former, has produced readings which extract Fanon from the context of struggle which animated his work. This leads people to treat him as simply a theorist of race, rather than a revolutionary who saw race as a technology of imperialism.

However, it is important to remember that the Panthers were not the only ones articulating such a radical form of solidarity. They shared their analyses with the infamous ‘political blackness’, which now sees the anti-racist left in the UK turn in on itself, as well as the South African Black Consciousness movement. When the Panthers closed the gap between the local and global arenas, this undermined the ideological stability of racial difference. For South African students, and migrants in Britain, an expansive definition of Black – incorporating Africans and Asians (mostly from the subcontinent) in Britain, and Africans, Indians and ‘coloured people’ in South Africa – presented a substantial challenge not only to the systemic racism faced by those colonial and post-colonial subjects within the metropole on one hand, and at the heart of a settler-colonial project of accumulation on the other, but also to the very processes of racialisation and ethnicisation which mystify relations of exploitation.

If one can imagine why, in strength, the hand of solidarity is easily extended, this raises pertinent questions about the contemporary political arena. The 1980s neoliberal backlash against the increasing political power of the Third World and its diasporas in the West has resulted in a chronically weak Left and a restructuring of the economic and social relations upon which communities were conceived. It is in this context that the #BlackLivesMatter movement and more academically-directed decolonisation movements such as Rhodes Must Fall have emerged and spread across the globe. Both movements, and their eponymous slogans, intervene in a historically unprecedented moment, where identity-based social justice politics have largely replaced class politics. While Union density in Europe and North America is waning and the language of class is increasingly scarce, a new brand of identity politics is on the ascendancy in many arenas, not least university campuses.

Though Afro-pessimism could well do without contemporary identity politics, and intersectionality, its most recognisable watchword – and in many ways is trying to – it is a gap left by intersectionality, in accounting for the existence (rather than nature) of oppression that has brought it into political spaces. Thus, in order to understand the zeitgeist of anti-racist organising today, we must be allowed to fearlessly interrogate the two as integrative, with an implicit social theory which is profoundly limited in what it conceives of as politically possible. Without the transformative and clarifying power of struggle, the theoretical tension between individual and structure with which Afro-pessimism is confronted, just like in Crenshaw’s juridical theory, is resolved through a particular concept of identity as the manner in which structure manifests in individuals. This leaves us with a social theory that treats structures of domination as pathogenic, creating multiple oppressor and oppressed binaries. Against the pathologisation of the oppressed, this politics pathologises ‘privilege’. It results in a logic which dictates that not to share in the experiences which are generalised among a given group is to be implicated in the oppression of that group. In other words, it means the impossibility of genuine solidarity.

Afro-pessimism meets this charge by positing an ‘anti-black’ solidarity among ‘non-black’ people. Thus, it is concerning that the framework acts as a mechanism of determining social power (the right to speak on or organise around issues) in political spaces with three key premises: Firstly, collapsing the distinction between ‘blackness’ as a project of mystification – along with its social, political and economic processes of non-consensual ethnicisation – and ‘Africanness’ as a historical fact. Secondly, the essentialisation of blackness, as a coherent and stable category that was invested with a set of stigmatising values by imperial encounters, rather than being de facto created by the imperial encounters themselves. Third, the collectivisation of ‘black’ trauma within an imaginary, which is reminiscent of Black Nationalism, and sees the transatlantic slave trade as simultaneously an origin-story and an (albeit crucial) event in the longer trajectory of a coherent people.

What, then, are we fighting for? I want to open the door to this critical, but absent, conversation around anti-racist organising – the space for such conversations is desperately needed. Indeed, many of the claims about race that I have challenged created a suffocating climate in the last decade in which dissent from shared assumptions and attempts to develop theoretical grounds for solidarity are routinely characterised as ‘anti-black’.

Thinking back to the words of Fanon and Wilderson which opened this conclusion, we see a contrast that illuminates phenomena responsible for the contemporary prominence of this particular language of black exceptionalism. However, the best that this politics can offer us is a fight without a purpose. Since this account of how the world works genuinely believe that these identities – and the conflicts which they purportedly entail – are insurmountable, its conception of emancipation is either messianic, genocidal, or it otherwise does not believe that emancipation is possible. Thus, anti-blackness, an unrelenting and totalising beast, an omnipresent hindrance to selfhood, is impossible to effectively resist. Like Fanon’s French negro, freedom in this account must come to blacks from without – to struggle is pointless. And yet, for this very reason, having abdicated liberatory struggle in favour of despair, when dancing in the ashes at the end of the world, we would still ‘[know] nothing of the cost of freedom’.

[anotherworldnowblog]

1

TOWARDS A THEORY OF A FEEDBACK LOOP OF GOOD VIBRATIONS!

(December 2019 - January 2020)

“The cult of competition must be replaced by the cult of solidarity and of sharing.” - Franco Berardi, Futurability

A knowing smile forms underneath my scarf when I pass the bike cop. I smile because I feel, deeply, that his days instilling terror from above us are numbered. Everything from the rusted, oozing “el” tracks to the fact that damn near the entire anti-war protest stopped to help when a younger marcher fell to the ground to the way you are looking at me right now is practically screaming out a song of love, life, and possibility. I allow this tingling, rushing feeling to fill me completely, from my calloused heels up to my swelling throat. I’m high from it. I have developed a new superpower. I can see hope everywhere now. I’m drunk with belief in us. Until experiencing it first hand, I might have been convinced that this level of hope was either dangerous, delusional, or - at the very least - unsustainable. That I’d fall into lazy paralysis and a misguided belief in the inevitability of a communist future. But that’s not really how hope works, I think.

Hope is not belief that something is actively happening (i.e. the end of global capitalism), nor is it rooted even in the odds of some potential outcome (i.e. the odds that ***** and I end up together forever). Hope flows out of the possible, indifferent of likelihood. “The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave” (Rebecca Solnit, Hope In The Dark). What comes next is still unwritten, and as long as that remains so, all possibilities are drawn into equivalence in their non-existence, their not-yet-happenedness. To say “anything is possible” is probably too much. As we have said elsewhere, the possible is inscribed in the present (Berardi). But I have never felt so sure that somewhere within the vast, twisting tree of the presently possible there lies at least a few better worlds. And signs seemingly affirming the existence of these possible worlds are blossoming around the globe and rebounding across its networks. Despite the neoliberal capitalists’ attempts to automate the course of history through financial trickery, ideology, and digitization, we are still here in the miserable present, and the future is just as not-here-yet, or “dark,” as ever.

I have come to believe that, at this late stage of capitalism, hope takes on meaning beyond the mere apprehension of a desirable possibility. It transcends its designation as an affective state and moves in the direction of duty and action, or praxis. The maturity of neoliberal capitalism, the pervasive twin logics of finance and digitization, and the social repercussions of existing within a near-Absolute network conjointly give rise to a moment where our hope for the abolition of the nightmarish “present state of things” can be carefully deployed as a weapon or tool for guiding latent possibility into The Really Existing. In the new economy, our sincere belief in the possibility of a future together founded upon ideals of love, global solidarity, and the broadest possible conception of the common good becomes the means of achieving the world we so clearly deserve.

After the neoliberal turn in the 1970’s and 80’s, there could be no doubt: financialization of the economy had fully decoupled the public good from private profit. Major financial institutions were now gambling against the people, at times against the state itself, and even against the very planet’s continued habitability. The economic foundation upon which emerges our society has been transformed by neoliberal capitalism into a depressing mixture of doubt, mistrust, bad faith (not to mention racialized violence, hyper-exploitation, and a politics of cynical inclusion utilizing a cybernetic panopticon). The pace of life quickened to keep up with a system that’s sole focus was short-term profit and ever faster circulation of capital. Drugs were invented to ensure workers’ ability to keep up with the new demands of an accelerating world. Work itself was transformed into an isolated, not to mention precarious, endeavor. Where there had once been factory floors there are now freelancers and independent contractors, where there had been careers there now only stands part-time or seasonal jobs, or “gigs.”

But more than just the physical terrain of work changed with the rise of neoliberalism; production itself was transformed. Today, “it is not use value but emotive or cultic value that plays a constitutive role in the economy of consumption… emotion comes to possess value for capitalism only when a switch to immaterial production occurs. Emotions have become a means of production only in our own times” (Byung-Chul Han, Psychopoltics). The means of production today is nebulous, hard to pin down, both within and without. Not just our personal property (a spare room, a car) but even a thought, a feeling, a relationship becomes a site of value creation. Everyone a means of production! We’re all now our own bosses, little self-contained enterprises, exploiting ourselves endlessly with every “like,” post, or reaction. As Han goes on to say later in the same chapter, “Emotions assume dimensions beyond the scope of use value. In so doing, they open up a field of consumption that is new and knows no limit.” Our emotional, inner selves, the sphere of our lives that used to be firmly our own despite our abysmal conditions as wage slaves has finally become raw material, food, for capital under neoliberalism. At the same time as our working lives have become unbearably precarious and anxiety appears to be the dominant feeling characterizing our moment, technologies are deployed that capture and weaponize that very anxiety against us for the sake of opening up new markets and expanding private profits.

All of this has given rise to an understandably paranoid, sad, lonely, and anxious population who are largely kept too busy and dejected to even take stock of their position or the rapid changes that have and continue to unfold around them, let alone begin organizing for a chance at a better future.

It is this sadness, isolation, exhaustion, and anxiety; this mistrust, bad faith, and simply the lack of faith in each other (or really much of anything) that constitutes the terrain upon which we will wage our revolution. The capitalists’ blind pursuit of speed and profit has sapped the life from, well, life. Our goal must be its prompt return.

“The front line no longer cuts through the middle of society; it now runs through each one of us…”  -Tiqqun, This Is Not A Program

We currently lack the solidarity and technical capacity to break free of this system, but right this moment we do have the ability to begin to prefigure the type of world that comes next and we damn sure have the ability to share that vision with the world– the techno-capitalists made sure of that. In fact, the algorithmic particularities of the networked world make things more plausible or imaginable or possible the more they are seen as plausible or imaginable or possible. The possible is actually made more possible by appearing possible. Within the network, something is made more imaginable when it is imagined.

The networked world is constantly experiencing wild feedback loops (as well as the more insidious, controlled variety) where attention is concentrated, activity streamlined and spread, virally, and the impact of the initial action then exponentially exceeds any prior estimation based on the initial activity’s supposed or predicted potentiality.

Franco Berardi describes these feedback loops as “positive feedback” in his 2015 book, Heroes. He elaborates that,

“Contrary to negative feedback, which maintains stability in a dynamic system through a reduction of the exciting factors, positive feedback is a process in which the effects of a disturbance on a system result in an increase in the intensity of the factors which generate the disturbance. In other words: A produces more of B which in turn produces more of A. Thermal runaway, for instance, is a situation in which an increase in temperature provokes a further increase in temperature, often leading to a destructive result.”

Embodied in the vast architecture of the networked world there lies, not only the obvious apparatus of a Total surveillance and future counterrevolution, but a potential weapon for our side. In building a vast system of interlocking “social networks” governed by a logic of maximized engagement, the capitalists have inadvertently created a situation where possibility can be steered into being by a relatively small number of actors, in our case, revolutionary possibility.

For a decade now, we have unfortunately seen an accelerating positive feedback loop, a wave, fed by the contradictions inherent in American neoliberal capitalism, of horrifying racism mixed with extreme violence. This wave eventually brought us Trump, while globally, a similar phenomenon brought with it Brexit, BoJo, Viktor Orban, Bolsanaro, and most recently, a fascistic coup in Bolivia. But just as the ascent of neo-fascism seems all but guaranteed, we are now witnessing the explosive birth of what could be the beginnings of a global uprising against austerity and neoliberal capitalism. What began with the Gilets Jaunes in Paris, has spread to every corner of the inhabited world. Barricades are burning in Haiti, Mexico, Iraq, Lebanon, and Ecuador. We’ve seen techniques for resisting armed police invented and honed in Hong Kong (laser pointers, tear gas neutralization, umbrellas, etc.) adapted and deployed in Chile within days of each other. Just in the week of this essay’s writing we have seen a local movement for the abolition of public train and bus fares in Chile adopted in New York, and then Toronto, and then Chicago and Seattle. Protestors are bravely de-arrested in Hong Kong and immediately, the possibility of a refusal to be detained fans across the network. Within weeks, footage emerges in France during the general strike of the same: an assertive declination to being taken by the police, on the part of the people.

From every corner of the planet, images of dignified struggle and deep solidarity are being generated and shared, and the belief that another world is not just possible, but preferred, is accelerating through the network. The same is true of the idea that fighting the police is both plausible and necessary. The combination of a brutal, artificial scarcity imposed on the masses from above along with the previously unimaginable level of cognitive interconnectivity thanks to the internet and its social networks, has brought us to the cusp of what could legitimately be a revolutionary moment. And the artificial nature of that aforementioned scarcity is a reason for real confidence in ourselves.

This brings us, finally, to the feedback loop of good vibrations. It is possible, as Subcomandante Marcos once described, referring to the EZLN’s defiant existence as a loosely federated region of communes, that “a crack in history” is in the process of opening up. Capitalist Realism is very probably coming to an end. The contradictions inherent in neoliberal capitalism have become too great to simply smooth over with dreamwork and fentanyl. What comes now, be it fascism or, hopefully, something far more agreeable (Anarcho-communism? Library socialism? Green Stalinism?), is not yet decided. As we are seeing around the world, this is a global civil war. And as has been stated above, the terrain of this struggle is not just the places we work or live but the very feelings in our hearts and dreams in our minds. It is a war for our capacity to imagine and to love.

What is meant by the half tongue-in-cheek notion of a feedback loop of good vibrations is the recognition that our position as situated in a near-Total network can be leveraged towards the aim of steering something known as the Good Life into existence, or at least catalyse a new era of struggle for that Good Life. It is in some ways an inversion of pseudo-Marxist assumptions emerging out of the idea of base-superstructure, that posit culture as something always downstream from politics or economics. Financialization, digitization, and social networkification have conjointly created a situation where the cultural production of a society bleeds back into the political.

Financialization, meaning the increasing influence and size of the financial sector in relation to the overall composition of the economy, creates a pervasive logic of risk aversion, short-term gains, and general stupidity. Digitization prioritizes speed and thus linguistic simplicity and reproducibility. And social networkification results in a spectacular consolidation of global attention, incentivizes participation or inclusion, and turns what was previously known as the private sphere into public life. The confluence of these three forces is what gives us the potential for a feedback loop. Financialization first imbues the entire system with a preference for a “safe bet.” Financialization occuring in tandem with digitization means that this preference for a “safe bet” is algorithmically encoded into the (social) network. A “safe bet” in the era of social networkification is anything that captures human attention. This is where we see the system feedback into itself. Once tagged as a “safe bet,” the algorithm accelerates and concentrates attention within the network for maximum engagement and capture. The possible is actually made more possible by appearing possible.

Up until very recently, this “feedback loop” phenomenon was perhaps hard to spot because late into the era of Capitalist Realism, much of the cultural output of our society does little else than reaffirm the status quo, forming a negative feedback loop. This negative feedback loop has been alluded to by Mark Fisher as the “slow cancellation of the future” in his essays about cultural stagnation and anachronism. We have been stuck in a kind of flattened no-time. The end result is more of the same: limitless wealth for the few and deepening misery for the many. The effect is that financial capitalism becomes a self-regulated, stable system in that its continued existence is all that we are able to conceive of. In fact, it’s continued existence depends on this very dis-ability. It’s “stability” is only relative, obviously, as it is predicated on intensifying boom-bust cycles every 8-12 years and the destruction of the only life bearing planet we currently know of. Our inability to imagine anything beyond dystopia is what guarantees that the future will be a dystopia. That makes the first task for of our revolutionary effort relatively straightforward: imagine something else.

Literally anything else. This is not suggesting a praxis that is limited in its relevance to a specific style of post-capitalist formation. Communist utopia is not (and perhaps should never seek to be) the end of the political or problems, just the end of Capitalism, money, and scarcity. If you allow yourself, imagining utopia is easy. The communist horizon exists dormant within each of us, in our sociality as animals and in our capacity for love as humans. Our utopic vision is OUR vision. The next step is trickier: prefigure, embody, and evangelize that new world while stuck within this one and do so in such a way that leverages our position as unwillingly placed within a near Total network, towards our own, revolutionary ends (in some of the writing to follow this draft, we will use a variety of techniques, including and especially fiction, to describe what this could possibly look like).

There are two parts to the initial work I am referring specifically to here: the aforementioned “prefigurative” work, as well as “narrative” work. Narrative work is simply an attempt to tell a different story. It is when we dream of a better world and share that dream with another. It’s when we articulate a lack and thus a desire. It’s the work of stripping neoliberal capitalist ideology of its power. It’s when we reveal words like “pragmatic” and “sensible” and even “progressive” to be empty constructs and it is when we inject new life into words like “love” and “solidarity” and “trust.” Prefigurative work is more complicated. While this work typically consists of an attempt to embody a future world in the here and now, there is also an understanding that the embodiment will always be incomplete, and due to systemic limitations (the literal price of staying alive, more specifically) will often be unsustainable as well. Prefigurative actions are perhaps inherently performative. That doesn’t mean they can’t meet a real need or seek to deliver a real blow to capital. It is a flash vision of the normally hidden possibilities of other forms of life, uncovered for as long as we can hold them in stasis for common consideration.

But what does it mean for us to attempt this work in a time of immense interconnectivity and hyper-surveillance? What happens when nearly every action creates an image? Can prefigurative action be designed to achieve a certain resonance within the network? Can such an action go beyond the cynicism or doubt or bad faith of our system and exist as a monument to the ideals of a newly possible tomorrow? We already know that the local can overnight become the global thanks to the propensity of the social networks’ algorithms to accelerate. If social media has turned the private lives of individuals into public performances, can those multitudinous singularities, those infinite @’s, be arranged to represent and propagate new potentialities across the networked world?

It at least seems possible.

At long last, we arrive at what I hesitate to even call a theory, so for now let’s call it a hunch. The hunch is this: performative belief in the possibility of a better world actually makes that world more possible, specifically due to the networked, financialized system we currently struggle under.

“What is to be done?” Take care of one another and attempt to narrow the space capitalism carves out between us. The space between us and our better world and the space between each of us is one and the same.

An action creates an image. Every image creates a ripple. Every ripple can become a wave.

“Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there.… An insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire — a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythms of their own vibrations, always taking on more density.”

-The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

[ruminativerabbi]

Independence Day 2020

Tomorrow is the 224th anniversary of American independence and, as such, a day for all Americans—even despite the turmoil of the last months and weeks—for all Americans to celebrate and to honor. The revolutionary spirit, after all, that moved our nation’s founders to feel that they were behaving nobly and well rather than reprehensibly and treacherously by renouncing their allegiance to their king is alive and well in our nation’s apparently systemic need constantly to re-evaluate the givens of our national life and to revise where necessary. This is a very good thing!

It’s taken a lot to get this far. The American republic was, after all, a very different place on July 4, 1776, when independence was declared. All thirteen of the original colonies condoned slavery within their borders and although they differed dramatically in terms of the numbers of enslaved individuals present in each (ranging from more than 187,000 in Virginia to fewer than a thousand in New Hampshire), there was no state in the new nation that did not have slaves among its populace. Nor were they any in which women could vote, hold public office, or appear in court on their own behalf. Nor was public education a right extended to all regardless of financial or social class, or ethnic or religious background; it wasn’t until 1870, almost a full century after independence, that every single state had tax-subsidized elementary schools open to all. (And it took another half-century after that—until 1918—for every state in the Union actually to require its children to attend elementary school.)

Even from the beginning, America was a work in progress. New ideas, new institutions, new ways of seeing things and doing things—these were the hallmarks of Americanism even as early as the first decades of the republic. And they remain in place even today—the nationwide demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death while in police custody were an affirmation of American values, not a repudiation of them. And yet the concept of Americanism itself has fallen into desuetude: I can’t actually remember the last time I noted someone writing seriously about it or even using the term other than cynically. So I thought that this week, in honor of Independence Day, I would write about Americanism and see if the reticence so many seem to harbor about using it to define our national ethos is justified or not.

Part of the problem has to do with patriotism’s malign stepsiblings: chauvinism, jingoism, nativism, and unfounded exceptionalism. But setting aside the kind of skittishness that thought naturally engenders, the more basic question to ask is whether Americanism has an actual definition. Or is it one of those words that simply means whatever someone using it wills it to denote?

To many, Americanism is rooted in the “city on a hill” concept according to which the specific mission of America is to serve as a beacon of light and hope for the world. That was how John Winthrop used it when he preached a sermon on board the Arabella in 1630 and called upon his fellow Puritan emigrants to imagine that they had been called by God to build in a new land a society that would exemplify the ideals and moral bearing that they found it impossible to embrace in England, one that would serve, to use Thomas Paine’s turn of phrase, as “asylum for mankind.”

That was certainly what President Kennedy had in mind in 1961 when he declared that the point of America existing in the first place is to prove to the world that the finest philosophical principles—equality before the law, for example, or the supreme independence of the individual—could actually serve as the ideational underpinning of a nation of like-minded individuals seeking not to admire that “city on the hill” from the distance but actually to live and thrive in it. And it was equally certainly what President Reagan had in mind in his farewell address to the nation when he spelled out what the image of the shining city on the hill meant to him personally:

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

In my opinion, those words from decades ago define the great challenge facing our nation on this Independence Day.

My readers know that I am at heart a nineteenth-century man, one whose literary heroes—Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Fenimore Cooper, Irving, Twain, Emerson, and Thoreau—all came and went within that one century’s boundaries. (Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper were born in 1783 and 1789 respectively, but both only started publishing as adults. Mark Twain died in 1910, but all of his major works were published before 1900.) All, with no exceptions at all, addressed the question of the American ethos in their writing. But, of them all, it was and is Whitman—Long Island’s single greatest contribution to American culture—who spoke and speaks the most loudly and clearly to me on the topic of Americanism and its potential, even today, to inspire us and lead us forward.

I’ve had a copy of Leaves of Grass close at hand for most of my days. (The teenager in my story, “Under the Wheel,” who always has a copy in his backpack is some version of the teenaged me.) But I also have a 1921 book in my library entitled The Patriotic Poems of Walt Whitman. And it is within the pages of that book that I have found the verses that I hope can serve as my Independence Day gift to you all.

What is America? Whitman knew! “Center of equal daughters, equal sons / All, all alike, endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old, / Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich / Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law, and Love / A grand, sane, towering seated Mother / Chair’d in the adamant of Time.”

What is American freedom? Whitman knew that too. “Land tolerating all, accepting all, not for the good alone, all good for three, / Land in the realms of God to be a realm unto thyself, / Under the rule of God to be a rule unto thyself. / (Lo, where arise three peerless stars, / To be thy natal stars my country, Ensemble, Evolution, Freedom / Set in the sky of Law.) / Land of unprecedented faith, God’s faith / Thy soil, thy very subsoil, all upheav’d, / The general inner earth so long so sedulously draped over, now hence for what it is, boldly laid bare, / Open’d by thee to heaven’s light for benefit or bale.”

What is American destiny? “Equable, natural, mystical Union thou (the moral with immortal blent), / Shalt soar toward the fulfilment of the future, the spirit of the bod and the mind, / The soul, its destinies. / The soul, its destinies, the real real / (Purport of all these apparitions of the real); / In thee America, the soul, its destinies, / Thou globe of globes! thou wonder nebulous! / By many a throe of heat and cold convuls’d (by these thyself solidifying), / Thou mental, moral orb—thou New, indeed new, Spiritual World! / The Present holds thee not—for such vast growth as thine, / For such unaparallel’d flight as thine, such brook as thine, / the FUTURE only holds thee and can hold thee.”

And, speaking of the future, Whitman could see that clearly too: “Others take finish, but the Republic is ever constructive and ever keeps vista, / Others adorn the past, but you, O days of the present, I adorn you, / O days of the future, I believe in you—I isolate myself for your sake, / O America, because you build for mankind, I build for you….”

To me, these verses exemplify the best of Americanism, combining proud determinism with a sense of our national destiny to create a republic that does not merely pay lip service to the philosophical principles of equality and decency of which our Founders spoke, but which seeks constantly to morph forward, even if in fits and starts, to a future in which the ideals of the Constitution serve collectively as the paving stones of which is constructed the road forward for a nation united by trust in itself and hope for the future.

Our nation in floating forward on troubled seas. In my opinion, we are tormented by a lack of moral leadership in the highest offices of the land, by a malignant willingness to accept vulgarity and tawdriness as things that can be condemned but not truly eradicated, by a national malaise born of inequality going back to the dark days of the era of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, and, now, by a relentless virus that is stalking our nation’s streets and public places. But I am a Long Islander now…and Whitman is my man. He lived through the Civil War and saw for himself the almost unimaginable carnage it left in its terrible wake. He lived through the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, regarding whose terrible death he wrote some of his greatest poems. He wrote one single book, which he spent his life endlessly revisiting and revising. (In that, he was America personified.) And he left behind a dream for us to embrace as Americans seeking to make real the vision he codified in his verse, the one in which America is exceptional not because of its wealth or its military power, but because of the strength of its core ideas…and the power of its will to create in this place something new and truly remarkable.

[walriding]

!! demands you romance us with sleep paralysis & walrider possession !! (but really, that's a fascinating concept!?)

     As with most of my possession headcanons this might only make sense to me, but since you asked so nicely…

     Basically it’s impossible to divorce the Walrider from its demonic/spiritual/supernatural roots (I like the idea that its exact origin is vague because Murkoff had no idea what kind of entity they were attracting, but that’s for another post). Historically speaking, of course, many cultures have associated sleep paralysis with demonic activity because of the nature of the episodes. The common experiences reported with sleep paralysis are the obvious lack of mobility, and the overwhelming feeling that there’s something in the room watching you. Some people even see figures or shadows in corners or around their bed. Without having the medical knowledge required to understand that the phenomenon is basically a result of your body being stuck in REM sleep while your mind has woken up too early, it’s easy to see how more supernatural explanations might be given.

     But one of my favorite subtleties of Outlast is the idea that science is just a different way of examining things, but the answers it provides might be as unbelievable and strange as those offered by legends. The quote that always gets to me is: “The Doctor told me once if you showed a caveman our technology he would think it was magic. And if you showed a modern man magic, he would think it was technology. We have faith in all the wrong things. And it will destroy us.” To me, it really reinforces the idea that science and the supernatural are so closely related they’re practically indistinguishable, at least in terms of what the Walrider is. 

     In my view, the Host body is required to provide the Walrider with the energy it collects from the lucid dreaming process. Much like sleep paralysis, some people theorize that lucid dreaming essentially disrupts your REM sleep by causing the dreamer to be aware of their unconscious state. The Engine was designed to stimulate lucid dreaming in its users with the hopes that the Swarm would latch onto a Host by exploiting that semi-conscious state – once that connection happens, human cells aid the nanobots in their replication, and you’ve got yourself an indestructible super-weapon. In other words, it’s symbiosis. The Host provides for the Walrider, and the Walrider protects the Host.

     Simple, right?

     Sort of. The issue is that the particular type of energy the Walrider needs stems from nightmares and not pleasant dreams. Although it can’t outright create nightmares, it can guide dreams in that direction, but only if the dream is a lucid one (if it’s not, the Walrider can merely observe). The bonus is that the individual is aware of the fact that something else is messing with their mind as they sleep, but there isn’t much they can do about it. It’s extra traumatic. But it’s when they try to wake themselves that sleep paralysis occurs, and that’s when the average person is most likely to see the Walrider. (As a sidenote, its general appearance to non-Hosts and those who haven’t been exposed to Murkoff’s ‘therapy’ is that of a nebulous shadow – hence why sleep paralysis reports tend to describe dark/vaguely humanoid but ultimately indistinct figures.) 

     Unfortunately for Hosts such as Miles, many nights are likely to end in a sleep paralysis episode. For most people it lasts a few seconds, but for a Host, it can last for hours until the Walrider has had its fill. He’ll often wake up pinned beneath the thing, cognizant of his surroundings but unable to move or scream. Reality and dreams begin to overlap as images superimpose themselves on one another until he can’t tell if he’s in bed or strapped to a wheelchair or watching men burn or sprinting or dying or–

     You get the picture.

     This is the main reason why Miles avoids sleep if he can help it. Thankfully, his body is so efficiently run these days he doesn’t have to recharge all that often, but sometimes exhaustion gets the better of him. He’s granted a peaceful night every now and again (the Walrider likes keeping him on his toes), but the episodes are so traumatic he’s loathe to risk it.

     As for why the Swarm requires attachment to “a test subject who had witnessed enough horror”? Easy – what’s more horrifying than memories? Outlandish nightmares are easy to brush off as impossible and therefore non-threatening, which allows a lucid dreamer to potentially redirect the course of their dream away from the Walrider’s encouragement. But if it has enough material to work with from the darkest corners of a person’s mind, it’s far more likely that the individual will feel helpless (especially if the traumatic event was the very thing that broke them in the first place).

[remedialaction]

Foundation of Sand

or “Why the Marxian view of socialism and communism was inevitably flawed due to a contraction and lack of solid foundation, dooming the ideology.”

The ideology of Marxism, though largely associated with certain sorts of dictatorial, explicitly authoritarian states and organizations in the 20th and 21st centuries, in reality was never intended by its creator (or creators, in as much as one must count Engels as an important associate in the formation of Marxist theory) to result in dictatorial control. Indeed, quite the opposite, the entire concept of the vanguard party was explicitly opposed by Marx, though not necessarily the use of violence. 

In Marx’ view, what was going to happen was that the proletariat would increasingly use “democratic” and legal means to gain power and control, which was the actual intended meaning of the term “dictatorship of the proletariat,” not a literal centralized dictatorship, but rather a collective one of the working class, which would eventually lead to a socialized society and the atrophy of the state, until it became unnecessary and communism was established.

This required, of course, the transformation of humanity into a sort that could do this, which is one of the major flaws of Marx’ doctrines in general, in that they posit that human nature can be changed, because it does not actually exist. That is one of the parts of the foundation of Marx that was clearly made of sand; it lacked any stability. However, there was a fundamental other aspect Marx and Engel ignored.

In their writings, they acknowledged the coercive nature of government, but saw this as a necessary thing in the revolution that was to come. It must be understood that they did not use revolution in the way it has come to be meant, due to the acts of later individuals and ideologues such as Lenin, but rather in the sense of a transformation of society. The idea that society would democratically adopt and become socialist and eventually communist, however, had two major issues. 

First, they at no time actually managed to explain how this socialist society would be organized or how it even could be organized, indeed they explicitly chose not to do so, because of the idea they would be unable to do so due to their lack of knowledge of what the conditions of the future would be in a given society. Even their Communist Manifesto was more a Communist Manifest, in the sense it was more a document listing the details and cargo of the ship they wanted to sail, rather than an even cursory examination of how that ship was to be launched, sailed, or guided to its destination.

Secondly, and more importantly, they ignored the inevitable end, though, of this acceptation of coercive means. Given they explicitly chose not to reject violence, and indeed repeatedly even defended and endorsed more explicit examples, this is imminently notable. Indeed, logically, the government is itself an agent of violence, indeed it is the monopoly on its use in a given region. That some states may franchise out this monopoly is nothing more than a recognition of it, IE: that a government may allow an individual to engage in violence, be it against another person or in defense of self, and grant sanction, that the government even exercises such a power at all is a concession to the idea they have that monopoly.

The first of these meant that any supposed society they envisioned to come into existence was a nebulous affair, with no logical explainable of how it was to be run. This is hardly practical, let alone actionable. This is not merely to say all those who complain of a thing must have a solution to that which they call out as wrong, but Marxism was predicated on more than that, it was a complaint of a situation (which, notably, Marx was ill informed about anyway,) and a desired replacement, with no real effort spent on how to get form one point to another or effort put in to explaining how that system would be actually organized or run.

The second, and more dire still, was that a failure to recognize that the wrong means cannot achieve the right ends on the basic level, but even more that their embrace of coercive and violent acts in one area justified their uses in other areas, as they had no way to argue without being merely arbitrary that some forms of coercion or aggressive violence were somehow invalid while others were valid. 

Further, while it has been inaccurately said (by me, even, in earlier mistakes) that Marx elevated the worker, or rather, the proletariat to some sort of moral superiority or higher status, the truth was nothing of the sort. Indeed, Marx actually wrote of the opposite, which only makes the error the greater ironically, in that Marx somehow expected a system of class domination by a class he himself did not believe was any superior in morality or substance to the bourgeoisie or capitalist class as he envisioned them to act in a manner that would produce a better society. Of course, this is part of his general denial of human nature, and an essential reflection of a view that humans were products of their environment entirely, including their economic environment. 

Thus, taken all together, the foundation (or lack there of) for Marxism is its inevitable doom. In some ways, the social democrats reflect some aspects of Marxism better than the more radicals, and certainly more than any Anarcho-Communist, yet the inevitably failure of democracy and indeed the implicit violence in the democracy as it is actually exercised dooms the entire endeavor, as the evident truth that it implicitly not merely sanctions, but encourages class warfare and domination.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. Of course, few ask if the house should stand at all.

This, of course, does not even touch on his personal inconsistencies, in that his supposed writings about democracy and opposition to dictatorial means were in stark contrast to his actual behavior, which was profoundly anti-democratic and dictatorial; despite decrying the concept of small vanguard of intellectuals driving the movement, he seemed pressed to be that very vanguard and drive things as he wished. This is, however, a topic for another time.

[selfhelpqa-blog]

Think and Grow Rich Part 2

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Think and Grow Rich Part 2

THINK AND GROW RICH

PART 2

by

Napoleon Hill

Chapter 6

Imagination: The Workshop of the Mind

The Fifth Step toward Riches

The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man. The impulse, the DESIRE, is given shape, form, and ACTION through the aid of the imaginative faculty of the mind.

It has been said that man can create anything which he can imagine.

Of all the ages of civilization, this is the most favorable for the development of the imagination, because it is an age of rapid change. On every hand one may contact stimuli which develop the imagination.

Through the aid of his imaginative faculty, man has discovered, and harnessed, more of Nature’s forces during the past fifty years than during the entire history of the human race, previous to that time. He has conquered the air so completely, that the birds are a poor match for him in flying. He has harnessed the ether, and made it serve as a means of instantaneous communication with any part of the world. He has analyzed, and weighed the sun at a distance of millions of miles, and has determined, through the aid of IMAGINATION, the elements of which it consists. He has discovered that his own brain is both a broadcasting, and a receiving station for the vibration of thought, and he is beginning now to learn how to make practical use of this discovery. He has increased the speed of locomotion, until he may now travel at a speed of more than three hundred miles an hour.

The time will soon come when a man may breakfast in New York, and lunch in San Francisco.

MAN’S ONLY LIMITATION, within reason, LIES IN HIS DEVELOPMENT AND USE OF HIS IMAGINATION. He has not yet reached the apex of development in the use of his imaginative faculty. He has merely discovered that he has an imagination, and has commenced to use it in a very elementary way.

TWO FORMS OF IMAGINATION

The imaginative faculty functions in two forms. One is known as “synthetic imagination,” and the other as “creative imagination.” SYNTHETIC IMAGINATION:

Through this faculty, one may arrange old concepts, ideas, or plans into new combinations. This faculty creates nothing. It merely works with the material of experience, education, and observation with which it is fed. It is the faculty used most by the inventor, with the exception of the who draws upon the creative imagination, when he cannot solve his problem through synthetic imagination. CREATIVE IMAGINATION: -Through the faculty of creative imagination, the finite mind of man has direct communication with Infinite Intelligence. It is the faculty through which “hunches” and “inspirations” are received. It is by this faculty that all basic, or new ideas are handed over to man.

It is through this faculty that thought vibrations from the minds of others are received. It is through this faculty that one individual may “tune in,” or communicate with the subconscious minds of other men.

The creative imagination works automatically, in the manner described in subsequent pages. This faculty functions ONLY when the conscious mind is vibrating at an exceedingly rapid rate, as for example, when the conscious mind is stimulated through the emotion of a strong desire.

The creative faculty becomes more alert, more receptive to vibrations from the sources mentioned, in proportion to its development through USE. This statement is significant! Ponder over it before passing on.

Keep in mind as you follow these principles, that the entire story of how one may convert DESIRE into money cannot be told in one statement. The story will be complete, only when one has MASTERED, ASSIMILATED, and BEGUN TO MAKE USE of all the principles.

The great leaders of business, industry, finance, and the great artists, musicians, poets, and writers became great, because they developed the faculty of creative imagination.

Both the synthetic and creative faculties of imagination become more alert with use, just as any muscle or organ of the body develops through use.

Desire is only a thought, an impulse. It is nebulous and ephemeral. It is abstract, and of no value, until it has been transformed into its physical counterpart. While the synthetic imagination is the one which will be used most frequently, in the process of transforming the impulse of DESIRE into money, you must keep in mind the fact, that you may face circumstances and situations which demand use of the creative imagination as well.

Your imaginative faculty may have become weak through inaction. It can be revived and made alert through USE. This faculty does not die, though it may become quiescent through lack of use. Center your attention, for the time being, on the development of the synthetic imagination, because this is the faculty which you will use more often in the process of converting desire into money.

Transformation of the intangible impulse, of DESIRE, into the tangible reality, of MONEY, calls for the use of a plan, or plans. These plans must be formed with the aid of the imagination, and mainly, with the synthetic faculty. Read the entire book through, then come back to this chapter, and begin at once to put your imagination to work on the building of a plan, or plans, for the transformation of your DESIRE into money. Detailed instructions for the building of plans have been given in almost every chapter. Carry out the instructions best suited to your needs, reduce your plan to writing, if you have not already done so. The moment you complete this, you will have DEFINITELY given concrete form to the intangible DESIRE. Read the preceding sentence once more. Read it aloud, very slowly, and as you do so, remember that the moment you reduce the statement of your desire, and a plan for its realization, to writing, you have actually TAKEN THE FIRST of a series of steps, which will enable you to convert the thought into its physical counterpart.

The earth on which you live, you, yourself, and every other material thing are the result of evolutionary change, through which microscopic bits of matter have been organized and arranged in an orderly fashion.

Moreover-and this statement is of stupendous importance-this earth, every one of the billions of individual cells of your body, and every atom of matter, began as an intangible form of energy. DESIRE is thought impulse! Thought impulses are forms of energy. When you begin with the thought impulse, DESIRE, to accumulate money, you are drafting into your service the same “stuff’ that Nature used in creating this earth, and every material form in the universe, including the body and brain in which the thought impulses function.

As far as science has been able to determine, the entire universe consists of but two elements-matter and energy. Through the combination of energy and matter, has been created everything perceptible to man, from the largest star which floats in the heavens, down to, and including man, himself.

You are now engaged in the task of trying to profit by Nature’s method. You are (sincerely and earnestly, we hope), trying to adapt yourself to Nature’s laws, by endeavoring to convert DESIRE into its physical or monetary equivalent. YOU CAN DO IT! IT HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE!

You can build a fortune through the aid of laws which are immutable. But, first, you must become familiar with these laws, and learn to USE them. Through repetition, and by approaching the description of these principles from every conceivable angle, the author hopes to reveal to you the secret through which every great fortune has been accumulated. Strange and paradoxical as it may seem, the “secret” is NOT A SECRET. Nature, herself, advertises it in the earth on which we live, the stars, the planets suspended within our view, in the elements above and around us, in every blade of grass, and every form of life within our vision.

Nature advertises this “secret” in the terms of biology, in the conversion of a tiny cell, so small that it may be lost on the point of a pin, into the HUMAN BEING now reading this line. The conversion of desire into its physical equivalent is, certainly, no more miraculous!

Do not become discouraged if you do not fully comprehend all that has been stated. Unless you have long been a student of the mind, it is not to be expected that you will assimilate all that is in this chapter upon a first reading.

But you will, in time, make good progress. The principles which follow will open the way for understanding of imagination. Assimilate that which you understand, as you read this philosophy for the first time, then, when you reread and study it, you will discover that something has happened to clarity it, and give you a broader understanding of the whole. Above all, DO NOT STOP, nor hesitate in your study of these principles until you have read the book at least THREE times, for then, you will not want to stop.

HOW TO MAKE PRACTICAL USE OF IMAGINATION

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes. Ideas are products of the imagination. Let us examine a few well known ideas which have yielded huge fortunes, with the hope that these illustrations will convey definite information concerning the method by which imagination may be used in accumulating riches.

THE ENCHANTED KETTLE

Fifty years ago, an old country doctor drove to town, hitched his horse, quietly slipped into a drug store by the back door, and began “dickering” with the young drug clerk. His mission was destined to yield great wealth to many people. It was destined to bring to the South the most far-flung benefit since the Civil War.

For more than an hour, behind the prescription counter, the old doctor and the clerk talked in low tones. Then the doctor left. He went out to the buggy and brought back a large, old fashioned kettle, a big wooden paddle (used for stirring the contents of the kettle), and deposited them in the back of the store.

The clerk inspected the kettle, reached into his inside pocket, took out a roll of bills, and handed it over to the doctor. The roll contained exactly $500.00-the clerk’s entire savings! The doctor handed over a small slip of paper on which was written a secret formula. The words on that small slip of paper were worth a King’s ransom! But not to the doctor! Those magic words were needed to start the kettle to boiling, but neither the doctor nor the young clerk knew what fabulous fortunes were destined to flow from that kettle. The old doctor was glad to sell the outfit for five hundred dollars. The money would pay off his debts, and give him freedom of mind. The clerk was taking a big chance by staking his entire life’s savings on a mere scrap of paper and an old kettle! He never dreamed his investment would start a kettle to overflowing with gold that would surpass the miraculous performance of Aladdin’s lamp. What the clerk really purchased was an IDEA! The old kettle and the wooden paddle, and the secret message on a slip of paper were incidental. The strange performance of that kettle began to take place after the new owner mixed with the secret instructions an ingredient of which the doctor knew nothing.

Read this story carefully, give your imagination a test! See if you can discover what it was that the young man added to the secret message, which caused the kettle to overflow with gold. Remember, as you read, that this is not a story from Arabian Nights. Here you have a story of facts, stranger than fiction, facts which began in the form of an IDEA.

Let us take a look at the vast fortunes of gold this idea has produced. It has paid, and still pays huge fortunes to men and women all over the world, who distribute the contents of the kettle to millions of people.

The Old Kettle is now one of the world’s largest consumers of sugar, thus providing jobs of a permanent nature to thousands of men and women engaged in growing sugar cane, and in refining and marketing sugar.

The Old Kettle consumes, annually, millions of glass bottles, providing jobs to huge numbers of glass workers. The Old Kettle gives employment to an army of clerks, stenographers, copy writers, and advertising experts throughout the nation. It has brought fame and fortune to scores of artists who have created magnificent pictures describing the product.

The Old Kettle has converted a small Southern city into the business capital of the South, where it now benefits, directly, or indirectly, every business and practically every resident of the city.

The influence of this idea now benefits every civilized country in the world, pouring out a continuous stream of gold to all who touch it. Gold from the kettle built and maintains one of the most prominent colleges of the South, where thousands of young people receive the training essential for success.

The Old Kettle has done other marvelous things. All through the world depression, when factories, banks and business houses were folding up and quitting by the thousands, the owner of this Enchanted Kettle went marching on, giving continuous employment to an army of men and women all over the world, and paying out extra portions of gold to those who, long ago, had faith in the idea. If the product of that old brass kettle could talk, it would tell thrilling tales of romance in every language. Romances of love, romances of business, romances of professional men and women who are daily being stimulated by it.

The author is sure of at least one such romance, for he was a part of it, and it all began not far from the very spot on which the drug clerk purchased the old kettle. It was here that the author met his wife, and it was she who first told him of the Enchanted Kettle.

It was the product of that Kettle they were drinking when he asked her to accept him “for better or worse.”

Now that you know the content of the Enchanted Kettle is a world famous drink, it is fitting that the author confess that the home city of the drink supplied him with a wife, also that the drink itself provides him with stimulation of thought without intoxication, and thereby it serves to give the refreshment of mind which an author must have to do his best work.

Whoever you are, wherever you may live, whatever occupation you may be engaged in, just remember in the future, every time you see the words “Coca-Cola,” that its vast empire of wealth and influence grew out of a single IDEA, and that the mysterious ingredient the drug clerk-Asa Candler-mixed with the secret formula was. . . IMAGINATION!

Stop and think of that, for a moment. Remember, also, that the thirteen steps to riches, described in this book, were the media through which the influence of Coca-Cola has been extended to every city, town, village, and cross-roads of the world, and that ANY IDEA you may create, as 80Ufld and meritorious as CocaCola, has the possibility of duplicating the stupendous record of this world-wide thirst-killer.

Truly, thoughts are things, and their scope of operation is the world, itself.

WHAT I WOULD DO IF I HAD A MILLION DOLLARS

This story proves the truth of that old saying, “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” It was told to me by that beloved educator and clergyman, the late Frank W. Gunsaulus, who began his preaching career in the stockyards region of South Chicago.

While Dr. Gunsaulus was going through college, he observed many defects in our educational system, defects which he believed he could correct, if he were the head of a college. His deepest desire was to become the directing head of an educational institution in which young men and women would be taught to “learn by doing.” He made up his mind to organize a new college in which he could carry out his ideas, without being handicapped by orthodox methods of education.

He needed a million dollars to put the project across! Where was he to lay his hands on so large a sum of money? That was the question that absorbed most of this ambitious young preacher’s thought.

But he couldn’t seem to make any progress. Every night he took that thought to bed with him. He got up with it in the morning. He took it with him everywhere he went. He turned it over and over in his mind until it became a consuming obsession with him. A million dollars is a lot of money. He recognized that fact, but he also recognized the truth that the only limitation is that which one sets up in one’s own mind.

Being a philosopher as well as a preacher, Dr. Gunsaulus recognized, as do all who succeed in life, that DEFINITENESS OF PURPOSE is the starting point from which one must begin. He recognized, too, that definiteness of purpose takes on animation, life, and power when backed by a BURNING DESIRE to translate that purpose into its material equivalent.

He knew all these great truths, yet he did not know where, or how to lay his hands on a million dollars. The natural procedure would have been to give up and quit, by saying, “Ah well, my idea is a good one, but I cannot do anything with it, because I never can procure the necessary million dollars.” That is exactly what the majority of people would have said, but it is not what Dr. Gunsaulus said. What he said, and what he did are so important that I now introduce him, and let him speak for himself.

“One Saturday afternoon I sat in my room thinking of ways and means of raising the money to carry out my plans. For nearly two years, I had been thinking, but I had done nothing but think!

“The time had come for ACTION!”

“I made up my mind, then and there, that I would get the necessary million dollars within a week. How? I was not concerned about that. The main thing of importance was the decision to get the money within a specified time, and I want to tell you that the moment I reached a definite decision to get the money within a specified time, a strange feeling of assurance came over me, such as I had never before experienced. Something inside me seemed to say, ‘Why didn’t you reach that decision a long time ago? The money was waiting for you all the time!’

“Things began to happen in a hurry. I called the newspapers and announced I would preach a sermon the following morning, entitled, ‘What I would do if I had a Million Dollars.’

“I went to work on the sermon immediately, but I must tell you, frankly, the task was not difficult, because I had been preparing that sermon for almost two years. The spirit back of it was a part of me!

“Long before midnight I had finished writing the sermon. I went to bed and slept with a feeling of confidence, for I could see myself already in. possession of the million dollars.

“Next morning I arose early, went into the bathroom, read the sermon, then knelt on my knees and asked that my sermon might come to the attention of someone who would supply the needed money.

“While I was praying I again had that feeling of assurance that the money would be forthcoming. In my excitement, I walked out without my sermon, and did not discover the oversight until I was in my pulpit and about ready to begin delivering it.

“It was too late to go back for my notes, and what a blessing that I couldn’t go back! Instead, my own subconscious mind yielded the material I needed. When I arose to begin my sermon, I closed my eyes, and spoke with all my heart and soul of my dreams. I not only talked to my audience, but I fancy I talked also to God. I told what I would do with a million dollars if that amount were placed in my hands. I described the plan I had in mind for organizing a great educational institution, where young people would learn to do practical things, and at the same time develop their minds.

“When I had finished and sat down, a man slowly arose from his seat, about three rows from the rear, and made his way toward the pulpit. I wondered what he was going to do. He came into the pulpit, extended his hand, and said, ‘Reverend, I liked your sermon. I believe you can do everything you said you would, if you had a million dollars. To prove that I believe in you and your sermon, if you will come to my office tomorrow morning, I will give you the million dollars. My name is Phillip D. Armour.’”

Young Gunsaulus went to Mr. Armour’s office and the million dollars was presented to him. With the money, he founded the Armour Institute of Technology. That is more money than the majority of preachers ever see in an entire lifetime, yet the thought impulse back of the money was created m the young preacher’s mind in a fraction of a minute. The necessary million dollars came as a result of an idea. Back of the idea was a DESIRE which young Gunsaulus had been nursing in his mind for almost two years.

Observe this important fact… HE GOT THE MONEY WITHIN THIRTY-SIX HOURS AFTER HE REACHED A DEFINITE DECISION IN HIS OWN MIND TO GET IT, AND DECIDED UPON A DEFINITE PLAN FOR GETTING IT!

There was nothing new or unique about young Gunsaulus’ vague thinking about a million dollars, and weakly hoping for it. Others before him, and many since his time, have had similar thoughts. But there was something very unique and different about the decision he reached on that memorable Saturday, when he put vagueness into the background, and definitely said, “I WILL get that money within a week!”

God seems to throw Himself on the side of the man who knows exactly what he wants, if he is determined to get JUST THAT! Moreover, the principle through which Dr. Gunsaulus got his million dollars is still alive! It is available to you! This universal law is as workable today as it was when the young preacher made use of it so successfully. This book describes, step by step, the thirteen elements of this great law, and suggests how they may be put to use. Observe that Asa Candler and Dr. Frank Gunsaulus had one characteristic in common. Both knew the astounding truth that IDEAS CAN BE TRANSMUTED INTO CASH THROUGH THE POWER OF DEFINITE PURPOSE, PLUS DEFINITE PLANS.

If you are one of those who believe that hard work and honesty, alone, will bring riches, perish the thought! It is not true!

Riches, when they come in huge quantities, are never the result of HARD work! Riches come, if they come at all, in response to definite demands, based upon the application of definite principles, and not by chance or luck. Generally speaking, an idea is an impulse of thought that impels action, by an appeal to the imagination. All master salesmen know that ideas can be sold where merchandise cannot. Ordinary salesmen do not know this-that is why they are “ordinary”.

A publisher of books, which sell for a nickel, made a discovery that should be worth much to publishers generally. He learned that many people buy titles, and not contents of books. By merely changing the name of one book that was not moving, his sales on that book jumped upward more than a million copies. The inside of the book was not changed in any way. He merely ripped off the cover bearing the title that did not sell, and put on a new cover with a title that had “box-office” value.

That, as simple as it may seem, was an IDEA! It was IMAGINATION.

There is no standard price on ideas. The creator of ideas makes his own price, and, if he is smart, gets it. The moving picture industry created a whole flock of millionaires. Most of them were men who couldn’t create ideas-BUT-they had the imagination to recognize ideas when they saw them. The next flock of millionaires will grow out of the radio business, which is new and not overburdened with men of keen imagination. The money will be made by those who discover or create new and more meritorious radio programmes and have the imagination to recognize merit, and to give the radio listeners a chance to profit by it.

The sponsor! That unfortunate victim who now pays the cost of all radio “entertainment,” soon will become idea conscious, and demand something for his money. The man who beats the sponsor to the draw, and supplies programmes that render useful service, is the man who will become rich in this new industry.

Crooners and light chatter artists who now pollute the air with wisecracks and silly giggles, will go the way of all light timbers, and their places will be taken by real artists who interpret carefully planned programmes which have been designed to service the minds of men, as well as provide entertainment.

Here is a wide open field of opportunity screaming its protest at the way it is being butchered, because of lack of imagination, and begging for rescue at any price. Above all, the thing that radio needs is new IDEAS!

If this new field of opportunity intrigues you, perhaps you might profit by the suggestion that the successful radio programmes of the future will give more attention to creating “buyer” audiences, and less attention to “listener” audiences. Stated more plainly, the builder of radio programmes who succeeds in the future, must find practical ways to convert “listeners” into “buyers.”

Moreover, the successful producer of radio programmes in the future must key his features so that he can definitely show its effect upon the audience.

Sponsors are becoming a bit weary of buying glib selling talks, based upon statements grabbed out of thin air. They want, and in the future will demand, indisputable proof that the Whoosit programme not only gives millions of people the silliest giggle ever, but that the silly giggler can sell merchandise! Another thing that might as well be understood by those who contemplate entering this new field of opportunity, radio advertising is going to be handled by an entirely new group of advertising experts, separate and distinct from the old time newspaper and magazine advertising agency men. The old timers in the advertising game cannot read the modern radio scripts, because they have been schooled to SEE ideas. The new radio technique demands men who can interpret ideas from a written manuscript in terms of SOUND! It cost the author a year of hard labor, and many thousands of dollars to learn this.

Radio, right now, is about where the moving pictures were, when Mary Pickford and her curls first appeared on the screen.

There is plenty of room in radio for those who can produce or recognize IDEAS. If the foregoing comment on the opportunities of radio has not started your idea factory to work, you had better forget it. Your opportunity is in some other field. If the comment intrigued you in the slightest degree, then go further into it, and you may find the one IDEA you need to round out your career.

Never let it discourage you if you have no experience in radio. Andrew Carnegie knew very little about making steel-I have Carnegie’s own word for this-but he made practical use of two of the principles described in this book, and made the steel business yield him a fortune.

The story of practically every great fortune starts with the day when a creator of ideas and a seller of ideas got together and worked in harmony. Carnegie surrounded himself with men who could do all that he could not do. Men who created ideas, and men who put ideas into operation, and made himself and the others fabulously rich.

Millions of people go through life hoping for favorable “breaks.” Perhaps a favorable break can get one an opportunity, but the safest plan is not to depend upon luck. It was a favorable “break” that gave me the biggest opportunity of my lifebut-twenty-five years of determined effort had to be devoted to that opportunity before it became an asset.

The “break” consisted of my good fortune in meeting and gaining the cooperation of Andrew Carnegie. On that occasion Carnegie planted in my mind the idea of organizing the principles of achievement into a philosophy of success. Thousands of people have profited by the discoveries made in the twenty-five years of research, and several fortunes have been accumulated through the application of the philosophy. The beginning was simple. It was an IDEA which anyone might have developed.

The favorable break came through Carnegie, but what about the DETERMINATION, DEFINITENESS OF PURPOSE, and the DESIRE TO ATTAIN THE GOAL, and the PERSISTENT EFFORT OF TWENTY-FIVE YEARS? It was no ordinary DESIRE that survived disappointment, discouragement, temporary defeat, criticism, and the constant reminding of “waste of time.” It was a BURNING DESIRE! AN OBSESSION!

When the idea was first planted in my mind by Mr. Carnegie, it was coaxed, nursed, and enticed to remain alive. Gradually, the idea became a giant under its own power, and it coaxed, nursed, and drove me. Ideas are like that. First you give life and action and guidance to ideas, then they take on power of their own and sweep aside all opposition.

Ideas are intangible forces, but they have more power than the physical brains that give birth to them. They have the power to live on, after the brain that creates them has returned to dust. For example, take the power of Christianity. That began with a simple idea, born in the brain of Christ. Its chief tenet was, “do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” Christ has gone back to the source from whence He came, but His IDEA goes marching on.

Some day, it may grow up, and come into its own, then it will have fulfilled Christ’s deepest DESIRE. The IDEA has been developing only two thousand years. Give it time!

SUCCESS REQUIRES NO EXPLANATIONS FAILURE PERMITS NO ALIBIS

Chapter 7

Organized Planning: The Crystallization of Desire into Action

The Sixth Step toward Riches

You have learned that everything man creates or acquires, begins in the form of DESIRE, that desire is taken on the first lap of its journey, from the abstract to the concrete, into the workshop of the IMAGINATION, where PLANS for its transition are created and organized.

In Chapter two, you were instructed to take six definite, practical steps, as your first move in translating the desire for money into its monetary equivalent. One of these steps is the formation of a DEFINITE, practical plan, or plans, through which this transformation may be made. You will now be instructed how to build plans which will be practical, viz:

(a) Ally yourself with a group of as many people as you may need for the creation, and carrying out of your plan, or plans for the accumulation of money-making use of the “Master Mind” principle described in a later chapter. (Compliance with this instruction is absolutely essential. Do not neglect it.)

(b) Before forming your “Master Mind” alliance, decide what advantages, and benefits, you may offer the individual embers of your group, in return for their cooperation. No one will work indefinitely without some form of compensation. No intelligent person will either request or expect another to work without adequate compensation, although this may not always be in the form of money.

(c) Arrange to meet with the members of your “Master Mind” group at least twice a week, and more often if possible, until you have jointly perfected the necessary plan, or plans for the accumulation of money.

(d) Maintain PERFECT HARMONY between yourself and every member of your “Master Mind” group. If you fail to carry out this instruction to the letter, you may expect to meet with failure. The “Master Mind” principle cannot obtain where PERFECT HARMONY does not prevail.

Keep in mind these facts :

First. You are engaged in an undertaking of major importance to you. To be sure of success, you must have plans which are faultless.

Second. You must have the advantage of the experience, education, native ability and imagination of other minds. This is in harmony with the methods followed by every person who has accumulated a great fortune.

No individual has sufficient experience, education, native ability, and knowledge to insure the accumulation of a great fortune, without the cooperation of other people. Every plan you adopt, in your endeavor to accumulate wealth, should be the joint creation of yourself and every other member of your “Master Mind” group. You may originate your own plans, either in whole or in part, but SEE THAT THOSE PLANS ARE CHECKED, AND APPROVED BY THE MEMBERS OF YOUR “MASTER MIND” ALLIANCE.

If the first plan which you adopt does not work successfully, replace it with a new plan, if this new plan fails to work, replace it, in turn with still another, and so on, until you find a plan which DOES WORK. Right here is the point at which the majority of men meet with failure, because of their lack of PERSISTENCE in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

The most intelligent man living cannot succeed in accumulating money-nor in any other undertaking-without plans which are practical and workable. Just keep this fact in mind, and remember when your plans fail, that temporary defeat is not permanent failure. It may only mean that your plans have not been sound. Build other plans. Start all over again.

Thomas A. Edison “failed” ten thousand times before he perfected the incandescent electric light bulb. That is-he met with temporary defeat ten thousand times, before his efforts were crowned with success.

Temporary defeat should mean only one thing, the certain knowledge that there is something wrong with your plan. Millions of men go through life in misery and poverty, because they lack a sound plan through which to accumulate a fortune.

Henry Ford accumulated a fortune, not because of his superior mind, but because he adopted and followed a PLAN which proved to be sound. A thousand men could be pointed out, each with a better education than Ford’s, yet each of whom lives in poverty, because he does not possess the RIGHT plan for the accumulation of money.

Your achievement can be no greater than your PLANS are sound. That may seem to be an axiomatic statement, but it is true. Samuel Insull lost his fortune of over one hundred million dollars.

The Insull fortune was built on plans which were sound. The business depression forced Mr. Insull to CHANGE HIS PLANS; and the CHANGE brought “temporary defeat,” because his new plans were NOT SOUND. Mr. Insull is now an old man, he may, consequently, accept “failure” instead of “temporary defeat,” but if his experience turns out to be FAILURE, it will be for the reason that he lacks the fire of PERSISTENCE to rebuild his plans.

No man is ever whipped, until he QUITS-in his own mind. This fact will be repeated many times, because it is so easy to “take the count” at the first sign of defeat.

James J. Hill met with temporary defeat when he first endeavored to raise the necessary capital to build a railroad from the East to the West, but he, too turned defeat into victory through new plans.

Henry Ford met with temporary defeat, not only at the beginning of his automobile career, but after he had gone far toward the top. He created new plans, and went marching on to financial victory. We see men who have accumulated great fortunes, but we often recognize only their triumph, overlooking the temporary defeats which they had to surmount before “arriving”.

NO FOLLOWER OF THIS PHILOSOPHY CAN REASONABLY EXPECT TO ACCUMULATE A FORTUNE WITHOUT EXPERIENCING “TEMPORARY DEFEAT.” When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal. If you give up before your goal has been reached, you are a “quitter.”

A QUITTER NEVER WINS-AND-A WINNER NEVER QUITS.

Lift this sentence out, write it on a piece of paper in letters an inch high, and place it where you will see it every night before you go to sleep, and every morning before you go to work.

When you begin to select members for your “Master Mind” group, endeavor to select those who do not take defeat seriously. Some people foolishly believe that only MONEY can make money. This is not true! DESIRE, transmuted into its monetary equivalent, through the principles laid down here, is the agency through which money is “made.” Money, of itself, is nothing but inert matter. It cannot move, think, or talk, but it can “hear” when a man who DESIRES it, calls it to come!

PLANNING THE SALE OF SERVICES

The remainder of this chapter has been given over to a description of ways and means of marketing personal services. The information here conveyed will be of practical help to any person having any form of personal services to market, but it will be of priceless benefit to those who aspire to leadership in their chosen occupations.

Intelligent planning is essential for success in any undertaking designed to accumulate riches. Here will be found detailed instructions to those who must begin the accumulation of riches by selling personal services.

It should be encouraging to know that practically all the great fortunes began in the form of compensation for personal services, or from the sale of IDEAS. What else, except ideas and personal services, would one not possessed of property have to give in return for riches?

Broadly speaking, there are two types of people in the world. One type is known as LEADERS, and the other as FOLLOWERS. Decide at the outset whether you intend to become a leader in your chosen calling, or remain a follower. The difference in compensation is vast. The follower cannot reasonably expect the compensation to which a leader is entitled, although many followers make the mistake of expecting such pay.

It is no disgrace to be a follower. On the other hand, it is no credit to remain a follower. Most great leaders began in the capacity of followers. They became great leaders because they were INTELLIGENT FOLLOWERS. With few exceptions, the man who cannot follow a leader intelligently, cannot become an efficient leader. The man who can follow a leader most efficiently, is usually the man who develops into leadership most rapidly. An intelligent follower has many advantages, among them the OPPORTUNITY TO ACQUIRE KNOWLEDGE FROM HIS LEADER.

THE MAJOR ATTRIBUTES OF LEADERSHIP

The following are important factors of leadership :

1. UNWAVERING COURAGE based upon knowledge of self, and of one’s occupation. No follower wishes to be dominated by a leader who lacks self-confidence and courage. No intelligent follower will be dominated by such a leader very long.

2. SELF-CONTROL. The man who cannot control himself, can never control others. Self-control sets a mighty example for one’s followers, which the more intelligent will emulate.

3. A KEEN SENSE OF JUSTICE. Without a sense of fairness and justice, no leader can command and retain the respect of his followers.

4. DEFINITENESS OF DECISION. The man who wavers in his decisions, shows that he is not sure of himself. He cannot lead others successfully.

5. DEFINITENESS OF PLANS. The successful leader must plan his work, and work his plan. A leader who moves by guesswork, without practical, definite plans, is comparable to a ship without a rudder. Sooner or later he will land on the rocks.

6. THE HABIT OF DOING MORE THAN PAID FOR. One of the penalties of leadership is the necessity of willingness, upon the part of the leader, to do more than he requires of his followers.

7. A PLEASING PERSONALITY. No slovenly, careless person can become a successful leader. Leadership calls for respect. Followers will not respect a leader who does not grade high on all of the factors of a Pleasing Personality.

8. SYMPATHY AND UNDERSTANDING. The successful leader must be in sympathy with his followers. Moreover, he must understand them and their problems.

9. MASTERY OF DETAIL. Successful leadership calls for mastery of details of the leader’s position.

10. WILLINGNESS TO ASSUME FULL RESPONSIBILITY. The successful leader must be willing to assume responsibility for the mistakes and the shortcomings of his followers. If he tries to shift this responsibility, he will not remain the leader. If one of his followers makes a mistake, and shows himself incompetent, the leader must consider that it is he who failed.

11. COOPERATION. The successful leader must understand, and apply the principle of cooperative effort and be able to induce his followers to do the same. Leadership calls for POWER, and power calls for COOPERATION. There are two forms of Leadership. The first, and by far the most effective, is LEADERSHIP BY CONSENT of, and with the sympathy of the followers. The second is LEADERSHIP BY FORCE, without the consent and sympathy of the followers. History is filled with evidences that Leadership by Force cannot endure. The downfall and disappearance of “Dictators” and kings is significant. It means that people will not follow forced leadership indefinitely.

The world has just entered a new era of relationship between leaders and followers, which very clearly calls for new leaders, and a new brand of leadership in business and industry. Those who belong to the old school of leadership-by-force, must acquire an understanding of the new brand of leadership (cooperation) or be relegated to the rank and file of the followers. There is no other way out for them.

The relationship of employer and employee, or of leader and follower, in the future, will be one of mutual cooperation, based upon an equitable division of the profits of business. In the future, the relationship of employer and employee will be more like a partnership than it has been in the past.

Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, the Czar of Russia, and the King of Spain were examples of leadership by force. Their leadership passed. Without much difficulty, one might point to the prototypes of these ex-leaders, among the business, financial, and labor leaders of America who have been dethroned or slated to go. Leadership-by-consent of the followers is the only brand which can endure!

Men may follow the forced leadership temporarily, but they will not do so willingly.

The new brand of LEADERSHIP will embrace the eleven factors of leadership, described in this chapter, as well as some other factors. The man who makes these the basis of his leadership, will find abundant opportunity to lead in any walk of life. The depression was prolonged, largely, because the world lacked LEADERSHIP of the new brand. At the end of the depression, the demand for leaders who are competent to apply the new methods of leadership has greatly exceeded the supply. Some of the old type of leaders will reform and adapt themselves to the new brand of leadership, but generally speaking, the world will have to look for new timber for its leadership. This necessity may be your OPPORTUNITY!

THE 10 MAJOR CAUSES OF FAILURE IN LEADERSHIP

We come now to the major faults of leaders who fail, because it is just as essential to know WHAT NOT TO DO as it is to know what to do.

1. INABILITY TO ORGANIZE DETAILS. Efficient leadership calls for ability to organize and to master details. No genuine leader is ever “too busy” to do anything which may be required of him in his capacity as leader. When a man, whether he is a leader or follower, admits that he is “too busy” to change his plans, or to give attention to any emergency, he admits his inefficiency. The successful leader must be the master of all details connected with his position. That means, of course, that he must acquire the habit of relegating details to capable lieutenants.

2. UNWILLINGNESS TO RENDER HUMBLE SERVICE. Truly great leaders are willing, when occasion demands, to perform any sort of labor which they would ask another to perform. “The greatest among ye shall be the servant of all” is a truth which all able leaders observe and respect.

3. EXPECTATION OF PAY FOR WHAT THEY “KNOW” INSTEAD OF WHAT THEY DO WITH THAT WHICH THEY KNOW. The world does not pay men for that which they “know.” It pays them for what they DO, or induce others to do.

4. FEAR OF COMPETITION FROM FOLLOWERS. The leader who fears that one of his followers may take his position is practically sure to realize that fear sooner or later. The able leader trains understudies to whom he may delegate, at will, any of the details of his position. Only in this way may a leader multiply himself and prepare himself to be at many places, and give attention to many things at one time. It is an eternal truth that men receive more pay for their ABILITY TO GET OTHERS TO PERFORM, than they could possibly earn by their own efforts. An efficient leader may, through his knowledge of his job and the magnetism of his personality, greatly increase the efficiency of others, and induce them to render more service and better service than they could render without his aid.

5. LACK OF IMAGINATION. Without imagination, the leader is incapable of meeting emergencies, and of creating plans by which to guide his followers efficiently.

6. SELFISHNESS. The leader who claims all the honor for the work of his followers, is sure to be met by resentment. The really great leader CLAIMS NONE OF THE HONORS. He is contented to see the honors, when there are any, go to his followers, because he knows that most men will work harder for commendation and recognition than they will for money alone.

7. INTEMPERANCE. Followers do not respect an intemperate leader. Moreover, intemperance in any of its various forms, destroys the endurance and the vitality of all who indulge in it.

8. DISLOYALTY. Perhaps this should have come at the head of the list. The leader who is not loyal to his trust, and to his associates, those above him, and those below him, cannot long maintain his leadership. Disloyalty marks one as being less than the dust of the earth, and brings down on one’s head the contempt he deserves. Lack of loyalty is one of the major causes of failure in every walk of life.

9. EMPHASIS OF THE “AUTHORITY” OF LEADERSHIP. The efficient leader leads by encouraging, and not by trying to instill fear in the hearts of his followers. The leader who tries to impress his followers with his “authority” comes within the category of leadership through FORCE. If a leader is a REAL LEADER, he will have no need to advertise that fact except by his conduct-his sympathy, understanding, fairness, and a demonstration that he knows his job.

10. EMPHASIS OF TITLE. The competent leader requires no “title” to give him the respect of his followers. The man who makes too much over his title generally has little else to emphasize. The doors to the office of the real leader are open to all who wish to enter, and his working quarters are free from formality or ostentation.

These are among the more common of the causes of failure in leadership. Any one of these faults is sufficient to induce failure. Study the list carefully if you aspire to leadership, and make sure that you are free of these faults. SOME FERTILE FIELDS IN WHICH “NEW LEADERSHIP” WILL BE REQUIRED

Before leaving this chapter, your attention is called to a few of the fertile fields in which there has been a decline of leadership, and in which the new type of leader may find an abundance of OPPORTUNITY.

First. In the field of politics there is a most insistent demand for new leaders; a demand which indicates nothing less than an emergency. The majority of politicians have, seemingly, become high-grade, legalized racketeers. They have increased taxes and debauched the machinery of industry and business until the people can no longer stand the burden.

Second. The banking business is undergoing a reform. The leaders in this field have almost entirely lost the confidence of the public. Already the bankers have sensed the need of reform, and they have begun it.

Third. Industry calls for new leaders. The old type of leaders thought and moved in terms of dividends instead of thinking and moving in terms of human equations! The future leader in industry, to endure, must regard himself as a quasipublic official whose duty it is to manage his trust in such a way that it will work hardship on no individual, or group of individuals. Exploitation of working men is a thing of the past. Let the man who aspires to leadership in the field of business, industry, and labor remember this.

Fourth. The religious leader of the future will be forced to give more attention to the temporal needs of his followers, in the solution of their economic and personal problems of the present, and less attention to the dead past, and the yet unborn future.

Fifth. In the professions of law, medicine, and education, a new brand of leadership, and to some extent, new leaders will become a necessity. This is especially true in the field of education. The leader in that field must, in the future, find ways and means of teaching people HOW TO APPLY the knowledge they receive in school. He must deal more with PRACTICE and less with THEORY.

Sixth. New leaders will be required in the field of Journalism. Newspapers of the future, to be conducted successfully, must be divorced from “special privilege” and relieved from the subsidy of advertising. They must cease to be organs of propaganda for the interests which patronize their advertising columns. The type of newspaper which publishes scandal and lewd pictures will eventually go the way of all forces which debauch the human mind.

These are but a few of the fields in which opportunities for new leaders and a new brand of leadership are now available. The world is undergoing a rapid change. This means that the media through which the changes in human habits are promoted, must be adapted to the changes. The media here described, are the ones which, more than any others, determine the trend of civilization.

WHEN AND HOW TO APPLY FOR A POSITION

The information described here is the net result of many years of experience during which thousands of men and women were helped to market their services effectively. It can, therefore, be relied upon as sound and practical.

MEDIA THROUGH WHICH SERVICES MAY BE MARKETED

Experience has proved that the following media offer the most direct and effective methods of bringing the buyer and seller of personal services together.

1. EMPLOYMENT BUREAUS. Care must be taken to select only reputable bureaus, the management of which can show adequate records of achievement of satisfactory results. There are comparatively few such bureaus.

2. ADVERTISING in newspapers, trade journals, magazines, and radio. Classified advertising may usually be relied upon to produce satisfactory results in the case of those who apply for clerical or ordinary salaried positions. Display advertising is more desirable in the case of those who seek executive connections, the copy to appear in the section of the paper which is most apt to come to the attention of the class of employer being sought. The copy should be prepared by an expert, who understands how to inject sufficient selling qualities to produce replies.

3. PERSONAL LETTERS OF APPLICATION, directed to particular firms or individuals most apt to need such services as are being offered. Letters should be neatly typed, ALWAYS, and signed by hand. With the letter, should be sent a complete “brief’ or outline of the applicant’s qualifications. Both the letter of application and the brief of experience or qualifications should be prepared by an expert. (See instructions as to information to be supplied).

4. APPLICATION THROUGH PERSONAL ACQUAINTANCES. When possible, the applicant should endeavor to approach prospective employers through some mutual acquaintance. This method of approach is particularly advantageous in the case of those who seek executive connections and do not wish to appear to be “peddling” themselves.

5. APPLICATION IN PERSON. In some in-stances, it may be more effective if the applicant offers personally, his services to prospective employers, in which event a complete written statement of qualifications for the position should be presented, for the reason that prospective employers often wish to discuss with associates, one’s record. INFORMATION TO BE SUPPLIED IN A WRITTEN “BRIEF”

This brief should be prepared as carefully as a lawyer would prepare the brief of a case to be tried m court. Unless the applicant is experienced in the preparation of such briefs, an expert should be consulted, and his services enlisted for this purpose. Successful merchants employ men and women who understand the art and the psychology of advertising to present the merits of their merchandise. One who has personal services for sale should do the same. The following information should appear in the brief:

l. Education. State briefly, but definitely, what schooling you have had, and in what subjects you specialized in school, giving the reasons for that specialization.

2. Experience. If you have had experience in connection with positions similar to the one you seek, describe it fully, state names and addresses of former employers. Be sure to bring out clearly any special experience you may have had which would equip you to fill the position you seek.

3. References. Practically every business firm desires to know all about the previous records, antecedents, etc., of prospective employees who seek positions of responsibility. Attach to your brief photostatic copies of letters from:

a. Former employers

b. Teachers under whom you studied

c. Prominent people whose judgement may be relied upon.

4. Photograph of self. Attach to your brief a recent, unmounted photograph of yourself.

5. Apply for a specific position. Avoid application for a position without describing EXACTLY what particular position you seek. Never apply for “just a position.” That indicates you lack specialized qualifications.

6. State your qualifications for the particular position for which you apply. Give full details as to the reason you believe you are qualified for the particular position you seek. This is THE APPLICATION. It will determine, more than anything else, what consideration you receive.

7. Offer to go to work on probation. In the majority of instances if you are determined to have the position for which you apply, it will be most effective if you offer to work for a week, or a month, or for a sufficient length of time to enable your prospective employer to judge your value WITHOUT PAY. This may appear to be a radical suggestion, but experience has proved that it seldom fails to win at least a trial. If you are SURE OF YOUR QUALIFICATIONS, a trial is all you need.

Incidentally, such an offer indicates that you have confidence in your ability to fill the position you seek. It is most convincing. If your offer is accepted, and you make good, more than likely you will be paid for your “probation” period. Make clear the fact that your offer is based upon:

a. Your confidence in your ability to fill the position.

b. Your confidence in your prospective employer’s decision to employ you after trial.

c. Your DETERMINATION to have the position you seek.

8. Knowledge of your prospective employer’s business. Before applying for a position, do sufficient research in connection with the business to familiarize yourself thoroughly with that business, and indicate in your brief the knowledge you have acquired in this field.

This will be impressive, as it will indicate that you have im-agination, and a real interest in the position you seek. Remember that it is not the lawyer who knows the most law, but the one who best prepares his case, who wins. If your “case” is properly prepared and presented, your victory will have been more than half won at the outset.

Do not be afraid of making your brief too long. Employers are just as much interested in purchasing the services of well-qualified applicants as you are in securing employment. In fact, the success of most successful employers is due, in the main, to their ability to select well-qualified lieutenants. They want all the information available.

Remember another thing; neatness in the preparation of your brief will indicate that you are a painstaking person. I have helped to prepare briefs for clients which were so striking and out of the ordinary that they resulted in the employment of the applicant without a personal interview.

When your brief has been completed, have it neatly bound by an experienced binder, and lettered by an artist, or printer similar to the following:

BRIEF OF THE QUALIFICATIONS OF Robert K. Smith

APPLYING FOR THE POSITION OF Private Secretary to The President of THE BLANK COMPANY, Inc.

Change names each time brief is shown.

This personal touch is sure to command attention. Have your brief neatly typed or mimeographed on the finest paper you can obtain, and bound with a heavy paper of the book-cover variety, the binder to be changed, and the proper firm name to be inserted if it is to be shown to more than one company. Your photograph should be pasted on one of the pages of your brief. Follow these instructions to the letter, improving upon them wherever your imagination suggests.

Successful salesmen groom themselves with care. They understand that first impressions are lasting. Your brief is your salesman. Give it a good suit of clothes, so it will stand out in bold contrast to anything your prospective employer ever saw, in the way of an application for a position. If the position you seek is worth having, it is worth going after with care. Moreover, if you sell yourself to an employer in a manner that impresses him with your individuality, you probably will receive more money for your services from the very start, than you would if you applied for employment in the usual conventional way.

If you seek employment through an advertising agency, or an employment agency, have the agent use copies of your brief in marketing your services. This will help to gain preference for you, both with the agent, and the prospective employers. HOW TO GET THE EXACT POSITION YOU DESIRE

Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited. An artist loves to work with paints, a craftsman with his hands, a writer loves to write. Those with less definite talents have their preferences for certain fields of business and industry. If America does anything well, it offers a full range of occupations, tilling the soil, manufacturing, marketing, and the professions.

First. Decide EXACTLY what kind of a job you want. If the job doesn’t already exist, perhaps you can create it.

Second. Choose the company, or individual for whom you wish to work.

Third. Study your prospective employer, as to policies, personnel, and chances of advancement.

Fourth. By analysis of yourself, your talents and capabilities, figure WHAT YOU CAN OFFER, and plan ways and means of giving advantages, services, developments, ideas that you believe you can successfully deliver.

Fifth. Forget about “a job.” Forget whether or not there is an opening. Forget the usual routine of “have you got a job for me?” Concentrate on what you can give.

Sixth. Once you have your plan in mind, arrange with an experienced writer to put it on paper in neat form, and in full detail.

Seventh. Present it to the proper person with authority and he will do the rest. Every company is looking for men who can give something of value, whether it be ideas, services, or “con-nections.” Every company has room for the man who has a definite plan of action which is to the advantage of that company.

This line of procedure may take a few days or weeks of extra time, but the difference in income, in advancement, and in gaining recognition will save years of hard work at small pay. It has many advantages, the main one being that it will often save from one to five years of time in reaching a chosen goal.

Every person who starts, or “gets in” half way up the ladder, does so by deliberate and careful planning, (excepting, of course, the Boss’ son).

THE NEW WAY OF MARKETING SERVICES “JOBS” ARE NOW “PARTNERSHIPS”

Men and women who market their services to best advantage in the future, must recognize the stupendous change which has taken place in connection with the relationship between employer and employee.

In the future, the “Golden Rule,” and not the “Rule of Gold” will be the dominating factor in the marketing of merchandise as well as personal services. The future relationship between employers and their employees will be more in the nature of a partnership consisting of:

a. The employer

b. The employee

c. The public they serve

This new way of marketing personal services is called new for many reasons, first, both the employer and the employee of the future will be considered as fellowemployees whose business it will be to SERVE THE PUBLIC EFFICIENTLY. In times past, employers, and employees have bartered among themselves, driving the best bargains they could with one another, not considering that in the final analysis they were, in reality, BARGAINING AT THE EXPENSE OF THE THIRD PARTY, THE PUBLIC THEY SERVED.

The depression served as a mighty protest from an injured public, whose rights had been trampled upon in every direction by those who were clamoring for individual advantages and profits. When the debris of the depression shall have been cleared away, and business shall have been once again restored to balance, both employers and employees will recognize that they are NO LONGER PRIVILEGED TO DRIVE BARGAINS AT THE EXPENSE OF THOSE WHOM THEY SERVE. The real employer of the future will be the public. This should be kept uppermost in mind by every person seeking to market personal services effectively.

Nearly every railroad in America is in financial difficulty. Who does not remember the day when, if a citizen enquired at the ticket office, the time of departure of a train, he was abruptly referred to the bulletin board instead of being politely given the information?

The street car companies have experienced a “change of times” also. There was a time not so very long ago when street car conductors took pride in giving argument to passengers. Many of the street car tracks have been removed and passengers ride on a bus, whose driver is “the last word in politeness.”

All over the country street car tracks are rusting from abandonment, or have been taken up. Where-ever street cars are still in operation, passengers may now ride without argument, and one may even hail the car in the middle of the block, and the motorman will OBLIGINGLY pick him up.

HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED! That is just the point I am trying to emphasize. TIMES HAVE CHANGED! Moreover, the change is reflected not merely in railroad offices and on street cars, but in other walks of life as well. The “public-bedamned” policy is now passe. It has been supplanted by the “we-are-obligingly-at-your-service, sir,” policy.

The bankers have learned a thing or two during this rapid change which has taken place during the past few years. Impoliteness on the part of a bank official, or bank employee today is as rare as it was conspicuous a dozen years ago. In the years past, some bankers (not all of them, of course), carried an atmosphere of austerity which gave every would-be borrower a chill when he even thought of approaching his banker for a loan. The thousands of bank failures during the depression had the effect of removing the mahogany doors behind which bankers formerly barricaded themselves. They now sit at desks in the open, where they may be seen and approached at will by any depositor, or by anyone who wishes to see them, and the whole atmosphere of the bank is one of courtesy and understanding.

It used to be customary for customers to have to stand and wait at the corner grocery until the clerks were through passing the time of day with friends, and the proprietor had finished making up his bank deposit, before being waited upon. Chain stores, managed by COURTEOUS MEN who do everything in the way of service, short of shining the customer’s shoes, have PUSHED THE OLD-TIME MERCHANTS INTO THE BACKGROUND. TIME MARCHES ON! “Courtesy” and “Service” are the watch-words of merchandising today, and apply to the person who is marketing personal services even more directly than to the employer whom he serves, because, in the final analysis, both the employer and his employee are EMPLOYED BY THE PUBLIC THEY SERVE. If they fail to serve well, they pay by the loss of their privilege of serving.

We can all remember the time when the gas-meter reader pounded on the door hard enough to break the panels. When the door was opened, he pushed his way in, uninvited, with a scowl on his face which plainly said, “what-the-hell-did-youkeep-me-waiting-for?” All that has undergone a change. The meter-man now conducts himself as a gentleman who is “delighted-to-be-at-your-service-sir.” Before the gas companies learned that their scowling meter-men were accumulating liabilities never to be cleared away, the polite salesmen of oil burners came along and did a land office business.

During the depression, I spent several months in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania, studying conditions which all but destroyed the coal industry. Among several very significant discoveries, was the fact that greed on the part of operators and their employees was the chief cause of the loss of business for the operators, and loss of jobs for the miners.

Through the pressure of a group of overzealous labor leaders, representing the employees, and the greed for profits on the part of the operators, the anthracite business suddenly dwindled. The coal operators and their employees drove sharp bargains with one another, adding the cost of the “bargaining” to the price of the coal, until, finally, they discovered they had BUILT UP A WONDERFUL BUSINESS FOR THE MANUFACTURERS OF OIL BURNING OUTFITS AND THE PRODUCERS OF CRUDE OIL.

“The wages of sin is death!” Many have read this in the Bible, but few have discovered its meaning. Now, and for several years, the entire world has been listening BY FORCE, to a sermon which might well be called “WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH, THAT SHALL HE ALSO REAP.”

Nothing as widespread and effective as the depression could possibly be “just a coincidence.” Behind the depression was a CAUSE. Nothing ever happens without a CAUSE. In the main, the cause of the depression is traceable directly to the worldwide habit of trying to REAP without SOWING.

This should not be mistaken to mean that the depression represents a crop which the world is being FORCED to reap without having SOWN. The trouble is that the world sowed the wrong sort of seed. Any farmer knows he cannot sow the seed of thistles, and reap a harvest of grain. Beginning at the outbreak of the world war, the people of the world began to sow the seed of service inadequate in both quality and quantity. Nearly everyone was engaged in the pastime of trying to GET WITHOUT GIVING.

These illustrations are brought to the attention of those who have personal services to market, to show that we are where we are, and what we are, because of our own conduct! If there is a principle of cause and effect, which controls business, finance, and transportation, this same principle controls individuals and determines their economic status.

WHAT IS YOUR “QQS” RATING?

The causes of success in marketing services EFFECTIVELY and permanently, have been clearly described. Unless those causes are studied, analyzed, understood and APPLIED, no man can market his services effectively and permanently. Every person must be his own salesman of personal services. The QUALITY and the QUANTITY of service rendered, and the SPIRIT in which it is rendered, determine to a large extent, the price, and the duration of employment. To market

Personal services effectively, (which means a permanent market, at a satisfactory price, under pleasant conditions), one must adopt and follow the “QQS” formula which means that QUALITY, plus QUANTITY, plus the proper SPIRIT of cooperation, equals perfect salesmanship of service. Remember the “QQS” formula, but do more-APPLY IT AS A HABIT!

Let us analyze the formula to make sure we understand exactly what it means.

1. QUALITY of service shall be construed to mean the performance of every detail, in connection with your position, in the most efficient manner possible, with the object of greater efficiency always in mind.

2. QUANTITY of service shall be understood to mean the HABIT of rendering all the service of which you are capable, at all times, with the purpose of increasing the amount of service ren-dered as greater skill is developed through practice and experience. Emphasis is again placed on the word HABIT.

3. SPIRIT of service shall be construed to mean the HABIT of agreeable, harmonious conduct which will induce cooperation from associates and fellow employees. Adequacy of QUALITY and QUANTITY of service is not sufficient to maintain a permanent market for your services. The conduct, or the SPIRIT in which you deliver service, is a strong determining factor in connection with both the price you receive, and the duration of employment.

Andrew Carnegie stressed this point more than others in connection with his description of the factors which lead to success in the marketing of personal services. He emphasized again, and again, the necessity for HARMONIOUS CONDUCT. He stressed the fact that he would not retain any man, no matter how great a QUANTITY, or how efficient the QUALITY of his work, unless he worked in a spirit of HARMONY. Mr. Carnegie insisted upon men being AGREEABLE.

To prove that he placed a high value upon this quality, he permitted many men who conformed to his standards to become very wealthy. Those who did not conform, had to make room for others.

The importance of a pleasing personality has been stressed, because it is a factor which enables one to render service in the proper SPIRIT. If one has a personality which PLEASES, and renders service in a spirit of HARMONY, these assets often make up for deficiencies in both the QUALITY, and the QUANTITY of service one renders. Nothing, however, can be SUCCESSFULLY SUBSTITUTED FOR PLEASING CONDUCT.

THE CAPITAL VALUE OF YOUR SERVICES

The person whose income is derived entirely from the sale of personal services is no less a merchant than the man who sells commodities, and it might well be added, such a person is subject to EXACTLY THE SAME RULES of conduct as the merchant who sells merchandise.

This has been emphasized, because the majority of people who live by the sale of personal services make the mistake of considering themselves free from the rules of conduct, and the responsibilities attached to those who are engaged in marketing commodities.

The new way of marketing services has practically forced both employer and. employee into partnership alliances, through which both take into consideration the rights of the third party, THE PUBLIC THEY SERVE.

The day of the “go-getter” has passed. He has been supplanted by the “go-giver.” High-pressure methods in business finally blew the lid off. There will never be the need to put the lid back on, because, in the future, business will be conducted by methods that will require no pressure.

The actual capital value of your brains may be determined by the amount of income you can produce (by marketing your services). A fair estimate of the capital value of your services may be made by multiplying your annual income by sixteen and two-thirds, as it is reasonable to estimate that your annual income represents six percent of your capital value. Money rents for 6% per annum.

Money is worth no more than brains. It is often worth much less. Competent “brains,” if effectively marketed, represent a much more desirable form of capital than that which is required to conduct a business dealing in commodities, because “brains” are a form of capital which cannot be permanently depreciated through depressions, nor can this form of capital be stolen or spent.

Moreover, the money which is essential for the conduct of business is as worthless as a sand dune, until it has been mixed with efficient “brains.”

THE THIRTY MAJOR CAUSES OF FAILURE

HOW MANY OF THESE ARE HOLDING YOU BACK?

Life’s greatest tragedy consists of men and women who earnestly try, and fail! The tragedy lies in the overwhelmingly large majority of people who fail, as compared to the few who succeed. I have had the privilege of analyzing several thousand men and women, 98% of whom were classed as “failures.” There is something radically wrong with a civilization, and a system of education, which permit 98% of the people to go through life as failures. But I did not write this book for the purpose of moralizing on the rights and wrongs of the world; that would require a book a hundred times the size of this one.

My analysis work proved that there are thirty major reasons for failure, and thirteen major principles through which people accumulate fortunes. In this chapter, a description of the thirty major causes of failure will be given. As you go over the list, check yourself by it, point by point, for the purpose of discovering how many of these causes-of-failure stand between you and success.

1. UNFAVORABLE HEREDITARY BACKGROUND. There is but little, if anything, which can be done for people who are born with a deficiency in brain power. This philosophy offers but one method of bridging this weakness-through the aid of the Master Mind. Observe with profit, however, that this is the ONLY one of the thirty causes of failure which may not be easily corrected by any individual.

2. LACK OF A WELL-DEFINED PURPOSE IN LIFE. There is no hope of success for the person who does not have a central purpose, or definite goal at which to aim. Ninety-eight out of every hundred of those whom I have analyzed, had no such aim. Perhaps this was the

3. LACK OF AMBITION TO AIM ABOVE MEDIOCRITY. We offer no hope for the person who is so indifferent as not to want to get ahead in life, and who is not willing to pay the price. 4. INSUFFICIENT EDUCATION. This is a handicap which maybe overcome with comparative ease. Experience has proven that the best-educated people are often those who are known as “self-made,” or self-educated. It takes more than a college degree to make one a person of education. Any person who is educated is one who has learned to get whatever he wants in life without violating the rights of others. Education consists, not so much of knowledge, but of knowledge effectively and persistently APPLIED. Men are paid, not merely for what they know, but more particularly for WHAT THEY DO WITH THAT WHICH THEY KNOW.

5. LACK OF SELF-DISCIPLINE. Discipline comes through self-control. This means that one must control all negative qualities. Before you can control conditions, you must first control yourself. Self-mastery is the hardest job you will ever tackle. If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self. You may see at one and the same time both your best friend and your greatest enemy, by stepping in front of a mirror.

6. ILL HEALTH. No person may enjoy outstanding success without good health. Many of the causes of ill health are subject to mastery and control. These, in the main are:

a. Overeating of foods not conducive to health

b. Wrong habits of thought; giving expression to negatives.

c. Wrong use of, and over indulgence in sex.

d. Lack of proper physical exercise

e. An inadequate supply of fresh air, due to improper breathing.

7. UNFAVORABLE ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES DURING CHILDHOOD. “As the twig is bent, so shall the tree grow.” Most people who have criminal tendencies acquire them as the result of bad environment, and improper associates during childhood.

8. PROCRASTINATION. This is one of the most common causes of failure. “Old Man Procrastination” stands within the shadow of every human being, waiting his opportunity to spoil one’s chances of success. Most of us go through life as failures, because we are waiting for the “time to be right” to start doing something worthwhile. Do not wait. The time will never be “just right.” Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.

9. LACK OF PERSISTENCE. Most of us are good “starters” but poor “finishers” of everything we begin. Moreover, people are prone to give up at the first signs of defeat. There is no substitute for PERSISTENCE. The person who makes PERSISTENCE his watch -word, discovers that “Old Man Failure” finally becomes tired, and makes his departure. Failure cannot cope with PERSISTENCE.

10. NEGATIVE PERSONALITY. There is no hope of success for the person who repels people through a negative personality. Success comes through the application of POWER, and power is attained through the cooperative efforts of other people. A negative personality will not induce cooperation.

11. LACK OF CONTROLLED SEXUAL URGE. Sex energy is the most powerful of all the stimuli which move people into ACTION. Because it is the most powerful of the emotions, it must be controlled, through transmutation, and converted into other channels.

12. UNCONTROLLED DESIRE FOR “SOMETHING FOR NOTHING.” The gambling instinct drives millions of people to failure. Evidence of this may be found in a study of the Wall Street crash of ‘ 29, during which millions of people tried to make money by gambling on stock margins.

13. LACKOF A WELL DEFINED POWER OF DECISION. Men who succeed reach decisions promptly, and change them, if at all, very slowly. Men who fail, reach decisions, if at all, very slowly, and change them frequently, and quickly. Indecision and procrastination are twin brothers. Where one is found, the other may usually be found also. Kill off this pair before they completely “hog-tie” you to the treadmill of FAILURE.

14. ONE OR MORE OF THE SIX BASIC FEARS. These fears have been analyzed for you in a later chapter. They must be mastered before you can market your services effectively.

15. WRONG SELECTION OF A MATE IN MARRIAGE. This a most common cause of failure. The relationship of marriage brings people intimately into contact. Unless this relationship is harmonious, failure is likely to follow. Moreover, it will be a form of failure that is marked by misery and unhappiness, destroying all signs of AMBITION.

16. OVER-CAUTION. The person who takes no chances, generally has to take whatever is left when others are through choosing. Over-caution is as bad as under-caution. Both are extremes to be guarded against. Life itself is filled with the element of chance.

17. WRONG SELECTION OF ASSOCIATES IN BUSINESS. This is one of the most common causes of failure in business. In marketing personal services, one should use great care to select an employer who will be an inspiration, and who is, himself, intelligent and successful. We emulate those with whom we associate most closely. Pick an employer who is worth emulating.

18. SUPERSTITION AND PREJUDICE. Superstition is a form of fear. It is also a sign of ignorance. Men who succeed keep open minds and are afraid of nothing.

19. WRONG SELECTION OF A VOCATION. No man can succeed in a line of endeavor which he does not like. The most essential step in the marketing of personal services is that of selecting an occupation into which you can throw yourself wholeheartedly. 20. LACK OF CONCENTRATION OF EFFORT. The “jack-of-all-trades” seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one DEFINITE CHIEF AIM.

21. THE HABIT OF INDISCRIMINATE SPENDING. The spend-thrift cannot succeed, mainly because he stands eternally in FEAR OF POVERTY. Form the habit of systematic saving by putting aside a definite percentage of your income. Money in the bank gives one a very safe foundation of COURAGE when bargaining for the sale of personal services. Without money, one must take what one is offered, and be glad to get it.

22. LACK OF ENTHUSIASM. Without enthusiasm one cannot be convincing. Moreover, enthusiasm is contagious, and the person who has it, under control, is generally welcome in any group of people.

23. INTOLERANCE. The person with a “closed” mind on any subject seldom gets ahead. Intolerance means that one has stopped acquiring knowledge. The most damaging forms of intolerance are those connected with religious, racial, and political differences of opinion.

24. INTEMPERANCE. The most damaging forms of intemperance are connected with eating, strong drink, and sexual activities. Overindulgence in any of these is fatal to success.

25. INABILITY TO COOPERATE WITH OTHERS. More people lose their positions and their big opportunities in life, because of this fault, than for all other reasons combined. It is a fault which no well-informed business man, or leader will tolerate.

26. POSSESSION OF POWER THAT WAS NOT ACQUIRED THROUGH SELF EFFORT. (Sons and daughters of wealthy men, and others who inherit money which they did not earn). Power in the hands of one who did not acquire it gradually, is often fatal to success. QUICK RICHES are more dangerous than poverty.

27. INTENTIONAL DISHONESTY. There is no substitute for honesty. One may be temporarily dishonest by force of circumstances over which one has no control, without permanent damage. But, there is NO HOPE for the person who is dishonest by choice. Sooner or later, his deeds will catch up with him, and he will pay by loss of reputation, and perhaps even loss of liberty.

28. EGOTISM AND VANITY. These qualities serve as red lights which warn others to keep away. THEY ARE FATAL TO SUCCESS.

29. GUESSING INSTEAD OF THINKING. Most people are too indifferent or lazy to acquire FACTS with which to THINK ACCURATELY. They prefer to act on “opinions” created by guesswork or snap-judgments.

30. LACK OF CAPITAL. This is a common cause of failure among those who start out in business for the first time, without sufficient reserve of capital to absorb the shock of their mistakes, and to carry them over until they have established a REPUTATION.

31. Under this, name any particular cause of failure from which you have suffered that has not been included in the foregoing list.

In these thirty major causes of failure is found a description of the tragedy of life, which obtains for practically every person who tries and fails. It will be helpful if you can induce someone who knows you well to go over this list with you, and help to analyze you by the thirty causes of failure. It may be beneficial if you try this alone. Most people cannot see themselves as others see them. You may be one who cannot.

The oldest of admonitions is “Man, know thyself!” If you market merchandise successfully, you must know the merchandise. The same is true in marketing personal services. You should know all of your weaknesses in order that you may either bridge them or eliminate them entirely. You should know your strength in order that you may call attention to it when selling your services. You can know yourself only through accurate analysis.

The folly of ignorance in connection with self was displayed by a young man who applied to the manager of a well known business for a position. He made a very good impression until the manager asked him what salary he expected. He replied that he had no fixed

sum in mind (lack of a definite aim). The manager then said, “We will pay you all you are worth, alter we try you out for a week.”

“I will not accept it,” the applicant replied, “because I AM GETTING MORE THAN THAT WHERE I AM NOW EMPLOYED.”

Before you even start to negotiate for a readjustment of your salary in your present position, or to seek employment elsewhere, BE SURE THAT YOU ARE WORTH MORE THAN YOU NOW RECEIVE.

It is one thing to WANT money-everyone wants more-but it is something entirely different to be WORTH MORE! Many people mistake their WANTS for their JUST DUES. Your financial requirements or wants have nothing whatever to do with your WORTH. Your value is established entirely by your ability to render useful service or your capacity to induce others to render such service. TAKE INVENTORY OF YOURSELF – 28 QUESTIONS YOU SHOULD ANSWER

Annual self-analysis is an essential in the effective marketing of personal services, as is annual inventory in merchandising. Moreover, the yearly analysis should disclose a DECREASE IN FAULTS, and an increase in VIRTUES. One goes ahead, stands still, or goes backward in life. One’s object should be, of course, to go ahead. Annual self-analysis will disclose whether advancement has been, made, and if so, how much. It will also disclose any backward steps one may have made. The effective marketing of personal services requires one to move forward even if the progress is slow.

Your annual self-analysis should be made at the end of each year, so you can include in your New Year’s Resolutions any improvements which the analysis indicates should be made. Take this inventory by asking yourself the following questions, and by checking your answers with the aid of someone who will not permit you to deceive yourself as to their accuracy.

SELF-ANALYSIS QUESTIONNAIRE FOR PERSONAL INVENTORY

1. Have I attained the goal which I established as my objective for this year? (You should work with a definite yearly objective to be attained as a part of your major life objective).

2. Have I delivered service of the best possible QUALITY of which I was capable, or could I have improved any part of this service?

3. Have I delivered service in the greatest possible QUANTITY of which I was capable?

4. Has the spirit of my conduct been harmonious, and cooperative at all times?

5. Have I permitted the habit of PROCRASTINATION to decrease my efficiency, and if so, to what extent?

6. Have I improved my PERSONALITY, and if so, in what ways?

7. Have I been PERSISTENT in following my plans through to completion?

8. Have I reached DECISIONS PROMPTLY AND DEFINITELY on all occasions?

9. Have I permitted any one or more of the six basic fears to decrease my efficiency?

10. Have I been either “over-cautious,” or “under-cautious?”

11. Has my relationship with my associates in work been pleasant, or unpleasant? If it has been unpleasant, has the fault been partly, or wholly mine?

12. Have I dissipated any of my energy through lack of CONCENTRATION of effort?

13. Have I been open minded and tolerant in connection with all subjects?

14. In what way have I improved my ability to render service?

15. Have I been intemperate in any of my habits?

16. Have I expressed, either openly or secretly, any form of EGOTISM?

17. Has my conduct toward my associates been such that it has induced them to RESPECT me?

18. Have my opinions and DECISIONS been based upon guesswork, or accuracy of analysis and THOUGHT?

19. Have I followed the habit of budgeting my time, my expenses, and my income, and have I been conservative in these budgets?

20. How much time have I devoted to UNPROFITABLE effort which I might have used to better advantage?

21. How may I RE-BUDGET my time, and change my habits so I will be more efficient during the coming year?

22. Have I been guilty of any conduct which was not approved by my conscience?

23. In what ways have I rendered MORE SERVICE AND BETTER SERVICE than I was paid to render?

24. Have I been unfair to anyone, and if so, in what way?

25. If I had been the purchaser of my own services for the year, would I be satisfied with my purchase?

26. Am I in the right vocation, and if not, why not?

27. Has the purchaser of my services been satisfied with the service I have rendered, and if not, why not?

28. What is my present rating on the fundamental principles of success? (Make this rating fairly, and frankly, and have it checked by someone who is courageous enough to do it accurately).

Having read and assimilated the information conveyed through this chapter, you are now ready to create a practical plan for marketing your personal services. In this chapter will be found an adequate description of every principle essential in planning the sale of personal services, including the major attributes of leadership; the most common causes of failure in leadership; a description of the fields of opportunity for leadership; the main causes of failure in all walks of life, and the important questions which should be used in self-analysis. This extensive and detailed presentation of accurate information has been included, because it will be needed by all who must begin the accumulation of riches by marketing personal services. Those who have lost their fortunes, and those who are just beginning to earn money, have nothing but personal services to offer in return for riches, therefore it is essential that they have available the practical information needed to market services to best advantage.

The information contained in this chapter will be of great value to all who aspire to attain leadership in any calling. It will be particularly helpful to those aiming to market their services as business or industrial executives.

Complete assimilation and understanding of the information here conveyed will be helpful in marketing one’s own services, and it will also help one to become more analytical and capable of judging people. The information will be priceless to personnel directors, employment managers, and other executives charged with the selection of employees, and the maintenance of efficient organizations. If you doubt this statement, test its soundness by answering in writing the twenty-eight self-analysis questions. That might be both interesting and profitable, even though you do not doubt the soundness of the statement. WHERE AND HOW ONE MAY FIND OPPORTUNITIES TO ACCUMULATE RICHES

Now that we have analyzed the principles by which riches may be accumulated, we naturally ask, “where may one find favorable opportunities to apply these principles?” Very well, let us take inventory and see what the United States of America offer the person seeking riches, great or small.

To begin with, let us remember, all of us, that we live in a country where every law-abiding citizen enjoys freedom of thought and freedom of deed unequaled anywhere in the world. Most of us have never taken inventory of the advantages of this freedom. We have never compared our unlimited freedom with the curtailed freedom in other countries.

Here we have freedom of thought, freedom in the choice and enjoyment of education, freedom in religion, freedom in politics, freedom in the choice of a business, profession or occupation, freedom to accumulate and own without molestation, ALL THE PROPERTY WE CAN ACCUMULATE, freedom to choose our place of residence, freedom in marriage, freedom through equal opportunity to all races, freedom of travel from one state to another, freedom in our choice of foods, and freedom to AIM FOR ANY STATION IN LIFE FOR WHICH WE HAVE PREPARED OURSELVES, even for the presidency of the United States.

We have other forms of freedom, but this list will give a bird’s eye view of the most important, which constitute OPPORTUNITY of the highest order. This advantage of freedom is all the more conspicuous because the United States is the only country guaranteeing to every citizen, whether native born or naturalized, so broad and varied a list of freedom.

Next, let us recount some of the blessings which our widespread freedom has placed within our hands. Take the average American family for example (meaning, the family of average income) and sum up the benefits available to every member of the family, in this land of OPPORTUNITY and plenty!

a. FOOD. Next to freedom of thought and deed comes FOOD, CLOTHING, and SHELTER, the three basic necessities of life. Because of our universal freedom the average American family has available, at its very door, the choicest selection of food to be found anywhere in the world, and at prices within its financial range. A family of two, living in the heart of Times Square district of New York City, far removed from the source of production of foods, took careful inventory of the cost of a simple breakfast, with this astonishing result:

Articles of food;

Cost at the breakfast table:

Grape Fruit Juice, (From Florida) 02

Rippled Wheat Breakfast food (Kansas Farm). … 02

Tea (From China) 02

Bananas (From South America) 02V2

Toasted Bread (From Kansas Farm) 01

Fresh Country Eggs (From Utah) 07

Sugar (From Cuba, or Utah) 00V2

Butter and Cream (From New England) 03

Grand total … .20

It is not very difficult to obtain FOOD in a country where two people can have breakfast consisting of all they want or need for a dime apiece! Observe that this simple breakfast was gathered, by some strange form of magic (?) from China, South America, Utah, Kansas and the New England States, and delivered on the breakfast table, ready for consumption, in the very heart of the most crowded city in America, at a cost well within the means of the most humble laborer.

The cost included all federal, state and city taxes! (Here is a fact the politicians did not mention when they were crying out to the voters to throw their opponents out of office because the people were being taxed to death).

b. SHELTER. This family lives in a comfortable apartment, heated by steam, lighted with electricity, with gas for cooking, all for $65.00 a month. In a smaller city, or a more sparsely settled part of New York city, the same apartment could be had for as low as $20.00 a month.

The toast they had for breakfast in the food estimate was toasted on an electric toaster, which cost but a few dollars, the apartment is cleaned with a vacuum sweeper that is run by electricity. Hot &nd cold water is available, at all times, in the kitchen and the bathroom. The food is kept cool in a refrigerator that is run by electricity. The wife curls her hair, washes her clothes and irons them with easily operated electrical equipment, on power obtained by sticking a plug in the wall. The husband shaves with an electric shaver, and they receive entertainment from all over the world, twenty four hours a day, if they want it, without cost, by merely turning the dial of their radio. There are other conveniences in this apartment, but the foregoing list will give a fair idea of some of the concrete evidences of the freedom we, of America, enjoy. (And this is neither political nor economic propaganda).

c. CLOTHING. Anywhere in the United States, the woman of average clothing requirements can dress very comfortably and neatly for less than $200.00 a year, and the average man can dress for the same, or less.

Only the three basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter have been mentioned. The average American citizen has other privileges and advantages available in return for modest effort, not exceeding eight hours per day of labor. Among these is the privilege of automobile transportation, with which one can go and come at will, at very small cost.

The average American has security of property rights not found in any other country in the world. He can place his surplus money in a bank with the assurance that his government will protect it, and make good to him if the bank fails. If an American citizen wants to travel from one state to another he needs no passport, no one’s permission. He may go when he pleases, and return at will. Moreover, he may travel by train, private automobile, bus, airplane, or ship, as his pocketbook permits. In Germany, Russia, Italy, and most of the other European and Oriental countries, the people cannot travel with so much freedom, and at so little cost. THE “MIRACLE” THAT HAS PROVIDED THESE BLESSINGS

We often hear politicians proclaiming the freedom of America, when they solicit votes, but seldom do they take the time or devote sufficient effort to the analysis of the source or nature of this “freedom.” Having no axe to grind, no grudge to express, no ulterior motives to be carried out, I have the privilege of going into a frank analysis of that mysterious, abstract, greatly misunderstood “SOMETHING” which gives to every citizen of America more blessings, more opportunities to accumulate wealth, more freedom of every nature, than may be found in any other country.

I have the right to analyze the source and nature of this UNSEEN POWER, because I know, and have known for more than a quarter of a century, many of the men who organized that power, and many who are now responsible for its maintenance. The name of this mysterious benefactor of mankind is CAPITAL!

CAPITAL consists not alone of money, but more particularly of highly organized, intelligent groups of men who plan ways and means of using money efficiently for the good of the public, and profitably to themselves. These groups consist of scientists, educators, chemists, inventors, business analysts, publicity men, transportation experts, accountants, lawyers, doctors, and both men and women who have highly specialized knowledge in all fields of industry and business.

They pioneer, experiment, and blaze trails in new fields of endeavor. They support colleges, hospitals, public schools, build good roads, publish newspapers, pay most of the cost of government, and take care of the multitudinous detail essential to human progress.

Stated briefly, the capitalists are the brains of civilization, because they supply the entire fabric of which all education, enlightenment and human progress consists.

Money, without brains, always is dangerous. Properly used, it is the most important essential of civilization. The simple breakfast here described could not have been delivered to the New York family at a dime each, or at any other price, if organized capital had not provided the machinery, the ships, the railroads, and the huge armies of trained men to operate them.

Some slight idea of the importance of ORGANIZED CAPITAL may be had by trying to imagine yourself burdened with the responsibility of collecting, without the aid of capital, and delivering to the New York City family, the simple breakfast described.

To supply the tea, you would have to make a trip to China or India, both a very long way from America. Unless you are an excellent swimmer, you would become rather tired before making the round trip. Then, too, another problem would confront you.

What would you use for money, even if you had the physical endurance to swim the ocean?

To supply the sugar, you would have to take another long swim to Cuba, or a long walk to the sugar beet section of Utah. But even then, you might come back without the sugar, because organized effort and money are necessary to produce sugar, to say nothing of what is required to refine, transport, and deliver it to the breakfast table anywhere in the United States.

The eggs, you could deliver easily enough from the barn yards near New York City, but you would have a very long walk to Florida and return, before you could serve the two glasses of grapefruit juice. You would have another long walk, to Kansas, or one of the other wheat growing states, when you went after the four slices of wheat bread.

The Rippled Wheat Biscuits would have to be omitted from the menu, because they would not be available except through the labor of a trained organization of men and suitable machinery, ALL OF WHICH CALL FOR CAPITAL.

While resting, you could take off for another little swim down to South America, where you would pick up a couple of bananas, and on your return, you could take a short walk to the nearest farm having a dairy and pick up some butter and cream. Then your New York City family would be ready to sit down and enjoy breakfast, and you could collect your two dimes for your labor!

Seems absurd, doesn’t it? Well, the procedure described would be the only possible way these simple items of food could be delivered to the heart of New York City, if we had no capitalistic system.

The sum of money required for the building and maintenance of the railroads and steam ships used in the delivery of that simple breakfast is so huge that it staggers one’s imagination. It runs into hundreds of millions of dollars, not to mention the armies of trained employees required to man the ships and trains. But, transportation is only a part of the requirements of modern civilization in capitalistic America. Before there can be anything to haul, something must be grown from the ground, or manufactured and prepared for market. This calls for more millions of dollars for equipment, machinery, boxing, marketing, and for the wages of millions of men and women.

Steam ships and railroads do not spring up from the earth and function automatically. They come in response to the call of civilization, through the labor and ingenuity and organizing ability of men who have IMAGINATION, FAITH, ENTHUSIASM, DECISION, PERSISTENCE! These men are known as capitalists. They are motivated by the desire to build, construct, achieve, render useful service, earn profits and accumulate riches. And, because they RENDER SERVICE WITHOUT WHICH THERE WOULD BE NO CIVILIZATION, they put themselves in the way of great riches. Just to keep the record simple and understandable, I will add that these capitalists are the self-same men of whom most of us have heard soap-box orators speak. They are the same men to whom radicals, racketeers, dishonest politicians and grafting labor leaders refer as “the predatory interests,” or “Wall Street.”

I am not attempting to present a brief for or against any group of men or any system of economics. I am not attempting to condemn collective bargaining when I refer to “grafting labor leaders,” nor do I aim to give a clean bill of health to all individuals known as capitalists.

The purpose of this book-A purpose to which I have faithfully devoted over a quarter of a century-is to present to all who want the knowledge, the most dependable philosophy through which individuals may accumulate riches in whatever amounts they desire.

I have here analyzed the economic advantages of the capitalistic system for the two-fold purpose of showing:

1. that all who seek riches must recognize and adapt themselves to the system that controls all approaches to fortunes, large or small, and

2. to present the side of the picture opposite to that being shown by politicians and demagogues who deliberately becloud the issues they bring up, by referring to organized capital as if it were something poisonous.

This is a capitalistic country, it was developed through the use of capital, and we who claim the right to partake of the blessings of freedom and opportunity, we who seek to accumulate riches here, may as well know that neither riches nor opportunity would be available to us if ORGANIZED CAPITAL had not provided these benefits.

For more than twenty years it has been a somewhat popular and growing pastime for radicals, self-seeking politicians, racketeers, crooked labor leaders, and on occasion religious leaders, to take pot-shots at “WALL STREET, THE MONEY CHANGERS, and BIG BUSINESS.”

The practice became so general that we witnessed during the business depression, the unbelievable sight of high government officials lining up with the cheap politicians, and labor leaders, with the openly avowed purpose of throttling the system which has made Industrial America the richest country on earth. The lineup was so general and so well organized that it prolonged the worst depression America has ever known. It cost millions of men their jobs, because those jobs were inseparably a part of the industrial and capitalistic system which form the very backbone of the nation.

During this unusual alliance of government officials and self-seeking individuals who were endeavoring to profit by declaring “open season” on the American system of industry, a certain type of labor leader joined forces with the politicians and offered to deliver voters in return for legislation designed to permit men to TAKE RICHES AWAY FROM INDUSTRY BY ORGANIZED FORCE OF NUMBERS, INSTEAD OF THE BETTER METHOD OF GIVING A FAIR DAY’S WORK FOR A FAIR DAY’S PAY.

Millions of men and women throughout the nation are still engaged in this popular pastime of trying to GET without GIVING. Some of them are lined up with labor unions, where they demand SHORTER HOURS AND MORE PAY! Others do not take the trouble to work at all. THEY DEMAND GOVERNMENT RELIEF AND ARE GETTING IT. Their idea of their rights of freedom was demonstrated in New York City, where violent complaint was registered with the Postmaster, by a group of “relief beneficiaries,” because the Postmen awakened them at 7:30 A.M. to deliver Government relief checks. They DEMANDED that the time of delivery be set up to 10:00 o’clock.

If you are one of those who believe that riches can be accumulated by the mere act of men who organize themselves into groups and demand MORE PAY for LESS SERVICE, if you are one of those who DEMAND Government relief without early morning disturbance when the money is delivered to you, if you are one of those who believe in trading their votes to politicians in return for the passing of laws which permit the raiding of the public treasury, you may rest securely on your belief, with certain knowledge that no one will disturb you, because THIS IS A FREE COUNTRY WHERE EVERY MAN MAY THINK AS HE PLEASES, where nearly everybody can live with but little effort, where many may live well without doing any work whatsoever.

However, you should know the full truth concerning this FREEDOM of which so many people boast, and so few understand. As great as it is, as far as it reaches, as many privileges as it provides, IT DOES NOT, AND CANNOT BRING RICHES WITHOUT EFFORT.

There is but one dependable method of accumulating, and legally holding riches, and that is by rendering useful service. No system has ever been created by which men can legally acquire riches through mere force of numbers, or without giving in return an equivalent value of one form or another.

There is a principle known as the law of ECONOMICS! This is more than a theory. It is a law no man can beat. Mark well the name of the principle, and remember it, because it is far more powerful than all the politicians and political machines.

It is above and beyond the control of all the labor unions. It cannot be swayed, nor influenced nor bribed by racketeers or self-appointed leaders in any calling. Moreover, IT HAS AN ALL-SEEING EYE, AND A PERFECT SYSTEM OF BOOKKEEPING, in which it keeps an accurate account of the transactions of every human being engaged in the business of trying to get without giving. Sooner or later its auditors come around, look over the records of individuals both great and small, and demand an accounting. “Wall Street, Big Business, Capital Predatory Interests,” or whatever name you choose to give the system which has given us AMERICAN FREEDOM, represents a group of men who understand, respect, and adapt themselves to this powerful LAW OF ECONOMICS! Their financial continuation depends upon their respecting the law. Most people living in America like this country, its capitalistic system and all. I must confess I know of no better country, where one may find greater opportunities to accumulate riches. Judging by their acts and deeds, there are some in this country who do not like it. That, of course is their privilege; if they do not like this country, its capitalistic system, its boundless opportunities, THEY HAVE THE PRIVILEGE OF CLEARING OUT! Always there are other countries, such as Germany, Russia, and Italy, where one may try one’s hand at enjoying freedom, and accumulating riches providing one is not too particular.

America provides all the freedom and all the opportunity to accumulate riches that any honest person may require. When one goes hunting for game, one selects hunting grounds where game is plentiful. When seeking riches, the same rule would naturally obtain.

If it is riches you are seeking, do not overlook the possibilities of a country whose citizens are so rich that women, alone, spend over two hundred million dollars annually for lip-sticks, rouge and cosmetics. Think twice, you who are seeking riches, before trying to destroy the Capitalistic System of a country whose citizens spend over fifty million dollars a year for GREETING CARDS, with which to express their appreciation of their FREEDOM!

If it is money you are seeking, consider carefully a country that spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually for cigarettes, the bulk of the income from which goes to only four major companies engaged in supplying this national builder of “non-chalance” and “quiet nerves.” By all means give plenty of consideration to a country whose people spend annually more than fifteen million dollars for the privilege of seeing moving pictures, and toss in a few additional millions for liquor, narcotics, and other less potent soft drinks and gigglewaters.

Do not be in too big a hurry to get away from a country whose people willingly, even eagerly, hand over millions of dollars annually for football, baseball, and prize fights. And, by all means, STICK by a country whose inhabitants give up more than a million dollars a year for chewing gum, and another million for safety razor blades.

Remember, also, that this is but the beginning of the available sources for the accumulation of wealth. Only a few of the luxuries and non-essentials have been mentioned. But, remember that the business of producing, transporting, and marketing these few items of merchandise gives regular employment to MANY MILLIONS OF MEN AND WOMEN, who receive for their services MANY MILLIONS OF DOLLARS MONTHLY, and spend it freely for both the luxuries and the necessities.

Especially remember, that back of all this exchange of merchandise and personal services may be found an abundance of OPPORTUNITY to accumulate riches. Here our AMERICAN FREE-DOM comes to one’s aid. There is nothing to stop you, or anyone from engaging in any portion of the effort necessary to carry on these businesses. If one has superior talent, training, experience, one may accumulate riches in large amounts. Those not so fortunate may accumulate smaller amounts. Anyone may earn a living in return for a very nominal amount of labor.

So-there you are!

OPPORTUNITY has spread its wares before you. Step up to the front, select what you want, create your plan, put the plan into action, and follow through with PERSISTENCE. “Capitalistic” America will do the rest. You can depend upon this much-CAPITALISTIC AMERICA INSURES EVERY PERSON THE OPPORTUNITY TO RENDER USEFUL SERVICE, AND TO COLLECT RICHES IN PROPORTION TO THE VALUE OF THE SERVICE.

The “System” denies no one this right, but it does not, and cannot promise SOMETHING FOR NOTHING, because the system, itself, is irrevocably controlled by the LAW OF ECONOMICS which neither recognizes nor tolerates for long, GETTING WITHOUT GIVING.

The LAW OF ECONOMICS was passed by Nature! There is no Supreme Court to which violators of this law may appeal. The law hands out both penalties for its violation, and appropriate rewards for its observance, without interference or the possibility of interference by any human being. The law cannot be repealed. It is as fixed as the stars in the heavens, and subject to, and a part of the same system that controls the stars.

May one refuse to adapt one’s self to the LAW OF ECONOMICS?

Certainly! This is a free country, where all men are born with equal rights, including the privilege of ignoring the LAW OF ECONOMICS.

What happens then?

Well, nothing happens until large numbers of men join forces for the avowed purpose of ignoring the law, and taking what they want by force.

THEN COMES THE DICTATOR, WITH WELL ORGANIZED FIRING SQUADS AND MACHINE GUNS!

We have not yet reached that stage in America! But we have heard all we want to know about how the system works. Perhaps we hall be fortunate enough not to demand personal knowledge of so gruesome a reality. Doubtless we shall prefer to continue with our

FREEDOM OF SPEECH, FREEDOM OF DEED, and FREEDOM TO RENDER USEFUL SERVICE IN RETURN FOR RICHES.

The practice, by Government officials of extending to men and women the privilege of raiding the public treasury in return for votes, sometimes results in election, but as night follows day, the final payoff comes; when every penny wrongfully used, must be repaid with compound interest on compound interest. If those who make the grab are not forced to repay, the burden falls on their children, and their children’s children, “even unto the third and fourth generations.” There is no way to avoid the debt. Men can, and sometimes do, form themselves into groups for the purpose of crowding wages up, and working hours down. There is a point beyond which they cannot go. It is the point at which the LAW OF ECONOMICS steps in, and the sheriff gets both the employer and the employees.

For six years, from 1929, to 1935, the people of America, both rich and poor, barely missed seeing the Old Man Economics hand over to the sheriff all the businesses, and industries and banks. It was not a pretty sight! It did not increase our respect for mob psychology through which men cast reason to the winds and start trying to GET without GIVING.

We who went through those six discouraging years, when FEAR WAS IN THE SADDLE, AND FAITH WAS ON THE GROUND, cannot forget how ruthlessly the LAW OF ECONOMICS exacted its toll from both rich and poor, weak and strong, old and young. We shall not wish to go through another such experience.

These observations are not founded upon short-time experience. They are the result of twenty-five years of careful analysis of the methods of both the most successful and the most unsuccessful men America has known.

Chapter 8

Decision: The Mastery of Procrastination

The Seventh Step toward Riches

ACCURATE analysis of over 25,000 men and women who had experienced failure, disclosed the fact that LACK OF DECISION was near the head of the list of the 30 major causes of FAILURE. This is no mere statement of a theory-it is a fact. PROCRASTINATION, the opposite of DECISION, is a common enemy which practically every man must conquer.

You will have an opportunity to test your capacity to reach quick and definite DECISIONS when you finish reading this book, and are ready to begin putting into ACTION the principles which it describes.

Analysis of several hundred people who had accumulated fortunes well beyond the million dollar mark, disclosed the fact that every one of them had the habit of REACHING DECISIONS PROMPTLY, and of changing these decisions SLOWLY, if, and when they were changed. People who fail to accumulate money, without exception, have the habit of reaching decisions, IF AT ALL, very slowly, and of changing these decisions quickly and often.

One of Henry Ford’s most outstanding qualities is his habit of reaching decisions quickly and definitely, and changing them slowly. This quality is so pronounced in Mr. Ford, that it has given him the reputation of being obstinate. It was this quality which prompted Mr. Ford to continue to manufacture his famous Model “T” (the world’s ugliest car), when all of his advisors, and many of the purchasers of the car, were urging him to change it.

Perhaps, Mr. Ford delayed too long in making the change, but the other side of the story is, that Mr. Ford’s firmness of decision yielded a huge fortune, before the change in model became necessary. There is but little doubt that Mr. Ford’s habit of definiteness of decision assumes the proportion of obstinacy, but this quality is preferable to slowness in reaching decisions and quickness in changing them.

The majority of people who fail to accumulate money sufficient for their needs, are, generally, easily influenced by the “opinions” of others. They permit the newspapers and the “gossiping” neighbors to do their “thinking” for them. “Opinions are the cheapest commodities on earth. Everyone has a flock of opinions ready to be wished upon anyone who will accept them. If you are influenced by “opinions” when you reach DECISIONS, you will not succeed in any undertaking, much less in that of transmuting YOUR OWN DESIRE into money.

If you are influenced by the opinions of others, you will have no DESIRE of your own. Keep your own counsel, when you begin to put into practice the principles described here, by reaching your own decisions and following them. Take no one into your confidence, EXCEPT the members of your “Master Mind” group, and be very sure in your selection of this group, that you choose ONLY those who will be in COMPLETE SYMPATHY AND HARMONY WITH YOUR PURPOSE.

Close friends and relatives, while not meaning to do so, often handicap one through “opinions” and sometimes through ridicule, which is meant to be humorous. Thousands of men and women carry inferiority complexes with them all through life, because some well-meaning, but ignorant person destroyed their confidence through “opinions” or ridicule.

You have a brain and mind of your own. USE IT, and reach your own decisions. If you need facts or information from other people, to enable you to reach decisions, as you probably will in many instances; acquire these facts or secure the information you need quietly, without disclosing your purpose.

It is characteristic of people who have but a smattering or a veneer of knowledge to try to give the impression that they have much knowledge. Such people generally do TOO MUCH talking, and TOO LITTLE listening. Keep your eyes and ears wide open-and your mouth CLOSED, if you wish to acquire the habit of prompt DECISION. Those who talk too much do little else. If you talk more than you listen, you not only deprive yourself of many opportunities to accumulate useful knowledge, but you also disclose your PLANS and PURPOSES to people who will take great delight in defeating you, because they envy you.

Remember, also, that every time you open your mouth in the presence of a person who has an abundance of knowledge, you display to that person, your exact stock of knowledge, or your LACK of it! Genuine wisdom is usually conspicuous through modesty and silence.

Keep in mind the fact that every person with whom you associate is, like yourself, seeking the opportunity to accumulate money. If you talk about your plans too freely, you may be surprised when you learn that some other person has beaten you to your goal by PUTTING INTO ACTION AHEAD OF YOU, the plans of which you talked unwisely.

Let one of your first decisions be to KEEP A CLOSED MOUTH AND OPEN EARS AND EYES. As a reminder to yourself to follow this advice, it will be helpful if you copy the following epigram in large letters and place it where you will see it daily.

“TELL THE WORLD WHAT YOU INTEND TO DO, BUT FIRST SHOW IT.”

This is the equivalent of saying that “deeds, and not words, are what count most.” FREEDOM OR DEATH ON A DECISION

The value of decisions depends upon the courage required to render them. The great decisions, which served as the foundation of civilization, were reached by assuming great risks, which often meant the possibility of death.

Lincoln’s decision to issue his famous Proclamation of Emancipation, which gave freedom to the colored people of America, was rendered with full understanding that his act would turn thousands of friends and political supporters against him. He knew, too, that the carrying out of that proclamation would mean death to thousands of men on the battlefield. In the end, it cost Lincoln his life. That required courage.

Socrates’ decision to drink the cup of poison, rather than compromise in his personal belief, was a decision of courage. It turned Time ahead a thousand years, and gave to people then unborn, the right to freedom of thought and of speech.

The decision of Gen. Robert E. Lee, when he came to the parting of the way with the Union, and took up the cause of the South, was a decision of courage, for he well knew that it might cost him his own life, that it would surely cost the lives of others.

But, the greatest decision of all time, as far as any American citizen is concerned, was reached in Philadelphia, July 4, 1776, when fifty-six men signed their names to a document, which they well knew would bring freedom to all Americans, or leave every one of the fifty-six hanging from a gallows!

You have heard of this famous document, but you may not have drawn from it the great lesson in personal achievement it so plainly taught.

We all remember the date of this momentous decision, but few of us realize what courage that decision required. We remember our history, as it was taught; we remember dates, and the names of the men who fought; we remember Valley Forge, and Yorktown; we remember George Washington, and Lord Cornwallis. But we know little of the real forces back of these names, dates, and places. We know still less of that intangible POWER, which insured us freedom long before Washington’s armies reached Yorktown.

We read the history of the Revolution, and falsely imagine that George Washington was the Father of our Country, that it was he who won our freedom, while the truth is-Washington was only an accessory after the fact, because victory for his armies had been insured long before Lord Cornwallis surrendered. This is not intended to rob Washington of any of the glory he so richly merited.

Its purpose, rather, is to give greater attention to the astounding POWER that was the real cause of his victory. It is nothing short of tragedy that the writers of history have missed, entirely, even the slightest reference to the irresistible POWER, which gave birth and freedom to the nation destined to set up new standards of independence for all the peoples of the earth. I say it is a tragedy, because it is the self-same POWER which must be used by every individual who surmounts the difficulties of Life, and forces Life to pay the price asked.

Let us briefly review the events which gave birth to this POWER. The story begins with an incident in Boston, March 5, 1770. British soldiers were patroling the streets, by their presence, openly threatening the citizens. The colonists resented armed men marching in their midst. They began to express their resentment openly, hurling stones as well as epithets, at the marching soldiers, until the commanding officer gave orders, “Fix bayonets Charge!”

The battle was on. It resulted in the death and injury of many. The incident aroused such resentment that the Provincial Assembly, (made up of prominent colonists), called a meeting for the purpose of taking definite action. Two of the members of that Assembly were, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams-LONG LIVE THEIR NAMES! They spoke up courageously, and declared that a move must be made to eject all British soldiers from Boston.

Remember this-a DECISION, in the minds of two men, might properly be called the beginning of the freedom which we, of the United States now enjoy. Remember, too, that the DECISION of these two men called for FAITH, and COURAGE, because it was dangerous.

Before the Assembly adjourned, Samuel Adams was appointed to call on the Governor of the Province, Hutchinson, and demand the withdrawal of the British troops. The request was granted, the troops were removed from Boston, but the incident was not closed. It had caused a situation destined to change the entire trend of civilization. Strange, is it not, how the great changes, such as the American Revolution, and the World War, often have their beginnings in circumstances which seem unimportant? It is interesting, also, to observe that these important changes usually begin in the form of a DEFINITE DECISION in the minds of a relatively small number of people. Few of us know the history of our country well enough to realize that John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Richard Henry Lee (of the Province of Virginia) were the real Fathers of our Country. Richard Henry Lee became an important factor in this story by reason of the fact that he and Samuel Adams communicated frequently (by correspondence), sharing freely their fears and their hopes concerning the welfare of the people of their Provinces. From this practice, Adams conceived the idea that a mutual exchange of letters between the thirteen Colonies might help to bring about the coordination of effort so badly needed in connection with the solution of their problems. Two years after the clash with the soldiers in Boston (March ‘7 2), Adams presented this idea to the Assembly, in the form of a motion that a Correspondence Committee be established among the Colonies, with definitely appointed correspondents in each Colony, “for the purpose of friendly cooperation for the betterment of the Colonies of British America.”

Mark well this incident! It was the beginning of the organization of the far-flung POWER destined to give freedom to you, and to me. The Master Mind had already been organized. It consisted of Adams, Lee, and Hancock. “I tell you further, that if two of you agree upon the earth concerning anything for which you ask, it will come to you from My Father, who is in Heaven.”

The Committee of Correspondence was organized. Observe that this move provided the way for increasing the power of the Master Mind by adding to it men from all the Colonies. Take notice that this procedure constituted the first ORGANIZED PLANNING of the disgruntled Colonists.

In union there is strength! The citizens of the Colonies had been waging disorganized warfare against the British soldiers, through incidents similar to the Boston riot, but nothing of benefit had been accomplished. Their individual grievances had not been consolidated under one Master Mind. No group of individuals had put their hearts, minds, souls, and bodies together in one definite DECISION to settle their difficulty with the British once and for all, until Adams, Hancock, and Lee got together.

Meanwhile, the British were not idle. They, too, were doing some PLANNING and “Master-Minding” on their own account, with the advantage of having back of them money, and organized soldiery. The Crown appointed Gage to supplant Hutchinson as the Governor of Massachusetts. One of the new Governor’s first acts was to send a messenger to call on Samuel Adams, for the purpose of endeavoring to stop his opposition-by FEAR.

We can best understand the spirit of what happened by quoting the conversation between Col. Fenton, (the messenger sent by Gage), and Adams.

Col. Fenton: “I have been authorized by Governor Gage, to assure you, Mr. Adams, that the Governor has been empowered to confer upon you such benefits as would be satisfactory, [endeavor to win Adams by promise of bribes], upon the condition that you engage to cease in your opposition to the measures of the government. It is the Governor’s advice to you, Sir, not to incur the further displeasure of his majesty. Your conduct has been such as makes you liable to penalties of an Mt of Henry VIII, by which persons can be sent to England for trial for treason, or misprision of treason, at the discretion of a governor of a province. But, BY CHANGING YOUR POLITICAL COURSE, you will not only receive great personal advantages, but you will make your peace with the King.”

Samuel Adams had the choice of two DECISIONS. He could cease his opposition, and receive personal bribes, or he could CONTINUE, AND RUN THE RISK OF BEING HANGED!

Clearly, the time had come when Adams was forced to reach instantly, a DECISION which could have cost his life. The majority of men would have found it difficult to reach such a decision. The majority would have sent back an evasive reply, but not Adams! He insisted upon Col. Fenton’s word of honor, that the Colonel would deliver to the Governor the answer exactly as Adams would give it to him. Adams’ answer, “Then you may tell Governor Gage that I trust I have long since made my peace with the King of Kings. No personal consideration shall induce me to abandon the righteous cause of my Country. And, TELL GOVERNOR GAGE IT IS THE ADVICE OF SAMUEL ADAMS TO HIM, no longer to insult the feelings of an exasperated people.”

Comment as to the character of this man seems unnecessary. It must be obvious to all who read this astounding message that its sender possessed loyalty of the highest order. This is important. (Racketeers and dishonest politicians have prostituted the honor for which such men as Adams died).

When Governor Gage received Adams’ caustic reply, he flew into a rage, and issued a proclamation which read, “I do, hereby, in his majesty’s name, offer and promise his most gracious pardon to all persons who shall forthwith lay down their arms, and return to the duties of peaceable subjects, excepting only from the benefit of such pardon, SAMUEL ADAMS AND JOHN HANCOCK, whose offences are of too flagitious a nature to admit of any other consideration but that of condign punishment.”

As one might say, in modern slang, Adams and Hancock were “on the spot!” The threat of the irate Governor forced the two men to reach another DECISION, equally as dangerous. They hurriedly called a secret meeting of their staunchest followers. (Here the Master Mind began to take on momentum). After the meeting had been called to order, Adams locked the door, placed the key in his pocket, and informed all present that it was imperative that a Congress of the Colonists be organized, and that NO MAN SHOULD LEAVE THE ROOM UNTIL THE DECISION FOR SUCH A CONGRESS HAD BEEN REACHED. Great excitement followed. Some weighed the possible consequences of such radicalism. (Old Man Fear). Some expressed grave doubt as to the wisdom of so definite a decision in defiance of the Crown. Locked in that room were TWO MEN immune to Fear, blind to the possibility of Failure. Hancock and Adams. Through the influence of their minds, the others were induced to agree that, through the Correspondence Committee, arrangements should be made for a meeting of the First Continental Congress, to be held in Philadelphia, September 5, 1774. Remember this date. It is more important than July 4, 1776. If there had been no DECISION to hold a Continental Congress, there could have been no signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Before the first meeting of the new Congress, another leader, in a different section of the country was deep in the throes of publishing a “Summary View of the Rights of British America.” He was Thomas Jefferson, of the Province of Virginia, whose relationship to Lord Dunmore, (representative of the Crown in Virginia), was as strained as that of Hancock and Adams with their Governor.

Shortly after his famous Summary of Rights was published, Jefferson was informed that he was subject to prosecution for high treason against his majesty’s government. Inspired by the threat, one of Jefferson’s colleagues, Patrick Henry, boldly spoke his mind, concluding his remarks with a sentence which shall remain forever a classic, “If this be treason, then make the most of it.”

It was such men as these who, without power, without authority, without military strength, without money, sat in solemn consideration of the destiny of the colonies, beginning at the opening of the First Continental Congress, and continuing at intervals for two years-until on June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee arose, addressed the Chair, and to the startled Assembly made this motion:

“Gentlemen, I make the motion that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states, that they be absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be totally dissolved.”

Lee’s astounding motion was discussed fervently, and at such length that he began to lose patience. Finally, after days of argument, he again took the floor, and declared, in a clear, firm voice, “Mr. President, we have discussed this issue for days. It is the only course for us to follow. Why, then Sir, do we longer delay? Why still deliberate? Let this happy day give birth to an American Republic. Let her arise, not to devastate and to conquer, but to reestablish the reign of peace, and of law. The eyes of Europe are fixed upon us. She demands of us a living example of freedom, that may exhibit a contrast, in the felicity of the citizen, to the ever increasing tyranny.”

Before his motion was finally voted upon, Lee was called back to Virginia, because of serious family illness, but before leaving, he placed his cause in the hands of his friend, Thomas Jefferson, who promised to fight until favorable action was taken. Shortly thereafter the President of the Congress (Hancock), appointed Jefferson as Chairman of a Committee to draw up a Declaration of Independence.

Long and hard the Committee labored, on a document which would mean, when accepted by the Congress, that EVERY MAN WHO SIGNED IT, WOULD BE SIGNING HIS OWN DEATH WARRANT, should the Colonies lose in the fight with Great Britain, which was sure to follow.

The document was drawn, and on June 28, the original draft was read before the Congress. For several days it was discussed, altered, and made ready. On July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson stood before the Assembly, and fearlessly read the most momentus DECISION ever placed upon paper.

“When in the course of human events it is necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature, and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. . .

When Jefferson finished, the document was voted upon, accepted, and signed by the fifty-six men, every one staking his own life upon his DECISION to write his name. By that DECISION came into existence a nation destined to bring to mankind forever, the privilege of making DECISIONS. By decisions made in a similar spirit of Faith, and only by such decisions, can men solve their personal problems, and win for themselves high estates of material and spiritual wealth. Let us not forget this!

Analyze the events which led to the Declaration of Independence, and be convinced that this nation, which now holds a position of commanding respect and power among all nations of the world, was born of a DECISION created by a Master Mind, consisting of fifty-six men. Note well, the fact that it was their DECISION which insured the success of Washington’s armies, because the spirit of that decision was in the heart of every soldier who fought with him, and served as a spiritual power which recognizes no such thing as FAILURE.

Note, also, (with great personal benefit), that the POWER which gave this nation its freedom, is the self-same power that must be used by every individual who becomes self-determining.

This POWER is made up of the principles described in this book. It will not be difficult to detect, in the story of the Declaration of Independence, at least six of these principles; DESIRE, DECISION, FAITH, PERSISTENCE, THE MASTER MIND, and ORGANIZED PLANNING.

Throughout this philosophy will be found the suggestion that thought, backed by strong DESIRE, has a tendency to transmute itself into its physical equivalent. Before passing on, I wish to leave with you the suggestion that one may find in this story, and in the story of the organization of the United States Steel Corporation, a perfect description of the method by which thought makes this astounding transformation.

In your search for the secret of the method, do not look for a miracle, because you will not find it. You will find only the eternal laws of Nature. These laws are available to every person who has the FAITH and the COURAGE to use them. They may be used to bring freedom to a nation, or to accumulate riches. There is no charge save the time necessary to understand and appropriate them. Those who reach DECISIONS promptly and definitely, know what they want, and generally get it. The leaders in every walk of life DECIDE quickly, and firmly. That is the major reason why they are leaders. The world has the habit of making room for the man whose words and actions show that he knows where he is going.

INDECISION is a habit which usually begins in youth. The habit takes on permanency as the youth goes through graded school, high school, and even through college, without DEFINITENESS OF PURPOSE. The major weakness of all educational systems is that they neither teach nor encourage the habit of DEFINITE DECISION.

It would be beneficial if no college would permit the enrollment of any student, unless and until the student declared his major purpose in matriculating. It would be of still greater benefit, if every student who enters the graded schools were compelled to accept training in the HABIT OF DECISION, and forced to pass a satisfactory examination on this subject before being permitted to advance in the grades.

The habit of INDECISION acquired because of the deficiencies of our school systems, goes with the student into the occupation he chooses … IF .. in fact, he chooses his occupation. Generally, the youth just out of school seeks any job that can be found. He takes the first place he finds, because he has fallen into the habit of INDECISION. Ninety-eight out of every hundred people working for wages today, are in the positions they hold, because they lacked the DEFINITENESS OF DECISION to PLAN A DEFINITE POSITION, and the knowledge of how to choose an employer.

DEFINITENESS OF DECISION always requires courage, sometimes very great courage. The fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence staked their lives on the DECISION to affix their signatures to that document. The person who reaches a DEFINITE DECISION to procure the particular job, and make life pay the price he asks, does not stake his life on that decision; he stakes his ECONOMIC FREEDOM. Financial independence, riches, desirable business and professional positions are not within reach of the person who neglects or refuses to EXPECT, PLAN, and DEMAND these things. The person who desires riches in the same spirit that Samuel Adams desired freedom for the Colonies, is sure to accumulate wealth.

In the chapter on Organized Planning, you will find complete instructions for marketing every type of personal services. You will find also detailed information on how to choose the employer you prefer, and the particular job you desire. These instructions will be of no value to you UNLESS YOU DEFINITELY DECIDE to organize them into a plan of action.

Chapter 9

Persistence: The Sustained Effort Necessary to Induce Faith

The Eighth Step toward Riches

PERSISTENCE is an essential factor in the procedure of transmuting DESIRE into its monetary equivalent. The basis of persistence is the POWER OF WILL.

Will-power and desire, when properly combined, make an irresistible pair. Men who accumulate great fortunes are generally known as cold-blooded, and sometimes ruthless. Often they are misunderstood. What they have is will-power, which they mix with persistence, and place back of their desires to insure the attainment of their objectives.

Henry Ford has been generally misunderstood to be ruthless and cold-blooded. This misconception grew out of Ford’s habit of following through in all of his plans with PERSISTENCE.

The majority of people are ready to throw their aims and purposes overboard, and give up at the first sign of opposition or misfortune. A few carry on DESPITE all opposition, until they attain their goal. These few are the Fords, Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Edisons.

There may be no heroic connotation to the word “persistence,” but the quality is to the character of man what carbon is to steel. The building of a fortune, generally, involves the application of the entire thirteen factors of this philosophy. These principles must be understood, they must be applied with PERSISTENCE by all who accumulate money.

If you are following this book with the intention of applying the knowledge it conveys, your first test as to your PERSISTENCE will come when you begin to follow the six steps described in the second chapter. Unless you are one of the two out of every hundred who already have a DEFINITE GOAL at which you are aiming, and a DEFINITE PLAN for its attainment, you may read the instructions, and then pass on with your daily routine, and never comply with those instructions.

The author is checking you up at this point, because lack of persistence is one of the major causes of failure. Moreover, experience with thousands of people has proved that lack of persistence is a weakness common to the majority of men. It is a weakness which may be overcome by effort. The ease with which lack of persistence may be conquered will depend entirely upon the

INTENSITY OF ONE’S DESIRE.

The starting point of all achievement is DESIRE. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat. If you find yourself lacking in persistence, this weakness may be remedied by building a stronger fire under your desires.

Continue to read through to the end, then go back to Chapter two, and start immediately to carry out the instructions given in connection with the six steps. The eagerness with which you follow these instructions will indicate clearly, how much, or how little you really DESIRE to accumulate money. If you find that you are indifferent, you may be sure that you have not yet acquired the “money consciousness” which you must possess, before you can be sure of accumulating a fortune.

Fortunes gravitate to men whose minds have been prepared to “attract” them, just as surely as water gravitates to the ocean. In this book may be found all the stimuli necessary to “attune” any normal mind to the vibrations which will attract the object of one’s desires.

If you find you are weak in PERSISTENCE, center your attention upon the instructions contained in the chapter on “Power”; surround yourself with a “MASTER MIND” group, and through the cooperative efforts of the members of this group, you can develop persistence. You will find additional instructions for the development of persistence in the chapters on auto-suggestion, and the subconscious mind. Follow the instructions outlined in these chapters until your habit nature hands over to your subconscious mind, a clear picture of the object of your DESIRE. From that point on, you will not be handicapped by lack of persistence.

Your subconscious mind works continuously, while you are awake, and while you are asleep. Spasmodic, or occasional effort to apply the rules will be of no value to you. To get RESULTS, you must apply all of the rules until their application becomes a fixed habit with you. In no other way can you develop the necessary “money consciousness.”

POVERTY is attracted to the one whose mind is favorable to it, as money is attracted to him whose mind has been deliberately prepared to attract it, and through the same laws. POVERTY CONSCIOUSNESS WILL VOLUNTARILY SEIZE THE MIND WHICH IS NOT OCCUPIED WITH THE MONEY CONSCIOUSNESS. A poverty consciousness develops without conscious application of habits favorable to it. The money consciousness must be created to order, unless one is born with such a consciousness.

Catch the full significance of the statements in the preceding paragraph, and you will understand the importance of PERSISTENCE in the accumulation of a fortune. Without PERSISTENCE, you will be defeated, even before you start. With PERSISTENCE you will win.

If you have ever experienced a nightmare, you will realize the value of persistence. You are lying in bed, half awake, with a feeling that you are about to smother. You are unable to turn over, or to move a muscle. You realize that you MUST BEGIN to regain control over your muscles. Through persistent effort of will-power, you finally manage to move the fingers of one hand. By continuing to move your fingers, you extend your control to the muscles of one arm, until you can lift it. Then you gain control of the other arm in the same manner. You finally gain control over the muscles of one leg, and then extend it to the other leg. THEN-WITH ONE SUPREME EFFORT OF WILLyou regain complete control over your muscular system, and “snap” out of your nightmare. The trick has been turned step by step. You may find it necessary to “snap” out of your mental inertia, through a similar procedure, moving slowly at first, then increasing your speed, until you gain complete control over your will. Be PERSISTENT no matter how slowly you may, at first, have to move.

WITH PERSISTENCE WILL COME SUCCESS.

If you select your “Master Mind” group with care, you will have in it, at least one person who will aid you in the development of PERSISTENCE. Some men who have accumulated great fortunes, did so because of NECESSITY. They developed the habit of PERSISTENCE, because they were so closely driven by circumstances, that they had to become persistent.

THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR PERSISTENCE! It cannot be supplanted by any other quality! Remember this, and it will hearten you, in the beginning, when the going may seem difficult and slow. Those who have cultivated the HABIT of persistence seem to enjoy insurance against failure. No matter how many times they are defeated, they finally arrive up toward the top of the ladder.

Sometimes it appears that there is a hidden Guide whose duty is to test men through all sorts of discouraging experiences. Those who pick themselves up after defeat and keep on trying, arrive; and the world cries, “Bravo! I knew you could do it!” The hidden Guide lets no one enjoy great achievement without passing the PERSISTENCE TEST. Those who can’t take it, simply do not make the grade.

Those who can “take it” are bountifully rewarded for their PERSISTENCE. They receive, as their compensation, whatever goal they are pursuing. That is not all! They receive something infinitely more important than material compensationthe knowledge that

“EVERY FAILURE BRINGS WITH IT THE SEED OF AN EQUIVALENT ADVANTAGE.”

There are exceptions to this rule; a few people know from experience the soundness of persistence. They are the ones who have not accepted defeat as being anything more than temporary.

They are the ones whose DESIRES are so PERSISTENTLY APPLIED that defeat is finally changed into victory. We who stand on the side-lines of Life see the overwhelmingly large number who go down in defeat, never to rise again. We see the few who take the punishment of defeat as an urge to greater effort. These, fortunately, never learn to accept Life’s reverse gear. But what we DO NOT SEE, what most of us never suspect of existing, is the silent but irresistible POWER which comes to the rescue of those who fight on in the face of discouragement. If we speak of this power at all we call it PERSISTENCE, and let it go at that. One thing we all know, if one does not possess PERSISTENCE, one does not achieve noteworthy success in any calling.

As these lines are being written, I look up from my work, and see before me, less than a block away, the great mysterious “Broadway,” the “Graveyard of Dead Hopes,” and the “Front Porch of Opportunity.” From all over the world people have come to Broadway, seeking fame, fortune, power, love, or whatever it is that human beings call success. Once in a great while someone steps out from the long procession of seekers, and the world hears that another person has mastered Broadway. But Broadway is not easily nor quickly conquered. She acknowledges talent, recognizes genius, pays off in money, only after one has refused to QUIT.

Then we know he has discovered the secret of how to conquer Broadway. The secret is always inseparably attached to one word, PERSISTENCE!

The secret is told in the struggle of Fannie Hurst, whose PERSISTENCE conquered the Great White Way. She came to New York in 1915, to convert writing into riches. The conversion did not come quickly, BUT IT CAME. For four years Miss Hurst learned about “The Sidewalks of New York” from first hand experience. She spent her days laboring, and her nights HOPING. When hope grew dim, she did not say, “Alright Broadway, you win!” She said, “Very well, Broadway, you may whip some, but not me. I’m going to force you to give up.”

One publisher (The Saturday Evening Post) sent her thirty six rejection slips, before she “broke the ice and got a story across. The average writer, like the “average” in other walks of life, would have given up the job when the first rejection slip came. She pounded the pavements for four years to the tune of the publisher’s “NO,” because she was determined to win.

Then came the “payoff.” The spell had been broken, the unseen Guide had tested Fannie Hurst, and she could take it. From that time on publishers made a beaten path to her door. Money came so fast she hardly had time to count it. Then the moving picture men discovered her, and money came not in small change, but in floods. The moving picture rights to her latest novel, “Great Laughter,” brought $100,000.00, said to be the highest price ever paid for a story before publication. Her royalties from the sale of the book probably will run much more.

Briefly, you have a description of what PERSISTENCE is capable of achieving. Fannie Hurst is no exception. Wherever men and women accumulate great riches, you may be sure they first acquired PERSISTENCE. Broadway will give any beggar a cup of coffee and a sandwich, but it demands PERSISTENCE of those who go after the big stakes. Kate Smith will say “amen” when she reads this. For years she sang, without money, and without price, before any microphone she could reach. Broadway said to her, “Come and get it, if you can take it.” She did take it until one happy day Broadway got tired and said, “Aw, what’s the use? You don’t know when you’re whipped, so name your price, and go to work in earnest.” Miss Smith named her price!

It was plenty. Away up in figures so high that one week’s salary is far more than most people make in a whole year.

Verily it pays to be PERSISTENT!

And here is an encouraging statement which carries with it a suggestion of great significanceTHOUSANDS OF SINGERS WHO EXCEL KATE SMITH ARE

WALKING UP AND DOWN BROADWAY LOOKING FOR A “BREAK”WITHOUT SUCCESS. Countless others have come and gone, many of them sang well enough, but they failed to make the grade because they lacked the courage to keep on keeping on, until Broadway became tired of turning them away. Persistence is a state of mind, therefore it can be cultivated.

Like all states of mind, persistence is based upon definite causes, among them these :

a. DEFINITENESS OF PURPOSE. Knowing what one wants is the first and, perhaps, the most important step toward the development of persistence. A strong motive forces one to surmount many difficulties.

b. DESIRE. It is comparatively easy to acquire and to maintain persistence in pursuing the object of intense desire.

c. SELF-RELIANCE. Belief in one’s ability to carry out a plan encourages one to follow the plan through with persistence. (Self-reliance can be developed through the principle described in the chapter on auto-suggestion).

d. DEFINITENESS OF PLANS. Organized plans, even though they may be weak and entirely impractical, encourage persistence.

e. ACCURATE KNOWLEDGE. Knowing that one’s plans are sound, based upon experience or observation, encourages persistence; “guessing” instead of “knowing” destroys persistence.

f. CO-OPERATION. Sympathy, understanding, and harmonious cooperation with others tend to develop persistence.

g. WILL-POWER. The habit of concentrating one’s thoughts upon the building of plans for the attainment of a definite purpose, leads to persistence.

h. HABIT. Persistence is the direct result of habit. The mind absorbs and becomes a part of the daily experiences upon which it feeds. Fear, the worst of all enemies, can be effectively cured by forced repetition of cwt8 of courage. Everyone who has seen active service in war knows this.

Before leaving the subject of PERSISTENCE, take inventory of yourself, and determine in what particular, if any, you are lacking in this essential quality. Measure yourself courageously, point by point, and see how many of the eight factors of persistence you lack. The analysis may lead to discoveries that will give you a new grip on yourself.

SYMPTOMS OF LACK OF PERSISTENCE

Here you will find the real enemies which stand between you and noteworthy achievement. Here you will find not only the “symptoms” indicating weakness of PERSISTENCE, but also the deeply seated subconscious causes of this weakness. Study the list carefully, and face yourself squarely IF YOU REALLY WISH TO KNOW WHO YOU ARE, AND WHAT YOU ARE CAPABLE OF DOING.

These are the weaknesses which must be mastered by all who accumulate riches.

1. Failure to recognize and to clearly define exactly what one wants.

2. Procrastination, with or without cause. (Usually backed up with a formidable array of alibis and excuses).

3. Lack of interest in acquiring specialized knowledge.

4. Indecision, the habit of “passing the buck” on all occasions, instead of facing issues squarely. (Also backed by alibis).

5. The habit of relying upon alibis instead of creating definite plans for the solution of problems.

6. Self-satisfaction. There is but little remedy for this affliction, and no hope for those who suffer from it.

7. Indifference, usually reflected in one’s readiness to compromise on all occasions, rather than meet opposition and fight it.

8. The habit of blaming others for one’s mistakes, and accepting unfavorable circumstances as being unavoidable.

9. WEAKNESS OF DESIRE, due to neglect in the choice of MOTIVES that impel action.

10. Willingness, even eagerness, to quit at the first sign of defeat. (Based upon one or more of the 6 basic fears).

11. Lack of ORGANIZED PLANS, placed in writing where they may be analyzed.

12. The habit of neglecting to move on ideas, or to grasp opportunity when it presents itself.

13. WISHING instead of WILLING.

14. The habit of compromising with POVERTY instead of aiming at riches. General absence of ambition to be, to do, and to own.

15. Searching for all the short-cuts to riches, trying to GET without GIVING a fair equivalent, usually reflected in the habit of gambling, endeavoring to drive “sharp” bargains.

16. FEAR OF CRITICISM, failure to create plans and to put them into action, because of what other people will think, do, or say. This enemy belongs at the head of the list, because it generally exists in one’s subconscious mind, where its presence is not recognized. (See the Six Basic Fears in a later chapter).

Let us examine some of the symptoms of the Fear of Criticism. The majority of people permit relatives, friends, and the public at large to so influence them that they cannot live their own lives, because they fear criticism. Huge numbers of people make mistakes in marriage, stand by the bargain, and go through life miserable and unhappy, because they fear criticism which may follow if they correct the mistake. (Anyone who has submitted to this form of fear knows the irreparable damage it does, by destroying ambition, self-reliance, and the desire to achieve).

Millions of people neglect to acquire belated educations, after having left school, because they fear criticism. Countless numbers of men and women, both young and old, permit relatives to wreck their lives in the name of DUTY, because they fear criticism. (Duty does not require any person to submit to the destruction of his personal ambitions and the right to live his own life in his own way).

People refuse to take chances in business, because they fear the criticism which may follow if they fail. The fear of criticism, in such cases is stronger than the DESIRE for success.

Too many people refuse to set high goals for themselves, or even neglect selecting a career, because they fear the criticism of relatives and “friends” who may say “Don’t aim so high, people will think you are crazy.

When Andrew Carnegie suggested that I devote twenty years to the organization of a philosophy of individual achievement my first impulse of thought was fear of what people might say. The suggestion set up a goal for me, far out of proportion to any I had ever conceived. As quick as a flash, my mind began to create alibis and excuses, all of them traceable to the inherent FEAR OF CRITICISM. Something inside of me said, “You can’t do it-the job is too big, and requires too much time-what will your relatives think of you ?-how will you earn a living?-no one has ever organized a philosophy of success, what right have you to believe you can do it?-who are you, anyway, to aim so high?remember your humble birth-what do you know about philosophy-people will think you are crazy-(and they did)-why hasn’t some other person done this before now?”

These, and many other questions flashed into my mind, and demanded attention. It seemed as if the whole world had suddenly turned its attention to me with the purpose of ridiculing me into giving up all desire to carry out Mr. Carnegie’s suggestion.

I had a fine opportunity, then and there, to kill off ambition before it gained control of me. Later in life, after having analyzed thousands of people, I discovered that MOST IDEAS ARE STILL-BORN, AND NEED THE BREATH OF LIFE INJECTED INTO THEM THROUGH DEFINITE PLANS OF IMMEDIATE ACTION. The time to nurse an idea is at the time of its birth. Every minute it lives, gives it a better chance of surviving. The FEAR OF CRITICISM is at the bottom of the destruction of most ideas which never reach the PLANNING and ACTION stage.

Many people believe that material success is the result of favorable “breaks.” There is an element of ground for the belief, but those depending entirely upon luck, are nearly always disappointed, because they overlook another important factor which must be present before one can be sure of success. It is the knowledge with which favorable “breaks” can be made to order.

During the depression, W. C. Fields, the comedian, lost all his money, and found himself without income, without a job, and his means of earning a living (vaudeville) no longer existed. Moreover, he was past sixty, when many men consider themselves “old.” He was so eager to stage a comeback that he offered to work without pay, in a new field (movies). In addition to his other troubles, he fell and injured his neck. To many that would have been the place to give up and QUIT. But Fields was PERSISTENT. He knew that if he carried on he would get the “breaks” sooner or later, and he did get them, but not by chance.

Marie Dressier found herself down and out, with her money gone, with no job, when she was about sixty. She, too, went after the “breaks,” and got them. Her PERSISTENCE brought an astounding triumph late in life, long beyond the age when most men and women are done with ambition to achieve.

Eddie Cantor lost his money in the 1929 stock crash, but he still had his PERSISTENCE and his courage. With these, plus two prominent eyes, he exploited himself back into an income of $10,000 a week! Verily, if one has PERSISTENCE, one can get along very well without many other qualities. The only “break” anyone can afford to rely upon is a self-made “break.” These come through the application of PERSISTENCE. The starting point is DEFINITENESS OF PURPOSE.

Examine the first hundred people you meet, ask them what they want most in life, and ninety eight of them will not be able to tell you. If you press them for an answer, some will say-SECURITY, many will say-MONEY, a few will say-HAPPINESS, others will say-FAME AND POWER, and still others will say-SOCIAL RECOGNITION, EASE IN LIVING, ABILITY TO SING, DANCE, or WRITE, but none of them will be able to define these terms, or give the slightest indication of a PLAN by which they hope to attain these vaguely expressed wishes. Riches do not respond to wishes. They respond only to definite plans, backed by definite desires, through constant PERSISTENCE. HOW TO DEVELOP PERSISTENCE

There are four simple steps which lead to the habit of PERSISTENCE. They call for no great amount of intelligence, no particular amount of education, and but little time or effort. The necessary steps are:

1. A DEFINITE PURPOSE BACKED BY BURNING DESIRE FOR ITS FULFILLMENT.

2. A DEFINITE PLAN, EXPRESSED IN CONTINUOUS ACTION.

3. A MIND CLOSED TIGHTLY AGAINST ALL NEGATIVE AND DISCOURAGING INFLUENCES, including negative suggestions of relatives, friends and acquaintances.

4. A FRIENDLY ALLIANCE WITH ONE OR MORE PERSONS WHO WILL ENCOURAGE ONE TO FOLLOW THROUGH WITH BOTH PLAN AND PURPOSE.

These four steps are essential for success in all walks of life. The entire purpose of the thirteen principles of this philosophy is to enable one to take these four steps as a matter of habit. These are the steps by which one may control one’s economic destiny. They are the steps that lead to freedom and independence of thought. They are the steps that lead to riches, in small or great quantities. They lead the way to power, fame, and worldly recognition. They are the four steps which guarantee favorable “breaks.” They are the steps that convert dreams into physical realities.

They lead, also, to the mastery of FEAR, DISCOURAGEMENT, INDIFFERENCE.

There is a magnificent reward for all who learn to take these four steps. It is the privilege of writing one’s own ticket, and of making Life yield whatever price is asked.

I have no way of knowing the facts, but I venture to conjecture that Mrs. Wallis Simpson’s great love for a man was not accidental, nor the result of favorable “breaks” alone. There was a burning desire, and careful searching at every step of the way. Her first duty was to love. What is the greatest thing on earth? The Master called it love-not man made rules, criticism, bitterness, slander, or political “marriages,” but love.

She knew what she wanted, not after she met the Prince of Wales, but long before that. Twice when she had failed to find it, she had the courage to continue her search. “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Her rise from obscurity was of the slow, progressive, PERSISTENT order, but it was SURE! She triumphed over unbelievably long odds; and, no matter who you are, or what you may think of Wallis Simpson, or the king who gave up his Crown for her love, she is an astounding example of applied PERSISTENCE, an instructor on the rules of self-determination, from whom the entire world might profitably take lessons.

When you think of Wallis Simpson, think of one who knew what she wanted, and shook the greatest empire on earth to get it. Women who complain that this is a man’s world, that women do not have an equal chance to win, owe it to themselves to study carefully the life of this unusual woman, who, at an age which most women consider “old,” captured the affections of the most desirable bachelor in the entire world.

And what of King Edward? What lesson may we learn from his part in the world’s greatest drama of recent times? Did he pay too high a price for the affections of the woman of his choice?

Surely no one but he can give the correct answer. The rest of us can only conjecture. This much we know, the king came into the world without his own consent.

He was born to great riches, without requesting them. He was persistently sought in marriage; politicians and statesmen throughout Europe tossed dowagers and princesses at his feet. Because he was the first born of his parents, he inherited a crown, which he did not seek, and perhaps did not desire. For more than forty years he was not a free agent, could not live his life in his own way, had but little privacy, and finally assumed duties inflicted upon him when he ascended the throne.

Some will say, “With all these blessings, King Edward should have found peace of mind, contentment, and joy of living.” The truth is that back of all the privileges of a crown, all the money, the fame, and the power inherited by King Edward, there was an emptiness which could be filled only by love.

His greatest DESIRE was for love. Long before he met Wallis Simpson, he doubtless felt this great universal emotion tugging at the strings of his heart, beating upon the door of his soul, and crying out for expression. And when he met a kindred spirit, crying out for this same Holy privilege of expression, he recognized it, and without fear or apology, opened his heart and bade it enter. All the scandal-mongers in the world cannot destroy the beauty of this international drama, through which two people found love, and had the courage to face open criticism, renounce ALL ELSE to give it holy expression.

King Edward’s DECISION to give up the crown of the world’s most powerful empire, for the privilege of going the remainder of the way through life with the woman of his choice, was a decision that required courage. The decision also had a price, but who has the right to say the price was too great? Surely not He who said, “He among you who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.” As a suggestion to any evil-minded person who chooses to find fault with the Duke of Windsor, because his DESIRE was for LOVE, and for openly declaring his love for Wallis Simpson, and giving up his throne for her, let it be remembered that the OPEN DECLARATION was not essential. He could have followed the custom of clandestine liaison which has prevailed in Europe for centuries, without giving up either his throne, or the woman of his choice, and there would have been NO COMPLAINT FROM EITHER CHURCH OR LAITY. But this unusual man was built of sterner stuff. His love was clean. It was deep and sincere. It represented the one thing which, above ALL ELSE he truly DESIRED, therefore, he took what he wanted, and paid the price demanded.

If Europe had been blessed with more rulers with the human heart and the traits of honesty of ex-king Edward, for the past century, that unfortunate hemisphere now seething with greed, hate, lust, political connivance, and threats of war, would have a DIFFERENT AND A BETTER STORY TO TELL. A story in which Love and not Hate would rule.

In the words of Stuart Austin Wier we raise our cup and drink this toast to ex-king Edward and Wallis Simpson: “Blessed is the man who has come to know that our muted thoughts are our sweetest thoughts. “Blessed is the man who, from the blackest depths, can see the luminous figure of LOVE, and seeing, sing; and singing, say: ‘Sweeter far than uttered lays are the thoughts I have of you.’”

In these words would we pay tribute to the two people who, more than all others of modern times, have been the victims of criticism and the recipients of abuse, because they found Life’s greatest treasure, and claimed it. *Mrs. Simpson read and approved this analysis.

Most of the world will applaud the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson, because of their PERSISTENCE in searching until they found life’s greatest reward. ALL OF US CAN PROFIT by following their example in our own search for that which we demand of life.

What mystical power gives to men of PERSISTENCE the capacity to master difficulties? Does the quality of PERSISTENCE set up in one’s mind some form of spiritual, mental or chemical activity which gives one access to supernatural forces? Does Infinite Intelligence throw itself on the side of the person who still fights on, after the battle has been lost, with the whole world on the opposing side?

These and many other similar questions have arisen in my mind as I have observed men like Henry Ford, who started at scratch, and built an Industrial Empire of huge proportions, with little else in the way of a beginning but PERSISTENCE. Or, Thomas A. Edison, who, with less than three months of schooling, became the world’s leading inventor and converted PERSISTENCE into the talking machine, the moving picture machine, and the incandescent light, to say nothing of half a hundred other useful inventions.

I had the happy privilege of analyzing both Mr. Edison and Mr. Ford, year by year, over a long period of years, and therefore, the opportunity to study them at close range, so I speak from actual knowledge when I say that I found no quality save PERSISTENCE, in either of them, that even remotely suggested the major source of their stupendous achievements.

As one makes an impartial study of the prophets, philosophers, “miracle” men, and religious leaders of the past, one is drawn to the inevitable conclusion that PERSISTENCE, concentration of effort, and DEFINITENESS OF PURPOSE, were the major sources of their achievements.

Consider, for example, the strange and fascinating story of Mohammed; analyze his life, compare him with men of achievement in this modern age of industry and finance, and observe how they have one outstanding trait in common, PERSISTENCE!

If you are keenly interested in studying the strange power which gives potency to PERSISTENCE, read a biography of Mohammed, especially the one by Essad Bey. This brief review of that book, by Thomas Sugrue, in the Herald-Tribune, will provide a preview of the rare treat in store for those who take the time to read the entire story of one of the most astounding examples of the power of PERSISTENCE known to civilization. THE LAST GREAT PROPHET Reviewed by Thomas Sugrue

“Mohammed was a prophet, but he never performed a miracle. He was not a mystic; he had no formal schooling; he did not begin his mission until he was forty. When he announced that he was the Messenger of God, bringing word of the true religion, he was ridiculed and labeled a lunatic. Children tripped him and women threw filth upon him. He was banished from his native city, Mecca, and his followers were stripped of their worldly goods and sent into the desert after him. When he had been preaching ten years he had nothing to show for it but banishment, poverty and ridicule. Yet before another ten years had passed, he was dictator of all Arabia, ruler of Mecca, and the head of a New World religion which was to sweep to the Danube and the Pyrenees before exhausting the impetus he gave it. That impetus was three-fold: the power of words, the efficacy of prayer and man’s kinship with God.

“His career never made sense. Mohammed was born to impoverished members of a leading family of Mecca. Because Mecca, the crossroads of the world, home of the magic stone called the Caaba, great city of trade and the center of trade routes, was unsanitary, its children were sent to be raised in the desert by Bedouins. Mohammed was thus nurtured, drawing strength and healthfrom the milk of nomad, vicarious mothers. He tended sheep and soon hired out to a rich widow as leader of her caravans. He traveled to all parts of the Eastern World, talked with many men of diverse beliefs and observed the decline of Christianity into warring sects. When he was twenty-eight, Khadija, the widow, looked upon him with favor, and married him. Her father would have objected to such a marriage, so she got him drunk and held him up while he gave the paternal blessing. For the next twelve years Mohammed lived as a rich and respected and very shrewd trader. Then he took to wandering in the desert, and one day he returned with the first verse of the Koran and told Khadija that the archangel Gabriel had appeared to him and said that he was to be the Messenger of God.

“The Koran, the revealed word of God, was the closest thing to a miracle in Mohammed’s life. He had not been a poet; he had no gift of words. Yet the verses of the Koran, as he received them and recited them to the faithful, were better than any verses which the professional poets of the tribes could produce. This, to the Arabs, was a miracle. To them the gift of words was the greatest gift, the poet was all-powerful. In addition the Koran said that all men were equal before God, that the world should be a democratic state-Islam. It was this political heresy, plus Mohammed’s desire to destroy all the 360 idols in the courtyard of the Caaba, which brought about his banishment. The idols brought the desert tribes to Mecca, and that meant trade. So the business men of Mecca, the capitalists, of which he had been one, set upon Mohammed. Then he retreated to the desert and demanded sovereignty over the world.

“The rise of Islam began. Out of the desert came aflame which would not be extinguished-a democratic army fighting as a unit and prepared to die without wincing. Mohammed had invited the Jews and Christians to join him; for he was not building a new religion. He was calling all who believed in one God to join in a single faith. If the Jews and Christians had accepted his invitation Islam would have conquered the world. They didn’t. They would not even accept Mohammed’s innovation of humane warfare. When the armies of the prophet entered Jerusalem not a single person was killed because of his faith. When the crusaders entered the city, centuries later, not a Moslem man, woman, or child was spared. But the Christians did accept one Moslem idea-the place of learning, the university.”

END PART 2 OF 3 PARTS

[laurenredhead]

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge

I have not managed to update this blog for a long time. The reason for that has been lack of time, rather than that nothing has been going on. However, I think a carp has been greeting people on the front of my website for long enough and I thought I’d better add something new here.

I also have been struggling to find time to advance my research and my thinking: lots of competing deadlines and a very busy time at work haven’t been helping. But I have been trying to make time to read more to at least get started. Currently this has most to do with the parts of my job that are to do with supporting research and researchers, so this might be thought of as reading about rather than for research. Nevertheless, it is good to be engaging with arguments and I hope that posting some of my notes might be useful for others, too.

Last year, Princeton re-published Abraham Flexner’s 1939 essay ‘The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge’. In this essay, Flexner defends scholarly activity, particularly in science, as valuable beyond - and in spite of - its commercial applications. This new edition pairs the original essay with another, by Robbert Dijkgraaf, titled ‘The World of Tomorrow’. Dijkgraaf seeks to put Flexner’s essay in historical context and to show how it is relevant today. He uses the term ‘basic research’ to mean abstract/fundamental/blue-sky/theoretical research. This choice of words is possibly a bit unfortunate (because of the connotations of ‘basic’), but is, I think, intended to convey the primacy of such research.

Both essays focus mainly on work done in science (Flexner’s area) but clearly show how the same arguments might be extended to other disciplines. This also shows how all disciplines can benefit from interdisciplinary connections, by sharing arguments and ideas. The arts and humanities sometimes cite science as a counterargument, where metrics and commercialisation ‘work’, but such essays as these show that this is not the case. Sciences, Arts, and Humanities need the same arguments to protect their work, and they should be interested in the same arguments and making them together even when institutions like universities seek to separate researchers by discipline.

Dijkgraaf’s essay opens the book, stating that,

‘rather than attempting to demarcate the nebulous and artificial distinction between “useful” and “useless knowledge", [it is possible to speak] of applied and “not yet applied” research’ (p9).

He explains how, and how quickly, theoretical research undertaken at Flexner’s Institute of Advanced Study yielded practical applications even though that was never Flexner’s intention. Supporting both applied and ‘not yet applied’ research, according to Dijkgraaf, is ‘a social imperative’ (p9).

Although he appeals the economic arguments about long term investments, he also writes,

‘the world of tomorrow depends not only on technical expertise but also on unobstructed curiosity and the benefits - and pleasures - of travelling far upstream, against the current of practical considerations.’ (p10)

Such an attitude to the future could be found at Flexner’s institute. Dijkgraaf writes that Flexner had, ‘a deep confidence in the creative powers of the individual and an equally deep distrust of the ability of institutions to foster such talent’ (p12). He also notes that Flexner, ‘believed that only with the benefit of hindsight could the long arcs of knowledge be discerned, often starting with unfiltered enquiry and ending in practical applications’ (pp16-17). This means that applications cannot and should not even be considered at the beginning of research endeavours; the essay describes how

‘the path from exploratory blue-sky research to practical applications is not one directional and linear, but rather complex and cyclic.’ (p20)

If applications are not considered, then five points that highlight the importance of such research might be. The first is that abstract research makes future applied research possible. Dijkgraaf writes, ‘basic research clearly advances knowledge in and of itself’, (p23) and that, ‘knowledge is the only resource that increases when used’ (p24). Beyond this, new tools and techniques that are designed to support abstract research may become global applications (such as the internet and cloud computing); it is contended that the best scientists have historically been attracted to the hardest and most abstract problems; publicly accessible knowledges arises from fundamental research done at universities; and start-up companies rather than established ones are typically the first to use such research (the example of Google is given).

Dijkgraaf describes how many important or famous scientists embraced creativity over knowledge and method as they thought to advance their disciplines. However, he writes, ‘the state of scholarship has now reached a critical stage that in many ways mirrors the crisis that Flexner addressed’ (p33). This crisis is seen as a reversal of funding allocations and expansion of research that were established in the US after World War II. This essay is about the US, but many of the issues: financial problems, expansion of metrics, and managerialism, might be equally applicable to the UK today.

It is observed that private enterprise in the US previously sponsored some ‘basic’ research - even generating Nobel prizes. But this is no longer the case. Research has been concentrated in universities - even where private enterprise benefits from it - and, ‘the added burden of industrial research is crowding out basic research at many universities’ (p34). One way this is evidenced is that, ‘success rates in grant applications for basic research are plummeting across all disciplines, particularly for early career researchers.’ (p35) The value of this change is questionable. Dijkgraaf writes that,

‘the “metrics” used to assess the quality and impact of research proposals - even in the absence of a broadly accepted framework for such measurements - systematically undercut pathbreaking scholarship in favour of more predictable, goal-directed research.’ (pp35-36).

He calls this approach ‘number fetishism’, one in which ‘subtle, complex values ad insights become invisible.’ (p36)

Dijkgraaf argues that researchers should strive to communicate the value of their research. [I think many of us in the UK would argue that we are trying to do exactly this!]. He argues that society benefits not just from science, or research, but from its culture that can improve people’s approaches to decision-making, or assessing information in their own lives. Finally, he notes the interdisciplinary nature of these arguments, writing,

‘like the arts, unfettered scholarship uplifts the spirits, heightens our perspective above the everyday, and shows us a new ay to look at the world. It literally changes our world.’ (p46)

Flexner’s essay similarly begins with interdisciplinary aims for fundamental research: the cultivation of beauty; the extension of knowledge; the cure of disease; and the amelioration of suffering (p51). These four things are described as being at odds with the world at large. However, Flexner writes that

‘from a practical point of view, intellectual and spiritual life is, on the surface, a useless form of activity.’ (p51)

But he asks ‘whether our conception of what is useful may not have become too narrow to be adequate to the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit’ (p53).

Flexner gives the example of Marconi as an individual credited with a ‘discovery’ who in fact built on a wide bases of theoretical research to invent, ‘merely the last technical detail’. This was, he writes, ‘inevitable’ (pp54-55). His point here is that the final, applied, detail must necessarily arise from the existence of the previous research, but the part to the original research is not itself linear. This original research is what universities must seek; he writes that they should be ‘devoted to the cultivation of curiosity.’ (p57) Similarly, when Faraday’s work is considered, ‘utility resulted, but it was never a criterion to which is ceaseless experimentation could be subjected’ (p60). Some of his work yielded much utility and some less so, but this does not differentiate the value of any of it.

Flexner gives examples of practical applications that have come about through unrelated, abstract or theoretical work conducted a long time before they were discovered and without any knowledge of the problems that they would be applied to. However, he points out that he is, ‘not suggesting that everything that goes on in laboratories will ultimately turn to some unexpected practical use, or that an ultimate practical use is its actual justification’ (p71). He acknowledges that supporting abstract research will ultimately result in some money being wasted. However, even if this waste ‘looks prodigious’ to administrators, ‘it is as nothing compared to the advantages that have accrued [through such research]; advantages that could never have accrued if the idea of use had permeated [the] minds [of the researchers].’ (p72) Here, he gives the example of bacteriology but elsewhere he gives other disciplinary examples.

Flexner contents that increasing numbers of applications had become possibility at his time of writing because many abstract/theoretical discoveries had been accrued and enabled this. He describes the ‘roaring river’ of scientific discovery that comes about through the meeting of many different streams: it is a collective endeavour. It is also a part of being human. He emphasises, ‘the overwhelming importance of spiritual and intellectual freedom’ (p76) and writes that what is true in mathematics is, ‘equally true of music and art and every other expression of the untrammelled human spirit.’ (p76).

This was not written with only the abstract ideas of research in mind. In 1939, Flexner’s research institute had welcomed many international scholars, including many Jewish scholars, fleeing Germany and other countries in Europe. Lack of freedom in research, and in particular the focus on the utility of knowledge, was for him a symptom of fundamentalism that he viewed across Europe. He wrote that by justifying freedom of expression and freedom to conduct abstract research, ‘without any reference whatsoever, implied or actual, to usefulness, we justify colleges, universities and institutes of research. He points out that racism and religious intolerance are antithetical to research endeavours.

In the rest of the essay, he describes the Institute of Advanced Study, and its international and collegiate dimensions. To anyone in a UK institution, this will sound like a fantasy: ‘no faculty meetings are held; no committees exist. […] Administration has been minimised in its extent and importance.’ (p82) Scholars have, ‘no duties - only opportunities.’ (p83). He describes what this has meant to various visiting scholars there and, as Flexner and Dijkgraaf both note, the accomplishments of its scholars speak for themselves.

Taken together, these two essays do make a powerful argument for fundamental or abstract research, demonstrating how it has underpinned many of the advances of the past, and how - although its exact future applications cannot be known - the continuation of its importance can be predicted by the work done at the Institute of Advanced Studies as only one example. It is also clear that both authors have first-hand knowledge of the intellectual pleasure and satisfaction of such research. This speaks to me as a scholar, but might be less easy to communicate to others who have not experienced this. As the management of institutions are increasingly removed from research or - more and more often - have never really been involved in it, this may make this aspect of the argument harder to convey.

Despite this, these short essays might provide scholars of all disciplines with some of the tools of argument for abstract research in their own discipline, as well as evidence of the tradition of the argument for such research. And for anyone who values science in the abstract (which seems to be somewhat of a trend in popular culture today) these arguments may also help to link today’s research cultures with those successful cultures of the past.

Reference: Abraham Flexner, The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017)

[drannafrost]

Narratives of Slow Violence Across Timespacematter in Young People With Lyme Disease

The theme of time was one of three major conclusions in my ethnographic study of five lyme disease sufferers in the Pacific Northwest. The other two conclusions were sacrificial bonds and what I call the philosophy of the weird. I will write about those later. Anyhow, though the following piece is long, I think you will find that it contributes to the conversation about young people who are growing up and living with chronic illness. My article touches on human development, organizational issues in health care, and the concept of self. For more information about young people growing up with chronic illness, I suggest reading the articles here and here. Happy reading.

Time

“Time” was the most frequent word used in the primary participants’ first interviews. (See Figures 1 and 2.) In fact, whether the interview subjects were conscious of it or not, the concept of time was on the minds of all the participants. They spoke about time in terms of taking medicine, sleep, activities (either shortened, skipped, or requiring hours- or days-long recovery), their illness trajectory, the length of their illness, anxiety, and even in terms of meeting their medical insurance deductibles. In his journal, Strider wrote, “Time is getting short, I’m feeling the heat, the stakes are – well, everything – and I object to that. I object to that. Dammit, this is not right. Rage. Rage. I want to punch something.” The way Strider spoke about his experience seems almost like his adversary is less about lyme disease and more about the clock. Indeed, when Lizzie asked her fellow participants over dinner during the weekend gathering if they would go back in time and choose to have lyme disease again, the people who declined were those who had suffered from lyme disease for nearly three decades. By now, they had lost half their life, and due to the effects of aging and the way the infection had systematically devastated their bodies, there was little reason to believe they could or would achieve full recovery. To be specific, there was little hope they would hold down a full-time, stable, and/or economically gainful job again. The best they could hope for was the ability to engage in some of their hobbies and pursue a self-actualized, humble, simple life.

On the other hand, those who would choose lyme disease again were those who were in their 30s or younger, who had suffered from lyme disease for no longer than 13 years, and were relatively functional. Being “relatively functional” does not mean that these certain sufferers lack health complications or are already in remission. Indeed, I presume a lyme-literate doctor would deem some of them to be currently “unwell.” Nevertheless, finding a diagnosis and relatively successful treatment at a younger age appears to enable these folks to assimilate lyme disease into their life. Because they know what they are suffering from and – crucially – because they have the economic and social resources to treat it, they feel more empowered in their relationship to the disease. Those who have had lyme for far longer without knowing what they had and/or the resources to treat it feel much more victimized by the disease. Despite young age and plentiful resources, however, all of the participants and even many of their friends and family members felt like time had been stolen away from them. They believed the time they lost suffering from lyme disease could have been better spent following their dreams, cultivating deeper, more intimate relationships with loved ones, traveling, and so on. In any event, time means something different depending on one’s relationship to the disease.

Figure 1. This word cloud shows the 40 most frequent words in the primary participants’ first interview. The top five most frequent words were time, back, lyme, going, and pain.

Figure 2. This cluster analysis is based on Jaccard’s coefficient and supplements the aforementioned word frequency analysis. Here, the central quality of time is seen in relation to the other most frequent words in the primary participants’ first interviews.

Slow Violence

Regardless of the quality of the relationship to time, the lyme body nevertheless has a strong relationship to it. Indeed, at the same dinner table during the weekend gathering, I asked all of the participants how long they expected lyme disease to be in their life. Without a moment’s hesitation, Lizzie, Strider, and Brooke blurted out, “Forever.” Lana and Jae nodded their heads in agreement. As such, the forever nature of the lyme body is a casualty of “slow violence.” According to Nixon (2011), “[Slow violence] occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (p. 2). Nixon pointed out that normative violence is typically considered to occur in a fixed place in a very quick amount of time and typically in a spectacular fashion. Indeed, the “rhetoric of precision” (p. 201) suggests violence, and especially war, to be quick and immediate. It is easy, therefore, to call the 1991 Gulf War a precise four-day war until one considers that it was the first depleted-uranium conflict in history. As such, the consequences of this radioactive material have been indiscriminate and incapable of being judged. According to Nixon, slow violence is “incremental and accretive” (p. 2) because its consequences wreak havoc across exponential spheres of influence so that the conditions which sustain life gradually degrade.

In that light, spacematter must be factored into what is considered to constitute time. For instance, upon exploring the impacts of contaminated ecological zones, Nixon (2011) noticed that the size of these zones depended on who has the power to make those decisions. Accordingly, the dimensions of these zones tend to become a “contest” (p. 47) between those who gain official recognition as sufferers and those who fail to be recognized either “because their narratives of injury are deemed to fail the prevailing politico-scientific logic of causation” (p. 47) or because they quite simply lack the political connections.

Therefore, time is not about merely watching the minutes and days tick by, but about the way it shapes and is shaped by space and matter. If the rhetoric of precision decides that violence occurs in one specific time in one exact place in one unambiguous, observable physical manifestation of the body, bodies that experience slow violence will surely fail to be recognized as “official sufferers.” As such, the lyme body could be considered to be an archetype of slow violence, as evidenced in the numerous and nebulous facts and qualities of the disease:

The time, location, and class of disease transmission;

The time, ability, and place of access to health care;

The time, location, and type of testing;

The time, location, and delineation of diagnosis;

The manifestations of symptoms in the body across time and space;

The length and kind of treatments, and the manifestations of the treatments in the body across time and space;

The presence of other diseases and syndromes, which are either the cause of lyme or caused by lyme;

The type of resources and the time in which patients have them; and

The narratives embodied within patient and doctors about the disease trajectory across time and space.

Ambiguous Narratives

Speaking of narratives, it appears that lyme disease has significantly altered the perception of time and the subsequent storytelling of the illness. For instance, in the middle of sharing her experience of her daughter’s journey finding successful lyme treatment, Lizzie’s mom interrupted herself:

There’s so many aspects. A lot of it I do forget. And then I’m like, ‘Ohhhh, yeahhhh! That happened.’ You know, it just becomes this big jumble of so many things happening because it was such an active part of her life – just [being a] senior in high school, you know, getting ready for college – there was so much going on [that] you forget the little parts.

Indeed, over the course of the study and especially into the weekend gathering, I observed that the participants’ narratives varied quite a bit. I noticed some core details were omitted from their narratives, while other details were altered. In fact, on a few occasions, I found myself correcting their stories on the account of my own research.

Ambiguous narratives have significant repercussions in the quality of lyme diagnosis and treatment. Calling herself a “total novice,” Lana’s Naturopath was admittedly confused by Lana’s long illness history. In addition to being frustrated by the way Lana’s memory seemed to be inconsistent, her doctor had either no evidence or confusing evidence as to which infections were truly in Lana’s body. For instance, her doctor had been unsuccessful in obtaining the lab results of her Igenex test taken several years prior. Her doctor did, however, have the results of spirochete identification from a dark field microscope, but the quality of that test was debatable, she said.

Depending on who you talk to, that’s the gold standard, or the spirochete generally will hide really rapidly and be very difficult to identify on the dark field. So I don’t know. I don’t have those original notes. I have the notes from the next doctor speaking about the identification of the spirochete. . . . So [Lana’s] whole story is very confusing and it’s long. She’s been sick for a long time, so it’s hard to know an exact linear pathway, and that’s one of the things we’ve been struggling with. The last time she left – actually, I think the past two times she’s left – I’ve given her, “These are the labs I want you to get through your Medicare doctor. Even if we get a negative Western blot, at least I have something, you know.” So in terms of what we’re dealing with, all I really know is Borrelia, but I’m sure with her other symptoms that we have other things going on just because based on her symptoms, you can sort of identify what matches what, you know, and then also the cycling of symptoms: when they’re better, when they’re worse.

Coincidentally, Lana got a Western blot lyme disease test taken when she went to the ER for a sinus infection. However, according to Lana, her Naturopath ended antibiotic treatment for lyme disease when the Western blot yielded a negative result.

Besides knowing what to diagnose sufferers with, the condition in which a patient narrates their illness story appears to be highly significant to the quality of response from the establishment. As the only participant to be a minor when she first became sick with lyme disease, Lizzie’s relationship with the medical world was initially problematic. Since Lizzie was 17-years-old at the time, she naturally turned to her pediatrician, but it became quickly obvious Lizzie’s illness went beyond his purview. Next, Lizzie visited an internist where she discovered she had the opposite problem: there, the doctor assessed her as a typical teenager with typical teenage mood swings. According to her mom,

As a 17-year-old, it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, this is a high school kid. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Oh, you know, another ache and pain.’ I don’t think they took her as seriously as they should have, and that’s where I had to try and step in.

In fact, there were numerous times in the first few years of Lizzie’s illness in which her mom spoke up for her daughter, even to the point of giving the doctors ultimatums. Over time, an aging Lizzie has positively changed the quality of the relationships with her doctors, Lizzie’s mom said. Where at age 17 doctors would make Lizzie feel inferior, now at age 20 her doctors seem to approach her as an equal. Yet, age alone did not solely change the quality of these relationships. The fact that Lizzie’s parents intentionally “raised her up in this illness” seemed to give Lizzie the confidence she needed to approach her doctors. According to Lizzie’s mom,

As a mom, I had the sense that this wasn’t gonna be a short, little thing. This was going to go on. And I knew that I wasn’t going to be there because now she’s a senior and what’s life gonna be? If she does go to school, that’s a big part of the discussion: “You’re on your own.” So I tried to consciously step back. I will prep her before her appointments. I would tell her, “This is what you need to say. These are the questions. They might not answer you and they sometimes can be very difficult, but these are the things you need to go in there. Don’t be in a rush. Get them to answer your questions.” And then I would back off. Some of the appointments I would stay in the lobby. I made a conscious decision. I wanted her to figure out how to deal with this stuff, but I knew that if I had to, I could go later or call them. I wanted her to know not only that what to do and what to ask and how to deal with this, but to get that self-confidence. It’s night and day from when we started. Part of it is she feels better. It’s hard to do when you feel like crap, you know, but she has gotten very good at knowing that she has a voice and when you go into a doctor, you don’t have to take, ‘Oh, there’s nothing wrong with you.’ No. There is. She’s gotten much better at being assertive and going in. I would tell her to make a list and she would literally go in with a pad and she would say, “Mom, this is so…” and I said, “No, listen. You’re the consumer here. When they go home at night, whether you feel better or not doesn’t affect them. It affects you. You’re the one that needs answers and needs results, not them. So you need to make them work for you.”

Young Adulthood

There is a very good reason why age matters in lyme disease. As Figure 3 illustrates, just 11 years separates the ages of disease transmission. In other words, at 17-years-old, Lizzie was the youngest person to contract lyme disease, and at age 28, Brooke was the oldest. The average age of transmission is 24.

Figure 3. This chart compares the participants’ absolute ages (as of the beginning of the study) with the age they transmitted lyme disease. Spanning from age 17 (Lizzie) to 28 (Brooke), there is just an 11-year gap among all ages of transmission, and the transparent box running through the center of the chart indicates this. Their average age of transmission is 24. Furthermore, the length of illness spans anywhere from three years (Lizzie) to 28 years (Strider) (again, calculating from the beginning of the study). Their average length of illness is 15.4 years.

These data indicate that lyme is a “young person’s disease,” a term Lizzie’s doctor first suggested actually. Of course, exceptions exist, and for at least Lana and Strider, they wonder if they actually contracted lyme as teenagers. In fact, nearly all of the participants genuinely leave the door open, so to speak, for their lyme transmission to have occurred earlier than they know. The “age of transmission,” therefore, has more to do with the “age of first lyme sickness” than with transmission. Unless and until the sufferers confirm the exact moment in time when they were able to locate the exact vector that was on their bodies and was carrying the lyme infection, it is nearly impossible to make a definitive assertion about transmission. In this way, “transmission” is a bit of a misnomer, but I use it anyway because it is worth considering the ways that transmission in young adulthood could potentially impact the length of time between transmission/sickness to an appropriate diagnosis, subsequent treatment, and length of illness all the way until full remission.

Four years before the ACA legislation was passed, the National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) reported that even though young adults were at-risk for a variety of health conditions, they were the least likely to have medical insurance compared to all other age groups (Brindis, Mulye, Park, & Irwin, 2006). In fact, in the three years just prior to the ACA becoming mandatory, 25.9% of young adults ages 18-24 were uninsured (Cohen & Martinez, 2015). The NIHCM attributed this to the propensity for young adults to have lower-paying entry-level or part-time jobs (Brindis et al., 2006). As such, young adults were less likely to receive routine care from a consistent practitioner, but more likely to use the emergency room as their primary source of care. Furthermore, the mortality rate among young adults ages 20-24 was higher than teenagers ages 15-19.

One of the major implications for passing the ACA in 2010 was that it would enable young adults to be insured by either staying on their parents’ insurance up until the age of 26 or applying for their Medicaid if they had an income greater than 133% of the federal poverty level (Monaghan, 2014). This policy decision seems to have proved effective because in the first quarter of 2015, the rate of uninsured young adults ages 18-24 had decreased to 15.4% (Cohen & Martinez, 2015). This was lower than ages 25-34, which had an 18.3% uninsured rate, but higher than ages 45-64, which had a 9% uninsured rate. According to Monaghan (2014), however, having insurance does not necessarily correlate with young adults having a usual source of care. The author blamed this largely on: scheduling issues, the lack of medical training on young-adult issues, the lack of preventative services, and the poor integration of mental and behavioral health services.

Unfortunately, chronic autoimmune diseases, including lyme disease, appear noticeably absent from Monaghan’s (2014) list of problems for gaining a usual source of care. If lyme disease demonstrates anything, it is that it is absent from nearly everyone’s radar. As the five sufferers in this study have indicated, their “depression” was the result of lyme disease. So, too, was their alcoholism, smoking, or drug use to ease body pain. Likewise, cardiac issues, circulation issues, tumors, cognitive issues, urinary tract infections, sinus infections, and so forth were all related to lyme disease. This goes to show that despite Monaghan’s effort to address “young people’s issues,” lyme disease as an etiology is still absent from the list of possibilities and potentialities. Accordingly, medical practitioners are still more likely to misdiagnose lyme disease as any number of diseases and syndromes.

In all, young adults appear to be the most financially and socially vulnerable. Already having few financial resources, they are also just learning to navigate the health care system on their own. With Lizzie’s mom being a nurse and her dad being a cancer researcher, they were both conscious about teaching their daughter to ask for what she needs, but not everyone has a strong and informed support system as Lizzie did. Lana was essentially emancipated at age 15, then had her first child at age 19; Brooke was married and living hours away from her family of origin; Strider had just left the military while wandering the country and even living in a shack for a while; and Jae was slowly moving across the country away from her family in the pursuit of promotion after promotion. It does not mean that any of them did not know how to go find a doctor. In fact, their problem might have been visiting too many doctors and having the proverbial door closed in their faces in almost all of them. Therefore, one of the problems that lyme disease illustrates is the lack of doctors who are competent to become a lyme sufferer’s “usual source of care.” As long as doctors are ill-equipped to treat lyme disease from diagnosis to remission and beyond, sufferers without financial and social resources will continue to be sick for decades afterward. Without a “social net” in young adulthood, lyme sufferers are bound to become increasingly incapable of rallying the financial and social capital necessary to diagnose and treat lyme disease properly and thoroughly. Without early intervention, over time they will most likely earn less, contribute to society less but demand more, and have weaker social networks.

Setting aside the problem with the “usual source of care” for a moment, the data from this study suggests that the younger a person is at the age of transmission, the faster they receive thorough treatment. Additionally, better financial and social resources will probably help them more fully recover at a faster rate and more cheaply. Take a look at the participants here: Lizzie was 17 when she got sick and 19 when she began to receive thorough IV treatment for about 16 months. Four years after first getting sick, she had been entirely weaned off of IV medication and was on her way to completing oral antibiotic treatment. It seems likely she will go into remission sometime in 2016. In addition, her support system is one of the strongest I have ever seen. In addition to excellent medical insurance and her father’s high income, her family and friends have supported her throughout. Not only do they all view illness as a part of life, but they also expect Lizzie to take responsibility for her illness. They will not allow her to fall victim to the disease.

In contrast, Brooke and Jae are in their mid-‘30s and have been sick with lyme disease between eight to 12 years. Brooke began receiving treatment about two-and-a-half years after getting sick; for Jae, it was about 11 years. Brooke got three years of treatment, while Jae got just three or four months. Either way, both ended their antibiotic treatment somewhat on a whim and certainly without long-term planning. In both cases, they drifted away from their treating doctors. Regardless of the reasons, they limped along while still experiencing complications along the way. Although their health emergencies may not have been as debilitating as they used to be, both Brooke and Jae are far from remission. Unless they receive stronger intervention, I would not be surprised if they drift for several more years. On the more hopeful side, both of these women have financial and social resources, generally speaking. While extreme medical costs would most likely cripple them, they have family that would probably support them if it came to that.

The final set of sufferers are those who have been ill for a couple decades or more, most likely have not received a diagnosis until deep into it, may or may not be getting treated, and have few financial and social resources. Lana and Strider are both 54 and had been ill for 27 and 28 years, respectively. Both are now on Social Security Disability (SSD). Medicaid/Medicare severely limits the doctors they could see; most likely, these doctors will not or cannot treat lyme disease. Strider had some savings, which enabled him to pay for his lyme-literate practitioner out of pocket. Also, as a nurse, he knew how to work the medical system in his favor, so he found relative success in the traditional medical system. As a veteran, he was also considering entering the VA system to receive treatment. In his case, Strider’s intellectual resources have benefited him greatly. Lana, on the other hand, had no financial resources. Living on a fixed income, even the cost of her $87.50 Naturopath was too expensive for her. In addition, Lana had few friends and family members because she chose not to entrust them with her needs. Strider used to alienate his friends and family, too, mostly as the result of the neuropsychiatric manifestations of lyme disease. However, in the course of the study, Strider was making ample effort to restore those relationships. He decided to help others fix their homes, figure out better ways of communicating with his wife, and mentor one or two younger men. In all, there is probably little hope that Lana and Strider will fully recover because their medical issues are deep and extensive. Though they cannot change the length of their illness or their age, Strider’s story indicates that his quality of life increased once he decided to change the quality of his social resources.

The Things They Carried

Strider’s case is an excellent example where an unconscious self-narrative significantly impacted his being-in-the-world. Indeed, the presence of ambiguous narratives, even to the point of absence of lyme disease diagnosis and treatment in young adulthood, goes to show that we cannot neglect the narrative the lyme body tells itself and, therefore, tells the world. As such, sufferers embody their self-narratives across time and space, too. For instance, Brooke admitted during the weekend gathering that her participation in the study gave her a chance to finally stop and reflect on her illness experiences all the way back to the beginning eight years prior. Until the study, she had given no thought to her illness experience. Even though she attends yoga, she preferred classes that keep students moving all the way throughout. The moment she is forced to lie down and be quiet is the moment her mind starts racing about all of the tasks she has to do back at home or work. Brooke’s narrative, I must not think, only do, correlates with her attitude about herself as patient. She is more comfortable with getting in and out of the doctor as quickly as possible, as well as leaving with a clear, practical, and economical plan of action. When those expectations are not met, she tends to do what she was doing at the end of the study, which is to proclaim she is “fine” if and when she is obviously “not fine.” It came as no surprise to me, then, that, in jest, Brooke admitted she was glad the study was over so she could go back to “not thinking” about her illness. By then, I obviously cared for her well-being, so I did not hesitate to respond by earnestly suggesting she seek psychotherapy in order to continue the self-reflective practice that she left at the end of the study.

On a slightly emotionally heavier level, all of the participants initially stated their reason for doing the study was to gain the opportunity to share their self-narratives, no matter how others perceive them. Being very aware that their voices were largely rejected at the personal, organizational, and global echelons of influence, this study gave them the chance to share their stories in faith that it would accelerate knowledge of lyme disease, help other sufferers, and maybe even help themselves. By the end of the study, however, it appeared that all of the participants were surprised that the study was less “reporting” the facts of their disease and more about discovering who they were in the midst of, or perhaps in spite of, their suffering. Thus, the study became less about verbal discharge and more about gathering the meaning they made in their lives. “It feels good to share [my story],” Jae said weeping. “It’s made me feel very human.” At the very end of his last interview, Strider, too, had also come to the conclusion that his story was much more than the culmination of facts.

The reason I participated in this study was that the importance of my experience is not going to die with me – to make a mark on this world so that my suffering means something. [He is in tears and trembling at this point.] That’s the important thing because the pain – it’s gotta be worth somethin’. It’s gotta mean somethin’. I gotta write it down and people gotta listen and this has gotta change. I can’t see a nation of people suffering the way I have. Nobody is bad enough to deserve what I’ve been through and your study is gonna help change that and I’m obliged to do it by who I am. This has to happen. That’s the truth. [Strider gives me a fist bump.]

Both Jae and Strider indicated that telling one’s self-narrative was less logos and more legein (Corradi Fiumara, 1990). The more the lyme body shared, the more other bodies listened; the more other bodies listened, the more the lyme body realized it was safe and did not need to retreat into emotional and/or physical isolation; the more the lyme body stopped retreating, the more it remained inside the truth; finally, the more the lyme body remained inside the truth, the more other bodies listened.

In Summary

As an “incremental and accretive” (Nixon, 2011) illness, lyme disease seems to be experienced like a slow-moving landslide across spacetimematter. Emotions, conversations, lab tests, relationships, doctors, financial resources, symptoms, work, desires, policies, geographic regions, and research all intersect and diffract, eventually becoming so entangled with one another that it is impossible to separate them anymore. Time, therefore, appears to be the one constant variable that constitutes the lyme body. Still, even the measurement of time will always be different. How does one measure time? In med passes? In days recovering from a seemingly innocuous activity? In days not working? In periods of pre-lyme? pre-diagnosis? during treatment? post-treatment? How one comes to define time in lyme disease will be different for each person. Indeed, for someone born with the disease, a “pre-lyme” phase of life will never exist. What is more, all that constitutes the lyme body is the opposite of precision. When it comes to understanding and knowing the lyme body, there are only possibly’s and Ohhhh, yeahhhh’s. In this way, the lyme body is almost all correlation and little causation. Likewise, there are no true zones – travel and climate change demonstrate that if lyme disease is an epidemic in the Northeastern U.S., then it must be assumed to be everywhere else, too. Because few assertions can be made about lyme disease, we must err on the side of larger zones than smaller ones. In this manner, then, the lyme body is more likely to be constituted by how-the-fuck?s and I-don’t-knows. The lyme body is almost all clarification and little conviction, as well; it is moving through spacetimematter in ways yet seen or understood right now. Therefore, the more we lean on correlation and clarification, rather than on causation and conviction, the greater chance we will create room for the lyme body to shape knowing the disease.

References

Brindis, C., Mulye, T. P., Park, M. J., & Irwin, Jr., C. E. (2006). Young people’s health care: A national imperative. Retrieved from National Institute for Health Care Management website: www.nihcm.org/pdf/YoungPeoplesHCFINAL.pdf

Cohen, R. A., & Martinez, M. E. (2015). Health insurance coverage: Early release of estimates from the national health interview survey, January–March 2015. Retrieved from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/insur201508.pdf

Corradi Fiumara, G. (1990). The other side of language: A philosophy of listening. (C. Lambert, Trans.). Routledge: London.

Monaghan, M. (2014). The Affordable Care Act and implications for young adult health. Translational Behavioral Medicine, 4(2), 170-174. doi:10.1007/s13142-013-0245-9

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.