Great Throughts Treasury

"My thought is that the average adjusted boy is, if anything, more humanly wasted than the disaffected. So let us go on to discuss his stupidity, his lack of patriotism, his sexual confusion, and his lack of faith."

"Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the beatniks and delinquents... The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same conclusions as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has becoming increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don?t more people speak up and say so?"

"No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties."

"Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man."

"Nothing could be more stupid than for the communications commission to give to people who handle the means of broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then, disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship."

"Now shame is the only direct attack on conceit, the defensive image of oneself. Conceit is the common denominator of the Organization man, the hipster, and the juvenile delinquent-this is why I have been lumping them together. The conceited image of the self is usually not quite conscious, but it is instantly woundable; and people protect it with a conformity to their peers (oneself is superior). But the conceited groups differ in their methods of confirming and enhancing conceit: the juvenile delinquent by surly and mischievous destructiveness of the insulting privileged outgroup; the hipster by making fools of them with token performances; the Organization Man by status and salary. To his inner idol, they sacrifice the ingenuous exhibition and self-expression that could make them great, effective, or loved in the world; but that can also be shamed if it is mistaken, out of place, or disproportionate."

"One striking characteristic of modern education is the unanimous disapproval of exploiting the powerful feeling of shame... Yet in ancient education, e.g. in the Socratic dialogs, this very arousal of shame is a chief device; the teacher greets the hot flush as a capital sign that the youth is educable, he has noble aims. Such a youth has dignity in his very shame."

"Positively, the delinquent behavior seems to speak clearly enough. It asks for what we can?t give, but it is in this direction we must go. It asks for manly opportunities to work, make a little money, and have self-esteem; to have some space to bang around in, that is not always somebody?s property; to have better schools to open for them horizons of interest; to have more and better sex without fear or shame; to share somehow in the symbolic goods (like the cars) that are made so much of; to have a community and a country to be loyal to; to claim attention and have a voice. These are not outlandish demands. Certainly they cannot be satisfied directly in our present system; they are baffling. That is why the problem is baffling, and the final recourse is to a curfew, to ordinances against carrying knives, to threatening the parents, to reformatories with newfangled names, and to 1,100 more police on the street."

"Social scientists... have begun to think that ?social animal? means ?harmoniously belonging.? They do not like to think that fighting and dissenting are proper social functions, nor that rebelling or initiating fundamental change is a social function. Rather, if something does not run smoothly, they say it has been improperly socialized; there has been a failure in communication... But perhaps there has not been a failure in communication. Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable... We must ask the question, ?Is the harmonious organization to which the young are inadequately socialized perhaps against human nature, or not worthy of human nature, and therefore there is difficulty in growing up??"

"The ?brightness? of the 15 percent might or might not indicate a profound feeling for the causes of things; it is largely verbal and symbol-manipulating, and is almost certainly partly an obsessional device not to know and touch risky matter, just as Freud long ago pointed out that the nagging questions of small children are a substitute for asking the forbidden questions."

"The aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to re-establish ?belonging,? although this kind of speech and thought is precisely calculated to avoid contact and so makes belonging impossible."

"The ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the clouds and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows."

"The Beat spokesman, surprisingly, seemed to be satisfied with the ethics that we have inherited."

"The chessboard was reflected in her eyes. Eager to beat her, first I looked on her eyes. I made a Spanish move, an ancient one, and broken was the red rank of pawns in her light eyes. Then I lowered my eyes from that chessboard and Love said, "Oh not her; conquer the king if you can.""

"The classical anthropological question, What is man??how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!?is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and go on to Culture."

"The difference seems to be that we cannot offer available opportunities for honor, we do not have them; and therefore we must protect what shreds of dignity the youth has. Since he has no future, if we make him ashamed of his past and present, he is reduced to nothing. In other ages, the community had plenty of chances of honor, and to belong to the community itself was an honor."

"The family is the American fascism."

"The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semi-monopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness."

"The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations."

"The irony is that in our decades, the combination of rationalism, asceticism, and individualism (the so-called Protestant Ethic) has produced precisely the system of boondoggling, luxury-consumption, and status."

"The issue is not whether people are good enough for a particular type of society; rather it is a matter of developing the kind of social institutions that are most conducive to expanding the potentialities we have for intelligence, grace, sociability and freedom."

"The paucity of its vocabulary and syntax is for the Beats essentially expressive of withdrawal from the standard civilization and its learning. On the other hand this paucity gives, instead of opportunities for thought and problem solving, considerable satisfaction in the act and energy of speaking itself, as is true of any simple adopted language, such as pig Latin. But this can have disadvantages. One learns to one?s frustration that they regard talk as an end in itself, as a means of self-expression, without subject matter. In a Beat group it is bad form to assert or deny a proposition as true or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning."

"The sexual plight of these children [those adolescents experimenting sexually] is officially not mentioned. The revolutionary attack on hypocrisy by Ibsen, Freud, Ellis, Dreiser, did not succeed this far. Is it an eccentric opinion that an important part of the kids' restiveness in school from the onset of puberty has to do with puberty? The teachers talk about it among themselves, all right. (In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had sex, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.) But since the objective factor does not exist in our schools, the school itself begins to be irrelevant. The question here is not whether sexuality should be discouraged or encouraged. That is an important issue, but far more important is that it is hard to grow up when existing facts are treated as though they do not exist. For then there is no dialogue, it is impossible to be taken seriously, to be understood, to make a bridge between oneself and society. In American society we have perfected a remarkable form of censorship: to allow everyone his political right to say what he believes, but to swamp his little boat with literally thousands of millions of newspapers, mass-circulation magazines, best-selling books, broadcasts, and public pronouncements that disregard what he says and give the official way of looking at things."

"The way in which our society does do honor to its indubitably great men ... is a study in immunizing people against their virus... They are the menagerie of Very Important People who exist only for ceremonial occasions... The effectually prevents the two practical uses that we could make of them. We neither take seriously the simple, direct, fearless souls that they invariably are, whether humble or arrogant, to model ourselves after them because they make more sense as human beings; nor do we have recourse the them to help us when we have need of exceptional purity, magnanimity, profundity, or imagination."

"The way most people get into this business is they work for a flower shop... They learn the business by working for someone else. That's the American way."

"Their religion is unfeasible, for one cannot richly meet the glancing present... without long discipleship and secure sustenance."

"There is such a thing as food and such a thing as poison. But the damage done by those who pass off poison as food is far less than that done by those who generation after generation convince people that food is poison."

"These groups [of disaffected youth] are not small, and they will grow larger. Certainly they are suffering. Demonstrably they are not getting enough out of our wealth and civilization. They are failing to assimilate much of the culture. As was predictable, most of the authorities and all of the public spokesmen explain it by saying there has been a failure of socialization. They say that the background conditions have interrupted socialization and must be improved. And, not enough effort has been made to guarantee belonging; there must be better bait or punishment. But perhaps there has not been a failure to communicate. Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable. In this book I shall therefore take the opposite tack and ask, 'Socialization to what? To what dominant society and available culture?' And if this question is asked, we must at once ask the other question, 'Is the harmonious organization to which the young are inadequately socialized, perhaps against human nature, or not worthy of human nature, and therefore there is difficulty in growing up?' If this is so, the disaffection of the young is profound and it will not be finally remediable by better techniques of socializing. Instead, there will have to be changes in our society and its culture, so as to meet the appetites and capacities of human nature, in order to grow up."

"These young-marrying, contemporaries or juniors of the Beat Generation, have often expressed themselves as follows: My highest aim in life is to achieve a normal healthy marriage and raise healthy [non-neurotic] children. On the face of it, this remark is preposterous. What was always taken as a usual and advantageous life-condition for work in the world and the service of God is now regarded as an heroic goal to be striven for. Yet we see that it is a hard goal to achieve against the modern obstacles. Also it is a real goal, with objective problems that a man can work at personally, and take responsibility for, and make decisions about?unlike the interpersonal relations of the corporation, or the routine of the factory job for which the worker couldn't care less. But now, suppose the young man is achieving this goal: he has the wife, the small kids, the suburban home, and the labor-saving domestic devices. How is it that it is the same man who uniformly asserts that he is in a Rat Race? Either the goal does not justify itself, or indeed he is not really achieving it. Perhaps the truth is, if marriage and children are the goal, a man cannot really achieve it. It is not easy to conceive of a strong husband and father who does not justified in his work and independent in the world. Correspondingly, his wife feels justified in the small children, but does she have a man, do the children have a father, if he is running a Rat Race? Into what world do the small children grow up in such a home?"

"This is one of the most difficult retail businesses to be successful at because with most businesses, you buy finished goods, put them on the shelf and sell them... But in the flower business you are buying raw product, manufacturing the goods and then selling them, that's where you lose your shirt is the manufacturing, or assembling of arrangements."

"Thwarted, or starved, in the important objects proper to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally find or invent deviant objects for themselves... Their choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid, and often disastrous; we cannot expect average kids to deviate with genius. But on the other hand, the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical and wasted."

"To consider powerful souls as if they were a useful public resource is quite foreign to our customs. In a small sense it is undemocratic, for it assumes that some people really know better in a way that must seem arbitrary to most. In a large sense it is certainly democratic, in that it makes the great man serve as a man."

"To learn theory by experimenting and doing. To learn belonging by participating and self-rule. Permissiveness in all animal behavior and interpersonal expression. Emphasis on individual differences. Unblocking and training feeling by plastic arts, eurythmics and dramatics. Tolerance of races, classes, and cultures. Group therapy as a means of solidarity, in the staff meeting and community meeting. Taking youth seriously as an age in itself. Community of youth and adults, minimizing 'authority.' Educational use of the actual physical plant (buildings and farms) and the culture of the school community. Emphasis in the curriculum on real problems and wider society, its geography and history, with actual participation in the neighboring community (village or city). Trying for functional interrelation of activities."

"To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which comes from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one?s own style and creatively adjust this to one?s author."

"To want a job that exercises a man?s capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is utopian anarcho-syndicalism; it is labor invading the domain of management. No labor leader has entertained such a thought in our generation. Management has the ?sole prerogative? to determine the products."

"Use appropriate unlicensed adults of the community?the druggist, the storekeeper, the mechanic?as the proper education of the young into the grown-up world."

"We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least."

"We define boredom as the pain a person feels when he?s doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something he wants to do but won?t, can?t, or doesn?t dare. Boredom is acute when he knows the other thing and inhibits his action, e.g., out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just the chronic boredom, for a person can?t learn, or be intelligent about, what he?s not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere. (Another large part of stupidity is stubbornness, unconsciously saying, ?I won?t. You can?t make me.?)"

"We do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men."

"We do not need to be able to say what ?human nature? is in order to be able to say that some training is ?against human nature.?"

"We live increasingly in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, the procedure, prestige, and profit."

"We're talking about one extra carnation, which is one of the cheapest flowers, and nobody ever puts in just one extra flower... That's why it's so tough. Every arrangement has to be controlled for product going into it and the people who come into this business are not numbers people. They are creative so they've got an automatic resistance to doing what they need to do to make it profitable."

"What we're saying to people is 'Look, we'll wipe that (Internet access) cost out for you, but make your other calls through our service and we'll give you discounts (of 30 percent compared with standard British Telecom rates)."

"When the Devil quotes Scriptures, it's not, really, to deceive, but simply that the masses are so ignorant of theology that somebody has to teach them the elementary texts before he can seduce them."

"When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality."

"When we choose a man to beautify our towns, we do not automatically call on the major artists of the world... We now lavishly praise Frank Lloyd Wright, but we never made any community use of him, though he longed for the chance."

"Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers."

"Wrong' training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month Club selections, because they are ludicrous and dull. As a young man, then, he will effectually be excluded from all of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and most of publishing, because what moves him or what he creates is quite irrelevant to what is going on: it is too fine. His father has brought him up as a dodo."

"You are the military industrial of the United States, the most dangerous body of men at the present in the world, for you not only implement our disastrous policies but are an overwhelming lobby for them, and you expand and rigidify the wrong use of brains, resources, and labor so that change becomes difficult. Most likely the trends you represent will be interrupted by a shambles of riots, alienation, ecological catastrophes, wars, and revolutions, so that current long-range planning, including this conference, is irrelevant."

"You'll have to rent a shop, open a retail display area, buy the refrigerators and equipment and subscribe to a wire service."