Finally, the Vietnam War was “wound down” and eventually phased out. But before we could recover from the Watergate shock to our political idealisms, we discovered that Americans were consuming most of the world’s energy and were dependent on the Arabs, some of whom didn’t like us very much, for some very good reasons. Like it or not, by the middle seventies, the dream of American self-sufficiency was coming to an end. It was “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie” in more ways than one.
During the late sixties and early seventies Harrad captured the imagination of millions of the younger generation. Hundreds of them wrote to “Harrad, Cambridge, Massachusetts” trying to apply for admission and many tried group marriages. But there war no Harrad, and without the deprogramming of Harrad-style human-values seminars, they were often floundering in their own ego conflicts.
After Vietnam, the drift toward disaster continued. Inflation, exacerbated by the rise in the price of oil, plunged the country into some long-needed soul-searching. For a few years, with the help of a grim President Carter, we almost had a sense of national purpose: We began to worry about energy shortages; we would stop wasting fuel; we could build smaller automobiles and return to the stick-shift, that consumed less gas per mile. Some became enthusiastic about nuclear power and some about the vast potential for solar energy. We began to believe that the Club of Rome prophecies might be true. Many realized that indeed we were exhausting the planet’s natural resources. “Small is beautiful” became a slogan for those who wanted to return to the simpler ways of our forefathers. Ecology and Earth Days gave some of us a common bond.
But it didn’t last long. We elected a new president who didn’t think negatively. Supply-side economics became a new password to the future. Just let the rich get richer, and the poor will become less poor as excess money trickles down to them. For nearly eight years, the Reagan presidency seemed to work, but then we woke up to the fact that the national debt had increased to one and a half trillion dollars. We were importing far more than we were exporting, and our trade deficit was horrendous. But, never mind, the Japanese and West Germans were underwriting our Epicurean “I gotta be me ... live today, tomorrow you die” philosophy. Once again, with credit cards expanding our purchasing power, we owed our soul to the company store. Why worry and why save? There might be more dollars; but every year the dollar would buy 5 to 6 percent less than it did the year before. As for national and international debt, why worry? Owners of the new company store were international bankers, but they couldn’t afford to flush the toilet; they might go down the drain with us.
In the past twenty-five years, the only sense of purpose that some Americans have and that still motivates them in the Reagan/Bush era is expressed, to my way of thinking by Fritz Perls’ lines, which he was happy to recite at Esalen (home of the Get-into-Yourelf movement) while wearing a jumpsuit with nothing under it: “I do my thing and you do your thing. I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other it is beautiful If not, it can’t be helped.”
In essence, that’s the philosophy of the Donald Trumps, the Leona Helmsleys, the Ivan Boeskys, the Imelda and Ferdinand Marcoses, of S & L presidents, and of most politicians today. They and thousands more, including the corporate-takeover experts and the “insiders” trading on Wall Street became the mentors of millions of Americans. It was summed up by Michael Douglas, portraying a Wall Street banker, with the words: “Greed is good!” When we fail to win President Bush’s billion-dollar war on drugs, we’ll prove it once again. “Greed pays off.”
During these years, the perversion of democracy and capitalism into a world of greed and conspicuous consumption—not all of it finanoed honestly—has thoroughly warped the so-called sexual revolution. We continue to commercialize and devalue human sexuality. Psychologists have told us that the big orgasm is equivalent to a sneeze. But millions of women continue to read the women’s magazines searching for the “big O,” the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Within the last few decades we have almost eliminated censorship. At last we can read D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and even Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade. The Supreme Court acknowledged that the human body was not obscene. Nudist magazines that first appeared in the 1940s no longer had to airbrush the genitals from photographs of naked men and women. What have we gotten in return? Adult bookstores, X-rated movies, the merger of violence and sex in R-rated movies, sick-sex magazines, and thousands of how-to-do-it sex books and motion pictures that more often than not have reduced the sex act to meaningless copulation between mental idiots.
Talking, while fucking—enjoying each other as thinking brains as I have described it in Hanad and many other novels—is not possible between programmed robots. Our sexual mentors try to teach us that the way to self-discovery is via multiple orgasms. And the brave new world of equal rights for women has been counterbalanced by a continuous, profit-oriented objectivization of the female, who now, in living color, could reveal not only her pubic hair to the male voyeur but her labia as well. In fact, one could peer so deeply into her tunnel of love that the male photographer and the viewer of his pictures could practically fall into the womb.
Beth Hillyer, posing for a Cool Boy photographer, would no longer have to shave her pubic hair, but the decision that Beth and her InSix friends would have to make in today’s environment would be more difficult.
In the early 1980s, with the invention of the VCR millions of Americans, including a very large percentage of females who would never have ventured into the sleazy combat zones of major cities, could now watch in the privacy of their own home men and women copulating on their television screens. But in 95 percent of the X-rated movies, as I have pointed out in my X-Rated Video Tape Guide, there is very little caring sex or attempts to establish caring relationships. They do not portray sex as an act of mutual discovery or point the way for educators, churches, and synagogues to sacramentalize human sexuality; they do not portray the beauty of the human body and acts of fertility and love. Instead, we now have available 10,000 or more videotapes, produced since 1980, portraying a fairly simple type of human sex act. They are rented or purchased by a hundred million or more Americans. For the most part, all they offer is the mating of horny young female animals with ever-erect male studs, none of whom evince much interest in each other as thinking human beings.
Can we lift ourselves by the bootstraps and create a new kind of society where human sexuality and the total wonder of the human body and the human mind become the new religion—a humanistic religion, without the necessity of a god, because you and I and all the billions who could interact caringly with one another are the only god we need? I think we can, if we devise an entirely new approach to education.
Phase 1. This new approach could begin tomorrow with a federal program that would guarantee an additional four-year, work/study, undergraduate program for every high-school graduate. The additional four years of education would offer either complete vocational training or studies leading to a bachelor’s degree—and ultimately (based on grades or testing) a possible additional four years of graduate studies. With such a program in place I believe the problems that have haunted other educational proposals would disappear.
In this educational environment, the function of elementary and secondary schools would be to educate all citizens to become competent in reading, writing, and mathematics, and to give them an overall view of human history, science, arts, and literature. Since computer learning would be part of the process, the only strictly vocational training in high school would be typing and computer literacy. Science would be taught in such a way as to give all students historical perspectives. It should be kept in mind that this approach to education would be equivalent to the present-day curriculum for college-bound students and would offer very few or no vocational subjects.
Young people today are getting a wide generalized education via
television, and in their early teens many acquire some skills by working in supermarkets, fast-food franchises, nursing homes, restaurants, and other places during their high-school years. With the change in high-school education I have described, those who later pursue a strictly vocational undergraduate education, would have experienced a much broader general education that most high-school graduates receive today.
Upon graduation from high school, all students could apply for admission to an undergraduate living program in their area or in another part of the country and, depending on their high-school grades, could pursue an education leading to either a vocational degree or a bachelor’s degree. Those who graduated in the higher percentiles could, if they wished, pursue an advanced degree in science, medicine, law, or some social science or humanities program, or professional education for teaching. In a sense these are also vocational degrees. Students would pay for their advanced degrees in a work/ study program in their special interest, or, as future teachers, by guiding human-values seminars.
Those who did not graduate from high school would be disqualified to vote in local or federal elections. With few vocational skills, the inability to obtain skilled work, and potential disenfranchisement, they would have a real incentive to graduate from high school or remedy the problem in later life by further study.
No longer worrying about financial problems, students would obtain their undergraduate degrees from colleges and universities that operated on a thirteen-week work/study cycle and remained in session throughout the year. All students would be guaranteed a minimum wage, which would be adjusted for inflation. Assuming, as I write this, that the minimum wage would reach $5 an hour, each student would earn $200 a week in two work cycles, or a total of $5,200.
From these earnings, each student would receive a personal allowance of $20 a week, and the balance would be paid directly to his or her college or university to cover tuition, books, room and board. Assuming that a state university education, which costs much less than private colleges, averages between $5,000 and $10,000 a year, the deficit of $6,000 at the higher level between the student’s earnings and the total annual cost would be subsidized by the federal government.
Obviously, at this level the cost of undergraduate education could be lowered, and the federal government would be responsible to keep the subsidy as small as possible. Assuming that at any time there would be approximately 20,000,000 Americans enrolled in a four-year undergraduate program, the federal subsidy would be about $150 billion annually. Federal and state educational subsidies are presently close to half of this amount, but we must also remember that welfare and unemployment benefits for this age group—and hopefully later—would be substantially reduced.
Also worthy of consideration is the fact that a fully educated citizenry is a better way to convince the world of the merits of democracy than the $300 billion we continue to budget in the 1990s for defense. The United States can give the entire world a “peace dividend” by committing itself to the complete education of future generations.
The economic effect of the doubling or even tripling of the number of people who receive an additional four years of education should intrigue economists. It is all on the up side and is a program on which liberal Democrats and Republicans could unite. If a four-year undergraduate education were available to all high-school graduates, it would sharply decrease the unemployment rate in future years, and by the first quarter of the 21 st century, when millions of more Americans will be living into their seventies and eighties, it will provide a much more affluent and better-educated younger generation, who will be able to support them.
A completely educated body of citizens with a sense of its own past and of all human history can communicate better with one another at all levels. In addition, a holistic education would eliminate gaps among the professions of medicine, law, science, teaching, engineering, business, manufacturing, and trades, because, as undergraduate students, all members of the future work force would have been working or studying alongside one another, in everything from plumbing to auto mechanics, philosophy to acting, premed to painting and building construction, etc.
Ultimately a gradual leveling would occur. The huge gap that now exists in terms of income and prestige between “top” professionals and skilled tradesmen could disappear. The lawyer or the doctor who could not repair his or her automobile would quickly discover that the auto mechanic was as broadly educated outside his vocation as he or she was, because their undergraduate studies had offered all of them an integrated search for universal human values and taught them how to care for one another, no matter what their level of vocational expertise.
Back in the 19th century the idea of attending a university was not simply to obtain a degree in a particular subject but to experience and learn from the teacher/scholar interaction. There was an attempt to unify all human knowledge and to search for roots (the basic definition of the word radical). Today most college and university teachers are afraid to explore and question particular—often no longer valid—religious, economic, political, and sexual values (or lack of values) that govern our lives.
In a society committed to education and that truly believed in the joy of learning, young people could look forward to earning a living stipend and paying for their education by becoming a contributing part of the economic system as they entered the alternating thirteen-week work/study cycle. In the process they would no longer—as most undergraduate students do now—exist in a social vacuum for four years.
All students in this proposal for the 21st century would be required to take a weekly seminar in human values throughout their entire four years. The seminars would be run by graduate students and would expose them to a deconditioning process as they explored the world of ideas in fifty books each year. The annotated bibliography that follows this essay will give you some idea of how I would structure the human-values approach.
Up to this point I have given you a broad outline of Phase 1 of the Harrad/Premar Solution. In Phase 2, I’ll detail how it could function along the lines of The Harrad Experiment.
Phase 2 would be entirely optional. If you can find a copy of The Premar Experiments,3 it will give you much more background. I wrote this sequel to Harrad because thousands of people wrote me that the Harrad concept was too elitist.
The Premar Experiments, also written in journal form, describes the thirteen-week work/study cycle. Unlike Harrad students, Premars do not live in dormitories but in reconditioned low-income housing on the fringes of central cities, where they pursue their choice of undergraduate study in nearby colleges or universities. The living quarters are essentially a commune, with forty-eight students living in three-story tenement houses. Each house is run by a graduate student couple who are married. Known as Compars (communal parents), they would be four or five years older than the incoming freshman, and in a very real sense function as older siblings to the Premars. The forty-eight students living in the Premar housing stay together for their entire undergraduate years; they pursue either bachelor’s or vocational degrees. They should be equally divided between men and women, and approximately one-fifth of the students should have African American, Native American, Hispanic, or Asian backgrounds. Rooming arrangements are similar to those of Harrad, except that the roommate exchange takes place every six months over a period of the first two years.
All students live alternately with four members of the other sex, one of whom will be from a minority background. Premars (or Phase 2 students as I refer to them in an update of the novel) cannot choose their own roommates until the beginning of their junior year. But if they wish they can drop out of Phase 2 and return to Phase 1 of the undergraduate program at any time. This would be a carefully considered option, since they could not return and if they left Premar they would continue their undergraduate years with a roommate of the same sex.
All students who were accepted into Phase 2 of the undergraduate program would provide blood and urine tests taken six months p
rior to their arrival, along with a physical examination, showing that they are free of the AIDS virus, venereal diseases, and drugs. (Keep in mind that when I originally wrote the Harrad and Premar proposals AIDS was nonexistent.) In addition, each student would agree in writing to confme sexual intimacies to other students within the group to which he or she is assigned and would be “monogamous” with each roommate in turn. Because of a strict and ongoing surveillance and frequent bloodtesting, the use of condoms by Phase 2 men would be optional. All women would either use birth-control pills, or, if the pill were not advisible, medically, they would be fitted for a diaphragm. While an abortion would be available, it would be cause for expulsion from Phase 2 and a return to Phase 1.
All Phase 2 students would agree that in spite of their possible attraction to a particular roommate, they would accept the no-choice roommate shift every six months in their first two years. It would also be understood that any Phase 2 students who wished to marry would drop out of both phases of the program. The reason that underlies this rule is that women in the 21st century should not have children until they are 21 or over. The use of hard drugs and excessive use of alcohol would likewise be cause for expulsion.
The Harrad Experiment Page 29