U.s. Andersen Quotes

Szasz opposed any involuntary psychiatric intervention and, along with the Cuckoo’s Nest portrayal, paved the way for the disastrous dismantling of U.S. mental health facilities. But more generally they helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress the people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact”—now the universal bottom-line argument for anyone, from creationists to climate change deniers to antivaccine hysterics, who prefer to disregard science in favor of their own beliefs.

In 1982 I reported and wrote a Time cover story called “Inmate Nation” about what’s now called mass incarceration, because the number of U.S. inmates had just started to increase sharply and, to my editor and me, alarmingly—that year by 43,000 to 412,000. The total number of inmates today is 1.5 million, of whom 130,000 are in privately run prisons.

it was the sudden, shocking exposure of actual conspiracies starting in the 1970s that made Americans overcorrect, to assume that anything bad is the intentional result of some conspiracy. Which may make it harder, ironically, to expose and dismantle the rare real ones. Our news and Internet-enabled media discourse are clogged more than ever with conspiracy theories. All the fantastical noise obscures the occasional signals. I’m thinking, for instance, of the Russian government’s interference in the last U.S. presidential election, to which too little attention was paid as it was happening. In the middle of 2016, it sounded like just one more wild speculation.

The book received a wider review in the business press than in academic journals. A few weeks after the U.S. publication I was invited to address the annual meeting of Drexel-Burnham to outline how the new Treasury bill standard of world finance had replaced the gold exchange standard. Herman Kahn was the meeting’s other invited speaker. When I had finished, he got up and said, “You’ve shown how the United States has run rings around Britain and every other empire-building nation in history. We’ve pulled off the greatest rip-off ever achieved.” He hired me on the spot to join him as the Hudson Institute’s economist. I was happy enough to leave my professorship in international economics at the New School for Social Research. My professional background had been on Wall Street as balance-of-payments economist for the Chase Manhattan Bank and Arthur Andersen. My research along these lines was too political to fit comfortably into the academic economics curriculum, but at the Hudson Institute I set to work tracing how America was turning its payments deficit into an unprecedented element of strength rather than weakness.

IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern Strategy from the 1960s worked partly because it rode demographic change. In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the white majority in the whole country is down nearly to 60 percent; in other words, America’s racial makeup is now more “Southern” than the Deep South’s was in the 1960s. For a while, the party’s leaders were careful to clear their deck of explicit racism. It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to be concerned about violent crime spiraling upward from the 1960s through the ’80s? We don’t want social welfare programs to encourage cultures of poverty and dependency, do we? Although the dog-whistled resentment of new policies disfavoring or seeming to disfavor white people became more audible, Republican leaders publicly stuck to not-entirely-unreasonable arguments: affirmative action is an imperfect solution; too much multiculturalism might Balkanize America; we shouldn’t let immigrants pour into the U.S. helter-skelter. But in this century, more Republican leaders started cozying up to the ugliest fantasists, unapologetic racists. When Congressman Ron Paul ran for the 2008 GOP nomination, he appeared repeatedly with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was just coining the term “alt-right” for his movement. Senator Rand Paul employed as an aide and wrote a book with a former leader of the League of the South, an organization devoted to a twenty-first-century do-over of Confederate secession. After we elected a black president, more regular whistles joined the kind only dogs can hear. Even thoughtful Ross Douthat, one of the Times’s conservative columnists, admitted to a weakness for the Old South fantasy. During the debate about governments displaying Confederate symbols after nine black people were shot dead by a white supremacist in Charleston, he discussed “the temptation…to regard the Confederate States of America as the political and historical champion of all…attractive Southern distinctives….Even a secession-hating Yankee like myself has felt, at certain moments the pull of that idea, the lure of that fantasy.

Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that a country of three hundred million people at the turn of the twenty-first century could and should revert to something like its nineteenth-century self. Both had a familiar American magical-thinking fetish for gold—to return to gold as the foundation of U.S. currency because, they think, only gold is real. However, as the post-Reagan Republican mother ship maintained extreme and accelerating antigovernment fervor—acquiring escape velocity during the 2000s, leaving Earth orbit in the 2010s—libertarianism became a right-wing movement. (Also helpful was the fact that extreme economic libertarians included extremely rich people like the Koch brothers who could finance its spread.) Most Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: let business do whatever it wants, but don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism. It’s a political movement whose most widely read and influential texts are fiction. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has said, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.

American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry Nik Smotrov, Natalya’s husband Yevgeny Filipov, aide to Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky Vera Pletner, Dimka’s secretary Valentin, Dimka’s friend Marshal Mikhail Pushnoy REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS Nikita Sergeyevitch Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Andrei Gromyko, foreign minister under Khrushchev Rodion Malinovsky, defense minister under Khrushchev Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor Yuri Andropov, successor to Brezhnev Konstantin Chernenko, successor to Andropov Mikhail Gorbachev, successor to Chernenko Other Nations Paz Oliva, Cuban general Frederik Bíró, Hungarian politician Enok Andersen, Danish accountant

From the 1940s through the ’70s—when our richest citizens were paying rates of 70 and 80 and 90 percent on the millionth dollars they earned each year—U.S. productivity and GDP per person and median household income after inflation all doubled.

The authors of one study divided all 3,138 U.S. counties into two groups, Opportunity-Falling and Opportunity-Rising America, depending on whether each county lost or gained businesses between 2005 and 2015. In the two-thirds of counties that were Opportunity-Falling during that decade before the 2016 election, Trump won the two-party vote by 53 to 47 percent, while in the Opportunity-Rising counties he lost by 55 to 45 percent.

FIRST MEDITATION

Expect and accept. Know and experience. Be positive and thankful. For the great laws of attraction and creation are laws of attunement and never divulge their secrets to those who batter at the door with force.

We exist in order that we may become something more than we are, not through favorable circumstance or auspicious occurrence, but through an inner search for increased awareness. To be, to become — these are the commandments of evolving life, which is going somewhere, aspires to some unsealed heights, and the awakened soul answers the call, seeks, grows, expands. To do less is to sink into the reactive prison of the ego, with all its pain, suffering, limitation, decay, and death. People who live through reaction to the world about them are the victims of every change in their environments, now happy, now sad, now victorious, now defeated, affected but never affecting. They may live many years in this manner, rapt with sensory perception and the ups and downs of their surface selves, but one day pain so outweighs pleasure that they suddenly perceive their ego as illusory, a product of outside circumstances only. Then they either sink into complete animal lethargy or, turning away from the senses, seek inner awareness and self-mastery. Then they are on the road to really living, truly becoming; then they begin to uncover their real potential; then they discover the miracle of their own consciousness, the magic in their mind. Mastery over life is not attained by dominion over material things, but by mental perception of their true cause and nature.

It is a mental world we live in, not a physical one at all. The physical is merely an extension of the mental, and an imperfect extension at that. Everything we see, hear, and feel is not a hard and inescapable fact at all, but only the imperfect revelation to the senses of an idea held in mind. Preoccupation with sensory experience has focused attention on effects instead of causes, has led scientific investigation down a blind alley where everything grows smaller into infinity or larger into infinity and walls us off from the secrets that lie behind life. It is not the planets and stars, the elements and winds, or even the existence of life itself that is the miracle that demands our attention. It is consciousness.

To be conscious is to be conscious; there are not different kinds. The “I” that is in your neighbor is the exact same “I” within you. It may appear to be different through being attached to different sensory experience, but that is only because it has allowed itself to be conditioned by such experience. In point of actual fact consciousness is never the result of experience but the cause instead, and wherever we find it, it is primarily aware of existing, of being “I.” There is only one basic consciousness in all creation; it takes up its residence in all things, appears to be different according to the things it enters into, but in essence is never changed at all. It is intelligence, awareness, energy, power, creativeness, the stuff from which all things are made. It is the alpha and omega of existence, first cause; it is you.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff,

We are all born into a bondage of the senses, and insofar as we place absolute credence in their evidence, we remain slaves to them. Only when we arrive at a mystic intuition of the universality of intelligence are we finally able to realize that matter in essence is only mind and that innate in each of us is the same resident being, which exists everywhere at all times and in all things, appearing to be different according to the form into which it has entered but essentially remaining one, indivisible, and infinite

The intellect by itself moves nothing,” said Aristotle, and modern psychology has affirmed this law. We encounter those circumstances that reflect the quality of our deeper consciousness. In short, we see only that which we are, and it is this enamoring quality of our ego that deludes us about the world. Most people keep running into the same situations over and over again. Some are accident prone; others are eternally fretting about their health; still others make a failure of one enterprise after another. Some lives take on the tenor of an epic tragedy as fate seems to heap one misfortune on top of another. But it is not misfortune that such people are encountering; merely the outer manifestation of the inner working of their own minds.

Mastery over life is not attained by dominion over material things, but by mental perception of their true cause and nature. The wise person does not attempt to bend the world to fit their way or to coerce events into a replica of their desires, but instead strives for a higher consciousness that enables them to perceive the secret cause behind all things. Thus they find a prominent place in events; by their utter harmony with those events they actually appear to be molding them.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. He pierced the veil, perceived behind the sense-enamoring dance of nature’s myriad forms the workings of the one mind and one intelligence from which all life and aspiration spring. There can be no inner peace or surety of action without this basic spiritual knowledge. People who live isolated from the roots of their being have cut themselves off from the source of all power and dwell alone and without resource in a hostile and threatening world.

It is the mere fact of being, the ability to say, “I.” Consciousness is an indisputable fact, the greatest miracle of all, and all the sights and sounds of the world are merely side effects.

We do not truly understand what we are, only that we are conscious and confined within a particular body, and the experience and knowledge we acquire, together with our disposition as to their use, we label “I,” and thus we are deluded into calling a ghost by our own name.

Hidden behind this ghost, obscured by its struggles and fancies, is the Secret Self, which even though hidden, ignored, or misunderstood, nevertheless moves all things on the chessboard of life according to their natures and aspirations. We are never ego or sense-self. These are masks we don as we play at the parts we find in life. What we truly are is not a changing thing, but is whole and entire, powerful and serene, limitless and eternal. It springs from the inexhaustible source of life itself, and when we learn to identify ourselves with it, then we have hitched a ride on a power so far beyond our tiny temporal selves that our lives are changed in the most amazing manner.

It takes firm-heartedness to face the fact that you have chosen every circumstance and thing in your life, not consciously, of course, but subconsciously. People who are sick usually are appalled at the idea that they have chosen to be sick, dumbfounded at the effrontery of anyone suggesting that they can get well by simply choosing to be well. If somebody explains the conditioning quality of positive thinking, they sometimes try it for a time but usually without visible results, for they think positively negatively, telling themselves that they are well while they know that they are sick. People can become well by choosing to become well, but they seldom become so the moment after making this choice.

It first is necessary for them to embark upon a program of conditioning their consciousness into awareness of health. They have become sick because their consciousness picked up an awareness of sickness; and this must be cast out, replaced; and the task will not be accomplished in a day. Curiously, other people sometimes have more effect on our subconscious than we ourselves do. A good hypnotist often is able to effect amazing cures. These are usually temporary, however, because the hypnotist-instilled idea is soon dissipated and replaced by the prompter that caused illness in the first place. The individual’s conscious mind put the sickness prompter in the subconscious and will continue to do so until the pattern of thinking is changed.

if ever, make decisions in an area of our consciousness that is free from the guilt, fears, and envies of our ego-self. In consequence, we are never truly free to decide anything. Each decision wells up in us from the subconscious, reminding us below the level of awareness of some long-forgotten incident in which the ego suffered or had pleasure, and now, in this present instance, we must follow a path dictated by ego-reaction, and so we remain slaves to the past. It just is not possible to fight this reaction. Someone who has an inordinate fear of heights, for example, is never cured of the fear simply by being exposed to height. In fact, such treatment is likely to end in complete personality displacement, in an all-consuming fear hysteria. In the final analysis, such a sufferer is only able to overcome the fear by modifying the importance of their ego-self, by displacing it from the frontal awareness of their consciousness, taking unto themself a deeper, more heightened sense of being through identification with the Secret Self; and so their life begins to be guided by a mental and spiritual essence rather than a protoplasmic pain-pleasure reaction.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1905 that states and towns could legally require citizens to be vaccinated against smallpox and other infectious diseases

JONES IS BOTH symptom and cause of how knee-jerk, florid conspiracism has become rampant and normalized in America, a fixture of the way people now think and talk, eclipsing simpler Occam’s razor understandings. Let me repeat once again: I’m not saying that large secret plots haven’t existed in the past and don’t exist now. For decades, people in the U.S. government, especially those whose work involves high-stakes secrecy, did a lot to make Americans start imagining conspiracies everywhere. The Warren Commission investigation of the Kennedy assassination was full of bungles and became a growth medium in the conspiracists’ petri dishes for an infinity of bacterial theories—even though its essential conclusion was almost certainly correct. The government did lie about UFO sightings over the years—in order to cover up air force surveillance aircraft experiments. The Watergate burglary and cover-up were conspiracies—and promptly exposed, investigated, and punished. Among the most significant recent conspiracies, the cover-up by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and elite of its sexually predatory clergy was finally exposed—after we’d wasted vast resources and ruined hundreds of lives exposing and prosecuting a satanic sexual abuse conspiracy that didn’t exist.

Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that a country of three hundred million people at the turn of the twenty-first century could and should revert to something like its nineteenth-century self. Both had a familiar American magical-thinking fetish for gold—to return to gold as the foundation of U.S. currency because, they think, only gold is real. However, as the post-Reagan Republican mother ship maintained extreme and accelerating antigovernment fervor—acquiring escape velocity during the 2000s, leaving Earth orbit in the 2010s—libertarianism became a right-wing movement. (Also helpful was the fact that extreme economic libertarians included extremely rich people like the Koch brothers who could finance its spread.) Most Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: let business do whatever it wants, but don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism.

Sharia law uses the sacred texts of Islam as the basis for moral behavior, the way Jews are supposed to use the Talmud and Christians the Bible—and, in Muslim countries, it uses the Quran explicitly as the basis for legal codes. Just before we elected our forty-fourth non-Muslim president in a row, people on the right began fantasizing that American Muslims were scheming to supplant U.S. jurisprudence with Islamic jurisprudence. The definitive text is a 2010 book called Shariah: The Threat to America. Its nineteen authors included respectable hard-right conservatives and national security wonks. We’re “infiltrated and deeply influenced,” the book says, “by an enemy within that is openly determined to replace the U.S. Constitution with shariah.” The movement took off, and in short order the specter of sharia became a right-wing catchphrase encompassing suspicion of almost any Islamic involvement in the U.S. civic sphere. The word gave Islamophobia a patina of legitimacy. It was a specific fantasy—not I hate Muslims or I hate Arabs but rather I don’t want to live under Taliban law, and therefore it could pass as not racist but anti-tyranny. It was also a shiny new exotic term, a word nobody in America but a few intellectuals knew.

the Branch Davidians’ theology is not so different from that of a large fraction of Americans. We call Koresh a “cult leader,” which allows us to file him away reassuringly as a one-off nut, like Charles Manson or Jim Jones. But it’s important to recognize that his church was a long-standing subgroup of a 150-year-old Protestant denomination that is one of the twenty largest churches in America, with six thousand U.S. congregations.*1

Compared to a decade ago, it’s true, almost twice as many Americans say they don’t believe in God. But consider the actual numbers: the total of agnostics and atheists has gone from extremely tiny (4 percent in 2007) to very tiny (7 percent in 2014). Those are percentages one otherwise finds in less-developed countries. If that is evidence for U.S. secularization, we are now just about as secular as, oh, Turkey.

AFFIRMATIONS:   -I am now allowing perfect health to flow throughout my body.   -Every cell in my body dances with the perfection of my Creator.   -I love my body and I’m allowing it to be strong.   “I give myself permission to be well.” -Louise Hay   “Every day in every way I AM getting better and better!” -Bill Austin   “I myself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve my love and affection.” -Buddha   -Ask Yourself: “Why am I so healthy?”     I AM LOVE   I AM WELLNESS   I AM PURE ENERGY PERCEIVING TRUTH   Disease