7. After getting father's fortune, it became impossible to go into his business, but my Uncle Sam said he had a fine army

I FOUND IN most of my courses that the professor's reason for giving the course and probably my fellow students' for taking the course were completely different from mine. The professor, he may have been concerned with keeping up his professional status, continuing his research--not interested in education as such but in furthering the discipline. The student taking the course may have been somebody going on to grad school in that discipline and beginning to develop a professional identification with it or it may have been somebody just cranking the grades out in the proper order for the proper fulfillment of his distribution requirements.

There was little personal in the work as such. I proved freshman year to myself that I could just do the work and get by, and I was willing to do that but after awhile I found I just couldn't prostitute myself to get by. It's still too threatening to me personally. Uh, I would, it's sorta the same problem I had in high school of losing myself--I would feel lost--by getting too involved in a middle class venture.

I'd been moving very steadily, very smoothly up the ranks of a society of which I do not feel part. I really do not value money, do not value status, although I would enjoy having positions of status to show I am fit to handle that kind of responsibility and I would have more freedom to do as I please. But I could not take a position of influence if the only way to do it would be to perpetuate a system which in many respects I find corrupt, ineffectual, impersonal. The threat involved in keeping under the system is that I have no outside base from which to keep outside of it to criticize it. I would just become completely enmeshed in it and my personal values would be changed to fit along with it.

I have no objection to picking up academic skills to develop my responsibility fully, but I do object to making that the only purpose and to learning those skills in the context where they have to be used for some specific things.

That's why I'm looking forward to being in the army as opposed to Harvard. Because there I can work and get exercise and although I'll have to take crap and people will order me around all the time, my mind will be free. Nobody there is going to make use of my mind. What will be required of me will be crude enough so I can stand outside of it. Whereas here what's required of me is the utilization of my most personal and most difficult ability--the ability to reform my mind to fit a certain way of thinking. Thta's too much pressure.

SO AFTER getting kicked out of that first Catholic high school, I took a vacation for the rest of the month before going to an easy school, also a Catholic boys' school, where I knew kids from grade school.

There were lots of middle class kids, but not upper middle class, professionals, and a lot of working class kids. It was a tough school, football gang type. No pressure to succeed, in fact just the opposite. I could taxi along very comfortably. I even copied some of the work I had to do from some of the other kids. I adapted to that extent. My first semester I had a 93 average. I was smarter than all but one or two kids in the school so I had no trouble getting by.

8. They told me to see a shrink, but I didn't want to be an SDSer

THE REASON I'm leaving is because I have less expensive tastes. I don't have to have the middle class money status and position to get by in life. I can afford not to go to college. I can feel more comfortable with a group of working class people than a group of highly-motivated kids from New York.

The difference between other dissidents--like the radicals--and me is that most of them, after they have separated themselves from the establishment and Harvard, find something else to identify with. The SDSer can afford to be an SDSer. It's a subculture with its own satisfactions. It may not be particularly useful politically but it satisfies the needs of its members who share the same separation from society. It sorta becomes a private club that has its own values and structure that are as alien to me as the Harvard system or the American system. They escaped from one society to build another one which is sometimes just as bad.

They told me to see a shrink, but I don't want to change. I like myself the way I am. Just because I can't adapt to Harvard doesn't mean in itself that I should go to the shrink and get adapted. What may be best for me is to adapt myself to something better