In this series, Dr. Carson examines the connection between ideology and the revolutions of our time and traces the impact on several major countries and the spread of the ideas and practices around the world.
The subjugation of the individual proceeds along two parallel lines as the idea which has the world in its grip extends its sway. One line is to bring the individual under the domination of organizations, and ultimately of government. The other is to use numbers in such a way as to reduce the individual to a nullity and thus to instrument him to the purposes of those who hold power.
Collectivism is supposed to be a means of transcending the limits of the individual, of augmenting him by joining him with others. The device by which this is to be accomplished is the organization. The notion which makes this appear to be possible is that the organizational whole is greater than the sum of its human parts. But, as has been noted, the organizational whole is only greater than the sum of its parts in its coercive and destructive potential. It is less than the sum of its parts in its constructive potential. This is so because rather than augmenting the constructive powers of the individual by organization they tend to be narrowed, confined, and delimited the more firmly control is asserted.
The collectivist reliance on organization, then, results in increasing coercion, decreasing production, and individuals who are restrained and subdued. The illusion that the individual could be transcended by organization arose from the great increase in production made possible by the much more extensive use of capital in the last two centuries.
Much has been made in this work of the religious character of the animus behind socialism. It might be more appropriate at this point, however, in discussing the devices of socialism, to emphasize the magical qualities attributed to them. The veneration of the organization, and especially the state, entailed in socialism, amounts to a belief that some sort of magic inheres in them. That man could be transformed by these instruments requires magical components within them. If they do have, it is black magic, for the use of force deforms rather than transforms man.
The Use of Numbers
But the reliance upon and use of numbers in our era provides a clearer demonstration of how deeply we are drawn into magical incantations and divinations by the idea that has us in its grip. The description of this will show, too, how the individual is being subdued and subjugated by the use of numbers.
The belief that there is magic in numbers, or at least in certain numbers, is not new to our era, of course; it is at least as old as the earliest records of man’s doings. The number “three” has often been singled out as a potent number. “Seven” has long been a favorite number, and it is still highly honored in dice games. Understandably, perhaps, special properties may be attributed to “ten,” for it is the normal number of our fingers, as also of our toes. “Thirteen” is widely reckoned to be an unlucky number. Many people believe that they have a lucky number, and contemporary numerology rises to its superstitious peak in the daily selection of a number by those who play the “numbers” racket.
A number system does have strange and often wondrous aspects to it, and it may be that the tendency to see something magical in numbers stems from these. In any case, the use of numbers in calculation, which is their primary legitimate use, has enabled man to formulate precisely much of his knowledge of the universe and to extend his utilization and control over things about him. We comprehend the universe we inhabit mainly by way of numbers: the speed of light, the speed of sound, the distance of the earth from the sun, the length of time it takes the earth to rotate on its axis or to make one revolution round the sun, the law of gravity, and a great variety of other interesting and sometimes useful information. Size, magnitude, quantity, and ratio, all now expressible with great precision in numbers, are critical for present day production and distribution of goods.
Interchangeable parts—possibly the single most critical technique in the vast expansion of man’s power by tools—are made possible by adherence to careful and precise calculations. Hundreds of thousands of nuts are made which will match the threads of a single bolt. Electricity, which cannot be seen, tasted, heard, nor smelled can be measured to the watt and sent surging through wires in force that will vary by only a very few volts. The size of engines—the measure of their potential output—is now commonly expressed in cubic inches or centimeters. The ratio of gears determines the potential speed of vehicles. And so on. In short, man’s mastery of things in the world about him is made possible or greatly enhanced by the most precise sorts of calculations. Numbers are the touchstone of contemporary man’s control over things for his purposes.
To Control People
The thrust of socialism is to divert the effort from the use of numbers to control and utilize things to their use for controlling people, divesting individuals of the control of their own affairs, and utilizing them for the power ends of government. The late Ludwig von Mises demonstrated that in a pure socialist system economic calculation would be impossible.’ The reason would be that there would be no market-determined prices whose fluctuation would provide the necessary data for calculation. His student, Murray Rothbard, carries this insight a step farther when he declares that government ownership of any undertaking “injects a point of chaos into the economy.” This is so, he says, for “No government enterprise can ever determine prices or costs or allocate factors or funds in a rational . . . manner.”2
It follows, I take it, that any government intervention in the market will tend to produce a similar effect. The principle that emerges from this can be stated this way: The greater the extent of government intervention or ownership the less can numbers be used to control things and the more will the effect of their use be (when and if they are used) to control people. One of the hallmarks of socialism, as we shall see, is to use numbers to control people.
The most obvious use of numbers in gradualist countries is in the effort to control the economy of a nation. The numbers that are believed to be relevant to this undertaking are statistics. Ours is the only era and time in all of history in which national statistics have been extensively collected, compiled, and used. There is a reason for this. Statistics are just about the most inherently uninteresting thing imaginable. They are formed by reducing persons, places, or things, to numbers, which is the aspect of them that is positively the least interesting. Indeed,, a statistic acquires interest ordinarily as it conveys unusual magnitude or proportions. Insofar as it deals with the average, which is what statistics usually do, it is to that extent uninteresting.
Figuratively Speaking
Poets and historians sometimes used numbers in other ages. An historian writing in the Middle Ages might refer to 10,000 archers standing upon a hill. It is most doubtful that he, or anyone else, had counted them. What he was saying was that a huge army of archers stood on the hill, and numbers struck him as the best way to convey that. Ancient literature contains many references to very precise numbers of people (usually rounded off to the hundreds or thousands), but they are not statistics, as we understand such things; they are poetic uses of numbers. It is not that people in other ages did not sometimes keep careful records and precise accounts; it is rather that to abstract them as statistics would not have seemed to them worth the effort.
Socialism vitalizes, animates, gives meaning and purpose to statistics. It does this by attributing a magical quality to them. They are to be the means by which economies are to be planned, controlled, and all efforts are to be concerted. It would probably be possible to calculate with some precision the extent of the spread of socialism in a country, especially of gradualist socialism, by the degree to which statistics are kept and used. In short, the widespread use of statistics is a phenomenon of socialism.
Statistics are an abstraction of some aspect of history. They tell us the barest minimum about something or other that happened in the past—yesterday, ten days ago, a year ago, a hundred years ago, and so on backward. (They are, it might be said, history reduced to the idiot level, with all the juices wrung out, with everything that made history vital left out.)
Statistics and Prediction
The magical quality which socialists—which is to say, most of those who use them, whether they are aware of it or not—attribute to them is that they are a prediction of the future. One encounters evidence for such a belief all the time. For example, the newspapers report that an electric power company has gone before a state public utilities commission with a request for
$289,000,926 annual increase in its annual revenues, say. Almost as if it were incidental, they also report that the request was for a rate hike. Now it is quite conceivable that the company might get the rate hike requested and actually experience a decline in revenues. Indeed, since the demand for electricity is elastic, it is predictable, other things being equal, that any substantial increase in rates will result in a decrease in consumption, either relatively or absolutely. In fact, statistics are not a prediction of the future; they are a desiccated record of some aspect of the past.
The only way to predict the future with any accuracy is to control it, to remove from people as individuals the means by which they can manage their own affairs and change the course of things. That is, of course, what socialists intend and attempt to do. Marx claimed to have discerned the course of the future with scientific accuracy. It was a bogus claim. Twentieth century socialists are trying to use the power of government to make his predictions come true.
A Tool for Planners
Statistics can be used in planning with some degree of success in a controlled situation. Barring some catastrophic occurrence, it is possible to predict how many classrooms will be needed in the United States for first graders next year if we know how many five-year olds there are at present. What makes this statistic a useful basis for prediction, however, is positive law and long established custom. Most states have compulsory attendance laws, and the usual, and, in many states, the required, school entering age is sometime during the sixth year of a child. It is possible to predict where the classrooms will be needed with reasonable accuracy if children are required to attend the school in their district and a recent survey has revealed how many children there are. The fewer the variables—if there are no private schools, if the population is immobile, if no parental discretion is permitted—the more accurate the outcome of the prediction based on statistics.
In theory, perfect planning would be possible if the population was under the complete control of a single power (and all acts of God would cease, which communists have tried to achieve by denying God and naturalists by denying that He performs any acts). The thrust of socialism is toward that complete control over men by depriving them of choices by which they might thwart the planners. The effort to use statistics as a means to control the future pushes us toward reducing individual man to a statistic. Specifically, it manifests itself as the tendency to reduce man to a number.
Calculation Impossible
Under pure socialism, Mises said, economic calculation would be impossible. But under pure socialism not only economic calculation but all calculation would be redundant, hence irrelevant and unnecessary. Calculation is useful only because things are independent of us and do not necessarily conform to our will. I count my sheep, or would if I had any, because one or more may have strayed or been stolen, or a new one might have been born during the night, or for whatever reason they are independent of my will.
Under pure socialism, statistics would be a command that would be perfectly fulfilled, not a sum arrived at after the fact. Soviet communists have half-way pretended they could do this for decades now. Their statistics are a compound of commands, wishful thinking, and the determination to deceive those who examine them. Expert Sovietologists have long found it necessary either to make their own calculations or to make drastic reductions in those reported by Soviet authorities. Clever workers in the Soviet Union can sometimes fill or surpass their quotas—statistical commands—by having more than one worker count the same product as his own.
Pending the arrival of pure socialism—an event which is at worst several eons away, by my reckoning—socialists do find it useful to engage in calculation. Indeed, gradualists compile statistics with greater passion than saints stored up virtue in ages past. They calculate gross national products, consumer price indices, wholesale price indices, the number who are unemployed, the number of empty hospital beds, the size of the public debt, the amount of private indebtedness, the number of people who suffer from the common cold and how many days work are lost as well, and may, for aught I know, compute the average daily discomfiture occasioned for victims of hangnails. With all these masses of statistics in hand, they sally forth to “fine tune” the economy and enact programs that their statistics tell them will assure that in the future just the right amount of whatever is needed will be available.
The verdict is not yet in as to whether those who consulted chicken entrails to divine the future had greater success than users of statistics, but it would not surprise me to learn that the Department of Health, Education and Welfare has commissioned a study on just that subject, a statistical study, no doubt.
Assaulting the Individual
Even though calculation is still going on, indeed more of it than there ever has been before, under the impetus of socialism numbers are increasingly being used for another purpose. As noted earlier, the primary function of numbers is for use in calculation. That may well be their only legitimate use, since all other uses tend to perversions, as in gaming, magic, and superstitious practices. The use of numbers to identify things is innocent enough so long as the maker or owner of the object assigns the number. But even the assignment of numbers to things is suspect when anyone other than the owner assigns the number, for it is a usurpation of the prerogatives of ownership.
But the assignment of a number to an individual—which is the significant change being fostered by socialism—is more than suspect; it is a subtle and symbolic assault on the person. It has an unsavory past and portends ill for the future. It is a device for bringing people under control of the number assigners. The movement toward reducing individuals to numbers is grist for the mills of socialism. It arose in the wake of socialism, reduces the human to the level of a statistic, and instruments him for the kind of control entailed in command statistics.
Individuality is an obstacle to collectivism. Everything that distinguishes one individual from another, all differences in personality, any uniqueness, any peculiarity, any rough edges, all these hinder the meshing of the individual with the group, the organization, the class, the mass, the society, and finally the state. The concerting of all effort requires that individuality be sublimated, subordinated, or nullified. Numbers are the right instrument for this.
What’s In a Name?
The sign and symbol of individuality is a person’s name. It has been said that the most pleasing sound in the world to a person is that of his own name. There is good reason for this. It stands for his personality, his individuality, his uniqueness, all that he has done and become. He who loves and respects himself must in some fashion love his name, even when he does not like it as a name when considered objectively. Religious ceremonies sometimes give public sanction to the sacramental character of the name. In Christianity, this is often done by linking naming with baptism. An individual’s status as a distinct being is conferred upon him socially by his name.
Naming of persons and animals is a prerogative of parents, possessors, or trustees. In the case of minor children and animals a change in trustee or owner may result in a change of name. In the United States, at least, when a child becomes an adult he may by initiating the appropriate action change his name. The assigning of numbers to objects is historically the prerogative of the originator, maker, or owner. (Some objects are also given names sometimes, such as boats, homesteads, and, on occasion, automobiles. This is apt to be more playful than not, but it is an assertion of ownership in any case.)
Naming is a means of assigning distinctness and individuality. Numbering is a device for distinguishing objects that are very nearly alike from one another. He who names or numbers either explicitly or tacitly asserts his claim to that which is named or numbered. In short, individuality and ownership are deeply entangled in naming and numbering, spiritually, culturally, and legally.
It is within this context that we should view the increasing tendency to assign numbers to persons. There is yet another context within which it should be viewed, its grisly historical antecedents. (The end toward which an action tends is often implicit in its beginnings.) In earlier times, criminals were often branded. The brand was an identification and warning, a mark of degradation, and, in view of the custom of branding animals, an emblem of ownership by the state. The assigning of ‘numbers to prisoners was a lineal descendant of branding, a change accompanying or following upon the shift from corporal punishment of criminals to imprisonment as a usual punishment.
Numbers for Prisoners
The numbering of prisoners was the first ostentatious use of numbers in connection with persons in the United States. The number was prominently displayed sometimes in public places on “wanted” posters. This assigning of a number may have had some slight residual use for identification, but that is not its significance. It is the stamp of the state on the prisoner, the modern equivalent of branding. It is the emblem that he is no longer his own man but belongs to the state. A prisoner is stripped at the outset of much which sets him apart as an individual: his possessions, his clothing, his standing in the community, and many of his legal rights. The number is the seal of his new status.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, with his special insight and sensitivity, has suggested more of the import of assigning numbers to prisoners. He says that they did not get around to assigning numbers to political prisoners until late in the Stalinist era, long after it was generally done for all prisoners in some “civilized” countries. Here is an abbreviation of his account:
Then again, they quite blatantly borrowed from the Nazis a practice which had proved valuable to them—the substitution of a number for the prisoner’s name, his “I,” his human individuality, so that the difference between one man and another was a digit more or less in an otherwise identical row of figures. . . . Warders were ordered to address prisoners by their numbers only, and ignore and forget their names. It would have been pretty unpleasant if they could have kept it up—but they couldn’t. . . . In work rolls, too, it was the rule to write numbers before names. Why before and not instead of names? They were afraid to give up names altogether! However you look at it, a name is a reliable handle, a man is pegged to his name forever, whereas a number is blown away at a puff. If only the numbers were branded or picked out on the man himself, that would be something! But they never got around to it. . . .3
There came a time after the death of Stalin when the authorities no longer required the use of the numbers. Alexander Dolgun has described with what alacrity the prisoners ripped off their numbers and flung them into the air. “This seems like a small matter,” he said, “but for all the prisoners of Dzhezhazgan the number was the prime symbol of our slavery, of our demotion from human being to object. Its disappearance was like the beginning of a fresh new day.”4
Those who have suffered greatly often see with remarkable clarity. According to legend, Dolgun was one of only a very few who have survived the duration and degree of torture he underwent. We might suppose that he would have found the wearing of a number of such insignificance as to be unworthy of mention. Not so, his conclusion goes to the very heart of the matter; the number was a symbol “of our demotion from human being to object,” of the demotion of individual man from a value in and of himself to an object of use by others. The number is the Sign of the Beast of the idea that has the world in its grip.
Military Numbering
A goodly number of Americans were assigned numbers for the first time as members of the armed forces. Whatever value these serial numbers may have had for identifying mangled bodies, they also served a highly important symbolic purpose. The modern armed forces have brought organization to its peak of efficiency in doing that for which it is best suited, namely exerting force and destroying. To accomplish these ends, the military attempts to blend the individual into the organization in such a way that he becomes at one with it. Close order drill, for example, has for its object making the individual act in concert with the group. “The unit,” in the argot of the armed forces, is the organization to which he belongs, not the individual. Uniformity, obedience and conformity are prime military values. The individuality connoted by names is an obstacle; whereas, number connotes none of that. There is the matter, too, that one’s name is assigned by parents, and the number signalizes a new authority and control over him.
The generality of Americans were assigned numbers for the first time in the 1930′s when to have a Social Security number became a requirement for employment in many occupations. The significance of this numbering was partially concealed by the beneficent claims made for the undertaking, by the fact that it applied initially mainly to industrial workers, by the fact that it was called “insurance,” and by the casualness with which numbers were issued. Too, the number was to identify one’s “contribution” to the Social Security “fund.” Who could object to that? After all, one’s “contribution” certainly should be identified in some way.
It turned out, of course, that it was not a contribution at all; it is a tax, as the courts have decided. Nor is it insurance, in most ways that word is used. No policies have ever been issued. Monies paid into Social Security no longer belong to the individual. He no longer has any claim on them; they are forfeit to the government. The only claim he has is to such benefits as Congress may decide from time to time are to go to those who fall in the category to which his payments and financial condition entitle him. The only management, control, and possession he will ever have over any of this, as matters stand, is over such benefit payments as he may receive. Even the Social Security “fund” is a paper obligation resting on the credit of the United States.
The Number Is Essential
It may be objected at this point that I am making too much of numbers, that what is important is what is being done, not some incidental device by which it is done. On the contrary, I maintain that the opposite is the case. The number is essential; the particular thing that is done with it is only incidental. First of all, consider this fact, all that is left of all the money I have paid into Social Security is my number. If the money were essential and the number incidental, I should have the money and the number should have disappeared.
But one should not rest a case on what may only be a clever twisting of words. Even so, I would like to go one step farther along this line. Suppose that instead of having a Social Security number that my name only were used to identify my “contribution” to the “fund.” What could I say then? All that I have left of all that I have paid is my name? Assuredly not, for I would have my name whether or not I had paid my Social Security tax (plus a prisoner’s number if I had not paid it, no doubt). That reveals the use of the number—a device for asserting a distinct claim—but not its ultimate purpose.
The purpose of the number is gradually becoming clearer with the passage of time, and new legislation. Not only is the percentage of the Social Security tax being increased, not very gradually of late, either, and the coverage extended over the years, but also the number is being used in new ways. The Social Security number has now become a Taxpayer Identification number. By this extension, the government has begun to use a number to assert its control and potential ownership of all our income and resources.
A Case in Sweden
The Internal Revenue Service considers only so much of an individual’s income as his as he can show does not belong to the government. True, the government does not ordinarily take it all, but that is simply an incident of the legal establishment of class rate categories and exemptions. What can happen was lately demonstrated in Sweden. Ingmar Bergman, the famous film maker, left the country after the government insisted that he pay taxes which he claimed amounted to 139 per cent of his income. His decision was reached after the following had occurred. He was called out of a rehearsal by government investigators who hauled him away for questioning, confiscated his passport and accused him of evading $120,000 in income taxes. Bergman protested his innocence, but even after the criminal charges were dropped, Swedish officials continued to dun him for the back taxes they insisted he owed. Bergman went to pieces; he stopped work, suffered a nervous breakdown and contemplated suicide. Then . . having snapped out of the depression, the 58-year old director announced he was leaving his homeland for good.
Not before declaring, however, “I am leaving my fortune in Sweden at the disposal of the National Tax Board.”5
The idea that has the world in its grip presses governments toward taking away the independence of the individuals, toward taking away the means by which they might manage their own affairs, toward concerting their efforts by fitting them into organizations. It is the assigning of a number that is essential, not Social Security. Social Security is incidental; it is only one of the possible means by which government takes from the individual the control over his affairs. There are many other ways it can be and is done. The number, however, is essential; it is that to which the individual must be reduced in order to be instrumented by government. His name belongs to the individual; but the number signalizes the government’s claim on him.
The animus of collectivism is to reduce individual man to a number, then. It is to reduce him to the lowest common denominator, to a one which he shares with all other living human bodies. Only thus can he be melded with the masses of other men. This process of enmassment is the opposite of what occurs in the refinement of metals. In this latter process purification takes place; the best that is in the metals is separated from the dross and preserved.
Enmassment
The enmassing of man that occurs with collectivism may be likened to “enslagment,” or the formation of clinkers in a furnace when certain kinds of coal are burned. Clinkers result from a melding together of the impurities in the fuel. The best that is in man is his potentiality for originating, for reason, for spirituality, for building, for love and concern. The enmassment of collectivism suppresses these by giving the weight of numbers to the lowest and worst that is in man: his irrational urges, his desire to dominate, his envy, his will to put down that which he cannot appreciate or understand, his opposition to what is different, and his bent to destruction. The clinkers produced by collectivism smother the flame, just as clinkers in a furnace will a fire.
The weight of numbers is a fearful thing for individual man. Only very strong and sturdy men can stand for long against them in whatever way they are arrayed against him. Numbers have imperiled the individual in all ages. It has remained for our age to sanctify them. (Greece and Rome empowered the masses in the period of decline but fell short of sanctifying them, I believe.) We sanctify this weight of numbers by calling it democracy and claiming that it would be desirable to infuse all of life with its methods. Labor unions are empowered by government to use the weight of their numbers against individuals who desire to work. But the weight of numbers intrudes into every realm today: suppressing, restraining, and limiting man.
Counting the Votes
The actual political process becomes a means of subjugating the individual under the impetus of collectivism. Democratic socialism turns voting into a kind of self-immolation by which the individual yields up his independence and control over his own affairs by casting a ballot. He reduces himself to an anonymous number and becomes a statistic. Man’s potential weight in his own and in public affairs is largely reduced to a scratch on a ballot or, more appropriately, the turn of a wheel in a machine.
In the framework of the idea that has the world in its grip the only issue that is supposed to arise is over what means shall be used to concert all efforts to promote the general well-being. Not only does the individual reduce himself to a number by voting but also to a statistic in favor of one method of being concerted as opposed to another, if any issue at all can be discerned. The man who wishes to manage his own affairs is unlikely to find that among the available options.
Actually, voting for candidates may be a reasonably satisfactory means of determining who shall govern, so long as the demonstrably corrupt and unlettered are excluded. It is hardly the way to decide what government shall do, however, and that is the question which gradualism continually intrudes into the process. That is a constitutional question requiring for its answer not man reduced to a number but man in the full weight of his being as an individual.
Moreover, socialism turns voting into the quest for the holy grail. It turns the mundane business of selecting who shall govern into the choosing of religious leaders who are assumed to be competent to manage the transformation of man and society. So long as a choice of candidates remains, voting is important, of course. It does restrain politicians to know that they will have to stand for election, nor can power ever be absolute so long as its exercise can be modified by decisions of the electorate. But for those who do not accept the religious vision of socialism, voting is a game of chance, with the odds arranged heavily against them.
Rendered Meaningless
The ultimate reduction of man is not to a number. Even when that number is only one, it still has a fixed quality about it which resists manipulation and control. The ultimate reduction of man is to a meaningless number. Communists have discovered a way to do this in their “democratic process.”
Elections in the Soviet Union, for example, are meaningless affairs, so far as the participants are concerned. A Party slate has been nominated by the leaders, and it will be elected. It does not matter whether one hundred, one thousand, or one million vote: the result will be the same. Even so, a great effort is made to get out the vote. Pressure is brought to bear on selected individuals to go from door to door urging others to vote. Why? For one thing, as earlier noted, there is the facade of democracy which has propaganda uses. But it serves a highly important interior purpose as well. The individual is not only reduced to a number which can be rendered as a statistic but also to a meaningless number and statistic. The absolute and arbitrary power of the rulers over the populace is demonstrated.
By coming forth to vote they apparently acquiesce both in their own meaninglessness and the power of the rulers. The more who vote, the more complete the demonstration of power.
The subjugation of the individual descends to degradation under communism.
Next: 32. Restoration of the Individual.
—FOOTNOTES—
1 See Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (London: Fonathan Cape, 1951), pp. 135-37.
2 Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and >tate (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1970), p. 128.
3 The Gulag Archipelago, III (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 58-60.
4 Alexander Dolgun, An American in the Gulag (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), p. 174.
5 “Utopia’s Dark Side,” Newsweek (May 3, 176), p. 38.
***
What Price Socialism?
A society is socialized by extending, centralizing and accelerating the exercise of political power. Socialists may speak of controlled production as their method of operation, but production cannot be controlled except by controlling people. If men as producers are to be controlled, it means that they will be told what jobs they are to work at, where they will work, and how long they will work. This sort of political tyranny is inherent in a socialized society. It is a denial of man’s inherent right to be free.
No human society has been completely free; some men have always sought, and occasionally have obtained, a politically privileged position for themselves at the expense of other people. But until recently, all well disposed men sought to remedy social ills by working for a society in which every man has the right to plan his own life in any peaceful way his conscience allows. This human aspiration has been reversed in the thinking of socialists who talk in terms of a planned economy. In an economy planned politically there is no room for individuals to make their own plans; their lives are planned for them, which means that they are not free to run their own affairs.
–Admiral Ben Moreell
