Dr. Johan Engelbert's Sunday Speech

Welcome, ladies, to my first self-improvement seminar. This seminar is a test. And, if after a year, your lives are not significantly improved, I shall go back to the drawing board and work to improve my methods. If your lives are significantly improved, I shall introduce the method to housewives across the country. I congratulate you for being willing to be my test subjects in this grand experiment.

Now, you are all familiar with me, but you may not be familiar with my philosophy. I developed this philosophy during the War. I did not want to be in this camp, since I had voted for the Social Democrats in the 1932 elections. Circumstances beyond my control had forced me to be a Nazi scientist at the Mauthausen concentration camp. It is easy to fall into noogenic neurosis, that fear of a life without meaning, when you are forced to be in a Nazi death trap as a camp scientist. Many days, I wished to take my service pistol and kill myself. Yet I was able to keep going, because I knew after the war was over, I would repent from the harm I caused by taking what I learned there to improve mankind.

Though you are not in a situation as dire as mine, being comfortable, upper-class, suburban housewives, you can see that circumstances beyond your control have led you here. You might be unhappy with your lives. There is the fashionable Freudian psychoanalysis, but the object of that is only to be comfortable with your unfortunate circumstance. Sigmund Freud famously said that his mission was to change his patients from being in "hysterical misery" to "ordinary unhappiness"^[1]. I do not consider this good enough. What man needs in life is a purpose. I hope with this seminar I shall give you a purpose. After this seminar, you will no longer be merely housewives. You shall be something that transcends every category of mankind.

Thank you for listening. And I hope as you enjoy this Sunday, you shall take my words to heart.