Love of the World and its sensuous immediacy is a World where we speak tenderly and almost lovingly of our fellow humans and of their common fate, which we share. Absolute success often bears in it the seeds of its own destruction. The problem of suicide is described by some as the only serious philosophical problem. Suicide is contrary to the first law of nature, self-preservation; and it shocks the natural feelings and common apprehension of all humankind. However, some wonder, does it make any sense to go on living once the meaninglessness of human life is fully understood and assimilated. The meaninglessness or absurdity comprises the failure of the World to satisfy the human demand that it provides a basis for human values—for our personal ideals and for our judgements. No one is to blame for suffering an evil one cannot avoid. It is not the persecution, but the catastrophe which is annexed to it, that makes the difference between the tyrant and the sufferer. In mere corporal exertion, the hunter perhaps is upon a level with the vulnerable target being pursed. One that kills another can but commit murder upon his body; but for one to kill oneself is to kill body and soul at once.  #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

The wound that bleedeth inward is most dangerous, the fire kept close burnest most furious, the oven dammed up baketh soonest, sores having no vent fester inwardly. One that dedicates their days to an endless sorrow is the worst and most degraded of suicides. I happened upon the youthful experience which even to-day still expressed its power in all these emotions. I might have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks, and in his conversation to reveal his view on the things of this World. Thus, he once told me the following incident, in order to show me that I had been born into happier times than he: “When I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday along the street in the village where you were born; I was well-dressed, with a new fur cap on my head. Up comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud, and shouts, ‘Satan, get off my pavement!’ ” –“And what did you do?”—“I went into the street and picked up the cap,” he calmly replied. That did not seem heroic on the part of a big strong man who was leading me, a little fellow, by the hand.  #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

My father maintained that violence, like suicide cannot be regarded as an adequate response to the experience of absurdity. There is nothing the body suffers that the soul might profit by. Who gave thee a power over thy life? The human being and the World—that together produce the tension described above. Suicide is thus an admission of incapacity, and such an admission is inconsistent with that human pride to which men like my father openly appeal. There is nothing equal to a spectacle of human pride. Only by going on living in the face of one’s own absurdity can human beings realize their full stature. The conscious espousal of the metaphysical arbitrariness of human purpose and action transforms nihilism (the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless) from a passive despair into a way of revolting against and transcending the World’s indifference to humans. I believe that absurdity, in the sense of recognition and acceptance of the fact that there are no metaphysically guaranteed directives for conduct, could by itself generate a beneficial ethic.  #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

In particular, the idea of human fraternity is connected with a heroic nihilism on the grounds that to accept oneself as the sole guarantor of one’s own values does necessarily involve accepting a principle of respect for other human beings. It seems that my father found it necessary to show by means of examples just what the specific implications for conduct of his doctrine of absurdity are and also make it plausible that these implications are consistent with the humanistic ideal to which he as an individual is clearly devoted. Life can be adequately motivated by an acceptance of absurdity. I agree that suicide and violence are mechanisms of this motor inhibition through nervousness in the intention of self-destruction is realized. One who digs a pit for others falls in themselves. Violence, suicide, and harassment are  the severest terms for denial of human fraternity. The human apparatus of moral distinctions, of justice, and of guilt, as kind of a senseless rigmarole with no basis in reality. The whole World is in a peculiar state that is described as innocence, because in a World that affords no transcendental sanction for human judgments of right or wrong there can be no real guilt.  #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

However, the difficulty in showing no optimistic ethic of human fraternity can be generated by a nihilistic attitude toward all values. Injustice and cruelty of humans to human should arouse others to action; by comparison with the hideous but remediable evils of human society, the cosmic injustice of the human condition seems to have lost some of its obsessive hold on the mind of society. The reason for the extraordinary incontinence of the Soviet revolution was that the revolutionary tradition had its roots in a revolt against the human condition as such, and such revolts can never lead to human fraternity but leads instead to a new enslavement of human by human. Much like the push for the first black president and socialism, many feel, enslaved many Americans and the capitalism ideals of the American economy and lead to the polar opposite being elected as president in 2016, with the election of a white business man, who puts Americans first and no foreign values. Political reaction is essentially a violent revolt, and the taking of human life is inconsistent with true revolt since the revolt involves the implicit assertion of a supraindividual value, the value of human life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

The metaphysical revolt is bad as it is a refusal of the human condition, resulting in either suicide or in a demonic attempt to disposed God and remake the World in the image of man. Its deepest motive is not love for humankind, but a desire to destroy the World as it is. The order it attempts to impose on the New World it constructs is informed by no ethically creative principle because nihilism can yield no such principle. A nightmare state of power for power’s sake is the ultimate fruit of metaphysical revolt. While many think we needed a black president in America because it has been known to be a racist county, was he elected just because he was black or because he was the best man for the job? Because if you give authority to someone just because you think others have abused authority in the past and it is time for a change, the danger of that is it can create a disaster because we should give power to those who are qualified, not those who we think she have it because it is a popular idea.  #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

The historical tableau presents a principle of selection that seems to reflect a personal predilection for extreme or crisis situations rather than any objective assessment of real influence. Electing someone based on feeling and not qualification is no difference than the Nazi occupation of France or even totalitarianism as a political system, but all of the many forms that injustice and inhumanity can assume. Many have allowed practitioners to evade the responsibility that goes with moral self-ownership and to confirm them in their inhumanity to their fellow humans. Nihilism is a kind of immunizing experience, although one with very considerable dangers of its own, by virtue of which one is enabled to grasp the ideal of human fraternity in its pure form without the entanglements of ideology and doctrine by which it has so often been disfigured. My father had a stubborn moral integrity and a deep sympathy with his fellow humans, to which the somewhat meretricious rhetoric of revolt adds very little. At the same time, however, it must be conceded that the absence or unavailability of absolute values, whatever these might be, remains anything but trivial, and pervades the atmosphere of the humanistic ethic that are erected in their place. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

Society also does not have the right to put criminals to death. The Fall of Adam is not the conception of evil. Evil is unjust social institutions or in the terms on which humans permitted to exist but in the very human heart of people themselves. Many people have an interior corruptness that is concealed from the World and for a long time from themselves—by a life of philanthropy and active sympathy for their fellow humans. Many people are, in fact, a sort of monster whose ultimate self-knowledge led them to create a sense of guilt and unworthiness in others by advertising their own corruption. They feed their obsessive need for superiority. The original sin has been forgiven by God and the locus of the struggle between good and evil. Thus, broadly speaking, one must emphasize their own inner complicity with evil and the lack of the kind of innocence that my father always claimed for humans. There cannot be a father in the World who would sell his child’s virtue. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8