I promised you a story, you will get one. The point is, or was, that on account of what is going on in the World right now, I do not have time for all this moping. It is important to have social and personal courage because one of the critical areas in the World of work has to do with disruptive changes, catastrophes, and transformations. Many things happen to workers: slack periods when there may be little work to do, lay-offs, unemployment, firing, retirement, changes in superiors, functions, organizations. The worker, whatever the level, had to deal personally with the meaning of these changes. A person who is working at peak of performance in a job that he thinks represents his own best self-concept will probably experience the change most severely particularly if the individual has wrapped oneself up in the job to the point it stands for the maintenance of one’s self-concept. If one is able to view the job as one among many ways of expressing one’s selfhood then the individual is not as likely to suffer such a tremendous shock from the problem of existence because they have conquered the anxieties of fate and life. To lose work, to be fired, to be retired, may all affect an individual’s sense of security in the World where one must maintain oneself economically. Otherwise, people feel life as meanings and superfluous, and they say: I cannot do anything new, I cannot see anything new! Therefore, real security must not reside solely in the job. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12

The anxiety of fate and death controls the lives even of those who have lost the will to live. Death experienced by suicide is not directed to those who are conquered by life but to those who have conquered life, and are able both to live and to die, and can choose freely between them. Suicide as an escape, dictated by fear, contradicts the courage to be. Courage is based on the control of reason in oneself. Reason is to possess the ability of arguing on the basis of experience and with the tools of ordinary or mathematical logic. Reason is the meaningful structure of reality as a whole and of the human mind in particular. If there is no other attribute which belongs to human beings as human except reason, then reason will be a person’s one good, worth all the rest put together. This means that reason is a person’s true or essential nature, in comparison with which everything else is accidental. The courage to be is the courage to affirm one’s own reasonable nature over against what is accidental in us. A person who knows who he or she is can view one’s job, as important as it is for meeting one’s economical needs, as only one way of meeting one’s personal growth or motivation needs. If a person is confident in oneself, one had developed many aspects of one’s potential self. One may be able to find new kinds of work, either in the same company or with an entirely different kind of operation. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12

Readiness for God means tat we are prepared to do the smallest thing or the largest thing—it makes no difference. It means we have no choice in what we want to do, but that whatever God’s plans may be, we are there and ready. It is obvious that reason in this sense points to the person in the center and includes all mental functions. Reasoning as a limited cognitive function, detached from the personal center, never could create courage. One cannot remove anxiety by arguing it away. This is not a recent psychoanalytical discovery; when glorifying reason, we know it well. The person who puts all of one’s security eggs in one basket of any particular activity, be it a job, a project, another person, a planned windfall, is limiting oneself and probably does not have a healthy, holistic self-concept. One must know that one is more than just a worker, an opportunist, any one thing. One is a person, potentially or actually, who can do many things. Anxiety can be overcome only through the power of universal reason which prevails in the wise person over desires and fears. Courage presupposes the surrender of the personal center to the temple of God of being; it is participation in the divine power of reason, transcending the realm of passions and anxiety. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12

The problem of employee displacement by automation is one that needs looking at in depth. Not only are workings being laid off or retired, they are being replaced by mechanical contrivances. A wave of job automation could force up to 800 million people Worldwide out of a job by 2030. Therefore, an estimated 375 million workers will have to acquire new skills and switch occupations by 2030. Jobs that involve predictable, repetitive tasks are more easily automated, such as news reporters, camera operators, drivers, waiters, dishwashers, cooks, customer service representatives, those operating machinery, and data processing. However, occupations that pay more but involve managing people and social interactions face less risk of automation due to the inherent difficulty in programming machines to do those types of jobs. To lose a job because a tool, an implement, a machine can do the work better, more economically, more efficiently, and with less need or cost of maintenance, repair, or replacement, undermines an individual’s sense of personal significance. And, since automation is here to say, the solution to the problem may lie in changes of attitudes. Counseling is being done for those who are currently being displaced, but it is costly and often comes too late in the life of the worker. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12

Hopefully, however, the young who will take the place of the older working World will recognize that much of the manual labor of year past will be done by automatic means. It may mean an unfair competition for a person to pit oneself against machinery. Young workers need to recognize these possibilities and plan their lives around them. However, countries like Japan are experiencing a severe domestic shortage in manual labor caused by a rapid aging and shrinking population. The birthrate is at a nearly all-time low. Japan’s working-age population peaked in 1995 at 87 million and is forecast to fall to 45 million by 2065. So automation could help countries like Japan who are expected to have a deficit of 2.5 million workers by 2020, but they are also welcoming more than 500,00 foreign workers through 2025 to offset the labor shortage in industries such as agriculture and construction. And although there is a significant displacement in workers around the World, it is also being offset by a rising middle class in countries like Africa, China, India and Mexico. With the rising middle class in developing nations, more consumption with have a big impact on the direction of the economies, as there spending patterns will also increase. More jobs will be created in areas such as consumer durables, leisure activities, financial and telecommunication services, housing, health care, and education. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12

Furthermore, with many countries facing growth in older populations, researcher expect the aging demographics to require more medical care, more doctors, nurses, home health workers and assistance—while demand will decrease for children’s teachers and doctors. Technology jobs will be required as technology advances, like computer scientists, engineers and Information Technology administrators, who will see job growth as companies spend more in these areas. Therefore, the jobs gained could more than offset the jobs lost to automation. However, it will mean that businesses and governments must conceive the population in terms of their potential and seize opportunities to boost job creation and for labor markets to function well. An initiative plan needs to be implemented which recognizes that people are more than workers, they have other interests, aptitudes, and areas of emphasis. Family, friendships, recreation and leisure, social groupings, social projects, hobbies and avocational pursuits, all must be given a faire share of time and energy. Along with sustained investments, new training models, programs to ease worker transitions, income support and collaboration between the public and private sectors in order to help economies and employment to grow in the future. The courage to be is the courage to affirm our own rational nature, in spite of everything in us that conflict with its union with the rational nature of being-itself. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12

What conflict with the courage of wisdom is desires and fears. The object of fear is fear itself. Nothing is terrible in things except fear itself. For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship. Our anxiety puts frightening masks over all people and things. If we strip them of these masks their own countenance and the fear they produce disappears. This is true even of death Since every day a little of our life is take from us—since we are dying every day—the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely completes the death process. The horrors connected with it are a matter of imagination. They vanish when the mask is taken from the image of death. If many of the people now being retired had developed their potentials earlier and had not been so impressed with the Work-Sin Ethic, they could approach their retirement with anticipation. They would be coming into the time when they could shelve one aspect of their selfhood—their working status—and emphasize some of the other parts of their being. Many retired people are discovering new vitality in living as they realize that retirement does not have to mean worthlessness and death. We must never measure our spiritual capacity on the basis of our education or our intellect; our capacity in spiritual things is measured on the promises of God. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12

Never allow the limitation of your own natural ability to enter into the matter. If we have received the Holy Spirit, God expects the work of the Holy Spirit to be exhibited in us. Never forget that our capacity and capability in spiritual matters is measured by, and based on the promises of God. Women too are gaining a new sense of their multi-faceted selfhood. At one time, women had considered their only work as being childbirth and motherhood. Those who had emphasize those activities throughout their 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s often discover that the departure from the home and the marriage of their children leaves them with nothing to do. Many women go into menopause early because they have been conditioned to believe their productive, worthwhile years were wen they were raising babies. Menopause symbolically signals the end of their productivity. Being a mother is a glorious part of a woman’s life, but it is far from being her whole life. Fortunately the harsh words of the modern day Feminists, Daughters of Sappho, and Women’s Liberation Movement have shaken some women and men out of their single-minded thinking. Any human being possesses more facets of selfhood than those traditionally assigned to him or her by society. Full living, self-actualization, requires that we experience the fullness of being in as many ways as possible. “Now it is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ. He anointed us, set his seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as deposit, guaranteeing what is to come” 2 Corinthians 1.21-22.  #RandolphHarris 8 of 12

We work for many reasons. We work to keep in step with life itself, that we make our love visible in our works. We may view work as God’s punishment for sin. We many view work as the thing we do to prove we are human. We may see it as a necessary demonstration that by our good work, we are the demonstration that by our good work, we are the elect of God. We may see it as a human’s curse and burden. It is our uncontrolled desires that create masks and put then over people and things. Natural desires are limited and those which spring from false opinions are unlimited. Desires as such is not unlimited. In undistorted nature it is limited by objective needs and is therefore capable of satisfaction. However, human’s distorted imagination transcends the objective needs (When astray—your wanderings are limitless) and with them any possible satisfaction. And this, not the desire as such, produces an unwise tendency toward death. Work of all kinds confronts us continually. Some of it is necessitated by the life styles we have. Work is required to keep things going. Work is a necessary part of the cycle of living and fulfilling our existences. One of the Eastern views has it that we work to keep death away, both in the form of starvation and mortality itself. Many people work to build something that will remain behind like the Winchester Mansion and the Hearst Castle, thus giving them some small measure of immortality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12

We do not say that any of these attitudes is right or work. Our attitude is that we work because most of the good things that we are and that we have require it. We work not to prove our worthiness, but to demonstrate it. It the two areas of love and work we best demonstrate our selfhood. In this crucial area, in an age when technology threatens to take work away from us, it becomes necessary to recognize the important of fulfilling and actualizing our selfhood prior to the time we begin our labors. In this way, we already have a concept of who we are, independent of whether we can do this job or that. If the labors do not present themselves, we are not diminished. We must then find other ways of experiencing our selfhood. The affirmation of one’s essential being in spite of desires and anxieties creates joy. It is our business to learn how to feel joy. It is not the joy of fulfilled desires to which we refer, for real joy is a severe matter; it is the happiness of a soul which is lifted above every circumstance. Joy accompanies the self-affirmation of our essential being in spite of the inhibitions coming from the accidental elements in us. Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous Yes to one’s own true being. This combination of courage and joy shows the ontological character of courage most clearly. “Not that we lord it over your faith, but we work with you for your joy, because it is by faith you stand firm,” reports 2 Corinthians 1.24. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12

If courage is interpreted in ethical terms alone, its relation to the joy of self-fulfillment remains hidden. In the ontological act of the self-affirmation of one’s essential being courage and joy coincide. Undisturbed by fears and unspoiled by pleasures, we shall be afraid neither of death nor of the gods. The gods stands for fate. They are the powers that determine fate and represent the threat of fate. The courage that conquers the anxiety of fate also conquers anxiety about the gods. The wise person by affirming one’s participation in the universal reason transcends the realm of the gods. The courage to be transcends the polytheistic power of fate. The soul of the wise person is similar to God. The God who is indicated here is the divine Logos in unity with whom the courage of wisdom conquers fate and transcends the gods. It is the Gove above god. God is beyond suffering, he is above it. The wise person who courageously conquers desire, suffering, and anxiety realizes that the Lord is here now, and the freedom one is receiving is immediate. “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known me?” reports John 14.9. We have to get to the point of the absolute and unquestionable relationship that takes everything exactly as it comes from God. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12

The masses of the people, they are acknowledged as fools, in the bondage of desires and fears.  Even while participating in the divine Logos with their essential or rational nature, most human beings are in a state of actual conflict with their own rationality and therefore unable to affirm their essential being courageously. We should not care for anything that is outside the realm of our moral purpose. This is how the fear of God and love of God became one. If God pleases to give one information, then one will have true knowledge. Until the skeptic receives the revelation, one should live by a morale provisoire, following nature. God’s nature is infinite and therefore surpasses all attempts to define or limit it. The species has been regarded by the pious as the unalterable work of God; the limits laid down by the diagnostic features of any species established the limits of the possible variation in the species. God has existed from all eternity, for it takes as much power to conserve a substance in being from moment to moment as it does to create it in the first place. This illustrates how strongly the creative activity of God is involved in the created World, offering as it does a picture of created things tending constantly to slip out of existence if it were not for God’s sustaining activity. “Lehi saw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of Angels, in the attitude of singing and praising their God; yea, and my soul did long to be there,” Alma 36.22. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12