I thought of God Incarnate, with whom I had spoken. I thought of all my doubts that any of it had been real, of all my suspicious that I was the mere pawn of spirits. While everybody believes oneself to act according to one’s own interest, many people are actually determined by the anonymous laws of the market and of the economic machines. The individual capitalist expands his or her enterprise not primarily because one wants to, but because one has to, because postponement of further expansion would mean regression. Actually as a business grows, one has to continue making it bigger, whether one wants to or not. In this function of the economic law which operates behind the backs of mortals and forces them to do things without giving them the freedom to decide, we see that it is not only the law of the market which has its own life and rules over mortals, but also the development of science and technique. For a number of reasons, the problems and organization of science today are such that a scientist does not choose one’s problems; the problems force themselves upon the scientist. One solves one problem, and the result is not that one is more secure or certain, but that ten other new problems open up in place of the single solved one. They force the scientist to solve them; one has to go ahead at an ever-quickening pace. The same holds true for industrial techniques. The pace of science forces the pace of techniques. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced—by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes mortals its appendix. If the wealth of society corresponded to the actual needs of all its members, there would be no problem of distributing it; each member could take from the social product as much as he or she likes, or needs, and there would be no need of regulation, except in the purely technical sense of distribution. However, aside from primitive societies, this condition has never existed up to now in human history. The needs were always greater than the sum total of the social product, and therefore a regulation had to be made on how to distribute it, how many and who should have the optimal satisfaction of their needs, and which classes had to be satisfied with less than they wanted. In most highly developed societies of the past, the decision was made essentially by force. Certain classes had the power to appropriate the best of the social product for themselves, and to assign to other classes the heavier and dirtier works and a smaller share of the product. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Force was often implemented by social and religious tradition, which constituted such a strong psychic force within people that it often made the threat of physical force unnecessary. However, the modern market is a self-regulating mechanism of distribution, which makes it unnecessary to divide the social product according to an intended or traditional plan, and thus does away with the necessity of the use of force within society. Of course, the absence of force is more apparent than real. The worker who has to accept the wage rate offered to him or her on the labor market is forced to accept the market condition because one could not survive otherwise. Thus the freedom of the individual is largely illusory. One is aware of the fact that there is no outer force which compels one to enter into certain contracts; one is less aware of the laws of the market which operate behind one’s back as it were; hence one believes that one is free, when one is actually not. However, while this is so, the capitalist method of distribution by the market mechanism is better than any other method devised so far in a class society, because it is a basis for the relative political freedom of the individual which characterizes capitalism. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

The economic functioning of the market rests upon competition of many individuals who want to sell their commodities on the commodity market, as they want to sell their labor or services on labor and personality market. Everyone is struggling for the best places, even though only a few are chosen to attain them. In this scramble for success, the social and moral rules of human solidarity break down; the importance of life is in being first in a competitive race. Another factor which constitutes the capitalistic made of production is that in this system the aim of all economic activity is profit. Now around this profit motive of Capitalism, a great deal of calculated and uncalculated confusion has been created. We have been told—and rightly so—that all economic activity is meaningful only if it results in a profit, that is to say, if we gain more than we have spent in the act of production. To make a living, even the precapitalist artisan had to spend on raw material and the apprentice’s wages less than the price one charged for one’s product. In any society that supports industry, simple or complex, the value of the salable product must exceed the cost of production in order to provide capital needed for the replacement of machinery or other instruments for the development of increase of production. However, the question of the profitableness of production is not the issues. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Our problem is that our motive for production is not social usefulness, not satisfaction in the work process, but the profit derived from investment. The usefulness of one’s product to the consumer need not interest the individual capitalist at all. This does not mean that the capitalist, psychologically speaking, is driven by an insatiable greed for money. This may or may not be so, but it is not essential for the capitalistic quently the capitalist’s motive in an earlier phase than it is now, when ownership and management are largely separated, and wen the aim of obtaining higher profits is subordinate to the wish for the ever-growing expansion and smooth running of an enterprise. Incomes can, under the present system, be quite apart from person effort or service. The owner of capital can earn without working. The essential human function of exchange of effort for income can become the abstracted manipulation of money for more money. This is most obvious in the case of the absentee owner of an industrial enterprise. It does not make any difference whether one owns the whole enterprise, or only a share of it. In each case one makes a profit from one’s capital and from the work of others without having to make any effort oneself. There have been many pious justifications for this state of affairs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

It has been said that the profits were a payment for the risk one takes in one’s investment of capital, or for one’s self-depriving effort to save, which enabled one to accumulate the capital one can invest. However, it is hardly necessary to prove that these marginal factors do not alter the elementary fact that Capitalism permits the making of profits without personal effort and productive function. However, as far as those who do work and perform services, their incomes are not always in any reasonable correlation to the effort they make. One of the reasons is because the underevaluation of work, of human effort and skill. The other lies in the fact that as long as my gain is limited by the effort I make, my desire is limited. If, on the other hand, my income is not in proportion to my effort, there are no limitations to my desires, since their fulfillment is a matter of opportunities offered by certain market situations, and not dependent on my own capacities. Capitalism is supposed to truly be private Capitalism. Individuals see and seize new opportunities, act economically, sense new methods, are encouraged to acquire property. This pleasure in property, aside from competitiveness and profit seeking, is one of the fundamental aspects of the character of the middle and upper classes.  #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

Individualism is the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self without regard to its participation in its World. As such it is the opposite of collectivism, the self-affirmation of the self as part of a lager whole without regard to its character as an individual self. Individualism has developed out of the bondage of primitive collectivism and medieval semicollectivism. Primitive collectivism was undermined by the experience of personal guilt and individual question-asking. Both were effective at the end of the ancient World and led to the radical nonconformism of the cynics and skeptics, to the moderate nonconformism of the Stoics, and to the attempt to reach a transcendent foundation for the courage to be in Stoicism, mysticism, and Christianity. All these motives were present in medieval semicollectiveism, which came to end like early collectivism with the experience of personal guilt and the analytic power of radical question-asking. However, it did not immediately lead to individualism. Protestantism, in spite of its emphasis on the individual conscience, was established as a strictly authoritarian and conformist system, similar to that of its adversary, the Roman Church of the Counter-reformation. There was no individualism in either of the great confessional groups. And there was only hidden individualism outside them, since they had drawn the individualistic trends of the Renaissance into themselves and adapted them to their ecclesiastical conformity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

This situation lasted for 150 years but no more. After this period, that of confessional orthodoxy, the personal element came again to the fore. Pietism and methodism re-emphasized personal guilt, personal experience, and individual perfection. They were not intended to deviate from ecclesiastical conformity, but unavoidably they did deviate; subjective piety become the bridge of the victorious reappearance of autonomous reason. Pietism was the bridge to Enlightenment. However, even the Enlightenment did not consider itself individualistic. One believed not in a conformity which is based on the power of reason in every individual. The principles of practical and theoretical reasons were supposed to be universal among mortals and able to create, with the help of research and education, a new conformity. The whole period believed in the principle of harmony—harmony being the law of the Universe according to which the activities of the individual, however individualistically conceived and performed, lead behind the back of the single actor to a harmonious whole, to a truth in which at least a large majority can agree, to a good in which more and more people can participate, to a conformity which is based on the free activity of every individual. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

The individual can be free without destroying the group. The function of the economy seem to confirm this view: that laws of the market produced, behind the backs of the competitors in the marker, the greatest possible amount of goods for everybody. However, what characterizes income distribution in Capitalism is the lack of balanced proportion between an individual’s effort and work and the social recognition accorded one—financial compensation. This disproportion would, in a less affluent society than ours, result in greater extremes of luxury and poverty than our standards of morals would tolerate. I am not stressing, however, the material effects of this disproportion, but its moral and psychological effects. In the past, the worker, or rather one’s labor, was a commodity to be bought by the owner of capital, not essentially different from any other commodity on the market, and it was used to its fullest capacity by the buyer. Since it has been bought for its proper price on the labor market, there was no sense of reciprocity, or of any obligation on the part of the owner of capital, beyond that of paying the wages. If hundreds of thousands of workers were without work and on the point of starvation, that was their bad luck, the result of their inferior talents, or simply a social and natural law, which could not be changed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

Exploitation was not personal anymore, but it had become anonymous, as it were. It was the law of the market that condemned a mortal to work for starvation wages, rather than the intention or greed of any one individual. Nobody was responsible or guilty, nobody could change conditions either. One was dealing with the iron laws of society, or so it seemed. The alienation we feel regarding other people is bad enough. Alienation from ourselves is devasting. The crisis of insignificance is originally and functionally interwoven with intrapersonal alienation. Intrapersonal is not the same as interpersonal, which is what goes on between two or more people. Intrapersonal experiences are those which occur within one human being. We have talked of conflict, when two or more needs or motives are in contention. When this occurs, we may reach a stalemate in which neither need is met, or we may choose one over the other, or we may alternate from one motive to the other. In a few people, those whom psychiatrist call neurotics, the anxiety produced by conflicts reaches such a level that choice is out of the question. Not that the person has no choices, but the agony produced by anxiety is so great that one absolutely gives up any idea of making a choice; one abdicates one’s responsibility as a free person. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Neurotics may freeze and do nothing. They may find the anxiety converted into any number of bodily disorders. Truly, this level of conflict in certain people is so crippling that they often resort to dropping out of their humanity. As with other self-defeating behaviors, including masochistic actions or relationships, wherein the person gains only when he or she loses, these are the actions of people who feel too much guilt to take advantage of their freedom. Often they become compulsive about the things they do; their behavior is behavior without a choice. The most severe of the self-defeating situations is what we call intrapersonal alienation. The self is in some degree of dis-integration. When this occurs, as it does to all of us at times, and in many of us all the time, the self is not reaching its fullest potential. The dis-integration of self occurs in varying degrees. A particularly troublesome feeling or thought may be shelved. It may be repressed more or less permanently. When it is blocked off, through one or another of the self-defeating behaviors, the individual functions at less than full potential. Like a remote-control car with a low battery, one is not operating at full capacity. Intrapersonal alienation occurs wen we do not know the full extent of our selfhood, or, if we do know, when we segregate parts of it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

People who segregate parts of themselves usually dislike themselves, in whole or part, and often make self-derogatory remarks. They are not trying to be modest or to fish for compliments; they really mean it. More often than not, they try to live through other people. An example of this is the father whose only satisfaction comes from seeing his children (usually a son) succeed in areas where he never could. Sports are often overly emphasized by fathers who are literally re-living life through their sons. Dis-integration is also present in the person who lets others live one’s life for them. If all sides of one were working together in a harmonious way, one might pay attention to other people’s advice, opinions, or judgment, but one would retain full command of one’s own life. This is the essence of self-actualizing living. However, too many of us live our lives on other people’s terms. We let others direct the courage of our lives and if we discover it, instead of taking the steering wheel again, we simply grumble about it and go on doing the same thing. People who seem to be watching their own behavior from the point of view of a spectator are not integrated within.  They often speak of themselves in the second or third person and will describe Life, but not their own. It is as if the life of such a person were being lived, not by the individual. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

When people are disassociated from their own reality, they are not only other-directed, one is blocked off the active, spontaneous center of one’s own being, so that there is little or no will of one’s own being experienced. Alienation prevents disturbing self-awareness. The alienated patient often complains of being in a fog, but unconsciously one wants to stay in it. One welcomes self-anesthesia. Alienation, in the sense of conforming like an automaton, prevents one from the burden and the responsibility of commitment to oneself and one’s identity. It permits self-elimination. Alienation, in its most active form, is the rejection of being oneself and the attempt to become the other, the ideal self. It means escape from the hated self through self-idealization. When this war within goes on, the person often lives a dis-integrated or partial existence. Education showed that emphasis on the free development of the individual child does not reduce the chances of one becoming an active member of a conformist society. And the history of Protestantism confirmed the belief of the Reformers that the free encounter of everybody with the Bible can create an ecclesiastical conformity—in spite of individual and even denominational differences. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

The law of preestablished harmony means the monads of which all things consist, although they have no doors and windows that open toward each other, they participate in the same World which is present in each of them, whether it be dimly or clearly perceived. The problem of individualization and participation seemed to be solved philosophically as well as practically. Courage to be as oneself, as this is understood in the Enlightenment, is a courage in which individual self-affirmation includes participation in the universal, rational self-affirmation. Thus it is not the individual self as such which affirms itself but the individual self as such which affirms itself but the individual self as the bearer of reason. The courage to be as oneself is the courage to follow reason and to defy irrational authority. In this respect—but only in this respect—it is Neo-Stoicism. For the courage to be of the Enlightenment is not a resigned courage to be. It dares not only to face the vicissitudes of fate and the inescapability of death but o affirm itself as transforming reality according to the demands of reason. It is a fighting, daring courage. It conquers the threat of guilt by accepting errors, shortcomings, misdeeds in the individual as well as in social life as unavoidable and at the same time to be overcome by education. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

The courage to be as oneself within the atmosphere of Enlightenment is the courage to affirm oneself as a bridge from a lower to a higher state of rationality. It is obvious that this kind of courage to be must become conformist the moment its revolutionary attack on that which contradicts reason has ceased, namely in the victorious bourgeoisie. Strong faith in the Savior is submissively accepting of his will and timing in our lived—even if the outcome is not what we hoped for or wanted. As we confront our own trials and tribulations, we can plead with the Heavenly father, however. Not shrinking if much more important than surviving! God wants us to be able to accept bitter situations without becoming bitter. Do you take the time to discover each day how beautiful your life can be? How pleasant is it to plant a baby tree and watch it grow into a mature tree. With care it will surely become what it is destined to be, crowed with grace and beauty. Each day allows of to develop new and impressive character, more promise of beauty until we become what God has designed us to be. We are one of the noblest of God’s creations. His intent is that our lives will be gloriously beautiful regardless of what our circumstances are. As we are grateful and obedient, we can become all that God intends us to be. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15