The courage of despair, the experience of meaninglessness, and the self-affirmation in spite of them are manifest in the Existentialist of the 21^st century. Meaninglessness is the problem of all them. The anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness is, as we have seen, the anxiety of our period. The anxiety of fate and death and the anxiety of our guilt and condemnation are implied but they are not decisive. When we speak about the anticipation of one’s own death it is not the question of immortality that should concern us, but what the anticipation of death means for the human situation. When dealing with the problem of guilt, it may not be the theological question of sin and forgiveness that moves us, but what the possibility of person existence is in the light of personal guilt. The problem of meaning troubles recent Existentialist even wen they speak of finitude and guilt. The decisive event which underlies the search for meaning and despair of it in the 21^st century is the apparent loss of God, as he is being removed from society because people do not want to recognize him as a higher power. God represents the infinite desire of the human heart; it is how we rise above the given reality. If God is dead, with him the whole system of values and meanings in which one lived. This is felt both as a loss and as a liberation. It drives one either to nihilism or to the courage which takes nonbeing into itself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

The feeling of meaninglessness can become despairing and self-destructive. The books which roll off the presses on technique in love and sex, while still best-sellers for a few weeks, have a hollow ring: for most people seem to be aware on some sacredly articulated level that the frantic quality with which we pursue technique as our way to salvation is in direct proportion to the degree to which we have lost sight of salvation we are seeking. It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical assistants in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love. The decomposition of civilization, the lack of conviction and direction, the poverty and hysteria of the modern consciousness is symptomatic of a culture in which the personal meaning of love has been progressively lost. Love had been assumed to be a motivating force, a power which could be relied upon to push us onward in life. However, the great shift in our day indicates that the motivating force itself is now called into question. Love has become a problem to itself. So self-contradictory, indeed, has love become tat some of those studying family life have concluded that love is simply the name for the way more powerful members of the family control other members. Sometimes love can be a cover for violence. The same can be said about the will. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

We inherited from our Victorian forefathers the belief that the only real problem in life was to decide rationally what to do—and then will would stand ready as the faculty for making us do it. Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide. They very basis of will itself is thrown into question. Is will an Illusion? Many psychologist and psychotherapists have argued that it is. The terms “will power” and “free will,” so necessary in the vocabulary of our fathers, have all but dropped completely out of any contemporary, sophisticated discussion; or the words are used in derision. People go to therapists to find substitutes for their lost will: to learn how to get the unconscious to direct their lives, or to learn the latest conditioning technique to enable them to behave, or to use new drugs to release so motive for living. Or to learn the latest method of releasing affect, unaware that affect is not something you strive for in itself but a by-product of the way you give yourself to a life situation. And the question is, what are they going to use the situation for? In this failure of will lies the central pathology of our day—our time should be called the age of disordered will. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

In such an age of radical transition, the individual is driven back into one’s own consciousness. When the foundations of love and the will have been shaken and all but destroyed, we cannot escape the necessity of pushing below the surface and searching within our own consciousness and within the collective unarticulated consciousness of our society for the sources of love and will. If we can find the sources from which love and will spring, we may be able to discover the new forms which these essential experiences need in order to become viable in the new age into which we are moving. In this sense, our quest, like every such exploration, is a moral quest, for we are seeking the bases on which a morality for a new age can be founded. Every sensitive person finds oneself needing to go forth in the smithy of their soul the uncreated conscious of their race. The term “schizoid” means out of touch; avoiding close relationships; the inability to feel. In this case, it is not being used as a term to reference psychopathology, but rather as a general condition of our culture and the tendencies of people which make it up. However, from the point of view of individual psychopathology, the schizoid person is cold, aloof, superior, detached. This may erupt in violent aggression. All of which is a complex mask for a repressed longing for live. #RandolphHarris 4 of  16

The detachment of the schizoid is a defense against hostility and has its source in a distortion of love and trust in infancy which renders one forever fearing actual love because it threatens one’s very existence. The schizoid condition is a general tendency in our transitional age, and the helpless and disregard in infancy comes not just from parents but from almost every aspect of our culture. The parents are themselves helpless and unwitting expressions of their culture. The schizoid individual is the natural product of the technological human. It is one way to live and is increasingly utilized—and it may explode into violence. Whether the schizoid character state later breaks down into a schizophrenic like state in any given case, only the future can decide. However, this is much less apt to happen, as in the case with many patients, if the individual can frankly admit and confront the schizoid characteristic of one’s present state. The schizoid character has a conviction of being unlovable, and a feeling of being attacked and humiliated by criticism. Beethoven, for example, in compensation for his disappointment with, and resentment of, actual human beings imagined an ideal World of love and friendship. His music, perhaps more obviously than the of any other composer, display considerable aggression in the sense of power, forcefulness and strength. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

It is easy to imagine that, had Beethoven, not been able to sublimate his hostility in his music, he might we have succumbed to a paranoid psychosis. If people like Beethoven, Descartes, Freud, Sarah Winchester, and Schopenhauer had not been seen as psychopathological and then had assumedly been cured, we would not have had their creations. Thus, it must be admitted that the schizoid state can be a constructive way of dealing with profoundly difficult situations. And perhaps these people were simply geniuses we did not understand, or did not want to understand. Other cultures consider geniuses as creative gifts, our culture pushes many people toward becoming more detached and mechanical. In centering upon the problems of love and will, we cannot forget the beneficial characteristics of out time and the potentialities for individual fulfillment. It is an obvious fact that when an age is torn loose from its moorings and everyone is to some degree thrown on one’s own, more people can take steps to find and realize themselves. It is also true that we hear most hue and cry about the power of the individual when the individual has least. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The problems have a curious characteristic not yet adequately appreciated: they predict the future. The problems of a period are the existential crises of what one can be, but has not yet been, resolved; and regardless of how seriously we take that word resolved, if there were not some new possibility, there would be no crisis—there would be only despair. Problems arise where we meet our World and find it inadequate to ourselves or ourselves inadequate to it; something hurts, clashes, and we feel the pain of wounds, the labor of the spear. What is the attitude of the owner of the enterprise, the capitalist? The small business person seems to be in the same position as his predecessor a hundred years ago. They own and direct their small enterprise, they are in touch with the whole commercial or industrial activity, and in personal contact with their employees and workers. However, living in an alienated World in all other economic and social aspects, and furthermore being more under the constant pressure of bigger competitors, one is by no means as free as their great grandfathers were in the same business. However, what matters more and more in contemporary economy is big business, the large corporation. #RandolphHarris 7 of  16

In fine, it is the large corporation—the specific form in which Big Business is organized in a free enterprise economy—which has emerged as the representative and determining socioeconomic institution which sets the pattern and determines the behavior even of the owner of the corner cigar store who never owned a share of stock, and of one’s errand boy who never set foot in a mill. And thus the character of our society is determined and patterned by the structural organization of Big Business, the technology of the mass-production plant, and the degree to which our social beliefs and promises are realized in and by the large corporations. What then is the attitude of the owner of the big corporation to one’s property? It is one of almost complete alienation. One’s ownership consists in a piece of paper, representing a certain fluctuating amount of money; one as no responsibility for the enterprise and no concrete relationship to it in any way. The position of ownership has changed from that of an active to that of a passive agent. In place of actual physical properties over which the owner could exercise direction and for which one has an interest, the owner has little control. At the same time one bears no responsibility with respect to the enterprise or its physical property. It has often been said that the owner of a horse is responsible. If the horse lives one must feed it. If the horse dies one must bury it. The owner is practically powerless through one’s own efforts to affect the underlying property. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

The spiritual values that formerly went with ownership have been separated from it. Physical property capable of being shaped by its owner could bring to one direct satisfaction apart from the income it yielded in more concrete form. It represented an extension of one’s own personality. With the corporate revolution, this quality has been lost to the property owner much as it has been lost to the worker through the industrial revolution. The value of an individual’s wealth is coming to depend on forces entirely outside of oneself and one’s own efforts. Instead, its value is determined on the one hand by the actions of the individuals in command of the enterprise—individuals over whom the typical owner has no control, and on the other hand, by the actions of others in a sensitive and often capricious market. The value is thus subject to the vagaries and manipulations characteristic of the market place. It is further subject to the great swings in society’s appraisal of its own immediate future as reflected in the general level of values in the organized market. The value of the individual’s wealth not only fluctuates constantly—the same may be said of most wealth—but it is subject to constant appraisal. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

The individual can see the change in the appraised value of one’s estate from moment to moment, a fact which may markedly affect both the expenditure of one’s income and one’s enjoyment of that income. Individual wealth has become extremely liquid through the organized markets. The individual owner can covert it into other forms of wealth at a moment’s notice and, provided the market machinery is in working order, one may do so without serious loss due to forced sales. Wealth is less and less in a form which can be employed directly by its owner. When wealth is in the form of land, for instance, it is capable of being used by the owner even though the value of land in the market is negligible. The physical quality of such wealth makes possible a subjective value to the owner quite apart from any market value it may have. The newer form of wealth is quite incapable of this direct use. Only through sale in the market can the owner obtain its direct use. One is thus tired to the market as never before. Finally, in the corporate system, the owner of industrial wealth is left with a mere symbol of ownership while the power, the responsibility and the substance which have been an integral part of ownership in the past are being transferred to a separate group in whose hands the control is possessed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Another important aspect of the alienated position of the stockholder is one’s control over the enterprise. Legally, the stockholders control the enterprise, that is, they elect the management much as the people in a political system elect their representatives. Factually, however, they exercise very little control, due to the fact that each individual’s share is so exceedingly small, that one is not interested in coming to the meetings and participating actively. There are generally five major types of control: These include control through almost complete ownership, majority control, control through a legal device without majority ownership, minority control, and management control. Among the five types of control the first two—private ownership or majority ownership—exercise control in only 6 percent (according to wealth) of the two hundred largest companies, while in the remaining 94 percent control is exercised either by the management, or by a legal device in collaring a small proportion of the ownership or by a minority of stockholders. How this miracle is accomplished without force, deception or any violation of the law is very interesting. On the personal level, an accurate view of our economy is necessary to make correct individual decisions, such as how much we should save, where we should invest, what house we should buy, and whether we can trust our employer (or Social Security) to pay our pension. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

A correct view of how the economy works is yet more essential in making public decisions. The recent economic turmoil has brought back to the table many questions that had been considered settled. Now people are seeking new answers, urgently. We see it in the newspapers. We see it in the think tanks, and at conferences, and in the corridors of our economics departments. From time to time, it appears that our society undergoes great shifts in their stories of who people are and who they should be. The unapproachable remoteness of the source of meaning and the obscurity of the source of justice and mercy are expressed in language which is pure and classical. The courage to take upon oneself the loneliness of such creativity and the horror of such visions is an outstanding expression of the courage to be as oneself. Humans are separated from the sources of their courage—but not completely: mortals are still able to face and to accept their own separation. The age of anxiety and the courage to take upon oneself the anxiety in a World which has lost the meaning is as obvious as the profound experience of this loss: the two poles which are untied in the courage of despair receive equal emphasis. The hero faces a situation in which one’s passionate desire to be oneself drives one to the rejection of every human commitment. One refuses to accept anything which could limit one’s freedom. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Nothing has ultimate meaning for one, neither love nor friendship nor politics. The only immovable point is the unlimited freedom to change, to preserve freedom without content. One represents one of the most extreme forms of the courage to be as oneself, the courage to be a self which is free from any bound and which pay the price of complete emptiness. In the invention of such a figure one has to prove one’s courage of despair. We often stand on the boundary line of Existentialism but see the problem of meaninglessness as sharply as the Existentialists. Our hero is a person without subjectivity. One is not extraordinary in any respect. One acts as any ordinary official in a small position would act. One is a stranger because one is nowhere achieving an existential relation to oneself or to one’s World. Whatever happens to one has no reality and meaning to him or her: a love which is not a real love, a trial which is not a real trial, and execution which has no justification in reality. There is neither guilt nor forgiveness, neither despair nor courage in the individual. The individual is described not as a person but as a psychological process which is completely conditioned, whether one works or loves or kills or eats or sleeps. The person is an object among objects, without meaning for oneself and therefore unable to find meaning in one’s World. These types of people represent that destiny of absolute objectivation against which all Existentialists fight. One represents it in the most radical way, without reconciliation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

However, self-actualizing people, in their zeal to share their insights and good feelings about life, often find themselves surrounded by the hungry, actualization-seeking people and by the neurotic and much conflicted people. Misery loves its own company for a while, but most miserable people flock to a person who seems to be happy and fulfilled and often seek to get some of it for themselves. They hang around, hoping something of the health will rub off onto them. They frequently ask: “You seem so happy, so sure of yourself. How did you get that way?” And of course, the self-actualizer has trouble explaining it. One may say: “Just be yourself,” which is far more of a clue than one may know. Sometimes the self-actualizing people are conscious of wanting to help other people find happiness; sometimes they just get themselves into situations like this, without knowing why. Another difficulty many of them encounter is that their eagerness to live and live fully makes them impatient, even forgetful, of the details and trifles of everyday social experience. They are often absent-minded about dates, names and places, preferring to emphasize experiences. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

People who are self-actualizers may forget to say “thank you” when it seems unnecessary to them; after all, throughout the event they have been communicating their feelings and their appreciation to the host of the person sponsoring the event. Friends or relatives despair of their ever learning the social niceties. Yet, how unimportant the “niceties” are compared to the exhilaration of living fully, freely, and feelingly! Self-actualizing people, out of kindship and kindness, often let people take advantage of them, impose on them. This is not out of masochistic need. It is more of a feeling that they have so much and the other person seems to need so much that it just happens. Close friends may tell the self-actualizer that he or she is being used by so-and-so and the answer is: Better me than somebody who cannot afford to be used. Affording it harkens back to our discussion of emotional richness, not to economic wealth. Self-actualizing people literally have more than they need of feeling, of affection. Occasionally they enter into unequal relationships. Friends, acquaintances, relatives, and even loved ones may be far less actualizing than he or she is, but the self-actualizer enjoys the giving of oneself with little thought of receiving something in return. The danger here is that is may become more self-defeating than healthy. Without some replenishment, even a self-actualizer’s well can run dry temporarily. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Self-actualization is a process of living, not a set of goals, it is an ongoing experience, a way of life. Unfortunately, to describe people who are living their lives in a fulfilling, satisfying way is often to make it sound as if they had reached a state of being. However, only 1 percent of the adult population is even geared into living their lives as self-actualizers. Yet, a larger number of people are learning, or trying. Still, we have to keep in mind that there are extremes from manipulation to actualization. Manipulators are those who deceive and control, who are cynical and unaware. Actualizers are those who are authentic and honest, free, aware, and trusting. “While you make pretty speeches, I am being cut to shreds. You feed me to the lions, a delicate balance, and this just feels like spinning plates. I am living in cloud cuckoo land and this just feel like spinning plates. Our bodies floating down the muddy river,” reports Emma Hewitt (Like Spinning Plates). Divine discontent can move us to act in faith, follow the Savior’s invitations to do good, and give our lives humbly to him. Each of us, if we are honest, feels a gap between where and who we are, and where and who we want to become. We yearn for greater personal capacity. We have these feelings because we are children of God, born with the Light of Christ. These feelings are God given and create an urgency to act. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16