They will recollect how cold I looked, and how I just said “please.” Then they will hasten to the doctor. Keep your minds open to each other. Of course you will depend on words, no matter how much you read each other’s thoughts, but do not exchange souls. Too much, and you will lose the mutual telepathy. Of course we know there may be no link between what is taking place at the card table and what is taking place in the economy. However, if card games played by millions of people shift the role of deception, would not we be naïve simply to assume that such shifts do not also occur in the World of commerce? The marketing orientation is closely related to the fact that the need to exchange has become a paramount drive in modern mortals. By 1941, the end of the Great Depression, the Association of American Playing Card Manufacturers revealed that contract bridge had become the most popular card game in the country, and that 44 percent of the household in the United States of America played it. Contract bridge is a game played by partners, who must cooperate—asocial game that from the beginning was frequently recommended as a way to make friends or even find a beau. It was recommended as a means of learning social skills (though the game occasionally ended friendships or caused divorces). Contract bridge has only rarely been played for money. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

 It is, of course, true that even in a primitive economy based on a rudimentary form of division of labor, mortals exchange goods with each other within the tribe or among neighboring tribes. The mortal who produces cloth exchanges it for grain which one’s neighbor may have produced, or for sickles or knives made by the blacksmith. With increasing division of labor, there is increasing exchange of goods, but normally the exchange of goods is nothing but a means to an economic end. In capitalistic society exchanging has become and end in itself. None other than Adam Smith saw the fundamental role of the need to exchange, and explained it as a basic drive in mortals. This division of labor from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. Whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human nature, of which no further account can be given; or whether, as seems more probable, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to enquire. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

It is common to all mortals, and to be found in no other race of beings, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contracts. Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. The principle of exchange on an ever-increasing scale on the national and World market is indeed one of the fundamental economic principles on which the capitalistic system rests, but Adam Smith foresaw here that this principle was also to become one of the deepest psychic needs of the modern, alienated personality. Exchange has lost its rational function as a mere means for economic purposes, and has become an end in itself, extended to the noneconomic realms. Quite unwittingly, Adam Smith himself indicates the irrational nature of this need to exchange in one’s example of the exchange between the two dogs. There could be no possible realistic purpose in this exchange; either the two bones are alike, and then there is no reason to exchange them, or the one is better than the other, and then the dog who has the better one would not voluntarily exchange it. The example makes sense only if we assume that to exchange is a need in itself, even if it does not serve any practical purpose—and this is indeed what Adam Smith does assume. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

As I have already mentioned in another context, the love of exchange has replaced the love of possession. One buys a car, or a house, intending to sell it at first opportunity. However, more important is the fact that the drive for exchange operates in the realm of interpersonal relations. Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market. Each person is a package in which several aspects of one’s exchange value is blended into one: one’s personality, by which is meant those qualities which make one a good sale person of oneself; one’s looks, education, income, and change for success—each person strives to exchange this package for the best value obtainable. Even the function of going to a party, and of social intercourse in general, is to a large extent that of exchange. One is eager to meet the slightly higher-priced packages, in order to make contact and possibly a profitable exchange. One wishes to exchange one’s social position, and that is one’s own self, for a higher one, and in this process one exchanges one’s old set of friends, set of habits and feelings for the new ones, just as one exchanged a Mercedes-Benz for a BMW or a Ford for a Buick. While Adam Smith Believed this need for exchange to be an inherent part of human nature, it is actually a symptom of the abstractification and alienation inherent in the social character of modern mortals. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

The whole process of living is experienced analogously to the profitable investment of capital, my life and my person being the capital which is invested. If a mortal buys a cake of soap or a pound of meat, one has the legitimate expectation that the money one pays corresponds to the value of the soap or a pound of meat one buys. One is concerned that the equation “so much soap = so much money” makes sense in terms of the existing price structure. However, this expectation has become extended to all other forms of activity. If a mortal goes to an Emma Hewitt concert or to the theater to see Legally Blond 3, one asks oneself more or less explicitly whether the show is “worth the money” one paid (and of course you know it is). While this question makes some marginal sense, fundamentally the question does not make any sense, because two incommensurable things are brought together in the equation; the pleasure of listening to an Emma Hewitt concert cannot possibly be expressed in terms of money; the concert is not a commodity, nor is the experience of listening to it. The same holds true when a mortal makes a pleasure trip, goes to a lecture, gives a party, or any of the many activities which involve the expenditure of money. The acidity in itself is a productive act of living, and incommensurable with the amount of money spent for it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

The need to measure living acts in terms of something quantifiable appears also in the tendency to ask whether something was worth the time. A young man’s evening with a young lady, a visit with friends, and the many other action in which expenditure of money may or may not be involved, raise the question of whether the activity was worth the money or the tie. In each case one needs to justify the acidity in terms of an equation which shows that it was a profitable investment of energy. Even hygiene and health have to serve for the same purpose; a mortal taking a walk every morning tends to look on it as a good investment for one’s health, rather than a pleasurable activity which does not need any justification. This attitude found its closest and most drastic expression in Bentham’s concept of pleasure and pain. Starting on the assumption that the aim of life was to have pleasure, Bentham suggested a kind of bookkeeping which would show for each action whether the pleasure was greater than the pain, and if the pleasure was greater, the action was worth while doing. This the whole of life to him was something analogous to a business in which at any given point the favorable balance would show that it was profitable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

While Bentham’s views are not very much in the minds of people any more, the attitude which they express has become ever more firmly established. In Dr. Freud’s concept of the pleasure principle and in his pessimistic views concerning the prevalence of suffering over pleasure in civilized society, one can detect the influence of Benthamian calculation. A new question has arisen in modern mortal’s mind, the question, namely, whether life is worth living, and correspondingly, the feeling that one’s life is a failure, or is a success. This idea is based on the concept of life as an enterprise which should show a profit. The failure is like the bankruptcy of a business in which the losses are greater than the gains. This concept is nonsensical. We may be happy or unhappy, achieve some aims, and not achieve others; yet there is no sensible balance which could show whether life if worth while living. Maybe from the standpoint of a balance life is never worth while living. It ends necessarily with death; many of our hopes are disappointed; it involves suffering and effort; from a standpoint of the balance, it would seem to make more sense not to have been born at all. One the other hand, who will tell whether one happy moment of love, or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies? #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

Life is a unique gift and challenge, not to be measured in terms of anything else, and no sensible answer can be given to the question whether it is worth while living, because the question does not make any sense. “it is hard to say what I want my legacy to be, what I want people to say when I am long gone. At this point, right now, I am going to say I want people to see me as an entertainer. Someone who can do it all. I have to honestly say, everything is worth it. The times when you are tired. The times you are a bit sad. The—the good moments when you are on stage performing in front of thousands of people. In the end it is all worth it because it really makes me happy, and I would not trade it for anything else in the World. I honestly would not. There is nothing better than loving what you do. I have good friends, I have beautiful family, and I have a career; a career that is blooming, and still growing, and I am truly blessed. And I thank God for his blessings every single change I get,” reports Aaliayh. We have so much freedom, so many opportunities to develop our unique personalities and talents, our memories, and our personalized contributions. Tears of gratitude formed this wonderous World in which we live. God’s teachings give brilliance and hope and love to everyone single soul, being, creature and life form that exists, has ever existed, and that ever will exist. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

The interpretation of life as an enterprise seems to be the basis for a typical modern phenomenon, about which a great deal of speculation exists: the increase of experiencing death by suicide in modern Western society. Between 2010 and 2016 experiencing death by suicide increased 140 percent in Prussia, 355 percent in France. England had 110 cases of suicide per million inhabitants. Sweden 66, as against 150 respectively. Death by suicide is the 10^th leading cause of death in the United States. On average, there are 129 people who experience death by suicide in America.  In 2017, there were 1.3 million attempted suicides, 47,173 of those people died. Sucide and self-injury cost the Untied States of American $69 billion annually. How can we explain this increase in suicide, accompanying the increasing prosperity in the twenty-first century? No doubt that the experiencing death by suicide are highly complex, and that there is not a single motivation which we can assume to be the cause. We find revenge suicide as a pattern in China; we find experiencing death by suicide by melancholia all over the World; but neither of those motivations play much a role in the increase of rates of experiencing death by suicide in the twenty-first century. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

Some people think it is possible that there is an increase in death by suicide because of a phenomenon called anomie, which is the destruction of all the traditional social bonds, to the fact that all truly collective organization has become secondary to the state, and all genuine social life has been annihilated. Some people living in the modern political state are a disorganized dust of individuals. It is also believed that the boredom and monotony of life which is engendered by the alienated way of living is an additional factor for why people experience death by suicide. However, Easter cultures believe that it is possible dark spirits, dark energy, or demons follow people and cause some to experience death by suicide and it is not something the victim actually intended to do. The suicide figures for the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland and the United States, together with the figures on alcoholism and the opioid crises seem to support this hypothesis. However, there is another reason which has been ignored about experiencing death by suicide. It has to do with the whole balance concept of life as an enterprise which can fail. Problems or trials in our lives need to be viewed in the perspective of scriptural doctrine. Otherwise they can easily overtake our vision, absorb our energy, and deprive us of the joy and beauty the Lord intends us to receive here on Earth. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Many cases of suicide are caused by feeling that life has been a failure, that it is not worth whole living any more; one experiences death by suicide just as a business person declares one’s bankruptcy when losses exceed gains, and when there is no more hope of recuperating the losses.  Do you take time each day to realize how beautiful life can be? You are on Earth for a divine purpose. The tempering effect of patience is required. Some blessings will be delivered in this life, other will come from beyond the veil. Religion begins at the point where philosophy moves into personal commitment and action. A religion is more than a mere belief or an understanding of something; it implies the reaction of a mortal’s whole being to that on which one feels dependent. It is life lived in the conviction that what is highest in spirit is deepest in nature. Religion deals with an indwelling spirit in mortals or some animistic spirit in a rock, tree, car, or animal. For many, God is an Ultimate concern; however, mortals have many definitions of God, and the total number represents the infinite variety of experiences that people have. God is love—he is behind and inclusive of whatever love we may have known. God is a Truth that is beyond individual truths. Therefore, there is always more than two sides to every story. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

The concept of God has found very little coverage in books about psychology, mostly because the usual methods of the science’s study do not work well in trying to define, identify, quantify or describe God.  The best that scientists have been able to do is to study the effect of a belief or disbelief in God on people’s behavior. Nonetheless, the subject of religion is one of enormous importance. It is the feelings, acts, and experience of individual mortals in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine. Devout religionists point to the fact the for preliterate societies, rocks and Earth contained spirits which had to be appeased, appealed to, and worshipped in some manner or other as evidence of a universal need for worship and religious experience in all mortals. Religion helps account for the origin and development of the society, which most religions do; it helps to organize the power structure; it helps to sanction many of the personal behaviors of the people in society—like marriage, sex, family practices; it helps to provide some common symbols and bonds—such as the concept of the chosen people; it helps to designate certain roles—chief, priest, worshippers, acolytes, shaman, or witch doctor, and so on. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Religion is also used as a means of keeping the people in a particular state—building a gap between those who are keepers of the flame and those who worship, keeping the masses contented or in a state of puzzled uncertainty, keeping the masses happy. Many people let their religious beliefs help them to accept burdens or hardships (the cross I must bear) or to think of the better life Beyond (in that city foursquare). So it is possible that one function of some sort of religious belief or activity is to enable a person or a group of people to endure difficulties or otherwise to find help. However, is this all? Is it not possible that religion has the hard-to-describe function of enabling mortals to see their relatedness to the Universe and to other people? When a religion permits a mortal to transcend one’s solitariness and give one a picture of the larger reality, it may enable because the experience might be similar to standing on a quiet hillside at night and viewing the panorama of constellations and comets in the skies above. Some people become suddenly aware of the immensity of the Universe and raise serious doubts about their part in it all. Knowing the approximate distance to the nearest star, and that the star is actually a Sun to the planets that may circle about it, and that there may be some form of intelligence on those planets can make one feel tremendously insignificant! #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

How, with this experience, can one possibly add to one’s own feeling of significance? Some people cannot. However, others get that feeling called the Oceanic Experience and realize that their tiny and infinitesimal self is part of it all, that they and the Universe, as object, are no longer separate. Another point: Religion seems to be the only institution that gives (or has given) mortals a way of dealing with the anxiety that comes from knowing our physical bodies are not yet immortal, and that this may be the only certainty. Primitive mortals had few alternatives to explain life and death—no science or philosophy, just religious rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death. These gave mortals some assurance of continuity. As mortal have discovered more alternatives, there have been more changes in their religious views. For some people, losing themselves in such an experience means literally to lose themselves. However, for other people, this losing of self means to find and gain a larder, more comprehensive sense of self. If this can happen, we say the self-transcendence is beautiful. The pole of individualization expresses itself in the religious experience as a personal encounter with God. And the courage derived from it is the courage of confidence in the personal reality which is manifest in religious experience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

In contradistinction to the mystical union one can call this relation a personal communion with the source of courage. Although the two types are in contrast they do not excluded each other. For they are united by the polar interdependence of individualization and participation. The courage of confidence has often, especially in Protestantism, been identified with the courage of faith. However this is not adequate, because confidence is only one element in faith. Faith embraces both mystical participation and personal confidence. Most parts of the Bible describe the religious encounter in strongly personalist terms. Biblicism, notably that of the Reformers, follows this emphasis. Martin Luther directed his attack against the objective, quantitative, and impersonal elements in the Roman system. He fought for an immediate person-to-person relationship between God and mortals. In him the courage of confidence reached its highest point in the history of Christian thought. Every work of Martin Luther (not to be confused with Martin Luther King Jr.), especially in his earlier years, is filled with such courage. Again and again he uses the word trotz, “in spite of.” In spite of all the negativities which he had experienced, in spite of the anxiety which dominated that period, one derived the power of self-affirmation from one’s unshakable confidence in God and from the person encounter with him. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

According to the expressions of anxiety in his period, the negativity of Martin Luther’s courage had to conquer were symbolized in the figures of death and the Devil. It has rightly been declared that Albrechet Durer’s engraving, “Knight, Death, and the Devil,” is a classic expression of the spirit of the Lutheran Reformation and—it might be added—of Luther’s courage of confidence, of his form of the courage to be. A knight in full armor is riding through a valley, accompanied by the figure of death on one side, the Devil on the other. Fearlessly, concentrated, confident he looks ahead. He is alone but he is not lonely. In his solitude he participates in the power which gives him the courage to affirm himself in spite of the presence of the negatives of existence. His courage is certainly not the courage to be as a part. The Reformation broke away from the semicollectivism of the Middle Ages. Luther’s courage of confidence is personal confidence, derived from person-to-person encounter with God. Neither popes nor councils could give him this confidence. Therefore, he had to reject them just because they relied on a doctrine which blocked off the courage of confidence. They sanctioned a system in which the anxiety of death and guilt never was completely conquered. There were many assurances but no certainty, many supports for the courage of confidence but no unquestionable foundation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

The collective offered different ways of resisting anxiety but no way in which the individual could take his anxiety upon himself. Martin Luther never was certain; he never could affirm his being with unconditional directly with his total being, in an immediate personal relation. There was, except in mysticism, always mediation through the Church, in indirect and partial meeting between God and the soul. When the Reformation removed the mediation and opened up a direct, total, and person approach to God, a new nonmystical courage to be was possible. It is manifest in the heroic representatives of fighting Protestantism, in the Calvinist as well as the Lutheran Reformation, and in Calvinism even more conspicuously. It is not the heroism of risking martyrdom, of resisting the authorities, of transforming the structure of Church and society, but it is the courage of confidence which makes these people heroic and which is the basis of the other expression of their courage. One could say—and liberal Protestantism often has said—that the courage of the Reformers is the beginning of the individualistic type of the courage to be as oneself. However, such an interpretation confuses a possible historical effect with the matter itself. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

In the courage of the Reformers the courage to be as oneself is both affirmed and transcended. In comparison with the mystical form of courageous self-affirmation the Protestant courage of confidence affirms the individual self as an individual self in its encounter with God as person. This radically distinguishes the personalism of the Reformation from all the later forms of individualism and Existentialism. The courage of the Reformers is not the courage to be oneself—as it is not the courage to be as a part. It transcends and unites both of them. For the courage of confidence is not rooted in confidence about oneself. The Reformation pronouns the opposite: one can become confident about one’s existence only after ceasing to base one’s confidence on oneself. One the other hand the courage of confidence is in no way based on anything finite besides oneself, not even on the Church. It is based on God and solely on God, who is experiences in a unique and personal encounter. The courage of the Reformation transcends both the courage to be as a part and the courage to be as oneself. It is threatened neither by the loss of oneself nor by the loss of one’s World. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Freud himself had a very limited sexual life. His own sexual expression began late, around thirty, and subsided early, around forty. At forty-one Freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess complaining of his depressed mood, and added, “Also sexual excitation is of no more use to a person like me.” Another incident points to the fact that around this age his sexual life had more or less ended. Freud reports in The Interpretation of Dreams that at one time, in his forties, he felt physically attacked to a young woman and reached out half-voluntarily and touched her. He comments on how surprised he was that he was still able to find the possibility for such attraction in him. Freud believed in the control and channeling of sexuality, and was convinced that this had specific value both for cultural development and for one’s own character. In 1883, during his prolonged engagement to Martha Bernays, the young Freud wrote to his future wife: it neither pleasant nor edifying to watch the masses amusing themselves; we at least do not have much taste for it. I remember something that occurred to me while watching a performance of Carmen: the mob gives vent to its appetites, and we deprive ourselves. We deprive ourselves in order to maintain our integrity, we economize in our health, our capacity for enjoyment, our emotions; we save ourselves for something, not knowing what. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

And this constant suppression of natural instincts gives us the quality of refinement. And the extreme cases of people like ourselves who chain themselves together for life and death, who deprive themselves and pine for years so as to remain faithful, who probably would not survive a catastrophe that robbed them of their beloved. From that declaration, one may comprehend that Freud’s doctrine of sublimation lies in this belief that libido exists in a certain quantity in the individual, that you can deprive yourself, economize emotionally in one way to increase your enjoyment in another, and that if you spend your libido in direct sexuality you will not have it for utilization, for example, in artistic creation. This concept of sublimation is Freud’ most puritanical belief. The original Puritan movement, in its best representatives and before its general deterioration into the moralistic compartment of Victorianism at the end of the twenty-first century, was characterized by admirable qualities of dedication to integrity and truth. The progress of modern science owes a great deal to it and, indeed, would probably not have been possible without these virtues in their scientific laboratories. It is also possible to make contact with other people in the realm of ideas, of beliefs, of words and thoughts. This is called cognitive (thought) intimacy. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Two people may know each other’s minds, have access to the inner most arenas of each other’s mental processes. To establish such closeness means a constant and opening sharing of ideas. When intellectual changes occur, people can assist one another’s understanding by batting the ideas around—by debating them, arguing them, or simply talking them out. The special quality of cognitive intimacy is that it often consists of unspoken and unexpressed sharing. This quality makes it very difficult to describe. However, those who know it feel it to be one of the more exciting and challenging aspects of intimate experience. “Always I have known that you were there. I only had to find out where we have our own ways, our own signs to follow, with different roads that lead us home. And I feel you close. I am alive again. And it seems like home. This is where the rainbow ends. Footsteps I follow to your door, we do not need to talk anymore, we have the same heart, the same mine, the same souls. The distant lights will lead us on,” reports Emma Hewitt (Alive Again). Shared feeling is emotional intimacy, a mutual accessibility, naturalness, nonpossessiveness, and is a process that required constant attention. It is an important aspect of human closeness. It is this dimension of intimacy, perhaps, that brings us closet to a workable definite of loving. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21