We respected their choice to be together. We did not think they would simply disappear. We could not imagine it. We were afraid of hearing from them. We had no idea how they could multiply or survive in the modern World. Some people seek not to be outstanding but to fit in; they live as though they are directed by a radar set fastened to their head perpetually telling them what other people expect of them. This radar type gets one’s motives and directions for others; like a mortal who describes oneself as a set of mirrors, such an individual is able to respond but not to choose; one has no effective center of motivation of one’s own. Such people gain their strength by internalizing external rules, by compartmentalizing will power and intellect and by repressing their feelings. This type is well suited for business success, for, like 21^st century technology tycoons and the captains of Wall Street, they can manipulate people in the same way as electric cars of gas prices. The gyroscope is an excellent symbol for the since it stands for a completely mechanical center of stability. William Randolph Hearst was an example of this type: he amassed great power and wealth, but he was so anxious underneath this appearance of strength. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The gyroscope mortals often have a strong influence over their kids and are very rigid. This is how certain attitudes in a society tend to crystallize rigidly. If we take out the gyroscope, there will be an emptiness in society, which might follow a breakdown because it would be hollow. Our society has not yet found something to take the place of the gyroscope person’s rigid rules.  If this is truly the Age of Anxiety, it may be because we have entered an era when things happen so rapidly, on such a large scale, that we are overwhelmed by them. For example, we know something of the threats to human survival on our planet. Our uncertainty as to how and when such things might happen or about what to do might be called anxiety. Anxiety, like fear, has come beneficial aspects. It is not always wise to rid ourselves of anxieties, because we can learn from them. Though anxiety is an uncomfortable feeling, rather than popping a tranquilizer we might be better off trying to discover its cause and work through it. The outer-directed people in our tie generally are characterized by attitudes of passivity and apathy. Many people of today have by and large given up the driving ambition to excel, to be at the top; or if they do have such ambition, they regard it as a fault and are often apologetic for such a hangover from their fathers’ mores. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

So many people want to be accepted by their peers even to the extent of being inconspicuous and absorbed in the group. This sociological picture is very similar in its broad lines to the picture we get in psychological work with individuals. A decade or two ago, the emptiness which was beginning to be experienced on a fairly broad scale by the middle classes could be laughed at as the sickness of the suburbs. The clearest picture of the empty life is the suburban man, who gets up at the same hoe every weekday morning, takes the same train to work in the city, performs that same task in the office, lunches at the same place, leaves the same tip for the waitress each day, comes home on the same train each night, has 2.3 children, cultivates a little garden, spends a two-week vacation at the shore every Summer which he does not enjoy, goes to church every Christmas and Easter, and moves through a routine, mechanical existence year after year until he finally has enough move saved at the age of sixty-five to last at least twenty years, and then returns to Heaven. (To some people, that life sounds like a dream come true.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

However, there are indications in the present decade that emptiness and boredom have become much more serious states for many people. Not long ago, a very curious incident was reported in the New York papers. A bus driver in the Bronx, New York simply drove away in his empty bus one day and was picked up by the police several days later in the state of Florida, which is about 946 miles away. He explained that, having gotten tired of driving the same route every day, he had decided to go away on a trip. While he was being brought back it was clear from the papers that the bus company was having a hard time deciding whether or how he should be punished. By the time he arrived in the Bronx, he was a cause celebre, and a crowd of people who apparently had never personally known the errant bus driver were on hand to welcome him. When it was announced that the company had decided not to turn him over for legal punishment but to give him his job back again if he would promise to make no more jaunts, there was literal as well as figurative cheering in the Bronx. Why should these solid citizens of the Bronx, living in a metropolitan section which is almost synonymous with middle-class urban conventionality, make a hero out of a man who according to their standards was an auto thief, and worse yet, failed to appear at his regular time for work? #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

On a small scale, the story of the bus driver and the reaction from the people in the Bronx reminds us of the fact that the upper middle classes in bourgeois France several decades ago were able to endure the stultifying and mechanical routine of their commercial and industrial activities only by virtue of the presence of centers of Bohemianism at their elbows. People who live as hollow mortals can endure the monotony only by an occasional blowoff—or at least by identifying with someone else’s blowoff. In some circles emptiness is even made a goal to be sought after, under the guise of being adaptable. Nowhere is this illustrated more arrestingly than in an article in Life Magazine entitled “The Wife Problem.” Summarizing a series of researches which first appeared in Fortune about the role of the wives of corporations executives, this article points out that whether or not the husband is promoted depends a great deal on whether his wife fits the pattern. Time was when only the minister’s wife was looked over by the trustees of the church before her husband was hired; now the wife of the corporation executive is screened, covertly or overly, by most companies like the steel or wool or any other commodity the company uses. She must be highly gregarious, not intellectual or conspicuous, and she must have a very sensitive antennae (again that radar set!) so that she can be forever adapting. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

The good wife is good by not doing things—by not complaining when her husband works late, by not fussing when a transfer is coming up; by not engaging in any controversial activity. Thus her success depends not on how she actively uses her powers, but on her knowing when and how to be passive. However, the rule that transcends all others is to not be too good. Keeping up with the Joneses is still important. However, where in pushier and more primitive times it implied going substantially ahead of the Joneses, today keeping up means just that: keeping up. One can move ahead, yes—but slightly, and the timing must be exquisite. In the end the company conditions almost everything the wife does—from the companions she is permitted to have down to the car she drives and what and how much she drinks and reads. To be sure, in return for this indenture the modern corporation takes care of its members in the form of giving them added security, insurance, planned vacations, and so on. The Company had become like Big Brother—the symbol for the dictator—in Orwell’s novel, 1984. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Of course, the results of such control is a little frightening. Conformity, it would appear, is being elevated into something akin to a religion. Perhaps Americans will arrive at an ant society, not through fiat of a dictator, but through unbridled desire to get along with one another. While one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of some people, the emptiness has for many now moved from the state of boredom to a state of futility and despair which holds promise of dangers. The minor addiction to unprescribed medication among a small number of adolescents is partially due to the media they consume on the television, but also because of some state laws. Youth need to be reminded that it is important to stay sober because they really need their education to make it in society today. Education will help them move past the condition of emptiness. If youth are not growing toward something, one does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into deviant activities. What is the psychological origin of this experience of emptiness? The feeling of emptiness or vacuity which we have observed sociologically and individually should not be take to mean that people are empty, or without emotional potentiality. A human being is not empty in a static sense, as though one were a storage battery which needs charging. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

The experience of emptiness, rather, generally comes from the people’s feeling that they are powerless to do anything effective about their lives or the World they live in. Inner vacuousness is the long-term, accumulated result of a person’s particular conviction toward oneself, namely one’s conviction that one cannot act as an entity in directing one’s own life, or change other people’s attitudes toward one, or effectually influence the World around one. Thus one gets the deep sense of despair and futility which so many people in our day have. And soon, since what one wants and what one feels can make no real difference, one gives up wanting and feeling. Apathy and lack of feeling are also defenses against anxiety. When a person continually faces dangers one is powerless to overcome, one’s final line of defense is at last to avoid even feeling the dangers. Sensitive students of our time have seen these developments coming. People today no longer live under the authority of the church or moral laws, but under anonymous authorities like public opinion and those of the TV news media. However, what you do not understand is that 90 percent of the TV news media is control by six corporations, so what you are getting is a view they want manifested in society, to direct politics, business and economics and it may not be fair or accurate. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

The authority of public opinion is the public itself, but this public is merely a collection of many individuals each with one’s radar set adjusted to finding out what others expect of them. Many corporate executives are successful not only because of their education and experience, but also because the husband and wife are able to be successful in adjusting to public opinion. The public is thus made up of all the Elons, Britneys, Drakes, Toms, Marys, Dicks and Harrys who are the slaves to the authority of public opinion! The public is therefore afraid of a ghost, a bogeyman, a chimera. It is an anonymous authority with a capital “A” when the authority is a composite of ourselves, but ourselves without any individual centers. We are in the long run afraid of our own collective emptiness. And we have good reason to be frightened by this situation of conformity and individual emptiness. We need only remind ourselves that the ethical and emotional emptiness in European society three to five decades ago was an open invitation to fascist dictatorships to step in and fill the vacuum. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The great danger of this situation of vacuity and powerlessness is that it leads sooner or later to painful anxiety and despair, and ultimately, if not corrected, to futility and the blocking off of the most precious qualities of the human being. Its end results are the dwarfing and impoverishment of persons psychologically, or else surrender to some destructive authoritarianism. There is a correlation between economy and culture. Human nature itself needs and laws are in constant interaction with the economic conditions which shape historical development; and while mortals are sharped by the form of social and economic organization, they in turn also mold it. The passions and strivings which are rooted in mortal’s nature, and in the conditions of their existence, are the most powerful driving force for human development. Much like how many people love celebrity culture, so they try to design their homes like houses of the stars, buy fancy cars, buy clothes like those of their favor celebrities and even style their hair like theirs, and that is how cultural factors influence economic basis of society. Observation of the human reality proves that the economic structure of Capitalism constitutes a definite progress over all other socialist theories from a scientific viewpoint. Automatically, when the economic changes have been achieved, a better society can be brought into life by the people who have undergone a moral change within themselves. For instance, people are trying to preserve the economy, so are creating “repair cafes” to make to repair electronics. This is being called the “Repair Revolution.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

This is the age-old dilemma of our own personal responsibility even though we are moved by fate. In society, among workers and intellectuals, there is an expression of hope for the liberation of mortals, for the establishment of new moral values, for the realization of human solidarity. It reflects a condition of life to which we all are heir. It is the ultimate statement that truth and reality can be psychologized only to a limited extent. We must have a transpersonal belief in fate and moral responsibility at the same time. God has given every mortal a soul and that is our bond with the divine. To live in accord with one’s soul is difficult but profoundly rewarding. It is natural drive in its starkest form but a drive which mortals, being conscious of, can to some extent assimilate and direct. Our soul opens us up to the creative possibilities we did not know we possessed. And although we experience trials, tribulations, and crises, the struggle gives us a never-failing source of forms and potentialities to awe and to delight. Satan, Lucifer, and other figures who were all at one time archangels, are psychologically necessary. They have to be invented, had to be created, in order to make human action and freedom possible. Otherwise, there would be no consciousness. For every thought destroys as it creates: to think this thing, I have to cut out something else; to say “yes” to this is to say “no” to that and to have a “no” in the very ambivalence of the “yes.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

For consciousness works by way of either/or: it is destructive as well as constructive. Without rebellion, no consciousness. Thus, the hope that Satan or other adversaries can be gotten rid of by gradual progress toward perfection is possible. Faith is a total and centered act of the personal self, the act of unconditional, infinite and ultimate concern. The question now arises: what is the source of this all-embracing and all-transcending concern? The word concern points to two sides of a relationship, the relation between the one who is concerned and one’s concern. In both respects we have to imagine mortal’s situation in itself and in one’s World. The reality of mortal’s ultimate concern reveals something about one’s being, namely, that one is able to transcend the flux of relative and transitory experiences of one’s ordinary life. Mortal’s experiences, feelings, thoughts are conditioned and finite. They not only come and go, but their content is of finite and conditional concern—unless they are elevated to unconditional validity. However, this presupposed the general possibility of doing so; it presupposes the element of infinite in mortals. Mortals are able to understand in an immediate personal and central act the meaning of the ultimate, the unconditional, the absolute, the infinite. This alone makes faith a human potentiality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Human potentialities are powers that drive toward actualization. Mortals are driven toward faith by one’s awareness of the infinite to which one belongs, but which one does not own like a possession. This is in abstract terms what concretely appears as the restlessness of the hearts within the flux of life. The unconditional concern which is faith is the concern about the unconditional. The infinite passion, as faith as been described, is the passion for the infinite. Or, the ultimate concern is apprehension about what is experienced as definitive. In this way we have turned from the subjective meaning of faith as a centered act of the personality to its objective meaning, to what is meant in the act of faith. It would not help at this point of our analysis to call that which is meant in the act of faith God or a god. For at this step we ask: What in the idea of God constitutes divinity? The answer is: It is the element of the unconditional and of ultimacy. This carries the quality of divinity. If this is seen, one can understand why almost every thing in Heaven and on Earth has received ultimacy in the history of religion. However, we also can understand that a critical principle was and is at work in mortal’s religious consciousness, namely, that which is really ultimate over against what claims to be supreme but it only preliminary, transitory, finite. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

The term ultimate concern united the subjective and the objective side of the act of faith—the fides qua creditur (the faith through which is believes) and the fides quae crediture (the faith which is believed). The first is the classical term for the centered act of the personality, the ultimate concern. The second is the classical term for that toward which this act is directed, the ultimate itself, expressed in symbols of the divine. This distinction is very important, but not ultimately so, for the one side cannot be without the other. There is no faith without a content toward which it is directed. There is always something meant in the act of faith. And there is no way of having the content of faith expect in the act of faith. All speaking about divine matters which is not done in the state of ultimate concern is meaningless. Because that which is meant in the act of faith cannot be approached in any other way than through an act of faith. In terms like ultimate, unconditional, infinite, absolute, the difference between subjectivity and objectivity is overcome. The ultimate of the act of faith and the ultimate that is meant in the act of faith are one and the same. This is symbolically expressed by the mystics when they say that their knowledge of God has of himself; and is expressed by Paul when he says (1 Corinthians 13) that he will know as he is known, namely by God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

God never can be object without being at the same time subject. Even a successful prayer, is according to Paul (Romans 8), not possible without God as Spirit praying within us. The same experience expressed in abstract language is the disappearance of the ordinary subject-object scheme in the experiences of the ultimate, the unconditional. In the act of faith that which is the source of this act is present beyond the cleavage of the subject and object. It is present as both and beyond both. This character of faith gives an additional criterion for distinguishing true and false ultimacy. The finite which claims infinity without having it (as, for example, a nation or success) is not able to transcend the subject-object scheme. It remains an object which the believer looks at as a subject. One can approach it with ordinary knowledge and subject it to ordinary handling. There are, of course, many degrees in the endless realm of false ultimacies. The nation is nearer to true ultimacy than is success. Nationalistic ecstasy can produce a state in which the subject is almost swallowed by the object. However, after a periods the subject emerges again, disappointed radically and totally, and by looking at the nation in a skeptical and calculating way does injustice even to its justified claims. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The more idolatrous a faith the less it is able to overcome the cleavage between subject and object. For that is the difference between true and idolatrous faith. In true faith the ultimate concern is a concern about the truly supreme; while in idolatrous faith is existential disappointment, a disappointment which penetrates into the very existence of mortals! This is the dynamics of idolatrous faith: that it is faith, and as such, the centered act of a personality; that the centering point is something which is more or less the periphery: and that, therefore, the act of faith leads to a loss of the center and to the disruption of the personality. The ecstatic character of even an idolatrous faith can hide this consequence only for a certain time. However, finally it breaks into the open. Perception—our interpretation of the data our senses supply—finally determines what our experience of the World is. Our perceptions can be distorted, however, and our senses fooled. In addition, there may be a whole range of senses receiving input that we do not yet really understand. These are the so-called extra senses, those we associate with extra sensory perception (ESP). “Fear not, for behold, it is God that has shown unto you this marvelous thing, in the which is shown unto you that ye cannot lay your hands on us to slay us,” reports Helaman 5.26.  The Lord is with us, mindful of us, and blessing us in way only he can do. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Our desire is to always have God’s Spirit with us to push fear aside for a more eternal view of our mortal lives. Stand in holy places—be not troubled—and promises shall be fulfilled. We will find answers to our questions that trouble us or the peace to simply set them aside. That is the Spirit in action. This Earth is a sacred place in the kingdom of God, and this Earth calls for our reverence, our respect for others, our best selves in living the gospel, and our hopes to lay aside our fears and seek the healing power of Jesus Christ through his Atonement. People say this Earth is not our home, but we do live here. Much like a house rent, it may not be your permanent home, but it is your home because you are legally occupying the dwelling. There is no room for fear in these holy places of God or in the hearts of his children. Why? Because of love. God loves us—always—and we love him. Our love of God counters all fears, and his love abounds in holy places. Think about it. Wen we are tentative in our commitments to the Lord, when we stray from his path leading to life eternal, when we question or doubt our significance in his divine design, when we allow fear to open the door to all its companions—discouragement, anger, frustration, disappointment—the Spirit leave us, and we are without the Lord. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

We must learn to receive revelation. We experience the World through our sense. To receive personal revelation, we must place priority on living the gospel and encouraging faithfulness and spirituality in others as well as ourselves. However, we do not experience the same things. Our perceptions of the World differ. When we stand in holy placed, we can feel God’s love and perfect love casts out all fear. Sensation and perception are intimately linked together. It is through them that we both see the World. If we actively trust in the Lord and is ways, if we are engaged in his work, we will not fear the trends of the World or be troubled by them. I plead with you to set aside Worldly influences and pressures and seek spirituality in your daily life. Love what the Lord loves—which includes his commandments, his holy houses, our sacred covenants with him, the sacrament each Sabbath day, our communication through prayer—and you will not be troubled. We must trust the Lord and his promises and they will be fulfilled. We are wise and have received the truth, and have taken the Holy Spirit for our guide. “Peace, peace be unto you, because your faith in my Well Beloved, who was from the foundation of the World,” Helaman 5.47. The way to love other people is to express what we feel—anger and love—without aiming to hurt feelings. Open but reverent communication is how to make love in our lives. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18