Do not back to a civil tone with me. Yes, I saw Meghan. I saw her in the little sailor dress and she sat next to me. Another example of the differences between the modes of having and being is the exercise of authority. The crucial point is expressed in the difference between having authority and being an authority. Almost all of us exercise authority at least at some stage of our lives. Those who bring up children must exercise authority—whether they want to or not—in order to protect their children from dangers and give them at least minimal advice on how to act in various situations. In a patriarchal society women, too, as objects of authority, for most men. Most members of a bureaucratic, hierarchically organized society like ours exercise authority, except the people on the lowest social level, who are only objects of authority. Our understand of authority in the two modes depends on our recognizing that authority is a broad term with two entirely different meanings: it can be either rational or irrational authority. Rational authority is based on competence, and it helps the person who leans on it to grow. Irrational authority is based on power and serves to exploit the person subjected to it. “Now the cause of this iniquity of the people was this—Satan has great power, unto the stirring up of the people to do all manner of iniquity, and to the puffing them up with pride, tempting them to seek for power, and authority, and riches, and the vain things of the World,” reports 3 Nephi 6.15. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Among the most primitive societies, for instance, the hunters and food gatherers, authority is exercised by the person who is generally recognized as being competent for the task. What qualities this competence rests on depends much on the specific circumstances, although the impression would be that they would include experience, wisdom, generosity, skill, presence, courage. No permanent authority exists in many of these tribes, but an authority emerges in the case of need. Or there are different authorities for different occasions: warn, religious practice, adjustment of quarrels. When the qualities on which the authority rests disappear or weaken, the authority itself ends. A very similar form of authority may be observed in many primitive societies, in which competence is often established not by physical strength but by such qualities as experience and wisdom. In a very ingenious experiment with monkeys, it was discovered that if the dominant animal even momentarily losses the qualities than constitute its competence, its authority ends. Being-authority is grounded not only in the individual’s competence to fulfill certain social functions, but equally so in the very essence of a personality that has achieved a high degree of growth and integration. Such persons radiate authority and do not have to give orders, threaten, bribe. They are highly developed individuals who demonstrate by what they are—and not mainly by what they do or say—what human beings can be. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

The great Masters of Living were such authorities, and to a lesser degree of perfection, such individuals may be found on all educational levels and in the most diverse cultures. (The problem of education hinges on this point. If parents were more developed themselves and rested in their own center, the opposition between authoritarian and laissez-faire education would hardly exist. Needing this being-authority, the child reacts to it with great eagerness; on the other hand, the child rebels against pressure or neglect or overfeeding by people who show by their own behavior that they themselves have not made the effort they expect from the growing child.) With the formation of societies based on a hierarchical order and much larger and more complex then those of the hunters and food gatherers, authority by competence yields to authority by social status. This does not mean that the existing authority is necessarily incompetent; it does mean that competence is not an essential element of authority. Whether we deal with monarchical authority—where the lottery of genes decides qualities of competence—or with an unscrupulous criminal who succeeds in becoming authority by murder or treachery, or, as frequently in modern democracy, with authorities elected on the basis of their photogenic physiognomy, if they are appointed, or the amount of money they can spend on their election, in all these cases there may be almost no relation between competence and authority. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

However, there are even serious problems in the cases of authority established on the basis of some competence: a leader may have been competent in old field, incompetent in another—for instance, a statesperson may be competent in conducting war and incompetent in the situation of peace; or a leader who is honest and courageous at the beginning of his or her career loses these qualities by the seduction of power; or age or physical troubles may lead to a certain deterioration. Finally, one must consider that it is much easier for the members of a small tribe to judge the behavior of an authority than it is for millions of people in our system, who know their candidate only by the artificial image created by public relations specialists. Whatever the reasons for the loss of the competence-forming qualities, in most larger and hierarchically organized societies the process of alienation of authority occurs. The real or alleged initial competence is transferred to the uniform or to the title of the authority. If the authority wears the proper uniform or has the proper title, this external sign of competence replaces the real competence and its qualities. The king—to use this title as a symbol for this type of authority—can be stupid, vicious, evil, for instance, utterly incompetent to be an authority, yet he has authority. As long as he has the title, he is supposed to have the qualities of competence. Even of the emperor is undressed, everybody believes he wears beautiful clothes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

That people take uniforms and titles for the real qualities of competence is not something that happens quite of itself. Those who have these symbols of authority and those who benefit therefrom must dull their subject people’s realistic, for instance, critical, thinking and make them believe the fiction. Anybody who will think about it knows the machinations of propaganda, the methods by which critical judgment is destroyed, how the mind is lulled into submission by clichés, how people are made dumb because they become dependent and lose their capacity to trust their eyes and judgment. They are blinded to reality by the fiction they believe. However, here we must pause to answer two objections. Some readers may be thinking that this emphasis on the necessity and value of consciousness of self will make people too concerned about themselves. One objection would be that is leads one to be too introspective, and another that it makes for pride in one’s self. Persons with this latter objection might raise the questions, “Are we not told to think too highly of ourselves? And has it not been proclaimed that mortal’s pride in one’s self is the root of most evil in our time?” Let us consider the latter objection first. To be sure, one ought not to think too highly of one’s self, and a courageous humility is the mark of the realistic and mature person. However, thinking too highly of one’s self, in the sense of self-inflation and conceit, does not come from greater consciousness of one’s self or greater feelings of self-worth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

In fact, self-inflation and conceit comes from just the opposite of greater consciousness. Self-inflation and conceit are generally the external signs of inner emptiness and self-doubt; a show of pride is one of the most common covers for anxiety. Pride was a chief characteristic of the famous roaring 1920’s, but we know now that this period was one of widespread, suppressed anxiety. The person who feels weak becomes a bully, the inferior person the braggart; a flexing of muscles, much talk, cockiness, an endeavor to brazen it out, are the symptoms of covert anxiety in a person or a group. Tremendous pride was exhibited in fascism, as everyone knows who has seen the pictures of the strutting Mussolini, Hitler; but fascism is a development in people who are empty, anxious and despairing, and therefore seize on megalomaniac promises. To push this question deeper, many of the arguments in our day against pride in one’s self, and many of the homilies on alleged self-abnegation, have a motive quite other than humility or a courageous facing of one’s human situation. A great number of these arguments, for example, reveal a considerable contempt for the self. Aldous Huxley declares, “For all of us, the most intolerably dreary and deadening life is that which we live with ourselves.” Fortunately, it can be remarked immediately, this generalization is obviously untrue; it is empirically not a fact that the most dreary and deadening hour of Spinoza were those he lived with himself. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Consider Thoreau or Einstein or Jesus or many a human being who has no fame whatever, but who has ventured to become conscious of one’s self.  In fact, I seriously doubt whether Huxley’s remark is true even of himself, or of Reinhold Niebuhr, or others who with so much self-confidence and assertiveness proclaim the evils of mortal’s asserting themselves. Indeed, it is very easy to get an audience these days if one preaches against conceit and pride in one’s self, for most people feel so empty and convinced of their lack of worth anyway that they readily agree that the one who is condemning them must be right. This leads us to the most important point of all in understanding the dynamics of much modern self-condemnation, namely that condemning ourselves is the quickest way to get a substitute sense of worth. People who have almost, but not quite, lost their feeling of worth generally have very strong needs to condemn themselves, for that is the mist ready way of drowning the better ache of feelings of worthlessness and humiliation. It is as though the person were saying to one’s self, “I must be important that I am so worth condemning,” or “Look how noble I am: I have such high ideals and I am so ashamed of myself that I fall short.” A psychoanalyst once pointedly remarked that when someone in psychoanalysis berates one’s self at great length for picayune sins, one feels like asking, “Who do you think you are?” The self-condemning person is very often trying to show how important he or she is that God is so concerned with punishing him or her. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Much self-condemnation, thus, is a cloak for arrogance. Those who think they overcome pride by condemn themselves could well ponder Spinoza’s remark, “One who despises one’s self is the nearest to a proud man.” In ancient Athens when a politician was trying to get the votes of the working class by appearing very humble in a tattered coat with big holes in it, Socrates unmasked his hypocrisy by claiming, “Your vanity shows forth from every hole in your coat.” The mechanism of much of this self-condemnation in our day can be observed in psychological depression. The child, for example, who feels one is not loved by one’s parents can always say, generally to one’s self, “If I were different, If I were not bad, they would love me.” By this means one avoids facing the full force and the terror of the realization that one is not loved. Thus, too, with adults: if they can condemn themselves they do not need really to feel the pain of their isolation or emptiness, and the fact that they are not loved then does not cast doubt upon their feelings of worth as persons. For they can always say, “If it were not for such and such a sin or bad habit, I would be loved. It our age of hollow people, the emphasis upon self-condemnation is like whipping a sick horse: it achieves a temporary life, but it hastens the eventual collapse of the dignity of the person. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

The self-condemning substitute for self-worth provides the individual with a method of avoiding an open and honest confronting of one’s problems of isolation and worthlessness, and makes for a pseudo-humility rather than the honest humility of one who seeks to face one’s situation realistically and so what one can constructively. Furthermore, the self-condemning substitute provides the individual with a rationalization for one’s self-hate, and this reinforces the tendencies toward hating one’s self. And, inasmuch as one’s attitude toward other selves generally parallel one’s attitude toward one’s self, one’s covert tendency to other others is also rationalized and reinforced. The steps are not big from the feeling of worthlessness of one’s self to self-hatred to hatred for others. In circles where self-contempt is preached, it is of course never explained why a person should be so ill-mannered and inconsiderate as to force one’s company on other people if one finds it so dreary and deadening one’s self. And furthermore the multitude of contradictions are never adequately explained in a doctrine which advises that we should hate the one self, “I,” and love all others, with the obvious expectation that they will love us, hateful creatures that we are; or that the more we hate ourselves, the more we love God who made the mistake, in an off moment, of creating this contemptible creature “I.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Fortunately, however, we no longer have to argue that self-love is not only necessary and good but that is also is a prerequisite for loving others. Selfishness and excessive self-concern really come from an inner self-hatred. Self-love is not only not the same as selfishness but is actually the opposite to it. That is to say, the person who inwardly feels worthless is the one who must build one’s self up by selfish aggrandizement, and the person who has a sound experience of one’s own worth, that is who loves one’s self, has the basis for acting generously toward one’s neighbor. Fortunately, it also become clear from a longer religious perspective that much contemporaneous self-condemning and self-contempt are a product of particular modern problems. So many individuals feel so insignificant in the age of information, as they did during industrial development. This disease of emptiness may arise from feeling alienated from the advancement of society, or feeling unwelcomed in a foreign land. If anyone, therefore, will not learn from Christianity to love one’ self in the right way, then neither can one love one’s neighbor. To love one’s self in the right way and to love one’s neighbor are absolutely analogous concepts, are at bottom one and the same. Hence the law is: “You shall love yourself as you love your neighbor when you love him or her as yourself.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

We cannot rest with the contradictions we have seen in psychology and psychotherapy. Nor can we leave will and decision to chance. We cannot work on the assumption that ultimately the patient somehow happens to make a choice or slides into a decision by ennui, default, or mutual fatigue with the therapist, or act from sensing that the therapist (now the benevolent parent) will approve of one if one does take such steps. I propose that we need to put decision and will back into the center of the picture—“The very stone which the builders rejected is the head of the corner.” Not in the sense of free will against determinism, nor in the sense of denying what Dr. Freud describes as unconscious experience. These deterministic, unconscious factors certainly operate, and those of us who do therapy cannot escape having this impressed upon us many times in an hour. The issues, rather, is not against the infinite number of deterministic forces operating on every person. We shall keep our perspective clear if we agree at the outset that there are certain values in determinism. One is that a belief in determinism allies one with a powerful movement. That fact that one is most free to act energetically with abandon by virtue of being allied to a determinism is one of the paradoxes of our problem. Another value is that the determinism releases you from most of the innumerable petty and not-so-petty issues that you must settle every day; these are settled beforehand. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

A third value is that a belief in determinism overcomes your own self-consciousness: sure of yourself, you can charge ahead. For determinism in this sense is an enlarging of human experience by placing the issues on a deeper level. However, if we are true to our experience, we must find our freedom on the same deeper level. This paradox precludes our ever talking of complete determinism, which is a logical contradiction. For if it were true, there would be no need to demonstrate it. If someone does set out to demonstrate, as often used to occur in my college days, that one is completely determined, I would agree with one’s reasons and then add to one’s list a number of ways in which one is determined by unconscious dynamics which one may not be aware of and, indeed, is determined (possibly for the reason of one’s own emotional insecurity) to make the logical rebuttal that is one’s present argument is simply a result of one’s being completely determined, one is making an argument without consideration of whether it is true or false, and, therefore, that one and we have no criteria for deciding that it is true. This logical self-contradiction of complete determinism is, I believe, irrefutable. However, I would probably choose—remaining existential—rather to point out to my questioner that in the very raising of these questions, and by taking the energy to pursue them, one is exercising some significant element of freedom. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

In therapy, for a better example, no matter how much the patient is the victim of forces of which one is unaware, one is orienting one’s self in some particular way to the data in the very revealing and exploring of these deterministic forces in one’s life, and is thus engaged in some choice no matter how seemingly insignificant; one is experiencing some freedom, no matter how subtle. This does not at all mean that we push the patient into decisions. Indeed, I am convinced that it is only by the clarification of the patient’s own powers of will and decision that the therapist can avoid inadvertently and subtly pushing the patient in one direction or another. My argument is that self-consciousness itself—the person’s potential awareness that the vast, complex, protean flow of experience in one’s experience, a fact that often takes one by surprise—unavoidably brings in the element of decision at every point. I have had the conviction for a number of years, a conviction which has only been deepened by my experience as a psychoanalyst, that something more complex and significant is going on in human experience in the realm of will and decision than we have yet taken int our studies. And I am convinced that we have omitted this realm to the impoverishment of both our science of psychology and our understanding of our relations with ourselves and others. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

When we focus on God instead of on our circumstances, doubt, fear, anxiety, and negativity do not have a chance. When we magnify God instead of focusing on our difficulties, faith rises in our hearts. That will keep you fully persuaded that God will make a way, even though you do not see a way. And the beauty is that God will show up and do amazing things! In the experience of the holy, the ontological and the moral element are essentially untied, while in the life of faith they diverge and are driven to conflicts and mutual destruction. Nevertheless, the essential unity cannot be completely dissolved: there are always elements of the one type within the other, as previously indicated. In the sacramenta type o faith the ritual law is omnipresent, demanding purification, preparation, subjection to the liturgical rules, and ethical fitness. On the other hand, we have seen how many ritual elements are present in the religions of the law—the moral type of faith. This is true even of the humanist faith, where progressive and utopian elements can be found in the romantic-conservative type, while the progressive-utopian type is based on given traditions from which it criticizes the present situation and drives beyond it. The mutual participation of the types of faith in each other makes each of them complex, dynamic and self-transcending. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

The history of faith, which is more embracing than the history of religion, is a movement of divergence and convergence of the different types of faith. This is true of the act of faith as well as the content of faith. The expressions of mortal’s ultimate concern, understood subjectively as well as objectively, are not a chaos of unlimited varieties. They are representations of basic attitudes which have developed in the history of faith and are consequences of the nature of faith. Therefore, it is possible to understand and describe their movements against and toward each other and perhaps to show a point at which their reunion is reached in principle. It is obvious that the attempt to do this is dependent on the ultimate concern of the person making the attempt. If he happens to be a Christian theologian of the Protestant type, he will see in Christianity—and especially Protestant Christianity—the aim toward which the dynamics of faith are driving. This cannot be avoided, because faith is a matter of personal concern. At the same time, he who makes the attempt must give objective reasons for his decisions. Objective means in this case: derived from the nature of faith which is the same in all types of faith—if the term faith is to be used at all. Roman Catholicism rightly has called itself a system which united the most divergent elements of mortal’s religious and culture life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Its sources are the Old Testament, which itself combines the sacramental and the moral type, Hellenistic mystery religions, individual mysticism, classical Greek humanism, and the scientific methods of later antiquity. Above all, it is based directly on the New Testament, which in itself includes a variety of types and represents a union of ethical and mystical elements. A conspicuous example is Paul’s description of the Spirit. Faith, in the New Testament, is the state of being grasped by the divine Spirit. As Spirit it is the presence of the divine power in the human mind; as holy Spirit it is the Spirit of love, justice and truth. I would not hesitate to call this description the Spirit the answer to the question and the fulfillment of the dynamics which drive the history of faith. However, such an answer is not a place to rest upon. It must be given again and again on the basis of new experiences, and under changing conditions. Only if this is done does it remain an answer and a possible fulfillment. Neither Catholicism nor fundamentalism is aware of this necessity. Therefore, both have lost elements of the original union and have fallen under the predominance of one or the other side. This is the point where the Protestant protest has arisen before, during an after the Reformation of the sixteenth century. This is the point where the Protestant protest must always arise in the name of the ultimacy of the ultimate. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

The general criticism of the Roman Church by all Protestant groups was the exclusion of the prophetic self-criticism by the authoritarian system of the Church and the growth of the sacramental elements of faith over the moral-personal ones. The first point made a change of the second within the Church impossible, and so a break was unavoidable. However, the break brought about a loss of Roman sacramentalism and the uniting authority based on them. In consequence of this loss, Protestantism became more and more a representative of the mortal type of ultimate concern. In this way it lost not only the large number of ritual traditions in the Catholic churches but also a full understanding of the presence of holy in sacramental and mystical experiences. The Pauline experience of the Spirit as the unity of all types of faith was largely lost in both Catholicism and Protestantism. It is the attempt of the present description of faith to point, in contemporary terminology, to the reality of Paul’s understanding of the Spirit as the unity of the ecstatic and the personal, of the sacramental and the moral, of the mystical and the rational. Only if Christianity is able to regain in real experience this unity of the divergent types of faith can it express its claim to answer the questions and to fulfill the dynamics of the history of faith in past and future. However, how good is it to have a beautiful temple if it in is in the bowels of Hell? #RandolphHarris 17 of 17