Oh, this was nothing short of providential! I was absolutely furious and delirious happy at the same time. I closed my focus. In any age courage is the simple virtue needed for a human being to traverse the rocky road from infancy to maturity of personality. However, in an age of anxiety, an age of herd morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non. In periods when the mores of the society were more consistent guides, the individual was more firmly cushioned in his crises of development; but in times of transition like ours, the individual is thrown on one’s own at an earlier age and for a longer period. In the past courage has been oversimplified: we suppressed our awareness of death, told ourselves that happiness and freedom would come automatically and assumed that loneliness, anxiety and fear were always neurotic and could be overcome by better adjustment. It is true that neurotic anxiety and loneliness can and should be overcome: the chief courage needed in dealing with them is in taking steps to get professional help. However, there still remain the experiences of normal anxiety which confront any developing person, and it is in confronting rather than fleeing these that courage is essential. Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as one continues to grow, to move ahead; it is they only lasting virtue. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

We do not refer chiefly to the courage needed to face external threats, such as war and destructive weapons. We refer rather to courage as an inward quality, a way of relating to oneself and one’s possibilities. As this courage in dealing with oneself is achieved, one can with much greater equanimity meet the threats of the external situation. Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration. The need for courage arises not only at those stages when breaks with parental protection are most obvious—such as the birth of self-awareness, at going off to school, at adolescence, in crises of love, marriage and the facing of ultimate death—but t every step in between as one moves from the familiar surroundings over frontiers into the unfamiliar. Courage, in its final analysis, is nothing but an affirmative answer to the shocks of existence, which must be borne for the actualization of one’s own nature. The opposite to courage is not cowardice: that, rather, is the lack of courage. To say a person is a coward has no more meaning than to say one is lazy: it simply tells us that some vital potentiality is unrealized or blocked. The opposite to courage, as one endeavors to understand the problem in our particular age, is automaton conformity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

The courage to be oneself is scarcely admired as the top virtue these days. One trouble is that many people still associate that kind of courage with the stuffy attitudes of the self-made mortals of the late nineteenth century, or with the somewhat ridiculous no matter how sincere “I-am-the-master-of-my-fate” theme in such a poem as “Invictus.” With what qualified favor many people today view standing on one’s own convictions is revealed in such phrases as “sticking one’s neck out.” The central suggestion in this defenseless posture is that any passer-by could swing at the exposed neck and cut off the head. Or people describe moving ahead in one’s beliefs as “going out on a limb.” Again what a picture! The only things one can do out on a limb are to crawl back again, saw the limb off and come down, dramatic as Icarus in a martyr-like and probably useless crash, dramatic as Icarus in a martyr-like and probably useless crash, or remain out on the limb, vegetating like a Hindu tree-sitter and exposed to the ridicule of a populace which does not think highly of tree-sitting, till the limb breaks off of its own dead weight. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

Both of these expressions highlight the fact that what is most dreaded is getting out of the group, protruding, not fitting in. People lack courage because their fear of being isolated, alone, or of being subjected to social isolation, that is, being laughed at, ridiculed or rejected. If one sinks back into the crowd, one does not risk these dangers. And this being isolated is no minor threat because primitive people may be literally killed by being psychologically isolated from the community. There have been observed cases of natives who, when socially ostracized and treated by their tribes as though they did not exit, have actually withered away and died. To be cut dead by social disapproval has much more truth than poetry in it. It is thus no figment of the neurotic imagination that people are deathly afraid of standing on their own convictions at the risk of being renounced by the group. What we lack in our day is an understanding of the friendly, warm, personal, original, constructive courage of a Socrates or a Spinoza. We need to recover an understanding of the beneficial aspects of courage—courage as the inner side of growth, courage as a constructive way of that becoming of oneself which is prior to the power to give oneself. Thus, when in this chapter we emphasize standing on one’s own belief, we do not at all imply living in a vacuum of separateness; actually, courage is the basis of any creative relationship. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

It takes courage not only to asset oneself but to give oneself. When we suppress anger, insofar as its direct expression is concerned, we inevitably pay some price for this denial of ourselves. As a matter of fact, the idea of suppression of anger involve some self-deceit, for we always express our anger in some way. Attempting to suppress anger is like trying to push an inflated inner tube under water. When we manage to push one side of it under, it pops out at some other point. So when we suppress the direct expression of anger it manifests itself in some indirect way. We may take it out on ourselves or others. Usually our reactions involve some form of both. There is an emotional logic in our tendency to turn our anger inward in some self-damaging expression. After all, as we have seen, we have been taught to hate and mistrust this part of ourselves. We have been taught that anger is condemnable, so when we feel angry our feelings of self-hate are increased. Some punishment of ourselves for having these feelings that we do not accept in ourselves is therefore in order. Sometimes turning anger in on oneself results in physical illness. The symptoms may be relatively simple and fleeting. Many people, for example, will develop a slight headache following a conversation in which there was more anger than they expressed or perhaps even realized. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

Often more chronic problems develop, such as ulcers or high blood pressure. Indeed, although there is much additional research to be done into the relation of anger and physical illness, it seems clear that such emotional factors can have much to do with either the onset or the progress (or both) of most physical ailments. The physical illness itself can then become a weapon for the expression of hostility, too. The wife, for example, who does not allow herself to express her anger toward her husband and children directly may mete out considerable punishment toward them as well as herself when she has frequently recurring sick headache. Depression is another frequent result of turning anger in one one’s self. Marge, a middle-aged woman, sought professional help because much of the time she was in moods of gloomy despair and because she seemed to have no motivation to do her work. Her thoughts were sufficiently suicidal that she asked the therapist to keep her supply of sleeping pills lest she take an overdose in the midst of an acute depression. As she talked, it rapidly became apparent that she had deep feelings of self-hatred stretching back into childhood, when her parents seemed to have had some need to take a very pessimistic attitude toward her, her adequacy, and the possibility of her ever amounting to anything. So sensitized had she become to this attitude that any sign of rejection or criticism by others was interpreted by her as total rejection and an indication of her complete worthlessness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

It is not surprising to learn that Marge was filled with rage about these slights, whether they were real or fancied. However, since she had also learned to despise her anger, her rage remained almost totally unexpressed and not fully experienced, since to be aware of it would be further confirmation to her of her worthlessness. Instead, the anger was converted into feelings of depression and helplessness. It was only as she was gradually able to express some anger directly in day-by-day situations that her depression slowly lifted and she became freer to devote energies to productive pursuits in her profession and in her personal life. Perhaps the most subtle but most damaging price we pay for the suppression of anger is in the gradual deadening of the self that often occurs. The child learns it is risky to express anger and even wrong and worthy of rebuke to feel angry. Yet anger-producing situations are constantly occurring. One solution to this dilemma that the child faces is gradually to shut anger out of immediate awareness. Years of practice lead to some degree of success at this task. In this process of cutting off one’s awareness of a significant part of one’s self, it is almost as though we were making a psychological command out of the biblical verse suggesting that “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” As a matter of fact, this verse is probably often quoted in ways that encourage us to keep ourselves unaware of our feelings of anger or desire of pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

Extreme examples of this tendency, which probably we all have to some extent, can be seen in advanced schizophrenic patients who seem unable to have any genuine emotional experience. It is true that such persons may occasionally appear to become enraged, and they may erupt in violence. Even then, however, there appears to be a mechanical quality to the rage. They are too emotional deadened to connect their explosion with any deep, meaningful feeling. Many of us who are not as seriously emotionally damaged as that might be described as having a slow fuse to anger. All of us probably had the experience of having an encounter with a person during which we feel vaguely uncomfortable. Later on, when the person was safely absent, we suddenly realized that we were quite angry. And then (safe again) we thought of all the things we would have liked to have said if we had only thought of them at the right moment. In addition to damaging our relationship to ourselves, we also pay a price in our relationship to others when we suppress our feelings of anger, for almost invariably we find some way of taking our anger out on them. Behind most anger is hurt, resentment, or frustration. If you dig deep enough into the anger that you have felt, one of these three roots will probably be there. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8