There was something altogether more Nordic and icy about him than there was about Lestat, whose hair tended more to golden, for all its luminous highlights, and whose eyes were forever prismatic, drinking up the colors around him, becoming even a gorgeous violent with the slightest provocation from the worshipful outside World. In Marius, I saw the sunny skies of the northern wilderness, eyes of steady radiance which rejected any outside color, perfect portals to his own most constant soul. In official circles, the very term itself, “the public”—as Walter Lippmann noted eight seven years ago—has come to have a phantom meaning, which dramatically reveals its eclipse. From the standpoint of the deciding elite, some of those who clamor publicly can be identified as Labor, others as Business, still others as Farmer. Those who can not readily be so identified make up The Public. In this usage, the public is composed of the unidentified and the non-partisan in a World of defined and partisan interest. It is socially composed of well-educated salaried professionals, especially college professors; of non-unionized employees, especially white-collar people, along with self-employed professionals and small business people. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
In this faint echo of the classic notion, the public consists of those remnants of the middle class, old and new, those interests are not explicitly defined, organized, or clamorous. In a curious adaption, the public often becomes, in fact, the unattached expert, who, although well informed, has never taken a clear-cut, public stand on controversial issues which are brought to a focus by organized interests. These are the public members of the board, the commission, the committee. What the public stands for, accordingly, is often a vagueness of policy (called open-mindedness), a lack of involvement in public affairs (known as reasonableness), and a professional disinterest (known as tolerance). Some such official members of the public, as in the field of labor-management meditation, start out very young and make a career out of being careful to be informed but never taking a strong position; and there are many others, quite unofficial, who take such professionals as a sort of model. The only trouble is that they are acting as if they were disinterested judges but they do not have the power of judges; hence their reasonableness, their tolerance, and their open-mindedness do not often count for much in the shaping of human affairs. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
All those trends that make for the decline of the politician and of his or her balancing society bear decisively upon the transformation of public into mass. One of the most important of the structural transformations involved is the decline of the voluntary association as a genuine instrument of the public. As we have already seen, the executive ascendancy in the economic, military, and political institutions has lowered the effective use of all those voluntary associations which operate between the state and the economy on the one hand, and the family and the individual in the primary group on the other. It is not only that institutions of power have become large-scale and inaccessibly centralized; they have at the same time become less political and more administrative, and it is within this great chance of framework that the organized public has waned. In terms of organization, the transformation has become underpinned by the shift from the individual and one’s primary community to the voluntary association and the mass party as the major units of organized power. Voluntary associations have become larger to the extent that they have become effective; and to just that extent they have become inaccessible to the individual who would shape by discussion the policies of the organization to which one belongs. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Accordingly, along with the older institutions, these voluntary associations have lost their grip on the individual. As more people are drawn into the political arena, these associations become mass in scale; and as the power of the individual becomes more dependent upon such mass associations, they are less accessible to the individual’s influence. Mass democracy means the struggle of powerful and large-scale interest groups and associations, which stand between the big decisions that are made by state, corporation, army, and the will of the individual citizens as a member of the public. Since these middle-level associations are the citizen’s major link which decision, one’s relation to them is of decisive importance. For it is only through them that one exercises such power as one may have. The gap between the members and the leaders of the mass association is becoming increasingly wider. As soon as a being get to be a leader of an association large enough to count one readily becomes lost in an instrument of that association. One does so in the interests of maintaining one’s leading position in, or rather over, one’s mass association and so one does so because one comes to see oneself not as a mere delegate, instructed or not, of the mass association one represent, but as a member of an elite comped of such beings as oneself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
These facts, in turn, lead to the big gap between the terms in which issues are debated and resolved among members of this elite, and the terms in which they are presented to the members of the various mass associations. For the decisions that are made must take into account those who are important—other elites—but they must be sold to the mass memberships. The gap between speaker and listener, between power and public, leads less to any iron law of oligarchy than to the law of the representative of others in a professional capacity: as the pressure group expands, its leaders come to organize the opinions they represent. So elections, as we have seen, become contests between two giant and unwieldy parties, neither of which the individual can truly feel that one influences, and neither of which is capable of winning psychologically impressive or politically decisive majorities. And, in all this, the parties are of the same general form as other mass associations. When we say that a being in the mass is without any sense of political belonging, we have in mind a political fact rather than merely a style of feeling. We have in mind a certain way of belonging to a certain kind of organization. The way of belonging here rests upon a belief in the purposes and in the leaders of an organization, and thus enables men and women freely to be at home within it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
To belong in this way is to make the human association a psychological center of one’s self, to take into our conscience, deliberately and freely, its rules of conduct and its purposes, which we thus shape and which in turn shape us. We do not have this kind of belonging to any political organization. The kind of organization we have in mind is a voluntary association which has three decisive characteristics: first, it is a context in which reasonable opinions may be formulated; second, it is an agency by which reasonable activities may be undertaken; and third, it is a powerful enough unit, in comparison with other organizations of power, to make a difference. It is because they do not find available association at once psychologically meaningful and historical effective that beings often feel uneasy in their political and economic loyalties. The effective units of power are not the huge corporation, the inaccessible government, the grim military establishment. Between these, on the one hand, and the family and the small community on the other, we find no intermediate associations in which beings feel secure and with which they feel powerful. There is little live political struggles. Instead, there is administration from above, and the political vacuum below. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
The primary publics are now either so small as to be swamped, and hence give up; or so large as to be merely another feature of the generally distant structure of power, and hence in accessible. Public opinion exists when people who are not in the government of a country claim the right to express political opinions freely and publicly, and the right that these opinions should influence or determine the policies, personnel, and actions of their government. In this formal sense there has been and there is a definite public opinion in the United States. And yet, with modern developments this formal right—when it does still exist as a right—does not mean what it once did. The older World of voluntary organization was as different from the World of the mass organization, as was Tom Paine’s World of pamphleteering from the World of the mass media. Since the French Revolution, conservative thinkers have Viewed With Alarm the rise of the public, which they called the masses, of something to that effect. “The populace is sovereign, and the tide of barbarism mounts,” wrote Gustave Le Bon. “The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of the kings,” and already “the destinies of nations are elaborated at the present in the heart of the masses, and no longer in the councils of princes.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
During the twentieth century, liberal and even socialist thinkers have followed suit, with more explicit references to what we have called the society of masses. From Le Bon to Emil Leader and Ortega y Gasset, they have held that the influence of the mass is unfortunately increasing. However, surely those who have supposed the masses to be all powerful, or at least well on their way to triumph, are wrong. In our time, as Chakhotin knew, the influence of autonomous collectivities within political life is in fact diminishing. Furthermore, such influence as they do have is guided; they must now be seen not as publics acting autonomously, but as masses manipulated at focal points into crowds of demonstrators. For as publics become masses, masses sometimes become crowds; and, in crowds, the physical rape by the mass media is supplemented up close by the harsh and sudden harangue. Then the people in the crowd disperse again—as atomized and submissive masses. For the primitive the gift was a part of the stream of nature’s bounty. Many people today think that the primitive saw the World more under the aspect of miracle and awe than we do, and so one appreciated elemental things more than we do. In order to recapture this was of looking at nature, we moderns usually have to experience a breakdown and rebirth into naïve perception. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
When asked about what Christianity means to some, many people say it is about the search for the elements of bread and wine. However, we do not need to romanticize about primitive (whether truly or not) in order to understand one’s valuation of nature’s bounty. We saw that the main organismic motive was self-perpetuation; its is logical that when self-perpetuation became a conscious problem at the level of being one naturally tended to value those things that gave one the power to endure, those things that incorporated the Sun’s energy and that gave warmth and life. The original sacrifice is always food because this is what one wants from the gods as the basis for life. “Give us our daily break.” Furthermore, if food contains power, it is always more than itself, more than a physical thing: it has a mysterious inner essence or spirit. Milk is the essence of the cow, shark’s teeth are the essence of the shark’s vitality and murderousness, and so forth. So when the primitive being gave these things as gifts, one did not give a dead thing, a mere object as it appears to us—but a piece of life, of spirit, even a part of oneself because one was immersed in the stream of life. The gifts had mana power, the strength of supernatural life. This is what made the bond and allowed the stream to follow between giver and receiver: to give and then to counter-give kept the motion going, preserved the cycle of power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
This is how we are to understand the potlatch giving and one-upmanship, the destruction of quantities of goods: the eternal flux of power in the broad stream of life was generated by the greatest possible expenditure; beings wanted that stream to follow as bountifully as possible. It then became hard to distinguish who gave and who received, since all were bathed in the power of the movement: everyone participated in the powers that were opened up—the giver, the community, the gods. “I give you power so that you may have power.” The more you give, the more everyone gets. This feeling of expenditure as power is not strange to us moderns either. We want to keep our goods moving with the same obsessive dedication—BMW 4 Series automobiles, General Electric refrigerators, Cresleigh homes, and cold hard cash money. If the economy moves, if there is a frenzy of buying and trading on the stock market, activity in the banks and record low employment, we feel that there is health and strength in the World; and this is not only because the movement of goods piles up money in the bank, but actually reflects, I think, the sense of trust and security that the magical free-enterprise powers are working for us so long as we continue to buy, sell, and move goods. And the Trump economy has done this with the Dow Jones reaching a record high of 27,359.16 on 15 July 2019. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
China is experiencing the same thing as it continues to rack up one of the most enviable growth rates in the World. Consumers continue to trade up to more expensive premium goods and some companies are registering record sales. And as China looks to shift its export dependent community to a greater reliance on domestic consumption, the total number of affluent consumers in China is expected to read 280 million by 2020—more than doubling the current total of 120 million. Affluent people are described and households with disposable incomes of between $20,000 and $1 million. Disposable income is money left over after taxes are taken out of your paycheck, but many people also define disposable income as the money you have left over after taxes and other bills such as mortgage, car payment, student loans and electric bill have been paid. The upper affluent in China—those earning between $40,000 and $1 million per year will account for 40 percent of the 280 million. There are 327 million people in the Untied States and the affluent in China, by year 2020, will match 86 percent of the total United States of America population. So the sense of exhilaration and self-celebration in China is a movement of production and consumption of goods. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Like the primitive men and women, modern beings feel that one can prosper only if one shows that one already has power. Yet of course in its one-dimensionality this is a caricature on the primitive potlatch, as much of modern power ideology is; it has no anchor in the invisible World, in the deference to the gods. Primitive beings gave to the gods. This is the origin of trade: the fact the one group made offerings to the gods of their kinsmen and vice versa. This led to the exchange of different groups, and in it we see the direct motive of the creation of a surplus for exchange. The exchange of offerings was always a kind of contest—who could give the most to their gods of their kinsmen. We can see that this did for a person: it gave one a contest in which one could be victorious if one’s offerings of surplus exceeded those of the clan. In a word, it gave one cosmic heroism, the distinction of releasing the most power in nature for the benefit of all. One was a hero in the eye not only of the gods but also o beings; one earned social honor, the right to crow. One was a big power being. Thus we can see in gift giving and potlatch the continuation of the triumph of the hunter, but not in the creation and distribution of one’s own fabricated surplus. This state of things is called narcissistic capitalism: the equation of wealth with magic power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
And so all this seemingly useless surplus, dangerously and painstakingly wrought, yields the highest usage of all in terms of power. Humans, the animals who knows they are not safe here, who need continued affirmation of one’s powers, is one animal who is implacably driven to work beyond animal needs precisely because one is not a secure animal. The origin of human drivenness is religious because beings experience creatureliness; the amassing of a surplus, then, goes to the very heart of human motivation, the urge to stand out as a hero, to transcend the limitations of the human condition and achieve victory over impotence and finitude. We see, too, that in the strict utilitarian sense in which we understand the term, primitive work cannot be economic; for instance, our common ownership and collective enterprise in which the person is a partner do not do justice to the multidimensionality of the primitive World. Primitive beings worked so that one could win a contest in which the offering was made to the gods; one got spiritual merit for one’s labors. I suppose early Calvinism was an echo of this performance for the eyes of beings and the gods, but without the continual giving, the redistribution of the most goods. Big men in primitive society were those who gave away the most, had nothing for themselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Sometimes a chief would even offer his own life to appease an injured party in a quarrel; one’s role was often nothing else than to be a vehicle for the smooth flow of life in the tribe. (The resemblance of historical Calvinism ends abruptly at this kind of performance for spiritual merit.) This reveals a central fact about social life: primitive beings immersed themselves in a network of social obligations for psychological reasons. Beings have to have a core psychological motive for being in the group in the first place, otherwise one would not be a group-living animal. Or, to call a spade a space, beings entered social organizations in order to share guilt. You know fat meat is greasy, and trying to hide the truth from some people is like trying to hide Sunrise from a rooster. Social organizations is a structure of shared guilt…a symbolic mutual confession of guilt. And so in one sweep we can understand how primitive economics is inexorably sacred, communal, and yet psychologically motivated at the same time. We must accept that facts that human beings reveal themselves in art and literature and philosophy, and by profiting from the insights of the particular cultural movements which express the anxiety and conflicts of contemporary beings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
It is also important here to remind ourselves that every scientific method rests upon philosophical presuppositions. These presuppositions determine not only how much reality the observer with this particular method can see—they are indeed the spectacles through which one perceives—but also whether or not what is observed is pertinent to real problems and, therefore, whether the scientific work will endure. It is a gross, albeit common, error to assume naively that one can observe facts best if one avoids all preoccupation with philosophical assumptions. All one does, then, is mirror uncritically the particular parochial doctrines of one’s own limited culture. The result in our day is that science gets identified with methods of isolating factors and observing them from an allegedly detached house base—a particular method which arose out of the split between subject and object made in the seventeenth century in Western culture and then developed into its special compartmentalized form in the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. We in our day are no less subject to methodolatry than are members of any other culture. However, it seems especially a misfortune that our understanding in such a crucial area as the psychological study of beings, with the understanding of emotional and mental health depending upon it, should be curtailed by uncritical acceptance of limited assumptions. Science offers more leeway than graduate students are permitted to realize. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Is not the essence of science the assumption that reality is lawful and, therefore, understandable, and is it not an inseparable aspect of scientific integrity that any method continuously criticize its own positions? The only way to widen one’s blinders is to analyze one’s philosophical assumptions. In my judgment it is very much to the credit of the psychiatrists and psychologists in this existential movement that they seek to clarify their own bases. This enables them to see their human subjects with a fresh clarity and to shed original light on many facets of psychological experience. “Know ye not that ye are in the hands of God? Know ye not that he hath all power, and at his great command the Earth shall be rolled together as a scroll? Therefore, repent ye, and humble yourselves before him, lest he shall come out in justice against you—least a remnant of the seed of Jacob shall go forth among you as a lion, and tear you in pieces, and there is none to deliver,” reports Mormon 5.23-24. God not only has developed all his forces to their highest degree of maturity but also has attained a perfect equilibrium of them. The masses who turn to such a figure will receiver the inspiration to be received, and are functioning on a higher level as their psyche is ruled by reality. Because some holy being have been uncouth, unkempt, uncivilized, uneducated, and unmannerly, it is foolish to connect them with holiness. They were simply barbarians. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Randolph Harris II International 