I no longer precisely remember what it was. We were interrupted. However, I did not forget that little exchange on the shadowy margins of the ballroom as we watched the others dance. Some time earlier the so-called democratic system had, however, introduced a new technical detail into the relations between citizens and States. This was the secret vote, which though not in itself enough to change things radically, sometimes produced results which were surprising, and, as far as public order was concerned, scandalous. Though these incidents were isolated and had no immediate sequel, they were none the less disturbing. I was seven years old when the first election campaign, which I can remember, took place in my district. At that time we still has no political parties, so the announcement of this campaign was received with very little interest. However, popular feeling ran high when it was disclosed that one of the candidates was “the Prince.” There was no need to add Christian and surname to realize which Prince was meant. He was the owner of the great estate formed by the arbitrary occupation of the vast tracts of land reclaimed in the previous century from the Lake of Fucino. About eight thousand families (that is, the majority of the local population) are still employed today in cultivating the estates fourteen thousand hectares. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

The Prince was deigning to solicit his families for their vote so that he could become their deputy in parliament. The agents of the estate, who were working for the Prince, talked in impeccably liberal phrases: “Naturally,” said they, “naturally, no one will be forced to vote for the Prince, that is understood; in the same way that no one, naturally, can force the Prince to allow people who do not vote for him to work on his land. This is the period of real liberty for everybody; you are free, and so is the Prince.” The announcement of these liberal principles produced general and understandable consternation among the less affluent. For, as may easily be guessed, the Prince was the most hated person in our part of the country. As long as he remained in the invisible Olympus of the great feudal proprietor (none of the eight thousand tenants had seen him, up to then, even from afar) public hatred for him was allowed, and belonged to the same category as curses against hostile deities; such curses, through useless, are satisfying. However, now the clouds were being rent, and the Prince was coming down within reach of mortal beings. From now on, consequently, they would have to keep their expressions of hatred within the narrow circle of private life and get ready to welcome him with due honors in the village streets. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

My father seemed reluctant to accept this kind of logic. He was the youngest of several brothers, all of them less affluent proprietors; the youngest, the most restless, and the only one with any inclinations towards insubordination. One evening his older brothers came and urged him, in the common interest, to be prudent and careful. For me (to whom no one paid any attention, for grown-ups think that children do not understand such thing) it was a most instructive evening. “The prince being a candidate is a real farce,” the eldest brother admitted. “Political candidatures should be reserved for layers and other such windbags. However, as the Prince is a candidate, all we can do is support him.” “If the Prince’s candidature is a farce,” replied my father, “I do not understand why we should support him.” “Because we are his dependents, as you know perfectly well.” “Not in politics,” said my father. “In politics we are free.” “We do not cultivate politics, we cultivate the land,” they answered him. “As cultivators of the land we depend on the Prince.” “There is no mention of politics in our contracts for the land, only of potatoes and beetroots. As voters we are free.” “The Prince’s bailiff will also be free not to renew our contracts,” they answered him. “That is why we are forced to be on his side.” “I cannot vote for someone merely because I am forced to,” said my father. “I would feel humiliated.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

“No one will know how you vote,” they answered my father. “In the secrecy of the polling booth you can vote as you like, freely. However, during the electioneering campaign we must be on the Prince’s side, all of us together.” “I would be pleased to do it if I was not ashamed to,” said my father, “but, do believe me, I would be too much ashamed.” To settle it, my uncles and my father reached this compromise: he would not come out either on the Prince’s side or against him. The Prince’s election tour was prepared by the civil authorities, the police, the carabineers, and the agents of the estate. One Sunday, the Prince deigned to pass through the principal villages in the constituency, without stopping and with making any speeches. This tour of his was remembered for a long time in our district, mainly because he made it in a motorcar, and it was the first time we had seen one. The word “motorcar” itself had not yet found a place in our everyday language, and the less affluent called it a “horseless carriage.” Strange legends were current among the people about the invisible motive force which took the place of the horses, about the diabolical speed which the new vehicle could reach, and about the ruinous effect, particularly on the vines, of the stink it left behind it. That Sunday the entire population of the village had gone to meet the Prince on the road by which he was to arrive. There were numerous visible signs of the collective admiration and affection for the Prince. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

The crowds were dressed up in their best, and were in a perfectly understandable state of excitement. The “horseless carriage” arrived late, and roared through the crowd and the village, without stopping and without even slowing down, leaving a thick white dust cloud behind it. The Prince’s agents then explained, to anyone who cared to listen, that the “horseless carriage” went by “petrol vapor” and could only stop when the petrol has finished. “It is not like horses,” they explained, “where all one need do is to pull on the reins. There are not any reins at all. Did you notice any reins?” Two days later a strange little old man arrived from Rome; he wore glasses, and had a black stick and a small suitcase. Nobody knew him. He said he was an oculist and had put himself up as candidate against the Prince. A few people gathered round him out of curiosity, mainly children and women, who had not the right to vote. I was among the children, in my short trousers and with my schoolbooks under my arm. We begged the old man to make a speech. He said to us “Remind your parents that the vote is secrete. Nothing else.” Then he said, “I am poor; I live by being an oculist; but if any of you have anything wrong with your eyes I am willing to treat them for noting.” So we brought him an old woman who sold vegetables. She has bad eyes, and he cleaned them up and gave her a little phial with drops in it and explained how to use it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Then the oculist said to us (we were only a group of children): “Remind your parents that the vote is secret,” and he went away. However, the Prince’s election was so certain, to judge by the festive throngs which had welcomed him during his electioneering tour, that the authorities and the agents of the estate had announced in advance a whole program for the celebration of the inevitable victory. My father, according to the agreement with his brothers, did not side with either candidate, but managed to get himself included among the scrutineers of the ballot-papers. Great was everybody’s surprise when it became known that in the secrecy of the polling booths an enormous majority had voted against the Prince and for the unknow oculist. It was a great scandal; the authorities called it sheer treachery. However, the treachery was of such proportions that the agents of the estate could take any reprisals against anyone. After this, social life went back to normal. Nobody asked oneself: Why can the will of the people only express itself sporadically? Why can it not become a permanent and stable basis for the reorganization of public life? And yet, it would be incorrect to conclude, from a false interpretation of the episode I have just recorded, that the major obstacle was fear. Our people have never been cowardly or spineless or weak. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

On the contrary the rigors of the climate, the heaviness of the work, the harsh conditions of the struggle for existence, have made our people into one of the toughest, hardest, and most enduring peoples in the whole of Italy. So much so, that there are fewer references in our local annals to political surprises resulting from the secret vote tan there are to revolts, localized and short lived, but violent, destructive and almost savage. These humiliated and downtrodden people could endure the worst abuses without complaint, but then they would break out on unforeseen occasions. The behavioristic method is so important for the problems of aggression because most investigators of aggression in the United States of America have written with a behavioristic orientation. Their reasoning is, briefly stated: if Johnny discovers that by being aggressive his younger brother (or mother, and so on) will give him what he wants, he will become a person who tends to behave aggressively; the same would hold true for submissive, courageous, or affectionate behavior. The formula is that one does, feels, and thinks in the way that has proven to be a successful method of obtaining what one wants. Aggression, like all other behavior, is purely learned on the basis of seeking one’s optimal advantage. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

Aggression is a response that delivers noxious stimuli to another organism. There are two reasons for excluding the concept of intent from the definition of aggression. First, it implies teleology, a purposive act directed toward a future goal, and this view is inconsistent with the behavioral approach. Second, and more important, is the difficulty of applying this term to behavioral events. Intent is a private event that may or may not be capable of vernalization, may nor may not be accurately reflected in a verbal statement. One might be led to accept intent as an inference from the reinforcement history of the organism. If an aggressive response has been systematically reinforced by a specific consequence, such as a flight of the victim, the recurrence of the aggressive response has been systematically reinforced by a specific consequence, such as flight of the victim, the recurrence of the aggressive response might be said to involve an “intent to cause flight.” However, this kind of inference is superfluous in the analysis of behavior; it is more fruitful to examine directly the relation between reinforcement history of an aggressive response and the immediate situation. Furthermore, intent is both awkward and unnecessary in the analysis of aggressive behavior; rather, the crucial issues is the nature of reinforcing consequences that affect the occurrences and the strength of aggressive responses. In other words, what are the classes of reinforcers that affect aggressive behavior? #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

By “intent” one understands conscious intent. However, this does not mean we are totally unreceptive to the psychoanalytic approach: if anger is not the drive for aggression, is it fruitful to regard it as a drive? The position adopted here is that it is not fruitful. As outstanding behaviorist psychologists, we have to be much more sensitive to the phenomenon of a being’s feelings. Physical forces can determine behavior, the largely unconscious character of these forces, and awareness (insight) may be a factor which can bring about changes in the energy charge and direction of the forces. Behaviorist claim that their method is scientific because they deal with what is visible, for instance, with overt behavior. However, they do not recognize that behavior itself, separated from the behaving person, cannot be adequately described. A being fires a gun and kills the person—if isolated from the aggressor, means little, psychologically. In fact, a behavioristic statement would be adequate only about the gun; with regard to it the motivation of the being who pulls the trigger is irrelevant. However, only if we know the conscious and unconscious motivation moving one to pull the trigger, one’s behavior can be fully understood. We do not find a single cause for one’s behavior, but we can discover the physical structure inside the being—one’s character—and the many conscious and unconscious factors which at a certain point to one firing the gun. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

We find that we can explain the impulse to fire the fun as being determined by many factors in one’s character system, but that one’s act of firing the fun is the most contingent among all factors, and the least predictable one. It depends on many accidental elements in the situation, such as easy access to a gun, absence of other people, the degree of stress, and the conditions of one’s whole psychophysiological system at the moment. The behaviorist maxim that observable behavior is a scientifically reliable datum is simply not true. The fact is that the behavior itself is different depending on the motivating impulse, even though for superficial inspection this difference may not be visible. A simple example demonstrates this: each of two fathers, with different character structures, spanks his son because he believes that the child needs this kind of punishment for the sake of his healthy development. The fathers behave in what seems to be an identical manner. They slap the children with their hands. Yet, if we compare the behavior of include the study of some dreams and certain projective tests. However, one should not underestimate the knowledge in depth which a skilled observer can obtain simply by observing a person minutely for a while (including of course one’s gestures, voice, posture, facial expressions, hand and so on). #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Even without personal knowledge, diaries, letter, and a detailed history of a person, this kind of observation can be important for the understanding in depth of one’s character. If one had the opportunity, the appeal to justice may also be put on the basis of what the neurotic would be willing to do for others. If one were in the other’s position, one will point out how loving or self-sacrificing one would be, and one feels that one’s demands are justified by the fact that one asks no more from others than one would do oneself. In reality the psychology of such justification is more intricate than the neurotic oneself realizes. This picture one has of one’s own qualities is mainly one’s unconscious arrogation to oneself of the kind of conduct one would demand of others. It is not altogether a deception, however, for one has in truth certain self-sacrificing tendencies, arising from such sources as one’s lack of self-assertion, one’s identification with the underrepresented, one’s impulse to be as indulgent to others as one would have them be to one.  When the demands are put on the basis of reparation for an alleged injury, the hostility that may be present in the appeal to justice appears most clearly. The motto is: “You have made me suffer or have damaged me, and therefore you are obliged to help me, take care of me, or support me.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

This strategy is analogous to the one employed in traumatic neuroses. I have no personal experience with traumatic neuroses, but I wonder whether persons acquiring a traumatic neurosis do not belong in the category and use the injury as basis for demands which they would be inclined to make in any event. I shall cite a few examples which show how a neurotic may arouse feelings of guilt or obligation in order that one’s own demands may seem just. A wife becomes ill in reaction to a disloyalty of her husband. She does not express any reproach, perhaps does not even consciously feel it, but her illness is implicitly a kind of living reproach, intended to arouse guilt feelings in her husband and to make him willing to devote all his attention to have. Another neurotic of this kind, a woman with obsessive and hysterical symptoms, would sometimes insist on helping her sisters with housework. After a day or two she would unconsciously resent bitterly the fact that they had accepted her help and would have to lie down, with an increase of symptoms, thus forcing the sisters not only to manage without her but to have the increased work of taking care of her. Again, the impairment of her condition expressed an accusation and led to demanding reparations from others. When one of her sisters criticized her, the same person once fainted, thus demonstrating her resentment and extorting sympathetic treatment. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

One patient of mine, at a certain period of her analysis, became worse and worse, and developed the fantasy that the analysis would leave her a wreck in addition to robbing her of all her funds, and that therefore in the future I should be obliged to take complete care of her. Reactions of this kind are frequent in every kind of medical treatment, and are often accompanied by open threats to the physician. In minor degrees occurrences like the following are common: when the analyst foes on a holiday, the patient’s condition shows a marked impairment; implicitly or explicitly one would asset that it is the analyst’s fault that one has become worse and that therefore one has a special claim on the analyst’s attention. This example may easily be translated into the experiences of everyday life. As these examples indicate, neurotic persons of this kind may be willing to pay the price of suffering—even intense suffering—because in that way they are able to express accusations and demands without being aware of doing so, and hence are able to retain their feeling of righteousness. When a person uses threats as a strategy for obtaining affection one may threaten injury either to one’s self or to the other. One will threaten some kind of desperate act, such as ruining a reputation or doing violence to another one oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

Threats of suicide, or even attempts at suicide, are a familiar example. One patient of mine obtained two successive husbands by this threat. When the first man gave indications of being about to withdraw, she jumped into a river in a crowded and conspicuous part of the city; when the second seemed reluctant to marry, she opened the gas, at a time when she was sure of being discovered. Her manifest intention was to demonstrate that she could not live without the particular man. Since a neurotic hopes, by one’s threats, to obtain acquiesces to one’s demands, one will not carry them out as long as one has hopes of achieving this end. If one loses this hope one may carry them out under the stress of despair and vindictiveness. We are familiar enough in this community with the spectable of persons exulting in their emancipation from belief in the God of their ancestral Calvinism,–one who made the garden and the serpent, and preappotined the eternal fires of hell. Some of the have found humaner gods to worship, others are simply converts from theology; but, both alike, they assure us that to have got rid of the sophistication of thinking they could feel any reverence or duty toward that impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

 Now, to make an idol of the spirit of nature, and worship it, also leads to sophistication; and in souls that are religious and would also be scientific the sophistication breeds a philosophical melancholy, from which the first natural step of escape is the denial of the idol; and with the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of absolute joyousness may remain, there comes also the downfall of the whimpering and cowering mood. With evil simply taken as such, beings can make short work, for their relations with it then are only practical. It looms up no longer so spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance, as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly, and ceases to worry about their derivation from the ‘one and only Power.’ Here, then, on this stage of mere emancipation from monistic superstition, the would-be suicide may already get encouraging answers to one’s question about the worth of life. When the burden of metaphysical and infinite responsibility rolls off, there are in most beings instinctive springs of vitality that respond healthily. The certainty that you now may step out of life whenever you please, and that to do so is not blasphemous or monstrous, is itself an immense relief. The thought of suicide is now no longer a guilty challenge and obsession. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

This little life is all we must endure; the grave’s most holy peace is ever sure. I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me. Meanwhile, if only to see what tomorrow’s newspaper will contain, or what the next post-carrier will bring, we can always stand it for twenty-four hours longer. However, far deeper than this mere vital curiosity are arousable, even in the pessimistically-tending mind; for where the loving and admiring impulses are dead, the heating and fighting impulses will still respond to fit appeals. This evil which we feel so deeply is something that we can also help to overthrow; for its sources, now that no ‘Substance’ or ‘Spirit’ is behind them, are finite, and we can deal with each of them in turn. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life; they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon’s glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come. Germany, when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs of Bonaparte’s troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic and idealistic literature that the World has seen; and not till the French ‘milliards’ were disturbed after 1871 did pessimism overrun the country in the shape in which we see it today. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

This history of our own race is one long commentary on the cheerfulness that  comes with fighting ills. Or take the Waldenses, of whom I lately have been reading, as examples of what strong beings will endure. In 1485 a papal bull of Innocent VIII. enjoyed their extermination. It absolved those who should take up the crusade against them from all ecclesiastical pains and penalties, released them from any others, legitimized their title to all property which they might have illegally acquired, and promised remission of sins to all who should kill the heretics. There is no town in Piedmont where some of our brethren have not been put to death. Jordan Terbano was brunt alive at Susa; Hippolite Rossiero at Turin; Michael Goneto, an octogenarian, at Sarcena; Vilermin Ambrosiohanged on the Col di Meano; Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle, has his entrails torn from his living body at Turin; Peter Geymarali of Bobbio in like manner had his entails take out in Lucerna, and a fierce cat thrust in their place to torture him further; Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia; Magdalena Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni; Susanna Michelini was bound hand and foot, and left to perish of cold and hunger on the snow at Sarcena: Bartolomeo Fache, gashed with sabres, had the wounds filled up with quickline, and perished thus in agony. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Daniel Michelini had his tongue torn out at Bobbo for having praised God; James Baridari perished covered with sulphurous matches which had been forced into his flesh under the nails, between the fingers, in the nostrils, in the lips, and all over the body, and the lighted; Daniel Rovelli has his mouth filled with gunpowerder, which, being lighted, blew his head to pieces; Sara Rostignol was slit open from legs to the bosom, and left so to perish on the road between Eyral and Lucerna; Anna Charbonnier was impaled, and carried thus on a pike from San Giovanni to La Torre. Und dergleichen mehr! In 1630 the plague swept away one-half of the Vaudois population, including fifteen of their seventeen pastors. The places of these were supplied from Geneva and Dauphiny, and the whole Vaudois people learned French in order to follow their services. More than once their number fell, by unremitting persecution, from the normal standard of twenty-five thousand to about four thousand. In 1686 the Duke of Savoy ordered the three thousand that remained to give up their faith or leave the country. Refusing, they fought the French and Piedmontese armies till only eighty of their fighting men remained alive or uncaptured, wen they gave up, and were sent in a body to Switzerland. However, in 1698, encouraged by William of Orange and led by one of their pastor-captains, between eight hundred and nine hundred of them returned to conquer their old homes again. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

They fought their way to Bobi, reduced force sent against them; until at last the Duke of Savoy, giving up his alliance with that abomination of desolation, Louis XIV., restored them to comparative freedom,–since which time they have increased and multiplied in their barren Alpine valleys to this day. What are our woes and sufferance compared with these? Does not the recital of such a fight so obstinately waged against such odds fill us with resolution against our petty power of darkness,–machine politicians, spoilsmen, and the rest? Life is worthy of living, no matter what it brings, if only such combats may be carried to successful terminations and one’s heel set on the tyrant’s throat. To the suicide, then, in one’s supposed World of multifarious and immoral nature, you can appeal—and appeal in the name of the very evils that makes one’s heart sick—there to wait and see one’s part of the battle out. And the consent to live on, which you ask of one under these circumstances, is not the sophistical ‘resignation’ which devotees of cowering religions preach: it is not resignation in the sense of licking a despotic Deity’s hand. It is, on the contrary, a resignation based on manliness and pride. So long as your would-be suicide leaves an evil of one’s own unremedied, so long one has strictly no concern with evil in the abstract and at large. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

The submission which you demand of yourself to the general fact of evil in the World, your apparent acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at large is none of your business until your business with your private particular evils is liquidated and settled up. A challenge of this sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made to be accepted by beings whose normal instinct are not decayed; and your reflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with a certain interest again. Then sentiment of honor is a very penetrating thing. When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts have had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down their lives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together here in comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our relation to the Universe in a more solemn light. Does not the acceptance of a happy life upon such terms involve a point of honor? Are we not bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some self-denying service with our lives, in return for all those lives upon which ours are built? If one has a normally constituted heart, to hear this question is to answer it in but one possible way. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Thus, then, we see that mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and honor may make life on a purely naturalistic basis seem worth living from day to day to beings who have cast away all metaphysics in order to get rid of hypochondria, but who are resolved to owe mothing as yet to religion and its more beneficial gifts. A poor half-way stage, some of you may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant it to be an honest stage; and no being should dare to speak meanly of these instincts which are our nature’s best equipment, and to which religion herself must in the last resort address her own peculiar appeals. “And it may suffice if I only say they are preserved for a wise purpose, which purpose is known unto God; for he doth counsel in wisdom over all his works, and his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal round. O remember, remember how strict are the commandments of God. And he said: If ye will keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land—but if ye keep not his commandments ye shall be cut off,” reports Alma37.12-13. The time will come when values will change, when ambitions, powers, possessions, and acquisitions will all be put back into their proper places, when their tyranny over the will and the feelings will be put to and end. One who seeks one’s inner being, and finds it, finds also one’s inner good. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21