Randolph Harris II International Institute

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Nature Keeps Her Equilibrium by Bringing in Counter Forces, or Complementary Ones, to Correct or Balance Any Condition where to Much has Gone too Far!

ImageYou know why this disconcerts you so very much? I will tell you why! Because you never admitted to yourself that what you did in writing your books, in writing your songs, in singing your songs…you never admitted that it was all for us. You always pretended it was some great gesture to humankind and for their benefit. Wipe us out. Really! You never admitted that you were one of us, talking to the rest of us, and what you did, you as part of us! It may be argued that the working-class boy does not care what middle-class people think of him, that he is ego-involved only in the opinions of his family, his friends, his working-class neighbors. A definitive answer to this argument can come only from research designed to get at the facts. This research, in our opinion, is yet to be done. There is, however, reason to believe that most children are sensitive to some degree about the attitudes of any persons with whom they are thrown into more than the most superficial kind of contact. The contempt or indifference of others, particularly of those like schoolmates and teachers, with whom we are constrained to associate for long hours every day, is difficult, we suggest, to shrug off. It poses a problem with which one may conceivably attempt to cope in a variety of ways. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

ImageOne of the ways we may attempt to deal with the problem is by making an active effort to change oneself in conformity with the expectations of others; one may attempt to justify or explain away one’s inferiority in terms which will exculpate one; one may tell oneself that one really does not care what these people think; one may react with anger and aggression. However, the least probable response is simple, uncomplicated, honest indifference. If we grant the probable truth of the claim that most American working-class children are most sensitive to status sources on their own level, it does not follow that they take lightly rejection, disparagement and censure from other status sources. Even on their own social level, the situation is far from simple. The working class, we have repeatedly emphasized, is not culturally homogeneous. Not only is there much diversity in the cultural standards applied by one’s own working-class neighbors and kin so that it is difficult to find a working-class milieu in which middle-class standards are not important. In addition, the working-class culture we have described is, after all, an ideal type; most working-class people are culturally ambivalent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

ImageDue to lack of capacity, of the requisite character structure or of luck, they may be working-class in terms of job and income; they may have accepted this status with resignation and rationalized it to their satisfaction; and by example, by class-linked techniques of child training and by failure to support the middle-class agencies of socialization they may have produced children deficient in the attributes that make for status in middle-class terms. Nevertheless, all their lives, through all the major media of mass indoctrination—the school, the movies, the radio, the newspapers and the magazines—the middle-class powers-that-be that manipulate these media have been trying to sell them on middle-class values and middle-class standards of living, for the most part. However, TV News has become nothing but reports of crime, destruction, and anchored by talking heads who are pushing for rebellion and an abortion of American family values. Nonetheless, there is the propaganda of the deed, the fact that the middle-class powers-that-be have seen with their own eyes working-class contemporaries get ahead and make the grade in the middle-class World. In consequence of all this, we suspect that few working-class parents unequivocally repudiate as intrinsically worthless middle-class objectives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

ImageThere is good reason to believe that the modesty of working-class aspirations is partly a matter of trimming one’s sails to the available opportunities and resources and partly a mater of unwillingness to accept the discipline which upward striving entails. However complete and successful one’s accommodation to an humble status, the vitality of middle-class goals, of the American Dream, is nonetheless likely to manifest itself in one’s aspirations for one’s children. One’s expectations may not be grandiose, but ne will want one’s children to be better off than one is. Whatever one’s own work history and social reputation may be, one will want one’s children to be steady and respectable. One may exert few beneficial pressures to succeed and the experiences one provides one’s children may even incapacitate them for success; one may be puzzled at the way they turn out. However, whatever the measures of one’s own responsibility in accounting for the product, one is not likely to judge that product by unadulterated corner-boy standards. Even corner-boy parents, although they may value in their children such corner-boy virtues as generosity to friends, personal loyalty and physical prowess, are likely also to be gratified by the recognition by middle-class representatives and by the kinds of achievement for which the college-boy want of life is a prerequisite. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

ImageEven in the working-class milieu from which one acquired his incapacity for middle-class achievement, the working-class corner-boy may find himself at a status disadvantage as against his more upwardly mobile peers. Lastly, of course, is that most ubiquitous and inescapable status of sources, oneself. Technically, we do not call the person’s attitudes towards oneself status but rather self-esteem, or, when the quality of the self-attitude is specifically moral, conscience or superego. The important question for us is this: To what extent, if at all, do boys who are typically working-class and corner-boy in their overt behavior evaluate themselves by middle-class, college-boy standards? For our overt behavior, however closely it conforms to one set of norms, need not argue against the existence of effectiveness of alternative and conflicting norms. The failure of our own behavior to conform to our own expectations is an elementary and commonplace fact which gives rise to the tremendously important consequences of guilt, self-recrimination, anxiety and self-hatred. The reasons for the failure of self-expectations and overt conduct to agree are more complex. One reason is that we often internalize more than one set of norms, each of which would dictate a different course of action in a given life situation; since we can only do one thing at a time, however, we are forced to choose between them or somehow to compromise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

ImageIn either case, we fall short of the full realization of our expectations and must somehow cope with the residual discrepancy between those expectations and our overt behavior. The love of violence is, to me, the ancient and symbolic gesture of beings against the constraints of society. Vicious beings can exploit impulse as vicious. For no society is strong which does not acknowledge the protesting being; and no being is human who does not draw strength from the natural animal. Violence is the sphinx by the fireside, and she has a human face. In Truffaut’s film The Wild Child, we see a re-enactment of an actual event that took place in the eighteenth century but which has special poignancy for us here. A doctor tries to teach a savage boy who was found in the forest living as an animal to see if he can be brought back to the human condition. The affectionate Victor, as Truffaut has named the boy, learns to speak and to count in rudimentary fashion. However, these small successes and failures only add up to ambiguity. In a moment of discouragement, Truffaut as the doctor resolves to stake all on one unambiguous test to find out whether Victory is human—will the boy fight back when he is punished? Knowing that Victory accepts punishment—being shut in a closet—when he has made a mistake, Truffaut tried to shut him in the closet when he had correctly done the task he was assigned. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

ImageVictory puts up a fight because he did nothing wrong and is being shoved in a closet. With a glad sigh of recognition the doctor stats that there is present in the boy the central element which constitutes the human being. What is this element? It is the capacity to sense injustice and take a stand against it in the form of I-will-be-destroyed-rather-than-submit. It is a rudimentary anger, a capacity to muster all one’s power and asset it against what one experiences as unfair. However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguished characteristic of human beings. It is, in short, the capacity to rebel. In the present day, when multitudes of people are caught in anxiety and helplessness, they tend psychologically to freeze up and to cast out the city walls whoever would disturb their pretended peace. Ironically, it is during just those periods of transition when they most need the replenishing that the rebel can give them that people have the greatest block in listening to him. However, in casting out the rebel, we cut our own lifeline. For the rebel function is necessary as the life-blood of culture, as the very roots of civilization. First I must make the important distinction between the rebel and the revolutionary. One is in ineradicable opposition to the other. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

ImageThe revolutionary seeks an external political change, the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another. The origin of the term is the World revolve, literally meaning a turnover, as the revolution of a wheel. When the conditions under a given government are insufferable some groups may seek to break down that government in the conviction that any new form cannot but be better. Many revolutions, however, simply substitute one kind of government for another, the second no better than the first—which leaves the individual citizen, who has had to endure the inevitable anarchy between the two, worse off than before. Revolution may do more harm than good. The rebel, on the other hand, is one who opposes authority or restraint: one who breaks with established custom or tradition. His distinguished characteristic is his perpetual restlessness. He seeks above all an internal change, a change in the attitudes, emotions, and outlook of the people to whom he is devoted. He often seems to be temperamentally unable to accept success and the ease it brings; he kicks against the pricks, and when one frontier is conquered, he soon becomes ill-at-ease and pushes on to the new frontier. He is drawn to the unquiet minds and spirits, for he shares their everlasting inability to accept stultifying control. He may, as Sokrates did, refer to himself as the gadfly for the state—the one who keeps the state for settling down into complacency, which is the first step toward decadence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

ImageNo matter how much the rebel gives the appearance of being egocentric or of being on an ego trip, this is a delusion; inwardly the authentic rebel is anything but bash. True to the meaning of the rebel as one who renounces authority, he seeks primarily not the substitution of one political system for another. He may favor such political change, but it is not his chief goal. He rebels for the sake of a vision of life and society which he is convinced is critically important for himself and his fellows. Every act of rebellion tacitly presupposes some value. Whereas the revolutionary tends to collect power around himself, the rebel does not seek power as an end and has little facility for using it; he tends to share his power. Like the resistance fighters in France during the last World war, the rebel fights not only for the relief of his fellow men and women but also for his personal integrity. For him these are but two sides of the same coin. The enslaved being who kills one’s master is an example of the revolutionary. He can then only take his master’s place and be killed in turn by later revolutionaries. However, the rebel is the one who realizes that the master is as much imprisoned, if not as painfully, as he is by the institution for slavery; he rebels against that system which permits slaves and masters. His rebellion, if successful, saves the master also from the indignity of own slaves. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

ImageWe can see in the superb statues of Apollo carved at this time of Greek opulence—the archaic figure with his strong, straight form, his calm beauty of head, his ordered features which are eloquent with controlled passion, even down to the slight knowing smile on the almost straight mouth—how this god could be the symbol in which the Greek artists as well as other citizens of that period perceived their longed-for order. There is a curious feature in these statues that I have seen: the eyes are dilated, made more open than is normal in the head of living man or in classical Greek statues. If you walk through the archaic Greek room of the National Museum in Athens, you will be struck by the fact that the dilated eyes of the marble figures of Apollo give an expression of great alertness. What a contrast to the relaxed, almost sleepy eyes of the familiar fourth-century head of Hermes by Praxiteles. These dilated eyes of the archaic Apollo are characteristic of apprehension. They express the anxiety—the excessive awareness, the looking about on all sides least something unknown might happen—that goes with living in fomenting age. There is a remarkable parallel between these eyes and the eyes in the figures Michelangelo painted in another formative period, the Renaissance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

ImageAlmost all of Michelangelo’s human beings, powerful and triumphant as they appear at first glance, have on closer inspection, the dilated eyes which are a telltale sigh of anxiety. And as if to demonstrate that he is expressing the inner tensions not only of his age but of himself as a member of his age, Michelangelo in his self-portraits paints eyes that are again markedly distended in the way that is typical of apprehension. The poet Rilke also was struck by Apollo’s prominent eyes with their quality of seeing deeply. In his “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” he speaks of “…his legendary head in which the eyeballs ripened,” and then continues “…But his torso still glows like a candelabrum in which his gaze, only turned low, holds and gleams. Else could not the curve of the breast blind you, nor in the slight turn of the loins could a smile be running to that middle, which carried procreation. Else would this stone be standing maimed and short under the shoulders’ translucent plunge nor flimmering like the fell of beasts of prey nor breaking out of all its countours like a star: for there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.” In this vivid picture we note how well Rilke catches the essence of controlled passion—not inhibited or repressed passion, as was to be the goal during the later Hellenistic age of the Greek teachers who had become afraid of vital drives. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

ImageThese early Greeks, who wept and made love and killed with zest, gloried in passion and Eros and the daimonic. (Persons in  therapy nowadays, considering the strange spectacle in ancient Greece, remark on the fact that it is the strong person like Odysseus or Achilles who weeps.) However, the Greeks knew also that these drives had to be directed and controlled. It was the essence, they believed, of a man of virtue (arete) that he chooses his passions rather than be chosen by them. In this lies the explanation of why they did not need to go through the self-castrating practice of denying Eros and the diamonic, as modern Western beings do. The sense of the archaic period is shown even in Rilke’s curious last sentence, which seems at first (but only at first) to be a non sequitur: “You must change your life.” This is the call of passionate beauty, the demand that beauty makes on us by its very presence that we also participate in the new form. Not all moralistic (the class has nothing whatever to do with right or wrong), it is nevertheless an imperious demand which grasps us with the insistence that we take into our own lives this new harmonious form. Christianity actually entered the confusion of the Roman World in order to simplify it and to lighten the terrible burdens of the miscarried sexual era. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

ImageChristianity was seen as the era of the son in revolt against the oppressions and inequalities of the era of the family. Under Christianity the spiritual fatherhood of Christ took the place of biological fatherhood of the family. Christ poses a totally new and radical question: “Who are my mother and brothers?” The son was now completely independent; he could freely choose his own spiritual father and was no longer bound by the fatalities of heredity. The individual could fashion his or her own salvation, independent of any Earthly authority. Christianity was a great democratization that put spiritual power right back into the hands of the single individual and in one blow wiped away the inequalities of this dispossessed and the slaves that had gradually and inexorably developed since the breakup of the primitive World and that had assumed such grotesque proportions in the mad drivenness of the Mediterranean World. As many historical scholars have pointed out, Christianity in this sense dipped back into paganism, into primitive communalism, and extended it beyond the tribe. Christianity was seen as a new form of democratic, universal, magical self-renewal. The person recaptured some of the spiritual integrity that the primitive had enjoyed. But as in all things human, the whole picture is ambiguous and confused, far different from the ideal promise. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

ImageActually Christianity was harnessed by the state, and its power was infused into the institution of kingship to keep its authority; the attack on the fatality of biology, the accidents of heredity, was put into the service of the ideology of the family, and it reinforced patriarchy. We still see this in Roman Catholic countries today. In other words, Christianity failed to establish the universal democratic equality that it had promised historically—the reinstitution of the sacred primitive community plus a valuation of the individual person that had no existed before. Such a revolution in thought and in social forms would have kept everything that was best in the primitive World view, and at the same time it would have liberated the person from the dead weight of communal constraints and conservatism that choked off individual initiative and development. Obviously, this failure of Christianity was intimately tied up with the general problem of class, slavery, real economic inequality. This had been the tragedy that Rome herself was unable to resolve. Rome created a new type of citizen but failed to carry through and create the necessary economic equality of the families, which was the only thing that could guarantee the new structure. After all, if each being was a king in one’s own family, one had to be an equal king with all others; otherwise the designation lost all meaning. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

ImageTheoretically, the state was dedicated to this kind of democracy because it arrogate to itself the power to hid everything in balance, to checkmate competing powers and to protract the citizens against each other. In the earlier chiefdoms, the kin group still kept their power, and there was no one to keep them from feuding among themselves. The chief’s kin group was usually the strongest, and he could punish those who attacked him, but he did not monopolize force as the later state did; he could not, for example, compel the people to go to war. The crucial characteristic of the state, and the hallmark of its genuine power and tyranny, was that it could compel its subjects to go to war. And this was because the power of each family was given over to the state; the idea was that this would prevent the social misuse of power. This made the state a king of power-bank, but the state never used this power to abolish economic inequalities; as a result it actually misused the social power entrusted to it by the families and held them in unequal bondage. Christianity, too, perpetuated this economic inequality and slavishness of the would-be free, democratic citizen; and there never has been, historically, any fundamental change in the massive structure of domination and exploitation represented by the sate after the decline of primitive society. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

ImageThe Reformation was a late attempt to reassert the promise of early Christianity—true individual power and equality—but it too failed by being absorbed in the unequal state scramble. It was not until World War I that the whole stricture finally crumbled, after the rumbling blow given by the French Revolution: the patriarchal family, divine monarchy, the dominance of the Church, the credibility of the democratic state in its promise of true equality. The Soviets alone pushed several of these down a mine shaft along with the czar. We are struggling today in the mire of this very discredit of all overlapping traditional immortality symbols. The struggle actually began at the time of the Roman Empire, and we have still not resolved it. We consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make our children into our own image with a firm hand like the Romans, elbow others to get a breath-quickening glimpse of the queen in her ritual procession, and confess to the priests and attend church. And we wonder why, with all this power capital drawn from many sources, we are deeply anxious about the meaning of our lives. The reason is plain enough: none of these, nor all of them taken together, represents an integrated World conception into which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

ImageNot that promise of the ancient World and of Christianity failed completely. Something potentially great did emerge out o them: the era of psychological man. We can look at it as a development out of the era of the son. It took the form of a new kind of scientific individualism that burst out of the Renaissance and the Reformation. It represented a new power candidate for replacing all the previous ideologies of immortality, but now an almost completely and unashamedly secular one. This was a new Faustian pursuit of immortality through one’s own acts, one’s own works, one’s own discovery of truth. This was a kind of secular-humanist immortality based on the gifts of the individual. Instead of having one hero chieftain leading a tribe or a kingdom or one hero savior leading all humankind, society would not become the breeding ground for the development of as many heroes as possible, individual geniuses in great number who would enrich humankind. This was the explicit program of Enlightenment thinkers and of the ideology of modern Jeffersonian democracy. But alas it has been our sad experience that the new scientific austian being too has failed—in two resounding ways. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

ImageThese two ways of failure were represented almost all by themselves sum up the crisis of the end of our century. For one thing, modern democratic ideology simply repeated the failure of Rome and Christianity: it did not eliminate economic inequality. And so it was caught in the same fundamental and tragic contradictions as its predecessors. Second, the hope of Fustian beings was the they would discover Truth, obtain the secret to the workings of nature, and so assure the complete triumph of beings over nature, one’s apotheosis on Earth. Not only have Faustian beings failed to do this, but one is actually ruining the very theater of one’s own immortality with one’s own poisonous and madly driven works; once one had eclipsed the sacred dimensions, one had only the earth left to testify to the value of one’s life. This is why, I think, even one-dimensional politicians and bureaucrats, in both capitalist and communist countries, are becoming anxious about environmental collapse; the Earth is the only area of self-perpetuation in the new ideology of Faustian beings. “Hello, son, you are ready to come into the end? We cannot wait to hold you and rock you to sleep in your rocking chair. Before you know it, you will be standing, crashin ‘round the house like bandits, all day. You cannot get in to too much trouble, nothing gonna stop me from loving you always. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Image“My wild, wild son, run free. Oh, you will know it when you are were you are supposed to be. Oh, my wild, wild, son, run free. Oh, you will know it when you are living out your dream. Someday when you leave the house and the open road calls, just know your heart will not lie to you if you learn to listen close. When you meet your queen, go, get her make sure that she knows you will love her always, ‘fore you know it, your own child’s standing. You can crash around with them like bandits all day,” (Wild, Wild Son by Armin van Buuren). When you power is developed and accumulated it can then transmute and purify the energy of others so that it can be harnessed and channeled according to intent. We study God’s word to make sure that we have been adequately conditioned to raise our own store of personal power, and that way we are less likely to become a parasite. This kind of work should be employed strategically to take power from people who abuse power to level the playing field a bit. With the grace of God you will enhance your chances of success in your health, career, family, and education and in all things your power focuses on will be greatly intensified. “And he hath said: Repent all ye ends of the Earth, and come unto me, and be baptized in my name, and have faith in me, that ye may be saved,” reports Moroni 7.34. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19Image

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