For the time in their lives and regardless of class, people felt a strong sense of solidarity. In the face of n external threat, social differences were forgotten and the people were united. We are facing a new ethic, an ethic which will be relevant to the new age into which we are moving. Put simply, it is an ethic of intention. It is based on the assumption that each being is responsible for the effects of one’s own actions. The ultimate evil in our day is inherent in situations in which the person is prevented from taking responsibility. The future lies with the man or woman who can live as an individual, conscious within the solidarity of the human race. One then uses the tension between individuality and solidarity as the source of one’s ethical creativity. So far we have been taught to do one or the other. We have learned to accept responsibility for our convictions; but that is not enough. We have learned to accept responsibility for our convictions; but that is not enough. We have learned to accept responsibility for the sincerity of our actions; but that, too is not enough. These are both individualistic—both part of the ethic which had its roots in the Renaissance. It is worth reminding ourselves that one can be entirely sincere and firm in one’s convictions—and entirely wrong. We must accept responsibility for whether we are right or wrong. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Being human means having a soul. In fact, “everything that is self-conscious and capable of thought and love has a soul. The soul emanated from self-consciousness. The soul is the expression of the self-consciousness. When you began to think and feel, a soul was formed within you as the result of your thinking and feeling,” (Page 296 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). It is hoped that one can learn to accept responsibility for their actions without the guilt on one’s hands of the killing of the mathematician or the bombing of a financial district or the killing of thousands of innocent people in Mexico. However, to do this, we must first overcome alienated concepts of personality and its alienating techniques. What is called for is not just help in achieving self-awareness, not mere explanations, but emotional experience which will help the individual to begin to feel oneself and to permit oneself more and more to be. In other words, one needs a warm, mutually trusting relationship in which for the first time one is accepted as one is, accepted with those characteristics which earlier in one’s life one had felt compelled to reject or repress. Ordinary neurotics who in trying to escape from themselves do damage chiefly to themselves. However, what about those who express their alienation by destroying others? #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Their self-esteem rests on a status and respect that comes with their positions, and it depends on their jobs, on being head of a family, or similar external factors. Nearly all of them lose their desirable characteristics of those with family values, such as their sense of propriety and self-respect. They become shiftless, and develop an exaggerated extent of undesirable characteristics: pettiness, quarrelsomeness, self-pity as they thrive on suffering, anger, resentment, sorrow, grief. It gives them delight, intoxicating delight. “They believe the gods want the blood of children and the agony of those children when they die, and the agony of their parents when they see them sacrificed. And people have been bred to feed off suffering! To feed off the grief and the pain of the victims of war and blood-soaked altars. But there is no value in suffering,” (Page 300 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). Many people who thrive off the suffering of others will eventually become depressed in an agitated way and will complain eternally. We can, in a splurge of individualism, live by our own integrity; or we can, in a splurge of solidarity, identify ourselves with a group r party that takes over our decisions for us and decides by its own rules. If it neglects the other, either way leads us into error. Held in balance, however, they constitute the two sources of ethical choice. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

From the first ethical choice should be preserved the element of the consciousness of the individual, necessary to all ethics; and from the second, the element of interpersonal responsibility, also a necessary source of all ethics. The legend of Jesus Christ and him dying on the cross is to remind us that suffering is not good and it even hurts the divine, but it is also a story that gives us hope to know that someone died for our sins and is a reminder that salvation is possible. Also, “the concept of eternal damnation that lies behind this God Incarnate-crucifixion religion—the idea that the Maker (God) of the Universe, the Maker of all Worlds, has devised a place of eternal unspeakable conscious agony for all human beings who are not redeemed through acceptance of the horrific  execution of this God Himself as His own Son in the flesh! How this God has consecrated suffering; how He has elevated unspeakable suffering as something to which He personally attaches value. He requires this Hell of eternal suffering as some sort of payment from those struggling finite humans who have disobeyed Him or failed to consecrate the suffering of God Incarnate on His fabled cross as an act of love!” (Page 305 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Human’s unlimited potential is a term one hears often, and we are adjured to fulfill it as much as possible. “For thousands of years, the people have believed this. It is the only way they can go forward in a World where there is so much suffering. They have always believed that a brave man (or woman) will suffer torment, but not give in. They want you to fight. They have bred you to fight. And when you see heroism, great heroism as in a battle, this too gives off energy, and you are energized to fight beyond your normal endurance.” (Pages 300 and 299 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). However, what tends to be missing is the recognition that this potential never functions except as it is experienced within its own limits. The error is in treating potential as if it has no limits at all, as though life’s course were perpetually onward and upward. The illusion that we become good by progressing a little more each day is a doctrine bootlegged from technology and made into a strict and rigid doctrine in ethics where is does not fit. This is the course in technology; but in ethics, in aesthetics, in other matters of the spirit, the term progress in that sense has no place. Modern beings are not ethically superior to Sokrates and the Greeks, and although we build buildings differently, we do not make them more beautiful than the Parthenon. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

The rehabilitation of disturbed persons is frequently an individual mater. However, as we are beginning to learn, the community itself and its culture may affect the nature of mental disorders and their treatment. This is suggested in our study of mental health among the Hutterites by Joseph Eaton and Robert Weil. An isolated and cohesive religious sect in the American Mid-West, the Hutterites “live a simple, rural life, have a harmonious social order and provide every member with a high level of economic security from the womb to the tomb. They are a homogeneous group, free from many of the tensions of the American melting-pot culture. And they have long been considered almost immune to mental disorders.” The Hutterite culture does not prevent mental disorders, it has almost no violence, divorce, alcoholism, or other forms of social maladjustment. More over it provides a highly therapeutic atmosphere for treatment—the whole community showing sympathy and support for the disturbed individual and all patients being looked after by their immediate families. No stigma attaches to them and they are encouraged to participate in the normal life of family and community. Modern society offers no such solidarity and consequently no such therapy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15This brings us back to our central problem: how can complex, modern societies achieve such solidarity? This question has preoccupied a host of thinkers and planners. In all communities where solidarity is achieved beings may escape from alienation, only to lose themselves in conformity to the group. Is there any way out of dilemma? While it is important to recognize that belongingness and togetherness represent a new form of tyranny, it will not do to urge upon an alienated population a meaningless freedom. The task before us is to build group cultures that will satisfy being’s yearning to reach one’s fellows without destroying one in the process. Who is to say that it cannot be done? We need a psychological foundation that will do justice to both our diversity and our particularity, our freedom and our limits. Such a foundation would view human beings in its fullness while carefully acknowledging its tragedy and incompleteness. It would honor our biological and mechanical propensities, but not at the cost of compromising our capacity to create and to transcend ordinary consciousness. Many people look a human life as though it were a Roman candle onto which you can hang to be carried higher and higher into the stratosphere, up, up, forever. However, soon the Roman candle bursts, and then where are you? #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

It is completely forgotten that joy increases to the extent that the capacity for woe does also. Humans were made for joy and woe; and when this we rightly know, through the World we safely go. Joe and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine. The awareness that human existence is both joy and woe is prerequisite to accepting responsibility for the effect of one’s intensions. My intentions will sometimes be evil—the dragon or the Sphinx in me will often be clamoring and will sometimes be expressed—but I ought to do my best to accept it as part of myself rather than to project in on you. Growth cannot be a basis for ethics, for growth is evil as well as good. Each day we grow toward infirmity and death. Many a neurotic sees this better than the rest of us: one fears growing into greater maturity because one recognizes, in a neurotic way of course, that each step upward brings one nearer to death. Cancer is a growth. It is a disproportionate growth where some cells run wild growing. The Sun is generally good for the body, but when one has tuberculosis, it is disproportionately the t.b. bacilli and therefore the affected parts have to be shielded. Whenever we find we have to balance one element against another, we find that we need other, more profound criteria than one-dimensional ethic of growth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

The question will arise: What is the relation of the ethic suggested here to our present ethical system in Christianity? Christianity has to be taken realistically, in terms of what it has become rather than what was ideally meant by Jesus. The Christian ethic evolved from the “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” system of justice present at the beginning of the Old Testament—for instance, the concept of justice attained by the balance of evils. The Christian and Hebrew ethic then shifted its focus to the inner attitudes: “As a human thinketh in one’s heart, so is one.” The ethic of love ultimately become the criterion, even to the extent of the ideal commandment: “Love your enemies.” However, in the course of this development it is forgotten that love for one’s enemies is a matter of grace. Grace is the help or strength given through the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. Through the grace of God, everyone will be resurrected—our spirits will be reunited with our bodies, never again to be separated. Through His grace, the Lord also enables those who live His gospel to repent and be forgiven. Grace is a gift from Heavenly Father given through His Son, Jesus Christ. The word grace, as used in the scriptures, refers primarily to enabling power and spiritual healing offered through the mercy and love of Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

Loving your enemies is a possible impossibility, never to be realized in a real sense except by an act of grace. It would be required grace for me to love a cruel individual. When the element of grace is omitted the commandment of loving one’s enemies becomes moralistic: it is advocated as a state an individual can achieve by working on one’s own character, a result of a moral effort. Then we have something very different: an oversimplified, hypocritical form of ethical pretense. This leads to those moral calisthenics that are based on blocking-off of one’s awareness of reality and that prevent the actually valuable actions one could make for the social betterment. The innocent person in religion, the one who lacks the wisdom of serpents, can do considerable harm without knowing it. We also tend consistently to forget the presence of the diamonic all the way through the Old Testament. Speaking of Jeremiah, when we think of the statement: to pluck up and break down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant. Such words sound strangely destructive to modern ears. However, the words spoken to Jeremiah are an enemy to all gradualism, all theories of history based upon the escalation of goodness. Can it be true that God is not a Niagara of Pablum, spilling His childish comfort upon the morally and humanly neutral, whose faces are raised blankly to partake of the infantile nourishment? “Therefore I will contend with you” [says God to Jeremiah]. It is at once the highest compliment of God and a guaranty of the dramatic and abrasive quality of life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Another thing that occurred in the cultural evolution is that the ethic of Christianity in our time became allied, especially in the last five centuries, with the individualism which emerged in the Renaissance. This increasingly became the ethics of the isolated individual, standing bravely in one’s lonely situation of self-enclosed integrity. The emphasis was on being true to one’s own convictions. This was true especially in American sectarian Protestantism, strongly assisted by the individualism cultivated by our life on the frontier. Hence the great emphasis in America on sincerity as one lived by one’s own convictions. We idealized beings such as Thoreau, who supposedly did that. Hence also the emphasis on one’s own character development, which in America seems always to have a mortal connotation. This is the character that makes one intolerable to other being. Ethics and religion became largely a matter of Saturday or Sunday, the weekdays being relegated to making money—which one always did by ways that kept one’s own character impeccable. We had then the curious situation of the being of impeccable character directing a factory that unconscionably exploited its thousands of employees. It is interesting that fundamentalism, that form of Protestantism which puts most emphasis on the individualistic habit of character, tends to be also the most nationalistic and defense-minded of the sects, and expresses supremacy in their beliefs. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

A central criticism of this ethical development is that it omitted any real inclusion of the solidarity of the human kind. The crowd, as it was called, was important in one’s moral development only as something one stood against, as something one trained one’s self not to be influenced by. We bought our own ethical achievement as solitary creates, interested in helping others only by giving from our own abundance—tithing. And since this character development fitted the capitalistic system and the habits that went into making money, one rose socially, never forgetting one’s duty to share with the less affluent. However, this rarely fooled the less fortunate, and it never got us out of our individualistic shell. What is lacking is an authentic empathy with others, an identification with the woes and the joys of those bereft of power—the groups of people who have yet to experience self-actualization, and the poor. Naturally the Marxist concern with solidarity geared to the proletariat in contrast to the self-involved middle and upper cases, achieved a vast following. It is no wonder that the Marxist emphasis on internationalism, brotherhood, and comradeship caught the imagination and emotions of a World which thirsted for just that. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

We need not—indeed, we must not—surrender our concerns with integrity and our valuing of the individual. I am proposing that our individualistic gains since the Renaissance be set in balance with our new solidarity, our willingly assumed responsibility for our fellow men and women. In these days of mass communication, we no longer be oblivious to their needs; and to ignore them is to express our hatred. Understanding, in contrast to ideal love, is human possibility—understanding for our enemies as well as our friends. There is in understand the beginning of compassion, of pity, and of charity. Granted that human potentialities are not fulfilled by a movement upward but by an increase in escape downward as well. Every step forward also digs the depths to which one can likewise go. No longer shall we feel that virtues are to be gained merely by leaving behind vices; the distance up the ladder ethically is not to be defined in terms of what we have left behind. Otherwise goodness is no longer good but self-righteous pride in one’s own character. Evil also, if it is not balanced by capacities for good, becomes more sensitive to both good and evil each day; and this dialectic is essential for our creativity. To admit frankly, our capacity for evil hinges on our breaking through pseudoinnocence. S long as we preserve our one-dimensional thinking, we can cover up our deeds by pleasing innocent. This anti-diluvian escape from conscience is no longer possible. We are responsible for the effect of our actions, and we are also responsible for becoming as aware as we can of these effects. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

It is especially hard for the person in psychotherapy to accept his or her increased potentiality for evil which goes along with the capacity for good. Patients have been so used to assuming their own powerlessness—whether truly powerless or not. Any direct awareness of power throws their orientation to life off balance, and if they were to admit their own evil, they do not know what they would do. To other people the fact that they can hurt other people seems an unthinkable thing because they are always used to being hurt by other people. Frenzy and hysteria are exactly ways of not being conscious of what one is doing. It is a considerable boon for a person to realize that one has one’s negative side like everyone else, that the diamonic works in potentiality for good and evil, and that one can neither disown it nor live without it. When one also comes to the sense that much of one’s achievement is bound up with the very conflicts this diamonic impulse engenders, it is similarly beneficial. This is the seat of the experience that life is a mixture of good and evil; that there is no such thing as pure good; and that if the evil were not there as a potentiality, the good would not be either. Life consists of achieving good not apart from evil but in spite of it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

The last lap necessarily brings one into the Silence of God which transcends intellect, but it is a silence that is rich with freedom and serenity. Here alone one may hear the wordless voice of God and, once heard, one can well afford to disregard al other voices. Although movement towards enlightenment goes forward by stages, the actual moment of enlightenment comes abruptly with a sudden transcendence of the darkness in which some ordinarily live. If one perseveres, the time will come when one’s mind will naturally orient itself toward the spiritual pole of being. And this will happen by itself, without any urging on one’s part. No outer activity will be able to stop the process, for to make it possible one’s mind will apparently double its activity. In the foreground, it will attend to the outer World, but in the background it will attend to God. Believers and doers are what we need—faithful people who are humble in the presence of the Lord…to experience the love of God is one of the purest of all experiences. This awareness of the soul’s unique, even sacred nature, is what should be instilled in all our people. “Fear not, for behold, it is God that has shown unto you this marvelous thing, in the which is shown unto you cannot lay your hands on us to slay us,” reports Helaman 5.26. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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