New opinion are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. Some psychiatrists believe that humans are much more destructive and much crueler than animals. Animals are not sadistic; animals are not enemies of life. However, human history is a chronicle of unimaginable cruelty and destructiveness. That record gives us no reason to make light of the strength and intensity of human aggressiveness. However, I also think that the rots of our aggressiveness do not go back to our terrestrial nature, our instincts, and our past, but that human aggressiveness, to the extent that it is greater than that of animals, can be explained by the specific conditions of human existence. Aggressiveness, or destructiveness is an evil; it is not just a “so-called” evil. However, it is human. It is potential present in humans, present in all of us, and it will come to the fore if our development does not take better, more mature directions. The human “extra” of aggression, that measure of aggression in humans that exceeds animal aggression, is rooted in human character. I do not mean character here in a legal sense but in a psychoanalytical sense: character as a system of relationships that link an individual to the World. By character I mean what humans have created to replace the animal instincts that are only minimally developed in one. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

What I am saying about character here may sound somewhat theoretical, but if you look back on your own experience I am sure that many of you will understand precisely what I am driving at when I speak of character in that sense. You will surely have come across people whom you would identify as having a sadistic character. And you will also have met others would characterize as “kindly.” When you make those judgments you are not saying that this person once did something sadistic or that that one was once very friendly. You are referring instead to a quality of character that runs through the individual’s entire life. There are sadistic individuals who never do anything sadistic because they never have the opportunity to, and only a very few acute observer will ever catch them red-handed in some small sadistic act. Conversely, there are character that are not basically destructive, yet individuals of this kind may shoot someone else down in a fit of rage or despair. However, that does not by any means indicate that their characters are essentially destructive. If we assume that human, that is, rooted in human’s specifically human condition and not in one’s primitive past, then we can avoid a logical paradox that the theoreticians of instinct cannot escape, try as they might. They claim that human’s greater aggressiveness can be explained from the lesser aggressiveness of animals. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

  How can that be? We cannot assume that what a human has inherited from their primitive past has made them much more and aggressive and destructive than animals have ever been. The more logical conclusion is that human behaviour that differs from animal behaviour—in this case, human’s greater cruelty—is not something humans have inherited from their primitive past but something originating in the specific conditions of human existence. However, now let me make a few remarks about animal aggressiveness. Animal aggressiveness is attuned to biological needs. It serves the survival of the individual and of the species, and it is mobilized whenever there is an external threat to the animal’s vital interests, for example, whenever one is faced with a threat to one’s life, one’s food, one’s relations with animals of the opposite gender, one’s territory, or the like. If threatened, animals—and human beings—will react with either aggressiveness or flight. If no threat is present, no aggression will be mobilized. Aggressiveness is present in the brain as a mechanism that can be activated at any time but does not accumulate and does not have to be vented in actions if there is no particular stimulus or occasion for such behaviour. It does not, in other words, reflect the “hydraulic” model. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

When the neurophysiologist Hess showed which centers or which areas of the brain produced aggressiveness when the appropriate stimuli were present and when a threat to vital interests mobilized those centers, he was the first to make it very clear that animal aggressiveness does not reflect the hydraulic model. The aggressiveness of predators is a different matter. Predators attack to obtain their food. That predatory aggressiveness is located, neurophysiologically, in enters of the brain different from the ones that control defensives aggression. On the whole, then, we find that animals are generally not very aggressive at all, unless they happen to be threatened. Blood is rarely spilled among animals, even when they actually fight. Observation of chimpanzees, sacred baboons, and other primates has shown how extraordinarily peaceful the social life of those primate actually is. We can probably safely say that if humanity displayed no more aggression than the chimpanzees, we would not have to worry about war and aggression at all. The same is true of wolves. Wolves are predators, and if they attack a sheep, they are of course aggressive. Human beings imagine the wolf to be an incredibly aggressive creature. However, in doing so they confuse one’s aggressiveness in finding food with one’s aggressiveness when one is not hunting for food. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18Wolves among themselves are not the least bit aggressive; they are downright friendly. It is therefore unjust to characterize human aggressiveness by comparing it with aggressiveness among wolves, as we do when we say that one man behaved toward another as one wolf did toward another (homo homini lupus). We could possibly say “as a wolf behaved toward a sheep” but not “as a wolf did toward a wolf.” We can see, then, that animal aggressiveness does not follow the hydraulic model. As long as the animal is not threatened, there is no constantly increasing aggressiveness that finally produces an explosion. To put it another way, human aggressiveness is a possibility provided by biology and present in the brain, but its activation is not a necessity. It will not manifest itself unless the need for self-preservation sets it in motion. That is an important difference from the behaviouristic thesis holding that aggressiveness is a learned trait and that it is circumstances and circumstances only that make people aggressive. Things are not that simple either, for if aggressiveness could be taught by circumstances, it could not move into action as quickly and intensely as it does and as it in fact must. The reality is that aggressiveness is a biological given, a possibility that is present and that can be mobilized very quickly. All the neurophysiological mechanisms necessary for its activation are there and functional in us, but, as I have said, they have to be mobilized first, and without mobilization they need not go into action. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Let me illustrate the point with a graphic example. If, for self-defense, someone keeps a revolver next to one of one’s bed at night or in one’s desk during the day, that does not mean one intends to shoot that revolver all the time. However, it does mean that one will use it in case of danger. That is precisely the way the physiology of our brain is organized. There is a revolver present in out brain, as it were, always ready for quick action in case of an attack. However, contrary to what the instinct theory claims, the existence of that state of preparedness does not result in a piling up of aggression that eventually has to explode. Then, too, Hess and other neurophysiologists have found that animals respond to danger not only with attacks but also with flight. Attack is the last resort the animal takes when its chances of flight are cut off. Only then does it attack; only then does it fight. And if we are to speak of an “aggressive instinct” in human beings, then we must also speak of a flight instinct as well. If the proponents of a theory of aggression and of instinct say humans are constantly prodded on by aggressive feelings that one can control only when the greatest of difficulty, we are obliged to add that humans are also motivated by an almost irresistible urge to flee, and this impulse, too, can be controlled only with the greatest of difficulty. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Anyone who has ever observed combat knows very well how strong the human impulse to flee is. Otherwise we would not need the laws that often punish military desertion with death. In other words, the human brain provides us with two possibilities for reacting to an attack: We can fight or we can flee. However, both the flight impulse and the attack impulse remain inactive if there is no threat, and they do not automatically produce a constantly active and ever-increasing tendency for aggression or flight. We have seen that the “hydraulic” theory of aggression is not tenable. Neurophysiological findings show that neither human or animal aggressiveness is a constantly growing, spontaneously self-activating drive but is mobilized by stimuli carrying a threat to either the human being’s or the animal’s existence or vital interests. However, there are reasons other than physiological ones that make the “hydraulic” theory untenable. It collapses, too, in the face of facts we can marshal from anthropology, paleontology, psychiatry, and social psychology. If the theory were correct, then we would expect that on the whole aggressiveness would be about the same in all individuals and in all cultures and societies. We would, of course, make allowance—as we do with intelligence—for differences in intensity, relatively small though those differences are. However, by and large people everywhere should display the same amount of aggressiveness and destructiveness. However, that is simply not the case. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Perhaps even more impressive than our knowledge of groups is the knowledge which is accumulating in the behavioural sciences as to the conditions which will be followed by specified types of behaviour in the individual. It is the possibility of scientific prediction and control of individual behaviour which comes closet to the interest of each one of us. Let us look at scattered bits of this type of knowledge. We know how to set up the conditions under which many individuals will report as true, judgments which are contrary to the evidence of their senses. And when a person is led to believe that everyone else in the group has an opinion, then one has a strong tendency to go along with this judgment, and in many instances does so with a real belief in one’s false report. Not only can we predict that a certain percentage of the individuals will thus yield, and disbelieve their own senses, but we can also determine the personality attributes of those who will do so, and by selection procedures would be able to choose a group who would almost uniformly give in to these pressures for conformity. We know how to change the opinions of an individual in a selected direction, without one’s ever becoming aware of the stimuli which changed one’s opinion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

A static, expressionless portrait of a man was flashed on a screen by Smith, Spence and Klein. Then they intermittently flashed the word “angry” on the screen, at exposures so brief that the subjects were consciously completely unaware of having seen the word. They tended, however, to see the face as becoming more angry. When the word “happy” was flashed on the screen in similar fashion, the viewers tended to see the face as becoming more happy. Thus they were clearly influenced by stimuli which registered at a subliminal level, stimuli of which the individual was not, and could not be, aware. We know how to influence psychological moods, attitudes, and behaviours, through drugs. For this illustration we step over into the rapidly developing borderline area between chemistry and psychology. Fromm drugs to keep awake while driving or studying, to so-called “truth serum” which reduces the psychological defenses of the individual, to the chemotherapy now practiced in psychiatric wards, the range and complexity of the growing knowledge in this field is striking. Increasingly there are efforts to find drugs with more specific effects—a drug which will energize the depressive individual, another to calm the excited, and the like. Drugs have reportedly been given to soldiers before a battle to eliminate fear. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Trade names for the tranquilizing drugs such as Miltown have already crept into our language, even into our cartoons. While much is still unknown about this field, in the not-too-distant future, the motivational and emotional conditions of normal life will probably be maintained in any desired state through the use of drugs. While this seems to be a somewhat exaggerated view, this prediction could be partially justified. We know how to provide psychological conditions which will produce vivid hallucinations and other abnormal reactions in the thoroughly normal individual in the waking state. This knowledge came about as the unexpected by-product of research at McGill University. It was discovered that if all channels of sensory stimulation are cut off or muffled, abnormal reactions follow. If healthy subjects lie motionless, to reduce kinaesthetic stimuli, with eyes shielded by translucent goggles which do not permit perception, with hearing largely stifled by foam rubber pillows as well as by being in a quiet cubicle, and with tactile sensations reduced by cuffs over the hands, then hallucinations and bizarre ideation bearing some resemblance to that of the psychotic occur withing forty-eight hours in most subjects. What the results would be if the sensory stifling were continued longer is not known because the experience seemed so potentially dangerous that the investigators were reluctant to continue it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

We know how to use a person’s own words to open up whole troubled areas in one’s experience. When a recorded therapeutic interview with a patient, brief statements by the patient which seem significantly related to the underlying dynamics of the case. Such a brief statement is then put on a continuous tape so that it can be played over and over. When the patient hears one’s own significant words repeated again and again, the effect is very potent. By the time it has been repeated twenty or thirty times the patient often begs to have it stopped. It seems clear that it penetrates the individual’s defenses, and opens up the whole psychic area related to that statement. For example, a woman who feels very inadequate and is having marital difficulties, talked about her mother in one interview, saying of her, among other things, “That is what I cannot understand—that one could strike at a little child.” This recorded sentence was played over and over to her. It made her very uneasy and frightened. It also opened up to her all her feelings about her mother. It helped her to see that “not being able to trust my mother not to hurt me has made me mistrustful of everybody.” This is a very simple example of the potency of the method, which can not only be helpful but which can be dangerously disorganizing if it penetrates the defenses too deeply or too rapidly. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

We know the attitudes which, if provided by a counselor or a therapist, will be predictably followed by certain constructive personality and behaviour changes in the client. Studies we have completed in recent years in the field of psychotherapy justify this statement. The findings from these studies may be very briefly summarized in the following way. If the therapist provides a relationship in which one is a genuine, internally consistent; acceptant, prizing the clients as a person of worth; empathically understanding of the client’s private World of feelings and attitudes; then certain changes occur in the client. Some of these changes are; the client becomes more realistic in one’s self-perceptions; more confident and self-directing; more beneficially valued by oneself; less likely to repress elements of one’s experience; more mature, socialized and adaptive in one’s behaviour; less upset by stress and quicker to recover from it; more like the healthy, integrated, well-functioning person in one’s personality structure. These changes do not occur in a control group, and appear to be definitely associated with the client’s being in a therapeutic relationship. We know how to disintegrate a being’s personality structure, dissolving one’s self-confidence, destroying the concept one has of oneself, and making one dependent on another. We have an accurate study of the process popularly know as “brainwashing.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The study has shown that no magical nor essentially new methods have been used, but mostly a combination of practices have been developed for brainwashing by rule of thumb. What is involved is largely a somewhat horrifying reversal of the conditions of psychotherapy briefly noted above. If the individual under suspicion is rejected and isolated for a long time, then one’s need for a human relationship is greatly intensified. The interrogator exploits this by building a relationship in which one shows mostly non-acceptance, and does all one can to arouse guilt, conflict and anxiety. One is acceptant toward the subject only when the subject cooperates by being willing to view events through the interrogator’s eyes. One is completely rejecting of the subject’s internal frame of reference, or personal perception of events. Gradually, out of ones need for more acceptance, the subject comes to accept half-truths as being true, until little by little one has given up one’s own view of one’s self and of one’s behaviour and has accepted the viewpoint of one’s interrogator. One is very much demoralized and disintegrated as a person, and largely the puppet of the interrogator. One is then willing to “confess: that one is an enemy of the state, and has committed all kinds of treasonable acts which wither one has not done, or which actually had a very different significance. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

In a sense it is misleading to describe these methods as a product of the behaviour sciences. They were developed by the police, not by scientists. Yet I include them here since it is very clear that these crude methods could be made decidedly more effective by the means of scientific knowledge which we now possess. In short our knowledge of how personality and behaviour may be changed can be sued constructively or destructively, to build or to destroy persons. Remember the story in the Bible, Matthew 20.12-15, about a land owner who paid all the workers equally no matter how many hours they worked? Well, at a certain state university there was a freshman English class with the typical variety of students. One the one hand there were a few conscientious and well-disciplined students who had learned good study habits in high school. They consistently did assignments, studied well for tests, and turned in well-prepared term papers on time. At the opposite end of the spectrum were the typical “party boys” who did just enough work to get by. They rarely did assignments, hardly studied for tests, and never turned in a term paper on time. And as is typical in such a class, the vast majority of students were somewhere in between. At last final exam day arrived. As expected, the disciplined students all did well, and the party boys all did poorly. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

After a couple of days, the professor posted the grades outside his office door. As the students crowded around to see what grade they had received, they were all stunned to see that everyone in the class had received an “A.” The party boys could hardly believe their good fortune, and the good students were outraged to realized that those who deserved to fail had received the same tip grade as they had. If you saw any credibility in this story you probably shared in the outrage of the hardworking students. It certainly does seem unfair that the class of “goof-offs” should receive the same grade as those who actually earned an “A.” However, what you have read is simply a modern-day version of the parable of the generous landowner we considered in the Bible story. Although I have recast the story in terms of a present-day setting, the essential elements of the two stories are identical. In both versions a group of people got far more than they deserved and received as much reward as those who had actually worked for theirs. The message even of the biblical parable strikes many people as unfair. One some speaking occasions, I have actually asked for a how of hands on the issue, and the vast majority of people have felt the landowner was unfair. People agree with those workers who labored a full twelve hours, right through the heat of the day, that they should be paid more than those who worked only one hour. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

In the strict context of labour relations (or of class grades in the modern parable), they are right that the people who worked longer should have been paid more. The landowner and the English professor both seem unfair. However, Jesus was not teaching principles of labour relations. He was teaching principles of grace. He said, “The kingdom of Heaven is like…” and proceeded to tell the parable. In effect, He said to Peter, “In the kingdom of Heaven the operative principle is not merit but grace.” One group of people did not think the landowner was unfair: the labourers who worked only one hour. Jesus did not tell us their reaction, but we can easily assume they were elated and grateful. As the day had worn on, leaving them standing unemployed in the marketplace, their hope for any pay and hence any food for their families for the day had gradually eroded. At give o’clock in the afternoon they faced an evening with no supper. Finally they were given an opportunity to earn what they assumed would be a mere pittance, one-twelfth of a day’s wages—not nearly enough to buy food for their families. It is not hard to imagine, then their joy upon receiving a day’s wages, enough to feed their families that day. They did not think about any unfairness on the part of the landowner; they considered him very generous. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

God is teaching us to be the change we want to see in the World and giving everyone grace so they can feel compelled to treat others well. “I judge that ye have faith in Christ because of your meekness; for if ye have not faith in him then ye are not fit to be numbered among the people of his church. And again, my beloved brethren I would speak unto you concerning hope. How is it that ye can attain unto faith, save ye shall have hope? And what is it that ye shall hope for? Behold I say unto you that ye shall have hope through the atonement of Christ and the power of his resurrection, to be raised unto life eternal, and this because of your faith in him according to the promise. Wherefore, if a being have faith one must needs have hope; for without faith there cannot be any hope,” reports Moroni 7.39-41. Lord Jesus Christ, pour into us the Holy Spirit promised by the Father, that He may give us life, and teach us the fulness of truth in the Mystery of the blessed and undivided Trinity; that our salvation may be perfectly accomplished by His gift, wherein consists the perfection of all virtue. O Holy Spirit of the Comforter, Who with the Father and the Son abides One God in Trinity; descend this day into our hearts, that while Thou makest intercession for us, we may with full confidence call upon our Father. May the infinite and ineffable Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, direct our life in good works, and after our passage through this World vouchsafe to us eternal rest with the righteous. Grant this, O Eternal and Almighty God. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Lord God Almighty, Thou art beforehand with men for thou hast reconciled thyself to the World through the cross, and dost beseech people to accept reconciliation. It is my responsibility to grasp thy overtures of grace, for if thou, the offended part, act first with the word of appeasement, I need not call in question thy willingness to save, but must deplore my own foolish maliciousness; if I do not come to thee as one who seeks thy favour, I live in contempt, anger, malice, self-sufficiency, and thou dost call it enmity. Thou hast taught me the necessity of a mediator, a messiah, to be embraced in love with all my heart, as king to rule me, as prophet to guide me, as priest to take away my sin and death, and this by faith in thy beloved Son who teaches me not to guide myself, not to obey myself, not to try to rule and conquer sin, but to cleave to the one who will do all for me. Thou hast made known to me that to save me is Christ’s work, but to cleave to him by faith is my work, and with this faith is the necessity of my daily repentance as mourning for the sin which Christ by grace has removed. Continue, O God, to teach me that faith apprehends Christ’s righteousness not only for the satisfaction of justice, but as unspotted evidence of thy love to me. Help me to make use of his work of salvation as the ground of peace, and thy favour to, and acceptance for me the sinner, so that I may live always near the cross. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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Rancho Cordova, CA |

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