What the mind attends, the mind considers. What the mind does not consider, the mind dismisses. What the mind continues to consider, the mind believes. What the mind believes, the mind eventually does. The hero is merely a special complex of the ordinary qualities of one’s race. The petty differences impressed upon normal Greek minds by Plato or Aristotle or Zeno, are nothing at all compared with the vast differences between every Green mind and every Egyptian or Chinese mind. We may neglect them in a philosophy of history, just as in calculating the impetus of a locomotive we neglect the extra impetus given by a single piece of better coal. What each being adds is but an infinitesimal fraction compared with what one derives from one’s parents, or indirectly from one’s earlier ancestry. And if what the past gives to the hero is so much bulkier than what the future receives from one, it is what really calls for philosophical treatment. The problem for the sociologist is as to what produces the average person; the extraordinary person and what they produce may by the philosopher be taken for granted, as too trivial variations to merit deep inquiry. A leader has been defined as one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words. It is expressed in the choices one makes. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility. Each step on the path to a higher standard of leadership takes courage—courage to commit to absolute values and to the Universal code of conduct to treat others as ourselves. Your courage will serve as a source of inspiration to others and will help those you associate with to achieve a higher standard as well. How useless it is to go to a teacher who has only an intellectual—that is, a talking—knowledge of it, for help is clearly shown by an old story. Once upon a time a certain king developed a desire to obtain divine consciousness. He obtained a scholar as his guide. For two months he received teaching but found that he gained nothing in the actual experience of divinity. He thereupon threatened the scholar with his royal displeasure. The scholar returned home in a sorrowful state of mind. He had done his best and did not know how to satisfy the king. His daughter, who was a girl of high intelligence, saw her father’s distress and made him tell her the case. The next day she appeared at the court and informed the kind that she could throw light on his problem. She then asked him to order his soldiers to bind both herself and himself to separate pillars. This was done. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Then the girl said, “O King, release me out of this bondage.” “What!” answered the kind, “You speak of an impossibility. I myself am in bondage and how can I release you?” The girl laughed and said, “O King, this is the explanation of your problem. My father is a prisoner of this World-illusion. How can he set you free? How can you gain divinity from him?” If anyone who presents a World view really knows that one is talking about, there should be some noticeable vitality in one’s talk. If a teacher empties the purse or wallet of one’s pupils, be sure one is a false one. If one demands servility from them, one is most likely a false one. If one makes no response to someone’s approach yet has the stamp of authenticity, one may not be the particular one with whom that person can find affinity. A weakness among these cultists is that they persist in seeing their leader with a kind of character and a height of consciousness which are not sustained by the facts. One is turned into an unerring superman or even defined as a living god. One’s virtues are either exaggerated or invented, one’s most commonplace words are pondered over as if they were oracles of prophecy or epigrams of wisdom. And if they do not gift one with cosmic omniscience and total prescience, one is gifted with something like it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

The consequence is that the expectations of votaries, having been lifted too high, must fall too low when one’s personality is deflated and one’s shortcomings are exposed. Their disappointment inevitably follows. However, since not many spiritual seekers of the kind who kind who join organizations are possessed of the qualities of discrimination and intelligence, the bulk of one’s followers cling to their idol. An honest and sincere leader would be alarmed at such exaggerated worship, and do one’s utmost in self-deprecation to being it to an end. One knows that making a cult of a particular person will divert attention from the proper object of devotion. Truly enough, the details vanish in the bird’s-eye view; but so does the bird’s-eye view vanish in the details. Which is the right point of the view for philosophic vision? Nature gives no reply, for both points of view, being equally real, are equally natural; and no one natural reality per se is any more emphatic than any other. Accentuation, foreground, and background are created solely by the interested attention of the looker-on; and if the small difference between the genius and one’s tribe interests me most, while the large one between that tribe and another tribe interests others, our controversy cannot be ended until a complete philosophy, accounting for all differences impartially, shall justify both. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

There is very little difference between one person and another; but what little there is, is very important. This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter. It is not only the size of the difference which concerns the philosopher, but also its place and its kind. An inch is small thing, but we know the proverb about an inch on one’s nose. Experts in inveighing against hero-worship, are thinking exclusively of the size of the inch; I, as a hero-worshipper, attend to its seat and function. Now, there is a striking law over which few people seem to have pondered. It is this: That among all the differences which exist, the only ones that interest us strongly are those we do not take for granted. We are not a bit elated that our friendship should have two hands and the power of speech, and should practice the matter-of-course human virtues; and quite as little are we vexed that our dog goes on all fours and fails to understand our conversation. Expecting no more from the latter companion, and no less from the former, we get what we expect and are satisfied. We never think of communing with the dog by discourse of philosophy, or with the friend by head-scratching or the throwing of crusts to be snapped at. However, if either dog or friend fall above or below the expected standard, they arouse the most lively emotion. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

On our brother’s vices or genius we never weary of descanting; to one’s bipedism or one’s hairless skin we do not consecrate a thought. What he says may transport us; that one is able to speak at all leaves us stone cold. He reason of all this is that one’s virtues and vices and utterances might, compatibly with the current range of variation in our tribe, be just the opposites of what they are, while one’s zoologically human attributes cannot possibly go astray. There is thus a zone of insecurity in human affairs win which all the dramatic interest is possessed; the rest belongs to the dead machinery of the stage. This is the formative zone, the part not yet ingrained into the race’s average, but yet a typical, hereditary, and constant factor of the social community in which it occurs. It is like the soft layer beneath the bark of the tree in which all the year’s growth is going on. Life has abandoned the mighty trunk inside, which stands inert and belongs almost to the inorganic World. Layer after layer of human perfection separates me from the primitive people who pursed humans as game with cries of “meat, meat!” This vast difference ought to rivet my attention far more than the petty one which obtains between two such birds of a feather as one with contrasting ideas and myself. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Yet while I never feel proud that the sight of a passer-by awakens in me no cannibalistic waterings of the mouth, I am free to confess that I shall feel very proud if I do not publicly appear inferior to a scholar who disagrees with me in the conduct of this momentous debate. The zone of the individual differences, and of the social “twists” which by common confession they initiate, is the zone of formative processes, the dynamic belt of quivering uncertainty, the line where past and future meet. It is the theatre of all we do not take for granted, the stage of the living drama of life; and however narrow its scope, it is roomy enough to lodge the whole range of human passions. The sphere of the race’s average, on the contrary, no matter how large it may be, is dead and stagnant thing, an achieved possession, from which all insecurity has vanished. Like the trunk of a tree, it has been built up by successive concretions of successive active zones. The moving present in which we live with its problems and passions, its individual rivalries, victories, and defeats, will soon pass over to the majority and leave its small deposit on this static mass, to make room for fresh actors and a newer play. We have seen how the idealized image substitutes for true self-confidence and pride. However, there is yet another way in which it serves as surrogate. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Since the neurotic’s ideals are contradictory they cannot possibly have any obligating power; remaining din and undefined, they can give one no guidance. Here if it were not tat one’s endeavour to be one’s self-created idola gave a kind of meaning to one’s life one would feel wholly without purpose. This becomes particularly apparent in the course of analysis, when the undermining of one’s idealized image gives one for a time the feeling of being quite lost. And it is only then that one recognizes one’s confusion in the matter of ideals and that this begins to strike one as undesirable. Before, the whole subject was beyond one’s understanding and interest, no matter how much lip service one gave it; now for the first time one realizes that ideals have some meaning, and wants to discover what one’s own ideals really are. This kind of experience is evidence, I should say, that the idealized image substitutes for genuine ideals. An understanding of this function has significance for therapy. The analyst may point out to the patient at an earlier period the contradictions in one’s set of values. However, one cannot expect any constructive interest in the subject and hence cannot work on it until the idealized image has become dispensable. To a greater degree than any of the others, one particular function of the image can be held accountable for its rigidity. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

If in our private mirror we see ourselves as paragons of virtue or intelligence, even our most blatant faults and limitations will disappear or acquire attractive coloration—just as in a good painting a shabby, decaying wall is no longer a shabby, decaying wall but a beautiful composite of brown and gray and reddish colour values. We can arrive at a deeper understanding of this defensive function if we raise the single question: What does a person regard as one’s faults and shortcomings? It is one of those questions that at first sight does not seem to lead anywhere because one starts to think of infinite possibilities, while at the surface still plastic in their hands, and what whilom feasibility they made impossible—each one of us may best fortify and inspire what creative energy may lie in one’s own soul. Nevertheless there is a fairly concrete answer. What a person regards as one’s faults and shortcomings depends on what one accepts or rejects in oneself. That, however—under similar cultural conditions—is determined by which aspect of the basic conflict predominates. The complaint type, for instance, does not regard one’s fears or one’s helplessness as a taint, whereas the aggressive type looks upon one’s softer feelings as shameful, to be hidden from oneself and others. The complaint type registers one’s hostile aggressions as sinful; the aggressive type looks upon one’s softer feelings as contemptible weakness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Each type, in addition, is driven to reject all that is actually mere pretense on the part of one’s more acceptable self. The complaint type, for instance, has to reject the fact that one is not genuinely loving and generous person; the detached type does not want to see that one’s aloofness is not a matter of one’s own free choice, that one must keep apart because one cannot cope with others, and so on. Both, as a rule, reject sadistic trends. We would this arrive at the conclusion that what is regarded as a shortcoming and rejected is whatever does not fit into he consistent picture created by the predominant attitude toward others. And we could say that the defensive function of the idealized image is to negate the existence of conflicts; that is why it must of necessity remain so immovable. Before I recognized this I often wondered why it is so impossible for a patient to accept oneself as a little less significant, a little less superior. However, looked at this way the answer is clear. One cannot budge an inch because the recognition of certain shortcomings would confront one with one’s conflicts, thus jeopardizing the artificial harmony one has established. We can arrive, therefore, as the absolute correlation between the intensity of he conflicts and the rigidity of the idealized image: an especially elaborate and rigid image permits us to infer especially disruptive conflicts. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Likewise related to the basic conflict is an image with an absolute use of more than merely camouflaging the conflict’s unacceptable parts. It represents a kind of artistic creation in which opposites appear reconciled or in which, at any rate, they no longer appear as conflicts to the individual oneself. A few examples will show how this happens. The predominating aspect of X’s conflict was compliance—a great need for affection and approval, to be taken care of, to be sympathetic, generous, considerate, loving. Second in prominence was detachment, with the usual aversion to joining groups, emphasis on independence, fear of ties, sensitivity to coercion. The detachment constantly clashed with the need for human intimacy and created repeated disturbances in one’s relations with women. Aggressive drives, too, were quite apparent, manifesting themselves in his having to be first in any situation, in dominating others indirectly, occasionally exploiting them, and tolerating no interference. Naturally these tendencies detracted considerably from one’s capacity for love and friendship, and clashed as well with his detachment. Unaware of these drives, one had fabricated an idealized image that was a composite of three figures. One was the greater lover and friend—incredible that any woman could care more for another man; nobody was so kind and good as he. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

He was the greatest leader of his time, a political genius held much in awe. And finally he was the great philosopher, the man of wisdom, one of the few gifted with profound insight into the meaning of life and its ultimate futility. The image was not altogether fantastic. He had ample potentialities in all these directions. However, the potentialities had been raised to the level of accomplished fact, of great and unique achievement. Moreover, the compulsive nature of the drives had been obscured and was replaced by a belief in innate qualities and gifts. Instead of a neurotic need for affection an approval there was a supposed capacity to love; instead of a drive to excel, assumed superior gifts; instead of a need for aloofness, independence and wisdom. Finally and most important, the conflicts were exorcised in the following way. The drives which in real life interfered with one another and prevented one from fulfilling any of one’s potentialities were promoted to the realm of abstract perfection, appearing as several compatible aspects of a rich personality; and the three aspects of the basic conflict which they represented were isolated in the three figures that made up his idealized image. Another example brings into clearer relief the importance of isolating the conflicting elements. In the case of Y the predominate trend was detachment, in a rather extreme form, with all the implications described before. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

One’s tendency to comply was also quite marked, though Y himself shut it out from awareness because it was too incompatible with one’s desire for independence. Strivings to be extremely good occasionally broke forcibly through the shell of repression. A longing for human intimacy was conscious, and clashed continuously with one’s detachment. One could be ruthlessly aggressive only in his imagination: he indulged in fantasies of controlling society, wishing quite frankly to enslave all those who interfered with his life; he professed to believe in a jungle philosophy—the gospel of might makes right, with its ruthless pursuit of self-interest, was the only intelligent and unhypocritical way of living. In one’s actual living, however, he was rather timid; explosions of violence occurred under certain conditions only. His idealized image was the following odd combination. Most of the time he was a hermit living on a mountaintop, having attained to infinite wisdom and serenity. At rare intervals one could turn into a werewolf, entirely devoid of human feelings, bent on feeding. And as if these two incompatible figures were not enough, he was as well the ideal friend and lover. We see here the same denial of neurotic trends, the same self-aggrandizement, the same mistaking of potentialities for realities. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

In this instance, though, no attempt has been made to reconcile the conflicts; the contradictions remain. However—in contrast to real life—they appear pure and undiluted. Because they are isolated they do not interfere with one another. And that seems to be what counts. The conflicts as such have disappeared. One last example of a more unified idealized image: In the factual behaviour of Z aggressive trends strongly predominated, accompanied by sadistic tendencies. He was domineering and inclined to exploit. Driven by a devouring ambition, he pushed ruthlessly ahead. He could plan, organized, fight, and adhered consciously to an unmitigated jungle philosophy. He was also extremely detached; but since his aggressive drives always entangled him with groups of people, he could not maintain his aloofness. He kept strict guard, though, not to get involved in any personal relationship nor to let himself enjoy anything to which people were essential contributors. In this he successfully fairly well, because absolute feelings for others were greatly repressed; desires for human intimacy were mainly channeled along lines of pleasures of the flesh. There was present, however, a distinct tendency to comply, together with a need for approval that interfered to comply, together with a need for approval that interfered with his craving for power. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

And there were underlying puritanical standards, used chiefly as a whip over others—but which of course he could not help applying oneself as well—that clashed headlong with his jungle philosophy. In his idealized image he was the knight in shinning armour, the crusader with wide and unfailing vision, ever pursuing the right. As becomes a wise leader, he was not personally attached to anyone but dispensed a stern though just discipline. He was honest without being hypocritical. Women loved him and he could be a great lover but was not tied to any woman. Here the same goal is achieved as in the other instances: the elements of the basic conflict are blended. The idealized image is thus an attempt at solving the basic conflict, as attempt of at least as great importance as the others I have described. It has the enormous subjective value of serving as a binder, of holding together a divided individual. And although it exists only in the person’s mind, it exerts a decisive influence on one’s relations with others. However, words and plans are not enough. Leaders stand up for their beliefs. They practice what they preach. They show others by their own example that they live by the values that they profess. Leaders know that while their position gives them authority, their behaviour earns them respect. It is consistency between words and actions that build a leader’s credibility. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Do not keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone. Leave the beaten track occasionally and drive into the woods. You will be certain to find something you have never seen before. Of course it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. Follow up, explore all around it; one discovery will lead to another, and before you know it you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the results of thought. “For behold, to one is given by the Spirit of God, that one may teach the word of wisdom; and to another, that one may teach the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; and to another, exceedingly great faith; and to another, the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; and again, to another, that one may work might miracles; and again, to another, that one may prophesy concerning all things; and again, to another, the beholding of Angels and ministering spirits; and again, to another, all kinds of tongues; and again, to another, the interpretation of languages and of divers kinds of tongues. And all these gifts come by the Spirit of Christ; and they come unto every being severally, according as one will. And I would exhort you, my beloved brethren, that ye remember that every good gift cometh of Christ,” reports Moroni 10.9-18. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

O God the Father, Origin of Divinity, Good beyond all that is good, Fair beyond all that is fair, in Whom is calmness, peace, and concord; do Thou make up the dissension which divide us from each other, and bring us back into an unity of love, which may bear some likeness to Thy subline Nature. And as Thou art above all things, makes us one by the unanimity of a good mind, that through the embrace of charity and the bonds of affection we ma be spiritually one, as well in ourselves as in each other, though that peace of Thine which maketh all  things peaceful, and through the grace, mercy, and tenderness of Thine only begotten Son. “Imagine God, a God as immense as the Universe with all its millions of stars and planets, its unchartable distances, its inevitable sounds and its silence. Such a God could know all things, all things, the minds and attitudes and fears and regrets of every single living thing, every person. This God could gather a soul, whole and complete and magnificent. He could catch it up in His powerful hands, and carry it Heavenward beyond this World to be forever united with Him,” reports Anne Rice, The Wolf Gift, pages 73-74. We beseech Thee, O Lord, to keep us in perpetual peace, as Thou hast vouchsafed us confidence in Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

O Lord, may I never fail to come to the knowledge of truth, never rest in a system of doctrine, however scriptural, that does not bring or further salvation, or teach me to deny ungodliness and Worldly lusts, or help me to live soberly, righteously, Godly; never rely on my own convictions and resolutions, but be strong in thee and in thy might; never cease to find thy grace sufficient in all my duties, trials, and conflicts; never forget to repair to thee in all my spiritual distresses and outward troubles, in all the dissatisfactions experienced in creature comforts; never fail to retreat to Him who is full of grace and truth, the friend that loveth at all times, who is touched with feelings of my infirmities, and can do exceeding abundantly for me; never confine my religion to extraordinary occasions, but acknowledge thee in all my ways; never limit my devotions to particular seasons but be in thy fear all the day long; never be Godly only on the sabbath or in Thy house, but on every day abroad and at home; never make piety a dress but a habit, not only a habit but a nature, not only a nature but a life. Do good to me by all Thy dispensations, by all means of grace, by worship, prayers, praises, and at last let me enter that World where is no temple, but only Thy glory and the Lamb’s. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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