Time talks. It speaks more plainly than words….It can shout the truth where words lie. Occasionally we should allow the trite to tease us into thought, for such old friends, the cliches in our life, are the only strangers we know. Conformist aggression comprises various acts of aggression that are performed not because the aggressor is driven by the desire to destroy, but because one is told to do so and considers it one’s duty to obey orders. In all hierarchically structed societies obedience is perhaps the most deeply ingrained trait. Obedience is equated with virtue, disobedience with sin. To be disobedient is the arch crime from which all other crimes follow. Abraham was willing to kill his son out of obedience. Antigone is killed by Creon for her disobedience to the laws of the state. Armies, especially, cultivate obedience, since their very essence is built on an absolute reflex like acceptance of commands that precludes any questioning. The soldier who kills and maims, the bomber pilot who destroys thousands of lives in one moment, are not necessarily driven by a destructive or cruel impulse, but by the principle of unquestioning obedience. Conformist aggression is sufficiently widespread to deserve serious attention. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

I From the behaviour of boys and girls in a juvenile gang to that of soldiers in an army, many destructive acts are committed in order not to appear a coward, and out of obedience to orders. It is these motivations, and not human destructiveness, that are at the rot of this type of aggressive behaviour, which is often wrongly interpreted as indicating the power of innate aggressive impulses. Conformist aggression might as well have been classified as pseudoaggression; the reason for not doing so is that obedience as a consequence of the need to conform will in many cases mobilize aggressive impulse not to obey or not to conform constitutes for many a real threat, against which they defend themselves by performing the required aggressive act. People who are dependent on others may find themselves at the disposal of an exciting but often frustrating or rejecting person. What are the consequences for an individual locked into relationships with Frustrating Exciting or Rejecting Objects? The individual feels that the person they are dependent on does not care about them, not even about one’s love for the attachment person, and the individual somehow has to come to terms with this situation. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

The individual may be angry. However, how can a dependent person dare to let its life depend on someone with whom it is angry, someone who appears to be already in a mod to be annoyed, frustrating and rejecting—someone who already sees the individual as in the wrong and deserving punishment? (Most caregivers feel like this toward the people they care for at times, so there is likely to become some ground for the individual’s worries to grow in—enough for them to be maintained once they have sprung up.) The individual who feels that its caregivers find its needs insufferable, will expect its anger to be even more interoperable to them. This will be a very worried and fearful individual. The process is an escalating one, for when fear becomes associated with the steps that lead to anger, signal anxiety sets in. When it wants what it knows it will not get, the individual will now be worried and frightened because this will make it feel disappointed and rejected, and that often makes it angry, and that will make the caregivers more rejecting. We are deeply concerned with the extent to which life can be frustrating, painful, and frightening for the dependent personality. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

For people who are dependent, their daily lives may be a hell of terror and rage. Dependent people can be anyone from infants, children, women, men, senior citizens, the disabled, and even pets. A World of frequent arousal and disappointment is a painful World to live in; painful too is the accompanying experience of the self. It is a devastating experience to be in a relationship where you are mostly expressing your feelings to someone who does not care what they are, or is angry about them. There are distinguishable gradations in this misery. For start, there is the humiliation of having your feelings so depreciated. At a deeper level the shame, at having feelings which are not valued but rejected, can reduce an individual to a constant sense of worthlessness and destitution. One feel wicked, inferior, inadequate, and altogether wrong to be expecting so unjustifiably much, to be so demanding a nuisance. One may come to regard one’s own loving feelings as somehow shameful and bad, and may keep them to oneself so as not to lose altogether the sense of being loving (even if not lovable). At a deeper level still, the individual feels quite emptied—and experience of disintegration and imminent death. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

How can the individual find some protection against such feeling? By various splits in the imagery of itself and others. To disown your feelings is a kind of protection. A mature individual, with more firmly established self-structures, might perhaps be able to do this by distancing oneself from the memory that it had been excited and frustrated. However, in the very early stages of development, a worried individual may keep even the imagery of itself-capable-of-excitement split off and separate from other self-imagery—this knowledge of oneself as excitable is never integrated; those partial maps are not available. To protect oneself and individual may disown the knowledge of its own excitement, and of its own excitability, its own capacity to get excited and have hopes, needs, and wishes. The individual may disown the memory of having ever wanted what it could not get. One may cease to acknowledge any image of oneself as capable of wanting what one cannot get. That part of the map may be unavailable to the everyday World of the working models. Or, having kept away from the imagery which goes with itself wanting nice things, the individual may conclude that there is something wrong with what appears nice and satisfying. Like how many people say they do not like McMansions in the suburbs or Germany cars, for example, when what is wrong is, they cannot afford them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

Because some people cannot have things they want, it becomes a belief to them that everyone is wrong to want nice things. One may even conclude that satisfaction is bad. The individual may take another course to protect oneself from the idea that the World is a bad place. One may disown not just aspects of one’s own feelings, but aspects of the World of other people and things. One may make splits in the World of others. Where frustrating, exciting, and rejecting relationships predominate, the individual develops that idea that the way people relate to each other is arousing and exciting but not satisfying, or that people are at heart angry with themselves and each other, and that what happens to wishes and hopes is that they get disappointed and denied. These discoveries may be too painful to hold on to, and so the individual may keep them apart from other aspects of one’s experience of the World. Also kept apart may be the information (potentially there, because it registered when it happened) that there are satisfying things and people; acknowledging this would bring with it the knowledge that good things are being withheld, that good people have gone away. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

Anger augments these processes. For when an individual experiences its grown-ups as unloving and rejecting, one may feel anger. This one will fear to express lest one’s anger makes them more rejecting than ever and thus increases their “badness” (by making them more real in the individual’s eyes as “bad objects”). Or the individual may fear that one’s anger will make them less loving and thus less capable of being “good objects.” The individual, perhaps already angry in one’s hurt frustration, may fear that one’s very recognition of one’s attachment figure’s lack of love and care is the hostile act which will destroy their goodness. (This incidentally provides a good example of the fear of anger acting as a signal anxiety, warning us to keep something that is there in front of our eyes.) By controlling its imagery, the individual tries to control its World. If such an individual is tempted to transfer one’s lovingness to the World of “inner objects,” small wonder. An inner object is an image or representation of a person, something that is significant to the individual such as a person who is an object of attachment, and is experiences as an embodied presence within the mind. Having made the transfer, the individual feels love, and phantasizes about it, and about the people one loves. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

Perhaps one even feels oneself loved—or, rather, perhaps one maintains a phantasy of oneself as loved by a phantasy attachment figure. However, none of this is given expression in a way another person can know about. There may be a vivid life of remembering, thinking, imagining, planning, even suffering—but in phantasy, not now, not here, involving only phantasy objects in a phantasy World. The individual has withdrawn from the World which id mediated through the senses. There is a state of mind in which life is so grim that the sense are dulled and messages from the World of other people and things do not penetrate: nothing sensory is processed into the state of organized clarity which lets the World and other people and things do not penetrate: nothing sensory is processed into the state of organized clarity which lets the World of other people and things break through. Instead, the person experiences life in terms of a set of selectively organized phantasies: “Exciting Objects,” “Rejecting Objects,” “Ideal Objects.” One might suppose this phantasy World to be a haven of reciprocal love and care. To some extent this may be so, but when children or adults come to psychotherapy because of the straits in which they find themselves, it is usually discovered that this inner World is not a happy one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

Phantasies are not necessarily agreeable. They can be very nasty and unsustaining. However, they have one use for the damaged individual (in us all): they are familiar and they set us more manageable problems than we think real life will set us. If we ever had a dream in which we went through some events, thought “Oh I do not like that,” and redreamt the events with differences which made the story more acceptable to us, many of us have had experience of managing our phantasies. When we feel very powerless and vulnerable, for most of us, phantasy objects are probably more controllable than everyday people, and this feels good at times. Concepts and images are more amenable—or so it would seem from a disadvantaged position—than parents, teachers, bosses, spouses. The schizoid reaction is one in which the cowed personality withdraws as far as possible, from actual relationships with uncontrollable people and events to phantasied relationships with rather more abstract figures. The schizoid state is not an aspect of an inevitable developmental position, but a fear-dictated flight from object-relations. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

A person’s inner World may be full of tension, dominated by daydreams about self-sacrifice, unrequited love, underserved blame, and punishment. Small wonder, if these were the main relationships which the individual could make: the individual needs attachments, and will make painful relationships rather than none at all. Even when, later, a person learns that relationships can be happier relationships has still to be achieved, the pain of having had bad relationships has still to be lived with: tolerated and integrated, not disowned or flinched from. And alas, happier experiences subsequent to the initial damage sometimes have relatively little effect on long-established structures—the very understanding of what they are, or should be, and of what relationships other people enjoy, can be highly distorted. The phantasy World gives us an opportunity to disown to some extent both the World of other people and things, and our own unwelcome thoughts, memories, and feelings. Hence it is very hard to renounce phantasy-relationships with phantasy-objects, and to risk making relationships with real people again, who are unknow, who may be very rewarding but also may be very hateful, whose possibilities have to be discovered, not invented. Moral principles are the object of relation choice. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

Moral principle defines the moral law that humans can rationally will to govern their conduct in an ethical commonwealth. More philosophy becomes the study of the conception and outcome of a suitably defined rational decision. This idea has immediate consequences. For once we think of moral principles as legislation for a kingdom of ends, it is clear that these principles must not only be acceptable to all but public as well. This moral legislation is to be agreed to under conditions that characterize humans as free and equal rational beings. An attempt to interpret this conception is the description of the original position which states: that first guarantee is the equal basic rights and liberties needed to secure the fundamental interests of free and equal citizens and to pursue a wide range of conceptions of the good. The second principle provides fair equality of educational and employment opportunities enabling all to fairly compete for powers and positions of office; and it secures for all a guaranteed minimum of the for all a guaranteed minimum of the all-purpose means (including income and wealth) that individuals need to pursue their interests and to maintain their self-respect as free and equal persons. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

When the principles of one’s actions are chosen by one as the most adequate possible expression of one’s nature as a free and equal rational being, that person is acting autonomously. The principles one acts upon are not adopted because of one’s social position or natural endowments, or in view of the particular kind of society in which one lives or the specific things that one happens to want. To act on such principles is to act heteronomously (subject to a law or standard external to itself). Now veil of ignorance (a moral reasoning device designed to promote impartial decision making by denying those who make verdicts about a situation or person or group access to potentially biasing information about who will benefit most or least from the available options) deprives the person in the original position of knowledge that would enable them to choose heteronomous principles. The parties arrive at their choice together as free and equal rational persons knowing only that those circumstances obtain which give rise to the need for principles of justice. This is also what God wanted. God’s most precious gifts to humans is the principle of free agency—the privilege of choice which was introduced by God the Eternal Father to all his spirit children in the premortal state. This occurred in the great council in Heaven before the peopling of this Earth. The children of God were endowed with freedom of choice while yet but spirit beings. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

The divine plan provided that humans be freeborn in the flesh and become heirs to the inalienable birthright of liberty to choose and act for themselves in mortality. It was essential for their eternal progression that they be subjected to the influences of both good and evil. “For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so…righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad,” reports 2 Nephi 2.11. To see if we will choose the right and do all things whatsoever the Lord our God shall command us, as sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father, we have this gift of free agency to use in our mortal lives. We must be tried, tested, and proved. As spirit children of God, we have built-in powers of conscience sufficient to develop our free agency in right choices and to acquire in right choices and to acquire qualities of goodness, humility, and integrity of purpose. When persons act on these principles they are acting in accordance with principles that they would chose as rational and independent persons in an original position of equality. The principles of their actions do not depend upon social or natural contingencies, nor do they reflect the bias of the particulars of their plan of life or the aspirations that motivate them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

By acting from these principles of justice, persons express their nature as free and equal rational beings subject to the general condition of human life. If this nature were the decisive determining element, for one to express one’s nature as a being of a particular kind is to act on the principles that would be chosen. Of course, the choice of parties in the original position is subject to the restrictions of that situation. However, when knowingly acting on the principles of justice in the ordinary course of events, we deliberately assume the limitations of the original position. One reason for doing this, for persons who can do so and want to, is to give expression to one’s nature. The two principles of justice are the principle of equal liberty and the difference principle. Principle of equal liberty states that each person has an equal right to the most extensive liberties compatible with similar liberties for all. Difference principle states that social and economic inequalities should be arranged so that they are both to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged persons, and attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of equality of opportunity. The argument for the two principles of justice does not assume that the parties have particular ends, but only that they desire certain primary goods. These are things that it is rational to want whatever else one wants. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Thus given human nature, wanting certain primary goods is part of being rational; and while each is presumed to have some conception of the good, nothing is known about one’s final ends. The preference for primary goods is derived, then, from only the most general assumptions about rationality and the conditions of human life. To act from the principles of justice is to act from categorical imperatives in the sense that they apply to us whatever in particular our aims are. This simply reflects the fact that no such contingencies appear as premises in the derivation. When they act from the moral law, humans realize their true selves, whereas if they permit their actions to be determined by sensuous desires or contingent aims, they become subject to law of nature. The lives of the saint and the scoundrel are equally the outcome of free choice (on the part of the noumenal self) and equally the subject of causal laws (as a phenomenal self). Thus is a person realizes one’s true self by expressing it in one’s actions, and if one desires above all else to realize this self, then one will choose to act from principles that manifest one’s nature as a free and equal rational being. The moral law expresses our nature in indefinable ways that acting from contrary principles does not. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

The parties qua noumenal selves have complete freedom to choose whatever principles they wish; but they also have a desire to express their nature as rational and equal members of the intelligible realm with precisely this liberty to choose, that is, as beings who can look at  the World in this way and express this perspective in their life as members of society. They must decide, then, which principles when consciously followed and acted upon in everyday life will best manifest this freedom in their community, most fully reveal their independence from natural contingencies and social accident. Now if the argument of the contract doctrine is correct, which provides that a contract cannot confer rights or impose obligations upon any person who is not a part to the contract, then these principles are indeed those defining the moral law, or more exactly, the principles of justice for institutions and individuals. The description of the original position interprets the point of view of noumenal selves, of what it means to be a free and equal rational being. Our nature as such beings is displayed when we act from the principles we would choose when this nature is reflected in the conditions determining the choice. Thus humans exhibit their freedom, their independence from the contingencies of nature and society, by acting in ways they would acknowledge the original position. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Properly understood, then, the desire to act justly derives in part from the desire to express most fully what we are or can be, namely free and equal rational beings with a liberty to choose. It is for this reason that the failure to act on the moral law gives rise to shame and not to feelings of guilt. And this is appropriate, since acting unjustly is acting in a manner that fails to express our nature as free and equal rational beings. Such actions therefore strike at our self-respect, our sense of our own worth, and the experience of this loss is shame. We have acted as though we belong to a lower order, as though we were a creature whose first principles are decided by natural contingencies. Liberty is acting in accordance with a law that we give reason to ourselves. And this leads not to a morality of austere command but to an ethic of mutual respect and self-esteem. I have assumed that all along, parties know that they are subject to the conditions of human lie. Being in the circumstances of justice, they are situated in the World with other humans who likewise face limitations of moderate scarcity and competing claims. Human freedom is to be regulated by the principles chosen in the light of these natural restrictions. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

Thus justice as fairness is a theory of human justice and among its premises are the elementary facts about persons and their place in nature. The freedom of pure intelligences not subject to these constraints, and freedom of God, are outside the scope of the theory. However, it might appear that this doctrine was meant to be applied to all rational beings as such and therefore to God and the angels as well. If, when we say that God is good, we really mean it in the circumscribed sense of the word, we would thereby imply that God could be better also—in which case Gid would no longer be God, being a changeable being, an improvable being. It was Dr. Spinoza’s defect that he failed to perceive that the ultimate principle baffles such positive description and transcends such nameable attributes as “good.” He fell into it through allowing his overly mathematical intellect to unduly tip the balance against his mystical intuition. His God had different qualities, even though their number was infinite. This made it a limited God. There is no way of describing the mysterious principle behind all existence that will be a correct way. Words drawn from the language of finite human creatures are inapplicable to the infinite principle that transcends those creatures. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

If we do use words here, it is only for the sake of literary convince and with a presupposed understanding of their relativity, not for their literalness. Sometimes we think so small. We limit our possibilities and potential. When God sees you, He sees all your potential. God knows what you are capable of. His grace and favour in your life enable you to become what He sees. However, first you have to take the limits off of God and your life. “He raised us up together with Him…that He might clearly demonstrate through the ages to come the immeasurable (limitless surpassing) riches of His free grace (His unmerited favour),” reports Ephesians 2.6-7. When we choose thought of faith and expectancy, we are opening the gates for God t work in extraordinary ways. We are taking the limits off. This gives God the opportunity to multiply what we have in our hands. We must choose God’s thoughts of victory. Choose thoughts of increase and blessings. As we do this, our lives we receive an abundance of blessings. On behalf of the truth we must make bold to say even this, that God, the cause of all things, by His abounding love and goodness, is placed outside Himself by His providence for all existing things. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

Although creatures have not existed from eternity, expect in God, yet because they have been in Him from eternity, God has known them eternally in their proper natures; and for that reason has loved them, even as we, by the images of things within us, know things existing in themselves. Now, everything in the Scriptures goes against spurning the law. Jesus himself identified those who love him as the ones who keep his commandments (John 14.23-24). John said bluntly, “Sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3.4). Paul, equally bluntly, “Abstain from every form of evil” (1 Thessalonians 5.22). And Jesus again, “Why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (Luke 6.46). Paul made a major point of explaining that “what the law could not do [namely, secure human conformity to itself by its own power] because of the weakness of human abilities, God brought about by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and by condemning sin in the flesh [showing it up for the imposter it is, on its own turf], in order that what the law requires might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk in terms of the flesh, but in terms of the spirit,” reports Romans 8.3-4. The presence of the Spirit of grace is not meant to set the law aside, but to enable conformity to it from an inwardly transformed personality. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

We walk in the spirit of the law and the letter naturally follows as is appropriate. You cannot separate spirit from law, though you must separate spirit and law from legalism—righteousness in terms of actions. The law by itself kills off any hope of rightness and righteousness through human ability and effort, but it kindles hope in God ever brighter as we walk in the law through Christ in us the hope of glory (Colossians 1.27). Grace does not set law aside except on the one point of justification, of acceptance before God. To the contrary, law is itself a primary manifestation of grace and is raised above legalism to a primary instrument of spiritual transformation in union with “the spirit of life in Christ Jesus.” Law comes with grace into the renewed soul. There is no such thing as grace without law. Even in human relationships, if it is to be graciousness, graciousness must have an order. It is not some formless blob of ecstatic indulgence. Grace has to do with life, not just forgiveness, and life requires order. The order of redeemed life is expressed in the Word of God in the fullest sense of the phrase, including the moral law. You are journeying across the divining water that lies between this World and the next carried away by the ferryman on your way. Look ahead of you, do not look behind. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

Look ahead of you, where your destiny lies. Do you see them? They are there, ahead of you on the other shore. Slowly, the become visible to you; the shining ones appear slowly out of the concealing mists. Clearly they appear to you, though hidden from our eyes. Got to them, they welcome you. Go to them, not stopping for farewells. Holy Ones in the World beyond, please open wide your arms to receive this one who is journeying to you. Make one a home, bring one to rest. Farewell. We who have loved you wish you a good journey. The Lord is righteous in all His ways, and gracious in all His works. The Lord is near unto all who call upon Him in truth. He will fulfil the desires of them that revere Him; He will also hear their cry, and will save them. The Lord preserves all them that love Him; but all the wicked will He bring low. My mouth shall speak the praise of the Lord; let all humans bless His holy name for ever and ever. We will bless the Lord from this time forth and forever. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord, O my soul. I will praise the Lord as long a I live; I will sing praises unto my God while yet I have breath. Put not trust in princes, in a mere man in whom there is no help. When his breath departs, he returns to dust, in that every day his thoughts perish. Happy is one whose help is God. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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Mills Station is a neighborhood of luxury single-family homes with personalization opportunities in the Cresleigh Ranch master plan conveniently located close to major employment centers, scenic parks, shopping, outdoor activities, and recreation.  Mills Station residence 2 has welcoming covered porch and inviting foyer, which flows into the spacious great room and formal dining area. There are also several patios and a private backyard. #CresleighHomes