The only absolute rule is: Never lose control of the show. Principles of rational choice are to be given by enumeration so that eventually they replace the concept of rationality. The relevant features of a person’s situation are identified by these principles and the general conditions of human life to which plans must be adjusted. Let us assume that choice situation relates to the short term. The question is how to fill in the more or less final details of a subplan to be executed over a relatively brief period of time, as when we make plans for a holiday. The larger system of desires may not be significantly affected, although of course some desires will be satisfied in this interval and others will not. Now for short-term questions anyway, certain principles seem perfectly straightforward and not in dispute. The first of these is that of effective means. Suppose that there is a particular objective that is wanted, and that all the alternatives are means to achieve it, while they are in other respects neutral. The principle holds that we are to adopt that alternative which realizes the end in the best way. More fully: given the objective, one is to achieve it with the least expenditure of means (whatever they are); or given the means, one is to fulfill the objective to the fullest possible extent. This principle is perhaps the most natural criterion of rational choice. Indeed, there is some tendency to suppose that deliberation must always take this form, being regulated ultimately by a single final end. Otherwise it is thought that there is no rational way to balance a plurality of aims against one another. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

The second principle of rational choice is that one (short-term) plan is to be preferred to another if its execution would achieve all of the desired aims of the other plan and one or more further aims in addition. This criterion is referred to as the principle of inclusiveness. Thus, if such a plan exists, we are to follow the more inclusive plan. To illustrate, suppose that we are planning a trip and we have to decide whether to go to Rome or Paris. It seems impossible to visit both. If on reflection it is clear that we can do everything in Paris that we want to do in Rome, and some other things as well, then we should go to Paris. Adopting this plan will realize a larger set of ends and nothing is left undone that might have been realized by the other plan. Often, however, neither plan is more inclusive than the other; each may achieve an aim which the other does not. We must invoke some other principle to make up our minds, or else subject our aims to further analysis. A third principle we may call that of the greater likelihood. Suppose that the aims which may be achieved by two plans are roughly the same. Then it may happen that some objectives have been a greater chance of being realized by one plan than the other, yet at the same time none of the remaining aims are less likely to be attained. For example, although one can perhaps do everything one wants to do in both Rome and Paris, some of the things one wishes to do seem more likely to meet with success in Paris, and for the rest it is roughly the same. If so, the principle holds that one should go to Paris. A greater likelihood of success favours a plan just as the more inclusive end does. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

When these principles work together the choice is as obvious as can be. Suppose that we prefer a Titian to a Tintoretto, and that the first of two lottery tickets gives the larger change to Titian while the second assigns it to the Tintoretto. Then one must prefer the first ticket. So far we have been considering the application of the principles of rational choice to the short-term case. Now, let us examine the other extreme in which one has to adopt a long-term plan, even a plan of life, as when we have to choose a profession or occupation. It may be thought that having to make such a decision is a task imposed only by a particular form of culture. In another society this choice might not arise. However, in fact the question of what to do with our life is always there, although some societies force it upon us more obviously than others and at a different time of life. The limit decision to have no plan at all, to let things come as they may, is still theoretically a plan that may or may not be rational. Accepting the idea of a long-term plan, then, it seems clear that such a scheme is to be assessed by what it will probably lead to in each future period of time. The principle of inclusiveness in this case, therefore, runs as follows: one long-term plan is better tan another for any given period (or number of periods) if it allows for the encouragement and satisfaction of all the aims and interests of the other plan and for the encouragement and satisfaction of some further aim or interest in addition. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

The more inclusive plan, if there is one, is to be preferred: it comprehends all the ends of the first plan and at least one other end as well. If this principle is combined with that of effective means, then together they define rationality as preferring, other thins equal, the greater means for realizing our aims, and the development of wider and more varied interests assuming that these aspirations can be carried through. The principle of grater likelihood supports this preference even in situations when we cannot be sure that the larger aims can be executed, provided that the chances of execution are as great as with the less comprehensive plan. The application of the principles of effective means and the greater likelihood to the long-term case seems sound enough. However, the use of the principle of inclusiveness may seem problematical. With a fixed system of ends in the sort run, we assume that we already have our desires and given this fact we consider how best to satisfy them. However, in long-term choice, although we do not yet have the desires which various plans will encourage, we are nevertheless directed to adopt that plan which will develop the more comprehensive interests on the assumption that these further aims can be realized. Now a person may say that since one does not have the more inclusive interests, one is not missing anything in not deciding to encourage and to satisfy them. One may hold that the possible satisfaction of desires that one can arrange never to have is an irrelevant consideration. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Of course, one might also content that the more inclusive system of interests subjects one to a greater risk of dissatisfaction; but this objection is excluded since the principle assumes that the larger pattern of ends is equally likely to be attained. There are two considerations that seem to favour the principle of inclusiveness in the long-term case. First of all, assuming that how happy a person is depends in part upon the proportion of one’s aims that are achieved, the extent to which one’s plans are carried through, it follows that pursuing the principle of inclusiveness tends to raise this proportion of one’s aims that are achieved, the extent to which one’s plans are carried through, it follows that pursuing the principle of inclusiveness tends to raise this proportion and thereby enhance a person’s happiness. This effect is absent only in the case where all of the aims of the less inclusive plan are already safely provided for. The other consideration is that, in accordance with the Aristotelian Principle, I assume that human beings have a higher-order desire to follow the principle of inclusiveness. They prefer the more complex comprehensive long-term plan because its execution presumably involves a more complex combination of abilities. The Aristotelian Principle states that, others things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and that this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

A person takes pleasures in doing something as one becomes more proficient at it, and of two activities which one performs equally well, one prefers the one that calls upon the greater number of more subtle and intricate discriminations. Thus the desire to carry out the larger pattern of ends which brings into play the more finely developed talents is an aspect of the Aristotelian Principle. And this desire, along with the higher-order desires to act upon other principles of rational choice, is one of the regulative ends that moves us to engage in rational deliberation and to follow its outcome. Many things in these remarks call for further explanation. It is clear, for example, that these three principles are not in general sufficient to rank the plans open to us. Means may not be neutral, inclusive plans may not exist, the aims achieved may not be sufficiently similar, and so on. To apply these principles we view our aims as we are inclined to describe them, and more or less count the number realized by this or that plan, or estimate the likelihood of success. For this this reason I shall refer to these criteria as counting principles. They do not require a further analysis or alteration of our desires, nor a judgment concerning the relative intensity of our wants. These matters I put aside for the discussions of deliberative rationality. It seems best to conclude this preliminary account by nothing what seems to be reasonably clear: namely that we can choose rational plans of life. And this means that we can choose now which desires we shall have at a later time. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

One might suppose at first that this is not possible. We sometimes think that our major desires at least are fixed and that we deliberate solely about the means to satisfy them. Of course, it is obvious that deliberation leads us to have some desires that we did not have before, for example, the desire to avail ourselves of certain means that we have on reflection come to see as useful for our purposes. Furthermore, it is clear that taking thought may lead us to make a general desire more specific, as when a desire for music becomes a desire to hear a particular work. However, let us suppose that, except for these sorts of exceptions, we do not choose now what to desire now. Nevertheless, we can certainly decide now to do something that we know will affect the desires that we shall have in the future. At any given time rational persons decide between plans of action in view of their situation and beliefs, all in conjunction with the present major desires and the principles of rational choice. Thus we chose between future desires in the light of our existing desires, including among these the desires to act on rational principles. When an individual decides what to be, what occupation or profession to enter, say, one adopts a particular plan of life. In time one’s choice will lead one to acquire a definite pattern of wants and aspirations (or the lack thereof), some aspects of which are peculiar to one while others are typical of one’s chosen occupation or way of life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

These considerations appear evident enough, and simply parallel in the case of the individual the deep effects that a choice of a conception of justice is bound to have upon the kinds of aims and interests encouraged by the basic structure of society. Convictions about what sort of person to be are similarly involved in the acceptance of principles of justice. Yet, overstilmulation may lead to bizarre and anti-adaptive behaviour. We still know too little about this phenomenon to explain authoritatively why overstimulation seems to produce maladaptive behaviour. Yet we pick up important clues if we recognize that overstimulation can occur on at least three different levels: the sensory, the cognitive, and the decisional. The line between each of these is not completely clear, even to psychologist, but if we simply, in commonsense fashion, equate the sensory level with perceiving, the cognitive with thinking, and the decisional with deciding, we will not go too far astray. The easiest to understand is the sensory level. Experiments in sensory deprivations, during which volunteers are cut off from normal stimulation of their senses, have shown that the absence of novel sensory stimuli can lead to bewilderment and impaired mental functioning. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

By the same token, the input of too much disorganized, patternless or chaotic sensory stimuli can have similar effects. It is for this reason that practitioners of political or religious brainwashing make use not only of sensory deprivation (solitary confinement, for example) but of sensory bombardment involving flashing lights, rapidly shifting patterns of colour, chaotic sound effects—the whole arsenal of psychedelic kaleidoscopy. The religious fervour and bizarre behaviour of certain hippie cultists may arise not merely from drug abuse, but from group experimentation with both sensory deprivation and bombardment. The chanting of monotonous mantra, the attempt to focus the individual’s attention or interior, bodily sensation to the exclusion of outside stimuli, are efforts to induce the weird and sometimes hallucinatory effects of understimulation. At the other end of the scale, we note that glazed stares and numb, expressionless faces of youthful dancers at the great rock music auditoriums where light shows, split-screen movies, high decibel screams, shouts and moans, grotesque costumes and withering, painted bodies create a sensory environment characterized by high input and extreme unpredictability and novelty. An organism’s ability to cope with sensory input is dependent upon its physiological structure. The nature of its sense organs and the speed with which impulses flow through its neural system set biological bounds on the quantity of sensory data it can accept. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

If we examine the speed of signal transmission within various organism, we find that the lower the evolutionary level, the slower the movement. Thus, for example, in a sea urchin egg, lacking a nervous system as such, a signal moves along a membrane at a rate of about a centimeter an hour. Clearly, at such a rate, the organism can respond to only a very limited part of its environment. By the time we move up the ladder to a jellyfish, which already has a primitive nervous system, the signal travels 36,000 times faster: ten centimeters per second. In a worm, the rate leaps to 100 cps. Among insects and crustaceans, neural pulses race along at 1,000 cps. Among anthropoids the rate reaches 10,000 cps. Crude as these figures no doubt are, they help explain why humans are unquestionably among the most adaptable of creatures. Yet even in human, with a neural transmission rate of about 30,000 cps, the boundaries of the system are imposing. (Electrical signals in a computer, by contrast, travel billions of times faster.) The limitations of the sense organs and nervous system mean that many environmental events occur at rates too fast for us to follow, and we are reduced to sampling experience at best. When the signals reaching us are regular and repetitive, this sampling process can yield a fairly good mental representation of reality. However, when it is highly disorganized, when it is novel and unpredictable, the accuracy of our imagery is necessarily reduced. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Our image of reality is distorted. This may explain why, when we experience sensory overstimulation, we suffer confusion, a blurring of the line between illusion and reality. Most people confuse “self-knowledge” with knowledge of their conscious ego-personalities. Anyone who has any ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that one knows oneself. However, the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents. People measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of oneself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. In this respect the psyche behaves like the body, of whose physiological and anatomical structure the average person knows very little too. Although one lives in it and with it, most of it is totally unknown to the layperson, and special scientific knowledge is needed to acquaint consciousness with what is known of the body, not to speak of all that is not known, which also exists. What is commonly called “self-knowledge” is therefore a very limited knowledge, most of it dependent on social factors, of what goes on in the human psyche. Hence one is always coming up against the prejudice that such and such a thing does not happen “with us” or “in our family” or among our friends and acquaintances. On the other hand, one meets with equally illusory assumptions about the alleged presence of qualities which merely serve to cover up the true fact of the case. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

In this broad belt of unconsciousness, which is immune to conscious criticism and control, we stand defenseless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections. As with all dangers, we can guard against this risk of psychic infection only when we know what is attacking us, and how, where and when the attack will come. Since self-knowledge is a matter of getting to know the individual facts, theories are of very little help. For the more a theory lays claim to universal validity, the less capable it is of going justice to the individual facts. Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean. This means is quite valid, though it need not necessarily occur in reality. Despite this it figures in the theory as an unassailable fundamental fact. The exceptions at either extreme, though equally factual, do not appear in the final result at all, since they cancel each other out. If, for instance, I determine the weight of each stone in a bed of pebbles and get an average weight of give ounces, this tells me very little about the real nature of the pebbles. Anyone who thought, on the basis of these findings, that one could pick up a pebble of five ounces at the first try would be in for a serious disappointment. Indeed, it might well happen that however long one searches one would not find a single pebble weighting exactly five ounces. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. This is particularly true of theories which are based on statistics. The distinctive thing about real facts, however, is their individuality. Not to put too fine a point on it, one could say that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity. These considerations must be borne in mind whenever there is talk of a theory serving as a guide to self-knowledge. There is and can be no self-knowledge based on theoretical assumptions, for the object of this knowledge is an individual—a relative exception and an irregular phenomenon. Hence it is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique. One is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last analysis can be neither known nor compared with anything else. At the same time humans, as members of a species, can and mist be described as a statistical unit; otherwise nothing general could be said about one. For this purpose one has to be regarded as a comparative unit. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

This results in a universally valid anthropology or psychology, as the case maybe, with an abstract picture of the human as an average unit from which all individual features have been removed. However, it is precisely these features which are of paramount importance for understanding humans. If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average human and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude. I can only approach the task of understanding with a free and open mind, whereas knowledge of a him, or insight into human character, presupposes all sorts of knowledge about humankind in general. Most dangerous to the consequence of the naked public square is the loss of community. Community is a gathering of people around shared values, a commitment to one another and to common ideals and aspirations that cannot be created by government. We have forgotten that constitutions work only as they reflect an actual sense of community. Without commitment to community, individual responsibility quickly erodes. One vivid illustration of this was a Princeton student’s protest after President Jimmy Cater proposed reinstating the draft registration in 1977. Newspapers across the country showed the young man defiantly carrying a placard proclaiming: “Nothing is worthy dying for.” To many, these words seem an affirmation of life, the ultimate assertion of individual worth. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

What they fail to reckon with, however, is the reverse slogan: if nothing is worth dying for, is anything worth living for? A society that has no reference points beyond itself “increasingly becomes a merely contractual agreement,” says sociologist Peter Berger. The problem with that, he continues, is that human beings will not die for a social contract. And “unless people are prepared, if necessary, to die for it,” a society cannot long survive. In these first twenty-one years of the twenty first century, we are sailing uncharted waters. Never before in the history of the New World civilization has the public square been so devoid of transcendent values. The notion of law rooted in transcendent truth, in God Himself, is not the invention of Christian fundamentalists calling naively for America to return to its Christian roots. The roots of American law are as much in the works of Cicero and Plato as in the Bible. However, if fundamentalists are guilty of distorting American history, their critics are guilty of distorting the whole history of the New World. Plato, in terms as religious as Moses or David, claimed that transcendent norms were the true foundations for civil law and order. He taught that “there exist divine moral laws, not easy to apprehend, but operating upon all humankind.” He refuted the argument of some Sophists that there was no distinction between virtue and vice, and he affirmed that “God, not man, is the measure of all things.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Cicero, to whom the American Found Fathers looked for guidance, maintained that religion is indispensable to private morals and public order and that it alone provided the concord by which people could live together. “True law,” wrote Cicero, “is right reason in agreement with Nature; it is of universal application and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions.” Augustine wrote The City of God to defend the role of Christianity as the essential element in preserving society, stating that what the pagans “did not have the strength to do out of love of country, the Christian God demands of [citizens] out of love of Himself. Thus, in a general breakdown of morality and of civic virtues, divine Authority intervened to impose frugal living, continence, friendship, justice, and concord among citizens.” Augustine contended that without true justice emanating from a sovereign God there could never be the concord of which Cicero wrote. During the French Revolution, Edmund Burke acknowledged that the attempt to build a secularized state was not so much irreverent as irrational. “We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but out instincts; and that it cannot prevail long.” Religion has always been a decisive factor in the shaping of the American experience. According to one modern scholar, it was the Found Fathers’ conviction that “republican government depends for its health on values that over the not-so-long run must come from religion.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

John Adams believed that the moral order of the new nation depended on biblical religion. “If I were an atheist….I should believe that chance ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all humankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the Universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.” Tocqueville, the shrewd observer of American democracy, maintained that “religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions…How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?” In considering such lessons from the past, historians Will and Ariel Durant cited the agnostic Joseph Renan, who in 1866 wrote, “What would we do without [Christianity]? If rationalism wish wishes to govern the World without regard to the religious needs of the soul, the experience of the French Revolution is there to teach us the consequences of such a blunder.” The Durants concluded, “There is no significant example in history before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.” Although awareness is the first way in which we can regard the soul or Overself, the latter is also that which makes awareness possible and hence a sub- or super-conscious thing. This explains why it is that we do not know our souls, but only our thoughts, our feelings, and our bodies. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

It is because we are the soul and hence we are the knower as well as the act of knowing. The eyes see everything outside yet do not see themselves. The Overself is certainly the Way (within humans), the Truth (knowing the Real Being), and the Life (applying this knowledge and practising this way in the midst of ordinary everyday activity). The supreme irony of our century is that in those nations that still enjoy the greatest human freedoms, this traditional role of religion is denigrated; while in nations that have fallen under the oppressor’s yoke, the longing for the spiritual is keenest. The West intellectuals widely disdain religion; in the Soviet Union they cry out for its return. In a wave of articles, three popular contemporary Soviet writers, Vasily Bykov, Viktor Astafyev, and Chinghiz Aytamatov, have blamed Russia’s moral degradation upon the decline of religion. “Who extinguished the light of goodness in our soul? Who blew out the lamp of conscience, toppled it into a dark, deep pit in which we are groping, trying to find the bottom, a support and some kind of guiding light to the future?” asks Astafyev, a Christian, in Our Contemporary, a popular Moscow journal. Though a Muslim, Aytmatov centers his writings on Christ, whom he admires as a greater influence than Mohammad. He and his fellow writers have boldly attacked Communism for creating “an all-encompassing belief” that has plunged the Russian people into a moral abyss. Bykov, winner of every Soviet literary award, declares there can be no morality without faith. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Yet our twenty first century has set itself apart as the first to explicitly reject the wisdom of the ages that religion is indispensable to the concord and justice of society. We cannot accurately and strictly define the Overself. It is really indescribable, but its effects are not. The feeling of the Overself’s presence and the way to awaken it may both be described for the benefit of those who have neither experienced the one nor learned the others. If the Overself could be expressed in words there would be no need for Its silence. We can know the Overself only by being it, not by thinking it. It is beyond thoughts for it is Thought, Pure Mind, itself. Return, O my soul, unto thy tranquility, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee. Many places my heart sings for you, chamber by chamber, beat by beat. Please be deep in love and reap the love every day. For the Lord hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from ears, and my feet from stumbling. I shall walk before the Lord in the land of the living. I trusted in God even when I cried out: “I am greatly afflicted.” Even when I said in my distraction: “All men are untrustworthy,” I placed my faith in God. As my faith becomes more radiant, each day becomes more precious than the last, and more perfect. It is rewarding work to contemplate a lifetime on the Scriptures. “And it came to pass that Nephi and Lehi did preach unto the Lamanites with such great power and authority, for they had power and authority given unto them that they might speak, and they also had what they should speak given unto them,” reports Helaman 5.18 #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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