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Freedom is Always in Bondage to Destiny

We live in a World of unprecedented opulence, of a kind that would have been hard to even imagine a century or two ago. Capitalism is a particular form of social organization of production and exchange. Based on an advanced division of labour, capitalism is a system in which production is oriented toward the needs of others, toward exchange. It is therefore a system in which even the people who directly participate in transforming nature into useful products—the immediate producers—cannot physically survive on their own. Furthermore, capitalism is a system in which those who do not own the instruments of production must sell their capacity to work. Workers obtain a wage, which is not a title to any part of the specific product which they generate but an abstract medium for acquisition of any goods and services. They must produce profit as a condition of their continued employment. The product is appropriated privately in the sense that workers have no institutional claim to its allocation or distribution in their role as immediate producers. Capitalist, who are profit-takers, decide under multiple constraints how to allocate or distribution in their role as immediate producers. Capitalists, who are profit-takers, decide under multiple constraints how to allocate the product, in particular what part of it to invest, where, how, and when. These allocations are constrained by the fact that capitalist compete with each other and that they can be influenced by the political system. The ownership of the means of production also endows the proprietors with the right to organize (or to delegate the organization of) production. Capitalists, as employers, regulate the organization of work, although they may be again constrained by rules originating of work, although they may be again constrained by rules originating from the political system. As immediate producers, workers have no institutional claim to directing the productive activities in which they participate. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Significant changes in the psychological atmosphere accompanied the economic development of capitalism. A spirit of restlessness began to pervade life toward the end of the Middle Ages. The concept of time in the modern sense began to develop. Minutes became valuable; a symptom of this new sense of time is the fact that in Nurnberg the clocks have been striking the quarter hour since the sixteenth century. Too many holidays began to appear as a misfortune. Time was so valuable that one felt one should never spend it for any purpose which was not useful. Work became increasingly a supreme value. A new attitude toward work developed and was so strong that the middle class grew indignant against the economic unproductivity of the institutions of the Church. Begging orders were resented as unproductive, and hence immoral. The idea of efficiency assumed the role of one of the highest moral virtues. At the same time, the desire for wealth and material success became the all-absorbing passion. “All the World,” says the preacher Martin Butzer, “is running after those trades and occupations that will bring the most gain. The study of the arts and sciences is set aside for the basest kind of manual work. All the clever heads, which have been endowed by God with a capacity for the nobler studies, are engrossed by commerce, which nowadays is so saturated with dishonesty that is it the last sort of business an honourable man should engage in.” One outstanding consequences of the economic change we have been describing affected everyone. The medieval social system was destroyed and with it the stability and relative security it had offered the individual. Now with the beginning of capitalism all classes of society started to move. There ceased to be a fixed place in the economic order which could be considered a natural, unquestionable one. The individual was left alone; everything depended on his own effort, not on the security of his traditional status. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Each class, however, was affected in a different way by this development. For the poor of the cities, the workers and apprentices, it meant growing exploitation and impoverishment; for the peasants also it meant increased economic and personal pressure; the lower nobility faced ruin, although in a different way. While for these classes the new development was essentially change for the worse, the situation was much more complicated for the urban middle class. We have spoken of the growing differentiation which took place within its ranks. Large sections of it were put into an increasingly bad position. Many artisans and small trader had to face the superior power of monopolists and other competitors with more capital, and they had greater and greater difficulties in remaining independent. They were often fighting against overwhelmingly strong forces and for many it was a desperate and hopeless fight. Other parts of the middle class were more prosperous and participated in the general upward trend of rising capitalism. However, even for these more fortunate ones the increasing role of capital, of the market, and of competition, changed their personal situation into one of insecurity, isolation, and anxiety. The fact that capital assumed decisive importance meant that a suprapersonal force was determining their economic and thereby their personal fate. Capital had ceased to be a servant and had become a master. Assuming a separate and independent vitality it claimed the right of a predominant partner to dictate economic organization in accordance with its own exacting requirements. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

The new function of the marker had a similar effect. The medieval market had been a relatively small one, the functioning of which was readily understood. It brought demand and supply into direct and concrete relation. A producer knew approximately how much to produce and could be relatively sure of selling his products for a proper price. Now it was necessary to produce for an increasingly large market, and one could not determine the possibilities of sale in advance. It was therefore not enough to produce useful goods. Although this was one condition for selling them, the unpredictable laws of the market decided whether the products could be sold at all and at what profit. The mechanism of the new marker seemed to resemble the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, which taught that the individual must make every effort to be good, but that even before his birth it had been decided whether or not he is to be saved. The market day became the day of judgement for the products of human effort. Another important factor in this context was the growing role of competition. While competition was certainly not completely lacking in medieval society, the feudal economic system was based on the principle of co-operation and was regulated—or regimented—by rules which curbed competition. With the rise of capitalism these medieval principles gave way more and more to a principle of individualistic enterprise. Each individual must go ahead and try his luck. He had to swim or to sink. Others were not allied with him in a common enterprise, they became competitors, and often he was confronted with the choice of destroying them or being destroyed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Certainly the role of capital, the market, and individual competition, was not as important in the sixteenth century as it was to become later on. At the same time, all the decisive elements of modern capitalism had already by that time come into existence, together with their psychological effect upon the individual. While we have just described one side of the picture, there is also another one: capitalism freed the individual. It freed man from the regimentation of the corporative system; it allowed him to stand on his own feet and to try his luck. He became the master of his fate, his was the risk, his the gain. Individual effort could lead him to success and economic independence. Money became the great equalizer of man and proved to be more powerful than birth and caste. This side of capitalism was only beginning to develop in the early period which we have been discussing. It played a greater role with the small group of wealthy capitalists than with the urban middle class. However, even to the extent to which it was effective then, it had an important effect in shaping the personality of man. We find the same ambiguity of freedom in the socioeconomic changes on the individual in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which we have discussed before. The individual is freed from the bondage of economic and political ties. He also gains in positive freedom by the active and independent role which he has to play in the new system. However, simultaneously he is freed from those ties which used to give him security and a feeling of belonging. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Life has ceased to be lived in a closed World the center of which was man; the World has become limitless and at the same time threatening. By losing his fixed placed in a closed World man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life. He is threatened by powerful suprapersonal forces, capital and the market. His relationship to his fellow men, with everyone a potential competitor, has become hostile and estranged; he is free—that is, he is alone, isolated, threatened from all sided. Not having the wealth or the power which the Renaissance capitalist has, and also having lost the sense of unity with men and the universe, he is overwhelmed with a sense of his individual nothingness and helplessness. Paradise is lost for good, the individual stands alone and faces the World—a stranger thrown into a limitless and threatening World. The new freedom is bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety. These feelings must be alleviated if the individual is to function successfully. The country was to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the humans she had cruelly wronged. No nation can salve her conscience by plastering it with gold. This problem could not be settled by diplomacy and suaveness, by “policy” alone. If worse came to worst, could the moral fiber of this nation survive the slow throttling and genocide of the less fortunate? America has a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate, a forward movement to thrift, patience, and industrial training for the masses, we must to this day still strive for this, rejoicing honours and glorying in the strength of this nation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

America apologized for injustice, and encourages her people to rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, and to not participate in in the emasculating effects of caste distinctions. Americans must also cherish the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the World accords to humans, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among thee are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Economic arrangements play a dual role in the promotion of a free society. On the one hand, freedom in economic arrangement is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. In the second place, economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom. The first of these roles of economic freedom needs special emphasis because intellectuals in particular have a strong bias against regarding this aspect of freedom as important. They tend to express contempt for what they regard as material aspects of life, and to regard their own pursuit of allegedly higher values as on a different plane of significance and as deserving of special attention. For most citizens of the country, however, if not for the intellectual, the direct importance of economic freedom is at least comparable in significance to the indirect importance of economic freedom as a means to political freedom. Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions. So also did political freedom in the golden age of Greece and in the early days of the Roman era. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Being free is an act that permits discernment of alternatives (if any) in a situation, deliberation about those alternatives, choice of one of them, and ability to put that choice into practice as a culmination or outcome for which a person is required to take responsibility as his or her own goal-guided action. A free action must always occur in a casual context, but it must not be entirely determined by that context. And it must above all else be an action that is ultimately under a person’s control and one for which that person can rightly be regarded as its ultimate source. If there are circumstances at any particular time that prevent all aspects of such personal control, then one can be said to be unfree in those circumstances. This description of freedom requires that there be significant aspects of openness in oneself and in the World, openness that permits real alternatives, outcomes that cannot even in principle be predictable in advance, and novel achievements. It also requires that there be such a thing as teleological or goal-guided behaviour and not just behaviour produced by efficient causes. The description of genuine freedom can be extended to include being other than humans, to the extent that these beings possess the capabilities described. Every civilized and rational person today is in favour of freedom because they recognize as the struggle for basic liberties, societies are based upon open dialogue, human rights and democracy. However, in keeping predetermined mindsets we chain ourselves to the past and to our genetic shortcomings. Our quality of life suffers when we make decisions with predetermined mindsets because the structure that these mindsets impose on ourselves and our experiences do not necessarily fit or make sense. Although seeing these mental structures in ourselves is difficult, and rooting them out in search of new ones even more so. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

One shortcoming of these predetermined mindsets is the judgement of the experiences that result from our decisions. Because we make decisions based on certain mindsets, we come to expect a set of results from those decisions that reflect our mindsets, and all ensuing experiences are internally judged or qualified based on those expectations. If we took a job only for financial gain, then we would measure the success of our careers solely in terms of money. This pre-qualification of our experiences based on predetermined mindsets is devastating for two reasons. First, it paints experiences under the guise of success and failure according to how well expectations are met, a guise that short-changes those experiences. What if we do not get the bonuses we expected because of economic conditions? To think that the past years spent on the job were thus consequently wasted would be devastating. All experiences are of some value, didactic or otherwise, and to box them into qualified successes or failures is to waste that value. The second problem with qualifying experiences based on mindsets is the flips side of the first—it blinds us to the lighter characteristics and/or the learnings of an experience if they do not lie within the real of expectations. The shortcomings of predetermined mindsets are waste and harm, but without greater insight, acclimatization causes us to mistake them for being a natural part of life. Euphemistically, and tragically, they become tolerable. Ignorance is bliss, if the human condition is one of unwitting masochism. However, far worse, and far better, is to have hindsight into the waste and harm these mindsets cause. Even more abhorrent is the feeling of regret that accompanies the acknowledgement of the waste and harm. We have all experienced regret and it grows with every realization of a poor decision using bad faith; a decision that leads to a missed opportunity or a deleterious outcome.  #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Regrets make predetermined mindsets painful, making them far more detrimental by demon whiskey to creature a severe inflammation. However, regrets can also make the situation far better when the inflammation becomes intolerable inciting the person proactive. The intolerable pain of regret opens up our eyes to our inherent freedom of self-invention. This freedom is the key to ensuring that the decision we make in life, and the paths we choose to take, will not be made according to mindsets and structures of which we are unaware, and thus of which we will regret. Although it is reasonable and necessary to make decisions based on structures and mindset, those mindsets need to be chosen with great discernment rather than predetermined for full freedom of choice. The principles and ideals by which we live are forms of mindsets and structure, but as long as we have chosen to live by those principle instead of having developed them as biases, then we have not forfeited our freedom. Freedom of expression allows us to be heard and to construct our identities as communicative human beings. Possessing free will, we have the capacity to choose how we individual will act. We are thus particular and subjective entities. At the same time, however, we are each endowed with reason and are consequently able to discern the same universal and objective truths. We are thus also universal and objective entities. Development can be seen as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy. If we have reasons to want more wealth, we have to ask: What precisely are these reasons, how do they work, on what are they contingent and what are the things we can “do” with more wealth? In fact, we generally have excellent reasons for wanting more wealth. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The usefulness of wealth lies in the things that it allows us to do—the substantive freedoms it helps us to achieve. However, this relation is neither exclusive (since there are significant influences on our lives other than wealth) nor uniform (since the impact of wealth on our lives varies with other influences). It is as important to recognize the crucial role of wealth in determining living conditions and the quality of life as it is to understand the qualified and contingent nature of this relationship. An adequate conception of development must go much beyond the accumulation of wealth and the growth of gross national product and other income-related variables. Without ignoring the importance of economic growth, we must look well beyond it. The ends and means of development require examination and scrutiny for a fuller understanding of the development process; it is simply not adequate to take as our basic objective just the maximization of income or wealth, which is, as Aristotle noted, “merely useful and for the sake of something else.” For the same reason, economic growth cannot sensibly be treated as an end in itself. Development has to be more concerned with enhancing the lives we lead and the freedoms we enjoy. Expanding the freedoms that we have reason to value not only makes our lives richer and more unfettered, but also allows us to be fuller social persons, exercising our own volitions and interacting with—and influencing—the World in which we live. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

There are two distinct reasons for the crucial importance of individual freedom in the concept of development, related respectively to evaluation and effectiveness. First, in the normative approach used here, substantive individual freedoms are taken to be critical. The success of a society is to be evaluated, in this view, primarily by the substantive freedoms that the members of our society enjoy. This evaluative position differs from the informational focus of more traditional normative approaches, which focus on other variables, such as utility, or procedural liberty, or real income. Having greater freedom to do the things one has reason to value is significant in itself for the person’s overall freedom, and important in fostering the person’s opportunity to have valuable outcomes. Both are relevant to the evaluation of freedom of the members of the society and thus crucial to the assessment of the society’s development. The second reason for taking substantive freedom to be so crucial is that freedom is not only the basis of the evaluation of success and failure, but it is also a principal determinant of individual initiative and social effectiveness. Greater freedom enhances the ability of people to help themselves and also to influence the World, and these matters are central to the process of development. The concern here relates to what we my call (at the risk of some oversimplification) the “agency aspect” of the individual. The United States of America has no family policy. Many American students of the family, as shown by their reactions to this phrase, do not know what it means. In the absence of an explicit family policy, they not only find it difficult to imagine what one might be, but are inclined to question if one would be desirable. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Perhaps the absence of a declared policy is typical of the pragmatic American temper. Yet whether this question is thought about by the public at large or not, both family researchers and professional practitioners in family agencies can postpone at peril of sterile futility the effort to state an over-all policy to guide their activities. What the researcher needs if one’s findings are to prove relevant is the designation of dependent variables of vital interests to the subjects of one’s study; what the practitioner needs if one is to evaluate the effect and efficiency of one’s efforts is the specification of definite goals. It may be argued that a family policy is already discernible in implicit form. It may also be argued that nothing would be gained by striving to articulate its essentials; indeed something might be lost in the way of future flexibility by trying to fix on paper the nature of such a labile entity. This view though plausible in the abstract does not hold up when tested against the benefits of knowing what one is doing. Nor is it correct to charge that when purposes are made explicit they become less easy to alter. To state the objectives of research and of action makes them easier to criticize and modify on the basis of experience than when they remain behind the veil of sacred assumptions. In particular instances outcomes can be legitimately judged only in relation to defined intentions. A national policy for the American family, though derived from implicit views and common practices, would have to be discussed and agreed upon before it could become official. One could surmise it main outlines, since these are embodied in occasional statements of goals we have been discussing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Interpreters differ the closer they approach the concrete instance. It would be presumptuous, therefore, to do more than suggest that the concept of interpersonal competence, which allows for an open-ended view of personality, could stand for the optimal product of family performance. Yet there can be no doubt that the development of the individual member would hold first place among the goals of a family policy. A family policy includes not only general goals but specifies appropriate means for their realization. The typical family agencies of the American urban community are the nearest we have to self-conscious instruments of a coherent family policy. However, as we have found in examining them, all six types are hesitant to avow a positive program for constructing some optimal pattern of family living for American communities. Whether taken separately or in combination, they seem to abjure any responsibility for family development more inclusive than current clienteles and their recognized problems. In part this diffidence seems to be based upon the specializations among the multiple, segmented agencies, though this fact of proliferation could also be used as argument for a coherent policy. In part the tendency to limit responsibility seems also to derive from the therapeutic approach. All dreams also, as well as visions, can be classed, as to their source, under three heads: divine; human; or of a psychopathological offender—each to be known, first by the condition of the person, and second by the principle distinguishing the work of God or a psychopathological offender. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

The principle distinguishing divine from psychopathological in relation to dreams is, in the first instance, by their import and exceptional value (Gen. 37.5-7; Matt. 1.20, 2.12), and in the latter, their “mystery,” absurdity, emptiness, folly, et cetera, as well as by their effects on the person. In the first, the recipient is left normal, calm, quiet, reasonable, and with an open, clear mind. In the second, elated or dazed, confused and unreasonable. The presentations of evil spirits at night can be the cause of morning “dullness” of mind and heaviness of spirit. The sleep has not been refreshing because of their power, through the passivity of the mind during sleep, to influence the whole being. “Natural” sleep renews and invigorates the faculties and the whole system. Insomnia may be the work of psychopathological offenders adapting their workings to the overwrought condition of the person, so as to keep their attacks under cover. Believers who are open to the supernatural World should especially guard their nights by prayer, and by definite rejection of the first insidious working of psychopathological offenders along these lines. How many say, “The Lord woke me,” and place their reliance upon a “revelation” given in a state of half-consciousness, even though the mind and will were only partially alert to discern the issues of the “guidance” or “revelation” given to them. Let such believers observe the results of their obedience to night-revelations, however, and they will find many traces to the deceitful workings of the enemy. They will find, too, how their faith is often based upon a beautiful experience given in the early hours of the morning; or, vice versa, is shaken by accusations, suggestions, attacks and conflicts manifestly of the psychopathological one, instead of an intelligent reliance upon God Himself in His changeless character of faithfulness and love to His own. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

All workings of the enemy at night can be made to cease by recognizing them as of a psychopathological offender, and definitely refusing them in the name of the Lord. Existence is always both fact and act. Although freedom is not destroyed, it is always in bondage to destiny. Therefore, no individual act within existence can overcome estrangement; existence itself become destiny. In spite of his inner freedom, man cannot achieve reunion with God. Certain individual acts can be performed which express fleetingly and fragmentarily man’s essential goodness, but thee reveal only what is indispensable for victory over existence, namely, reunion with the ground of being. In order to overcome the old state of estrangement, man needs to receive new being, for new being precedes new acting just as estrangement precedes conduct disorder. Union with God, with the power of being, must be re-established. This is the quest for the New Being. The history of religion records man’s attempts and failures to find the New Being, to save himself. Religion is the sphere where the New Being is sought; it is contrasted with the split between essence and existence. Myth and cult are indispensable for existential man, because, in the state of existence, reason cannot penetrate to its depth in the ground of being. However, religion is ambiguous, for the very fact of the quest indicates the presence, at least germinally and fragmentarily, of the New Bing, and at the same time the quest degenerates into futile efforts at self-salvation. These vain attempts, which are found in all religions and not only in particular ones, can be listed as follows: legalism, asceticism, mysticism, sacramentalism, doctrinablism, and emotionalism. Yet, even in their inadequacy they are salutary in a minimal way, for awareness of estrangement and desire for reunion indicate the presence of a saving power. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The quest for the New Bing is universal because the human predicament and its ambiguous conquest are universal. This utopian expectation, religious in substance, is often cloaked under a secular form. Although the character of the quest constantly changes, we can distinguish two major types: the non-historical and the historical expectation of the New Being. The non-historical attitude, exemplified primarily in Far Eastern religions, does not expect salvation through history, but rather in the negation of all beings and the affirmation of the Ground of Being alone. The historical attitude, on the other hand, assets the essential goodness of being and awaits the New Being as a transformation of reality through a historical process which is unique, unrepeatable, irreversible. The symbol of “Christ” or “Messiah” expresses the universal expectation of the New Being. Although the messianic idea is thoroughly historical, it is capable of incorporating the non-historical type. The cosmic Messiah of apocalyptic literature, the personification of divine Wisdom, the Son of Man, the Logos of the Fourth Gospel, the mysticism of Paul and his doctrine of the Spirit—all these transhistorical elements build a bridge across which non-historical expectations can enter into Christianity. The non-historical type, however, is unable to embrace the historical type. Consequently, Christianity is the universal type of the universal quest for the New Being set in motion by a universal revelation. Yet it is not universally acknowledged as such, for man’s estrangement, futile self-salvation, and consequent despair generate a self-understanding and an expectation which is contradicted by the New Being in Jesus as the Christ. The New Being of Christianity is “paradoxical” in the root meaning of the word; it runs counter to the expectations of the whole of human experience. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The Christ is the symbol for the expectation of the New Being. How is it to be interpreted? Traditionally he has been called the “mediator” in that he makes the ultimate concrete and saves by reuniting. The mediator, however, is not a third reality between God and man, for all mediation and salvation is from God. The Christ is essential man. He represents man to man, that is, He shows what man essentially is. However, He also represents God to man, because essential man had embedded within him the image of God. Therefore, essential manhood and essential God-manhood are identical. It is important to note that the paradox of the Christian message is not that essential humanity includes the union of God and man, but rather, that in one personal life essential manhood has appeared under the condition of existence without being conquered by them. Another term often used to interpret the symbol of the Christ is “incarnation.” It is a concept commonly found in pagan religions, we have grave reservations about it because it is so vulnerable to misunderstanding. For instance, if incarnation is taken to mean “God has become man,” then it is nonsense, because the words do not mean what they say. Obviously, God does not change into something that is not God. Again, incarnation carries polytheistic connotations of divine beings besides God and mythological connotations of anthropomorphism. However, we do accept incarnation in the Johannine sense of “the Logos became flesh.” “Logos” is the principle of divine self-manifestation, “flesh” signifies historical existence, and “became” indicates that God participates in that which is estranged from Him. Thus, the Johannine phrase means that “God is manifest in a personal life-process as a saving participant in the human predicament. The question of existence terminates in the quest for the New Being. We have remained on the level of expectation, even though it has been described in Christian terminology. The next step is the actual appearance of the Christ in Jesus, the event which fulfills al expectations. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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