Things are in the Saddle and Ride Humankind

Any discrimination based simply on race or colour is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or prejudice. Differences made on account of ignorance or immorality are legitimate methods of calling attention to improper thinking; but discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the World is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed. We repudiate the monstrous doctrine that the oppressor should be the sole authority as to the rights of the oppressed. At the same time, we want to acknowledge with deep thankfulness the help of our fellow humans who still stand for equal opportunity and who have given and still give of their wealth and of their poverty for our advancement. And while we are demanding and ought to demand, and will continue to demand the rights enumerated above, God forbid that we should ever forget to urge corresponding duties upon our people: The duty to vote. The duty to respect the rights of others. The duty to work. The duty to obey the laws. The duty to be clean and orderly. The duty to send our children to school. The duty to respect ourselves, even as we respect others. This statement, complaint and prayer we submit to the American people, and Almighty God. The difference between the accusations of the enemy and the ultimate negative’s temptations is that the latter is an effort on its part to compel or draw human beings into sin, and the former is a charge of transgression. Temptation is an effort to cause the human to transgress the law; accusation is an effort to place the believer in the guilty position of having transgressed the law. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Psychopathological offenders want human beings to be wrong so that they may accuse and punish others for being wrong. “Accusation” can be a counterfeit of conviction—the true conviction of the Spirit of God. It is important that the believer should know, when the charge of transgression is made, whether it is a divine conviction or an accusation of the ultimate negative. Yes, the ultimate negative may accuse a person when one is truly guilty. However, it may also accuse a person when one is not guilty—endeavouring to make one’s accusation seem like a conviction from the humans’ own conscience. The ultimate negative is thus able to infuse a sense of guilt. A genuine sin originates from the evil nature within—a result of the Fall. It is not a transgression forced into the personality from without—something involuntary. If psychopathological offenders are at the back of an involuntary sin, how can the believer tell? If the human is right with God, standing on Romans 6 with no deliberate yielding to known sin, then any accusation of sin coming back again unaccountably may be dealt with as from evil spirits. The believer must therefore never accept an accusation—or a charge, supernaturally made—of having transgressed unless one is fully convinced, by one’s own knowledge and clear decision, that one has sinned; for if one accepts the charge when innocent, one will suffer as much as if one had really transgressed. One must also be on guard to refuse any compulsory drive to “confession” of sin to others, which may be the forcing of the enemy to pass on one’s lying accusations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Life is the process of actualization of the potential. As different potencies are actuated, different life-dimensions appear—the inorganic, organic, psychological, spiritual, and historical dimensions. The historical dimension is the broadest of them all; it includes all the others and adds an element of its own. This additional element is best seen by contrasting the historical with the dimension which precedes it, the spiritual dimension. The realm of the spirit is characterized by the actualization of power and meaning, while the historical dimension looks to their fulfilment. The spiritual dimension describes the process of actualization; the historical dimension, the direction of this process. In the spiritual dimension humans create; in the historical dimension the newness of one’s creation appears. It should now be evident that there is no real distinction between the two dimensions, for an actualization is already a kind of fulfilment, and a process has a direction. The historical dimension, therefore, is a continuation of the spiritual dimension, and to this prolongation it adds the note of finality. History, because it is a form of spiritual creativity, is proper to humans alone, but, due to the multidimensional unit of life, it is applied analogously to all dimension of life. The more abstract the truth you want to teach, the more you must seduce the senses to it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Where the tree of knowledge stands, there is always paradise; thus speak the oldest and the youngest serpents. Perhaps no one has yet been truthful enough about what “truthfulness” is. Perhaps it is not entirely clear what the “fundamental will of the spirit” means. It means that commanding something-or-other that people call “the spirit” wants to be master of itself and of its surroundings, and to feel itself to be master: it wills from multiplicity to simplicity, a binding, taming, domineering, and truly mastering will. Its needs and capacities are in this sense the same as those the physiologist attribute to everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. The strength of the spirit to appropriate what is foreign manifests itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to overlook or put aside what is utterly contradictory—just as it arbitrarily highlights certain features and lines in what is foreign, in every piece of the “external World,” prescinding, falsifying just so. Its aim is thereby to incorporate new “experiences,” to line things up in new rows—hence, growth or, more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased strength. An apparently opposite drive of the spirit serves this same will, an abrupt opting for ignorance, willful exclusion, a closing of one’s windows, an inner nay-saying to this or that thing, not letting things come near, a kind of defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with darkness, horizons closing in, a yea-saying and approving of ignorance: all this is necessary relative to its power to appropriate, its “digestive power,” so to speak—and, really, “the spirit” is most like a stomach. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Here, too belongs the occasional will of the spirit to let itself be deceived, perhaps with a capricious intimation that things are not such and such, that one merely accepts that such and such—a relishing of all uncertainty and ambiguity, a joyful self-delight in the arbitrary narrowness and secrecy of a nook, in the all too near, the foreground, the enlarged, the diminished, the shunted aside, the beautified, a self-delight in the willfulness of all these expressions of power. And here, too, belongs that by no means harmless willingness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and to dissemble before them, that constant stress and strain of a creative, formative, changeable force: the spirit enjoys its feeling of security in them—it is indeed precisely its protean arts that defend and conceal it best!—This will to semblance, to simplification, to masks, to cloaks, in short, to surfaces—for every surface is a cloak—is countered by that sublime inclination of the knower who takes things, and wants to take them, in a deep, manifold, and thorough way: as a kind of cruelty of intellectual conscience and taste, which every courageous thinker will recognize in one’s self, provided one has hardened and sharpened one’s eyes for oneself long enough and is accustomed to strict discipline and strict words. One will say, “There is something cruel in the inclination of my spirit”—let the virtuous and amiable try to take him out of that! #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

In fact, if we were charged, rumoured, praised for a kind of “wild honesty”–it would sound nicer—we free, very free spirits—and perhaps that will in fact be how it sounds, our—legacy? Meanwhile—for there is still time till then—we ourselves are least of all inclined to dress up with the same moral verbal tinsels and fringes: our entire work hitherto has made us sick of this style and its glaring opulence. These are beautiful, glittering, tinkling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, self-sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful human—there is something in them that makes one swell with pride. However, we hermits and marmots, we convinced ourselves long ago in all the secrecy of a hermit’s conscience that even this dignified pageantry of words belongs to the old false finery, junk, and gold dust of unconscious human vanity, and that the terrible underlying primary text homo natura must also be recognized beneath such flattering colours and painted surfaces. To translate humans back into nature; to master the many vain and effusive interpretations and incidental meanings that have until now been scrawled and painted over that eternal primary text homo natura; to make sure that humans stand henceforth before humans, as one stands already today, hardened by the discipline of science, before the rest of nature, with unfrightened Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to the lures of the old metaphysical bird catchers who have whistled to one all too long, “You are more! You are higher! You are of a different origin!”—that may be a strange and insane task, but it is a task—who would deny it! Why would we choose it, this insane task? Everyone will ask us this. And we, pressed so hard, we who have already asked ourselves the same question a hundred times, we have found and find no better answer. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

There are many political problems which stand in the way of an American-Russian understanding: Korea, Formosa, Laos, the Middle East, the Congo, Cuba, South America. Yet there is probably no problem which forms a greater obstacle to understanding than that of Germany. When the Second World War ended there was agreement that Germany must be prevented from ever again becoming a military menace to either the West or to Russia. While the fantastic Morgenthau plan for making here a mainly agricultural states was rejected, it was agreed that Germany was not to have a strong army. The Germans themselves also seemed to agree to this. Mr. Adenauer spoke out firmly against the idea of a strong Germany military force, and the Social Democrats, the strongest opposition party, were violently opposed to armament and “Atomtod” (atom-death). There were also big popular demonstrations against atomic armament in several German cities. Now, not too many years later, the situation has been completely reversed. Germany is already the strongest military power in Europe, with the exception of Russia. Her generals insist that Germany keeps possession of their atomic weapons and continues to advance them for her self-defense; the Social Democrats are hardly less ardent promoters of German military might than the Adenauer party. The Western position is simple enough; the Soviet Union in her wish to dominate the World (as demonstrated by her conquest of the East European states after the war) will overrun Western Europe unless Europe can be defended by sufficiently strong military forces. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Without an armed Germany, however, Europe is not strong enough to resist a Russian onslaught, hence a rearmed, military strong Germany is needed to defend the free World This argument is further strengthened by the assumption that present-day Germany is democratic and peace-loving, and thus can not possibly be a threat to Russia or to anyone who does not have evil intentions. The Russians, on the other hand, have never shared this viewpoint; they feel menaced by a militarily strong Germany, and they believed that Hermany will repeat the Kaiser’s and Mr. Hitler’s attempts to conquer Russia. Is the Western emphasis on the peace-loving and democratic nature of the present German regime sufficiently convincing to dispel the Russian fears? Is Germany as “changed” as the Western allies proclaim? Germany is a big industrial European, which has arrived at full maturity. The World has already been divided among the older powers (England, France, Holland, Belgium). Germany, whose industrial development assumed an extraordinarily fast pace has a highly developed industry (characterized, like that of Japan, by a great degree of cartelization) and a disciplined and capable labour force, yet it is geographically a relatively small country and still in the process of reaching its fully potential. Some people believe it will become a World power. At the same time, Germany has a feudal class, which has developed a most remarkable military cast. It is competent, devoted, and extremely nationalistic. The blending of industrial expansion with her military potential has led Germany on the path of being a strong country capable of defending itself. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Germany has put pressure on the peacefully minded civilian government to enforce national pride. The German army has been modernized and rebuilt and industries are flourishing and its leaders are focusing on protection of private enterprises. This nationalistic feeling is kept alive and it can be fanned to great intensity any day a German government should want to do so. Unlike America, a nation of immigrants, many patriotic people are still in high government positions. What is the likely future of the social character of humans in a bilateral or multilateral armed World, where, no matter how complex the problems or how full the satisfactions of any particular society, the biggest and most pervasive reality in any humans’ life is the poised missile, the humming data processor connected to it, the waiting radiation counters and seismographs, the overall technocratic perfection (overlying the nagging but important fear of its imperfection) of the mechanism of holocaust? To live for any length of time under the constant threat of destruction creates certain psychological effects in most human beings—fright, hostility, callousness, a hardening of the heart, and a resulting indifference to all the values we cherish. Such conditions will transform us into barbarians—through barbarians equipped with the most complicated machines. If we are serious in claiming that our aim is to preserve freedom (that is, to prevent the subordination of the individual under an all-powerful state), we must admit that this freedom will be lost, whether the deterrent work or does not work. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Aside from these psychological facts, the continuation of the arms race constitutes a particular threat to Western culture. In the process of conquering nature, producing and consuming have become the main preoccupation of Western life—the goal of many. We have transformed means into ends. We manufacture machines which are like men and women, and we produce men and women who are like machines. In one’s work, the individua is managed as a part of a production team. During one’s leisure time, one is manipulated as a consumer who likes what one is told to like and yet has the illusion that one follows one’s own taste. In centering one’s life around the production of things, humans themselves are in danger of becoming things, worshipping the idols of the production machine and the state while they are under the illusion of worshipping God. Things are in the saddle and ride humankind. Circumstances we created have consolidated themselves into powers which rule over us. The technical and bureaucratic system we have built tells us what to do, it decides for us. We may not be in danger of becoming slaves, but we are in danger of becoming robots, and the human values of our tradition are threatened—integrity, individuality, responsibility, reason, and love. Talking about these values more and more becomes an empty ritual. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

This trend toward a World of impotent men and women directed by virile machines (both in the United States of American and in Russia)—brought about by technological and demographic factors, and by the increasing centralization and bureaucracy in big corporations and government—will reach the point of no return if we continue the arms race. Dangerous as our present situation is, we still have a chance to put humans back into the saddle, to effect a renaissance of the spiritual values of the great humanistic tradition. Unless such a renaissance occurs, unless we can achieve a radical revitalization of the spirit on which our culture is founded, we shall lose the vitality necessary for survival and we shall decay, just as many other great powers have decayed in history. The real threat to our existence is not communist ideology, it is not even the communist military power—it is the hollowness of our beliefs, the fact that freedom, individuality, and faith have become empty formulas, that God has become an idol, that our vitality is sapped because we have no vision except that of having more of the same. It seems that a great deal of the hatred of communism is in the last analysis based on a deep disbelief in the spiritual values of democracy. Hence, instead of experiencing love of what we are for, we experience hate of what we are against. If we continue to live in fear of extinction and to plan mass destruction of others, the last chance for a revival of our humanist-spiritual tradition will be lost. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

An aspect of reactive violence is the kind of violence which is produced by frustration. When a wish or a need is frustrated, we find aggressive behaviour in animals, children, and adults. Such aggressive behaviour constitutes an attempt, although often a futile one, to attain the frustrated aim through the use of violence. It is clearly an aggression in the service of life, and not one for the sake of destruction. Since frustration of needs and desires has been an almost universal occurrence in most societies until today, there is no reason to be surprised that violence and aggression are constantly produced and exhibited. Related to the aggression resulting from frustration is hostility engendered by envy and jealousy. Both jealousy and envy constitute a special kind of frustration. They are caused by the fact that B has an object which A desires, or is loved by a person whose love A desires. Hate and hostility are aroused in A against B who receives that which A wants, and cannot have. Envy and jealousy are frustrations, accentuated by the fact that not only doe A not get what he or she wants, but that another person I favoured instead. The story of Mr. Cain, unloved through no fault of his own, who kills the favoured brother, and the story of Mr. Joseph and his brothers, are classical versions of jealousy and envy. Psychoanalytic literature offers a wealth of clinical data on these same phenomena. Another type of violence related to reactive violence but already a step further in the direction of pathology is revengeful violence. In reactive violence the aim is to avert the threatened injury, for this reason such violence serves the biological function of survival. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

In revengeful violence, on the other hand, the injury has already been done, and hence the violence has no function of defense. It has the irrational function of undoing magically what has been done realistically. We find revengeful violence in individuals as well as among primitive and civilized groups. The revenge motive is in inverse proportion to the strength and productiveness of a group or of an individual. If it has been shattered by having been injured, the important and the cripple have only one recourse to restore their self-esteem: to take revenge according to the lex talionis: “an eye for an eye.” On the other hand, the person who lives productively has no, or little, such need. Even if one has been hurt, insulted, and injured, the very process of living productively makes one forget the injury of the past. The ability to produce proves to be stronger than the wish for revenge. The truth of this analysis can be easily established by empirical data on the individual and on the social scale. Psychoanalytic material demonstrates that the mature, productive person is less motivated by the desire for revenge than the neurotic person who has difficulties in living independently and fully, and who is often prone to stake one’s whole existence on the wish for revenge. In server psychopathology, revenge becomes the dominant aim of one’s life, since without revenge not only self-esteem, but the sense of self and of identity threaten to collapse. Similarly we find that in the most backward groups (in the economic or cultural and emotional aspects) the sense of revenge (for example, for a past national defeat) seems to be strongest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Thus the lower middle classes, which are those most deprived in industrialized nations, are in many countries the focus of revenge feelings, just as they are the focus of racialist and nationalist feelings. By means of a “projective questionnaire” it would be easy to establish the correlation between the intensity of revenge feelings and economic and cultural impoverishments. More complicated probably is the understanding of revenge among primitive societies. Many primitive societies have intense and even institutionalized feelings and patterns of revenge, and the whole group feels obliged to avenge the injury inflicted on one of its members. It is likely that two factors play a decisive role here. The first is much the same as the one mentioned above: the atmosphere of psychic scarcity which pervades the primitive group and which makes revenge a necessary means of restitution for a loss. The second is narcissism, a phenomenon which can become intense with which the primitive group is endowed, any insult to its self-image is so devasting that it will quite naturally arouse intense hostility. Closely related to revengeful violence is a source of destructiveness which is due to the shattering of faith which often occurs in the life of a child. What is meant here by the “shattering of faith”? A child starts life with faith in goodness, love, justice. The infant has faith in his mother’s milk, in her readiness to cover him or her when one is cold, to comfort one when one is sick. This faith can be faith in father, mother, in a grandparent, or in any other person close to one; it can be expressed as faith in God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

In many individuals this faith is shattered at an early age. The child hears father lying in an important matter; he sees his cowardly fright of mother, ready to betray him (the child) in order to appease her; he witnesses the parents’ pleasures of the flesh, and may experience a father as a brutal beast; he is unhappy or frightened, and neither one of the parents, who are allegedly so concerned for him, notices it, or even if he tells them, pays any attention. There are any number of times when the original faith in love, truthfulness, justice of the parents is shattered. Sometimes, in children who are brought up religiously, the loss of faith refers directly to God. A child experiences the death of a little bird he loves, or of a friend, or of a sister, and his faith in God as being good and just is shattered. However, it does not make much of a difference whether it is faith in a person or in God which is shattered. It is always the faith in life, in the possibility of trusting it, of having confidence in it, which is broken. It is of course true that every child goes through a number of disillusionments; but what matters is the sharpness and severity of a particular disappointment. Often this first and crucial experience of shattering of faith takes place at an early age: at four, five, six, or even much earlier, at a period of life about which there is little memory. Often the final shattering of faith takes place at a much later age. Being betrayed by a friend, by a sweetheart, by a teacher, by a religious or political leader in whom one can trust. Seldom is it one single occurrence, but rather a number of small experiences which accumulatively shatter a person’s faith. The reactions to such experiences vary. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

One person may react by losing dependency on the particular person who has disappointed one, by becoming more independent oneself and being able to find new friends, teachers, or loved ones whom one trusts and in whom one has faith. This is the most desirable reaction to early disappointments. IN many other instances the outcome is that the person remains skeptical, hopes for a miracle that will restore one’s faith, tests people, and when disappointed in turn by them tests still others or throws oneself into the arms of a powerful authority (the Church, or a political party, or a leader) to regain one’s faith. Often one overcomes one’s despair at having lost faith in life by a frantic pursuit of Worldly aims—money, power, or prestige. The reaction which is important in the context of violence is still another one. The deeply deceived and disappointed person can also begin to hate life. If there is nothing and nobody to believe in, if one’s faith in goodness and justice has all been a foolish illusion, if life is ruled by the ultimate negative rather than by the ultimate concern—then, indeed, life becomes hateful; one can no longer bear the pain of disappointment. One wishes to prove that life is evil, that humans are evil, that oneself is evil. The disappointed believer and lover of life thus will be turned into a cynic and a destroyer. This destructiveness is one of despair; disappointment in life has led to hate of life. In my clinical experience these deep-seated experiences of loss of faith are frequent, and often constitute the most significant leitmotiv in the life of a person. The same holds true in social life, where leaders in whom one trusted prove to be evil or incompetent. If the reaction is not one of greater independence, it is often one of cynicism or destructiveness. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

While all these forms of violence are still in the service of life realistically, magically, or at least as the result of damage or to disappointment in life, the next form to be discussed, compensatory violence, is a more pathological form, even though less drastically so than necrophilia. By compensatory violence, violence is a substitute for productive activity occurring in an impotent person. While human beings are the object of natural and social forces which rule them, one is at the same time not only the object of circumstances. One has the will, the capacity, and the freedom to transform and to change the World—within certain limits. What matters here is not the scope of will and freedom, but the fact that humans cannot tolerate absolute passivity. One is driven to make one’s imprint on the World, to transform and to change, and not only to be transformed and changed. This human need is expressed in the early cave drawings, in all the arts, in work, and in pleasures of the flesh. All these activities are the result of the human capacity to direct one’s will toward a goal and to sustain one’s effort until the goal is reached. The capacity to thus use one’s powers is potency. (Potency involving pleasures of the flesh is only one of the forms of potency.) If, for reasons of weakness, anxiety, incompetence, et cetera, humans are not able to act, if one is impotent, one suffers; this suffering due to impotence is rooted in the very fact that the human equilibrium has been disturbed, that humans cannot accept the state of complete powerlessness without attempting to restore one’s capacity to act. However, can one and how? #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

One way to restore one’s capacity to act is to submit to and identify with a person or a group having power. By this symbolic participation in another person’s life, humans have the illusion of acting, when in reality one only submits to and becomes a part of those who act. The other way, and this is the one which interests us most in this context, is humans’ power to destroy. To create life is to transcend one’s status as a creature that is thrown into life as dice are thrown out of a cup. However, to destroy life also means to transcend it and to escape the unbearable suffering of complete passivity. To create life requires certain qualities which the impotent person lacks. To destroy life requires only one quality—the use of force. The impotent human, if one has a pistol, a knife, or a strong arm, can transcend life by destroying it in others or in oneself. One thus takes revenge on life for negating itself to one. Compensatory violence is precisely that violence which has its roots in and which compensates for impotence. The human who cannot create wants to destroy. In creating and in destroying one transcends one’s role as a mere creature. Mr. Camus expressed this idea succinctly when he had Mr. Caligula say: “I live, I kill, I exercise the rapturous power of a destroyer, compared with which the power of a creator is merest child’s play.” This is the violence of the cripple, of those to whom life has denied the capacity for any positive expression of their specifically human powers. They need to destroy precisely because they are human, since being human means transcending thing-ness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Closely related to compensatory violence is the drive for complete and absolute control over a living being, animal or human. This drive is the essence of sadism. In sadism the wish to inflict pain on others is not the essence. All the different forms of sadism which we can observe go back to one essential impulse, namely, to have complete mastery over another person, to make of one a helpless object of our will, to become one’s god, to do with one as one pleases. To humiliate one, to enslave one, are means toward this end, and the most radical aim is to make one suffer, since there is no greater power over another person than that of forcing one to undergo suffering without one’s being able to defend oneself. The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform a human into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life—freedom. Only if one has fully experienced the intensity and frequency of destructive and sadistic violence in individuals and in masses can one understand that compensatory violence is not something superficial, the result of evil influences, bad habits, and so on. It is a power in humans as intense and strong as one’s wish to live. It is so strong precisely because it constitutes the revolt of life against its being crippled; humans have a potential for destructive and sadistic violence because one is human, because one is not a thing, and because one must try to destroy life if one cannot create it. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The Colosseum in Rome, in which thousands of impotent people got their greatest pleasure by seeing men devoured by beasts, or killing each other, is the great monument to sadism. From these considerations follows something else. Compensatory violence is the result of unlived and crippled life, and its necessary result. It can be suppressed by fear of punishment, it can even be deflected by spectacles and amusements of all kinds. Yet it remains as a potential in its full strength, and whenever the suppressing forces weaken, it becomes manifest. The only cure for compensatory destructiveness is the development of the creative potential in humans, one’s capacity to make productive use of one’s human powers. Only if humans cease to be crippled will one cease to be a destroyer and a sadist, and only conditions in which humans can be interested in life can do away with those impulses which make the past and present history of humans so shameful. Compensatory violence is not, like reactive violence, in the service of life. It is the pathological substitute for life; it indicates the crippling and emptiness of life. However, in its very negation of life it still demonstrates humans’ need to be alive and not to be a cripple. One who stops one’s ears at the cry of the needy, shall one day cry oneself, and shall not be answered. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. There is nothing better than a human who rejoices in one’s work. The Sacramento Fire has been proudly serving the community since 1851, they are not receiving all of their resources, please show your support by making donations. This will help the community survive. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20