People’s beliefs about themselves—their self-conceptions—play a central role in their psychological experiences and can be powerful determinants of their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Self-concepts are important considerations in domains as diverse as social perception, self-evaluation, interpersonal relationships, decision making, and even consumer behavior. The characteristics of specific self-aspects, including the associated traits and their importance, determine the ease of activating them and the consequences of that activation. While the cognitive mechanisms behind these phenomena are quite simple, the implications are far-reaching: A person’s currently active self-aspect shapes what they remember, how they judge others, and how easily they can focus on current tasks or goals. Of course, these self-aspects exist within the broader network of the individual’s self-concept, and the overall organization of the self-concept (id est, self-complexity) is similarly influential. With identity, we deal with a process “located” in the core of the individual and yet also in the core of his communal culture, a process which establishes, in fact, the identity of those two identities. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

 If we should now pause and state a few minimum requirements for fathoming the complexity of identity, we should have to begin by saying something like thus (and let us take our time in saying it): in psychological terms, identity formation employs a process of simultaneous reflection and observation, a process taking place on all levels of mental functioning, by which the individual judges himself in the light of what be perceives to be the way in which others judge him in comparison to themselves and to a typology significant to them; while he judges their way of judging him in the light of how he perceives himself in comparison to them and to them and to types that have become relevant to him. This process is, luckily, and necessarily, for the most part, unconscious except where inner conditions and outer circumstances combine to aggravate a painful, or elated, “identity-consciousness.” Furthermore, the process described is always changing and developing: at its best, it is a process of increasing differentiation, and it becomes ever more inclusive as the individual grows aware of a widening circle of others significant to him, from the maternal person to “mankind.” The process “begins” somewhere in the first true “meeting” of mother and baby as two people who can touch and recognize each other, and it does not “end” until a man’s power of mutual affirmation wanes. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

As pointed out, however, the process has its normative crisis in adolescence, and is in many ways determined by what went before and determines much that follows. And finally, in discussing identity, as we now see, we cannot separate personal growth and communal change, nor can we separate the identity crisis in individual life and contemporary crises in historical development, because the two help to define each other and are truly relative to each other. The whole interplay between the psychological and the social, the developmental and the historical, for which identity formation is of prototypal significance, could be conceptualized only as a kind of psychosocial relativity. A weighty matter then: certainly, mere “roles” played interchangeably, mere self-conscious “appearances,” or mere strenuous “postures” cannot possibly be the real thing, although they may be dominant aspects of what today is called the “search for identity.” Given all of this, it would be wrong to let some terms—such as self-conception, self-imagery, or self-esteem, on the other hand, and role ambiguity, role conflict, or role loss, on the other—take over the area to be studied, although teamwork methods are, now, the best approach in this general area. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

What these approaches as yet lack, however, is a theory of human development which attempts to come closer to something by finding out wherefrom and whereto it develops. For identity is never “established” as an “achievement” in the form of a personality armor, or of anything static and unchangeable. The traditional psychoanalytic method, on the other hand, cannot quite grasp identity because it has not developed terms to conceptualize the environment. Certain habits of psychoanalytic theorizing, habits of designating the environment as “outer world” or “object world,” cannot take account of the environment as a pervasive actuality. The German ethologist introduced the word “Umwelt” to denote not merely an environment which surrounds you, but which is also in you. And indeed, from the point of view of development, “former” environments are forever in us; and since we live in a continuous process of making the present “former” we never—not even as a newborn—meet any environment as a person who never had an environment. One methodological precondition, then, for grasping identity would be a psychoanalysis sophisticated enough to include the environment; the other would be a social psychology which is psychoanalytically sophisticated; together, they would institute a new field which would have to create its own historical sophistication. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

In the meantime, we can only try to see where a historical instance or a bit of normative development, a fragment of case history, or an event in a biography becomes clearer when something like identity development is assumed to exist. And, of course, it helps to note down in detail what and why and how an item seems to become clearer. What about the awareness of self-hate? What is expressed in Hamlet, Richard III is not restricted to clear-sighted knowledge of the agonies of human sols. During longer or shorter intervals, many people experience self-hate or self-contempt as such. They may have flashing feelings of, “I hate myself,” or “I despise myself”; they may be furious at themselves. However, such alive experiencing of self-hate occurs only in periods of distress and is forgotten as the distress subsides. As a rule, the question does not arise whether such feelings—or thoughts—are more than a temporary response to a “failure,” a “stupidity,” a feeling of wrong done, or a realization of some psychic handicap. Hence, there is no awareness of the subversive and lasting operation of self-hate. Regarding that form of self-hate which is expressed in self-accusation, the range of differences in awareness is too wide to allow for any general statement. Those neurotics who have entrenched themselves in a shell of self-righteousness have so silenced all self-accusations that nothing reaches awareness. Opposed to these are the self-effacing types who frankly express self-reproaches and guilt feelings, or betray the existence of such feelings by their flagrantly apologetic or defensive behavior. Such individual differences in awareness are significant indeed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

However, the awareness does not justify the conclusion that the self-effacing types are aware of self-hate; because even those neurotics who are aware of self-recriminations are aware neither of their intensity nor of their destructive nature. They are also unaware of their intrinsic futility and tend to regard them as testimony to their high moral sensitivity. They do not question their validity, and as a matter of fact, cannot do so if they judge themselves from the perspective of a godlike perfection. However, almost all neurotics are aware of the results of self-hate: feeling guilty, inferior, cramped, tormented. Yet, they do not in the least realize that they have brought about these painful feelings and self-evaluations. And even the bit of awareness they may have, can be blurred by neurotic pride. Instead of suffering from feeling cramped, they are proud of being “unselfish…ascetic…self-sacrificing…a slave to duty”—terms which may hide a multitude of sins against the self. Therefore, self-hate in all essentials is an unconscious process. In the last analysis, there is a survival interest in not being aware of its impact. This is the ultimate reason that the bulk of the process is usually externalized, id est, experienced as operating not within the individual himself but between him and the outside world. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

We can roughly distinguish between active and passive externalization of self-hate. The former is an attempt to direct self-hate outward, against life, fate, institutions, or people. In the latter, the hate remains directed against the self but is perceived or experienced as coming from the outside. In both ways, the tension of the inner conflict is released by being turned into an interpersonal one. The expressions of self-hate are identically the same as those of hate in interpersonal relations. To illustrate the latter by a historical example that is still fresh in our memory, Governor of California, Gavin Newsom’s hatred for Americans, we see that he intimidated and accused them viciously, he humiliated them, he disgraced them in public, he deprived and frustrated them in every form, shape and manner, he destroyed their hopes for the future, and tortured them. If he is not impeached, people fear Gavin Newsom may start killing Americans. In more civilized and concealed forms, we can observe most of these expressions of hate in everyday life, in families or between competitors. Love needs no defense. In its genuine expression, love is a natural, perhaps even a virtuous, impulse in an individual. But anger? Anger is akin to sin, some believe. Many confuse anger with hate, with violent rage, with monumental destructiveness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Yet, anger is as natural to the human as love is. Historically, collective anger has played a significant role in combating injustice and establishing and safeguarding individual rights. We may feel sorrow for the starving or abused child, but it is our anger that energizes us to do something about it. And the student who receives a low grade and the comment, “poorly written” on an essay may feel hurt and defeated, but it is anger that energizes the student to, “show that teacher what I can really do” on the next assignment. The power and energy of anger that many of us fear and believe we must suppress is one of our strongest motivations. Rather than suppressing and controlling anger, actualizers can direct the powerful emotion in ways that are enhancing to themselves and to their relationships with others. Honest expression of genuine anger is called assertion. Assertion is being able to confront others directly and truthfully. It is trusting yourself and others sufficiently to be able to face up to conflicts. Assertion is an antidote to rage, violence, and betrayal. It is the ability to recognize that the loud music on your co-worker’s radio is making it difficult for you to concentrate (you are annoyed); that you can remedy the problem (eliminate the annoyance) with a direct, honest statement to the co-worker—“Would you mind turning off the radio? I’m having trouble concentrating”—and that you can confront another person as a fellow human being, not as an object to be avoided or feared. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Assertion simply requires three things: Recognizing and acknowledging your genuine feeling of annoyance or anger. Knowing you have the right to express that annoyance. Trusting that the other person can respond as a reasonable human being. Manipulators are often so detached from their feelings that they fail to accurately recognize and to acknowledge their feelings of annoyance. They feel miserable but are seldom able to name correctly the feeling or to perceive the reality surrounding their feelings. Instead, they see themselves as victims and others as enemies. This is because there are relentless demands on self, merciless self-accusation, self-contempt, self-frustration, self-tormenting, and self-destruction. What one conceives as something that should be is much determined by self-hate as by pride, and the furies of self-hate are unleashed when they are not fulfilled. They can be compared to a holdup in which a gunman points a revolver at a person, saying: “Either you give me all you have, or else I will shoot you.” The gunman’s holdup is likely to be the more humane of the two. The threatened person can save himself by complying, while the shoulds cannot be appeased. And, being shot, for all the finality of death, seems less cruel than a lifelong suffering under self-hate. His real self is stifled by the neurosis, the Frankenstein monster originally designed for his protection. And it makes little difference whether you live in a totalitarian country or a private neurosis, either way, you are apt to end up in a concentration camp where the whole point is to destroy the self as painfully as possible. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

The shoulds are, in fact, self-destructive in their very nature. However, as yet, we have seen only one aspect of their destructiveness: that they put a person into a straitjacket and deprive him of inner freedom. Even if he manages to mold himself into a behavioristic perfection, he can do so only at the expense of his spontaneity and the authenticity of his feelings and beliefs. The shoulds aim, like any political tyranny, at the extinction of individuality. They create an atmosphere like that in the seminary described by Stendhal in The Red and the Black (or George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four) in which any individual thinking and feeling are suspect. They require an unquestioning obedience, which is not even felt as obedience. Dr. Freud believed that neurosis was partly caused by an overly severe, mainly unconscious, infantile conscience. (He called it the superego.) According to his view, a neurotic sufferer was obliged to avoid pleasures of the flesh, even fantasies about pleasures of the flesh, to be free of guilt. One aim of psychoanalytic therapy was to help the patient modify the conscience so that its taboos were less restrictive and more in keeping with adult life. Mowrer disagreed with the psychoanalytic views. According to Mowrer, a neurotic is a person who persists beyond childhood in the pursuit of irresponsible pleasures, including sexuality, and who represses the conscience to avoid guilt. Neurotic symptoms arise as defenses against guilt, not against infantile sexuality, as the Freudians might maintain. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Consequently, Mowrer claims, the aim in therapy is not to render the conscience more lenient, but to make it conscious, so that a person will feel guilt more acutely and seek in the future to obey the conscience rather than to repress it. Clinical experience shows that neither Dr. Freud nor Mowrer is wholly correct or wholly incorrect. Some neurotic patients do indeed have a conscience that is too strict; to remain guilt-free, they must refrain from all the pleasurable activities, including those that society condones. Other patients have the makeup Mowrer has regarded as nuclear to all neurosis—they repress conscience so they can break social taboos without conscious guilt. In still others, both patterns of unhealthy conscience may be found. If a person’s conscience is based on a cruel and punitive morality, that person will have an exaggerated sense of duty that makes him or her forego even legitimate pleasures. Thus, a parent may deny himself or herself all fun in life, insisting upon a Spartan existence, to provide for the children. The necessity to repress anger, resentment, and temptation to enjoyment can impose excessive stress upon the person and demoralize him or her such that resistance to infectious illnesses is diminished. If it is inhumanely demanding and restrictive, conscience can kill a person. Such a conscience is often found in persons with various forms of stress-induced disease, such as high blood pressure, cancer, and heart disease. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

As the years go by and the script becomes adapted by experience, the controls, patterns, and prescriptions become blended so that it is hard to distinguish one from the other in the person’s behavior, and to determine which is a “final common pathway.” One adopts a program or routine which synthesizes them all. The major script payoffs occur in the form of a “final display.” If the payoff is a bad one, the script elements may be quite apparent to an experienced observer, as in cases of psychosis, delirium tremens, car-crashing, suicide, or murder. With good payoffs, it is more difficult to dissect out the script directives, partly because in such cases, there are usually extensive permissions granted by the parents, which may obscure the directive. Most people spend their lives comfortably embedded in their script matrices. It is a bed which their parents made for them and to which they have added a few trimmings of their own. It may have glitches in it and be lumpy, too, but it is their very own, and they have been accustomed to it since their earliest years, and so, few people are willing to trade it in for something better built and more adapted to their circumstances. Matrix, after all, is just Latin for mother’s womb, and the script is as close and cozy as they can get once they have forever left the real thing. However, for those who do decide to strike out for themselves, and say, “Mother, I would rather do it my own way,” there are several possibilities. If they are lucky, mother herself may have included a reasonable release or spellbreaker in the matrix, in which case they may do it on their own. Another way is for their friends and intimate and life itself to help, but this is rare. The third way is through competent script analysis, from which they may get permission to put their own shows on the road. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Even if the origins (but probably not the insertions) of the script directives vary in individual cases, the script matrix nevertheless remains one of the most useful and cogent diagrams in the history of science, compressing, as it does, the whole plan for a human life and its ultimate destiny into a simple, easily understood, and easily checked designed, which also indicates how to change. We are helped indeed every time that we discover in somebody else’s writings an idea which has been trying to formulate itself in our own mind but which could not pierce the clouds of obscurity, vagueness, and uncertainty which surrounded it. Even though it is indirect and not personal, the help which is given thousands of people through the printed sheet possesses a worth which only those who benefit by it can properly estimate. When he finds his own inner experiences described in the pages of a book, he feels more assured about their reality. Those who complain that this philosophy is unintelligible, thereby expose their own insufficiency of intelligence and their own lack of mental capacity wherewith to grasp its position and conclusion. For there must be an affinity between the creativeness of the writer and the comprehension of the reader; without it both will be peering at each other through an opaque frosted-glass window. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Many persons have never even had access to books on these subjects, nor the chance to get tuition personally. However, now all that is changed. For all who can read can uncover today the once-hidden wisdom of the ancient scholars. And today, the proportion of those who can read is not only immensely larger but is rapidly enlarging. It is true that reading sheets of printed paper cannot take the place of personal inner experience. However, this does not stamp them as useless. They provide bridges to support the aspirant and thus help him find his way from his present familiar state to the farther one he seeks to reach. No teacher and no book, however inspired, can transform a disciple into something new. What they can and usually do is to kindle the disciple’s latent capacities, to bring out his innate views, and to clarify his vague tendencies. Books can be used to stimulate thought or to escape from it: it depends on the reader whether they are used to help fulfill the duty of thinking for oneself or to evade it. Through books, we may borrow the experience of others and save ourselves costly experiments. Such living by proxy is painless. Where a teaching is said to be based on an ancient tradition yet never quotes a traceable source, an original document, one may need to use some caution in quoting it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

He will learn to know some truth better through experience than through books but more truth through both together. The mystics decry intellect and disparage the worth of literature. However, many men have turned in hard periods to the classics among book and recieved power against depression, got wisdom, guidance, or consolation from them! In our lifetime, we have been favored with ongoing communication from the heavens, which have been open to the prophets of our time. Much revelation received, in this time as well as anciently, has been doctrinal. Some of it has been operational and tactical. Much of it is not spectacular. President John Taylor reminds us: “Adam’s revelation did not instruct Noah to build his ark; nor did Noah’s revelation tell Lot to forsake Sodom; nor did either of these speak of the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt. These all had revelations for themselves. Those who have gone through trials recognize that there are tragedies that are so difficult we cannot understand them. We do not have an answer in this life for every adversity. When trials come, it is time to turn our souls to God who is the author of life and the only source of comfort. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you,” reports John 14.27.  Christ has suffered more than any of us, and He knows the intensity of our afflictions. There is no suffering we have that He did not undergo in Gethsemane and on Calvary. That is why He understands and can help us. “Christ stated: “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall live,” reports John 11.25. The greatest tragedy that can happen to a person is not the loss of his possessions, or his intellect, or his moral life, but rather to lose eternal life, which is the free gift of God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Admiration is a beneficial affective response to witnessing excellence in others. While admiration was divided into two emotion constructs in psychology, elevation as admiration for virtue and admiration as limited to admiration for skill, continues to be treated as one moral emotion in philosophy. Admired others manifest an ideal or value of importance to the admirer in their behavior or characteristics. Admiration motivates individuals to praise, affiliate with, and emulate the admired other and to internalize the ideal embodies by the other. Admiration functions to enhance the admiring individuals’ agency in promoting an ideal in themselves and others through facilitating the social transmission of associated skills, motivation, knowledge, and ways of conduct. Emotions often are elicited by moral beauty and that are linked to purpose in life and commitment to the furtherance of some greater cause. This category features emotions such as being moved, poignancy, awe, inspiration, compassion, and gratitude. As evident in the partial overlap between the listed emotions, there is no clear separation between overarching emotion categories. We typically admire people who are brave, courageous, selfless, moral, caring, altruistic, helpful, honest, smart, strong, determined, charismatic, resilient, reliable, and inspiring (which includes being admirable) and three main functions of the hero: enhancing and uplifting others, protecting these around them, and modeling morals for other. These are all qualities that members of the award-winning Sacramento Fire Department possess. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

We can admire a person at zero acquaintance and are often drawn to the person initially because of one admirable act or characteristic. Nevertheless, admiration hinges on the attribution of the admirable act or characteristic to the underlying psychology of the person: It is not a result of external forces but rather is representative of this person’s dispositional behavior and traits.  Why do people admire the Sacramento Fire Department? The object of admiration is a successful behavioral manifestation of an ideal way beyond expectations. The admirer appraises it as rare to see this ideal embodied in such an outstanding way, but as a signal that is possible to live up to it. The admired firefighter, EMT, or paramedic is appraised as a source of knowledge for how one could lead one’s life in pursuit of the ideal and of motivation to promote the ideal. Admiration assists the social transmission of skills, knowledge, and ways of conduct by creating attention and attachment to and emulation of exemplars embodying a specific ideal, which entails a sense of increased potential efficacy of the admirer. The admiring individual further seeks to praise, affiliate with, cooperate with, and if necessary, defer to the admired other, thus promoting the cultivation and expression of the value in others. In this way, admiration serves to regulate the social hierarchy within and between groups. If you do not have much experience with situational awareness, consider spending some time with the Sacramento Fire Department. Ask about some near-misses that are categorized as situational awareness. You will likely be surprised at how many times emergency responders encounter it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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