When institutions fail to enforce their own rules, individuals are forced into roles they never chose, sustaining dysfunction through silence, avoidance, and fear. Such situations require a lot of emotional labor. Emotional labor is the psychological glue that holds dysfunctional systems together, especially when people are forced into roles that contradict who they are. Emotional labor is not just being nice at work. It is the management of feeling—the requirement to display emotions that you do not feel and suppress emotions that you do feel to manage a role, and keep a situation cohesive. This is the situation with a weakly “cathected” or inactive leader. In healthy systems, emotional labor is part of the job. People are capable of mobilizing energy because they are doing something rewarding, or can be charged up by an outside source. However, in dysfunctional systems, emotional labor becomes the job. This happens when you are expected to absorb conflict others refuse to address, forced to be the “calm one,” the “fixer,” the “bigger person,” pressured to maintain harmony while others create chaos, required to pretend incompetence around you is normal, and are punished for showing frustration at others’ negligence. This is role drift through emotional coercion. I had to study psychology and religion to understand this situation, and it took me far off my path. I never agreed to be the therapist, the parent, the moral compass, the scapegoat, or the shock absorber—but the system pushed those roles onto me, relying on my integrity to compensate for everyone else’s refusal to do their jobs. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

At first, I wore the role like a badge of honor. I could help people become more rational, more grounded. But as the years stretched into more than a decade, the role hardened into a career I never asked for. The same problems cycled endlessly, even with paid professionals sitting right there, unable to help anyone resolve anything. Eventually, I started hiding—running errands at dawn, slipping out late at night—because people would wait around to latch onto me. After twelve to fourteen years of this, I reached a breaking point. I did not want to be the one absorbing everyone’s chaos, especially when so many others were standing right there, untouched and unbothered. I honestly do not have fun anymore. Life has become nothing but work—endless bills, endless responsibilities, endless situations to manage. It feels like every part of my existence has turned into a job. And the drama never ends. Holidays, family gatherings, every day of the week—there is always someone ready to do something forbidden, disobey the law, or explode the moment they get an audience. In this frustrated and vulnerable state, an individual has no defense against people with problematic behavior, and other human relationships are neglected. Engagements are dropped at a moment’s notice when someone wants to use their position or situation to have a conniption fit or temper tantrum. The mismatch between the authentic self and the forced role produces burnout, moral injury, resentment, identity fatigue, emotional numbness, and a sense of being trapped in a role you never agreed to play. This is why people say, “I do not even recognize myself anymore.” To perform a role effectively, one must be and feel potent: not omnipotent, but potent enough to deal with these individuals. The individuals must believe that they are potent enough, so the individual forced into the leader role has protection against their dysfunction and wrath. Dysfunctional adults need permission or a license to give up, or be released from negative behavior. Dysfunctional institutions survive because the system runs on the emotional labor of the unwilling. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

To be a judge obviously involves a knowledge of the law and probably also knowledge of a much wider range of human affairs that are legally relevant. It also involves, however, “knowledge” of the values and attitudes deemed appropriate for a judge, extending as far as those proverbially deemed appropriate for a judge’s wife. The judge must also have appropriate “knowledge” in the domain of the emotions: He will have to know, for example, when to restrain his feelings of compassion, to mention a not unimportant psychological prerequisite for this role. In this way, each role opens an entrance into a specific sector of the society’s total stock of knowledge. To learn a role, it is not enough to acquire the routines immediately necessary for its “outward” performance. One must also be initiated into the various cognitive and even affective layers of the body of knowledge that is directly and indirectly appropriate to this role. This implies a social distribution of knowledge. A society’s stock of knowledge is structured in terms of what is generally relevant and what is relevant to specific roles. This is true of even very simple social situations. In social situations, for instance, one must have knowledge of the procedures necessary to keep this company economically afloat. The social distribution of knowledge entails a dichotomization in terms of general and role-specific relevance. Given the historical accumulation of knowledge in a society, we can assume that, because of the division of labor, role-specific knowledge will grow at a faster rate than generally relevant and accessible knowledge. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

The multiplication of specific tasks brought about by the division of labor requires standardized solutions that can be readily learned and transmitted. These, in turn, require specialized knowledge of certain situations, and of the means/ends relationships in terms of which the situations are socially defined. In other words, specialists will arise, each of whom will have to know whatever is deemed necessary for the fulfillment of his particular task. To accumulate role-specific knowledge, a society must be so organized that certain individuals can concentrate on their specialties. If, in a hunting society, certain individuals are to become specialists as swordsmiths, there will have to be provisions to excuse them from the hunting activities that are incumbent on all other adult males. Specialized knowledge of a more elusive kind, such as the knowledge of mystagogues and other intellectuals, requires a similar social organization. In all these cases, the specialists become administrators of the sectors of the stock of knowledge that have been socially assigned to them. At the same time, an important part of generally relevant knowledge is the typology of specialists. While the specialists are defined as individuals who know their specialties, everyone must know who the specialists are in case their specialties are needed. The man on the street is not expected to know the intricacies of the magic, inducing fertility or casting evil spells. If the need for either service arises, what he must know, however, is which magicians to call upon. #RandolphHarris 4 of17

People complain about the cost of welfare, but nothing drains resources like a bad manager. In any specialized field, you cannot afford to have someone with a poor attitude and no commitment running the show. A person who is just there for a paycheck can destroy a business from the inside. A typology of experts (what contemporary social workers call a referral guide) is thus part of the generally relevant and accessible stock of knowledge, while the knowledge that constitutes expertise is not. The practical difficulties that may arise in certain societies (for instance, when there are competing coteries of experts, or when specialization has become so complicated that the layman gets confused) need not concern us now. It is thus possible to analyze the relationship between roles and knowledge from two vantage points. Looked at from the perspective of the institutional order, the roles appear as institutional representations and mediations of the institutionally objectivated aggregates of knowledge. Looked at from the perspective of the several roles, each role carries with it a socially defined appendage of knowledge. Both perspectives, of course, point to the same global phenomenon, which is the essential dialectic of society. The first perspective can be summed up in the proposition that society exists only as individuals are conscious of it, the second in the proposition that individual consciousness is socially determined. Narrowing this to the matter of roles, we can say that, on the other hand, the institutional order is real only insofar as it is realized in performed roles and that, on the other hand, roles are representative of an institutional order that defines their character (including their appendages of knowledge) and from which they derive their objective sense. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

The analysis of roles is of particular importance to the sociology of knowledge because it reveals the mediations between the macroscopic universes of meaning objectivated in a society and the ways by which these universes are subjectively real to individuals. Thus, it is possible, for example, to analyze the macroscopic social roots or a religious world view in certain collectives (classes, say, or ethnic groups, or intellectual coteries), and also to analyze the manner in which this world view is manifested in the consciousness of an individual. If one inquires into how the individual, in his total social activities, relates to the collectivity in question, the two analyses can be brought together. Such an inquiry will, of necessity, be an exercise in role analysis. Everybody knows that in Germany, the career of the young man who is dedicated to science normally begins with the position of Priivatdozent. After having conversed with and received the consent of the respective specialists, he takes up residence on the basis of a book and, usually, a rather formal examination before the faculty of the university. Then he gives a course of lectures without receiving any salary other than the lecture fees of his students. It is up to him to determine, within his venia legendi, the topics upon which he lectures. In the United States of America, the academic career usually begins in quite a different manner, namely, by employment as an “assistant.” This is similar to the great institutes of the natural sciences and medical faculties in Germany, where usually only a fraction of the assistants tries to habilitate themselves as Privatodozenten and often only later in their career. Particularly, this contrast means that the career of the academic man in Germany is generally based upon plutocratic prerequisites. For it is extremely hazardous for a young scholar without funds to expose himself to the conditions of the academic career. He must be able to endure this condition for at least a number of years without knowing whether he will have the opportunity to move into a position which pays well enough for maintenance. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

In the United States of America, where the bureaucratic system exists, the young academic man is paid from the very beginning. To be sure, his salary is modest; usually, it is hardly as much as the wages of a semi-skilled laborer. Yet, he begins with a seemingly secure passion, for he draws a fixed salary. As a rule, however, notice may be given to him just as with German assistants, and frequently he definitely has to face this should he not come up to expectations. These expectations are such that the young academic in America must draw large crowds of students. This cannot happen to a German docent; once one has him, one cannot get rid of him. To be sure, he cannot raise any “claims.” However, he has the understandable notion that after years of work, he has a sort of moral right to expect some consideration. He also expects—and this is often quite important—that one have some regard for him when the question of the possible habilitation of other Privatdozenten comes up. Whether, in principle, one should habilitate every scholar who is qualified, or whether one should consider enrollments, and hence give the existing staff a monopoly to teach—that is an awkward dilemma. It is associated with the dual aspect of the academic profession. In general, one decides in favor of the second alternative. However, this increases the danger that the respective full professor, however conscientious he is, will prefer his own disciples. If I may speak of my personal attitude, I must say that I have followed the principle that a scholar promoted by me must legitimize and habilitate himself with somebody else at another university. However, the result has been that one of my best disciples had been turned down at another university because nobody there believed this to be the reason. A further difference between Germany and the United States of America is that in Germany, the Privatdozent generally teaches fewer courses than he wishes. According to his formal right, he can give any course in his field. However, to do so would be considered an improper lack of consideration for the older docent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

As a rule, the full professor gives the “big” courses, and the docent confines himself to secondary one. The advantage of these arrangements is that during his youth, the academic man is free to do scientific work, although this restriction of the opportunity to teach is somewhat involuntary. In America, the arrangement is different in principle. Precisely during the early years of his career, the assistant is absolutely overburdened just because he is paid. In a department of German, for instance, the full professor will give a three-hour course on Goethe, and that is enough, whereas the young assistant is happy if, besides the drill in the German language, his twelve weekly teaching hours include assignments of, say, Uhland. The officials prescribe this curriculum, and in this, the assistant is just as dependent as the institute assistant in Germany. Of late, we can observe distinctly that the German universities in the broad fields of science develop in the direction of the American system. The large institutes of medicine or natural science are “state capitalist” enterprises, which cannot be managed without very considerable funds. Here, we encounter the same condition that is found wherever capitalist enterprise comes into operation: the “separation of the worker from his means of production.” The worker, that is, the assistant, is dependent upon the implements that the state puts at his disposal; hence, he is just as dependent upon the head of the institute as is the employee in a factory upon the management. For, subjectively and in good faith, the director believes that this institute is “his,” and he manages its affairs. Thus, the assistant’s position is often as precarious as that of any “quasi-proletarian” existence and just as precarious as the position of the assistant in the American university. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Those who fail in their once-bornness, we said, want to have another chance at being born. It often seems as though they want to be made over by the same mothers who give physical birth to them; but this, as we can now see, would be too literal an assumption. For that “first birth,” to which all of their symptoms are related, is the emergence of their consciousness as individuals, a consciousness born from the interplay of recognitions. Whoever is the maternal attendant to that early phase is man’s first “environment,” and whatever environment is then first experienced as such remains associated with “mother.” On the security of that first polarization of a self and a maternal matrix are built all subsequent securities. “Mother” is the person (or the persons) who knows how to convincingly offer provision and screening: the provisions of food, warmth, stimulation in answer to the infant’s searching mouth, skin, and senses; and the screening of the quality and quantity of his intake to avoid both over-and under-stimulation. The new human being, therefore, experiences his appetites and aversions together with the personal care (and care means provision and caution) he gets. They form his first world; but so do those moments when he feels uncared for, alone with his discomfort and his rage. For these, however, he has at his disposal signals with an immediate appeal to the mothers, which sooner or later bring more or less response from her: the regularity and predictability of her responses are the infant’s first world order, the original paradise of provision. During the first year of life, the reality of the provider thus gradually emerges from the original matrix as a coherent experience, a verified fact, a sound investment of love and trust—and the infant has matured enough to experience coherently, verify reasonably, and invest courageously. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

This bipolarity of recognition is the basis of all social experience. Let nobody say that it is only the beginning, it passes, and it is, after all, childish. Man is not organized like an archaeological mound, in layers: as he grows, he makes the past part of all future, and every environment, as he once experienced it, part of the present environment. Dreams and dreamlike moments, when analyzed, always reveal the myriad past experiences which are waiting outside the gates of consciousness to mingle with present impressions. Man, at all times, wants to be sure that the original bipolarity is intact, especially when he feels tired, doubtful, unsure, alone—a fact which has been utilized by both theology and psychoanalysis. In that first relationship, man learns something which most individuals who survive and remain sane can take for granted most of the time. Only psychiatrists, priests, and born philosophers know how sorely that something can be missed. I have called this early treasure “basic trust”; it is the first psychosocial trait and the fundament of all others. Basic trust in mutuality is that original “optimism,” that assumption that “somebody is there,” without which we cannot live. In situations in which such basic trust cannot develop in early infancy, children die mentally. They do not respond nor learn; they do not assimilate their food and fail to defend themselves against infection, and often they die physically as well as mentally. One may well claim for that earliest meeting of a perceiving subject with a perceived object (which, in turn seems to “recognize” the subject) the beginning of all sense of identity; this meeting thus becomes the anchor-point for all the developments which culminate, at the end of adolescence, in the establishment of psychosocial identity. At that point, an ideological formula, intelligible both in terms of individual development and of significant tradition, must do for the young person what the mother did for the infant: provide nutriment for the soul as well as for the stomach, and screen the environment so that vigorous growth may meet what it can manage. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Of all the ideological systems, however, only religion restores the earliest sense of appeal to a Provider, a Providence. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, no prayer indicates this more clearly than “The Lord makes His Face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace”; and no prayerful attitude better than the uplifted face, hopeful of being recognized. The Lord’s countenance is apt to loom to sternly, and His son’s on the cross to show the enigmatic quality of total abandonment in sacrifice; but painters and sculptors fashion a faintly smiling face for the Madonna, graciously inclined toward the infant, who responds with peace and gaiety until, in the Renaissance, he stands up and, fully confident, motions away from her. We can see the search for the same smile of peace in the work of Eastern painters and sculptors, although their Buddhas seem closer to being the overall parent and child, all in one. It is art, the work of the visually gifted and the visually driven, in conjunction with religion, which puts such emphasis on the face; thought expresses the original symbiotic unity as a state of being firmly yet flexibly held, embedded in a Way. The deification of the irrational, of blood and instinct, of the beast of prey in man can be countered with the appeal of reason; arbitrary action can be countered with the written law; barbarity with the appeal to culture and humanity; the violent maltreatment of persons with the appeal to freedom, tolerance and the rights of man; the subordination of science, art and the rest to political purposes with the appeal to the autonomy of the various different fields of human activity. In each case, this is sufficient to awaken the consciousness of a kind of alliance and comradeship between the defenders of these endangered values and the Christians. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Reason, culture, humanity, tolerance, and self-determination, all these concepts which until very recently had served as battle slogans against the Church, against Christianity, against Jesus Christ Himself, have now, suddenly, and surprisingly, come very near indeed to the Christian standpoint. This takes place at a time when everything Christian is more closely hemmed in than ever before and when the cardinal principles of Christian belief are displayed in their hardest and most uncompromising form, in a form which could give the greatest offence to all reason, culture, humanity, and tolerance. And, indeed, it is precisely in inverse proportion to this oppression and to this narrowing of its field of action that Christian thought acquires the alliance of all these concepts and with it an entirely unexpected new wide field of activity. It is clear that it is not the Church that is seeking the protection and alliance of these concepts; but, on the contrary, it is the concepts that have somehow become homeless and now seek refuge in the Christian sphere, in the shadow of the Christian Church. IF we are to interpret this experience simply as a purely tactical move, as an alliance of expediency which will be dissolved as soon as the struggle is at an end, it will not correspond at all to the real. What is decisive is rather the fact that there took place a return to the origin. The children of the Church, who had become independent and gone their own ways, now, in the hour of danger, return to their mother. During the time of their estrangement, their appearance and their language have altered a great deal, and yet at the crucial moment, the mother and the children once again recognize one another. Reason, justice, culture, humanity, and all the kindred concepts seek and find a new purpose and a new power in their origin. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

This origin is Jesus Christ. In Soloviev’s story of the Antichrist, in the last days before Christ’s return, the heads of the persecuted churches discuss the question of what is for each of them the most precious thing in Christianity; the decisive answer is that the most precious thing in Christianity is Jesus Christ Himself. That is to say, that in the face of the Antichrist, only one thing has force and permanence, and that is Christ Himself. Only he who shares in Him has the power to withstand and to overcome. He is the center and the strength of the Christian Bible, of the Church, and of theology, but also of humanity, of reason, of justice and of culture. Everything must return to Him; it is only under His protection that it can live. There seems to be a general unconscious knowledge, which, in the hour of ultimate peril, leads everything which desires not to fall victim to the Antichrist to take refuge with Christ. “He that is not against us is for us,” reports Mark 9.40. Christ defines the limits of membership in Himself more widely than His disciples wish Him to do or themselves do. The particular concrete instance to which this saying of Jesus refers is the case of a man who, without himself being a disciple or follower, nevertheless casts out devils in the name of Jesus. Jesus forbade the disciples to hinder him, for “there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me,” reports Mark 9.39. Wherever the name of Jesus is still spoken, even though it be in ignorance or in the knowledge only of its objective power but without personal obedience, and even though it be only with hesitation and embarrassment, wherever this name is spoken it creates for itself a space to which the revilement of Jesus has no access, a region which still belongs to the power of Christ, where one must not interfere and hinder but where one must allow the name of Jesus Christ to do its work. It is an experience of our days that the spoken name of Jesus alone exercises an unforeseen power; and the effort which it costs to speak this name is perhaps connected with some faint apprehension of the power which is inherent in it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Wherever the name of Jesus Christ is spoken, it is a protection and a claim. This is the case with all those who, in their struggle for justice, truth, humanity, and freedom, have learnt once again to speak the name of Jesus Christ, even though it is often with hesitation, with genuine fear. This name gives protection to them and to the high values for which they stand; and it is at the same time the claim to these men and to these values. “He that not with me is against me,” reports Matthew 12.30. It is the same Jesus who speaks these words. For abstract analysis, these two sayings of Jesus are in irreconcilable contradiction; but in reality, they necessarily belong together. Here again, we have living experience to prove our case; under the pressure of anti-Christian forces, there came together groups of men who confessed the faith unequivocally and who were impelled to seek a clear decision for or against Christ in the strict discipline of doctrine and of life. In their struggle, these confessing congregations could not help but perceive that the greatest of all the dangers which threatened the Church with inner disintegration and disruption lay in the neutrality of large numbers of Christians; they saw in this the true hostility to Christ. The exclusive demand for a clear profession of allegiance to Christ caused the band of confessing Christians to become ever smaller; the saying, “he that is not with me is against me,” became an actual, concrete experience of the Christian Church; and then, precisely through this concentration on the essential, the Church acquired an inward freedom and breadth which preserved her against any timid impulse to draw narrow limits, and there gathered around her men who came from very far away, and men to whom she could not refuse her fellowship and her protection; injured justice, oppressed truth, vilified humanity and violated freedom all sought for her, or rather for her Master, Jesus Christ. So now she had the living experience of that other saying of Jesus: “He that is not against us is for us.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

These two sayings necessarily belong together as the two claims of Jesus Christ, the claim to exclusiveness, the greater the freedom. However, in isolation, the claim to exclusiveness leads to fanaticism and to slavery; and in isolation, the claim to totality leads to the secularization and self-abandonment of the Church. The more exclusively we acknowledge and confess Christ as our Lord, the more fully the wide range of His domination will be disclosed to us. However, the slave of sin is not yet free; nor has he cast off the chain, “because he scoffs at it.” He is in bonds, and therefore double-minded, and for once, he may not have his own way. There is a power that binds him. He cannot tear himself loose from it. Nay, he cannot even wholly will it. For this power, too, is denied him. If you, my listener, should see such a man, although it is unlikely, for without a doubt, weakness and mediocrity are the more common, if you should meet him in what he himself would call a weak moment, but which, alas, you would have to call a better moment; if you should meet him when he had found no rest in the desert, when the giddiness passes away for a moment, and he feels an agonizing longing for Good; if you should meet him when, shaken in his inner most being, and not without sadness, he was thinking of that man of single purpose who even in all his frailty still wills the Good: then you would discover that he had two wills, and you would discover his painful double-mindedness. Desperate as he was, he thought: Lost is lost. However, he could not help turning around once more in his longing for the Good. How terribly embittered he had become against this very longing, a longing that reveals that, just as a man in all his defiance has not power enough wholly to lose himself from the Good, because it is the stronger, so he has not even the power wholly to will it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Perhaps you may even have heard that desperate one say, “Some good went down with me.” When a man meets his death by drowning, as he sinks, without being quite dead, he comes to the surface again. At least a bubble comes out of his mouth. When this has happened, then he sinks dead. That bubble was the last breath, the last supply of air, that could make him lighter than the sea. So, with that remark. In that remark, the last hope of salvation expired. In that remark, he gave himself up. Was there still concealed in this thought a hope of salvation? Hidden in the soul, was there still in this thought a possible link with salvation? When a remark is pronounced in confidence to another man (oh, terrible misuse of confidence, even if the desperate one only misused it against himself!), when this word is heard, then he sinks forever. Alas, it is horrible to see a man rush toward his own destruction. It is horrible to see him dance on the rim of the abyss without any intimation of it. However, this clarity about himself and about his own destruction is even more horrible. It is horrible to see a man seek comfort by hurling himself into the whirlpool of despair. However, this coolness is still more horrible: that in the anxiety of death, a man should not cry out for help, “I am going under, save me”; but that he should quietly choose to be a witness to his own destruction! Oh, most extreme vanity, not to wish to draw man’s eyes to himself by beauty, by riches, by ability, by power, by honor, but to wish to get his attention by his own destruction, by choosing to say of himself what at most pity in all sadness may venture to say of such a person at his grace, “Yet, some good went down with him.” In moments of crisis, the doubleness of the human mind becomes painfully clear. We cling to illusions, hoping to extract some advantage from the very forces that are destroying us, unwilling to admit that the Good—the rational, the humane, the lawful—is the one thing we never fully willed. Yet in the instant of danger, even if only for a fleeting moment, the other will becomes visible: the part of us that recognizes what must be done. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

This same clarity appears in emergency situations. When lives are at stake—when rescue or the prevention of fire spread is involved—there is no room for hesitation, sentimentality, or the false comfort of appearances. Property damage becomes irrelevant. The only rational response is decisive action. The threat of collapsing walls is present at every structure fire, but when you combine an enormous blaze in a row of old buildings, a swelling crowd, and a fire department stretched thin trying to save an entire neighborhood, the danger multiplies. That was the situation one August afternoon when a fire broke out at the “lower works” of a glass plant at the west end of Broadway. The alarm came in around 5:20 p.m. As the firemen left the station, they could already see the towering black smoke and knew they were facing a battle. The fire had begun at the west end of a row of warehouses and was rapidly consuming the adjoining structures. By the time the department arrived, all three warehouses were burning, threatening nearby homes and the rest of the abandoned factory. Captain X positioned himself near the east wall, trying to save the old office building and prevent the fire from advancing into the neighborhood. Thousands of people had gathered, edging dangerously close to the flames. Working alone, Captain X had to stop his hose several times to push the crowd back. As he turned again toward the fire, the wall suddenly collapsed, showering him with bricks and debris. Partially burned and pinned beneath the rubble, he was dug out by many of the same people whose lives he had just saved. Witnesses said he had a moment of warning but used it not to save himself, but to shove several people out of harm’s way before the wall came down on him. He was treated for leg injuries and survived. Despite the scale of the fire, no one else was hurt, and the blaze was contained to the warehouses. By morning, only tottering brick walls remained. The buildings were never rebuilt. This story is not just about a fire. It is about what real responsibility looks like. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

The Winchester Mansion

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