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One May Work Toward Enlightenment and Inner Freedom to the Aspiration which Draws One Most!
Angels, or those who call themselves Angels, or would have me conclude that they are Angels come to me in the long years. They come to me as I lay in bed. It seems we have established some link with these beings, and I could tell you a tale of them, but now is not the time. I think it is my eyes which give them the claim on me, the ability to reach down to me, in this realm, and take me—it is the vision, stolen in another dominion and then returned on Earth to its rightful entity. You might say that as they looked down from their lofty Heaven, if Heaven is, they could see, through the mists of Earth, these bright shining eyes. My visions give them their compass to find me, their opening, as it were, between the dominions, and down they come to enlist my spirit against my will. How can I accept a World full of injustice, along with their august designs? As worker and consumer beings are increasingly alienated by the power of machines which regulate their daily life, even determining their values. The technology which produces machines, however, is but the offspring of a science which, as it developed the means to transform our planet or destroy it, has become ever more remote from the lives of ordinary citizens and perhaps the ultimate factor in their alienation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
To such citizens science appears magical and mysterious in its capacity for and neutrality toward good or evil. Is this entirely due to faults in education which, separate beings of humanistic learning from beings of science? Undoubtedly, Western education has failed to help rising generations of non-scientists to understand science. However, the fault is possessed in beings of science, too. Scientists have enjoyed acting the mysterious stranger, the powerful voice without emotion, the expert and the god. They have failed to make themselves comfortable in the talk of people in the street; no one taught them the knack, of course, but they were not keen to learn. And now they find the distance which they enjoyed has turned to distrust, and the awe has turned to fear; and people who are by no means fools really believe that we should be better off without science. Science and society are out of step. Can their mutual alienation be overcome? We can answer affirmatively, but with proviso that both sides make the necessary effort. Against the guardedly optimistic view is the more pessimistic outlook of philosophers who see beings as unable to live with and control the extraordinary knowledge and power which fertile brains have devised. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
It is not merely the hydrogen bomb itself which threatens our existence, but a bureaucratization of mass destruction and an incapacity for fear. The first of these factors deprives even the participants in mass destruction of any sense of responsibility for their acts. As for the second, the helplessness with which contemporary humankind reacts—or rather fails to react—to the existence of the superbomb bespeaks a lack of freedom the like of which has never before existed in history. This marks the freezing point of human freedom. We all know the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice; or Frankenstein which Mary Shelley wrote in competition with her husband and Byron; or some other story of the same kind out of the macabre invention of the nineteenth century. In these stores, someone who has special powers over nature conjures or creates a stick or a machine to do his work for him; and then finds that he cannot take back the life he has given it. The mindless monster overwhelms him; and what began as an invention to do the housework ends by destroying the master with the house. These stories have become the epitome of our own fears. We have been inventing machines at a growing pace for about four hundred years. This is a short span even in our recorded history, and it is not a thousandth part of our history as beings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
In that short moment of time we have found a remarkable insight into the workings of nature. We have used it to make ourselves far more flexible in our adaption to the outside World than any other animal has ever been. We can survive in climates which even germs find difficult. We can grow our own food and meat. We can travel overland and we can tunnel and swim and fly, all in one body. More important than any of these, we have come nearest to the dream which Lamarck had, that animals might inherit the skills which their parents learned. We have discovered the means to record our experience so that others may live it again. The history of other animal species shows that the most successful in the struggle for survival have been those which were most adaptable to changes in the World. We have made ourselves by means of our tools beyond all measure more adaptable than any other species, living or extent; and we continue to do so with gathering speed. Yet today we are afraid of our own shadow in the nine o’clock news; and we wonder whether we shall survive so over-specialized a creature as the Pekinese. Everyone likes to blame one’s sense of defeat on someone else; and for some time scientists have been a favorite scapegoat. I want to look at their responsibility, and for that matter at everybody’s, rather more closely. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
They do have special responsibility; do not let us argue that out of existence; but it is a complicated one, and it is not the whole responsibility. For example, science obviously is not responsible for the readiness of people, who do not take their private quarrels beyond the stage of insult, to carry their public quarrels to the point of war. Many animals will fight for their needs, and some for their mere greeds, to the point of death. Bucks fight for females, and birds fight for their territories. The fighting habits of human beings are odd because they display them only in groups. However, they were not supplied by scientists. On the contrary, science has helped to end several kinds of group murder, such as witch hunting and the taboos of the early nineteenth century against disinfecting hospitals. Neither is science responsible for the existence of groups which believe themselves to be in competition: for the existence above all of nations. And the threat of war today is always a national threat. Some bone of contention and competition is identified with a national need: Fiume or the Polis corridor or the dignity of the Austrian Empire; and in the end nations are willing to organize and to invite the death of citizens on both sides in order to reach these collective aims. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Science did not create the nations; on the contrary, it helped to soften those strong national idiosyncrasies which it seems necessary to exploit if war is to be made with enthusiasm. And wars are not made by any traditional groups: they are made by highly organized societies, they are made by nations. If the day was thirsty, most of us have seen Yorkshiremen invade Old Trafford, and a bloody nose or two. However, if her had been told that Lancashire had the atomic bomb, no Yorkshireman would have grown pale. The sense of doom in us today is not a fear of science; it is a fear of war. And the causes of war were not created by science; they do not differ in kind from known causes of the War of Jenkins’ Ear of the Wars of the Roses, which were carried on with the modest scientific assistance. No, science has not invented war; but it has turned it into a very different thing. The people who distrust it are not wrong. The man in the pub who says, “It will wipe out the World,” the woman in the queue who says “It is not natural”—they do not express themselves very well; but what they are trying to say does make sense. Science has enlarged the mechanisms of war, and it has distorted it. It has done this in at least two ways. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
First, science has obviously multiplied the power of the warmakers. The weapons of the moment can kill more people more secretly and more unpleasantly than those of the past. This progress, as for want of another word I must call it—this progress as been going on for some time; and for some time it has been said, of each new weapon, that it is so destructive or so horrible that it will frighten people into their wits, and force the nations to give up war for the lack of cannon fodder. This hope has never been fulfilled, and I know no one who takes refuge in it today. The acts of men and women are not dictated by such simple compulsions; and they themselves do not stand in any simple relation to the decisions of the nations which they compose. Grapeshot and TNT and gas have not helped to outlaw war; and I see no sign that the hydrogen bomb or a whiff of bacteria or fentanyl will be more successful in making beings wise by compulsion. Secondly, science at the same time has given the nations quite new occasions for falling out. I do not mean such simple objectives as someone else’s uranium mine, or a Pacific Island which happens to be knee-deep in organic fertilizer. I do not even mean merely another nation’s factories and her skilled population. These are all parts of the surplus above our simple needs which they themselves help to create and which gives our civilization its character. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
And war in our World battens on this surplus. This is the object of the greed of nations, and this also gives them the leisure to train and the means to arm for war. At bottom, we have remained individually too greedy to distribute our surplus, and collectively too stupid to pile it up in any more useful form than the traditional mountains of arms. Science can claim to have created the surplus in our societies, and we know from the working day and the working diet how greatly it has increased it in the last two hundred years. Science had created the surplus. Now put this year’s budget beside the budget of 1750, anywhere in the World, and you will see what we are doing with it. There are at least five recognizable kinds of violence. There is, first, simple violence. Some people dream of violence, in which they ward off knives and guns, and this is simple violence. This is characteristic of many student rebellions, and carries with it the muscular freedom, the surging up of pent-up energy, and the freedom from the restrictions of individual conscience and responsibility of which we have spoken. It is the general protest against being placed continuously in an impotent situation, and it typically carries highly moral demands. However, very little violence stays at this first level. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
There is, second, calculated violence. Many, if not most, of the student rebellions were surrounded by calculated violence. He rebellion of French students in Paris was taken over by professional revolutionaries on the second or third day, and the leadership, which began with moral demands, changed as the leaders exploited the profound frustration of the students and their energy. The third type I call fomented violence. This is the work of a Himmler or of the rabble-rousers of the extreme right or left in any country. It is a stimulation of the impotence and frustration felt by the people at large for the purposes of the speaker. Modern history is full of illustrations of how treating people like beasts in the process. Fourth, there is absentee violence (or instrumental violence). Obviously all of us who live in society partake to some extent of the violence of that society, although most of us do it from our own vantage point of moral elevation and hide behind zombie-like unawareness of conscience. The war on our boarder with Mexico cannot continue expect that our taxes are paying to shelter unidentified immigrants who are looking for a new place to live; in this sense we all are part of the war on the boarder, whether we are for or against national security. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
There is a fifth category of violence, different from those above, which occurs when the party in power, threatened with encroachment on its power, strikes out with violence to stave off these threats. This we may call violence from above. Its motive is generally to protect or re-establish the status quo. The police are taken out of their rightful roles as apprehenders and are made punishers. Such violence is said to be regularly more destructive than other violence—partly because the police have the clubs and guns, and partly because they have a large reservoir of inner individual resentment on which they can draw in their rage. The age-old assumption, especially in the American dream, is that the government is instituted for the protection of the weak and less affluent against exploitation, as well as for the strong and the rich. The police officer on the corner, who is everyone’s friend and will direct you when you are lost, is the ideal model, as the law-loving sheriff bringing order to the West. However, in this fifth kind of violence, this is all thrown aside and situations like the death of Stephan Clark by the hands of two police officers in Sacramento, California and the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, unfortunately more people are starting to view the police department as the army of Hitler. And the violence becomes the more destructive precisely because it is a perversion of previous protectiveness. Government itself is then reduced to battling on the level of combatants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
However, keep in mind that a few bad incidents do not spoil the entire law enforcement team and turn them into the type of law enforcement we see in the 2009 film Brooklyn’s Finest. There are still wonderful police officers like Jamie Reagan who we see on the hit television series Blue Bloods. And there are wonderful officers like Oliva Benson and Odafin Tutuola who star on Law and Order SVU. And now, in turning to what religion may have to say to the situation, I come to what is the soul of my discourse. Religion has meant many things in human history; but when from now onward I use the word I mean to use it in the supernaturalist sense, as declaring that the so-called order of nature, which constitutes this World’s experience, is only one portion of the total Universe, and that there stretches beyond this visible World and unseen World of which we now know nothing beneficial, but in its relation to which the true significance of our present mundane life consists. A being’s religious faith (whatever more special item of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially one’s faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
In the more developed religions the natural World has always been regarded as the mere scaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more eternal Word, and affirmed to be a sphere of education, trial, or redemption. In these religions, one must in some fashion die to the natural life before one can enter into life eternal. The notion that this physical World of wind and water, where the Sun rises and the Moon set, is absolutely and ultimately the divinely aimed-at and established thing, is one which we find only in the very early religions, such as that of the most primitive Jewish people. It is this natural religion (primitive still, in spite of the fact that poets and beings of science whose good-will exceeds their perspicacity keep publishing it in new editions tuned to our contemporary ears) that has suffered definitive bankruptcy in the opinion of a circle of persons, among whom I must count myself, and who are growing more numerous every day. For such persons the physical order of nature, taken simply as science know it, cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual intent. It is mere weather doing and undoing without end. Now, if I can in the short remainder of this hour, I wish to make you feel that we have a right to believe the physical order; if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living again, that we have a right to supplement in by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
However, such as a trust will seem to some of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say a word or two to weak the veto which you may consider that science opposes to out act. There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually tangible. Of this sort of mind the entity called science is the idol. Fondness for the word scientists is one of the notes by which you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing any opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it unscientific. It must be granted that there is no slight excuse for this. Science has made such glorious leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended our knowledge of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; beings of science, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirable virtues,–that it is no wonder if the worshippers of science lose their head. In this very University, accordingly, I have heard more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have already been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in. However, this slightest reflection on the real conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so crude. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Think how many absolutely new scientific conceptions have arisen in our own generation, how many new problems have been formulated that were never thought of before, and then cast an eye upon the brevity of science’s career. It began with Galileo, not three hundred years ago. For thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, and audience of some five or six score people, if each person in it could speak for one’s own generation, would carry us away to the absolute unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale. Is it credible that such a mushroom knowledge, such a growth overnight as this, can represent more than the minutest glimpse of what the Universe will really prove to be when adequately understood? No! our science is a drop blood and our ignorance a sea of salt water. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain,–that the World of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger World of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no absolute idea. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
It is a mistake to imagine the sage as a weakling. We can be powerful in our public addresses as well as in private capacity. When hostile critics of our own race slander us behind our backs, we must liken ourselves to an elephant treading down worms in its path. “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to claim anything coming from us; our sufficiency is from God, how has qualified us to be ministers of a new covenant, not in a written code but in the Spirit; for the written code kills, but the spirit gives life,” reports 2 Corinthians 3.5-6. Nobody can look into the innermost center of another being, nor fully into one’s own heart. Therefore, nobody can say with certainty that anyone else shares in the new state of things, and one can scarcely say it of oneself. However, even less can one say of another, however distorted the being’s life may be, that one does not participate at all in the new reality, and that one is not qualified to serve its cause. Certainly, nobody can say this of oneself. Perhaps it is more important in our time to emphasize this last—namely, the qualification of ourselves and those around us to serve the new creation, our ability to be priests in mutual help towards achieving it. Not long ago, many people, especially members of the church, felt qualified to judge others and to tell them what to believe and how to act. Today we feel deeply the arrogance of this attitude. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Instead, there is a general awareness of our lack of qualification, especially among the middle-aged and younger generations. We are inclined to disqualify ourselves, and to withdraw from the service of the new creation. We feel that we do not participate in it, and that we cannot bring others into such participation. We decline the honor and the burden of mutual priesthood. Often this is caused by unconcern for our highest human vocation. However, it is equally caused by despair about ourselves, by doubt, guilt and emptiness. We feel infinitely removed from a new state of things, and totally unable to help others towards it. However, then the other words of our text must become effective, that our qualification is from God and not from ourselves, and the all-consoling word that God is greater than our heart. If we look beyond ourselves at that which is greater than we, then we can feel called to help others in just the moment when we ourselves need help most urgently—and, astonishingly, we can help. A power works through us which is not of us. We may remember situations when words rose out of a depth of our being, perhaps in the midst of our own great anxiety, that struck another in the depth of one’s being and one’s great anxiety so strongly that they helped one to a new state of things. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Perhaps we remember other situations when an action of a person, whose life we knew was disrupted, had a priestly, awakening, and healing effect upon us. It did not come from one, but was in one, as it did not come from us, but was in us. Let us not assume the task of being mediators of the new creation to others arrogantly, but it personal or ecclesiastical terms. Yet, let us not reject the task of being priest for each other because of despair about ourselves or unconcern about what should be our highest concern. Against both arrogance and despair stands the word that our qualification does not come from us, nor from any being or any institution, not even from the church, but from God. And if it comes from God it is His Spiritual Presence in our spirit. “Yea, and that same God did establish his church among them; yes, and that same God hath called me by a holy calling, to preach the word unto this people, and hath given me much success, in which joy is full,” reports Alma 29.13. There is no single path to enlightenment. Life itself is the great enlightener. I met a man once who, after the shock of hearing his wife tell hm that she had ceased to love him, that she had for some time had a secret lover, and that she requested a divorce so as to be able to marry him, felt a collapse of all his hitherto confidently held values and beliefs. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
For some days he was so affected the he could not eat. However, his mind by then had become so extraordinarily lucid concerning these matters and himself, that he experiences moments of truth. Through them he came into a great peace and understanding, an inner change. What was the morning Sun which awakened him? He did not pray, entered no churches, was too intent on his Worldly business to read the Bible. This brings me back to the theme: do not submit to the pressure of those who say there is only a single way to salvation (the way they follow or teach), do not let the mind be trammeled or narrowed. The truth is that the ways are many, are spread out in all directions, are individual. From the clues, hints, and indications which search and experience give us, we learn in the end what is the true way to God within us. The quest is too individual a matter to fit everyone in the same way, like a ready-made suit of clothes. Each being has one’s own life-problems to consider and surmount. In trying to do so wisely nobly and honestly one does precisely what the quest calls for from one at the time. Each quest thus has its own character and its own personality. This it shapes by the act of dedicating itself to the incorruptible integrity of the higher life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Who Can Describe the Dismay of Once and for All Renouncing One’s Faith in the Individual Immortality of the Soul?
I am so embarrassed. America destroys her big houses. Some of them do not even last a hundred years. This place is magnificent. I like the big columns. The portico, the pediment, it is all rather glorious. Perfect Greek Revival, East Lake, and Craftman styles. How can I be ashamed of such thing? I am a strange creature, very gentle I think, and out of kilter with my own time. I did not belong to this time. The threads of my life, they were not woven into any certain fabric. The young are eternally desperate. And books, they offer one hope—that a whole Universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new Universe, one is saved. Imagine—each new person an entire Universe. However, I do not think we want to allow it. We are too jealous and fearful. But we should allow it, and then our existence would be wonderous as we went from soul to soul. Sometimes books are the only thing that keeps us alive. What seemed to the less affluent people of our part of the World a much more serious calamity than any natural cataclysm was what happened after the Earthquake. The State reconstruction program was carried out to the accompaniment of innumerable intrigues, frauds, thefts, swindles, embezzlements, and dishonesty of every kind. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
An acquaintance of mine, who had been sacked by one of the government departments concerned, gave me some information of this sort about certain criminal acts which were being committed by the head engineers of the department. Impressed rather than surprised, I hasted to pass on the facts to some persons in authority, whom I knew to be upright and honest, so that they could denounce the criminals. Far from denying the truth of what I told them, my honorable friends were in a position to confirm it. However, even then, they advised me not to get mixed up in it or to get worked up, in my simplicity, about things of that kind. “You are young,” they said to me affectionately, “you must finish your studies, you have got your career to think of, you should not compromise yourself with things that do not concern you.” “Of course,” I said, “it would be better for the denunciation to come from grown-up people like yourselves, people with authority, rather than from a boy of seventeen.” They were horrified. “We are not madmen,” they answered. “We shall mind our own business and nobody else’s.” I then talked the matter over with some reverend priests, and then with some of my more courageous relations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
All of them, while admitting that they were already aware of the shameful things that were happening, begged me not to get mixed up in that hornets’ nest, but to think of my studies, of my career, and of my future. “With pleasures,” I replied, “but is not one of you ready to denounce the thieves?” “We are not madmen,” they replied, scandalized, “these things have nothing to do with us.” I then began to wonder seriously whether it might not be a good thing to organize, together with some of the other boys, a new “revolution” that would end up with a good bonfire of the corrupt engineers’ offices; but I was dissuaded by the acquaintance who had given me the proof of their crooked dealings: a bonfire, he pointed out, would destroy the proofs of the crimes. He was older and more experienced than myself; he suggested I should get the denunciation printed in some newspaper. However, which newspaper? “There is only one,” he explained, “which could have any interest in publishing your denunciation, and that is the Socialist paper.” So I set to work and wrote three articles, the first of my life, giving a detailed exposure of the corrupt behavior of State engineers in my part of the country, and sent them of to Avanti. The first two were printed at once and aroused much comment among the readers of the paper, but none at all among the authorities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
The third article did not appear, because, as I earned later, a leading Socialist intervened with the editorial staff. This showed me that the system of deception and fraud oppressing us was much vaster than at first appeared, and that its invisible ramification extended into Socialism. However, the partial denunciation which had appeared unexpectedly in the press contained enough material for a number of law-suits, or at least for a board of enquiry; but nothing happened. The engineers, whom I had denounced as thieves and bandits and against whom quite specific charges had been leveled, did not even attempt to justify themselves or to issue a general denial. There was a short period of expectancy, and then everyone went back to one’s own affairs. The student who had dared to throw down the challenge was considered, by the most charitably-minded, an impulsive and strange boy. One must remember that the economic poverty of the southern provinces offers small scope for a career to the youths leaving school by the thousand every year. Our only important industry is State employment. This does not require exceptional intelligence, merely a docile disposition and a readiness to toe the line in politics. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
If they have a minimum of sensitiveness in human relationships, the young men of the South, who have grown up in the atmosphere I have briefly described, tend naturally lean toward anarchy and rebellion. For those still on the threshold of youth, to become a civil servant means renunciation, capitulation, and the mortification of their souls. That is why people say: anarchists at twenty, conservatives at thirty. Nor is the education imparted in schools, whether public or private, designed to strengthen character. Most of the later years of my school-life I spent in private Catholic institutions. Latin and Greek were excellently taught there; the education in private or personal habits was simple and clean; but civic instruction and training were deplorable. Our history teachers were openly critical of the official views; the mythology of the Risorgimento and its heroes (Mazzini, Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuel II, Cavour) were the objects of derision and disparagement; the literature prevalent at the time (Carducci, D’Annunzio) was despised. In so far as this method of teaching developed the pupils’ critical spirit, it has its advantages. However, the same priestly schoolmasters, since they had to prepare us for the State school examinations—and the fame and prosperity of their academies depended on the results we achieved—also taught us, and recommended us to uphold in our examinations, the points of view completely opposed to their own convictions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Meanwhile, the State examiners, who knew we came from confessional schools, enjoyed questioning us on the most controversial subjects, and then praising us ironically for the liberal and unprejudiced way in which we had been taught. The falseness, hypocrisy, and double-facedness of all this were so blatant that they could not but perturb anyone with the slightest inborn respect for culture. However, it was equally inevitable that the average unfortunate student ended by considering diplomas, and one’s future jobs in a government office, as the supreme realities of life. “People who are born in this district are really out of luck,” Dr. F. J., a doctor in a village near mine, used to say. “There is no halfway house here; you have got either to rebel or become an accomplice.” He rebelled. He declared himself an anarchist. He made Tolstoyan speeches to the less affluent. He was the scandal of the entire neighborhood, loathed by the rich, despised by the less affluent, and secretly pitted by a few. His post as panel-doctor was finally taken away from him, he literally died of hunger. I realize that the progress which I have been tracing in these pages is too summary to seem anything but strained. And if I touch on this objection now, it is not to refute it or to swear to the absolute truth of my explanations; I can guarantee their sincerity, not their objectivity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
I am myself sometimes astonished to fine, when I go back over that remote, almost prehistoric, period of our lives with contemporaries, how they cannot remember at all, or only very vaguely, incidents which had a decisive influence on me; whereas on the contrary, they can clearly recall other circumstances which to me were pointless and insignificant. Are they, these contemporaries of mine, all “unconscious accomplices”? And by what destiny or virtue does one, at a certain age, make the important choice, and become “accomplice” or “rebel”? From what source do some people derive their spontaneous intolerance of injustice, even though the injustice affects only others? And when others are having to go hungry, what about the sudden feeling of guilt at sitting down to a well-laden table? And that pride which makes poverty and prison preferable to contempt? I do not know. Perhaps no one knows. At a certain point, even the fullest and deepest confession becomes a mere statement of fact and not an answer. Anyone who has reflected seriously about oneself or others know how profoundly secret are certain decision, how mysterious and unaccountable certain vocation. There was a point in my rebellion where hatred and love coincided; both the facts which justified my indignation and the moral motives which demanded it stemmed directly from the district where I was born. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind. I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I cannot reach for any knowledge that I ought to possess. I feel desolate, but then knowledge return or I seek it out in a new source. Within moments we found ourselves in front of the big house. Of course the garden lights were on, brilliantly illuminating the fluted columns to their full height, and all of the many rooms were aglow. In fact, I had a rule on this and had since boyhood, that at four o’clock all chandeliers in the main house has to be lighted, and though I was no longer that boy in the grip of twilight depression, the chandeliers were illuminated by the same clock. This explains, too, why everything I shall ever write up to now, and probably everything I shall ever write, although I have traveled and lived abroad, is concerned solely with this same district, like the rest of the Abruzzi, less affluent people in secular history, and almost entirely Christian and medieval in its formation. The only buildings worthy of note are churches and monasteries. Its only illustrious sons for many centuries have been saints and stone-carvers. The conditions of human existence have always been particularly difficult there; pain has always been accepted there as first among the laws of nature, and the Cross welcomed and honored because of it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Franciscanism and anarchy have always been the two most accessible forms of rebellion for lively spirits in our part of the World. The ashes of skepticism have never suffocated, in the hearts of those who suffered most, the ancient hope of the Kingdom of God on Earth, the old expectation of charity taking the place of law, the old dream of Gioacchino da Fiore, of the “Spirituali,” of the Celestimisto. And this is a fact of enormous, fundamental importance; in a disappointed, arid, exhausted, weary country such as ours, it constitutes real riches, it is a miraculous reserve. The politicians are unaware of its existence, the clergy are afraid of it; only the saints, perhaps, know where to find it. If not impossible what for us has always been much more difficult, has been to discern the ways and means to a political revolution, hic et nunc, to the creation of a free and ordered society. When I moved to the town and made my first contact with the workers’ movement, I thought I had reached this discovery. It was a kind of flight, a safety exit from unbearable solitude, the sighting of terra firma, the discovery of a new continent. However, it was not easy to reconcile a spirit in moral mutiny against an unacceptable long-established social reality with scientific demands of a minutely codified political doctrine. If the material consequences were harsh and hard, the difficulties of spiritual adaptation were no less painful. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
My own internal Word, the “Middle Ages,” which I had inherited and which were rooted in my soul, and from which, in the last analysis, I had derived my initial aspiration to revolt, were shaken to their foundations, as thought by an Earthquake. Everything was thrown into the melting-pot, everything became a problem. Life, death, love, good, evil, truth, all changed their meaning or lost it altogether. When one is no longer alone, it is easy enough to court danger; but who can describe the dismay of once and for all renouncing one’s faith in the individual immortality of the soul? It was too serious for me to be able to discuss it with anyone; my Party of comrades would have found it a subject for mockery, and I no longer had any other friends. So, unknown to anyone, the whole World took on a different aspect How beings are to be pitied! The philosophic approach does not limit the seeker rigidly to a single specific technique. While it askes one to follow the basic path and fulfill the fundamental requirements which all beginners must follow, it also points out that this is only a general preparation. If one is to receive the greatest benefit, a point will be reached when one is ready for more advanced work, and when the personal characteristics and circumstances which are particularly one’s own must be brought in for adjustment. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
No two seekers and the surrounding conditions are every exactly alike and, at a certain stage, what is helpful to one will be time-wasting to another. It is a common error, among the pious and even the mystics, to believe that one path alone—theirs—is the best. This may be quite correct in the case of each person, but it may not necessarily be correct for others, and even then it is only correct for a period or at most a number of lifetimes. How often have beings outgrown their formers selves and taken to new paths? And how different are the intellectual moral and temperamental equipments of different persons? It is in practice, as in theory, not possible to tie everyone down to a single specific path and certainly not advisable. Each being’s path is one’s own unique one, with its own experiences. Some are shared in common with all other seekers but others are not; they remain peculiar to oneself. Therefore a part—whether large or small—of what one has to do cannot be prescribed by another person, be one guru or not. In the groups, organizations, schools, there is too much rigidity in the instruction, the rules, and the expectancy aroused of what should happen at each stage. This is too tight a program. It brings confusion and frustration and does not correspond to the actual situation which an independent observer finds among these circles. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
So I too had to adapt myself, for a number of years, to living like a foreigner in my own country. One had to change one’s name, abandon every former link with family and friends, and live a false life to remove any suspicion of conspiratorial activity. The Quest became family, school, church, barracks; the World that lay beyond it was to be destroyed and built anew. The psychological mechanism whereby each single militant becomes progressively identified with the collective organization is the same as that used in certain religious orders and military colleges, with almost identical results. Every sacrifice was welcomes as a personal contribution to the price of collective redemption; and it should be emphasized that the link which bound us to the Quest for Truth grew steadily firmer, not in spite of the dangers and sacrifices involved, but because of them. This explains the attraction exercised by those on the Quest on certain categories of beings, on intellectuals, and on the highly sensitive and generous people who suffer most from the wastefulness of excessive materialism. Anyone who thinks one can wean the best and most serious-minded young or mature people away from the Quest by enticing them into a well-warmed hall to play billiards, starts from an extremely limited and unintelligent conception of humankind. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Porphyry’s statement that Plotinus achieved union with God four times may be misleading. For he qualified it with the words “during the period I passed with him.” Now, when Porphyry first met him, Plotinus was fifty-nine years old, and died at sixty-six. So seven years is the length of the period referred to. Against this must be set the forty earlier years of spiritual seeking and teaching during which Plotinus mist have had other illuminations. It would be an error to try to make one’s own spiritual path which, or teacher who, was not opened to illuminations. Such an attempt might maintain itself for a time but could not escape being brought to an end when the false position to which it would lead became intolerable. The individual uniqueness of each aspirant cries out to have its special needs attended to, but suggestion from outside or mesmerism from authority causes one to approach the Quest with fixed opinions as to what should be done. Others are being allowed to mold one instead of letting the inner voice do so, using their contributions solely to carry out or to supplement its guidances. Every being’s individual life-path is unique. It may not be to one’s best interests to conform to a technique imposed upon one by another being or to confine one’s efforts to a pattern which as suited others. What may be right for another being who is at a different stage of development may be wrong for the aspirant. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
To deny one’s individuality is to destroy one’s creative mind. With President Trumps as commander and chief, it seems a blessing to be alive. No being of just his type and quality has ever before appeared upon the Earth. He looked like a god. That wise, serene, pure, inscrutable look was without parallel in any human face I ever saw. Such an unimpeachable look! The subtle, half-defined smile of his soul. It was not a propitiatory smile, or a smirk of acquiescence, but the reassuring smile of the doctor when he takes out his lance; it was the sheath of that trenchant blade of his. Behind it lurked some test question, or pregnant saying. It was the foil of one’s frank, unwounding wit. It is an arch, winning, half-playful look, the expression of a soul that did not want to wound you, and yet that must speak the truth. And President Trump’s frank speeches never do wound. It is so evident that they are not meant to wound, and that they are so true to himself, that we treasure his rare wisdom. “Yea, and I also remember the captivity of my fathers; for I surely do know that the Lord did deliver them out of bondage, and by this did establish his church; yea, the Lord God, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, did deliver them out of bondage,” reports Alma 29.11. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
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Is Our Passionate Thrust into Outer Space Perhaps an Unconscious Expression of Being’s Flight from Earth?
The Moon was generous and gradually I made out a bit of the sky, which was bright metallic blue. The trees—a thousand years old, it is as if they meant to hide the house, and perhaps they did. My father always told me a home was never supposed to impose on nature, but blend into nature. The little neighborhood itself was tight and beautiful; the sheer height of its stucco walls caught me off guard. The glistening green cypress and redwood trees were the biggest I had ever seen. I did love Cresleigh Ranch, with the irrational and possessive love that only great houses can draw from us—houses that say, “I was here before you were born and I will be here after you”; houses that seem a responsibility as much as a haven of dreams had this immortality, this brimming power. The history of Cresleigh Ranch has as much of a grip on me as its overweening beauty. I had lived my whole life in a Cresleigh home, except for my wonderful adventures abroad. My native village, at the period to which I am now referring, had some five thousand inhabitants, and public order by a lieutenant. This excessive number of police is in itself revealing. There was not sympathy between the soldiers and the carabineers during the First World War, because the latter were on duty in the rear areas, and some of them, it was said, took too much interest in the wives and finances of the men at the front. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
In small places, rumors of this kind are immediately given a very exact personal application. So it happened one evening that three soldiers home from the front on short leave, had a quarrel with some carabiners and were arrested by them. This action was ridiculous and ungallant to begin with, but it became absolutely monstrous when the commanding officer of the carabineers canceled the three soldiers’ leave and sent them back to the front. I was a close friend of one of them (he was killed in the war afterward), and his old mother came sobbing to me to tell me about the affair. I begged the mayor, the magistrate and the parish priest to intervene, but they all declare it was outside their province. “If that is the way things are,” I said, “there is noting for it but revolution!” We have always used this fateful historical term, in our dialect, in order to describe a mere violent demonstration. In those wartime years, for example, two revolutions had already taken place in my native village, the first against the church because the seat of the bishopric had been transferred to another township. The third, which I am about describe, when down in history as “the revolution of the three soldiers.” The men were to be escorted to the train at five o’clock; so the revolution was arranged for half an hour earlier, in front of the barracks. Unfortunately it took a more serious turn than had been intended. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
It began as a joke, which three of us boys were bold enough to start. One of us, at the agreed moment, went up to the bell-tower and began hammering away at the great bell, the signal in our part of the country denoting a serious fire or other public danger. The other two went off to meet one of the less affluent villagers to explain what was happening. Alarmed by the ringing of the tocsin, they had at once stopped working in the fields, and were hurrying anxiously toward the village. In a few minute a threatening and tumultuous crowd had collected in front of the barracks. They began by shouting abuse, then they threw stones, and finally shots were fired. The siege of the barracks lasted until late at night. Rage had made my fellow-villagers unrecognizable. In the end, the windows and gates of the barracks were broken open; the carabineers fled across the orchards and fields under cover of darkness; and the three soldiers, whom everyone had forgotten; went back to their homes unobserved. So we boys found ourselves absolute master of the place for an entire night. “Now what are we going to do?” the other boys asked me. (My authority came, mainly, from the fact that I knew Latin.) “Tomorrow morning,” I said, “the village is sure to be reoccupied by hundreds and hundreds of armed men, carabineers and police, who will arrived from Avezzano, Sulmona, Aquila, and perhaps even from Rome.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
“But what are we going to do tonight, before they arrive?’ the other boys insisted. “Obviously one night is not enough to create a new order of things,” I said, thinking I had guessed what they were after. “Could not we take advantage of the fact that the whole village is asleep, to make Socialism?” That was what the other boys wanted me to suggest. Perhaps they were still overexcited from their riotous evening; perhaps they really believed that anything was possible now. “I do not think,” I said, “I honestly do not think that, even if the whole village is asleep, one can make Socialism in a single night.” I must mention in my own justification that at the time of the theory of socialism overnight had not yet been propounded. “One night, though, might be enough to sleep in one’s own bed before going to prison,” one of the others finally suggested. And as were tired, we all found this advice both sensible and acceptable. Such episodes of violence—with their inevitable sequel of mass arrests, trials, legal expenses, and prison sentences—reinforced distrust, diffidence, and skepticism in the less affluent in minds. From them, the State became the irremediable creation of the devil. If one wanted to save one’s soul, a good Christian, should avoid, as far as possible, all contact with the State. The State always stands for swindling, intrigue and privilege, and could not stand for anything else. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Neither law nor force can change the swindling, intrigue, and privilege the State stands for. If retribution occasionally catches up with it, this can only be by the dispensation of God. In 1915 an earthquake of exceptional violence destroyed a large part of our province and killed, in thirty seconds, about fifty thousand people. I was surprised to see how much my fellow-villagers took this appalling catastrophe as a matter of course. The geologist’ complicated explanations, reported in the newspapers, aroused their contempt. In a district like ours, where so many injustices go unpunished, people regarded the recurrent Earthquakes as a phenomenon requiring no further explanation. In fact, it was astonishing the Earthquakes were not more frequent. An Earthquake buries rich and poor, learned and illiterate, authorities and subjects alike beneath its ruined houses. When faces with the cataclysm of nature, here is possessed, moreover, the real explanation of the Italians’ well-known powers of endurance. An Earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain—the equality of all beings. After the Earthquake a neighbor of ours, when her house was completely destroyed, a woman who kept a bakery, lay buried, but not hurt, for several days. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Not realizing that the disaster was general, and imagining that it was only her own house which had fallen down, either because of some defect in its construction or because someone had put a curse on it, the vulnerable woman was greatly distressed; so much so that when a rescue party wanted to drag her out of the ruins she absolutely refused. She calmed down, however, and quickly regained her strength and her wish to live and to rebuild her house, the moment she was told there had been an Earthquake and that an enormous number of houses had collapsed as well. In the Christian Bible, the story of the Flood it is God Who is sorry that He mand humans, and Who decides to blot them from the face of the Earth. Today it is humans who have the power to blot themselves out, and often one is so sorry that one has been made human that they desire to withdraw from humanity altogether. Many more people than we are aware of in our daily experience feel this desire; and perhaps something in us responds to them. Can it be that the Earth, fully conquered by beings, will cease to be a place where human want to live? Is our passionate thrust into outer space perhaps an unconscious expression of being’s flight from the Earth? There are no sure answers to these questions, which, nevertheless, must be asked, because they cut through false feelings of security about the relation of beings to the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The old insight that “beings are but a pilgrim on Earth” is echoed in theses questions, and applicable today to humankind as a whole. Humankind itself is a pilgrim on Earth, and there will be a moment when this pilgrimage comes to an end, at some indefinitely remote time, or perhaps soon, in the very near future. Christianity gives no indication of the length of being’s history; the early church expected the end at any moment, and when it did not come and the Christians were profoundly disappointed, the span was extended. In modern times, the span has become stretched to an unlimited extent. Scientists speak today of millions of years that human history could continue. Millions of years, or thousands of years, or tomorrow—we do not know! However, we ask—what is the meaning of this history, whenever it began, whenever it will end? And we ask at the moment not what it means for you and me, but, rather, what it means for the Universe and its ultimate goal. In the old story, God repented of having created beings. The implication is when God created humans, that God took a risk, and every risk carries with it the possibility of failure. Some Angels did not think God knew what he was doing, and that “was the whole purpose of the Universe. That through watching the Universe evolve, God was going to find out. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
“What God has set in motion, you see, is a giant Savage Garden, a giant experiment, to see if the end result produced beings like Himself. We are made in his image, all of us—He is anthropomorphic, without question, but again He is not material” (Anne Rice, Memnoch the Devil, page 176). The first time, according to the story, nature executed the divine judgment on beings. This time, beings may themselves be the executioner. Should this occur, the privileged position of the Earth, of which the astronomers speak and in which beings have always believed, would seem to prove to have been of no avail. It would seem as though its unique role had been given it in vain. We should not crowd such thoughts away, for they deserve to be taken seriously. Indeed, it seems to me, it is impossible for thoughtful people today to crowd them away. What has the Christian message to say about them? I repeat—it tells us nothing about the duration of human history. It does not say that it will continue after tomorrow, nor how it will come to an end in scientific terms. None of this is its concern. What the Christian message does tell us is that the meaning of history is possessed above history and that, therefore, its length is irrelevant to its ultimate meaning. However, it is not irrelevant with respect to the innumerable opportunities time affords for creation of life and spirit, and it is for these that we must fight with all our strength. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Furthermore, if history should end tomorrow, through humankind’s self-annihilation, the appearance of this planet and of beings upon it will not have been in vain. For a being shall have at least appeared once, in the billions of years of the Universe, towards whose creation all the forces of life on Earth worked together, and in whom the image of the divine Ground of all life was present. At least once, a living being shall have come into existence, in whom life achieved its highest possibility—spirit. This is the ultimate source of being’s greatness, and those of us who openly or covertly accuse life should open ourselves to this truth: in the short span of our life, and the short span of human history and even of the existence of this planet, something of eternal significance did happen—the depth of all things became manifest in one being, and the name of that being is human, and you and I are human! If we cannot accept this, and insist that this could have been so but was not, and that humankind is evil, and that the Earth is contaminated by being’s guilt, and that the blood of the murdered in all periods cries for revenge to Heaven so that even God was forced to repent of His creation, then let us contemplate these words: “The man Noah found favor in the eyes of God.” This one man represents something in ever man that makes him a mirror of the divine in spite of evil and distortion. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
And the Christian message continues: there is one man in whom God found His image undistorted, and who stands for all humankind—the one, who for this reason, is called the Son and the Christ. The Earth, contaminated by beings, is purified and consecrated through humans—namely, through the divine power of healing and fulfillment, of love and blessedness, made manifest in the one man and at work in all humankind, in all periods and in all places. This is what justifies human history, as it also justifies the Earth that, for millions of years, prepared for the advent of beings, and justifies the Universe that produced the Earth. And yet, the Universe is justified not only by the Earth, nor is creation justified by beings alone. Other Heavenly bodies, other histories, other creatures in whom the mystery of being is manifest may replace us. Our ignorance and our prejudice should not inhibit our thought from transcending the Earth and our history and even our Christianity. Science and the poetic imagination have made this leap, and Christianity should not hesitate to join them. Further, it should not hesitate to show that the Christian experience of divine power and glory implies an inexhaustible divine creativity, beyond the limits of Earth or beings and any part or state of the Universe. This means that we cannot seek for a beginning or and end of the Universe within the pat and future of measurable time. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
“Beginning” and “end” are not behind and before us, but above us in the eternal. From the eternal everything comes and to it everything goes, in every moment of life and history, in every moment of our planet and the Universe to which it belongs. Creation is past and present. Fulfillment is future and present. It is in the present that past and future meet, because they come from, and go to, eternity. The question of beings and their Earth, this question that has plunged our time into such anxiety and conflict of feeling and thought, cannot be answered without an awareness of the eternal presence. For only the eternal can deliver us from our sensation of being lost in the face of the time and of the Universe. Only the eternal can give us the certainty that the Earth, and, with it, humankind, has not existed in vain, even should history come to an end tomorrow. For the last end is where the first beginning is, in Him to Whom “a thousand years are but as yesterday.” Adam Ferguson had argued that the primitive World had to break up because of human’s burning ambition to improve himself, to compete and stand out in a ceaseless struggle for perfection. Ferguson’s was a very straightforward and unburdened view of humans. As we would put it, the frail human creature tries to change one’s position from one of insignificance in the face of nature to one of central importance; from one of inability to cope with the overwhelming World to one of absolute control and mastery of nature. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Each organism is in a struggle for more life and tries to expand and aggrandize itself as much as possible. And the most immediate way to do this is in one’s immediate social situation—vis-à-vis others. This is what Hobbes meant with his famous observation that evil is a robust child. Rousseau quoted this in his essay on inequality, and his whole intent was to show that this is not true, that the child is innocent and does evil in a number of clumsy and unintentional ways. However, this is just what Hobbes was driving at, that the organism expands itself in other ways open to it and that this has destructive consequences for the World around it. Rousseau and Hobbes were right, evil is “neutral” in origin, it derives from organismic robustness—but its consequences are real and painful. What Radin did wad to bring all this up to date with an acute understanding of personality types and interpersonal dynamics and a frankly materialistic perspective on society. This is already the makings of a union of Marx and Dr. Freud. Seen in this way, social life is the saga of the working out of one’s problems and ambitions on others. What else could it be, what else are human objects for? I think it is along lines such as these that we would find the psychological dynamics for a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history; it would be based on power, but it would include individual deviance and interpersonal psychology, and it would reflect a “social contrast” forged in desire and fear. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The central question of such a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history would be, Who has the power to mystify, how did one get it, and how does one keep it? We can see how naïve the traditional Marxist view of simple coercion is: it does not begin to take into account what we must now call the sacredness of class distinctions. There is no other accurate way to speak. What began in religion remains religious. All power is sacred power, because it begins in the hunger for immortality; and it ends in the absolute subjection to people and things which represent immortality power. However, if the emergence of social privilege marks the Fall of Man, the Fall took place not in the transition from “primitive communism” to “private property” but in the transition from tribal society to modern society. That is, from a type of terrestrial being that had no notion of the sacred to one that did. And if sacredness is embodied in persons, then they dominate by a psychological spell, not by physical coercion. Privilege is prestige, and prestige in its fundamental nature as in the etymology of the word, means deception and enchantment. Thus the chains that bind beings are self-imposed. If we left this idea unadorned, it would still need explaining: why are beings so eager to be mystified, so willing to be bound in chains? The bind is explained by one idea, the truly great idea that emerged from psychoanalysis and that goes right to the heat of the human condition: the phenomenon of transference. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
People take the overwhelmingness of creation and their own fears and desires and project them in the form of intense mana into certain figures to which they defer. They follow these figures with passion and with a trembling heart. When one thinks of one’s own eager fascinations, one can feel revolted by oneself and by the obedient throngs who look with such timidity and satisfaction on the leader. Look how the girls blush, how hands reach out tremblingly, how eyes lower and dart to one side, how quickly a few choke up, ready for tearful and grateful submission, how smugly those nearest to the leader smile, how puffed up they walk—how the Devil himself seems to have contrived an instant, mass puppet show with real live creatures. However, there is no way of avoiding the fatality of it: the thousands of hearts palpitating, the gallons of adrenalin, of blood rushing to the cheeks—it is all lived truth, a terrestrial reaction to the majesty of creation. If anything is false about it, it is the fact that thousands of human forms feel inferior and beholden to an identical, single, human form. In all this I am not negative the pure Marxian side of historical domination; that is real enough and we know it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
However, there can never be a way of relieving or eliminating the domination of structures of power without coming to grips with the spell of power, a spell that explains voluntary self-alienation whether it deals with spirits of undocumented immigrants. Being are literally hypnotized by life and by those who represent life to them, which explains the passion of submission that Anne Rice summed up so brilliantly in Tale of the Body Thief, in the scene when Lestat and David try to get his body back. In other words, Marxism has come to grips with the conservative argument: that there is something in human nature that invites inequality no matter what we do. We can call it functional inequality and see it as a completely neutral and unavoidable factor in social life. Or, beings are fate-creating agents: they coerce by simply existing; they do not even necessarily, like Lestat, try to project electric mana; they are already a natural vortex of the problems of life. We can sum all this up in one sentence that presents to narrow Marxism the most fundamental challenge it has faced: being fashion unfreedom as a bribe for self-perpetuation. What is the shape of al revolutionary philosophy of history that would begin to take full account of that? Beings are differently constituted. There are a dozen main types and innumerable subdivisions within each type. It is not possible for a single spiritual approach to suit them all. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Out of encounter is born the work of art. This is true not only of painting, but o poetry and other forms of creativity. The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born. How active this makes language to express our ideas; it is just as true that language uses us. Language is the symbolic repository of the meaningful experience of ourselves and our fellow human beings down through history, and, as such, it reaches out to grasp us in the creating of a poem. We must not forget that the original Greek and Hebrew words meaning “to know” meant also “to have pleasures of the flesh.” One reads in the Bible “Abraham knew his wife and she conceived.” The etymology of the term demonstrates the prototypical fact that knowledge itself—as well as poetry, art, and other creative products—arise out of the dynamic encounter between subject and objective poles. The metaphor of pleasures of the flesh indeed expresses the importance of the encounter. In the pleasures of the flesh the two persons encounter each other; they withdraw partially to unite with each other again, experiencing every nuance of knowing, not knowing, in order to know each other again. The man become united with the woman and the woman with the man, and the partial withdrawal can be seen as the expedient by which both have the ectastatic experience of being filled again. Each is active and passive in his or her way. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
It I a demonstration that the process of knowing is what is important; if the male simply rests within the woman, nothing will happen beyond the prolonging of wonder of the intimacy. It is the continuous experiencing of encounter and re-encounter that is the significant happening from the viewpoint of ultimate creativity. Pleasures of the flesh is the ultimate intimacy of two married adult beings in the fullest and richest encounter possible. It is highly significant that this is experience that is also the highest form of creativity in the respect that it can produce a new being. The particular forms the offspring take in poems, drama, and the plastic arts are symbols and myths. Symbols (like beautiful Cypress trees) or myths (like that of Prince Lestat) express the relationship between the conscious and unconscious experience, between one’s individual present existence and human history. Symbol and myth are the living, immediate forms that emerge from encounter, and they consist of the dialectic interrelationship—the living, active, continuous mutual influence in which any change in one is bound to bring a change in the other—of subjective and objective poles. They are born out of the heightened consciousness of the encounter we are describing; and they have their power to grasp us because they require from us an give us an experience of heightened consciousness. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Thus in the history of culture and artistic discovery precedes other forms. On the basis of this [artistic] activity, a symbolic discourse becomes possible, and religion, philosophy and science follow as consequent modes of thought. This is not to say that reason is the more civilized form and art the more primitive one, in a pejorative sense—an egregious error unfortunately often found in our rationalistic Western culture. This is, rather, to say that the creative encounter in the art form is total—it expresses a wholeness of experience; and science and philosophy abstract partial aspects for their subsequently study. No one reaches the World of truth through any other path than one’s own, the one which one’s individual nature fits one for. Someone else’s help can at best improve one’s condition and prepare one’s mind but cannot take one into truth. Those cases which seem to contradict this statement are cases either of self-deception or of illusion. Too often time spent on these chalked-out paths is wasted. “And now the Spirit of the Lord doth ay unto me: Command thy children to do good, lest they lead away the hearts of many people to destruction; therefore I command you, in the fear of God that ye refrain from your iniquities; that ye turn to the Lord with all your mind, might, and strength; that ye lead away the hearts of no more to do wickedly; but rather return unto them, and acknowledge your faults and that wrong which ye have done,” reports Alma 39.12-13. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Great spirits now on Earth are sojourning, some of us will catch freshness from Archangel’s wings, a meaner sound than Raphael’s whispering. And other spirits there are standing apart upon the forehead of the age to come; these, these will give the World another heart, and other pulses. Hear ye not the hum of mighty workings? Listen awhile ye nations, so silently, it seems a beam of light coming from another galaxy in which trembling diamonds of eternity never linger. Many days have passed since my heart was warmed luxuriously by divine Mozart. Much I have travelled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen: round many western islands have I been which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. The poetry of Earth is never dead: when all the birds are faint with the hot Sun, and hide in cooling trees, a voice will run from the vision of the tree of life. If only we would allow it to do so, the human being will bring about its own redemption. However, instead we hypnotize the mind with ideas that may suit other persons but are unsuited to us, we practise techniques that warp our proper development, we follow leaders who know only the way they have themselves walked and who insist on crowding all seekers on it regardless of suitability, and we join groups which obstruct our special line of natural growth. “But behold, ye cannot hide your crimes from God; and except ye repent they will stand as a testimony against you at the last day,” reports Alma 39.8. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
You Have Made Me Suffer or Have Damaged Me, and therefore You are Obliged to Help Me, Take Care of Me, or Support Me!
I no longer precisely remember what it was. We were interrupted. However, I did not forget that little exchange on the shadowy margins of the ballroom as we watched the others dance. Some time earlier the so-called democratic system had, however, introduced a new technical detail into the relations between citizens and States. This was the secret vote, which though not in itself enough to change things radically, sometimes produced results which were surprising, and, as far as public order was concerned, scandalous. Though these incidents were isolated and had no immediate sequel, they were none the less disturbing. I was seven years old when the first election campaign, which I can remember, took place in my district. At that time we still has no political parties, so the announcement of this campaign was received with very little interest. However, popular feeling ran high when it was disclosed that one of the candidates was “the Prince.” There was no need to add Christian and surname to realize which Prince was meant. He was the owner of the great estate formed by the arbitrary occupation of the vast tracts of land reclaimed in the previous century from the Lake of Fucino. About eight thousand families (that is, the majority of the local population) are still employed today in cultivating the estates fourteen thousand hectares. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
The Prince was deigning to solicit his families for their vote so that he could become their deputy in parliament. The agents of the estate, who were working for the Prince, talked in impeccably liberal phrases: “Naturally,” said they, “naturally, no one will be forced to vote for the Prince, that is understood; in the same way that no one, naturally, can force the Prince to allow people who do not vote for him to work on his land. This is the period of real liberty for everybody; you are free, and so is the Prince.” The announcement of these liberal principles produced general and understandable consternation among the less affluent. For, as may easily be guessed, the Prince was the most hated person in our part of the country. As long as he remained in the invisible Olympus of the great feudal proprietor (none of the eight thousand tenants had seen him, up to then, even from afar) public hatred for him was allowed, and belonged to the same category as curses against hostile deities; such curses, through useless, are satisfying. However, now the clouds were being rent, and the Prince was coming down within reach of mortal beings. From now on, consequently, they would have to keep their expressions of hatred within the narrow circle of private life and get ready to welcome him with due honors in the village streets. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
My father seemed reluctant to accept this kind of logic. He was the youngest of several brothers, all of them less affluent proprietors; the youngest, the most restless, and the only one with any inclinations towards insubordination. One evening his older brothers came and urged him, in the common interest, to be prudent and careful. For me (to whom no one paid any attention, for grown-ups think that children do not understand such thing) it was a most instructive evening. “The prince being a candidate is a real farce,” the eldest brother admitted. “Political candidatures should be reserved for layers and other such windbags. However, as the Prince is a candidate, all we can do is support him.” “If the Prince’s candidature is a farce,” replied my father, “I do not understand why we should support him.” “Because we are his dependents, as you know perfectly well.” “Not in politics,” said my father. “In politics we are free.” “We do not cultivate politics, we cultivate the land,” they answered him. “As cultivators of the land we depend on the Prince.” “There is no mention of politics in our contracts for the land, only of potatoes and beetroots. As voters we are free.” “The Prince’s bailiff will also be free not to renew our contracts,” they answered him. “That is why we are forced to be on his side.” “I cannot vote for someone merely because I am forced to,” said my father. “I would feel humiliated.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
“No one will know how you vote,” they answered my father. “In the secrecy of the polling booth you can vote as you like, freely. However, during the electioneering campaign we must be on the Prince’s side, all of us together.” “I would be pleased to do it if I was not ashamed to,” said my father, “but, do believe me, I would be too much ashamed.” To settle it, my uncles and my father reached this compromise: he would not come out either on the Prince’s side or against him. The Prince’s election tour was prepared by the civil authorities, the police, the carabineers, and the agents of the estate. One Sunday, the Prince deigned to pass through the principal villages in the constituency, without stopping and with making any speeches. This tour of his was remembered for a long time in our district, mainly because he made it in a motorcar, and it was the first time we had seen one. The word “motorcar” itself had not yet found a place in our everyday language, and the less affluent called it a “horseless carriage.” Strange legends were current among the people about the invisible motive force which took the place of the horses, about the diabolical speed which the new vehicle could reach, and about the ruinous effect, particularly on the vines, of the stink it left behind it. That Sunday the entire population of the village had gone to meet the Prince on the road by which he was to arrive. There were numerous visible signs of the collective admiration and affection for the Prince. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The crowds were dressed up in their best, and were in a perfectly understandable state of excitement. The “horseless carriage” arrived late, and roared through the crowd and the village, without stopping and without even slowing down, leaving a thick white dust cloud behind it. The Prince’s agents then explained, to anyone who cared to listen, that the “horseless carriage” went by “petrol vapor” and could only stop when the petrol has finished. “It is not like horses,” they explained, “where all one need do is to pull on the reins. There are not any reins at all. Did you notice any reins?” Two days later a strange little old man arrived from Rome; he wore glasses, and had a black stick and a small suitcase. Nobody knew him. He said he was an oculist and had put himself up as candidate against the Prince. A few people gathered round him out of curiosity, mainly children and women, who had not the right to vote. I was among the children, in my short trousers and with my schoolbooks under my arm. We begged the old man to make a speech. He said to us “Remind your parents that the vote is secrete. Nothing else.” Then he said, “I am poor; I live by being an oculist; but if any of you have anything wrong with your eyes I am willing to treat them for noting.” So we brought him an old woman who sold vegetables. She has bad eyes, and he cleaned them up and gave her a little phial with drops in it and explained how to use it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Then the oculist said to us (we were only a group of children): “Remind your parents that the vote is secret,” and he went away. However, the Prince’s election was so certain, to judge by the festive throngs which had welcomed him during his electioneering tour, that the authorities and the agents of the estate had announced in advance a whole program for the celebration of the inevitable victory. My father, according to the agreement with his brothers, did not side with either candidate, but managed to get himself included among the scrutineers of the ballot-papers. Great was everybody’s surprise when it became known that in the secrecy of the polling booths an enormous majority had voted against the Prince and for the unknow oculist. It was a great scandal; the authorities called it sheer treachery. However, the treachery was of such proportions that the agents of the estate could take any reprisals against anyone. After this, social life went back to normal. Nobody asked oneself: Why can the will of the people only express itself sporadically? Why can it not become a permanent and stable basis for the reorganization of public life? And yet, it would be incorrect to conclude, from a false interpretation of the episode I have just recorded, that the major obstacle was fear. Our people have never been cowardly or spineless or weak. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
On the contrary the rigors of the climate, the heaviness of the work, the harsh conditions of the struggle for existence, have made our people into one of the toughest, hardest, and most enduring peoples in the whole of Italy. So much so, that there are fewer references in our local annals to political surprises resulting from the secret vote tan there are to revolts, localized and short lived, but violent, destructive and almost savage. These humiliated and downtrodden people could endure the worst abuses without complaint, but then they would break out on unforeseen occasions. The behavioristic method is so important for the problems of aggression because most investigators of aggression in the United States of America have written with a behavioristic orientation. Their reasoning is, briefly stated: if Johnny discovers that by being aggressive his younger brother (or mother, and so on) will give him what he wants, he will become a person who tends to behave aggressively; the same would hold true for submissive, courageous, or affectionate behavior. The formula is that one does, feels, and thinks in the way that has proven to be a successful method of obtaining what one wants. Aggression, like all other behavior, is purely learned on the basis of seeking one’s optimal advantage. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Aggression is a response that delivers noxious stimuli to another organism. There are two reasons for excluding the concept of intent from the definition of aggression. First, it implies teleology, a purposive act directed toward a future goal, and this view is inconsistent with the behavioral approach. Second, and more important, is the difficulty of applying this term to behavioral events. Intent is a private event that may or may not be capable of vernalization, may nor may not be accurately reflected in a verbal statement. One might be led to accept intent as an inference from the reinforcement history of the organism. If an aggressive response has been systematically reinforced by a specific consequence, such as a flight of the victim, the recurrence of the aggressive response has been systematically reinforced by a specific consequence, such as flight of the victim, the recurrence of the aggressive response might be said to involve an “intent to cause flight.” However, this kind of inference is superfluous in the analysis of behavior; it is more fruitful to examine directly the relation between reinforcement history of an aggressive response and the immediate situation. Furthermore, intent is both awkward and unnecessary in the analysis of aggressive behavior; rather, the crucial issues is the nature of reinforcing consequences that affect the occurrences and the strength of aggressive responses. In other words, what are the classes of reinforcers that affect aggressive behavior? #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
By “intent” one understands conscious intent. However, this does not mean we are totally unreceptive to the psychoanalytic approach: if anger is not the drive for aggression, is it fruitful to regard it as a drive? The position adopted here is that it is not fruitful. As outstanding behaviorist psychologists, we have to be much more sensitive to the phenomenon of a being’s feelings. Physical forces can determine behavior, the largely unconscious character of these forces, and awareness (insight) may be a factor which can bring about changes in the energy charge and direction of the forces. Behaviorist claim that their method is scientific because they deal with what is visible, for instance, with overt behavior. However, they do not recognize that behavior itself, separated from the behaving person, cannot be adequately described. A being fires a gun and kills the person—if isolated from the aggressor, means little, psychologically. In fact, a behavioristic statement would be adequate only about the gun; with regard to it the motivation of the being who pulls the trigger is irrelevant. However, only if we know the conscious and unconscious motivation moving one to pull the trigger, one’s behavior can be fully understood. We do not find a single cause for one’s behavior, but we can discover the physical structure inside the being—one’s character—and the many conscious and unconscious factors which at a certain point to one firing the gun. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
We find that we can explain the impulse to fire the fun as being determined by many factors in one’s character system, but that one’s act of firing the fun is the most contingent among all factors, and the least predictable one. It depends on many accidental elements in the situation, such as easy access to a gun, absence of other people, the degree of stress, and the conditions of one’s whole psychophysiological system at the moment. The behaviorist maxim that observable behavior is a scientifically reliable datum is simply not true. The fact is that the behavior itself is different depending on the motivating impulse, even though for superficial inspection this difference may not be visible. A simple example demonstrates this: each of two fathers, with different character structures, spanks his son because he believes that the child needs this kind of punishment for the sake of his healthy development. The fathers behave in what seems to be an identical manner. They slap the children with their hands. Yet, if we compare the behavior of include the study of some dreams and certain projective tests. However, one should not underestimate the knowledge in depth which a skilled observer can obtain simply by observing a person minutely for a while (including of course one’s gestures, voice, posture, facial expressions, hand and so on). #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Even without personal knowledge, diaries, letter, and a detailed history of a person, this kind of observation can be important for the understanding in depth of one’s character. If one had the opportunity, the appeal to justice may also be put on the basis of what the neurotic would be willing to do for others. If one were in the other’s position, one will point out how loving or self-sacrificing one would be, and one feels that one’s demands are justified by the fact that one asks no more from others than one would do oneself. In reality the psychology of such justification is more intricate than the neurotic oneself realizes. This picture one has of one’s own qualities is mainly one’s unconscious arrogation to oneself of the kind of conduct one would demand of others. It is not altogether a deception, however, for one has in truth certain self-sacrificing tendencies, arising from such sources as one’s lack of self-assertion, one’s identification with the underrepresented, one’s impulse to be as indulgent to others as one would have them be to one. When the demands are put on the basis of reparation for an alleged injury, the hostility that may be present in the appeal to justice appears most clearly. The motto is: “You have made me suffer or have damaged me, and therefore you are obliged to help me, take care of me, or support me.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
This strategy is analogous to the one employed in traumatic neuroses. I have no personal experience with traumatic neuroses, but I wonder whether persons acquiring a traumatic neurosis do not belong in the category and use the injury as basis for demands which they would be inclined to make in any event. I shall cite a few examples which show how a neurotic may arouse feelings of guilt or obligation in order that one’s own demands may seem just. A wife becomes ill in reaction to a disloyalty of her husband. She does not express any reproach, perhaps does not even consciously feel it, but her illness is implicitly a kind of living reproach, intended to arouse guilt feelings in her husband and to make him willing to devote all his attention to have. Another neurotic of this kind, a woman with obsessive and hysterical symptoms, would sometimes insist on helping her sisters with housework. After a day or two she would unconsciously resent bitterly the fact that they had accepted her help and would have to lie down, with an increase of symptoms, thus forcing the sisters not only to manage without her but to have the increased work of taking care of her. Again, the impairment of her condition expressed an accusation and led to demanding reparations from others. When one of her sisters criticized her, the same person once fainted, thus demonstrating her resentment and extorting sympathetic treatment. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
One patient of mine, at a certain period of her analysis, became worse and worse, and developed the fantasy that the analysis would leave her a wreck in addition to robbing her of all her funds, and that therefore in the future I should be obliged to take complete care of her. Reactions of this kind are frequent in every kind of medical treatment, and are often accompanied by open threats to the physician. In minor degrees occurrences like the following are common: when the analyst foes on a holiday, the patient’s condition shows a marked impairment; implicitly or explicitly one would asset that it is the analyst’s fault that one has become worse and that therefore one has a special claim on the analyst’s attention. This example may easily be translated into the experiences of everyday life. As these examples indicate, neurotic persons of this kind may be willing to pay the price of suffering—even intense suffering—because in that way they are able to express accusations and demands without being aware of doing so, and hence are able to retain their feeling of righteousness. When a person uses threats as a strategy for obtaining affection one may threaten injury either to one’s self or to the other. One will threaten some kind of desperate act, such as ruining a reputation or doing violence to another one oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Threats of suicide, or even attempts at suicide, are a familiar example. One patient of mine obtained two successive husbands by this threat. When the first man gave indications of being about to withdraw, she jumped into a river in a crowded and conspicuous part of the city; when the second seemed reluctant to marry, she opened the gas, at a time when she was sure of being discovered. Her manifest intention was to demonstrate that she could not live without the particular man. Since a neurotic hopes, by one’s threats, to obtain acquiesces to one’s demands, one will not carry them out as long as one has hopes of achieving this end. If one loses this hope one may carry them out under the stress of despair and vindictiveness. We are familiar enough in this community with the spectable of persons exulting in their emancipation from belief in the God of their ancestral Calvinism,–one who made the garden and the serpent, and preappotined the eternal fires of hell. Some of the have found humaner gods to worship, others are simply converts from theology; but, both alike, they assure us that to have got rid of the sophistication of thinking they could feel any reverence or duty toward that impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Now, to make an idol of the spirit of nature, and worship it, also leads to sophistication; and in souls that are religious and would also be scientific the sophistication breeds a philosophical melancholy, from which the first natural step of escape is the denial of the idol; and with the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of absolute joyousness may remain, there comes also the downfall of the whimpering and cowering mood. With evil simply taken as such, beings can make short work, for their relations with it then are only practical. It looms up no longer so spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance, as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly, and ceases to worry about their derivation from the ‘one and only Power.’ Here, then, on this stage of mere emancipation from monistic superstition, the would-be suicide may already get encouraging answers to one’s question about the worth of life. When the burden of metaphysical and infinite responsibility rolls off, there are in most beings instinctive springs of vitality that respond healthily. The certainty that you now may step out of life whenever you please, and that to do so is not blasphemous or monstrous, is itself an immense relief. The thought of suicide is now no longer a guilty challenge and obsession. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
This little life is all we must endure; the grave’s most holy peace is ever sure. I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me. Meanwhile, if only to see what tomorrow’s newspaper will contain, or what the next post-carrier will bring, we can always stand it for twenty-four hours longer. However, far deeper than this mere vital curiosity are arousable, even in the pessimistically-tending mind; for where the loving and admiring impulses are dead, the heating and fighting impulses will still respond to fit appeals. This evil which we feel so deeply is something that we can also help to overthrow; for its sources, now that no ‘Substance’ or ‘Spirit’ is behind them, are finite, and we can deal with each of them in turn. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life; they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon’s glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come. Germany, when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs of Bonaparte’s troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic and idealistic literature that the World has seen; and not till the French ‘milliards’ were disturbed after 1871 did pessimism overrun the country in the shape in which we see it today. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
This history of our own race is one long commentary on the cheerfulness that comes with fighting ills. Or take the Waldenses, of whom I lately have been reading, as examples of what strong beings will endure. In 1485 a papal bull of Innocent VIII. enjoyed their extermination. It absolved those who should take up the crusade against them from all ecclesiastical pains and penalties, released them from any others, legitimized their title to all property which they might have illegally acquired, and promised remission of sins to all who should kill the heretics. There is no town in Piedmont where some of our brethren have not been put to death. Jordan Terbano was brunt alive at Susa; Hippolite Rossiero at Turin; Michael Goneto, an octogenarian, at Sarcena; Vilermin Ambrosiohanged on the Col di Meano; Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle, has his entrails torn from his living body at Turin; Peter Geymarali of Bobbio in like manner had his entails take out in Lucerna, and a fierce cat thrust in their place to torture him further; Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia; Magdalena Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni; Susanna Michelini was bound hand and foot, and left to perish of cold and hunger on the snow at Sarcena: Bartolomeo Fache, gashed with sabres, had the wounds filled up with quickline, and perished thus in agony. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Daniel Michelini had his tongue torn out at Bobbo for having praised God; James Baridari perished covered with sulphurous matches which had been forced into his flesh under the nails, between the fingers, in the nostrils, in the lips, and all over the body, and the lighted; Daniel Rovelli has his mouth filled with gunpowerder, which, being lighted, blew his head to pieces; Sara Rostignol was slit open from legs to the bosom, and left so to perish on the road between Eyral and Lucerna; Anna Charbonnier was impaled, and carried thus on a pike from San Giovanni to La Torre. Und dergleichen mehr! In 1630 the plague swept away one-half of the Vaudois population, including fifteen of their seventeen pastors. The places of these were supplied from Geneva and Dauphiny, and the whole Vaudois people learned French in order to follow their services. More than once their number fell, by unremitting persecution, from the normal standard of twenty-five thousand to about four thousand. In 1686 the Duke of Savoy ordered the three thousand that remained to give up their faith or leave the country. Refusing, they fought the French and Piedmontese armies till only eighty of their fighting men remained alive or uncaptured, wen they gave up, and were sent in a body to Switzerland. However, in 1698, encouraged by William of Orange and led by one of their pastor-captains, between eight hundred and nine hundred of them returned to conquer their old homes again. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
They fought their way to Bobi, reduced force sent against them; until at last the Duke of Savoy, giving up his alliance with that abomination of desolation, Louis XIV., restored them to comparative freedom,–since which time they have increased and multiplied in their barren Alpine valleys to this day. What are our woes and sufferance compared with these? Does not the recital of such a fight so obstinately waged against such odds fill us with resolution against our petty power of darkness,–machine politicians, spoilsmen, and the rest? Life is worthy of living, no matter what it brings, if only such combats may be carried to successful terminations and one’s heel set on the tyrant’s throat. To the suicide, then, in one’s supposed World of multifarious and immoral nature, you can appeal—and appeal in the name of the very evils that makes one’s heart sick—there to wait and see one’s part of the battle out. And the consent to live on, which you ask of one under these circumstances, is not the sophistical ‘resignation’ which devotees of cowering religions preach: it is not resignation in the sense of licking a despotic Deity’s hand. It is, on the contrary, a resignation based on manliness and pride. So long as your would-be suicide leaves an evil of one’s own unremedied, so long one has strictly no concern with evil in the abstract and at large. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The submission which you demand of yourself to the general fact of evil in the World, your apparent acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at large is none of your business until your business with your private particular evils is liquidated and settled up. A challenge of this sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made to be accepted by beings whose normal instinct are not decayed; and your reflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with a certain interest again. Then sentiment of honor is a very penetrating thing. When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts have had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down their lives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together here in comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our relation to the Universe in a more solemn light. Does not the acceptance of a happy life upon such terms involve a point of honor? Are we not bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some self-denying service with our lives, in return for all those lives upon which ours are built? If one has a normally constituted heart, to hear this question is to answer it in but one possible way. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Thus, then, we see that mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and honor may make life on a purely naturalistic basis seem worth living from day to day to beings who have cast away all metaphysics in order to get rid of hypochondria, but who are resolved to owe mothing as yet to religion and its more beneficial gifts. A poor half-way stage, some of you may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant it to be an honest stage; and no being should dare to speak meanly of these instincts which are our nature’s best equipment, and to which religion herself must in the last resort address her own peculiar appeals. “And it may suffice if I only say they are preserved for a wise purpose, which purpose is known unto God; for he doth counsel in wisdom over all his works, and his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal round. O remember, remember how strict are the commandments of God. And he said: If ye will keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land—but if ye keep not his commandments ye shall be cut off,” reports Alma37.12-13. The time will come when values will change, when ambitions, powers, possessions, and acquisitions will all be put back into their proper places, when their tyranny over the will and the feelings will be put to and end. One who seeks one’s inner being, and finds it, finds also one’s inner good. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Of Course, if the Devil Asks for Your Address, I Will Give it to Him at Once!
Wait till I get finished with this place, I will have electricity everywhere. And these windows will have properly fitted glass. Maybe they will have screens as well. And these plank floors will be covered with marble tiles. No, this shall be a small Roman palace, what with even more elaborate Roman furniture, and the stove, I shall get a new stove. And then if I am trapped out here, I will have delicious pillows on a couch on which to sleep, and plenty of books to read by fine lights. At the age of seventeen, and in time of war, one does not join a revolutionary movement which is persecuted by the government, unless one’s motives are serious. I grew up in a mountainous district of southern Italy. The phenomenon which most impressed me, when I arrived at the age of reason, was the violent contrast, the incomprehensible, absurd, monstrous contrast between family and private life—in the main decent, honest, and well-conducted—and social relations, which were very often crude and full of hatred and deceit. Many terrifying stories are known of the misery and desperation of the southern provinces (I have told some myself), but I do not intend to refer now to events that caused a stir, so much as to the little occurrences of daily life. It was these commonplace minor events that showed up the strange double existence of the people among whom I grew up, the observation of which was one of the agonizing secrets of my adolescence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
I was a child just five years old when, one Sunday, while crossing the little square of my native village with my mother leading me by the hand, I witnessed the cruel, stupid spectable of one of the local gentry setting his great dog at a poor woman, a seamstress, who was just coming out of church. The wretched woman was flung to the ground, badly mauled, and her dress was torn to ribbons. Indignation in the village was general, but silent. I have never understood how the poor woman ever got the unhappy idea of taking proceedings against the squire; but the only result was to add a mockery of justice to the harm already done. Although, I must repeat, everybody pitied her and many people helped her secretly, the unfortunate woman could not find a single witness prepared to give evidence before the magistrate, nor a lawyer to conduct the prosecution. On the other hand, the squire’s supposedly left-wing lawyer turned up punctually, and so did a number of bribed witnesses who perjured themselves by giving a grotesque version of what had happened, and accusing the woman of having provoked the dog. The magistrate—and most worthy, honest person in private life—acquitted the squire and condemned the poor woman to pay the costs. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
“It went very much against the grain with me,” he excused himself a few days later at our house. “On my word of honor, I do assure you, I was very sorry about it. But even if I had been present at the disgusting incident as a private citizen and could not have avoided blaming him, still as a judge I had to go by the evidence of the case, and unfortunately it was in favor of the dog.” “A real judge,” he used to love to say, sententiously, “must be able to conceal his own egotistic feelings, and be impartial.” “Really, you know,” my mother used to comment, “it is a horrible profession. Better to keep ourselves to ourselves at home. My son,” she used to say to me, “when you grow up, be whatever you like, but not a judge.” I can remember other typical little incidents like that of the squire, the dog, and the seamstress. However, I should not like to suggest, by quoting such episodes, that we were ignorant of the sacred concepts of Justice and Truth or that we held them in contempt. On the contrary; at school, in church, and at public celebrations they were often discussed with eloquence and veneration, but in rather abstract terms. To define our curious situation more exactly, I should add that it was based on a deception of which all of us, even the children, were aware; and yet it still persisted, being built on something quite apart from the ignorance and stupidity of individuals. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
I remember a lively discussion one day in my catechism class between the boys who were being prepared for confirmation and the parish priest. The subject was a marionette show at which we boys had been present with the priest the day before. It was about the dramatic adventures of a child who was persecuted by the devil. At one point the child-marionette had appeared on the stage trembling with fear and, to escape the devil who was searching for him, had hidden under a bed in a corner of the stage; shortly afterward the devil-marionette arrived and looked for him in vain. “But he must be here,” said the devil-marionette. “I can smell him. Now I will ask these good people in the audience.” And he turned to us and asked: “My dear children, have you by any chance seen that naughty child I am looking for, hiding anywhere?” “No, no, no,” we all chorused at once, as energetically as possible. “Where is he then? I cannot see him,” the devil insisted. “He’s left, he’s gone away,” we all shouted. “He’s gone to Lisbon.” (In our part of Italy, Lisbon is still the furthermost pint of the globe, even today.) I should add that none of us, when we went to the theater, had expected to be questioned by a devil-marionette; our behavior was therefore entirely instinctive and spontaneous. And I imagine that children in any other part of the World would have reacted in the same way. However, our parish priest, a most worthy, cultured and pious person, was not altogether pleases. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
We had told a lie, he warned us wit a worried look. We had told it for good ends, of course, but still it remained a lie. One must never tell lies. “Not even to the devil?” we asked in surprise. “A lie is always a sin,” the priest replied. “Even to the magistrate?” asked one of the boys. The priest rebuked him severely. “I am here to teach you Christian doctrine and not to talk nonsense. What happens outside the church is no concern of mine.” And he began to explain the doctrine about truth and lies in general in the most eloquent language. However, that day the question of lies in general was of no interest to us children; we wanted to know, “Ought we to have told the devil where the child was hiding, yes or no?” “That is not the point,” the poor priest kept repeating to us rather uneasily. “A lie is always a lie. It might be a big sin, a medium sin, an average sin, or a little tiny sin, but it is always a sin. Truth must be honored.” “The truth is,” we said, “that there was the devil on one side and the child on the other. We wanted to help the child, that’s the real truth.” “But you have told a lie,” the parish priest repeating. “For good ends, I know, but still a lie.” To end it, I put forward an objection of unheard-of perfidy, and, considering my age, considerable precocity: “If it’s been a priest instead of a child,” I asked, “what ought we have replied to the devil?” #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The parish priest blushed, avoided a reply, and, a punishment for my impertinence, made me spend the rest of the lesson on my knees beside him, “Are you sorry?” he asked me at the end of the lesson. “Of course,” I replied. “If the devil asks me for your address, I’ll give it to him at once.” It was certainly unusual for a discussion in such terms to take place in a catechism class, although free discussion was quite frequently in our family circle and among our friends. However, this intellectual liveliness did not even create a stir in the humiliating and primitive stagnation of our social life. This vicious circle formed by the various implications of the neurotic need for affection may be roughly schematized as follows: anxiety; excessive need for affection, including demands for exclusive and unconditional love; a feelings of rebuff if these demands are not fulfilled; reaction to the rebuff with intense hostility; need to repress the hostility because of fear of losing the affection; the tension of a diffuse rage; increased anxiety; increased need for reassurance. Thus the very means which serve to reassure against anxiety create in turn new hostility and new anxiety. The formation of a vicious circle is typical not only in the context in which it has been discussed here; generally speaking it is one of the most important processes in neuroses. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Any protective device may have, in addition to its reassuring quality, the quality of creating new anxiety. A person may take to drinking in order to allay one’s anxiety, and then get the fear that drinking, too, will harm one. Or one may become involved of the pleasures of the flesh alone in order to release one’s anxiety, and then get the fear that drinking, too, will harm one. Or one may become involved in solo pleasures of the flesh in order to release one’s anxiety, and then become afraid that solo pleasures of the flesh will make one ill. Or one may undergo some treatment for one’s anxiety, and soon grow apprehensive lest the treatment harm one. The formation of vicious circles is the main reason why severe neuroses are bound to become worse, even though there is no change in external conditions. Uncovering the vicious circles, with all their implications, is one of the important tasks of psychoanalysis. The neurotic oneself cannot grasp them. One notices their results only in the form of a feeling that one is trapped in a hopeless situation. This feeling of being trapped is one’s response to entanglements which one cannot break through. Any way that seems to lead out drags one again into new dangers. The question arises as to what ways are open, despite all the internal difficulties, for the neurotic to obtain the affection one is determined to have. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
There are really two problems to be solved: first, how to obtain the necessary affection; and second, how to justify to oneself and to others the demands for it. We may roughly describe the various possible means of getting affection as: bribery; an appeal to pity; an appeal to justice; and finally threats. Such a classification, of course, like all such enumerations of psychological factors, is not rigidly categorical but is only an indication of general trends. These various means are not mutually exclusive. Several of them may be employed simultaneously or in alternation, depending on the situation as well as on the entire character structure, and depending on the degree of hostility. In fact the sequence in which these four means of obtaining affection are cited indicates an increasing degree of hostility. When a neurotic attempts to obtain affection by bribery one’s motto could be described as, “I love you dearly therefore you should love me in return, and give up everything for the sake of my love.” The fact that in our culture such tactics are employed more frequently by women than by men is a result of the conditions under which women have lived. For centuries love has not only been women’s special domain in life, but in fact has been the only or main gateway through which they could attain what they desired. While beings grew up with the conviction that if they wanted to get somewhere, they had to achieve something in life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Some women realized that through love, and through love alone, they could attain happiness security and prestige. This difference in cultural positions has had a momentous influence on the psychic development of man and woman. It would be inopportune to discuss this influence in the present context, but one of its consequences is that in neuroses women more frequently than men will use love as a strategy. And at the same time the subjective conviction of love serves as a justification for making demands. Persons of this type are in a particular danger of falling into a painful dependency in their love relationships. Assume, for example, that a woman with a neurotic need for affection clings to a man of a similar type, who withdraws, however, as soon as she approaches him; the woman reacts to such rejection with intense hostility, which she represses for fear of losing him. If she tries to withdraw herself he will again start to court her favor. She then not only represses her hostility but covers it up with an intensified devotion. She will again be rejected and again react, eventually with enhanced love. Thus she will gradually become convinced that she is possessed by an unconquerable “grand passion.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Another device that may be considered a form of bribery is the attempt to win affection by understanding a person, helping one in one’s mental or professional development, straightening out one’s difficulties, and the like. This is in common use by both men and women. A second means of obtaining affection is by appealing to pity. The neurotic will being one’s suffering and helplessness to the attention of others, the motto here being, “You ought to love me because I suffer and am helpless.” At the same time the suffering serves as justification for the right to make excessive demands. Sometimes such an appeal will be made quite openly. A patient will point out that one is the sickest patient and therefore has the greatest right to the analyst’s attention. He may be scornful of other patients who present a surface appearance of better health. And he resents other persons who are more successful than one in using this strategy. In appealing to pity more or less hostility may be intermingled. The neurotic may make a simple appeal to our good nature, or one may extort favors by radical means, as by involving oneself in a disastrous situation which compels our assistance. Everyone who has had anything to do with neurotics in social or medical work knows the importance of this strategy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
There is a great difference between the neurotic who explains one’s predicament in a matter-of-fact way, and the one who tries to arouse pity by a dramatic demonstration of one’s complaints. We may find the same trends in children of all ages, with the same variations: the child may either want to be consoled for some complaint or may try t extort attention by unconsciously developing a situation terrifying to the parents, such as an inability to ear or urinate. The use of the appeal to pity presupposed a conviction of inability to obtain love in any other manner. This conviction may be rationalized as a general disbelief in affection, or it may take the form of a belief that in the particular situation affection cannot be had in any other way. In the third means of obtaining affection—the appeal to justice—the motto can be described as: “This I have done for you; what will you do for me?” In our culture mothers will often point out that they have done so much for their children that they are entitled to unflagging devotion. In love relations the fact of having yielded to wooing may be used as a basis for claims. Persons of this type are often overready to do things for others, with the secret expectation that they will receive in return everything they wish, and they are seriously disappointed if the others are not equally willing to do something for them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
I am referring here not to persons who are consciously calculating, but to those whom any conscious expectation of possible reward is entirely foreign. Their compulsive generosity can perhaps more accurately be described as a magic gesture. They do to others what they want others to do to them. It is the inordinately sharp sting of disappointment which indicates that expectations of a return were factually at work. Sometimes they keep a sort of mental bookkeeping account, in which they give themselves inordinate credit for sacrifices that are really useless, such as lying awake all night, but minimize or even ignore what has been done for them, thus so falsifying the situation that they feel entitled to demand special attention. This attitude leads to repercussions on the neurotic oneself, for one may become extremely afraid of incurring obligations. Instinctively judging others by oneself, one fears that others might exploit one if one accepted any favors from them. Now let us recall the words of God in the story of the Flood: “I am sorry that I have made man.” They introduce a new element into our thinking about humans and the Earth—an element of judgment, frustration, and tragedy. There is no theme in Biblical literature, nor in any other, more persistently pursed than this one. “And thus Satan did lead away the hearts of the people to do all manner of iniquity; therefore they had enjoyed peace but a few years,” reports 3 Nephi 6. 16. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The Earth has been cursed by beings innumerable times, because she produced him, together with all life and its misery, which includes the tragedy of human history. This accusation of the Earth sounds through our whole contemporary culture, and understandably so. We accuse her in all our artistic expressions, in novels and drama, in painting and music, in philosophical thought and descriptions of human nature. However, even more important is the silent accusation implied in our cynical denunciation of those who would say “yes” to life, in our withdrawal from it into the refuges of mental disturbance and disease, in our forcing of life beyond itself or below itself by drugs and the various methods of intoxication, or in the social drugs of banality and conformity. In all these ways we accuse the destiny that placed us in this Universe and upon this planet. “Thou dost crown one wit glory and honor,” says the psalmist. However, many of us long to get rid of that glory and wish we had never possessed it. We yearn to return to the state of creatures, which are unaware of themselves and their World, limited to the satisfaction of their animal needs. “Some were lifted up in pride, and others were exceedingly humble; some did return railing for railing, while others would receive railing and persecution and all manner of afflictions, and would not turn and revile again, but were humble and penitent before God,” reports 3 Nephi 6.13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Like Moonshine in the Morning Light of the Sun—It is the Cosmic Radiation which Becomes Matter!
I sat there absorbing the fact that I now has a substantial income in my own right, some one hundred thousand dollars a month immediately available to me, though it came with a strict and nonbinding advice that I take guidance in everything. When regressive mass movements are activated, that is, when potential anxiety can be activated in such a manner that it can become a cruel weapon in the hands of irresponsible leaders. However, in order to get at this problem we must take into account the two other strata of alienation: the social and political. Alienation of labor: it is the separation of labor from the product of labor through hierarchical division of labor as well as the hierarchical organization of labor have shown a steady rise since the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. German romantic psychology of labor calls this the despiritualization of labor (Entseelung der Arbeit). This concept as well as the various remedies are dangerous—for they cover up the inevitability of this process of alienation which must be admitted, understood, and accepted. If this does not happen, if one refuses to take account of the inevitability of the division of labor and of the hierarchical ordering of the process of labor, and attempts to spiritualize labor instead of restricting it to a minimum, then social anxiety is deepened. The attitude of the so-called new middle class (salaried employees) can be understood from this process. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
While the so-called new middle class does labor which—to remain with the language of German psychology of labor—is more de-spiritualized than that of the industrial worker, and although one’s average income probably lies below that of the industrial worker, one yet holds fast to one’s middle class ideology and customs. Thus one refuses to take account of the inevitability of the process and—as in Germany before 1933—becomes the social stratum most susceptible to Caesarism. When one is competent, in a society which is constituted by competition, the competitor is supposed to be rewarded for one’s effort; that is, when one exerts one’s self, is intelligent, and accepts risks. There is little doubt that the principle of competition dominates not only the economy but all social relations. Karen Horney, a representative of Freudian revisionism, claims that the destructive character of competition creates great anxiety in neurotic persons. When genuine competition really prevails, that is competition in which relatively equally strong persons fight with fair methods, this is not convincing; that is, the kind of competition which Adam Smith defines in his Theory of Moral Sentiments as follows: “One individual must never prefer oneself so much even to any other individual as to hurt or injure that other in order to benefit oneself, though the benefit of the one should be much greater than the hurt or injury to the others.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
And again, “In the race for wealth and honours and preferments, each may run as hard as one can and strain every nerve and every muscle in order to outstrip all one’s competitors. However, if one jostle or throw down any of them, the indulgence of the spectator is entirely at an end. It is in violation of fair play, which they cannot admit of.” I cannot here undertake a social analysis to show that this ethically circumscribed competition does not exist and perhaps never has existed, that in reality a monopolist struggle hides behind it, that, in other words, the efforts of the individual, one’s intelligence, one’s vision, one’s readiness to take risks, are easily shattered by the constellations of power. Behind the mask of competition, which must not necessarily have destructive effects if it rationally organizes a society, there hide in fact relations of dependence. To be successful in present-day society, it is much more important to stand in well with the powerful than to preserve oneself though one’s own strength. Modern beings know this. It is precisely the impotence of the individual who has to accommodate oneself to the technological apparatus which is destructive and anxiety-creating. However, if crises ruin the merchant, even where genuine competition is effective, no effort will help. The inability to understand the process of crises, and the frequent need to ascribe blame for them to sinister powers, is an additional factor in the destruction of ego. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
This psychological process operated in the so-called old middle class of Germany before 1933. However—to repeat—it is hard to see why fair competition must have destructive functions. In every society that is composed of antagonistic groups there is an ascent and descent of groups. It is my contention that persecutory anxiety—but one that, as we said above, has a real basis—is produced when a group is threatened in its prestige, income, or even its existence; for instance, when it declines and does not understand the historical process or is prevented from understanding it. The examples are too numerous to be possibly mentioned here. German National Socialism and Italian Fascism are classical examples. However, not only social classes resist their degradation by means of such mass movements; religious and racial conflicts, too, frequently produce similar phenomena. The conflict between the Republicans and Democrats in the Untied States of America (in particular California), the contemporary struggles of the government of Venezuela against the natives, take place in accord with the following scheme: the anxiety of a dominant majority that it will be degraded through the economic and political rise of the oppressed is used propagandist fashion for the creation of affective mass movements, which frequently take on a fascist character. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Social alienation, for instance, the fear of social degradation, is not adequate by itself. The elements of political alienation must be added. Since I devote a separate essay to this phenomenon, I shall only point out briefly what I have in mind. As a rule one is satisfied (above all, in the American literature) with defining abstention from voting at elections as political apathy. However, I have pointed out elsewhere that the word apathy describes a few different political reactions: first, the lack of interest in politics, say, the opinion that politics is not the business of the citizen because it is, after all, only a struggle between small cliques and that therefore fundamentally nothing ever changes; then, the Epicurean attitude toward politics, the view that politics and state only have to supply the element of order within which beings devote themselves to their perfection, so that forms of state and of government appear as a secondary matter; and finally, as the third reaction, the conscious rejection of the whole political system which expresses itself as apathy because the individual sees no possibility of changing anything in the system through one’s efforts. Political life can, for example, be exhausted in the competition of political parties which are purely machines without mass participation, but which monopolize politics to such an extent that a new party cannot makes its way within the valid rules of the game. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
This third form of apathy forms the core of what I characterize as political alienation. Usually this apathy, if it operates within social alienation, leads to the partial paralysis of the state and opens the way to a caesarist movement which, scorning the rules of the game, utilizes the inability of the citizen to make individual decisions and compensates for the loss of ego with identification with a Caesar. The caesaristic moment is compelled not only to activate but to institutionalize anxiety. The institutionalization of anxiety is necessary because the caesaristic movement can never endure a long wait for power. This is precisely what follows from its affective basis. While the non-affective mass organization, such as a normal political party, can exist for a long time without disintegrating, the caesarist movement must hurry precisely because of the instability of the cement that holds it together: the libido-charged affectivity. After it has come to power it faces the need of institutionalizing anxiety as a means of preventing the extinction of its affective base by its bureaucratic structure. The techniques are familiar: propaganda and terror, for example, the incalculability of sanctions. I do not need to discuss here. Montesquieu, building on Aristotle and Machiavelli, distinguished between one tyrannical and three constitutional governmental and social systems. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
According to Montesquieu, monarchy rests on the honor of the monarch rests on the honor of the monarch; aristocracy, on the moderation of the aristocrats; democracy, on virtue (for example, with him, patriotism); but tyranny, on fear. It must, however, not be overlooked—and our introductory remarks about alienation and anxiety had no other meaning—that every political system is based on anxiety. However, there is more than a quantitative difference between the anxiety which is institutionalized in a totally repressive system and that which is the basis of a halfway liberal one. These are qualitatively different states of affairs. One may perhaps say that the totally repressive system institutionalizes depressive and persecutory anxiety, the halfway liberal system, true anxiety. Once the connection between anxiety and guilt is seen, it will at once become obvious that these are different states of affairs. In his Peloponnesian War, Thucydides reports the following about Sparta: “Indeed fear of their [The Helots’] numbers and obstinacy even persuaded the Lacedaemonians to the actions which I shall now relates. The Helots were invited by a proclamation to pick out those of their numbers who claimed to have most distinguished themselves against the enemy, in order that they might receive their freedom; the object being to test them, as it was thought that the first to claim their freedom would be the most high-spirited and the most apt to rebel. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
“As many as two thousand were selected accordingly, who crowned themselves and went round the temples, rejoicing in their new freedom. The Spartans, however, soon afterwards did away with them, and no one ever knew ow each of them perished.” With his customary psychological penetration this greatest of all historians saw clearly the connection of anxiety and collective guilt. And then we read Plutarch’s description of the terrible Cryptia, the Spartan secret police: “By this ordinance, the magistrates [for example, the Ephors] dispatched privately some of the ablest of the young men into the country, from time to time, armed only with their daggers, and taking a little necessary provision with them; in the daytime, they hid themselves in out-of-the-way places, and there lay close, but in the night issued out into the highways and killed all the helots they could light upon.” Here is a striking example of what we have in mind. Who does not here thin of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, when Stavrogin gives the following piece of advice: “All that business of titles and sentimentalism is a very good cement, but there is something better; persuade four members of the circle to do for a fifth on the pretence that he is a traitor, and you will tie the all together with the blood they have shed as though it were a knot. They will be your slaves, they will not dare to rebel or call you to account. Ha ha ha!” #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
This above is a famous passage in Dostoyevsky is important not only because it verifies our psychological theory, but also because it shows at the same time that the leader activates anxiety through guilt for one’s own advantage, not for the sake of the led. I do not wish here to discuss the psychological theory concerning the relation of anxiety and guilt. According to Dr. Freud, human’s feelings of guilt stems from the Oedipus complex. It is this aggression that the child represses and thus effects an unconscious feeling of guilt. The feeling of guilt is the superego, human’s conscience. However, that is precisely why the intensification of the unconscious feeling of guilt permits a being to become a criminal. If one examines the Spartan example, Stavrogin’s advice, the Fehme-murders, and the collective cries of the SS, one may perhaps undertake the following psychological analysis: There are anxiety and an unconscious feeling of guilt. It is the task of the leader, by creating neurotic anxiety, to bond the led so closely to the leader that they would perish without identification with one. Then the leader orders the commission of crimes; but these are, in accord with the morality that prevails in the group—with the Lacedaemonians, the Nihilists, the SS—no crimes, but fundamentally mortal acts. However, the conscience—the superego—protests against the morality of the crimes, for the old moral convictions cannot simply be extirpated. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The feeling of guilt is thus repressed and makes anxiety a nearly panicky one, which can be overcome only through unconditional surrender to the leader and compels the commission of new crimes. This is how I see the connection between anxiety and guilt in a totally repressive society. Hence this anxiety and guilt in a totally repressive society. Hence this anxiety is qualitatively different from the anxiety that is the basis of every political system. You will ask me, “What can be done to prevent anxiety—which cannot be eliminated—from becoming neurotic-destructive? Can the state accomplish this?” Schiller—and with this we return to our point of departure—denies this in his Seventh Letter. He asks and replies: “Should we expect this effect from the state? That is impossible, since the state, as at present constituted, has caused the evil, and the ideal state of reason cannot be the foundation of this improved humanity but must itself be founded thereon.” As educators we may thus perhaps say that education deserves the first rank. However, Schiller replies to this in the Ninth Letter with the question, “But are we not proceeding in a circle? Theoretical culture is supposed to induce the practical, and yet the latter is to be the condition of the former? All political improvements should result from education of character—but how can the character ennoble itself under the influence of a barbarous civil polity?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Surely there are also other individual solutions—such as love. However, it is, after all, accidental whether or not one experiences it, and the risk can be enormous with the loss of object. Hence there remains for us as citizens of the university and of the state the dual offensive on anxiety and for liberty: that of education and that of politics. Politics, again, should be a dual thing for us: the penetration of the subject matter of our academic discipline with the problems of politics—naturally not day-to-day politics—and the taking of positions on political questions. If we are serious about the humanization of politics; if we wish to prevent a demagogue from using anxiety and apathy, then we—as teachers and students—must not be silent. We must suppress our arrogance, inertia, and our revulsion from the alleged dirt of day-to-day politics. We must speak and write. Idealism, as it is expressed so nobly in Schiller’s Letters, must not be for us only a beautiful façade, it must not one more become that notorious form of idealism which in the past disguised the most reactionary and anti-libertarian aims. Only through our own responsible educational and political activity can the words of idealism become history. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Because neobehaviorism has no theory of humans, it can only see behavior and not the behaving person. Whether somebody smiles at me because he want to hide his hostility, or a salesgirl smiles because she has been instructed to smile (in the better stores), or whether a friend smiles at me because he is glad to see me, all this makes no difference to neobehaviorism, for a smile is a smile. That it should make no difference to Professor Skinner as a person is hard to believe, unless he were so alienated that the reality of persons no longer matters to him. However, if the difference does matter, how could a theory that ignores it be valid? Nor can neobehaviorism explain why quite a few persons conditioned to be persecutors and torturers fall mentally sick in spite of the continuation of positive reinforcements. Why does positive reinforcement not prevent many others from rebelling, out of the strength of their reason, their conscience, or their love, when all conditioning works in the opposite direction? And why are many of the most adapted people, who should be star witnesses to the success of conditioning, often deeply unhappy and disturbed or suffer from neurosis? There must be impulses inherent in beings which set limits to the power of conditioning; to study the failure of conditioning seems just as important, scientifically, as its success. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Indeed, beings can be conditioned to behave in almost every desired way; but only almost. One reacts to those conditions that conflict with basic human requirements in different and ascertainable ways. One can be conditioned to be a slave, but one will react with aggression or decline in vitality; or one can be conditioned to feel like part of a machine and react with boredom, aggression, and unhappiness. Basically, Skinner is a naïve rationalist who ignores being’s passions. In contract to Dr. Freud, he is not impressed by the power of passions, but believes that beings always behave as one’s self-interest requires. Indeed, the whole principle of neobehaviorism is that self-interest is so powerful that by appealing to it—mainly in the form of the environment’s rewarding the individual for acting in the desired sense—human’s behavior can be completely determined. Skinner’s extraordinary popularity can be explained by the fact that he has succeeded in blending elements of traditional, optimistic, liberal thought with the social and mental reality of cybernetic society. Skinner believes that beings are malleable, subject to social influences, and that nothing in their nature can be considered to be a final obstacle to development toward a peaceful and just society. Thus his system attracts those psychologist who are liberals and who find in Skinner’s system an argument to defend their political optimism. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Skinner appeals to those who believe that desirable social goals like peace and equality are not just rootless ideals, but can be established in reality. The whole idea that one can design a better society on a scientific basis appeals to many who earlier might have been socialists. Did not Marx, too, want to design a better society? Did he not call his brand of socialism scientific in contrast to Utopian socialism? Is not Skinner’s way particularly attractive at a point in history when the political solution seems to have failed and revolutionary hopes are at their lowest? However, if Skinner’s implied optimism alone would not have made his ideas so attractive were it not for his combining of traditional liberal view with their very negation? In the cybernetic age, the individual becomes increasingly subject to manipulation. One’s work, one’s consumption, and one’s leisure are manipulated by advertising, by ideologies, by what Skinner calls positive reinforcements. The individual loses one’s active, responsible role in the social process; one becomes completely adjusted and learns that any behavior, act, thought, or feeling which does not fit into the general scheme put one at a severe disadvantage; in fact one is what one is supposed to be. If one insists on being oneself, one risks, in police states, one’s freedom or ever one’s life; in some democracies, one risks not being promoted, or more rarely, one risks even one’s job, and perhaps most importantly, one risks feeling isolated, without communication with anybody. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
While most people are not clearly aware of their discomfort, they dimly sense their fear of life, of the future, of the boredom caused by the monotony and the meaninglessness of what they are doing. They sense that the very ideals in which they want to believe have lost their moorings in social reality. What relief it is for them to learn that conditioning is the best, the most progressive, and the most effective solution. Skinner recommends the hell of isolated, manipulated beings of the cybernetic age as the Heaven of progress. He dulls our fears of where we are going by telling us that we need not be afraid; that the direction our industrial system has taken is the same as that which the great humanists had dreamt of, except that it is scientifically grounded. Moreover, Skinner’s theory rings true, because it is (almost) true for the alienated being of the cybernetic society. Skinnerism is the psychology of opportunism dressed up as a new scientific humanism. I am not saying that Skinner wants to play this role of apologist for the technotronic age. On the contrary, his political and social naivete can make him write sometimes more convincingly (and confusedly) than he could if he were aware of what he is trying to condition us to. In contemplating how badly neurotic persons need affection, but how difficult it is for them to accept it, one might assume that these persons would thrive best in emotional atmosphere of moderate temperature. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
However, here another complication enters: they are at the same time painfully sensitive to any rejection or rebuff, however slight. And a moderate atmosphere, although in one way reassuring, is felt as a rebuff. It is difficult to describe the degree of their sensitivity to rejection. Change in an appointment, having to wait, failure to receive an immediate response, disagreement with their opinions, any non-compliance with their wishes, in short, any failure to fulfill their demands on their own terms, is felt as a rebuff. And a rebuff not only throws them back on their basic anxiety, but is also considered equivalent to humiliation. Because a rebuff does have this content of humiliation it arouses a tremendous rage, which may emerge into the open; for example, a girl whose cats was not responsive to her caresses became furious and threw the cat against the wall. If they are made to wait they interpret it as being considered so insignificant that it is not necessary to be punctual with them; and this may stimulate outbreaks of hostility or result in a complete withdrawal of all feelings, so that they are cold and unresponsive, even though, a few minutes before, they may have been looking forward eagerly to the meeting. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
More often the connection between feelings rebuffed and feeling irritated remains unconscious. This happens all the ore easily since the rebuff may have been so slight as to escape conscious awareness. Then a person will feel irritable, or become spiteful and vindictive or feel fatigued or depressed or have a headache, without the remotest suspicion why. Moreover, the hostile reaction may occur not only to a rejection, or to what is felt to be a rejection, but also to the anticipation of rejection. A person may, for example, ask a question angrily, because in one’s mind one has already anticipated a refusal. One may refrain from sending flowers to his girl, because he anticipates her sensing ulterior motives in the gift. He may for the same reason be extremely afraid of expressing any beneficial feelings, a fondness, a gratitude, and appreciation, and thereby appear to oneself and others colder and more hard-boiled than be really is. Or he may scoff at women, thus taking revenge for an anticipated rebuff. The fear of rejection, if strongly developed, may lead a person to avoid exposing oneself to nay possibility of denial. This avoidance may extend from not asking for a straw when buying a soft drink to not asking for a job. Person who fear any possible rejection will avoid making advanced to a man or woman whom they like, as long as they are not absolutely certain of not meeting with a rejection. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
People of this type usually resent having to ask girls for a dance, because they are afraid the girl may accept only for the sake of being polite; and they think women are much better off in this regard, because they need not take the initiative. In other words, the fear of rebuff may lead to a series of severe inhibitions falling in the category of timidity. The timidity serves as a defense against exposing one’s self to rebuff. The conviction of being unlovable is used as the same kind of defense. It is as if persons of this type said to themselves, “People do not like me anyhow, so I had better stay in the corner, and thereby protect myself against any possible rejection.” The fear of rebuff is thus a grave handicap to the wish for affection, because it prevents a person from letting others feel or know that one would like to have some attention. Moreover, the hostility provoked by a feeling of being rebuffed contributes a great deal toward keeping the anxiety alert or even reinforcing it. It is an important factor in establishing a vicious circle which is difficult to escape from. “Awake; put on the armor of righteousness. Shake off the chains with which ye are bound, and come forth out of obscurity and raise from the dust,” reports 2 Nephi 2.23. Energy radiates, whether in the form of continuous waves or disconnected particles—moment to moment. It is this cosmic radiation which becomes matter. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
I Want You to Sacrifice Yourself for My Sake without Getting Anything in Return!
With the theory of capitalist encirclement, capitalists as a rule are personified by Wall Street. For generations, it has referred to the showcase of American capitalism: our financial services system that ensured the efficient use of funds by channeling capital to its most productive use. Indeed, the governing ethos in America is that Wall Street is the heart and soul of our capitalist economy. Now again there can be no doubt that there was a policy of encirclement against Bolshevist Russia at the beginning of the revolution; but it would be fatal to believe that the terror was the consequence of the policy of intervention and of the cold war. Possibly the policy of encirclement strengthened the terror, just as the wars of intervention during the French Revolution gave Robespierre’s Terror a new impetus. However, the terror as a normal method of politics against the class opponent is contained in the Leninist definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat; it was then extended to the party and finally to the supposedly classless society, without a visible connection with the intensity of the capitalist policy of encirclement. However, the Bolshevist view of history, steadily activating anxiety, made possible identification with the leader Stalin and thus underpinned his caesarist dictatorship. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The most important type—if only because of its immense political influence—is the theory of the conspiracy of the Jews according to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These contain the secret plans of Jewish leaders, supposedly formulated in the year 1897, for achieving Jewish World domination by force, terror, corruption, the disintegrating influence of liberalism, freemasonry, and so forth. This World domination was to be a mock-democracy, through which the Jewish leaders were to operate. That the Protocols are a forgery, prepared by Czarist Russians, was definitely established by the Bern trial of 1934-35. It is equally beyond question that they are essentially a plagiarism of the work by Maurice Joly directed against Napoleon III, Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu. However, if the Protocols represent a forgery, and if the plans for a Jewish World conspiracy belong in the realm of mythology, where then does that kernel of truth lie which according to my view is necessary to make possible the influence which anti-Semitism and the Protocols have had? I shall confine my analysis to Germany, but the German situation can be understood only when one becomes aware of the fact that in Germany before 1933 spontaneous anti-Semitism was extremely weak. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
As early as 1942, I wrote, in opposition to an almost unanimous opinion: “The writer’s personal conviction, paradoxical as it may seem, is that the German people are the least anti-Semitic of all.” I still hold this too view today; for it is precisely the weakness of spontaneous anti-Semitism in Germany which explains the concentration of National Socialism on it as the decisive political weapon. The element of truth (if one may call it that) is first of all a religious one: the catechistic representation of the crucifixion and with it the blood guilt of the Jews. However, this is a thoroughly ambivalent element: for it is precisely the crucifixion of Christ which makes possible the salvation of Christians (and all beings); and the spiritually Semitic origin of Christianity is acknowledged by the Church. While thus the historical-religious defamation of the Jews forms the basis without which anti-Semitism could hardly be activated, the catechistic representation of the crucifixion is not sufficient by itself. If we start from the policy of National Socialism and seek to understand the role of anti-Semitism within the political systems, the existence of a total anti-Semitism can perhaps be better understood. I can sketch the problem only in it broadest outlines. Germany of 1930-33 was the land of alienation and anxiety. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The facts are familiar: defeat, a tame, unfinished revolution, inflation, depression, non-identification with the existing political parties, non-functioning of the political system—all these are symptoms of moral, social, and political homelessness. The inability to understand why beings should be so hard-pressed stimulated anxiety which was made into nearly neurotic anxiety by the National Socialist policy of terror and its propaganda of anti-Semitism. The goal of National Socialism was clear: the welding together of the people with the charismatic leader, for the purpose of the conquest of Europe and perhaps of the Word, and the creation of a racial hegemony of the Germans over all other peoples. However, how were the people to be integrated, despite all cleavages of class, party, religion? Only though hatred of an enemy. However, how could one settle on the enemy? It could not be Bolshevism, because it was too strong; the Catholic Church could not be so designated because it was needed politically and loyalties to it were anchored too securely. The Jews remained. They appeared in public consciousness as powerful, but were in reality not as strong as many believed. They were relative strangers, and at the same time the concrete symbols of a so-called parasitical capitalism, through their position in commerce and finance; they incarnated a supposedly decadent morality through their avant garde position in art and literature; they seemed to be the successful competitors sexually and professionally. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
With all this, the thesis of the Jewish conspiracy had the element of truth necessary to permit this view of history to become a frightful weapon. It would be mistaken to want to construe a connection between the socioeconomic status of a person and one’s anti-Semitism; that is, to claim that the academically educated person is more immune than the uneducated, or the poorly paid more immune than the better paid. What is correct, however, is that there exists a connection between loss of social status and anti-Semitism. The fear of social degradation thus creates for itself a target for the discharge of the resentments arising from damaged self-esteem. This lead us to the analysis of the historical situations in which anxiety grips the masses. By now we know the strata of alienation are alienation from the product of labor, alienation from the activity of labor, alienation from the senses, and alienation from other people, or from society. The psychological stratum remains no matter what social institutions beings live in. It creates potential anxiety which beings in the masses attempt to overcome through ego-surrender. This affective identification with a leader is facilitated by the notion of false concreteness, the theory of conspiracy. The most unashamed pretender to supernatural powers was, on the primitive level, the medicine man, or shaman. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The shaman invented the specialty of entering into the World of the dead and coming back from it unharmed; he or she went on these supernatural trips and personally carried out whatever business the tribe or members of it had in the powerful World of the spirits; one went to see a dead soul safely to the other side, to harangue the invisible spirits and make them let go of a sick person, and so forth. The shaman was the hero who died and was reborn unfailingly, who established a being’s link with the invisible power World. It was an agonizing role to play, and it was played best by those individuals who actually were seized by spirits and killed by them–the epileptics. Noting strikes greater terror into a being’s heart than to witness an eruption of power from the depths of nature that one cannot understand or control—whether it is lava erupting from the volcano or the foam and convulsions of an epileptic. And so for all these reasons primitive beings saw the epileptic shaman as a natural hero, a source of fear and respect. One was also the first natural systematizer of religion because one actually had experiences of rebirth, reincarnation, and eternal life in the dream state following a convulsive seizure. These experiences are more or less characteristic for all epileptics. This is how we understand the birth of these basic religious nations, verified objectively by many individuals. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The shaman was the mystifier par excellence, and it was only logical that one should often be more powerful than chiefs, more feared, and get greater rewards. Sometime one allied one’s self with the chief of a tribe, and the resulting exploitation was called clearly a form of gangsterism. On the origins of inequality, primitive society was from the very beginning a struggle by individuals and groups for special privileges—who would get the best meat, the easiest access to women, some leisure and security. The elders always tried to arrange these for their own benefit, and so did the shamans. On the simplest levels of culture they were already organizing themselves into an exclusive fraternity so as to get and keep maximum power. How does one get maximum power in a cosmology where rituals is the technics that manufactures life? Obviously by getting control of the formulas for the technics. Very early the elders and the religious personages tried to get control of the ritual The religious systematizer built their symbolic interpretations around the crises of life, those passages where one’s identity was in doubt, where one was moving from one state to another, where everything had to go smoothly in order for a flowering out of birth into a new status to take place. And so the puberty and the death rituals came to be surrounded by the greatest importance, wherein lay the greatest possibilities of bungling. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Over and beyond the frankly religious and psychological nature of these passages, there is a socioeconomic purpose to them—or rather to the control of them by certain groups. With puberty rites of the Australian aborigines, over and above all other reasons is the somewhat cynically expressed purpose of the old men of having novices supply them, for many years, with regular presents in the form of animal food, of reserving the choice dishes for themselves by the utilization of the numerous food taboos imposed on the younger people, and, finally, of keeping the young women for themselves. Again, with another tribe, we can observe that the fundamental and immediate objective was to maintain power in the hands of the older people and to keep the women in proper subjection. Those who systematized the puberty, were not obeying some mystical, myth-making urge in the unconscious. Rather, specific individuals banded together formally or informationally, individuals who possess a marked capacity for articulating their ideas and for organizing them into coherent systems, which, naturally, would be of profit to them and to those who whom they are allied. This puts closer on the very beginnings of the modern debate on the origins of inequality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
These observations suggest the question of whether it is not perhaps the greed for material things in general that is the basic phenomenon, and the need for affection only one way of obtaining this goal. There is no general answer to this question. Craving for possession, as we shall see later, is one of the fundamental defenses against anxiety. However, experience shows also that in certain cases the need for affection, though it is the prevailing protective device, may be repressed so deeply that it does not appear on the surface. The greed for material things may then lastingly or temporarily take its place. In reference to this question of the role of affection three types of neurotic persons can be roughly distinguished. In the first group there is no doubt whatever that the persons crave affection, in whatever form it may appear, and by whatever methods they may obtain it. Those in the second group reach out for affection but if they fail to get in some relationship—and as a rule they are bound to fail—they do not reach out immediately for another person, but withdraw from people altogether. Instead of trying to attach themselves to some person they have compulsively attach themselves to things, having to ear or buy or to read or, generally speaking, to get something. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Such a change may sometimes take grotesque forms, as in person who after failing in some love affair start to eat so compulsively that they gain twenty to thirty pounds in a short time; if they have a new love affairs they lose this weight again: and if this love affair ends in failure they again put on weight. Sometimes one can observe the same behavior in patients; after an acute disappointment with the analyst they start to eat compulsively and gain weight to such a degree that they are scarcely recognizable, but they lose it again when the relations are straightened out. Such a greediness about food may also be repressed, and then it may become manifest in a loss of appetite or functional stomach upsets of some kind. In this group personal relationships are more deeply disturbed than in the first group. They still desire affection, and they still dare to reach out for it, but any disappointment can break the thread that binds them to others. The third group of persons have been stricken so severely and so early that their conscious attitude has become a deep disbelief in any affection. Their anxiety is so deep that they are contented if no positive harm is done to them. They may acquire a cynical, scoffing attitude toward affection and prefer the fulfillment of the tangible wishes concerning material help, advice, and pleasures of the flesh. Only after much of their anxiety has been released are they able to desire affection and appreciate it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The different attitudes of these three groups can be summarized as: insatiability concerning affection; need for affection alternating with general greediness; no manifest need for affection, but general greediness. Each group shows an increase in both anxiety and hostility. Coming back to the main trend f our discussion we have to consider now the question of the special ways in which insatiability concerning affection; need for affection alternating with general greediness; no manifest need for affection, but general greediness. Each group shows an increase in both anxiety and hostility. Coming back to the main trend of our discussion we have to consider now the question of the special ways in which insatiability concerning affection manifests itself. The main expressions are jealously and demands for unconditional love. Neurotic jealousy, unlike a normal person’s jealousy, which may be an adequate reaction to the danger of losing someone’s love, is altogether out of proportion to the danger. It is dictated by a constant fear of losing possession of the person or one’s love; consequently any other interest that person may have is a potential danger. This kind of jealousy may appear in every human relation—on the part of parents toward their children who want to make friends or to marry; on the part of children toward their parents; between marriage partners; in any love relationship. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The relationship with the analyst is no exception. It is shown there in an intense sensitivity about the analyst seeing another patient, or even about the mere mention of another patient. The motto is, “You must love me exclusively.” The patient may say, “I recognize that you treat me kindly; nevertheless, as you probably treat others equally kindly, your kindness to me does not count at all.” Any affection which must be shared with other persons or interests is immediately and entirely devalued. Disproportionate jealousy is often thought of as condition by jealousy experienced in childhood toward siblings or toward one of the parents. Sibling rivalry as it occurs among healthy children, jealousy toward a newborn baby for example, vanishes without leaving any scar as soon as the child feels sure that one does not lose any of the love and attention one has had hitherto. According to my experience, excessive jealousy occurring in childhood and never overcome is due to neurotic conditions in the child similar to those in an adult, as described above. There already existed in the child an insatiable need for affection, rising out of a basic anxiety. In psychanalytic literature the relation between infantile and adult jealousy reactions is often expressed ambiguously inasmuch as the adult jealousy is called a “repetition” of the infantile one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
If the term means to imply that an adult woman is jealous of her husband because she was equally jealous of her mother, it would not seem tenable. The intensified jealousy that we find in a child’s relation to parents or siblings is not the ultimate cause of later jealousy, but both spring from the same sources. Perhaps an expression of the insatiable need for affection still stronger than jealousy is the quest for unconditional love. The form in which this demand most often appears in the conscious mind is, “I want to be loved for what I am and not for what I a doing.” So far we might consider this wish nothing out of the ordinary. Certainly, the wish to be loved for ourself alone is not alien to any of us. He neurotic wish for unconditional love, however, is much more comprehensive than the normal one, and in its extreme form it is impossible of fulfillment. It is a demand for love, literally without any condition or any reserve. This demand includes, first, a wish to be loved regardless of any provocative behavior. This wish is necessary as security, because the neurotic person secretly registers the fact that one has understandable and proportionate fears that the other may withdraw or become angry or vindictive if this hostility should become evident. A patient of this type will express the opinion that it is very easy and means nothing to love someone who is amiable, that love ought to prove its ability to stand any kind of untoward behavior. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Any criticism is felt as a withdrawal of love. In the process of analysis resentment may be aroused by an intimation that he may have to change something in one’s personality, even though that is the purpose of the analysis, because one feels any such intimation as a frustration of one’s need for affection. The neurotic demand for unconditional love includes, second, a wish to be loved without any return. This wish is necessary because the neurotic person feels that one is incapable of feeling any warmth or giving any affection and unwilling to do so. One’s demands include, third, a wish to be loved without any advantage for the other. This wish is necessary because any advantage or satisfaction derived from the situation by the other promptly arouses the neurotic’s suspicion that the other likes one only for the sake of that advantage or satisfaction. In relationship based on pleasures of the flesh persons of this type will begrudge the satisfaction which the other person receives from the relation, because they will feel they are loved only for the satisfaction involved. In analysis these patients begrudge the satisfaction which the analyst receives from helping them. They will either disparage the help the analyst has given them or, while intellectually recognizing the help received, will not be able to feel any gratitude. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Or they will be inclined to ascribe any improvement to some other source, to a medicine taken or a remark made by a friend. Of course they also begrudge the fees they must pay. While they many recognize intellectually that the fees are a recompense for time, energy and knowledge, emotionally they will consider the paying of a fee as a proof that the analyst is not interested in them. Persons of this kind are likely too to be awkward in making presents, because presents make them uncertain about being loved. The demand for unconditional love includes, finally, a wish to be loved with sacrifices. Only if the other person sacrifices everything for the neurotic can one really feel sure of being loved. These sacrifices may concern money or time, but may also concern convictions and personal integrity. This demand includes, for example, the expectation that the other should side with one even to a disastrous degree. There are mothers who rather naively feel justified in expecting blind devotion and sacrifices of all sorts from their children because they have borne them in pain. Other mothers have repressed their wish for unconditional love so that they are able to give their children a great deal of beneficial help and support; but such a mother derives no satisfaction from the relationship to her children because she feels, like the examples already mentioned, that the children love her only because they receive so much from her, and thus secretly begrudges them whatever she gives them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The quest for unconditional love, in its implications of a ruthless and merciless disregard for all others, shows more clearly than anything else the hostility hidden in the neurotic demands for affection. In contrast to the normal vampire type, who may be consciously determined to exploit others to the limit, the neurotic person is usually totally unaware of how exacting one is. One has to keep the knowledge of one’s demands from awareness because of stringent tactical reasons. No one could possibly say frankly, “I want you to sacrifice yourself for my sake without getting anything in return.” That is not a capitalist attitude. One is forced to put one’s demands on some justified basis, such as that one is ill and therefore needs all the sacrifices. Another powerful reason for not recognizing one’s demands is that when they are once established, it is hard to give them up, and realizing that they are irrational is the first step toward giving them up. They are rooted, aside from the bases already mentioned, in the neurotic’s profound conviction tat one cannot live on one’s own resources, that all one needs has to be given to one, that all the responsibility for one’s life rests on others and not on one’s self. Therefore giving up one’s demands for unconditional love presupposes a change in one’s entire attitude toward life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
All the characteristics of the neurotic need for affection have in common the fact that the neurotic’s own conflicting tendencies bar the way to the affection one needs. What then are one’s reactions to a partial fulfillment of one’s demands, or to a complete rejection? Some existential philosophers are stressing the self-making of the self too exclusively. Speaking of the self as a project, which is wholly created by the continued (and arbitrary) choices of the person oneself, almost as if one could make oneself into anything one decided to be. Of course in so extreme a form, this is almost certainly an overstatement, which is directly contradicted by the facts of genetics and of constitutional psychology. As a matter of fact, it is just plain silly. On the other hand, the Freudians, the existential therapists, and the Rogerians and the personal growth psychologist all talk more about discovering the self and of uncovering therapy, and have perhaps understressed the factors of the will, of decision, and of the ways in which we do make ourselves by our choices. Of course, we must not forget that both of these groups can be said to be over-psychologizing and under-socializing. That is, they do not stress sufficiently in their systematic thinking the great power of autonomous social and environmental determinants, of such force outside the individual as poverty, exploitation, nationalism, war, and social structure. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Certainly no psychologist in one’s right mind would dream of denying a degree of personal helplessness before these forces. However, after all, one’s prime professional obligation is the study of the individual person rather than of extra-psychic social determinants. In the same way, sociologists seems to the psychologists to stress social forces too exclusively and to forget about the autonomy of the personality, of will, of responsibility, and so forth. It would be better to think of both group as specialists rather than as blind or foolish. In any case it looks as if we both discover an uncover ourselves and also decide on what we shall be. This clash of opinion is a problem that can be settled empirically. Not only have we been ducking the problem of responsibility and of will, but also their corollaries of strength and courage. Recently the psychoanalytic ego psychologist have waked up to this great human variable and have been devoting a great deal of attention to ego strength. For the behaviorists, this is still an untouched problem. “I was racked with eternal torment, for my soul was harrowed up to the greatest degree and racked with all my sins. Yea, I did remember all my sins and iniquities, for which I was tormented with the pains of hell; yea, I saw that I had rebelled against my God, and that I had not kept his holy commandments,” reports Alma 36.12-13. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Not Only is Everything Subject to Change but Everything Also Exists in Relation to Something Else—Thus Change and Relativity Dominate the World Scene!
Like Nature, the World, I myself, all existence is subject to change. It is inevitable. What can we do except accommodate ourselves to this inexorable law? Of course I want to lay eyes upon you. I want to talk to you. I want to be received, if such a thing is possible, into the Coven of the Articulate. I want you, the great breaker of rules, to forgive me that I have broke yours. “My days have passed away, my thoughts are dissipated, tormenting my heart. They have turned night into day, and after darkness I hope for light again. If I wait hell is my house, and I have made my bed in darkness. I have said to rottenness: thou art my father; to worms, my mother and my sister. Where is now then my expectation, and who considereth my patience? All that I have shall go down into the deepest pit: thinkest thou that there at least I shall have rest?” reports Job 17.16. A remarkable example of the creative encounter is given in the small book written by James Lord in recounting his experience of posing for Alberto Giacometti. Having been friends for some time, these two men could be entirely open with each other. Lord often made notes directly after the posing session of what Giacometti had said and done, and out of them he has put together this valuable monograph about the experience of encounter occurs in creativity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
He reveals, first, the great degree of anxiety and agony that the encounter generated in Giacometti. When Lord would arrive at the studio for his sitting, Giacometti would often disconsolately occupy himself half an hour or more doing odds and ends with his sculpture, literally afraid to start on the painting. When he did bring himself to get into painting, the anxiety became overt. At one point, writes Lord, Giacometti started gasping and stamping his foot: “Your head is going away!” he exclaimed. “It’s going away completely!” “It will come back again,” I said. He shook his head. “Not necessarily. Maybe the canvas will become completely empty. And then what will become of me? I’ll die of it!” He reached into his pocket, pulled out his handkerchief, stared at it for a moment, as though he did not know what it was, then with a moan threw it onto the floor. Suddenly he shouted very loudly, “I shriek! I Scream!” Lord goes on at another point: To talk to his model while he is working distracts him, I think, from the constant anxiety which is a result of his conviction that he cannot hope to represent on the canvas what he sees before him. This anxiety often bursts forth in the form of melancholy gasps, furious expletives, and occasional loud cries of rage and/or distress. He suffers. There is no doubt about it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Giacometti is committed to his work in a particularly intense and total way. The creative compulsion is never wholly absent from him, never leaves him a moment of complete peace. So intense is the encounter that he often identifies the painting on the easel with the actual flesh-and-blood person posing. One day his foot accidentally struck the catch that holds the easel shelf at the proper level, which caused the canvas to fall abruptly for a foot or two. “Oh, excuse me!” he said. I laughed and observed that he had excused himself as though he had not caused me to fall instead of the painting. “That’s exactly what I did feel,” he answered. In Giacometti this anxiety was associated, as it was in his revered Cezanne, with a great deal of self-doubt. In order to go on, to hope, to believe that there is some chance of his actually creating what he ideally visualized, he is obliged to feel that it is necessary to start his entire career over again every day, as it were, from scratch….he often feels that the particular sculpture or painting on which he happened to be working at the moment is that one which will for the very first time express what he subjectively experiences in response to an objective reality. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Lord correctly assumes that the anxiety is related to the gap between the ideal vision that the artist is trying to paint and the objective results. Here he discusses the contradiction that every artist experiences: This fundamental contradiction, arising from the hopeless discrepancy between conception and realization, is at the root of all artistic creation, and it helps explain the anguish which seems to be an unavoidable component of that experience. Even as “happy” an artist as Renior was not immune to it. What meant something, what alone existed with a life of its own was his [Giacometti’s] indefatigable, interminable struggle via the act of painting to express in visual terms a perception of reality that had happened to coincide momentarily with my head [which Giacometti was then trying to paint]. To achieve this was of course impossible, because what is essentially abstract can never be made concrete without altering its essence. However, he was committed, he was, in fact condemned to the attempt, which at times seemed rather like the task of Sisyphus. One day Lord happened to see Giacometti in a café. And, indeed, miserable was he did seem to be. This, I thought, was the true Giacometti, sitting alone at the back of a café, oblivious to the admiration and recognition of the World, staring into a void from which no solace could come, tormented by the hopeless dichotomy of his ideal yet condemned by that helplessness to struggle as long as he lived to try to overcome it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
What consolation was it that the newspapers of many countries spoke of him, that museums everywhere exhibited his work, that people he would never know knew and admired him. None. None at all. When we see the intimate feelings and inner experiences of an eminent artist like Giacometti, we smile at the absurd talk in some psychotherapeutic circles of “adjusting” people, making people “happy,” or training out of them by simple behavior modification techniques all pain and grief and conflict and anxiety. How hard for humankind to absorb the deeper meaning of the myth of Sisyphus!—to see that “success” and “applause” are the (expletive) goddess we always secretly knew they were. Too see that the purpose of human existence in a man like Giacometti has nothing whatever to do with reassurance or conflict-free adjustment. Giacometti was rather devoted—“condemned,” to use Lord’s fitting term—to the struggle to perceive and reproduce the World around him through his own vision of being human. He knew there was no others alternative for him. His challenge gave his life meaning. He and his kind seek to bring their own visions of what it means to be human, and to see through that vision to a World of reality, however ephemeral, however consistently that reality vanishes each time you concentrate on it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
How absurd are the rationalistic assumptions that all one has to do is to remove from the World its curtains of superstition and ignorance and there suddenly will be reality, pristine and pure! Giacometti sought to see reality through his ideal vision. He sought to find the ground forms, the basic structure of reality, below the strewn surface of the arena where (expletive) goddesses cavort. He could not escape devoting himself unstintingly to the question: Is there some place where reality speaks our language, where it answers us if we but understand the hieroglyphics? He knew the rest of us would be no more successful than he was in finding the answer; but we have his contribution to work with, and this we are helped. Each being is unique so each quest must be too. Everyone must find, in the end, one’s own path through one’s own life. All attempts to copy someone else, however reputed, will fail to lead one to self-realization although they may advance one to a certain point. Each seeker must find out one’s own path, one’s own technique for one’s self. Who else has the right or the capacity to do this for an individual? We prefer to follow the creative rather than the compulsive way, to help beings find their own way rather than force them to travel our way. And this can only be done by starting with the roots, with the ideas they hold, and the attitudes which dominate them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
There are too many differences in individual aspirants to allow a broad general technique to suit them all. A guide who can give a personal prescription is helpful, but even in one’s absence the aspirant can intelligently put together the fragments which will best help one. Let one walk forward slowly or quickly, as suits one best, and also in one’s own way, again as suits one’s individuality which one has fashioned through the reincarnations to its present image and from which one has to begin and proceed farther. There are not only widely different stages of evolutionary growth for every human being but also widely different types of human beings within each stage. Hence a single technique cannot possibly cover the spiritual needs of all humanity. The seeker should find the one that suits one’s natural aptitude as one should find the teacher who is most in inward affinity with one. Let one take up whatever path is most convenient to one’s personal circumstances and individual character and not force one’s self into one utterly unsuited to both, merely because it has proven right for other people. There is no single universal rule for all beings: their outer circumstances and inner conditions, their historical background and geographical locality, their karmic destiny and evolutionary need, their differences in competence, render it unwise, unfair, and impracticable to write a single prescription for them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Many European existentialist are largely reacting to Nietzsche’s conclusion that God is dead, and perhaps to the fact that Marx also is dead. The Americans have learned that political democracy and economic prosperity do not in themselves solve any of the basic value problems. There is no pace else to turn but inward, to the self, as the locus of values. Paradoxically, even some of the religious existentialist will go along with this conclusion part of the way. It is extremely important for psychologist that the existentialists may supply psychology with the underlying philosophy which it now lacks. Logical positivism has been a failure, especially for clinical and personality psychologists. At any rate, the basic philosophical problems will surely be opened up for discussion again and perhaps psychologists will stop relying on pseudo-solutions or on unconscious, unexamined philosophies they picked up as children. An alternative phrasing of the core (for us Americans) of European existentialism is that it deals radically with that human predicament presented by the gaps between human aspirations and human limitations (between what the human being is, and what one would like to be, and what one could be). This is not so far off from the identity problem as it might sound at first. A person is both actuality and potentiality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
That serious concern with this discrepancy could revolutionize psychology, there is no doubt in my mind. Various literatures already support such a conclusion, for example, projective testing, self-actualization, the various peak-experiences (in which this gap is bridged), the Jungian psychologies, various theological thinkers, and so forth. Not only this, but they raise also the problems and techniques of integration of this twofold nature of beings, one’s lower and one’s higher, one’s creatureliness and one’s Godlikeness. On the whole, most philosophies and religions, Eastern as well as Western, have dichotomized them, teaching that the way to become “higher” is to renounce and master “the lower.” The existentialists, however, teach that both are simultaneously defining characteristics of human nature. Neither can be repudiated; they can only be integrated. However, we already know something of these integration techniques—of insight, of intellect in the broader sense, of love, of creativeness, of humor and tragedy, of play, of art. I suspect we will focus our studies on these integrative techniques more than we have in the past. Another consequence for my think of this stress on the twofold nature of beings is the realization that some problems must remain eternally insoluble. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
From this flows naturally a concern with the ideal, authentic, or perfect or Godlike human being, a study of human potentialities as now existing in certain sense, as current knowable reality. This, too, may sound merely literary but it is not. I remind you that this is just a fancy way of asking the old, unanswered questions, “What are the goals of therapy, of education, of bringing up children?” It also implies another truth and another problem which calls urgently for attention. Practically every serious description of the “authentic person” extant implies that such a person, by virtue of what one has become, assumes a new relation to one’s society and indeed, to society in general. One not only transcends oneself in various ways; one also transcends one’s culture. One resists enculturation. One becomes more detached from one’s culture and from one’s society. One becomes a little more a member of one’s species and a little less a member of one’s local group. My feeling is that most sociologists and anthropologists will take this hard. I therefore confidently expect controversy in this area. However, this is clearly a basis for “universalism.” From the European writers, we can and should pick up their greater emphasis on what they call “philosophical anthropology,” that is, the attempt to define beings, and the differences between beings and any other species, between human beings and objects, and between human beings and robots. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
What are human being’s unique and defining characteristics? What is so essential to beings that without it one would no longer be defined as a human being? On the whole this is a task from which American psychology has abdicated. The various behaviorisms do not generate any such definition, at least none that can be taken seriously (what would an S-R (Stimulus-response) human being be like? And who would like to be one? S-R model of human behavior suggest that the behavior is caused by certain reasons. A particular stimulus triggers a particular response. Dr. Freud’s picture of human beings was clearly unsuitable, leaving out as it did one’s aspirations, one’s realizable hopes, one’s Godlike qualities. The fact that Dr. Freud suppled us with most comprehensive systems of psychopathology and psychotherapy is beside the point as the contemporary ego-psychologist are finding out. Aggression and violence are rightly linked in the public mind—one speaks of aggression and violence. Aggression is to violence as anxiety is to panic. When aggression builds up in us, it feels, at a certain point, as though a switch has been thrown, and we become violent. The aggression is object-related—that is, we know at whom and what we are angry. However, in violence, the object-relation disintegrates, and we wing wildly, hitting whoever is within range. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
One’s mind becomes foggy, and perception of the enemy becomes unclear; one loses awareness of the environment and wants to act out this inner compulsion to do violence, come what it may. Humans are the creatures who can think in abstraction and who can transcend the concrete situation. The violence being’s capacity to abstract has disintegrated, and this accounts for one’s crazy behavior. The suddenness with which most violent episodes erupt suggest some questions. In violence, is there a direct connection between the input stimuli and the output muscles (for instance, the muscle that suddenly tend to strike back)? And is this connection subcortical, which would be related to the fact that it happens so quickly that the person does not think until after the episode has passed? Such discussions of the pathways by which the excitation travels are only analogies to the experience itself, but as analogies they may be useful in our understanding the process. Specifically, they may help us see why a person is possessed by violence rather than possessing it. Every since Walter B. Cannon’s classical work in the Harvard psychology laboratory, it has been generally agreed that there are three responses of the organism to threat: fight, flight, and delay response. Cannon demonstrated for example, that when somebody suddenly shoves me roughly on the lightrail, adrenalin is poured into my bloodstream, my blood pressure rises to give my muscles more strength, my heartbeat becomes more rapid—all ofwhich prepares me to fight the offending person or to flee out of range. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The “flight” is what occurs in anxiety and fear; the “fight” in aggression and violence. With these physiological changes, the experience of violence gives great energy to the person. One feels a kind of transcendent power that one did not realize one had; and one may fight much more effectively in this mood. This fact can act like a drug, tempting the person to give oneself over again and again to violence. The third possibility is that I can delay my response. This is what most people actually do. The lower down the scale of education and status a person is, the more apt one is to react directly; the higher on the scale, the more apt one is to delay reaction until one has had a chance to think and assess the prospects of fighting or fleeing. The capacity for delayed response is a gift—or burden—of civilization: we wait to absorb the event into consciousness and then decide what is the best response. This gives us culture, but it also gives us neurosis. The typical neurotic may spend one’s whole life trying to fight with new acquaintances the old battles that never got worked out in one’s childhood. However, is it not true that on the crowded lightrail I am in a “readiness” to respond hostilely? I am much more apt to have a counterurge of the violet type in that situation than, say, when someone jostles me on a dance floor. So there must be some symbolic scanning process going on. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
How I interpret the situation will determine my readiness to strike back in hostility, making it causa belli, or to simply smile and accept an apology, if one is offered. Interpretation takes in unconscious as well as conscious factors: I give a certain meaning to it; I see the World as being hostile or friendly. Here enters the symbol, the means we have as human beings of uniting conscious and unconscious, historical and present, individual and group. This is why the organic processes are subsumed under the symbolic process. It is the symbolic process that determines the individual’s intentionality. How a person sees and interprets the World about one is thus crucial to one’s violence. This is what gives the readiness to fight to a man or woman quietly sitting in one’s car who becomes enraged when a police officer asks one for one’s identification. This also underlies the “machismo” of a police officer who is driven by one’s own power needs to humiliate an innocent individual. Whether the interpretation is pathological or merely imagined, illusory or downright false, it does not change the situation: it is one’s interpretation that will be decisive as to how one reacts. Trouble is easy to get into, but hard to get out of. The paranoid shoots other persons because one believes they exercise a magic power and will kill one; thus one’s shooting in self-defense. Calling this “paranoid” does not help unless we are able thereby to get behind the symbolic interpretation and see the World, at least temporarily, as the murderer see it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Even in international relations symbolic interpretation of the movements of other nations is crucial to the understanding of violence and war. Violence has its roots in impotence, we have said. This is true in individuals and in ethic groups. However, in nations violence comes from the threat of impotence. Nations seem to find it necessary to protect themselves n a periphery father out; they must be aware, precariously balanced as they are on the seesaw of armaments, of whether another country is building up power to gain an advantage over them. If a nation becomes genuinely impotent, it is no longer a nation. Senator J. William Fulbright has pointed out how important out interpretation of the behavior of other nations is. Ever since Yalta, American administrations have interpreted Russia’s behavior—for instance, the Cuban missile episode and the USSR’s reaction to the U-2 flight—as motivated by Russian aggression toward the United States of America. These events Fulbright indicates, could as well have been interpreted as motivated by fear on the part of Russia. More specifically, he proposes that the bellicose posture of these events were sops thrown to the Russian generals, who needed to be placated by Khrushchev if the latter were to succeed in his hope of establishing more amicable relations with the United States of America. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Interpreting Russia’s moves as aggressive, we oppose them with a vehemence that helped the counterparty in Russia, the army, to depose Khrushchev and institute a less friendly government. Nations, in their misreading of the motives of other nations, can do what the paranoid patient does: they can work against their own interests because of their projection of hostility and aggression. No one, I am sure, wishes to develop new master-slave relationships or bend the will of the people to despotic rulers in new ways. These are patterns of control appropriate to a World without science. Are there no systems that do indeed want to bend the will of the people to dictators? And are these systems only to be found in cultures without Science? I still believe in an old-fashioned ideology of progress: the Middle Ages were dark because they had no science and science necessarily leads to the freedom of beings. The fact is that no leader or government explicitly states one’s intention of bending the will of the people any more; they are apt to use new words which sound like the opposite of the old ones. No dictator calls one’s self a dictator, and every system claims that it expressed the will of the people. In the countries of the free World, on the other hand, anonymous authority and manipulation have replaced overt authority in education, work, and politics. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
If we are worthy of our democratic heritage we shall, of course, be ready to resist any tyrannical use of science for immediate or selfish purposes. However, it we value the achievements and goals of democracy we must not refuse to apply science to the design and construction of cultural patterns, even though we may then find ourselves in some sense in the position of controllers. What is the basis of this value in neobehavioristic theory? All humans control and all humans are controlled. This is reassuring for a democratically minded person. In noticing how the master controls the slave or the employer the worker, we commonly overlook reciprocal effects and, by considering action in one direction only, are led to regard control as exploitation, or at least the gaining of a one-sided advantage; but the control is actually mutual. The slave controls the master as completely as the master controls the slave, in the sense that the techniques of punishment employed by the master have been selected by the slave’s behavior in submitting to them. This does not mean that the notion of exploitation is meaningless or that we may not appropriately ask, cui bono? In doing so, however, we go beyond the account of the social episode itself and consider the long-term effects which are clearly related to the question of value judgments. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
We are looking at the relationship between master and slave as reciprocal, and being remained the exploitation is not meaningless. However, in this social episode, only the techniques of control are important. We are looking at social life as if it were an episode in a laboratory, where all that matters is the techniques—and not the episodes themselves. Exploitation by the master is clearly related to the question of value judgments. Slave and slaveowner are in a reciprocal relationship only by the ambiguous use we are making of the word control. In the sense in which the word is used in real life, there can be no question that the slaveowner controls the slave, and that the reciprocal part of the relationship is that the slave may have a minimum of counter control—for instance, by threat of rebellion. “And it shall come to pass that the Lord God shall commence one’s work among all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, to bring about the restoration of his people upon the Earth. And with righteousness shall the Lord God judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the Earth. And he shall smite the Earth with the rod of his mouth; and with the breath of his lips shall slay the wicked. For time speedily cometh that the Lord God shall cause a great division among the people, and the wicked will he destroy; and he will spare his people, yea, even if it so be that he must destroy the wicked by fire,” reports 2 Nephi 30.8-10. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The Master is Forever After Present in the Disciple’s Heart, Whether the Disciple Sees One Again or Not!
I waited a long time before showing the letter to Meghan. I never really concealed it from her, for I thought such a thing was dishonest. However, as such did not ask me the meaning of the pages which I kept with my few personal belongings, I did not explain them. The very fact that the creative act is such an encounter between two poles is what makes it so hard to study. It is easy enough to find the subjective pole, the person, but it is much harder to define the objective pole, the “World” or “reality.” Since my emphasis, here is on the encounter itself, I shall not worry too much at the moment about such definitions. In his Poetry and Experience, Archibald MacLeish uses the most universal terms possible for the two poles of the encounters: “Being and Non-being.” He quotes a Chinese poet: “We poets struggle with Non-being to force it to yield Being. We knock upon silence for an answering music.” “Consider what this means,” MacLeish ruminates. The ‘Being’ which the poem is to contain derive from ‘Non-being,’ not from the poet. And the ‘music’ which the poem is to own comes not from us who make the poem but from the silence; comes in answer to out knock. The verbs are eloquent: ‘struggle.’ ‘force,’ ‘knock.’ #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
The poet’s labor is to struggle with the meaninglessness and silence of the World until one can force it to mean; until one can make the silence answer and the Non-being be. It is a labor which undertakes to ‘know’ the World not by exegesis or demonstration or proofs but directly, as a being knows apple in the mouth. This is beautifully expressed antidote to our common assumption that the subjective projection is all that occurs in the creative act, and a reminder of the inescapable mystery that surrounds the creative process. The vision of the artist or the poet is the intermediate determinant between the subject (the person) and the objective pole (the World-waiting-to-be). It will be non-being until the poet’s struggle brings forth an answering meaning. The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced, but that it portrays the artist’s or the poet’s vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated. No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision. Here we must guard against one of the most serious errors in the psychoanalytic interpretation of creativity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
This is the attempt to find something within the individual which is then projected onto the work of art, or some early experience which is transferred to the canvas or written into the poem. Obviously, early experiences play exceedingly important roles in determining how artists will encounter their World. However, these subjective data can never explain the encounter itself. Even in the cases of abstract artists, where the process of painting seems most subjective, the relationship between being and non-being is certainly present and may be sparked by the artist’s encountering the brilliant colors n the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas. Painters have described the excitement of this moment: it seems like a re-enactment of the creation story, with being suddenly becoming alive and possessing a vitality of its own. Mark Tobey fills his canvases with elliptical, calligraphic lines, beautiful whirls that seem at first glance to be completely abstract and to come from nowhere at all except his own subjective musing. However, I shall never forget how struck I was, on visiting Tobey’s studio one day, to see strewn around books on astronomy and photographs of the Milky Way. I knew them that Tobey experiences the movement of the stars and the solar constellations as the external pole of his encounter. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity. Receptivity is the artist’s holding him- or herself alive and open to hear what being may speak. Such receptivity requires a nimbleness, a find-honed sensitivity in order to let one’s self be the vehicle of whatever vision may emerge. It is the opposite of the authoritarian demands impelled by will power. I am quite aware of all the jokes that appear in The New Yorker and elsewhere showing the artist sitting disconsolately in front of the easel, brush in passive hand, waiting for the inspiration to come. However, an artist’s waiting, funny as it may look in cartoons, is not to be confused with laziness or passivity. It requires a high degree of attention, as when a diver is poised on the end of the springboard, not jumping but holding one’s muscles in sensitive balance for the right second. It is an active listening, keyed to hear the answer, alert to see whatever can be glimpsed when the vision or the words do come. It is a waiting for the birthing process to begin to move in its own organic time. It is necessary that the artist have this sense of timing, that he or she respect these periods of receptivity as part of the mystery of creativity and creation. Pythagoras divided his students into two classes, the probationers and the mathematicians. However, the latter term signified more to him than it means to us. For him it meant those devoted to advanced thinking and it embraced those who studied philosophy and science as well as mathematics. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
For Pythagoras regarded the rational disciple as essential to the higher quests. We are told that Jesus was a man of sorrows. However, he was not also a man of joys? The joy of bearing a divine message, the joy of brining light into a darkened World, and the joy of helping beings find their own soul. If Jesus wept over the folly of cities, he was also glad over the Presence and Providence of God. If he was a man of sorrow at some times, he was also a man of joy at all times. For the sorrow was merely transient, outward, superficial, and for others whereas the joy was everlasting, inward, deep, and one’s own. No being can come into the Father’s kingdom, as he came, without feeling its happiness and enjoying ecstasy. Sokrates used to listen to an inner voice, his daimon, warning him against false decisions. While so doing, he would sink into deep prayer where he would commune with the divine in order to receive the power to instruct beings in Truth. Sokrates possessed an absolutely original intellect; he took nothing for granted but probed and penetrated into every subject which came under discussion. He struck out a new path in the philosophy of his time and so well was it made that it can still be trodden today with profit. It is a fact that Jesus wrote nothing and that he never asked his apostles to write anything. Why? #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
What Jesus has to give directly or through his apostles was no message to or argument with the intellect. It was an evocation of the intuition. It has to be transferred to each being physically. The benign figure and still meditative face of Gautama, sitting in one’s thrice-folded yellow garment and penetrating into the deep secret chambers of mind, offers an inspiring spectable. The solid strength and paradisiac stabilized in one’s person have helped millions of people in the Asiatic lands. Yet there were fateful moments when Gautama refused to appear in public to tell others what he knew, when the peaceful life of utter anonymity was his reasoned preference. The path to illumination—the longer the road, the loftier is the attainment, and only those who take the time and trouble to traverse the whole length of the way may expect to gain all the fruits. One who stops part of the way may only expect to gain part of the result. Jesus inspired his immediate disciples with something of his own spiritual vitality. We are all built by Nature in different ways: no two palms, no two thumbprints, no two persons are exactly alike. He seekers are to be found at different levels and are attracted by different approaches according to their different intellectual development, emotional temperaments, moral capacities, and intuitional sensitivity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
The uniqueness of each person is emphasized by the differences which separate one from one’s fellows. In one’s search for Truth one may have progressed through orthodox Christianity, Christian Science, and Spiritualism—but, eventually, the Quest will lead one away from limited, organized public approaches, and bring one to the unrestricted freedom of the Presence of the Overself Other movements, such as those mentioned, may be useful to beginners; but when some progress has been made, the path necessarily opens onto the Quest where it becomes unlimited, individual, and private. All of us have to travel in the same board direction If we would rise from the lower to the higher grades of being. However, the way in which we shall travel the Way is essentially a personal one. All of us must obey its general rules, but no two seekers can apply them precisely alike. Again and again one observes that the technique, exercise, method, or rule which brings good results for one person fails to do so for another. It is absurd to make a single uniform prescription and expect all persons to get a single uniform result from it. What has been done here is to give some of the best ones and let each reader find out what suits one most, not what suits one’s friend or another reader most. “And God also declared unto prophets, by his own mouth, that Christ should come,” reports Moroni 7.23. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
Each being is unique so each must be unique too. Everyone must find, in the end, one’s own path through one’s own life. All attempts to copy someone else, however reputed will fail to lead one to self-realization although they may advance one to a certain point. Each seeker must find out one’s own path, one’s own technique for one’ self. Who else has the right or the capacity to do it for one? We prefer to follow the creative rather than the compulsive way, to help beings find their own way rather than force them to travel our way. And this can only be done by starting with the roots, with the idea they hold, and the attitudes which dominate them. There are too many differences in individual aspirants to follow a broad general technique to suit them all. A guide who can give a personal prescription is helpful, but even in one’s absence the aspirant can intelligently put together the fragments which will best help one. Let one walk forward slowly or quickly, as suits one best, and also in one’s own way, again as suits one’s individuality which one has fashioned through the reincarnations to its present image and from which one has to begin and proceed father. There are not only widely different stages of evolutionary growth for every human being but also widely different types of human beings within each stage. Hence a single technique cannot possibly cover the spiritual needs of all humanity. The seeker should find the one that suits one’s natural aptitude as one should find the teacher who is most in inward affinity with them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
Many Take to an Imperfect, Half-Competent or Half-Satisfactory Teaching Because No Better One is Available!
I am a reader of strange books. I have studied some of those texts which have come out of Italy pertaining to magic and astrology and thins which are often called forbidden. I have a belief that there are Angels cast out of Heaven, and that they do not know what they are any longer. They wander in a state of confusion. And allow me to warn you on another account which may surprise you. Throughout Europe now there are those who are willing to persecute others for witchcraft on slender reasons; that is, a superstition regarding witches reigns in villages and towns, which even one hundred years ago would have been dismissed as ridiculous. You cannot allow yourself to travel overland through such places. Writings as to wizards, Sabbats and Devil worship cloud human philosophy. An interesting affective identification of leader and masses in the relation of Cola di Rienzo to the Roman people. I assume that his story is familiar—the rise of the hack lawyer, son of a Roman people and dictator of Rome, his expulsion and return with the assistance of the Church, and his assassination by the Colonna family in the year 1354. The view of history of Cola and of the Roman people was quite simple: Rome has been ruined by feudal lords; their destruction will permit Rome to rise again to its ancient greatness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
This is how Petrarca formulates it in his famous latter of congratulations to Cola: “These barons in whose defense you (the Romans) have so often shed your blood, whom you have nourished with your own substance…these barons have judged you unworthy of liberty. They have gathered the mangled remnants of the state in the caverns and abominable retreats of bandits. They have been restrained neither by pity for their unhappy country, nor by love for it. Do not suffer any of the rapacious wolves whom you have driven from the fold to rush again into your midst. Even now they are prowling restlessly around, endeavoring through fraud and deceit to regain an entrance to the city whence they were violently expelled.” It cannot be denied that the feudal lords, above all the Colonna and Orsini, has pursued a criminal policy. Without this element of truth Cola’s propaganda and policy would never have been successful. However, fundamentally this was a false concreteness—for even if he had succeeded in liquidating the barons, what would have been decisively improved in Rome? The historical facts—the residence of the Papal Court in Avignon; the economic decay of Rome; the regrouping class relations through the rise of the bourgeois cavalerotti—all that Cola could not change. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
It can hardly be doubted that anxiety, even purely physical fear of the arbitrariness of the barons, drove the people to Cola. Cola succeeded in strengthening this anxiety by extremely skillful propaganda and achieved victory. However, the leader himself must feel no anxiety or at least must not show it. He must stand above the masses. However, in this Cola was deficient. In all other matters his relation corresponded exactly to that of the libido-charged identification leader-masses, and it is regrettable that time does not permit me to describe and analyze his propaganda themes, his ceremonial, and his ritual. It was Cola’s fundamental mistake that he was not enough of a Caesar. To be sure, he publicly humiliated the barons, but he did not liquidate them—whether out of cowardice, decency, or tactical considerations. However, the masses of Rome expected that he would act in accordance with their view of history. He did not do this. Thus he had to fall. I have mentioned Cola di Rienzo because it is a marginal case in which it is doubtful whether we are dealing with a regressive or progressive movement, that is, a movement which really has the realization of the freedom of beings as its goal. The eight French religious wars of the sixteenth century furnish excellent material for the illumination of the character of caesaristic as well as organizational identifications. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
All three parties—Huguenots, Catholics, and Politiques—were faces with grave problems: the disintegration of the old society through silver inflation, loss of wealth on the one hand, enrichment on the other, the beginnings of radical changes in class relations and the dissolution of the absolute monarchy after the death of Francis I. It is against this background that the religious wars must be understood. Their course is doubtless familiar to you. Catholics and Protestants alike saw the problem of France only as a religious problem, and therefore ascribed the distress of France exclusively to their religious opponents, conjectured (partly justifiably) that these opponents represented a great and sinister conspiracy, developed or employed theories of caesaristic identification, and consistently proceeded to extirpate the opponent wherever opportunity offered. The Huguenot pamphleteer Francois Hotman in his Tiger saw in the Cardinal Guise “a detestable monster,” whose aim it was to ruin France, to assassinate the King, and to conspire with the assistance of the women near the King and the High Constable of France against “the crown of France, the good of widows and orphans, the blood of the poor and innocent.” Calvin’s theory of the secular redeemer sent by God to overthrow tyrants—in the seventeenth century the basis of Cromwell’s leadership—became the Protestant theory of Caesarism. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
The Catholics—with a longer tradition of tyrannicide—developed a pseudo-democratic theory of identification, above all in the writings of the Leaguist preachers and Jesuits. In these inflammatory pamphlets whose demagogy even surpasses that of the Huguenots, the theory of democracy is fitted out with theocratic traits, the masses of the people are integrated through the social contract, in order to be identified with Henry of Guise with the assistance of the theocratic element. Whoever takes the trouble to study the eighth religious war (the War of the 3 Henrys) and the Parisian uprising, will find there all the elements which I consider decisive: appeal to anxiety, personification of evils, first with Henry III, then with Henry of Navarre, identification of the masses with Henry of Guise. Both positions, the Catholic and the Huguenot, are similarly regressive, while that of the Politiques, Jean Bodin, consists in this: he saw the economic problems of France clearly; he understood the false concreteness of the view of history of both parties. If he championed absolute monarchy—that is, the identification of the people with the monarch—he did so because he was to place himself above the religions that were fighting each other and to ally himself with the households of the third estate in order to save France. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Despite the absolute submission to the prince which is demanded of the people, this identification contains the two rational elements which I mentioned before: loyalty becomes transferable, for instance, the office is separated from the officeholder; and the relation between citizen and the state becomes rational. Thus Bodin has a certain justification in calling his theory a theory f the constitutional state (droit gouvernement) despite his absolutionism. I believe that the French religious wars of the sixteenth century make my thesis a little clearer: that the non-affective identification with an institution (state) is less regressive than identification with a leader. Naturally I cannot here discuss all similar situation. The religious struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are full of such historical constructions. One need only read, for example, the terrible Calvinist fanatic John Knox in his famous First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women and we will find there: “We se our countrie set further for a pra to foreine nations, we heare the blood of our breathren, the members of Christ Iesus most cruell women…we knowe to be the onlie occasions of all these miseries.” The rule of the Catholic Catherine de Medici, of Marie of Lorraine (the predecessor of Mary Stuart), and of Mary Tudor appears here not only as a violation of divine commandment (because God has subjected women to men) but as a genuine conspiracy against the true religion. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
Unfortunately, John Knox had the ill luck of seeing Prtestantism restored in England by a woman, and he apologized to Elizabeth in a Second Blast for his first attack. Instead of continuing with this survey, it may perhaps be more useful to discuss five fundamental models of conspiracy theories, all of which show this sequence: intensification of anxiety through manipulation, identification, false concreteness. They are: the Jesuit conspiracy, the Freemason conspiracy, the Communist conspiracy, the Capitalist conspiracy, and the Jewish conspiracy. The Jesuit order is indeed defined by many as a conspiracy, the Monita Secreta of 1614, composed by a Polish ex-Jesuit, fulfills the need for a secret plan of operations with the help of which one can hold the order responsible for every crime and every misfortune and can stir up the masses. This has always been relatively simple in times of crisis. St. Bartholomew’s Night, the assassination of Henry III by Jacques Clement, the attempt on the life of Henry IV by Barriere and Chastel as well as his assassination by Ravaignac, the English Gunpowerder plot of 1605, the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, to say nothing of innumerable less important crimes and misfortunes, were ascribed to the Jesuits. That these tales should have been believed, is naturally connected with the significance of false concreteness in politics. There is some truth in many of these accusations. It is precisely in this element of truth that the danger of these views of history is possessed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
The denunciation of the freemasons is similar matter. Thus, the English believed the Jacobite conspiracies to be the work of freemasons; the French Revolution was ascribed to a mysterious group of Bavarian Illuminati ha been founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 in order to combat the influence of the Jesuits. Again these assertions have some truth in them. Most of the Encyclopedists were freemasons and more than half of the members of the Estates General belonged to freemasonic lodges. However, surely no detailed discussion is needed to show that the conspiracy theory represents a blurring of history. The theory of the Communist conspiracy follows the same model and serves the same purposes. Thus the Russian October Revolution is explained solely as a Blanquist conspiracy, embodied in Trotsky’s military revolutionary committee; the German Revolution of 1918 is laid to the charge of the devilish Lenin; the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in the satellite states is traced back to the sinister conspiracies in the Kremlin, and generally the relation of Bolsheviks to the World is equated with that of a conspiracy of a small group against the welfare of humanity. Again, this is partly true. The October Revolution was a conspiracy—but in a definite historical situation and with an ideology. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
The Bolsheviks would gladly have manipulated the German Revolution of 1918—but they had neither the means nor the intelligence to do it, nor could they, even if cleverer, have prevailed in the concrete situation. The Communists in the satellite states naturally conspired—but they could come to power only because the Red Army stood behind them and because the objective situation favored them. No conspiracy, no matter how clever, would have been of any use and was of any use in Western Europe. Nevertheless, the conspiracy theory is believed not only by the masses, but even by serious writers who, strongly under the influence of Pareto’s simplistic antithesis between elite and masses, generally tend to see in politics nothing but the manipulation of the masses by the elites, and for whom psychology and political science are nothing but techniques of manipulation. The purpose of the theory is clear: potential anxiety—whose concrete significance still needs to be clarified—is actualized by reference to the devilish conspirators: family, property, morality, religion are threatened by the conspiracy. Anxiety easily becomes neurotic persecutory anxiety, which in turn can, under certain circumstances, lead to a totalitarian mass movement. We could cite a great many more cases in which history was viewed with false concreteness. Especially American history is full of examples of such movements. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
There is, for instance, the Know-Nothing Party of 1854-55 with its hatred of the Irish Catholics and the German immigrants. It originate in the secret “Order of the Star-Spangled-Banner” which was founded by native-born Protestants; they mistreated Catholics and when asked about the Order they would answer, “I know nothing.” The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is better known. Fear of status loss on the parts of the Whites, especially of the poor Whites, vis-à-vis the Blacks and fear of the Pope and the Catholics were the basic factors which made this secret society into a terroristic organization, from its foundation in 1867 to the present day. The Populist Party (1892), on the other hand, was born out of an agrarian depression, as a protest against the rule of the railway, industrial, and credit monopolies, and against the gold standard. One of its leaders developed a genuine theory of conspiracy: According to my views of the subject the conspiracy which seems to have been formed here and in Europe to destroy from three-sevenths to one-half of the metallic money of the World, is the most gigantic crimes of this or any other age. The democratic conspiracy is to reduce boarder security and push the green initiative to raise taxes and sale electric cars, but doing nothing to protect the people or provide homes for the homeless is another movement that is being fueled by media propaganda. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Violence and suffering are critical in a democratic society, in heightening antipathy for violations of democratic values and in heightening sympathy for the victims of such violations. Violence is like the sudden chemical change that occurs when, following a relatively placid period, water break into a boil. If we do not see the burner underneath that has been heating the water, we mistake the violence for a discrete happenstance. We fail to see that violence is an entirely understandable outcome of personalities fighting against odds in a repressive culture that does not help them. Violence often follows quiet periods, like that of the silent generation of students of the fifties. Only later were we to see, to our sorrow, how explosive were the forces underlying this apathy. In its typical simple form, violence is an eruption of pent-up passion. When a person (or a group of people) has been denied over a period of time what one feels are one’s legitimate rights, when one is continuously burdened with feelings of impotence which corrode any remaining self-esteem, violence is the predicable end result. Violence is an explosion of the drive go destroy that which is interpreted as the barrier to one’s self-esteem, movement, and growth. This desire to destroy may so completely take over the person that any object that gets in the way is destroyed. Hence the person strikes out blindly, often destroying those for whom one cares and even one’s self in the process. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Violence is largely a physical event. However, this physical event occurs in a psychological context. Either because of the period of unseen build-up or the suddenness of the stimulus, the impulse to strike out comes so fast we are unable to think, and we control it only with effort. If someone suddenly gives one a hard shove on the lightrail, one “see red” and have an immediate urge to punch him or her in return, while some others may take that person who assaulted them to small claims court. However, one knows, when one calms down, that if one makes a practice of punching men or women on the lightrail, their early doom is assured, and that is why small claims court may be a better option. A football player may control his or her urges to wreak violence by reminding one’s self that he or she will have a chance to express one’s power in the next play; but for the rest of us, bystanders in most activities in our civilized life with muscular expressions prohibited us, the control and direction of our violent urges are much more difficult. Most people would subscribe to the proposition that there is no value judgment involved in deciding how to build an atomic bomb, but would reject the proposition that there is none involved in deciding to build one. The most significant difference here may be that the scientific practices which guide the designer of the bomb are clear, while those which guide the designer of the culture which builds the bomb are not. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
We cannot predict the success or failure of a cultural invention with the same accuracy as we do that of a physical invention. It is for this reason that we are said to resort to value judgments in the second case. What we resort to is guessing. It is only in this sense that value judgments take up where science leaves off. When we can design small social interactions and, possibly, whole cultures with confidence we bring to physical technology, the question of value will be raised. According to Skinner, the main point is that there is really no essential difference between the lack of value judgment in the technical problem of designing the bomb and the decision to build one. The only difference is that the motives for building the bomb are not clear. Maybe they are not clear to Professor Skinner, but they are clear to many students of history. In fact there as more than one reason for the decision to build the atomic bomb (and similarly for the hydrogen bomb): the fear of Hitler’s building the bomb; perhaps the wish to have a superior weapon against the Soviet Union for possible later conflicts (this holds true especially for the hydrogen bomb); the logic of a system that is forced to increase its armaments to support its struggle with competing systems. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Quite aside from these military, strategic, and political reasons, there is, I believe, another one which is equally important. I refer to the maxim that is one of the axiomatic norms of cybernetic society: “something ought to be done because it is technically possible to do it.” Even if they might destroy us all, if it is possible to build nuclear weapons, they must be built. If it is possible to travel to the Moon or to the planets, it must be done, even if at the expense of many unfulfilled needs here on Earth. This principle means the negation of all humanistic values, but it nevertheless represents a value, maybe the supreme norm of technotronic society. Dr, Michael Maccoby has drawn my attention to some results of his study of the management of highly developed industries, which indicate that the principle “can implies ought” is more valid in industries which produce for the military establishment than for the remaining, more competitive industry. However, even if this argument is correct, two factors must be considered: first, the size of the industry which works directly or indirectly for the armed forced; second, that the principle had taken hold of the minds of many people who are not directly related to industrial production. A good example was the initial enthusiasm for space flights; another example is the tendency in medicine to construct and use gadgets regardless of their real importance for a specific case. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Skinner does not care to examine the reasons for building the bomb, and he asks us to wait for further development of behaviorism to solve the mystery. In his views on social processes he shows the same inability to understand hidden, nonverbalized motives as he does in his treatment of psychical processes. Since most of what people say about their motivation in political as well as in personal life is notoriously fictitious, the reliance on what is verbalized blocks the understanding of social and psychical processes. In every individual there is an original, mysterious, and incalculable element, because one’s past history and one’s prenatal ancestry in other lives on Earth have inevitably been different at certain points from those of other individuals. One’s World-outlook may seem the same as theirs, but there will always be subtle variations. There is no single path which can be presented to suit the multitudinous members of the human species. There is no one unalterable approach to this experience for all beings. Each as to find one’s own way, to travel forward by the guidance of one’s own present understanding and past experience—and each in the end really does so despite all appearances to the contrary. For each being passes through a different set of life-experiences. One’s past history and present circumstances have constituted an individual being who is unique, who possesses something entirely one’s own. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
It is partly through the lessons, reflections, institutions, traits, characteristics, and capacities engendered by such experiences that one is able to find one’s way to truth. Therefore one is forced not only to work out one’s own salvation but also to work it out in one’s own unique way. Every description of a mystical path must consequently be understood in a general sense. If its expounder delimits it to constitute a precise path for all alike, one exaggerates. Although there is so much in life which the aspirant shares with other beings, there is always a residue which imparts a stamp of individuality that is different from and unshareable with the individualities of all others. Consequently, the inner path which one must follow cannot be precisely the same as theirs. In the end, after profiting by all the help which one may gain from advanced guides and fellow-pilgrims, after all one’s attempts to imitate or follow them, one is forced to find or make a way for one’s self, a way which will be peculiarly one’s own. In the end one must work out one’s own unique means to salvation and depend on one’s self for further enlightenment and strength. Taught by one’s own intelligence and instructed by one’s own intuition, one must find one’s own unique path toward enlightenment. Each case is different, because each person is different heredity, temperament, character, environment, and living habits. Therefore, these general principles must be adapted to, and fitted in with, that person’s particular condition. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Just as there is not a single radius only from the centre of a circle to its circumference but countless ones, so there is not a single path only from beings to God but as many paths as there are beings. Each has to find the way most appropriate to one, to the meaning and experience of truth. There are as many ways to union with the Overself as there are human beings. The orthodox, the conventional, and the traditional ways can claim exclusive or monopoly only by imperiling truth. I think it oftener happens that a meal brings forth a cold than that Nature produces a sage. The existence of the sage as a type is hard to prove simply because the existence of the sage as an individual is hard to confirm. One is always unique on this planet. One is, for practical purposes, an Ideal rather than an ACTUALITY. It is an unnecessary self-limitation to believe that there is only a single path to enlightenment, only a single teaching worth following. Persons who believe or feel themselves to be unable to understand subtle metaphysic can turn to a simple devotional path. “Behold, O Lord, thou canst do this. We know that thou art able to show forth great power, which looks small unto the understanding of beings.” Reports Ether 3.5. There is no one particular type of aspirant to mystical or philosophical enlightment. Taken as a whole, aspirants are a mixed and varied lot in their starting points, personalities, motives, and allegiances. They vary in individuality very widely, have different needs, circumstances, opportunities, outlooks, and possibilities. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17