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Who Has Not Found Heaven for Where Your Treasure is Will be Your Heart?
And then the room was empty. Perfectly empty. I turned, disconsolate and shuddering, and put my head down on my arm, as if I could go to sleep on my desk. I was considering William James, that psychologist-philosopher American-man-of-genius, who struggled all his life with the problem of his will. One of my esteemed colleagues, writing of James’s severe depression and the fact that for a number of years he was on the verge of suicide, asks us not to judge him harshly for those aspects of maladjustment. I take a different view. I believe that understanding the depressions James suffered and the way he dealt with them increases our appreciation and admiration for him. True, all his life he was plagued by vacillation and an inability to make up his mind. In his last years, when he was struggling to give up his lecturing at Harvard, he would write in his diary one day, “Resign,” the next day, “Don’t resign,” and the third day, “Resign” again. James’s difficulty in making up his mind was connected with his inner richness and the myriad of possibilities for him in every decision. However, it was precisely James’s depressions—in which he would often write of his yearning for “a reason for wishing to live four hours longer”—which forced him to be so concerned with will, and precisely in the struggle against these depressions that he learned so much about human will. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
William James believed—and, as a therapist, I believe that his judgment here is clinically sound—that it was own discovery of the capacity to will which enabled him to live a tremendously fruitful life up to his death at sixty-eight, despite his depressions and hos continual affliction with insomnia, eye troubles, back disorders, and so on. In our own “age of this disordered will,” as it has been termed, we turn to William James with eagerness to find whatever help he can give us with our own problem of will. He begins his famous chapter on will, published in 1890, by summarily dismissing wish as what we do when we desire something which is not possible for achievement, and contrast it with will, which exists when the end is within our power. If with the desire there is a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply wish. I believe that this definition is one of the places where James’s Victorianism shows through; wishes are treated as unreal and immature. Obviously, no wish is possible when we first wish it. It becomes possible only as we wish it in many different ways, and through considering it from this side and that, possibly over a great period of time, we generate the power and take the risk to make it happen. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, then James launches into what turns out to be one of the most thrilling treatises on will in literature, which I can only touch on. There is, first, the primary type, which is distinguished by the fact it does not require a whole series of decisions. We desire to change our shirt or begin to write on paper, and once we start, a whole series of movements is set going by itself; it is ideomotor. This primary will requires absence of conflict. James is here trying to preserve spontaneity. He is taking his stand against Victorian Will power, the exercise of the separate faculty called will power which must have failed him dismally in his own life and led him into the paralysis which expressed itself in his depressions. Now we know in our day a lot more about this so-called absence of conflict, thanks chiefly to psychoanalysis, and that infinitely more is going on in states which seem without conflict. He then touches on the healthy will which he defines as action following vision. The vision requires a clear concept and consists of motives in their right ratio to each other—which is a fairly rationalistic picture. Discussing unhealth will, he rightly focuses on the obstructed will. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Obstructed will, one illustration of this that James cites is the state that exists when our eyes lose focus and we are unable to rally our attention. We sit blankly staring and do nothing. The objects of consciousness fail to touch the quick or break the skin. Great fatigue or exhaustion marks this condition; and an apathy resembling that then brought about is recognized in asylums under the name of abulia as a symptom of mental disease. It is interesting that he relates this apathy only to mental disease. I, for one, believe this is the chronic, endemic, psychic state of our society in our day—the neurotic personality of our time. The question then boils down to: Why does not something interest me, reach out to me, grasp me? And James then comes to the central problem of will, namely attention. I do not know whether he realized what a stroke of genius this was. When we analyze will with all the tools modern psychoanalysis brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or intention as the seat of will. The effort which goes into the exercise of the will is really effort to attention; the strain in the willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, for instance, the strain of keeping the attention focused. The once-born type of well-adjusted person does not a lot. This leads one to a surprising, though very keen, statement of an identity between belief, attention, and will. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Will and belief, in short, meaning a certain relation between objects and the Self, are two names for one and the same psychological phenomenon. The most compendious possible formula perhaps would be that our belief and attention are the same fact. James then beguiles us with one of his completely human and Earthly illustrations. I cite it in detail because I wish to come back to it in discussing the unfinished aspects of James’ concept of will: We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how they very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. [The scene is New England before the advent of central heating.] Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, “I must get up, this ignominious,” and so on. However, still the warm couch feels too delicious, and the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of the decisive act. Now how do we get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, “Hollo! I must lie here no longer” and idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the col during the period of struggle which paralyzed our activity. James concludes that the moment the inhibition ceases, the original idea exerts its effect, and up we get. He adds, with typical Jamesian confidence, that “This case seems to me to contain in miniature form the data for an entire psychology of volition.” Let us now take, for our special examination, James’s own example. We note that then he gets to the heart of the problem of will in this illustration there comes a remarkable statement. He writes, “We suddenly find that we have got up.” That is to say, he jumps over the whole problem. No decision at all occurs, but only a fortunate lapse of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
However, I ask, what went on in that fortunate lapse of consciousness? True, the paralyzing bind of his ambivalence was released. However, that is a negative statement and does not tell us why anything else happened. Surely we cannot call this just a lucky instant, as James does, or a happenstance! If our basis for will rests on the mere luck or happenstance, our house is built upon the sands indeed, and we have no basis for with at all. Now I do not mean to imply that so far James, in this example, has not said something. He has, and it is very important: the whole incident shows the bankruptcy of Victorian will power, will consisting of a faculty which is based upon our capacity to force our bodies to act against their desires. Victorian will power turned everything into a rationalistic, moralistic issue, for instance, the attraction of the warmth of the bed, the giving in to of which is ignominious, as opposed to the so-called supergo pressure to be upright, that is, up and working. Dr. Freud described at length the self-deceit and rationalization involved in Victorian will power and I believe, dethroned it once and for all. The example shows James’s own struggle against the paralyzing effects of Victorianism, in which the goal becomes twisted into a self-centered demonstration of one’s own character and the real moral issue get entirely lost in the shuffle. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
So we return to our crucial question. What went on in that fortunate lapse of consciousness? James only tells us that we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life. Ah, here lies our secret! Psychotherapy has brought us a good deal of data about that revery which James did not have—and I do not believe that we fall into it at all. For purposes of clarity, I shall state here my own argument concerning unfinished business in James’s concept of will. I as it is also omitted by us in contemporary psychology. The answer does not lie in James’s conscious analysis or in Dr. Freud’s analysis of the unconscious, but in a dimension which cuts across and includes both conscious and unconscious, and both cognition and conation. Along with rediscovering our feelings and wants, we also should recover our relation with the subconscious aspects of ourselves. As modern mortals have given up sovereignty over their bodies, so also have they surrendered the unconscious side of their personality, and it has become almost alien to them. When we cut off an exceedingly great and significant portion of the self, we are then no longer able to use much of the wisdom and power of the unconscious. It puts us in the position of trying to drive a BMW 5 series with the reins attached to only one wheel. Though the tendencies and intuitions in the unconscious are blocked off from our conscious awareness, they are still part of the self and accessible in various degrees to being made conscious. The sooner we recover sovereignty in that portion of the kingdom the better. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Understanding dreams is of course a subtle and complex matter—though it is not so complex as one would think when one reads about the esoteric symbols in much modern dream interpretation. These esoteric symbols put the whole problem back into a foreign language again—and that is another way, perhaps the typically modern way, of surrendering our sovereignty over the unconscious aspects of ourselves. As though we were saying the authorities and those who know the magic answers can understand our dreams, but we cannot ourselves! Dr. Erich Froom’s book, The Forgotten Language, points out that dreams, like myths and fairy tales, are not all a foreign language, but are in reality part of the one universal language shared my all humankind. Dr. Fromm’s book is to be recommended to the nontechnical reader who wishes to relearn something about this subconscious language of his fatherland. Dreams are expressions not only of conflicts and repressed desires, but also of previous knowledge that one has learned, possibly many years before, and thinks one has forgotten. Even the unskilled person, if one takes the attitude that what one’s dreams tell one is not simply to be rejected as silly, may get occasional useful guidance from one’s dreams. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
And the person who has become skillful in the understand of what one is saying to oneself in one’s dreams can get from them, from time to time, marvelously valuable hints and insights into solutions to problems. The more self-awareness a person has, the more alive one is. The more consciousness, the more self. Becoming a person means this heightened awareness, this heightened experiences of “I-ness,” this experience that it is I, the acting one, who is the subject of what is occurring. This view of what it means to become a person, in conclusion, saves us from two errors. The first is passivism—letting the deterministic forces in one’s experience take the place of self-awareness. It must be admitted that some tendencies in the older forms of psychoanalysis can be used to rationalize passivism. It was the epoch-making discovery of Dr. Freud to show how much every person is pushed by unconscious fears, desires and tendencies of all sorts, and that mortal is really much less a master in the household of one’s own mind than in the Victorian mortal of will power fondly believed. However, a harmful implication was carried along with this emphasis on the determinism of unconscious forces, which Dr. Freud himself partly succumbed to. The early psychotherapist Dr. Grodeck, for example, wrote, “We are lived by our unconscious,” and Dr, Freud in a letter commended him for his emphasis on the passivity of the ego. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
However, we must underline to correct a partial misunderstanding, that the over-all purpose of Dr. Freud’s exploration of the unconscious forces was to help people bring these forces into consciousness. The goal of psychoanalysis, as he said time and again, was to make the unconscious conscious: to enlarge the scope of awareness; to help the individual become aware of the unconscious tendencies which have tended to push the self around like mutinous sailors who have seized power below the deck of the ship; and this to help the person consciously direct one’s own ship. Hence the emphasis on the heightened awareness of one’s self, and the warning against passivism, have much in common with the over-all purpose of Dr. Freud’s thought. The other error of this view of the person enables us to avoid is activism—that is, using activity as a substitute for awareness. By activism we mean the tendency, so common in this country, to assume that the more one is acting, the more one is alive. It should be clear that when we have used the term “the active I,” we have not meant busyness or merely doing things. Many people keep busy all the time as a way of covering up their anxiety; their activism is a way of running from themselves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
People who are busy so they have something to focus on and as a result are distracted from their problems get a pseudo and temporary sense of aliveness by being in a hurry, as though something is going on if they are but moving, and as though being busy is a proof of one’s importance. Chaucer has a sly and astute comment about this type, represented in the merchant in Canterbury Tales, “Methinks he seemed busier than he was.” It is true, however, when life is not going the way you like it and you have a lot of problems that you cannot resolve on your own, being busy gives you a sense of purpose, it makes life worth living and it makes the days rip by life a vampire speed reading a novel. You wake up, stay busy, and before you know it is bed time, you are one day closer to being free. Keeping busy is the only reason some people are still alive. Our emphasis on self-awareness certainly includes actin as an expression of the alive, integrated self, but it is the opposite to activism—the opposite, that is, to acting as an escape from self-awareness. Aliveness often means the capacity not to act, to be creatively idle—which may be more difficult for most modern people than to do something. To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Self-awareness, as we have proposed it, brings back into the picture the quieter kinds of aliveness—the arts of contemplation and meditation for example, which the Western World, to its peril, has all but lost. It brings a new appreciation for being something rather than merely doing something. With such a relation to oneself, work for us modern mortals—who are the great toilers and producers—will not be an escape from ourselves or a way of trying to prove our worth, but a creative expression of the spontaneous powers of person who has consciously affirmed one’s relatedness to one’s World and one’s fellow mortals. The nature of faith justifies the history of religion and makes it understandable as a history of mortal’s ultimate concern, of one’s response to the manifestation of the holy in many places in many ways. A divine figure ceases to create reply, it ceases to be a common symbol and loses its power to move for action. Symbols which for a certain period, or in a certain place, expressed truth of faith for a certain group now only remind of the faith of the past. They have lost their truth, and it is an open question whether dead symbols can be revived. Probably not for those to whom they have died! A symbol of faith is infinite because it is not idolatrous. However, the human mind is a continuously working factory of idols. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Everything said about faith is derived from the experience of actual faith, of faith as a living reality, or in a metaphoric abbreviation, of the life of faith. Without the manifestation of God in mortals the question of God and faith in God are not possible. There is no faith without participation. Since the life of faith is life in the state of ultimate concern and no human being can exist completely without such a concern, we say: Neither faith nor doubt can be eliminate from mortals as mortals. Faith and doubt have been contrasted in such a way that the quiet certainty of faith has been praised as the complete removal of doubt. There is, indeed, a serenity of the life in faith beyond the disturbing struggles between faith and doubt. To attain such a state is a natural and justified desire of every human being. Doubt is not overcome by repression, but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself as an expression of its own finitude and affirms the content of an ultimate concern. Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible. All this is declared about living faith, of faith as actual concern, and not of faith as a traditional attitude without tensions, without doubt and without courage. Faith in this sense, which is the attitude of many members of the churches as well as of society at large. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
In mystical literature the vision of God is described as the stage which transcends the state of faith either after the Earthly life or in rare moments within it. In the complete reunion with the divine ground of being, the element of distance is overcome and with it uncertainty, doubt, courage and risk. The finite is taken into the infinite; it is not extinguished, but it is not separated either. This is not the ordinary human situation. To the state of separated finitude belong faith and the courage to risk. The risk of faith is the concrete content of one’s ultimate concern. Jesus and Satan appear as representative of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and mortals. Jesus is the representative being, and his manifestation is a symbol of the Savior of humanity. The World has followed Satan’s principles, since the time of the gospels. Yet even the victory of these principles could not destroy the longing for the realization of full being, expressed by Jesus as well as by many other great Masters who lived before him and after him. When you use things with a hardened heart, you use what is alien to you, and that indulgent, selfish use is avarice, which is the root of all evil. Some people hold to their selfish nature, and they may have the name of being saintly on the basis of the external appearances, but inside they are asses, because they do not grasp the meaning of divine truth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
However, this does not mean that we should not have anything, it just means that we should not be bound by anything. God wants to act in the soul, and he himself must be in the place in which he acts—and that he would like to do. Everything and anything can become an object of craving: things we use in daily life, property, rituals, good deeds, knowledge, and thoughts. While they are not in themselves bad, they become bad; that is, when we hold onto them, when they become chains that interfere with our freedom, they block our self-realization. People need to uncover their most hidden secrete ties of selfishness, of intentions, and opinions. However, the fact of the matter is most people will not analyze their behavior nor recognize their own errors until they are faced with extreme hardship. It is not a character building exercise, but it reveals your truth self. Some people walk away from their trials and tribulations a much better person, others walk away from their trials and tribulations with a spirit of lack and limitation and will do whatever they can to prosper, even if it means hurting their own family to get ahead in the World. Therefore, people should not consider so much what they are to do as what they are. Thus take care that your emphasis is laid on being good and not on the number or kind of things to be done. Emphasize rather the fundamentals on which your work rests. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Our being is the reality, the spirit that moves us, the character that impels our behavior; in contrast, the deeds or opinions that are separated from our dynamic core have no reality. We are to be active in the classic sense of the productive expression of one’s human powers, not in the modern sense of being busy. Activity means to go out of oneself. Run into peace. The person who is in the state of running, of continuous running into peace is a Heavenly person. One continually runs and moves and seeks peace in running. The active vessel is alive and it grows and it is filled and never will be full. Out of this criterion comes the message which is the very heart of Christianity and makes possible the courage to affirm faith in the Christ, namely, that in spite of all forces of separation between God and mortals this is overcome from the side of God. One of the forces of separation is a doubt which tries to prevent the courage to affirm one’s faith. Although we are never able to bride the infinite distance between the infinite and the finite from the side of faith, this alone makes the courage of faith possible. The risk of failure, of error and of idolatrous distortion can be taken, because the failure cannot separate us from what is our ultimate concern. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
God Permits Industrious Angels the Gleam of an Heroic Act that the Future Never Spoke
I felt her strength recede, and her eyes misted. A great glowing fire was quelled, and I had done it, and an ever present grief enfolded it. A protective surge rose in me and the wild fantasies reigned again inside of me as if no one else was present. The goal for every human being is to become a person. Every organism has one and only one central need in life, to fulfill its own potentialities. The acorn becomes an oak, the puppy become a dog and makes the fond and loyal relations with its human family which befit the dog; and all that is required of the oak tree and the and the dog. However, if the human being’s task in fulfilling one’s nature is much more difficult, for one must do it in self-consciousness. That is, human development is never automatic but must be to some extent chosen and affirmed by oneself. Among the works of mortals, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and in beautifying, the first importance surely is mortals themselves. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. We should also mention that there is a tendency of the inward forces which make mortals a living thing, namely that mortals do not grow automatically like a tree, but fulfills their potentialities only as one in his own consciousness plans and chooses. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Fortunately the long protracted period of infancy and childhood in human life—in contrast to the condition of the acorn, which is on its own as soon as it falls to the soil, or of the puppy which must fend for itself after a few weeks—prepares the child for this difficult task. One is able to acquire some knowledge and inner strength so that as one must begin to choose and decide, one has some capability for it. Mortals, furthermore, must make their choices as an individual, for individuality is one side of one’s consciousness of one’s self. We can see this point clearly when we realize that consciousness of one’s self is always a unique act—I can never know exactly how you see yourself and you never can know exactly how I relate to myself. This is the inner sanctum where each mortal must stand alone. This fact makes for much of the tragedy and inescapable isolation in human life, but it also indicates again that we must find the strength in ourselves to stand in our own inner sanctum as individuals. And this fact means that, since we are not automatically merged with our fellows, we must through our own affirmation learn to love each other. If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick, just as your legs would wither away if you never walked. However, the power of your legs is not all you would lose. The flowing of your blood, your heart action, your whole organism would be the weaker. And in the same way if mortals do not fulfill their potentialities as a person, one becomes to that extent constricted and ill. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
This is the essence of neurosis—the person’s unused potentialities, blocked by hostile conditions in the environment (past or present) and by one’s own internalized conflicts, turn inward and cause morbidity. Neurosis does not deny the existence of reality, it merely tries to ignore it. Energy is Eternal Delight; one who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. In contrast, joy is the affect which comes when we use our powers. Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal for life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity, who is able to affirm one’s being, if need be, against all others beings and the whole inorganic World. This power in its ideal form is shown in the life of a Socrates, who was so confident in himself and his values that he could take his being condemned to death not as a defeat but as a greater fulfillment than compromising his beliefs. However, we do not wish to imply such joy is only for the heroic and the outstanding; it is as present qualitatively in anyone’s act, no matter how inconspicuous, which is done as an honest and responsible expression of one’s own powers. The way to love other people is to express what we feel—anger and love—without aiming to hurt feelings. Open but reverent communication is now to make love in our lives. “The Lord has poured out his Spirit and caused hearts to be filled with joy,” reports Mosiah 4.20. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
If we assumed a complete indeterminism, for instance, that we could make ourselves over in bland freedom by any New Year’s whim or resolution, no one would need to bother to come for psychotherapy. Actually, we find that people’s problems are stubborn, recalcitrant, and troublesome—but we find they can change. And so we need to look further for what changes them. Academic psychologists tended also, no matter what the individual psychologist oneself believed about one’s own ethical actions, to accept the position that as psychologists we are concerned only with what is determined and could be understood in a deterministic framework. This limitation of perception inevitably tended to put blinders on our perception; we made our person over into the image of what we let ourselves see. Psychologists tended to repress the problem of power, particularly irrational power. We took literally Aristotle’s dictum that mortals are a rational being by assuming that they are only that, and that irrationality is merely a temporary aberration to be overcome by right education of the individual or, if the pathology is somewhat more severe, by re-education of one’s maladjusted emotions. There is, of course, a psychological concern with power, has generally been taken as merely a subhead to one’s beliefs in society inferiority and the struggle for security. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Dr. Freud’s assumptions about primitive cannibalism and the aggressive instinct have the element of power in them. However, this also tends to be a rationalize away in that it is used in referring only to severe pathology. The repression of power enable psychology more readily to discard will and hold to a theoretical determinism, since the critical element of the soul and effects of determinism did not then come out into the open. However, in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, where therapists deal with living, suffering people, the problem of the undermining of will and decision become increasingly critical. For the theory and process of psychoanalysis and most other forms of psychotherapy inevitably play into the passive tendencies of the patient. There are built-in tendencies in psychoanalysis itself that sap its vitality and tends to emasculate not only the reality with which psychoanalysis deals but the power and inclination of the patient to change. In the early days of psychoanalysis, when revelations of the unconscious have an obvious shock value, this problem does not come out into the open as much. And in any case with hysterical patients, who formed the bulk of those Dr. Freud worked with in his early formative years, there does not exist a special dynamic in what Dr. Freud could call repressed libido, pushing expression. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
However, now, when most of our patients are compulsive of one for or another, and everybody knows about the Oedipus complex, and our patients talk about pleasures of the flesh with an apparent freedom which would have shocked Dr. Freud’s Victorian patients off the couch (and, indeed, talking about pleasures of the flesh is the easiest way of avoiding really making any decisions about love and passionate intimacy relatedness), the predicament resulting from the undermining of will and decision can no longer be avoided. The repetition compulsion, a problem that has always remained intractable and insoluble within the context of classical psychoanalysis, is in my judgment fundamentally related to this crisis of will. Other forms of psychotherapy do not escape the dilemma of psychoanalysis, namely that the process of psychotherapy itself has built-in tendencies which invite the patient to relinquish one’s position as the deciding agent. The very name “patient” proposes it. Not only do the automatic, supportive elements in therapy have this tendency, but so does the temptation, to which patient and therapist easily succumb, to search for everything else as responsible for one’s problems rather than one’s self. To be sure, psychotherapists of all stripes and schools realize that sooner or later the patient must make some decision, learn to take some responsibility for oneself; but the theory and the technique of most psychotherapy tends to be built on exactly the opposite premise. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
The freedom to make choices experienced by a human being has nothing whatever to do with free will as a principle governing human behavior but is a subjective experience which is itself causally determined. Freedom may presumably be an illusion. Choice and responsibility are illusions caused by prior states but, in turn, causal of future acts. However, here we arrive at the radical inconsistency—as therapists, the analysts could not help recognizing that the patient’s act of choosing is of central importance. Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to choose one way or the other. Toward the end of analysis the therapist may find oneself wishing that the patient were capable of more push, more determination, a greater willingness to make the best of it. Often this wish eventuates in remarks to the patient: People must help themselves; nothing worth while is achieved without effort; you have to try. Such interventions are seldom included in case reports, for it is assumed that they possess neither the dignity nor effectiveness of interpretation. Often an analyst feels uncomfortable about such appeals to volition, as though one were using something one did not believe in, and as though this would have been unnecessary had only one analyzed more skillfully. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Psychoanalysts then found themselves in the curious, anomalous position of believing that the patient must have an illusion of freedom in order to change, and they therefore must cultivate this illusion, or at least do obeisance to it. The paradox, for example, is as psychotherapy progress the experience of freedom encases, so that successfully analyzed people report experiencing more freedom in the conduct of their lives than they did prior to psychotherapy. If this freedom is illusory, the purpose of therapy, or at least the result of successful therapy, is to restore an illusion even though most therapists believe that successful therapy increases the accuracy with which the patient perceives oneself and one’s World. Some analysts, indeed, admit openly that they are engaged in the cultivation of an illusion, and undertake to rationalize this in their theory. Consider what this means. We are told that an illusion is most significant in effecting personality change; that truth is not is most significant in effecting personality change; that truth is not fundamentally (or is only theoretically) relevant to actions, but illusion is. Thus, we are to strive not for truth but for an illusion. We are to believe in definitions of the World by which we cannot live. Or, if we do try strictly to live by them, we shall slide back into passive impotence that leads to apathy and depression. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
I do not need to labor the point that this resolution of the dilemma is untenable. Even we analysts could not live by such an illusion—for how is it possible (without considerable pathology) to commit one’s self if one knows in advance one is committing oneself to an illusion? Furthermore, if patients need to believe in illusions, the possibilities of illusions are, unlike truth, infinite—who is to decide which illusions are, unlike truth, infinite—who is to decide which illusion which works? If so, then our concept of truth has been wrong; for if the illusion genuinely works, it cannot be entirely illusion. Indeed, the statement that the illusions is most decisive for change is essentially an antirational (and thus, anti-scientific) one, for it implies that at the level of behavior the truth or falsehood of a concept is irrelevant. This cannot be accepted; if it seems to be true, there must be some truth in what we call illusion and some illusion in what we call truth. Another solution has been proposed from a different angle. Recognizing that freedom and will have to be given some place in the psychoanalytic structure of personality, the later ego analysts have developed the concept of the autonomy of the ego. The ego, then, is assigned the function of freedom and choice. However, the ego is, by definition, a part of the personality; and how can a part be free? #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
When we consider the autonomy of the unconscious, and the autonomy of the body, each of these would have a partial truth. However, would not each also be importantly wrong? Neither the ego nor the body nor the unconscious can be autonomous, but can only exist as parts of a totality. And it is in this totality that will and freedom must have their base. I am convinced that the compartmentalization of the personality into ego, superego, and id is an important part of the reason why the problem of will has remained insoluble within the orthodox psychoanalytic tradition. We know in our practice of psychoanalysis that lack of freedom is shown in all aspects of the patient’s organism. It is shown in one’s body (muscular inhibitions) and in what is called unconscious experience (repression) and in one’s social relationships (one is unaware of others to the extent one is unaware of oneself). We also know experientially that as this person gains freedom in psychotherapy, one becomes less inhibited in bodily movements, freer in one’s dreams, and more spontaneous in one’s unthought-out, involuntary relations with other people. This means that autonomy and freedom cannot be the domain of a special part of the organism, but must be a quality of the total self—the thinking—feeling—choosing—acting organism. Will and decision are inseparably linked with is as well as ego and supergo, if we are to use Dr. Freud’s terms. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Something of profound significance is going on—in spontaneity, feeling, symbolic meanings—in each decision one makes prior to anything which might be termed an ego function. A strong ego is not the cause of decisions but the result. Dos not the concept of autonomy of the ego have the same difficulties as the old one of free will, in positing some special part or organ of the personality as the seat of choice? If we strip the concept of its sophisticated clothes, it become something akin to the place where the soul is located. To be sure, ego psychoanalysis has the positive aspect of reflecting the pressing concerns of contemporary mortals with one’s problems of autonomy, self-direction, and choice. However, it is also caught in the contradictions with which these problems inescapably confront us. Psychoanalysis and psychology, in all their representations, reveal, with the inconsistency and contradiction which lie therein, the dilemma of will and decision that Western mortals today experiences. It is a sign Dr. Freud’s usual honesty that he frankly states that he is trying to give the patient freedom to choose even tough he knows this is directly contradictory to his theory. He did not quail before contradiction nor leap to too easy a solution. However, as the culture has evolved since Dr. Freud, it has become less and less possible to survive in this contradiction. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
We must consider the fact that we have omitted a dimension of human experience which is important, indeed critical, to human will. Let us assume that I am an omnipotent physiologist with a complete knowledge of the physiology, chemistry, and molecular activities of your brain at any given moment. With this knowledge I can then predict precisely what you will do as a result of the operation of your brain’s mechanisms, since your behavior, including your conscious and verbal behavior, is completely correlated with your neural functioning. However, this only applies if I do not tell you my prediction. Suppose that I tell you what you will do as a result of my complete knowledge of your brain. In doing this I shall have changed the physiology of your brain by furnishing it with this information. This makes it possible for you then to behave in a way quite different from my prediction. If I were to try to allow beforehand for the effects of telling you my prediction, I would be doomed to an endless regression—logically chasing my own tail in an effort to allow for the effects of allowing for the effect of allowing for the effects, indefinitely. Human awareness and consciousness—that is, knowing—introduce unpredictable elements into our being. And mortals are the creature who obstreperously insists on knowing. The change of consciousness which this involves is both outside and inside, consisting of forces operating on the World and the attitude of the person who is attending to these forces. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
We can note that one’s awareness would involve such things as becoming aware of forgotten and buried events in such things as becoming aware of forgotten and buried events in childhood and other aspects of the depth experiences which emerge in therapy. This is—to predict our later discussion—the problem of intentionality in contrast to mere intention. Intentionality, in human experience, is wat underlies will and decision. It is not only prior to will and decision but makes them possible. Why it has been neglected in Western history is clear enough. Ever since understanding has been separated from will, science has proceeded on the basis of this dichotomy, and we tried to assume that facts about human beings could be separated from conation. Particularly since Dr. Freud, this is no longer possible—even though Dr. Freud, without full justice to his own discoveries, clung to the old dichotomy in scientific theory. Intentionality does not rule out deterministic influence, but places the whole problem of determinism and freedom on a deeper plane. The moral types of faith are characterized by the idea of the law. God is the God who has given the law as a gift and as a command. He can be approached only by those who obey the law. There are, of course, laws in the sacramental and mystical types of faith, and no one can reach the ultimate without fulfilling these laws. However, there is an important difference between the laws in the two types of faith. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The law in the ontological types of faith demands subjection to ritual methods or ascetic practices. The law in the moral type demands moral obedience. The difference, certainly, is not absolute. For the ritual law includes moral conditions and the ethical laws includes ontological conditions. However, the difference is sufficient to make understandable the rise of the various great religions. They follow the one or the other type. One can distinguish the juristic, the conventional and the ethical in the mortal types of faith. The juristic type id most strongly developed in other countries; the ethical type is represented by Jewish prophets. The faith of a Christian is faith in revelation given by prophets in the Bible, and this revelation is the ultimate concern. The revelation preached by prophets are largely ritual, social, and spiritual laws. The ritual laws point to the sacramental stage out of which all religions and cultures have arisen. The social laws transcend the ritual elements and produce a holiness of what ought to be. And the spiritual laws teach us why it is important to keep our covenants with God. These laws permeate the whole life. Their source is a matter of ultimate concern, the prophet; their content is identical with God’s commands. The law is always felt as both a gift and a command. Under the protection of the law, life is possible and satisfying. This is true of the average person who believes in God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
When we love the spirit and letter of the law, the things of eternity can distill upon our souls like the dews from Heaven. With daily obedience and refreshing living water, we find answers, faith, and strength to meet everyday challenges and opportunities with gospel patience, perspective, and joy. This is possible through the covenant between God and the nation, and the ritual law in all its richness and abundance of sacramental activities. The law of justice is the way of reaching God. The divine law is of ultimate concern, as it is the central content of faith. As we keep the best of familiar patterns while seeking new and holier ways to love Go and help us and others prepare to meet him, it gives rules for a continuous actualization of the ultimate concern within the preliminary concerns of the daily life. The ultimate shall always be present and remembered even in the smallest activities of the ordinary life. On the other hand, all this is worth nothing if it is not united with obedience to the moral law, the law of justice, and righteousness. The final criterion for the relation of mortal to God is subjection to the law of justice. It is the greatest invitation from God and is full of love and possibility because Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
We are fighting for freedom from sacramentally consecrated bondage and for justice for every human being. It is faith that allows this superior power of reason to unite with justice and truth. This revolutionary movement gives the World tremendous power, as this type of faith is a state of ultimate concern and total devotion to this concern. The connections in the case of being are neither mechanical nor purely logical, but alive. In this assurance by God’s grace we may be perfected, experience peace, and promise that we will continue to flow forward with faith and confidence in the Lord even when things do not go as we hope, expect, or perhaps deserve, through no fault of our own, even after we have done our best. Remembering in the mode of being implies brining to life something one saw or heard before. Life can be filled with faith, joy, happiness, hope, and love when we exercise the smallest amounts of real faith in Christ. This will allow people to respond spontaneously and productively; they forget about themselves, about the knowledge, the positions they have. Their pride does not stand in their way, and it is precisely for this reason that they can fully respond to other people’s and their ideas. They give birth to new ideas, because the are not holding onto anything, but faith in God, and this can produce and give. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
While the having (material) persons rely on what they possess, the being persons rely on their faith in God and that fact that they are, that they are alive and that something new will be born if only they have the courage to let go and to respond. They come fully alive in the conversation, because they do not stifle themselves by anxious concern with what they have. Their own aliveness is infections and often helps the other person to transcend self-importance. Thus the conversation ceases to be an exchange of commodities (information, knowledge, status) and becomes a dialogue in which it does not matter any more who is right. The Lord helps us and blesses us and we learn to treasure our many precious gifts from God. God has enhanced our knowledge, culminated experience, rummaged our memories, enhanced our knowledge, and deepened our insight into human nature and we have gained knowledge of ourselves. We are inspired and come away with cultural property. When we are this deep in our faith, we are like a well-informed guide at a museum. We learn to hear so that we can distinguish when God speaks to our brains and hearts. “The Spirit of God, is also the spirit of freedom,” reports Alma 61.15. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
The Sun Just Touched the Morning—The Morning, Happy thing, Supposed the He Had Come to Dwell, and Life Would be All Spring!
I followed him into the front hallway and then up the broad staircase. How curious it was, to be his guest, to be walking on this wool carpet as if I were a mortal. Sleeping under the roof that was not mine. Next I would be doing in a Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. This could get out of hand. Please let it get out of hand. As a laid there, I pondered our loss of language for personal communication. It became clear to me, along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other. This is one important side of the loneliness now experienced by people in the Western World. Take the word “love” for example, a word which obviously should be most important in conveying personal feelings. When you use it, the person you are talking to may think you mean Hollywood love, or the sentimental emotion of the popular songs, “I love my baby, my baby loves me,” or religious charity, or friendliness, or sexual impulse, or whatnot. The same is true about almost any other important word in the nontechnical areas—truth, integrity, courage, spirit, freedom, and even the word self. Most people have private connotations for such words which may be quite different from their neighbor’s meaning, and hence some people even try to avoid using such words. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
We have an excellent vocabulary for technical subjects; almost every person can name the parts of a BMW M5 engine clearly and definitely. However, when it comes to meaningful interpersonal relations, our language is lost: we stumble, and are practically as isolated as native people who are left in tribe and it is considered a breach of law to contact them. Our dried voices, when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless, as wind in dry grass or birds’ feet over shattered glass in our dry cellar. This loss of the effectiveness of language, it may seem strange to point out, is a symptom of a disrupted historical period. When you explore the rise and fall of historical eras, you will note how the language is powerful and compelling at certain times, like the Greek language of the fifth century B.C. in which Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote their classics, or like Elizabethan English of Shakespeare and the King James translation of the Bible. At other periods the language is weak, vague and uncompelling, such as when Greek culture was being disrupted and dispersed in the Hellenistic period. I believe it could be shown in researches—which obviously cannot be gone into here—that when a culture is in its historical phase of growing toward unity, its language reflects the unity and power; whereas when a culture is in the process of change, dispersal and disintegration, the language likewise loses its power. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
“When I was eighteen, Germany was eighteen,” said Goethe, referring not only to the fact that ideals of his nation were then moving toward unity and power, but that the language, which was his vehicle of power as a writer, was also in that stage. In our day the study of semantics is of considerable value, to be sure, and is to be commended. However, the disturbing question is why we have to talk so much about what words mean that, once we have learned each other’s language, we have little time or energy left for communicating. There are other forms of personal communication than words: art and music, for example. Although repetition often implies monotony, because we are doing the same thing over and over again, it is not necessarily boring. The sterile World of suburban life depicted in Frank Gohlke’s photograph Housing Development South of Fort Worth, Texas is, precisely, the image of such monotony, as the eye travels down a street where the house after house is the same. Nevertheless, when the same or like elements—shapes, colors, or a regular pattern of any kind—are repeated over and over again in a composition, a certain visual rhythm will result. The suburbs are an effort to capture the beauty and consistency in everyday life, by producing a unified community where people feel safe and at peace. It is a representation of the American Dream and a neat form of art. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Music as a form of personal communication is not always appreciated, but many people have been captivated when they see the beauty of the craft. It is stuff people want. It touches the spot. For example, the singer Aaliyah, her music wanted publishing, it contains essence. People pay money for it. She went on to compose many tunes including We Need a Resolution and What If, which were ground breaking tunes that communicated information about relationship, political and personal, and it allowed people do discover that Rhythm and Blues had much more appear than some originally thought. Not only was she singing about a lover who had left her, but her ballads talked about the experience of people who are just not communicating in politics and how if Republicans did some of the things Democrats did, it would not be tolerated. Some could say these two particular songs foreshadowed and reflect how many feel about the current government shutdown. As the “Princess of Rhythm and Blues,” Aaliyah recorded extensively in the 1990s and early 2000s. Her creativity was exceptional and inspired many musicians who developed and performed their music based on her style and image. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Clearly, painting, photographs, architecture and music are just some of the sensitive spokespersons in the society, as well as to other societies and other historical periods. However, we find in some modern art and modern music a language which does not communicate. If most people, even intelligent ones, look at modern art without knowing the esoteric key, they can understand practically nothing. They are greeted by every kind of style—impressionism, expressionism, cubism, Harlemism abstractionism, representationalism, nonobjective painting, until Mondrian gives his message only in squares and rectangles, and Jackson Pollock, in a kind of reductio ad absurdum, spatters paint almost accidental forms on large broads and entitles the work simply the date on which it was completed. I of course imply no criticism of these artists, both of whom happen to give me pleasure. However, does it not imply something very significant about our society that talented artists can communicate only in such limited language? If you visit the Art Students League in New York, NY USA—which has perhaps the largest group of outstanding American artists as teachers and the most representative body of students—you will be surprised to find the classes in practically every studio painting in a distinctly different style, and you will have to shift emotional gears every twenty steps. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In the Renaissance a common mortal could look at the paintings of Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo and feel that the picture was telling one something which one could understand about life in general and one’s own inner life in particular. However, if an untutored mortal walked through the galleries on 57th Street in New York City today and saw, let us say, exhibits by Picasso, Dali and Marin, one might well agree that something important was being communicated but one would no doubt aver that only God and the artist knew what it was. For one’s own part one would probably be bewilder, and possibly somewhat irritated. A person is to be known by one’s own style, that is, by the unique pattern which gives underlying unity and distinctiveness to one’s activities. The same is partly true about a culture. However, when we ask what is the style of our day, we find that there is no style which can be called modern. The one thing these many modern different movements in art have in common, beginning with the great work of Cezanne and Van Gogh, is that they all are trying desperately to break through the hypocrisy and sentimentality of nineteenth-century art. Consciously or unconsciously, the seek to speak in their painting from some solid reality in the self experiencing the World. However, beyond this desperate search for honesty, which is much like that of Freud and Ibsen in their respective fields, there is only a potpourri of styles. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Making all necessary qualifications for the fact the time has not yet done its sifting for the modern period as it has, say, for the Renaissance, it is still true tat this potpourri is a revealing picture of the disunity of our times. The pictures that are discordant and empty, as are so many in modern art, are thus honest portrayals of the condition of our time. It is as though every genuine artist were frantically trying different languages to see which one would communicate the music of form and color to one’s fellow beings, but there is no common language. We find a giant like Picasso shifting in his own lifetime from style to style, partly as a reflection of the shifting character of the last four decades in Western society, and partly like a mortal dialing a ship’s radio on the ocean, trying to find the wave length on which one can talk to one’s follow mortals. However, the artists, and the rest of us too, remain spiritually isolated and at sea, and so we cover up our loneliness by chattering with other people about the things we do have language for—the World series, business affairs, the latest news reports. Our deeper emotional experiences are pushed further away, and we tend, thus, to become emptier and lonelier. The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole World. The consumer is the eternal suckling crying for the bottle. This is obvious in pathological phenomena, such as alcoholism and drug addiction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
We apparently single out alcoholism and drug addiction because their effects interfere with the addicted person’s social obligations. Compulsive smoking is not thus censured because, while not less of an addiction, it does not interfere with the smokers’ social functions, but possibly only with their life spans. Further attention is given to the many forms of everyday consumerism later on. I might only remark here that as far as leisure time is concerned, automobiles, television, travel, and pleasures of the flesh are the main objects of present-day consumerism, and while we speak of them as leisure-time activities, we would do better to call them leisure-time passivities. To sum up, to consume is one form of having, and perhaps the most important one for today’s affluent industrial societies. Consuming has ambiguous qualities: It relieves anxiety, because what one has cannot be taken away; but it also requires one to consume ever more, because previous consumption soon loses its satisfactory character. Modern consumers may identify themselves by the formula: I am = what I have and what I consume. Because the society we live in is devoted to acquiring property and making a profit, we rarely see any evidence of the being mode of existence and most people see the having mode as natural mode of existence, even the only acceptable way of life. All of which makes it especially difficult for people to comprehend the nature of the being mode, and even to understand that having is only one possible orientation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Nevertheless, these two concepts, being and having, are rooted in human experience. Neither one should be, or can be, examined in an abstract, purely cerebral way; both are reflected in our daily life and must be dealt with concretely. The following simple examples of how having and being are demonstrated in everyday life may help people to understand these two alternative modes of existence. No social or political arrangement can do more than further or hinder the realization of certain values and ideals. The ideas of the Judaeo-Christian tradition cannot possibly become realities in a materialistic civilization whose structure is centered around production, consumption and success on the market. On the other hand, no society could fulfill the goal of brotherliness, justice and individualism unless its ideas are capable of filling the hearts of mortals with a new spirit. We do not need new ideals or new spiritual goals. The great teachers of the human race have postulated the norms for sane living. To be sure, they have spoken in different languages, have emphasized different aspects and have had different views on certain subjects. However, altogether, these differences were small; the fact that the great religions and ethical systems have so often fought against each other, and emphasized their mutual differences rather than their basic similarities, was due to the influence of those who built churches, hierarchies, political organization upon the simple foundations of truth laid down by the mortals of the spirit. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Since the human race made the decisive turn away from rootedness in nature and animal existence, to find a new home in conscience and brotherly solidarity, since it conceived first the idea of the unity of the human race and its destiny to become fully born—the ideas and ideals have been the same. In every center of culture, and largely without any mutual influence, the same insights were discovered, the same ideals were preached. We, today, who have easy access to all these ideas, who are still the immediate heirs to the great humanistic teachings, we are not in need of new knowledge of how to live sanely—but in bitter need of taking seriously what we believe, what we preach and teach. The revolution of our hearts does not require new wisdom—but new seriousness and dedication. The task of impressing on people the guiding ideals and norms of our civilization is, first of all, that of education. However, how woefully inadequate is our educational system for this task. Its aim is primarily to give the individual the knowledge one needs in order to function in an industrialized civilization in the age of information, and to form one’s character into the mold which is needed: ambitious and competitive, yet cooperative within certain limits; respectful of authority, yet desirably independent, as some report cards have it; friendly, yet not deeply attached to anybody or anything. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Our high schools and colleges continue with the task of providing their students with the knowledge they must have to fulfill their practical tasks in life, and with the character traits wanted on the personality market. Very little, indeed, do they succeed in imbuing them with the faculty of critical thought, or with character traits which correspond to the professed ideas of our civilization. Surely there is no need to elaborate on this point, and to repeat a criticism which has been made so competently by Robert Hutchins and others. There is only one point I want to emphasize where: the necessity of doing away with the harmful separation between theoretical and practical knowledge. This very separation is part of the alienation of work and thought. It tends to separate theory from practice, and to make it more difficult, rather than easier, for the individual to participate meaningfully in the work one is doing. If work is to become an activity based on one’s knowledge and on the understanding of what one is doing, then indeed there must be a drastic change in our method of education, in the sense that from the very beginning theoretical instruction and practical work should be secondary to theoretical instruction; for people beyond school age, it should be the reverse; but at no age of development would the two sphere be separated from each other. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
No youngster should graduate from school unless one has learned some kind of handicraft in a satisfactory and meaningful manner; no primary education would be considered finished before the student has a grasp of the fundamental technical process of our industry. Certainly high school ought to combine practical work of a handicraft and of modern industrial techniques with theoretical instruction. The fact that we aim primarily at the usefulness of our citizens for the purposes of the social machine, and not at their human development is apparent in the fact that we consider education necessary only up to the age of fourteen, eighteen, or at most, the early twenties. Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age? Actually, as Alvin Johnson has pointed out so convincingly, the age between six and eighteen is not by far as suitable for leaning as is generally assumed. It is, of course, the best age to learn the three R’s, and languages, but undoubtedly the understanding of history, philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, etcetera, is limited at this early age, and in fact, even around twenty, at which age these subjects are taught in college, is not ideal. In many instances to really understand the problems in these fields, a person must have had a great deal more experience in living than one has had at college age. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
For many people the age of thirty or forty is much more appropriate for learning—in the sense of understanding rather than of memorizing—than school or collage age, and in many instances the general interest is also greater at the later age than at the stormy period of youth. It is around this age also at which a person should be free to change one’s occupation completely, and hence to have a chance to study again, the same chance which today we permit only to youngsters. A sane society must provide possibilities for adult education, must as it provides today for the schooling of children. This principle find expression today in the increasing number of adult-education courses, but all these private arrangements encompass only a small segment of the population, and the principle needs to be applied to the population as a whole. Schooling, be it transmission of knowledge or formation of character, it only one part, and perhaps not the most important part of education; using education here in its literal and most fundamental sense of e-ducere = to being out, that which is within mortals. Even if mortals have knowledge, even if one performs one’s work well, if one is decent, honest, and has no worries with regard to one’s material needs—one is not and cannot be satisfied. “I am mindful of you always in my prayers, continually praying unto God the Father in the name of his Holy Child, Jesus, that he, through his infinite goodness and grace, will keep you through the endurance of faith on his name to the end,” reports Moroni 8.3. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
After Dinner Light for Flowers and Dukes for Setting Sun
It was unspeakable to need someone in this way. I closed my eyes and listened to the night. Ravenous, repulsive creatures singing magnificently. If the workers and employees of an enterprise were exclusively concerned with their enterprise, the alienation between mortals and their social forces would remain unchanged. The narcissistic, alienated attitude would only have been extended from one individual to the team. It is therefore not an incidental but an essential part of workers’ participation that they looked beyond their own enterprise, that they be interested in and connected with consumers as well as with other workers in the same industry, and with the working population as a whole. The development of a kind of local patriotism for the firm, of an esprit de corps similar to that of college and university students, as recommended by British social psychologists, would only reinforce the asocial and egotistical attitude which is the essence of alienation. All such suggestions in favor of team enthusiasm ignore the fact that there is only one truly social orientation, namely the one of solidarity with humankind. Social cohesion within the group, combined with antagonism to the outsider, is not social feeling but extended egotism. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
All suggestions in the direction of the humanization of work do not have the aim of increasing economic output nor is their goal a greater satisfaction with work per se. They make sense only in a totally different social structure, in which economic activity is a part—and a subordinate part—of social life. One cannot separate work activity from political activity, from the use of leisure time and from personal life. If work were to become human, no real change would occur. In fact, it could not become interesting. It is the very evil of present-day culture that it separates and compartmentalizes the various spheres of living. The way to sanity is possessed in overcoming this split and in arriving at anew unification and integration within society and within the individual human being. The hostility in industry should give way to a feeling of participation in a joint endeavour. How is this to be achieved? The most direct and easily exploitable line of advance is in the direction of joint consultation. Much fruitful work has been done in this sphere, and it is now clear that something more is needed than joint production committees on the present model—some more radical effort to give the worker a sense of participation in the making of decisions. A few progressive firms have already made bold advances, and the results are encouraging. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
It could be advantageous to alter the legal structure of company ownership as to substitute for shareholders’ sole control a constitution which explicitly defines the responsibilities of the firm to worker, consumer and community; workers would become members of the company, and have their representatives on the board of directors. Ownership enterprises, when it passes from wealthy individuals, should go, not to the state, but to less remote public bodies, and should permit greater diffusion of power and encourage people of all sorts to play a more active part in the work and control of pubic and voluntary organizations. Consultation is less successful the further it recedes from face-to-face discussion on the job; and the size and structure of industrial units and the degree to which they can exercise independent initiative and therefore seen as matters of supreme importance. What is finally required for policy decisions and for an executive authority willingly accepted by all the members of an industry. There must be some exit process by which all those employed in an industry are enabled to participate in policy decisions; either through directly elected representative on the board or through a hierarchical system of joint consultation wit considerable powers. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
In either case there must also be an increasing participation in the process of interpreting policy and of making decisions at subordinate levels. The creation of a feeling of common purpose in the activities of industry still remains, therefore, one of the outstanding objectives of Capitalism. After all, what is the matter with joint stock company is the irresponsible dictatorship exercised over it, nominally by its shareholders, actually in many cases by one or two self-appointing and self-perpetuating directors. Make public companies directly responsible both to the community and to the whole body of those engaged in their activities, and they would become institutions of a very different kind. Also, it has been noted throughout history, in France and Germany, after the war that transferring of property rights from the private capitalist to society of the state has, in itself, only a negligible effect on the situation of the worker, and the central problem of why people cannot afford to rent and buy in the cities they live lies in the change of the work situation. Our whole industry is built upon the existence of an ever-widening inner market. Each enterprise wants to sell more and more in order to conquer an ever-widening share of the market. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The result of this economic situation is that industry uses all means within its power to whet the buying appetite of the population, to create and reinforce the receptive orientation which is so detrimental too mental sanity. As we have seen, this means that there is a craving for new but unnecessary things, a constant wish to buy more, even though the standpoint of human, unalienated use, there is no need for the new product. (The automobile industry, for instance, spent some billion dollars on the changes for the new 2019 models, BMW alone some hundred million dollars to compete with Mercedes-Benz. Without doubt, the older BMW was an excellent car, and the fight between BMW and Mercedes-Bens has not primarily the effect of giving the public a better car, but of making them buy a new car when the old one would have done for another generation or so). Another aspect of the same phenomenon is the tendency to waste, which is furthered by the economic need for increasing mass production. Aside from the economic loss implied in this waste, it has also an important psychological effect: it makes the consumer lose respect for work and human effort; it makes the makes one forget the needs of the people within one’s own and in less affluent lands, for whom the product one wastes could be a most valuable possession; in short, our habits of waste show an immature disregard for the realities of human life, for the economic struggle for existence which nobody can evade. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
It is quite obvious that in the long run no amount of spiritual influence can be successful if our economic system is organized in such a way that a crisis threatens when people do not want to buy more and more newer and better things. Hence if our aim is to change alienated into human consumption, changes are necessary in those economic processes which produce alienated consumption. It is the task of economists to devise such measures. Generally speaking, it means to direct production into fields where existing real needs have not yet been satisfied, rather than where needs must be created artificially. This can be done by means of credits through state-owned banks, by the socialization of certain enterprises, and by drastic laws which accomplish a transformation of advertising. Closely related to this problem is that of economic help from the industrialized societies to the economically less developed part of the World. It is quite clear that the time of colonial exploitation is over, that the various parts of the World have been brought together as closely as one continent was a hundred years ago, and that peace for the wealthier part of the World is dependent on the economic advancement of the less affluent part. Peace and liberty in the Western World cannot, in the long run, coexist with hunger and sickness in African and China. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Reduction of unnecessary consumption in the industrialized counties is a must if they want to help the nonindustrailized countries, and they must want to help them, if they want peace. A World development program covering fifty years would increase agricultural production to the point where all persons would receive adequate nutrition and would lead to an industrialization of the now undeveloped areas similar to the prewar level of Japan. The yearly outlay for the Untied States for such a program would be between four and five billion dollars each for the first thirty years, and afterward les. When we compare this to our national income, to our present federal budget, to the funds required for armament, and to the cost of waging war, the amount required does not appear to be excessive. When we compare it to the potential gains that can result from a successful program, it appears even smaller. And when we compare the cost with that of inaction and to the consequences of maintaining the status quo, it is indeed insignificant. The foregoing problems is only part of the more general problem as to what extent the interest of profitable capital investment may be permitted to manipulate the public needs in a detrimental and unhealthy way. The most obvious examples are our movie industry, the comic-book industry and the crime pages of our newspaper. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
In order to make the highest profit, the lowest instincts are artificially stimulated and the mind of the public is poisoned. The Food and Drug Act has regulated the unrestricted production and advertising of harmful food and drugs; the same can be done with regard to all other vital necessities. If such laws should prove to be ineffective, certain industries, such as the film industry, must be socialized, or at least competing industries must be created, financed with public funds. In a society in which the only aim is the development of mortals, and in which material needs are subordinated to spiritual needs, it will not be difficult to find legal and economic means to insure the necessary changes. As far as the economic situation of the individual citizen is concerned, the idea of equality of income has been the aim that the capitalistic society has tried to reach. What Americans need is an income which will be the basis for a dignified human existence. As far as inequalities of income are concerned, it seems that they must not transcend the point where differences in income lead to differences in the experience of life. The mortal without an income of millions, who can satisfy any whim without even thinking about it, experiences life in a different way from the mortal who to satisfy one costly wish has to sacrifice another. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The mortal who can never travel beyond his town, who can never afford any luxury (that is to say, something that is not necessary), again has a different life experience from one’s neighbor who can do so. However, even within certain differences of income the basic experience of life can remain the same, provided the income differences does not exceed a certain margin. What matters is not so much the greater or lesser incomes as such, but the point where quantitative differences of income are transformed into a qualitative difference of life experience. Needless to say, the system of social security, as it exists now in Great Britain and the United States of America for instance, must be retained. However, this is not enough. The existing social-security system must be extended to a universal subsistence guarantee. Each individual can act as a free and responsible agent only if one of the main reasons for present-day un-freedom is abolished: the economic threat of starvation which forces people to accept working conditions which they would otherwise not accept. We are no longer at the point where we can live off the land. Therefore, the owners of capital can enforce their will on the mortal who owns only one’s life, because without capital, we have no work except what the capitalist offers us. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
One hundred and fifty years ago, it was a widely accepted belief that no one had the responsibility for one’s neighbor. It was assumed—and scientifically proved by economists—that the laws of society made it necessary to have a vast army of less affluent and jobless people in order to keep the economy going. Today, hardly anybody would dare to voice this principle any longer. It is generally accepted that nobody should be excluded from the wealth of the nation, either by laws of nature, or by those of society. The rationalizations which were current a hundred years ago, that the less affluent owed their condition to their ignorance, lack of responsibility—briefly, to their sins—are outdated. In all Western industrialized countries a system of insurance has been introduced which guarantees everyone a minimum for subsistence in case of unemployment, sickness and old age. It is only one step further to postulate that, even if these conditions are not present, everyone has a right to receive the means to subsist. Practically speaking, that would mean that every citizen can claim a sum, enough for the minimum of subsistence even though one is not unemployed, sick or aged. One can demand this sum if one has quit one’s job voluntarily, if one wants to prepare oneself for another type of work, or for any personal reason which prevents one from earning money, without falling under one of the categories of the existing insurance benefits; shortly, one can claim this subsistence minimum without having to have any reason. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Some say it should be limited to two years, so as to avoid the fostering of a neurotic attitude which refuses any kind of social obligation. This may sound like a fantastic proposal, but so would our insurance system have sounded to people one hundred and fifty years ago. The main objection to such a scheme would be that if each person were entitled to receive minimum support, people would not work. This assumption rests upon the fallacy of the inherent laziness in human nature; actually, aside from neurotically lazy people, there would be very few who would not want to earn more than the minimum, and who would prefer to do nothing rather than work. However, the suspicious against a system of guaranteed subsistence minimum are not unfounded from the standpoint of those who want to use ownership of capital for the purpose of forcing others to accept the work conditions they offer. If nobody were forced any more to accept work in order not to starve, work would have to be sufficiently interesting and attractive to induce one to accept it. Freedom of contract is possibly only if both parties are free to accept and reject it; in the present capitalist system this is not the case. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
However, such a system would be not only the beginning of real freedom of contract between employers and employees; it would also enhance tremendously the sphere of freedom in interpersonal relationships between person and person in daily life. Let us look at some examples. A person who is employed today, and dislikes one’s job, is often forced to continue in it because one does not have the means to risk unemployment even for one or two months, and naturally if one quits the job, one has no right to unemployment benefits. However, actually the psychological effects of this situation go much deeper; the very fact that one cannot risk being fired, tends to make one afraid of one’s boss or whomever one is dependent on. One will be inhibited in answering back; one will try to please and to submit, because of the constantly present fear that the boss could fire one if one asserted oneself. Or let us take the mortal who at the age of forty decides the he or she wants an entirely different kind of job, for which it will take one or two years to prepare oneself. Since under the conditions of a guaranteed existence minimum this decision would imply having to live with a minimum of comfort, it would require great enthusiasm for and interest in one’s newly chosen field, and thus only those who were gifted and really interested would make the choice. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Or let us take a woman living in an unhappy marriage, whose only reason for not leaving her husband is the inability to support herself for the time necessary to be trained for a job. Or let us think of an adolescent living in severe conflicts with a neurotic or destructive father, whose mental healthy would be saved if he were free to leave his family. Briefly, the most fundamental coercion on economic grounds in business and private relations would be removed and the freedom to act would be restored to everybody. What about costs? Since we already have adopted the principle for the unemployed, the sick and aged, there would only be a marginal group of additional people who would make use of this privilege, the ones who are particularly gifted, those who find themselves in a temporary conflict, and the neurotic ones who have no sense of responsibility, or interest in work. Considering all factors involved, it would seem that the number of people using this privilege would not be extraordinarily high, and by careful research an approximate estimate could even be made today. However, it must be emphasized that this proposal is to be taken together with the other social changes suggested here, and that in a society in which the individual citizen actively participates in one’s work, the number of people not interested in work would only be a fraction of what it is under present-day conditions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Whatever their number, it seems that the cost for such a scheme would hardly be more tan what big states have spent for the maintenance of armies in the last decades, not taking into consideration the cost of armaments. It should also not be forgotten that in a system which restores interest in life and in work to everybody, the productivity of the individual worker would be far above that reported today as a result of even a few favorable changes in the work situation; in addition, our expenses due to criminality, neurotic or psychosomatic illness would be considerably less. Less dramatic illustrations of the loss of the sense of power of the self are present all around us in contemporary society, and, indeed, are so common that we generally take them for granted. For example, there is the curious remark made regularly nowadays at the end of radio programs, “Thanks for listening.” When you come to think of it, this remark is quite amazing. Why should the person who is doing the entertaining, who is giving something ostensibly of value, thank the recipient for taking it? To acknowledge applause is one thing, but thanking the recipient for deigning to listen and be amused is a quite different thing. It betokens that the action is given its value, or lack of value, by the whim of the consumer, the receiver—in the case of our illustration the consumer being their majesties, the public. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Imagine Kreisler, after playing a concerto, thanking the audience for listening! The parallel suggested by the radio announcer’s remark is the court jester, who not only had to perform but at the same time to beg the majesties who watched to deign to be amused—and proverbially the court jester was in as humiliating a position as a human being could occupy. Obviously we are not criticizing radio announcers as such. This remark merely illustrates an attitude which runs through our society: so many people judge the value of their actions not on the basis of the action itself, but on the basis of how the action is accepted. It is as though one has always to postpone one’s judgment until one looked at one’s audience. The person who is passive, to whom or for whom the act is done, as the power to make the act effective or ineffective, rather than the one who is doing it. Thus we tend to be performers in life rather than persons who live and act as selves. The alternative of having versus being does not appeal to common sense. To have, so it would seem, is a normal function of our life: in order to live we must have things. Moreover, we must have things in order to enjoy them. In a culture in which the supreme goal is to have—and to have more and more—and in which one can speak of someone as being worth a million dollars, how can there be any alternative between having and being? #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
One the contrary, it would seem that the very essence of being is having; that if one has nothing, one is nothing. Yet the great Masters of Living have made the alternative between having and being a central issues of their respective systems. In order to arrive at the highest state of human development, we must not crave possession. “For whosoever will save one’s life shall lose it; but whosoever will lose one’s life for my sake, the same shall save it. For what is a mortal advantaged, if one gains the whole World, and loses oneself, or be cast away?” reports Luke 9.24-25. To have nothing and make oneself open and empty, not letting one’s selfishness get in one’s way, is the condition for achieving spiritual wealth and strength. Luxury can be as much as a nice as poverty, depending on what one does to obtain it. Having and being are two fundamental modes of experience, the respective strengths of which determine the differences between the character of individuals and various types of social character. The force of life is stronger than the force of mere intellectual curiosity. The difference between being and having is not essentially that between East and West. The difference is rather between a society centered around persons and one centered around things. The having orientation is characteristic of Western industrial society, in which greed for money, fame, and power has become the dominant theme of life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Many modern people cannot understand the spirit of a society that is not centered in property and prosperity. Love becomes a goddess, an idol into which the mortal projects one’s loving; in this process of alienation one ceases to experience love, but is in touch only with one’s capacity to love by one’s submission to the goddess of Love. One has ceased to be an active person who feels; instead one has become an alienated worshiper of an idol, and one is lost wen out of touch with one’s idol. I have transformed my feeling into something I possess: the problem. However, problem is an abstract expression for all kinds of difficulties. I cannot have a problem, because it is not a thing that can be owned; it, however, can have me. That is to say, I have transformed myself into a problem and am now owned by my creation. This way of speaking betrays a hidden, unconscious alienation. To say I have a great love for you is meaningless. Love is not a thing that one can have, but a process, an inner activity that one is the subject of. I can love, I can be in love, but in loving, I have nothing. In fact, the less I have, the more I can love. To have is a deceptively simple expression. Every human being has something: a body, clothes, shelter—on up to the modern man or woman who has a car, a television set, a washing machine, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Living without having something is virtually impossible. Why, then, should having be a problem? Yet the linguistic history of having indicates that the word is indeed a problem. To those who believe that to have is a most natural category of human existence it may come as a surprise to learn that many languages have no word for to have. It is clear that some people do not understand the word for to have as it developed in connection with the development of private property, while it is absent in societies with predominately functional property, that is, possession for the use. And that is why Eastern philosophies are hard to understand or may lead people in Western society astray. Traditionally, the way mortals have overcomes the daimonic is by naming it. In this way, the human being forms personal meaning out of what was previously a merely threatening impersonal chaos. We need only recall the crucial importance historically knowing the particular name of the demon in order to expell him. In the New Testament, Jesus calls out “Beelzebub!” or “Legion!” or some other presumably accurate name, and the devils or devils leave the possessed unfortunate immediately. The priests who were successful at casting out devils in the Middle Ages were those who could divine the name of the demon, the pronouncing of which was sufficient to conjure the evil spirit out and away. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
God Keep You from the Knowledge of Who You Are–How Much Self-Knowledge Can a Human Being Bear?
She was absolutely ablaze with an inner concentration power. Liberty, equality, fraternity—it should be acknowledged that, very often, those three words bring nothing to our mind except the picture on currency or the inscription on the front doors of public buildings. However, human beings are really free under three conditions: Economic freedom, intellectual freedom, and moral freedom. Economic freedom declares that mortals have an inalienable right to work. One has to have absolute right to the fruit of one’s work from which one should not part except freely. Work should also be understood as everything of value that one brings to society. Intellectual freedom dictates that a mortal cannot be really free if one has an ideal and philosophical attitude which makes it possible for one to have a coherent activity in life. One cannot, under pretext of hastening one’s economic or intellectual liberation, use means contrary to the ethics of the community. Last, moral freedom does not mean license. It would be easy to demonstrate that moral freedom is to be found only within strict observance of the group ethics freely accepted. Fraternity can blossom only in society. Selfishness is a dangerous and non-lasting way of helping oneself. Mortals cannot separate their true interest from those of society. One can help only by helping society. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
We should become conscious that our own inclinations make us find an increase of joy with others. Solidarity is not only a task, it is a satisfaction and the best guarantee of security. Fraternity leads to mutual tolerance and to the determination never to separate. This makes it possible to take all decisions unanimously on a common minimum. Equality-we condemn those who declare demagogically that all people are equal. We can see that people are not equal in their life situations, and sometimes under other circumstances. People are not even viewed as equal under the law. Some people are given more clot than others and preferential treatment. For us equality of rights means to put at the disposal of everyone the means to fulfill oneself completely. It is important to devise a scheme in which active participation of everyone does not contradict a sufficiently centralized leadership; irrational authority has to be replaced by rational authority. There is an emphasis on the practice of life as against ideological differences. This emphasis enables people of the most varied and contradictory convictions to live together in humanity and tolerance without any danger of having to follow the right opinion proclaimed by the community. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Inasmuch as the work is not attractive technically, it is meaningful and attractive in its social aspect. Activity in the arts and science is an integral part of the total situation. Even during the Renaissance, the concept of imitations, or mimesis, involved the creation of representations that transcended mere appearance, that implied the sacred or spiritual essence of things. Various media develops a response to artists’ desire to imitate reality and express themselves more and more fluently. Some artists are interested in the ominous underside of contemporary culture that lurks as an ever present possibility in our lives. The goal is to portray psychological states that everyone experiences. Sometimes, like in Jane Dickson’s, Stairwell, 1984 one can almost feel the acid biting into the plate, as if the process itself is a metaphor for the pain and isolation of the figure learning forlornly over the bannister. Although it is printed in three colors, the roughness of the method’s surface serves to underscore the emotional turmoil and psychological isolation embodied in her subject matter. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The situation of alienation is overcome, work has become a meaningful expression of human energy, human solidarity is established without restriction of freedom—or danger of conformity. While many of the arrangements and principles of the communities can be questioned and argued about, it seems nevertheless that we have here one of the most convincing empirical examples of a productive life, and of possibilities which are generally looked upon as fantastic from the standpoint of our present-day life in Capitalism. The communities descried so far are, of course, not the only examples for the possibility of Capitalistic lifestyles with a humanitarian focus. They do, however, contribute to our knowledge of the possibilities of a new style of life. They also show that most of these communities are executed by people with a shrewd intelligence, and immensely practical sense. Undoubtedly, there have been many shortcomings in the principles and practice of these experiments, which must be recognized in order to be avoided. Many times people fail and it is in several cases essentially a symptom of the laziness of the mind and the inherent conviction that what has not been cannot be and will not be. The aim is to create a work situation which gives one a lifetime and energy to something which has meaning for the individual, in which one knows what one is doing, has an influence on what is being done, and feel untied with, rather than separated from, one’s fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worthy and dignity of the human being. When the individual is being swallowed up in the herd, and one is living by slave morality, it will de-humanize people and they will literally lose their identity as persons. However, this lose of the sense of self did not occur overnight. Many can recall the growing tendency to think of the self in superficial and oversimplified terms. Self-expression was supposed to be simply doing whatever popped into one’s head, as though the self were synonymous with any random impulse, and as though one’s decisions were to be made on the basis of a whom which might be a product of indigestion from a hurried lunch just as often as of one’s philosophy of life. To be yourself was then an excuse for relaxing into the lowest common denominator of inclination. To know one’s self was not thought to be especially difficult, and the problems of personality could be solved relatively easily by better adjustment. We were then congratulating ourselves that the child could be conditioned out of fear, superstition and other problem by techniques not essentially different from the way the dog’s saliva is conditioned to flow every time the dinner gong rings. These superficial views of the human situation were also furthered by the belief in automatic economic progress—we would all get richer and richer without too much struggles or suffering. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Practically everyone who gets their information for the media alone, without doing further research, shares the same oversimplified view of the human being and society. Science is advancing so rapidly that soon we will give people whatever temperament one desires, choleric or timid, strong or weakly gendered, merely by chemical injections into the body. However true this kind of push-button psychology is becoming a reality, it was the basis for the satire which Aldous Huxley have it in his Brave New World. People have become too confident in techniques and gadgets, not in the human being. The oversimplified, mechanical view of the self really betokens an underlying lack of belief in the dignity, complexity and freedom of the person. It is clear that the disbelief in the power and dignity of the person is becoming more openly accepted, for there appears a good deal of concrete evidence that the individual self is insignificant and that one’s personal choices do not matter. In the face of totalitarian democratic movements and controlled economic earthquakes like the housing shortage, we tend to feel smaller and smaller as persons. The individual self is dwarfed into as ineffectual a position as the proverbial grain of sand pushed around by ocean breakers. We move on as the wheel wills; one revolution registers all things, the rise and fall in pay and prices. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Most people now, therefore, are able to find good external reason for their belief that as selves they are insignificant and powerless. For how can one act, they well ask, in the face of the giant economic, political and social movements of the time? Authoritarianism in religion and science, let alone politics, is becoming increasingly accepted, not particularly because so many people explicitly believe in it but because they feel themselves individually powerless and anxious. So what else can one do, goes the reasoning, except follow the mass political leader (as happened in Europe) or follow the authority of customs, public opinion, and social expectations as is the tendency in this country? What is forgotten in such reasoning, is, of course, the fact that the loss of belief in the worth of the person is partly the cause of these mass social and political movements. Or, to put it more accurately, the loss of the self and the rise of collectivist movements, as we have pointed out, are both the result of the same underlying historical changes in our society. We need, therefore, to fight on both flanks—to oppose democratic totalitarianism and the other tendencies toward dehumanization of the person on one flank, and to recover our experience and belief in the worth and dignity of the person on the others. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
A startling picture of the loss of the sense of self in our society is given in a short novel, The Stranger, by the contemporary French author Albert Camus. It is the story of a Frenchman who is extraordinary in no respect—indeed, he might well be called an average modern man. He experiences the death of his mother, goes to work and about the ordinary things of life, has an affair and experiences pleasures of the flesh, all without any clear decision or awareness on his part. He later shoots a man, and it is vague even in his own mind whether he shot by accident or in self-defense. He goes through a murder trial and is executed, all with a horrible sense of unreality, as though everything happened to him: he never acted himself. The book is pervaded by a vagueness and haze which is frustrating and shocking, like the similar haze which is frustrating and shocking, like the similar haze of indecisiveness in Kafka’s stories. Everything seems to take place in a dream, with the man never really related to the World or anything he does or to himself. He is a man without courage or despair, despite the outwardly tragic events, because he has no awareness of himself. At the end when he is awaiting execution he almost gets a glimmer of the realization, as expressed, say in the words of George Herbert, “A sick toss’d vessel, dashing on each thing…My God, I mean myself.” Almost, but not quite; there is not enough sense of himself for even that to break through. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The novel is haunting and subtly terrifying picture of the modern mortal who is truly a stranger to himself. Thus far the argument here has been that the character traits engendered by our socioeconomic system, for example, by our way of living, are pathogenic and eventually produce a sick person and, thus, a sick society. There is, however, a second argument from an entirely different viewpoint in favor of profound psychological changes in mortal as an alternative to economic and ecological catastrophe. It is raised in two reports that deal with the technological, economic, and population trends on a World scale. The only drastic economic and technological changes on a global level, according to a master plan, can avoid major and ultimately global catastrophe. Economic changes are possible only if fundamental changes in the values and attitude of mortals occur (in human character orientations), such as a new ethic and a new attitude toward nature. New society is possible only if, in the process of developing it, a new human being also develops, or in more modest terms, if a fundamental change occurs in contemporary mortal’s character structure. Our present social order makes us sick, and we are headed for an economic catastrophe unless we radically change our social system. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The need for profound human changes emerges not only as an ethical or religious demand, not only as a psychological demand arising from the pathogenic nature of our present social character, but also as a condition for the sheer survival of the human race. Right living is not longer only the fulfillment of an ethical or religious demand. For the first time in history the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of human heart. However, a change of the human heart is possible only to the extent that drastic economic and social changes occur that give the human heart the change for change and the courage and the vision to achieve it. The almost unbelievable fact is that besides what President Trump is doing, no serious effort is made to avert what looks like a final decree of fate. While in our private life nobody except a mad person would remain passive in view of a threat to our total existence, those who are in charge of public affairs do practically nothing, and those who have entrusted their fate to them let them continue to do nothing. How is it possible that the strongest of all instincts, that for survival, seems to have ceased to motivate us? One of the most obvious explanations is that the leaders undertake any actions that make it possible for them to pretend they are doing something effective to avoid a catastrophe: endless conferences, resolutions, disarmament talks, all give the impression that the problems are recognized and something is being done to resolve them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Yet, while the appearance the people are listening, understanding and planning to take action to protect the citizens and their land, nothing of real importance happens; but both the leaders and the led anesthetize their consciences and their wish for survival by giving the appearance of knowing the road and marching in the right direction. Another explanation is that the selfishness the system generates makes leaders value personal success more highly than social responsibility. It is no longer shocking when political leaders and business executives make decisions that seem to be to their personal advantage, but at the same time are harmful and dangerous to the community. Indeed, if selfishness is one of the pillars of contemporary practical ethical, why should they act otherwise? They do not seem to know that greed (like submission) makes people stupid as far as the pursuit of even their own real interests is concerned, such as their interest in their own lives and the lives of their spouses and their children. At the same time, the general public is also selfishly concerned with their private affairs that they pay little attention to all that transcends the personal realm. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Yet another explanation for the deadening of our survival instincts is that the changes in living that would be required are so drastic that people prefer the future catastrophe to the sacrifice they would have to make now. Arthur Koestler’s description of an experience he had during the Spanish Civil War is a telling example of this widespread attitude: Arthur Koestler sat in the comfortable villa of a friend while the advance of Franco’s troops was reported; there was no doubt that they would arrive during the night, and very likely he would be shot; he could save his life by feeling, but the night was cold and rainy, the house, warm and cozy; so he stayed, was taken prisoner, and only by almost a miracle was his life saved many weeks later by the efforts of friendly journalists. This is also the kind of behavior that occurs in people who will risk dying rather than undergo an examination that could lead to the diagnosis of a grave illness requiring major surgery. And many of us have been there, we will wait months and sometimes even years before we find out what is going on with us because will think it will heal on its own, and it actually ends up getting worse. Aside from these explanations for fatal human passivity in matters of life and death, there is another. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Knowledge is another expression of the soul. The aura of mystical emanation which, in most people’s minds, surrounds the physicists or the psychiatrist or psychologist, is composed of both veneration and suspicion. It is a contemporary form of an age-old phenomenon believed in not only by primitive people but by all people down through history; that acquiring knowledge gives one a soul weapon over other people. If I have some special knowledge of you or your World which you do not know, I have power over you. This may be as simple as the fact that I know how something works and you do not; but basically, it is much more complex: it always skates on the edge of participation in the primitive belief that this knowledge gives me a special magical power. Some of the animosity against psychiatrists and psychologist and, specifically, against psychoanalysts (who have to challenge the demons, and it would be a wonder if they dd get off unscathed) arises from this deep-seated fear. Mortals in these professions, it is felt by many people, have a knowledge of life and death which others do not. Thus, there is a tendency to cling to them as gods one day and fight them as hated devils the next. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Knowledge is also our source of freedom and security. The truth shall set you free. However, in our emphasis on the gaining of knowledge, we have assumed that it was a one-way street—the more knowledge, the better; and we have forgotten this ambivalent, double character of knowledge, that it is also dangerous. We hear so much these days about knowledge bringing power, security, financial success, and so on, that we overlook the fact that the very word which refers to the acquiring of knowledge, “apprehend,” is also the word which means dread, “apprehension.” Looking in Webster’s, we find the definitions of apprehend: to perceive, to recognize the meaning of, to lay hold of with understanding; and the very next meaning is to anticipate with anxiety, dread of fear. And the same with “apprehension”: the first meaning, a grasp of the mind, is followed by the second, a distrust of fear of future evil. It cannot be an accident that woven into the very fabric of our language is the relationship between knowledge and the soul. “How dangerous it is to know,” we can say with Oedipus, “But I must know, no less.” It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
It is the psychoanalyst who can afford to forget this least of all. Patients come for treatment ostensibly with open arms for revelations about themselves. However, woe to the therapist who takes this at face value! The whole meaning of resistance and repression testifies to the anxiety and pain accompanying these disclosures about one’s self. That is one reason why it is good that the patient pay for one’s sessions; is one will not take too much when one pays for it, one will take scarcely a thing given one gratis! This gives us a new approach to the concept of resistance and repression—they reveal in person an inescapable need to hide from the truth about oneself. It is perpetually a moot question: How much self-knowledge can a human being bear? Oedipus is the prototype of the person who gains knowledge about oneself and pays the ultimate price for it. He is well aware of the threatening quality of knowledge: “Oh, I am in dread to hear,” he cries, “but I must hear no less.” Tiresias tries to persuade him not to search: “How terrible it is to know when no good comes from knowing.” The issue in the drama is, Shall Oedipus know what he has done? Shall Oedipus know who he is and what his origins are? Everyone commits these acts, in fantasy if not in reality—and in reality by the vicarious means of war and organized violence which one’s nation gives one. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
In actual fact, the only difference between Oedipus and the rest of humankind is that Oedipus faced and admitted what he had done despite all attempted persuasions to the contrary. Even Oedipus’ wife, Jocasta, joins in the general consensus that it is best that he remain in darkness; to show that she means this as a general principle of life, she attacks all the soothsayers and those who deal in myths or take the mysteries of the soul seriously: “Have no part of this craft,” she adjures her husband; dreams are not to be taken seriously and it is best to “live unthinking as a man may.” When the truth finally dawns on her (and it is important to keep in mind that she did not know this when she advised Oedipus not to seek his origins), she cries out desperately to her husband, “God keep you from the know of who you are!” However, Oedipus is a hero precisely because he will not let Tiresias or his wife or God or anyone else stand in the way of his knowledge about himself. He is the hero because he is man facing his own reality. Not that he does not cry out with the pain of it—he does, time and again. However, he repeats, “I will not stop till I have known the whole.” He also knows there are no false heroics “Curse on the man who took the cruel bonds from off my legs, as I lay in the field.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Though he curses the childhood which brought him this fate, he confronts it directly, and destroys himself in the process: a relatively happy and successful king transformed into a blind, bad-tempered, old man exiled to Colonus. However, he knows. And this courage to know, be it noted, with all its destructive possibilities, is found in the same person who can answer the riddle of the sphinx, the one who knows what man is. Down through the ages, mortals have tried through their myths to tell each other of this connection between knowledge and the soul. In Goethe’s Faust, the hero has such an all-encompassing drive to possess knowledge that the sells his soul to Mephistopheles and counts the price light—which was Goethe’s, and the myth’s way of saying that to give in to such an infinite passion for knowledge is already to have become one of the devil’s World. Adam and Eve are thrown out of Eden because they, having eaten of the tree of good and evil, now have knowledge; and this makes them like the gods, immortal. The legend portrays the birth of human consciousness and states that consciousness carries the soul with it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The myth of Prometheus has a parallel meaning: the god’s disclosing of the cultural arts to mortals—central in which is language—amounts to the setting of oneself against the other gods and incurring everlasting torment. Therefore, the more the soul is recognized, the more we shall be able to use the knowledge we acquire or our benefit and humankind’s. “O how great the plan of our God! For on the other hand, the paradise of God must deliver up the spirits of the righteous, and the grave deliver up the body of the righteous; and the spirit and the body is restored to itself again, and all mortals become incorruptible, and immortal, and they are living souls, having a perfect knowledge like unto us in the flesh, save it be that our knowledge shall be perfect,” reports 2 Nephi 9.13. The difficulty of understanding faith either as a matter of the intellect or as a matter of will, or of both in mutual support, has led to the interpretation of faith as emotion. This solution was, and partly is, supported from both the religious and the secular side. For the defenders of religion it was a retreat to a seemingly safe position after the battle about faith as a matter of knowledge or will had been lost. Religion is the feeling of unconditional dependence. Of course, feeling so defined does not mean in religion what it means in popular psychology. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Religion is not vague and changing, but as a definite content: unconditional dependence, a phrase related to what we have called ultimate concern. Nevertheless, the word feeling as induced many people to believe that faith is a matter of merely subjective emotions, without a content to be known and a demand to be obeyed. This interpretation of faith was readily accepted by representatives of science and ethics, because they took it as the best way to get rid of the interference from the side of religion in the process of scientific research and technical organization. If religion is mere feeling it is innocuous. The old conflicts between religion and culture are finished. Culture goes its way, directed by scientific knowledge, and religion is the private affair of every individual and a mere mirror of one’s emotional life. No claims for truth can be made by it. No competition wit science, history, psychology, politics is possible. Religion, put safely into the corner of subjective feelings, has lost its danger for mortal’s cultural activities. Neither of the two sides, the religious and the cultural, could keep this well-defined covenant of peace. Faith the state of ultimate concern claims the whole mortal and cannot be restricted to the subjectivity of mere feeling. It claims truth for its concern and commitment to it. It does not accept the situation in the corner of mere feeling. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
If the whole mortal is grasped, all one’s functions are grasped. If this claim of religion is denied, religion itself is denied. It was not only religion which could not accept the restriction of faith to feeling. It was also not accepted by those who were especially interested in pushing religion into the emotional corner. Scientists, artist, moralists showed clearly that they also were ultimately concerned. Their concern expressed itself even in those creations in which they wanted most radically to deny religion. A keen analysis of most philosophical, scientific and ethical systems shows how much ultimate concern in present in them, even if they are leading in the fight against what they call religion. This show the limits of the emotionalist definition of faith. Certainly faith as an act of the whole personality has strong emotional elements within it. Emotion always expresses the involvement of the whole personality in an act of life or spirit. However, emotion is not the source of faith. Faith is definite in its direction and concrete in its content. Therefore, it claims truth and commitment. It is directed toward the unconditional, and appears in a concrete reality that demands and justifies such commitment. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Softened by Time’s Consummate Plush and then We Knelt in Prayer
Well, now that is fascinating! So this dapper dude with the easy smile on his lips, wonderfully sunburnt tan skin, large and almost Graeco-Roman features, wearing the de rigueur New Orleans white linen three-piece suit does not always know what he is doing. My thesis is correct! I tried desperately to read the thoughts behind Erich’s words, but I could not. These May’s were so casually and maddeningly gifted. Maybe the man was not defenseless. He was just so strong he did not bother to put up any defenses. Obsessional work alone would drive people just as crazy as would complete laziness. With the combination, they can live. Besides, both contradictory attitudes correspond to an economic necessity: twenty-first century capitalism is based on maximal consumption of the goods and services produced as well as on routinized teamwork. Theoretical considerations demonstrate that radical hedonism cannot lead to happiness as well as why it cannot do so, given human nature. However, even without theoretical analysis the observable data show most clearly that our kind of pursuit of happiness does not produce well-being. We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent—people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Ours is the greatest social experiment ever made to solve the question whether pleasure (as passive affect in contrast to the active affect, well-being and joy) can be a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. For the first time in history the satisfaction of the pleasure drive is not only the privilege of a minority but is possible for more than half the population. The experiment has already answered the question in the negative. The second psychological premise of the information age, that the pursuit of individual narcissism leads to harmony and peace, growth in everyone’s welfare, is equally erroneous on theoretical grounds, and again its fallacy is proven by observable data. To be a narcissist not only refers to my behavior but to my character. It means: that I want everything for myself; that possessing, not sharing, gives me pleasure; that I must become greedy because if my aim is having, I am more the more I have; that I must feel antagonistic toward all others; my customers whom I want to deceive, my competitors whom I want to destroy, my workers whom I want to exploit. I can never be satisfied, because there is no end to my wishes; I must be envious of those who have more and afraid of those who have less. However, I have to repress all these feelings in order to represent myself (to others as well as to myself) as the smiling, rational, sincere, kind human being everybody pretends to be. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
The passion for having must lead to never-ending class war. The pretense of the socialists and communists that the communists that their system will end class struggle by abolishing classes is fiction, for their system is based on the principle of unlimited consumption as the goal of living. As long as everybody want to have more, there must be formations of classes, there must be class war, and in global terms, there must be international war. Greed and peace preclude each other. Radical hedonism and unlimited egotism could not have emerged as guiding principles of economic behavior had not a drastic change occurred in the eighteenth century. In medieval society, as in many other highly developed as well as primitive societies, economic behavior was determined by ethical principles. Thus, for the scholastic theologians, such as economic categories as price and private property were part of moral theology. Granted that the theologians found formulations to adapt their moral code to the new economic demands (for instance qualification to the concept of just price); nevertheless, economic behavior remained human behavior and, hence, was subjected to the values of humanistic ethics. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Through a number of steps eighteenth century capitalism underwent a radical change: economic behavior became separate from ethics and human values. Indeed, the economic machine was supposed to be an autonomous entity, independent of human needs and human will. It was a system that ran by itself and according to its own laws. The suffering of the workers as well as the destruction of an ever-increasing number of smaller enterprises for the sake of the growth of ever larger corporations was an economic necessity that one might regret, but that one had to accept as if it were the outcome of a natural law. American people are all supposed to be happy and nice because American culture is all about the American Dream, where people get an education, buy a house work hard and their dreams come true. America is supposed to be the beacon of light for the World. The development of this economic system was no longer determined by the question: What is good for Mortals? but by the questions: What is good for the growth of the system? One tried to hide the sharpness of this conflict by making the assumption that what was good for the growth of the system (or even for a single big corporation) was also good for the people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
This construction was bolstered by an auxiliary construction: that the very qualities that the system required of human beings—narcissism, selfishness, and greed—were innate in human nature; hence, not only the system but human nature itself fostered them. Societies in which narcissism, selfishness, and greed did not exist were supposed to be primitive, their inhabitants childlike. People refused to recognize that these traits were not natural drives that caused industrial society to exist, but that they were the products of social circumstances. Not least in importance is another factor: people’s relation to nature became deeply hostile. Being freaks of nature who by the very conditions of our existence are within nature and by the gift of our reason transcend it, we have tried to solve our existential problem by giving up the Messianic vision of harmony between humankind and nature by conquering nature, by transforming it to our own purposes until the conquest has become more and more equivalent to destruction. Our spirit of conquest and hostility has blinded us to the facts that natural resources have their limits and can eventually be exhausted, and that nature will fight back against human rapaciousness. The information age has contempt for nature—as well as for all things not machine-made and for all people who are not machine makers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
People are attracted today to the mechanical, the powerful machine, the lifeless, and ever increasingly to destruction. However, the ideal of the brotherhood and sisterhood of mortals is to a considerable extent furthered by economic competition—the tremendous scientific gains, the new factories and the more rapid moving of the wheels of the industry increased mortal’s material weal and physical health immensely, and for the first time in history our factories and our science can now produce so much that it is possible to wipe starvation and material want from the face of the Earth. One could well have argued that science and competitive industry were bringing humankind ever closer to its ethical ideas of universal humanity. However, in the first few decades it has become clear that this marriage is fully of conflict, and is headed for drastic overhauling or for divorce. For now the great emphasis on one person getting ahead of the other, whether it being getting higher grades in school, or more stars after one’s name in Sunday school, or gaining proof of salvation by being economically successful greatly blocks the possibilities of loving one’s neighbor. And, it even blocks the love between brother and sister and husband and wife in the same family. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Furthermore, since our World is now made literally one World by scientific and industrial advances, our inherited emphasis on individual competitiveness is as obsolete as though each mortal were to deliver one’s own letters by one’s own pony express. The final eruption which showed the underlying contradictions in our society was fascist totalitarianism, in which the humanist and Hebrew-Christian values, particularly the value of the person, were flouted in a mammoth upsurgence of barbarism. Some may be thinking that many of the above questions are stated wrongly—why does economic striving need to be against one’s fellow mortals, and why reason against emotion? True, but the characteristic of a period of change like the present is precisely that everyone does ask the wrong questions. The old goals, criteria, principles are still there in our minds and habits, but they do not fit, and hence most people are eternally frustrated by asking questions which never could lead to the right answer. Or they become lost in a potpourri of contradictory answers—reason operates while one goes to class, emotion when one visits one’s over, will power when one studies for an exam, and religious duty at funerals on Easter Sunday. This compartmentalization of values and goals leads very quickly to an undermining of the unity of the personality, and the person, in pieces within as well as without, does not know which way to go. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
As we see the splitting up of the personality, we must find a new unity in our lives. If the husband simply goes off to business, keeping one’s work and one’s family in different compartments like a good banker, and treats his wife as a doll, the house will collapse. As far as art goes, it must deal with the honest realities of life, and beauty has more to do with integrity than with prettiness. If people repress their emotions and try to act as unpleasant things do not exist, they end up neurotic. One must work out a technique for oneself to being out the deeper, unconscious, irrational levels in personality which have become suppressed, thus helping the person to become a thinking-feeling-willing unity. When done well, the benefits can be extraordinary. And as we learn to communicate, long-standing stereotypes can be dissolved, mistrust overcome, and visions shaped and grounded in a shared sense of purpose. People previously at odds with one another can come into alignment on objectives and strategies. New perspectives and insights can be gained, new levels of creativity stimulated, and bonds of community strengthened. Yes, we live in perilous times, but as we stay on the covenant path, we need not fear. I pray that the Holy Ghost will enlighten each of us as we consider how the principle of gathering together in one all things in Christ applies in practical ways to learning and living his restored gospel in our daily lives. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
People have seen the destruction of values which is occurring in our time, the loneliness, emptiness and anxiety which is engulfing some of us. We cannot ride on the goals of the past. Science is becoming a factory, and it is feared that mortal’s great advances in techniques without a parallel advance in ethics and self-understanding will lead to nihilism. There is a parable about the death of God. It is a haunting story of a madman who runs into the village square shouting, “Where is God?” It was written by Friedrich Nietzsche, and the people around did not believe in God; they laughed and said perhaps God had gone on a voyage or emigrated. The madman then shouted: “Whither is God? I shall tell you! We have killed him—you and I! Yet how have we done this? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when unchained this Earth from its Sun? Whither do we move now? Away from all Suns? Do we not fall incessantly? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there yet any up and down? Do we not err as through an infinite naught? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!” #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Here the madman became silent and looked again at his listeners: They too remained silent and looked at him. “I come too early,” he said then. “This tremendous event is still on its way.” Friedrich Nietzsche is not calling for a return to the conventional belief in God, but he is pointing out what happens when a society loss its center of values. That his prophecy came true is sown in the waves of massacres, pogroms and democratic tyranny. This tremendous event did not descend on us out of nowhere; a frightful night of barbarism did not just suddenly hit like the flood of Noah’s Ark. We have not yet found the new center which will enable us to choose our goals constructively, and thus to overcome the painful bewilderment and anxiety of not knowing which way to move. There is another form of impersonal soul which is society’s normal expression for at least part of this need. This is the curious phenomenon of masquerades and masked balls. Here is the cultivation of the fascination of the soul in anonymity—we do not know whose eyes are those of the person who seizes us or whom we seize to dance. We are freed, for the moment, from the perpetual responsibility—often wearisome indeed—of controlling our personal conduct. The masquerade, carnival and Fasching are forms in which society permits us to temporarily go back to the freedom of the soul in anonymity. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
As I recall from my own experience while living in Mediterranean countries, the carnivals before Lent were a great and delightful relief in which one could let off steam; they performed a catharsis not unlike that which the Dionysian festivals must have provided for the ancient Athenians. This cultural form of the soul seems to draw off urges for violence. It is of the essence of the exciting pleasures of this abandon, however, that it is temporary, sanctioned by the community, and that everybody participates. Oases of free abandon to the soul, these masked balls can exist only in the larger context of community catharsis and social approval. The next stage after the impersonal, both in the development of the infant and in each immediate experience of the adult, is to make the soul personal. To be human means to exist on the boundary between the anonymous and the personal. If we can channel the soul, we can become more individualized; if we let it disperse, we become anonymous. Mortal’s task, by virtue of the deepening and widening of one’s consciousness, is to integrate the soul into oneself. Making the soul anonymous personal requires standing up against the tendency of the soul to drive one into anonymity. This means enlarging our ability to break the automatic chain of stimulus and response; we can then, to some extent, choose what and what not to respond to. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
If the family training is rigid, or if there are traumatic experiences associated with it, the whole soul may be blocked off. No pleasures of the flesh can be experienced, or in some homes, never is any anger to be shown; the stage is then set for later demonic possession—and ultimate explosion. For these urges do not sleep; and, if they cannot be expressed beneficially, they explode or are projected on whoever is the enemy of the person or the group. The trick here is that we learn not to let our wills be sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought and lose the name of action, but rather that we integrate the soul power without destroying our spontaneity. This is possible in the new dimension of consciousness of which I speak. Thus, the soul becomes the personal power, the particular pattern of being which constitutes my own center, in this sense, individualizes. We can now understand how, in such a highly developed individual, the soul can be experienced as inner guidance: it is the voice in which one participates. However, having take cognizance of the fact that there are rational criteria for judging the soul, we must not forget the central and most perplexing issue, that it is impossible ever to make the soul fully rational. The soul will always be characterized by the paradox inhering in the fact that it is potentially creative and destructive at the same time. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
This is the most important question facing modern psychotherapy, and the most fateful also—for on it hinges the lasting success and the survival of therapy. If we try to avoid the dilemma of the soul, as many therapist wittingly or unwittingly do, by helping the patient adjust to the society, by offering one certain habits which we think are better for him or her, or by making one over to fit the culture, we are then inevitably engaged in manipulating the individual. If we surrender to our devils, we will lose our angels, too. The soul, which is part of knowledge and underlies love and will, acts as a gadfly to our consciousness by throwing us into continual dilemmas. The deepening and widening of consciousness we seek in psychotherapy consist not of the solution of these dilemmas—which is impossible anyway—but the confronting of them in such a way that we rise to a higher level of personal and interpersonal integration. In the classical Roman Catholic theology the will to believe is not an act which originates in mortal’s striving, but it is given by grace to one whose will is moved by God to accept the truth of what the Church teaches. Even so, it is not the intellect which is determined by its content to believe, but it is the will which performs what the intellect alone cannot do. This kind of interpretation agrees with the authoritarian attitude of the Roman Church. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
For it is the authority of the Church which gives the contents, to be affirmed by the intellect under the impact of the will. If the idea of grace mediated by the Church and motivating the will is rejected, as in pragmatism, the will to believe becomes willfulness. It becomes an arbitrary decision which may be supported by some insufficient arguments but which could have gone in other directions with equal justification. Such belief as the basis of the will to believe is certainly not faith. The will to believe demands the obedience of faith. It can also be the element of commitment which is implied in the state of ultimate concern. In the state of ultimate concern, all mental functions participate—which is certainly true. Obedience of faith can also mean subjection to the command to believe as it is given in prophetic and apostolic preaching. Certainly, if a prophetic word is accepted as prophetic, for instance, as coming from God, obedience of faith does not mean anything other than accepting a message as coming from God. However, if there is doubt whether a word is prophetic, then term obedience of faith loses its meaning. It becomes an arbitrary will to believe. The demand to be obedient is the demand to be what one already is. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
No command to believe and no will to believe can create faith. This is important for religious education, counseling and preaching. One should never convey the impression to those whom one wants to impress, that faith is a demand made upon them, the rejection of which is lack of good will. Finite mortals cannot produce the certainty which belongs to faith. This is in strict analogy to what we said about the impossibility of reaching the truth of faith by arguments and authorities, which in the best case give finite knowledge of a more or less probably character. Neither arguments for belief nor the will to believe can create faith. In a sense, the neighbor group is the most important unit in the community. It is a leaven and lever. It is required to meet at one of the families’ home and at no other place. There, while drinking coffee, all the issues are thrashed out together. Minutes of the meeting are taken down and sent to the Chief of Community, who sums up the minutes of all the neighbor groups. Answers to their questions are then given by those who are in charge of the different departments. In that way neighbor groups not only ask questions but voice discontent or make suggestions. It is also of course in the neighbor groups that people come to know each other best and help each other. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Another feature of the community is the court. It is elected by the general assembly, and its function is to decide on conflicts which arise between two departments, or between a department and a member; if the Chief of the Community cannot iron it out, the eight members of the Court (unanimous votes, as usual), do so. There is no set of law, and the verdicts is based on, and directed by the constitution of the Community, the common ethic minimum and common sense. The social department deals with all activities other than technical ones. All members, including wives, are expected to carry on their spiritual, intellectual, artistic and physical development. Reading the Rocklin Trails Le Lien monthly report is enlightening. Reports and commentaries on everything: football matches (competing with outside teams), photographic displays, visits to art exhibits, cooking recipes, ecumenical gatherings, reviews of musical performances such as Loewenguth Quartet, appreciation of films, lectures on Marxism, basketball scores, discussion on conscientious objections, accounts of the day at the farm, reports on what America has to teach, passages from St. Thomas Aquinas regarding money, reviews of books such as Louis Bromfield’s Pleasant Valley and Sartre’s Dirty Hands, etcetera. A resilient spirit of good will permeates it all. Le Lien is a candid picture of people who have said “yes” to life, and this with a maximum of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Perhaps better than any definition, some statements of members of the Community can give an idea of the spirit and practice of the Community of work: “I consider that one of the most beautiful human values is tolerance and the respect of religious and philosophical opinions. For that reason I feel particularly at home in Rocklin Trails. Not only is my freedom of thought and expression left intact, but I find in the community the material means and the time necessary to a deeper study of my philosophical conviction.” Another person declares, “I have been in the community for a while. I belong to a Catholic group. Like all Christians I am trying to build a society in which liberty and the dignity of the human beings will be respected. I declare, in the came of the whole Catholic group, the community is the type of society that a Christian can wish for. There, every person is free, respected, and everything inclines one to do better and to search for the Truth. If outwardly that society cannot be called Christian, it is Christian in fact. Christ gave us the sign through which it is possible to reorganize one’s own: And we do love one another. The community is composed of people who love one another fulfills our wishes to see people living in harmony together and knowing why they want to live.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
A Humanist writes: “I was 15 years old when I left school, I left the church at all, after my first communion. I had gone a little ahead in my schooling, but the spiritual problem was gone out of my mind. I was like the great majority: I did not give a d————–. At 22 I entered the community. At once I found there an atmosphere of study and work like in no other place. First I was attracted by the social side of the community, and it was only later that I understood what the human value could be. Then I rediscovered that spiritual and moral side which is in man and which I had lost at the age of 11. I belong to the humanist group, because I do not see the problem like the Christians or the materialists do. I love our community because through it all the deep aspirations which are in each of us can be awakened, met and developed, so that we may be transformed from individuals into men.” The community is not a new form of enterprise nor a reform in order to harmonize the relation capital-labor. It is a mode of living in which people find their fulfillment of life, equality, and fraternity. The real learning in this situation is that after a few trials, you begin to recognize certain patterns that do not work (call them blind alleys or errors), and so you eliminate then and concentrate only on those that give promise of working the two nails loose. Gradually, by eliminating more and more wrong twists and turns, you learn to solve the puzzle. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Many life problems are solved by the trial-and-error-or trial-and-success—method. It is one of our most basic learning strategies. People often learn best this way. They perform an action over and over again, gradually eliminating errors, doing a better job each time, until the task is learned. The original source of morality is experience. The only source of reformation is new and better experience. Why are we all not thieves? We are not thieves only partly because we learned the difference between mine and thine and that what is thine should stay thine. The people who learned no more than that did not actually learn even that. What they learned was that to expropriate what is thine can have unpleasant consequences, if the theft is discovered. If they are clever, they learned devious ways to seize what is not theirs, like the use of union funds for personal profit, or rigging the bidding on government contracts or manufacturing questionable medicines for large profits, and so on, endlessly. “Beware of this troubled World, watch out for Earthquakes. Goodbye to open sores, to broken semaphore. You know we miss her. We miss her picture. Sometimes it is fated. Disintegrated it for fear of growing old. Sometimes it is fated. Assassinated it for fear of growing old. Hang on, through we try, it is gone. For fear of growing old, cannot stop growing old,” reports Emma Hewitt (This Picture). #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
For Each Beloved Hour Heaven Had Come so Near and Wisdom is More Becoming Viewed at Distance than at Hand
I think on the contrary that I am now responsible for the supreme human obligation: to investigate the highest use of my powers. All ideas to make work interesting and meaningful again are really romantic dreams—the dreams of home ownership, buying your dream car, saving money, having a family, buying new clothes and book, the latest electronics and food you like are just a few of the many things that motivate people to work. In contrast, daydreaming is a symptom of lacking relatedness to reality. People daydream because they are not yet able to achieve their goals and want a distraction, an idea of what like will be like sometime in the future, or what life could have been like, only if they had made different decisions. Daydreaming is not refreshing or relaxing—it is essentially an escape with all the negative result that go with escape. On the other hand, laziness, far from being normal, is a symptom of mental pathology. In fact, one of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one’s life. Even if mortals have no monetary, or any other reward, one would be eager to spend one’s energy in some meaningful way because one could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces. Let us look at children: they are never lazy; given the slightest encouragement, or even without it, they are busy playing, asking questions, inventing stories, without any incentive expect the pleasure in the activity itself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
In the field of psychopathology we find that the person who has no interest in doing anything is seriously sick and is far from exhibiting the normal state of human nature. There is plenty of material about workers during periods of unemployment, who suffer as much, or more, from the enforced rest, as from material deprivations. There is just as much material to show that for many people over the sixty-five the necessity to stop working leads to profound unhappiness, and in many instances to physical deterioration and illness. Nevertheless, pain is important to our survival. It is a signal that we are being hurt and that we should do something to protect ourselves. Research indicates that there may be specific free nerve endings all over the body that convey the message of pain to the brain. If any of these receptors are stimulated to at least a certain degree of intensity, we feel pain. Some people are able to stand much more pain than others. They have a high pain threshold. More stimulation is needed to cause them pain. Some people can raise their pain threshold through hypnosis, medication, or some other training. Pain is also thought to be a great motivator because it pushes people to find an escape, to get more creative about their work, to finally produce something that will make them a success so they can escape the pain. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Some people would rather experience pain than boredom, as boredom could lead to dangerous and destructive behaviors. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for the widespread belief in mortal’s innate laziness. The main reason lies in the fact that alienated work is boring and unsatisfactory; that a great deal of tension and hostility is engendered, which leads to an aversion against the work one is doing and everything connected with it. As a result, we find a longing for laziness and for doing noting to be the ideal of many people. Thus, people feel that their laziness is the natural state of mind, rather than the symptom of a pathological condition of life, the result of meaningless and alienated work. Examining the current views on work motivation, it becomes evident that they are based on the concept of alienated work and hence that their conclusions do not apply to nonalienated, attractive work. Yet, not all nonalienated attractive work pays well, and still renders pain, but people keep going because they believe that one day their hard work will somehow pay off. Everyone has a story to tell and is just looking for the right person to tell it to. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, not everyone is looking to get famous off of their story and share it with the World. Some people just want to share their story with the right party, who can take the appropriate actions. When we are not able to express what we are going through and immediately take action, do not get frustrated and keep your faith in God. Know that God sees everything, and he loves you. God did not bring you this far to let you fall in despair. The conventional and most common theory is that money is the main incentive for work. This answer can have two different meanings: first, that the fear of starvation is the main incentive for work; in this case the argument is undoubtedly true. Many types of work would never be accepted on the basis of wages or other work conditions were the worker not confronted with the alternative of accepting these conditions or of starvation. The unpleasant, undesirable work in our society is done not voluntarily, but because the need to make a living forces so many people to do it. More often the concept of money incentive refers to the wish to earn more money as the motivation to greater effort in working. If mortals were not lured by the hope of greater monetary reward, this argument says, one would not work at all, or at least, would work without interest. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
This conviction still exists among the majority of industrialists, as well as among many union leaders. Thus, for instance, fifty manufacturing executives replied to the question as to what is of importance in increasing worker’s productivity: 44 percent responded that money alone is the answers, 28 percent declared money is by far the chief thing but some importance is to be attached to less tangible things, and another 28 percent said that money is important but beyond a certain point it will not produce results. Actually, employers throughout the World are in favor of wage-incentive plans as the only means which lead to higher productivity of the individual worker, to higher earnings for the workers and employers and thus, indirectly, to reduced absenteeism, easier supervision, and so on. Reports and surveys from industry and government bureaus generally attest to the effectiveness of wage-incentive plans in increasing productivity and achieving other objectives. It seems that workers also believe that incentive pay gets the most output per mortal. In fact, 65 percent of employees said that incentive pay makes for higher production. However, as to the question of which method of pay they prefer, 65 percent said that incentive pay increases output and 29 percent stated that incentive pay. (The ratio pf preference for hourly pay was 74 to 20 in the case of hourly workers, but even in the case of workers already on incentive pay, 59 percent were in favor of hourly pat as against 36 percent in favor of incentive pay.) #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The latter findings show that as useful as incentive pay is in raising output, it does not in itself solve the problem of obtaining workers’ cooperation. In some circumstances it may intensify that problem. This opinion is shared increasingly by industrial psychologists and even some industrialists. However, the discussion about money incentives would be incomplete if we did not consider the fact that the same wish for more money is constantly fostered by the same industry which relies on money as the main incentive for work. By advertising, installment plan systems, and many other devices, the individual’s greed to buy more and newer things is stimulated to the point that one can rarely have enough money to satisfy these needs. Thus, being artificially stimulated by industry, the monetary incentive plays a greater role than it otherwise would. Furthermore, it goes without saying that the monetary incentive must play a paramount role as long as it is the only incentive because the work process itself is unsatisfactory and boring. There are many examples of cases in which people choose work with less monetary reward if the work itself is more interesting. Aside from money, prestige, status and the power that goes with it are assumed to be the main incentives for work. There is no need to prove that the craving for prestige and power constitutes the most powerful incentive for work today among the middle and upper classes; in fact, the importance of money is largely that of representing prestige, at least as much as security and comfort. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
However, while economic independence and skill were important satisfactions for the independent businessperson, artisan, and highly skilled worker, these motivations are now rapidly decreasing. Discoveries are starting great waves of change in human culture, and in such a manner that these discoveries may deepen not erode the sense of universal human community. The differences in the disciplines, their epistemological exclusiveness, the variety of historical experiences, the differences of traditions, of cultures, of languages, of the arts, should be protected and preserved. However, the interrelationship and unity of the whole should at the same time be accepted. The ultimate awareness to the hopes and fears which pervade modern society rest on the moral fibre of mortals, and on the wisdom and responsibility of those who promote the course of its development. However, moral decisions cannot dispense with an insight into the interplay of the objective elements which offer and limit the choices made. Therefore, an understanding of what the issues are, though not a sufficient condition, is necessary prerequisite for directing action toward constructive solutions. Other vital questions explored relate to problems of international understanding as well as to problems dealing with prejudice and the resultant tensions and antagonisms. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The growing perception and responsibility of our World Age point to the new reality that the individual person and the collective person supplement and integrate each other; that the thrall of totalitarianism of bot left and right has been shaken in the universal desire to recapture the authority of truth and human totality. Humankind can finally place its trust not in a proletarian authoritarianism, not in a secularized humanism, both of which have betrayed the spiritual property right of history, but in a sacramental fellowship and unity of knowledge. This new consciousness has created a widening of human horizons beyond every parochialism, and a revolution in human thought comparable to the basic assumption, among the ancient Greek, of the sovereignty of reason; corresponding to the great effulgence of the moral conscience articulated by the Hebrew prophets; analogous to the fundamental assertions of Christianity; or to the beginning of the new scientific era, the era of the science of dynamics, the experimental foundations of which were laid by Galileo in the Renaissance. An important effort to re-examine the contradictory meanings and applications which are given today to such terms as democracy, freedom, justice, love, peace, fellowship and God. The purpose of such inquires is to clear the way for the foundation of a genuine World history not in terms of nation or race or culture but in terms of mortals in relation to God, to oneself, one’s fellow humans and the Universe, that reach beyond immediate self-interest. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
For the meaning of the World Age consists in respecting one’s hopes and dreams which lead to a deeper understanding of the basic values of all peoples. World Perspectives is planned to gain insight into the meaning of mortals, who not only are determined by history but who also determines history. History is to be understood as concerned not only with the life of mortals on this planet but as including also such cosmic influences as interpenetrate our human World. This generation is discovering that history does not conform to the social optimism of modern civilization and that the organization of human communities and the establishment of freedom and peace are not only intellectual achievements but spiritual and moral achievements as well, demanding a cherishing of the wholeness of feeling and thought, and constituting a never-ending challenge to mortals, emerging from the abyss of meaninglessness and suffering, to be renewed and replenished in the totality of one’s life. Justice itself, which has been in a state of pilgrimage and crucifixion and now is being slowly liberated from the grip of social and political demonologies in the East as well as in the West, begins to question its own premises. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The modern revolutionary movements which have challenged the sacred institutions of society by protecting injustice in the name of social justice are here examined and re-revaluated. In the light of this, we have no choice but to admit that the unfreedom against which freedom is measured must be retained with it, namely, that the aspect of truth out of which the night view appears to emerge, the darkness of our time, is as little abandonable as is mortal’s subjective advance. Thus the two sources of mortal’s consciousness are inseparable, not as dead but as living and complementary, an aspect of that principle of complementarity through which Niels Bohr has sought to unite the quantum and the wave, both of which constitute the very fabric of life’s radiant energy. There is in humankind today a counter force to the sterility and danger of a quantitative, anonymous mass culture; a new, if sometimes imperceptible, spiritual sense of convergence toward human and World unity on the basis of the sacredness of each human person and respect for the plurality of cultures. There is a growing awareness that equality may not be evaluated in mere numerical terms but is proportionate and analogical in its reality. For when equality is equated with interchangeability, individuality is negated and the human person transmuted into a faceless mask. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
We stand at the brink of an age of a World in which human life presses forward to actualize new forms. The false separation of mortals and nature, of time and pace, of freedom and security, is acknowledged, and we are faced with a new vision of mortals in one’s organic unity and of history offering a richness and diversity of equality and majesty of scope hitherto unprecedented. In relating the accumulated wisdom of mortal’s spirit to the new reality of the World age, in articulating its thought and belief, we seek to encourage a renaissance of hope in society and of pride in mortal’s decision as to what one’s destiny will be. Mortals have certainly contrived to change the environment, but subject to the new process involved in this change, the same process of selection continues to operate. The environment has changed partly in a physical and geographical sense, but more particularly from the knowledge owe now possess. The Biblical story of Adam and Eve contains a deep lesson, which a casual reading hardly reveals. Once the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge has been eaten, the World is changed. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The new World is dictated by the knowledge itself, not of course by an edict of God. The Biblical story has further interest in that the new World is said to be much worse than the former idyllic state of ignorance. Today we are beginning to wonder whether this might also be true. Yet we are uneasy, apprehensive, and our fears lead to the collapse of civilizations. Thus we turn to the truth that knowledge and life are indivisible, even as life and death are inseparable. We are what we know and think and feel; we are linked with history, with World, with the Universe, and faith in Life creates its own verification. All this is sharply expressed in the relation of faith and doubt. If faith is understood as belief that something is true, doubt is incompatible with the act of faith. If faith is understood as being ultimately concerned, doubt is a necessary element in it. It is a consequence of the risk of faith. The doubt which is implicit in faith is not a doubt about facts or conclusions. It is not the same doubt which is the lifeblood of scientific research. Even the most orthodox theologian does not deny the right of methodological doubt in matters of empirical inquiry or logical deduction. A scientist who would say that a scientific theory is beyond doubt would at that moment cease to be scientific. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
One may believe that the theory can be trusted for all practical purposes. Without such a belief no technical application of a theory would be possible. One could attribute to this kind of belief pragmatic certainty sufficient for action. Doubt in this case point to the preliminary character of the underlying theory. It is the very badness of the act that gives it then its vertiginous fascination. Remove the prohibition, and the attraction stops. How shall we define anxiety, and how is it related to fear?In my university days a student threw himself from an upper entry window of one of the college buildings and was nearly killed. Another student, a friend of mine, has to pass the window daily in coming and going from his room, and experienced a dreadful temptation to imitate the deed. Being a Catholic, he told hid director, who said, “All right! if you must, you must,” and added, “go ahead and do it,” thereby instantly quenching his desires. This director knew how to minister to a mind diseased. (However, this example is not recommended, the results could dangerous.) In one patient attacks of acute loneliness, developing into panic were not infrequent. He could not orient himself in the panics, could not hang on to his sense of time, became, as long as the bout of loneliness lasted, numb in his reactions to the World. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
The ghostlike character of his loneliness was shown in the fact that it could vanish instantaneously with a ring on the phone or his hearing the step of someone coming down the hall. He tired desperately to fight off these attacks—as we all do, which is not surprising since acute loneliness seems to be the most painful kind of anxiety which a human being can suffer. Patients often tell us that the pain is a physical gnawing in their chests, or feels like the cutting of a razor in their heart region, as well as a mental state of feeling like an infant abandoned in a World where nobody exists. This patient would try, when the loneliness began, to wrench his mind away to thoughts about something else, to get busy doing work or go out to a movie—but no matter what escape he tried, there remained the haunting, satanic menace hovering being him like a hated presence waiting to plunge a rapier into his lungs. If here were working, he could practically hear the Mephistophelean laugh behind him mocking him with the reminder that his stratagem would not succeed; sooner or later he would have to stop, more fatigued than ever—and immediately would come the rapier. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Or, if he were in the movies, the awareness could not be suppressed every time the scene changed that his gnawing ache would come back again as soon as he stepped out on the street. However, one day, he came in reporting that he had made a surprising discovery. When an acute attack of loneliness was beginning, it occurred to him not to try to fight it off—running had never helped anyway. Why not accept it, breathe with it, turn toward it and not away? Amazingly, the loneliness did not overwhelm him when he confronted it directly. Then it seemed even to diminish. Emboldened, he began to invite it by imagining situations in the past when he was acutely lonely, the memories of which had, up to now, always been sure to cue off the panic. However strangely enough, the loneliness had lost its power. He could not feel the panic even when he tried. The more he turned on it and welcomed it, the more impossible it was even to imagine how he had ever been lonely in that unbearably painful way before. The patient had discovered—and was teaching me that day—that he felt the acute loneliness only as he ran; when he turned on the devil, it vanished, to use metaphorical language. However, it is not metaphorical to state that the very running is a response which assures the soul uses it power. It is surely true that the anxiety (or loneliness) has the upper hand as long as we continue to run. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
In fear we know what threatens us, we are energized by the situation, our perceptions are sharper, and we take steps to run or in the other appropriate ways to overcome the danger. In anxiety, however, we are threatened without knowing what steps to take to meet the danger. Anxiety is the feeling of being caught, overwhelmed; and instead of becoming sharper, our perceptions generally become blurred or vague. Anxiety may occur in slight or great intensity. It may be a mild tension before meeting some important person; or it may be apprehension before an examination when one’s future is at stake and one is uncertain whether one is prepared to pass the exam. Or it may be the stark terror, when beads of sweat appear on one’s forehead, in waiting to hear whether a loved one is lost in a plane wreck, or whether one’s child is drowned or gets back safely after the storm on the lake. People experience anxiety in al sorts of ways: a gnawing within, a construction of the chest, a general bewilderment; of they may describe it as feeling as though all the World around were dark gray or black, or as though a heavy weight were upon them, or a feeling like the terror which a small child experiences when he realizes he is lost. Anxiety (loneliness or abandonment anxiety being its most painful form) overcomes the person to the extent tat one loses orientation in the objective World. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
To lose the World is to lose one’s self, and vice versa; self and World are correlates. The function of anxiety is to destroy the self-World relationship, for instance, to disorient the victim in space and time and, so long as this disorientation lasts, the person remains in a state of anxiety. Anxiety overwhelms the person precisely because of the preservation of this disorientation. Now if the person can reorient oneself, as happens, one hopes in psychotherapy—and again relate oneself to the World directly, experientially, with one’s senses alive, one overcomes the anxiety. It is often helpful for a person to see oneself struggling against an adversary. For then, instead of waiting forever for the therapy to analyze away the anxiety, one can help in one’s own treatment by taking practical steps when one experiences anxiety such as stopping and asking just what it was that occurred in reality or in one’s fantasies that preceded the disorientation which cued off the anxiety. One is not only opening the doors of one’s closet where the ghosts hide, but one often can also then take steps to reorient oneself in one’s practical life by making new human relationships and finding new work which interests the individual. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Still looking at my patient who had been obsessed with loneliness, let us ask: What was the constructive side of this soul which presumably had gone awry? Being a sensitive, gifted person, he had achieved notable success in practically all realms of human experience except personal intimacy. His gifts included a capacity for interpersonal empathy and a good deal of tenderness—most of which had been absorbed in his self-preoccupation. He had failed to use his capacities for relationship; he had been unable to open himself up to others, to reach out to them, to share feelings and other aspects of personal experience, to identify with and affirm them in the ways necessary to build durable relationship. In short, what he had lacked, and now needed, was the exercise of his capacities to love in an active, outgoing concern for the other’s welfare, for the sharing of pleasure and delight as an “I” with “Thou,” for a communion of consciousness with his fellows. The soul, in the constructive scene in this case and put in the simplest terms, was his potentiality for active loving. Nature, is after all, but one manifestation of spiritual reality, which reveals itself more directly in thought and art. In future stages of evolution, spirit, without loss of self-consciousness, must ascend again through knowledge of its cosmic relations to its universality and transcendence over matter. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Possessed by Genius–The Gift of Life is the Most Precious Chance One Has
I have plastered it, painted it, run its new wires, sanded its floors, and laid the gloss. I learned those skills out west, and all that time I lived out there I never forgot this house, used to pass it as a little boy, never forgot it, and never dreamed of course that one day I would be the master of it (chuckle), that is, if any mortal can be the master of this house, what this house has is a mistress, or even two, and for a time, for a long time. Come, let me show you the library. Though many philosophers, such as Owen and Proudhon, Tolstoy and Bakunin, Durkheim and Marx, Einstein and Schweitzer talk about it as they express different concepts, they all find that mortals have lost their central place, that they have been made an instrument for the purposes of economic aims, that one has been estranged from, and has lost the concrete relatedness to one’s fellow mortals and to nature, that one has ceased to have a meaningful life. I have tried to express the same idea by elaborating on the concept of alienation and by sowing psychologically what the psychological results of alienation are; that mortals regress to a receptive and marketing orientation and ceases to be productive; that they lose their sense of self, become dependent on approval, hence tending to conform and spend most of their energy in the attempt to compensate for or just cover up their anxiety. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Human intelligence is excellent, their reason deteriorates and in view of their technical powers they are seriously endangering the existence of civilization, and even of the human race. If we turn to view about the causes for this development, we find less agreement than in the diagnosis of the illness itself. While many are still prone to see the causes of all evil in the lack of political freedom, and especially of universal suffrage, others still stress the significance of economic factors. They believed that the alienation of mortals resulted from their role as an object of exploitation and use. Still spiritual and moral impoverishment is also a precipitating cause of Western mortal’s decay; in addition to repression of one’s instinctual drives and the resulting manifestations. However, what hold true for the causes of society’s infirmary, of course, is true for the remedies by which modern mortal’s defect can be cured. If I believe that the cause of the illness is economic, or spiritual, or psychological, I necessarily believe that remedying the cause leads to sanity. On the other hand, if I see how the various aspects are interrelated, I shall arrive at the conclusion that sanity and mental health can be attained only by simultaneous changes in the sphere of industrial and political organization, of spiritual and philosophical orientation, of character structure, and of cultural activities. The concentration of effort in any of these spheres, to the exclusion or neglect of others, is destructive of all change. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
In fact, here seems to lie one f the most important obstacles to the progress of humankind. Christianity has preached spiritual renewal, neglecting the changes in the social order without which spiritual renewal must remain ineffective for the majority of the people. The age of enlightenment has postulated as the highest norms independent judgment and reason; it preached political equality without seeing that political equality could not lead to the realization of the fraternity of mortals if it was not accompanied by a fundamental change in the socioeconomic organization. While people stress the necessity for social and economic changes, they neglect the necessity of the inner change in human beings, without which economic change can never lead to the good society. Each of these great reform movements of the last two thousand years has emphasized one sector of life to the exclusion of the others; their proposals for reform and renewal were radical—but their results were almost complete failure. The preaching of the Gospel led to the establishment of the Catholic Church; the teachings of rationalists. The result could hardly be different. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Mortals are a unit; their thinking, feeling, and their practice of life are inseparably connected. One cannot be free in one’s thought when one is not free emotionally; and one cannot be free emotionally if one is dependent and unfree in one’s practice of life, in one’s economic and social relations. Trying to advance radically in one sector to the exclusion of others must be necessarily lead to the results to which it did lead, namely, that the radical demands in one sphere are fulfilled only by a few individuals, while for the majority they become formulae and rituals, serving to cover up the fact that in other spheres nothing has changed. Undoubtedly one step of integrated progress in all sphere of life will have more far-reaching and more lasting results for the progress of the human race than a hundred steps preached—and even for a short while lived—in only one isolated sphere. Several thousands of years of failure in isolated progress should be a rather convincing lesson. Closely related to this problem is that of radicalism and reform, which seems to form such a dividing line between various political solutions. Yet, a closer analysis can show that this differentiation as it is usually conceived of is deceptive. There is reform and reform; reform can be radical, that is, going to the roots, or it can be superficial, trying to patch up the symptoms without touching the cases. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Reform which is not radical, in this sense, never accomplishes its ends and eventually ends up in the opposite direction. So-called radicalism on the other hand, which believes that we can solve problems by force, when observation, patience and continuous activity is required, is as unrealistic and fictious as reform. The revolution of the Bolsheviks led to Stalinism, the reform of the right wing Social Democrats in Germany, led to Hitler. The true criterion of reform is not its tempo but its realism, its true racialism; it is the question whether it goes to the roots and attempts to change causes—or whether it remains on the surface and attempts to deal only with symptoms. We are discussing the roads to sanity, that is, methods of cure, and we had better pause here for a moment and ask ourselves what we know about the nature of cure in cases of individual mental diseases. The cure of social pathology must follow the same principle, since it is the pathology of so many human beings, and not of an entity beyond or apart from individuals. The conditions for the cure of individual pathology are mainly the following: A development must have occurred which is contrary to the proper functioning of the psyche. In frame of reference of humanistic psychoanalysis, the cause of pathology lie in the failure to develop a productive orientation, a failure which results in the development of irrational passions, especially of incestuous, destructive and exploitative strivings. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The fact of suffering, whether it is conscious or unconscious, resulting from the failure of normal development, produces a dynamic striving to overcome the suffering, that is, for change in the direction of health. This striving for healthy in our physical as well as in our mental organism is the basis for any cure of sickness, and it is absent only in the most severe pathology. The first step necessary to permit this tendency for health to operate is the awareness of the suffering and of that which is shut out and disassociated from our conscious personality. In this frame of reference, it refers to the repressed irrational passions, to the repressed feeing of aloneness and futility, and to the longing for love and productivity, which is also repressed. Increasing self-awareness can become fully effective only if a next step is taken, that on changing a practice of life which was built on the basis of the neurotic structure, and which reproduces it constantly. A patient, for instance, whose neurotic character makes one want to submit to parental authorities has usually constructed a life where one has chosen dominating or sadistic father images as bosses, teachers, and so on. One will be cured only if one changes one’s realistic life situation in such a way that it does not constantly reproduce the submissive tendencies one wants to give up. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Furthermore, one must change one’s system of values, norms and ideals, so that they further rather than block one’s striving for health and maturity. The same condition—conflict with the requirements of human nature and resulting suffering, awareness of what is shut out, and change of the realistic situation and of values and norms—are also necessary for a cure of social pathology. To show the conflict between human needs and our social structure, and to further the awareness of our conflicts and of that which is dissociated, was the purpose of the previous discussion. However, we still need to further discuss the various possibilities of practical changes in our economic, political and cultural organization. Yet, before we start discussing the practical questions, let us consider once more what constitutes mental sanity, and what type of culture could be assumed to be conductive to mental health. The mentally healthy person is the productive and unalienated person; the person who relates oneself to the World lovingly, and who uses one’s reason to grasp reality objectively; who experiences oneself as a unique individual entity, and at the same time feels one with one’s follow mortals; who is not subject to irrational authority, and accepts willingly the rational authority of conscience and reason; who is in the process of being born as long as one is alive, and considers the gift of life the most precious chance one has. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Let us also remember that these goals of mental health are not ideals which have to be forced upon the person, or which mortals can attain only if one has overcome one’s nature, and sacrifices for one’s innate selfishness. On the contrary, the striving for mental health, for happiness, harmony, love, productiveness, is inherent in every human being who is not born as a mental or moral idiot. Given a chance, these strivings assert themselves forecefully, as can be seen in countless situations. In takes powerful constellations and circumstances to pervert and stifle this innate striving for sanity; and indeed, throughout the greater part of known history, the use of mortal by mortal has produced such perversion. To believe tat this perversion is inherent in mortals is like throwing seeds in the soil of the desert and claiming they were not meant to grow. What society corresponds to this aim of mental health, and what would be the structure of a sane society? First of all, a society in which no mortal is a means toward another’s end, but always and without exception an end in oneself; hence, where nobody is used, nor uses oneself, for purposes which are not those of the unfolding of one’s own human powers; where mortals are the center, and where all economic and political activities are subordinated to the aim of one’s growth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
A sane society is one in which qualities like greed, exploitativeness, possessiveness, narcissism, have no chance to be used for greater material gain or for the enhancement of one’s personal prestige. Where acting according to one’s conscience is looked upon a as fundamental and necessary quality and where opportunism and lack of principles is deemed to be asocial; where the individual is concerned with social matters so that they become personal matters, where one’s relation to one’s fellow mortals is not separated from one’s relationship in the private sphere. A sane society, furthermore, is one which permits mortals to operate within manageable and observable dimensions, and to be an active and responsible participant in the life of society, as well as the master of one’s own life. It is one which furthers human solidarity and not only permits, but stimulates, its members to relate themselves to each other lovingly; a sane society furthers the productive activity of everybody in one’s work, stimulates the unfolding of reason and enables mortals to give expression to one’s inner needs in collective art and rituals. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Another characteristic of modern people is loneliness. They describe this feeling as one being on the outside, isolated, or, if they are sophisticated, they say that they feel alienated. They emphasize how crucial it is for them to be invited to this part or that dinner, not because they especially want to go (though they generally do go) nor because they will get enjoyment, companionship, sharing of experience and human warmth in gathering (very often they do not, but are simply bored). Rather, being invited is crucial because it is a proof that they are not alone. Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the beneficial values of solitude, and even at times are very frightened at the prospect of being alone. Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they do not find themselves at all. The feeling of emptiness and loneliness go together. When persons, for example, are telling of a break-up in a love relationship, they will often not say they feel sorrow or humiliation over a lost conquest; but rather that they feel emptied. The loss of the other leaves an inner yawning void. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
The reasons for the close relationship between loneliness and emptiness are not difficult to discover. For when a person does not know with any inner conviction what one wants or what one feels; when, in a period of traumatic change, one comes aware of the fact that the conventional desires and goals one has been taught to follow no longer bring one any security or give one any sense of direction, when, that is, one feels an inner void while one stands amid the outer confusion of upheaval in one’s society, one senses danger; and one’s natural reaction is to look around for other people. They, one hopes, will give one some sense of direction, or at least some comfort in the knowledge that one is not alone in one’s fright. Emptiness and loneliness are thus two phases of the same basic experience of anxiety. Some people feel like we might be the last generation to walk this Earth—but do not know in which direction to turn. And because of their, their reaction is, strangely enough, a sudden, deep, loneliness. All of mortal’s history is an endeavor to shatter one’s seclusion. Feelings of isolation occur when one feels empty and afraid not simply because one wants to be protected by the crowd. Nor is the longing for others simply an endeavor to fill the void within one’s self—though this certainly is one side of the need for human companionship when one feels empty or anxious. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The more basic reason is that the human being gets one’s original experience of being a self out of one’s relatedness to other persons, and when one is alone, without other persons, one is afraid one will lose this experience of being a self. Mortals, the biosocial mammal, not only is dependent on other human beings such as one’s father and mother for one’s security during a long childhood; one like wise receives one’s consciousness of oneself, which is the basis of one’s capacity to orient oneself in life, from these early relationships. Therefore, it is clear to see that mortals need relationships with other people in order to orient themselves. Angels boring? Yes—until they fall! Then the Angel takes on fascination and interest. The dichotomy between devils and Angles was carried on through the Middle Ages, and the word for the diammonic is now clearly demon. The medieval citizens were enthralled by their demons. The medieval citizens were enthralled by their demons, even in the act of condemning them; why else all these gargoyles, beasts laughing and looking sinister, animals of every sort, scampering and climbing up the sides of their cathedrals and Victorian houses, carved in stone by artisans who must have known the daimonic at first hand? However, this did not stand in the way of their using this handy method of condemnation of their enemies as the devil’s party in their wars of religion and particularly in the Albigensian uprising. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
It seems that it is always mortal’s proclivity to define the outsider, the stranger, the one who differs from one, as the evil one and oneself as on the side of the angel. However, one who enters the sphere of faith enters the sanctuary of life. Where there is faith there is an awareness of holiness. One now becomes gifted with some supernatural power: one has had genius, or even one oneself is a genius. One’s acts do not conform to the norms of accepted behavior, but also one’s work has a superhuman quality that makes it incomparable with the work of other mortals. Therefore the usual categories of good and evil, of useful and useless, do not apply to the genius. What one does and what one suffers is one’s fate. One is not a genius because one is an extraordinary artist, but conversely, one is an artist become one is possessed by genius. Fate guides one to significant meetings and it produces great mortals. To see the experiential justification for this point we have only to recall that greatness consists of being in the right place at the right time; it is an encounter between a mortal of particular qualities and the particular needs of an age. Mortals with talent are seized by the historical situation and hurled to greatness. What concerns one ultimately becomes holy. The awareness of the holy is awareness of the presence of the divine, namely of the content of our supreme concern. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Faith’s presence remains mysterious in spite of its appearance. It is discovered in Nature, animate and inanimate, with soul and without soul, something which was only manifested in contradiction, and therefore cannot be grasped under one conception, still less under one word. Only in the impossible did it seem to find pleasure, and the possible it seemed to thrust from itself with contempt. The ancients become aware of something similar. Faith can manifest itself in the most remarkable way even in some animals, it primarily is connected with mortals. It represents a power which is, if not opposed to the moral order of the World, yet at cross-purposes to it; such that one could compare the one to the warp, and the other to the woof. In the most awesome form faith appears when it manifests itself in some human beings. They are not always mortals of superior mind or talents, seldom do they recommend themselves by the goodness of their heart. Yet a tremendous power emanates from them, they possess an incredible force over all other creatures and even over the elements; nobody can say how far their influence will reach. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The reason for these effects of the holy is obvious if we see the relation of the experience of the holy to the experience of the ultimate concern. The human hearts seeks the infinite because that is where the finite wants to rest. In the infinite it sees its own fulfillment. This is the reason for the ecstatic attraction and fascination of everything in which ultimacy is manifest. On the other hand, if ultimacy is manifest and exercises its fascinating attraction, one realizes at the same time the infinite distance of the finite from the infinite and, consequently, the negative judgment over any finite attempts to reach the infinite. The feeling of being consumed in the presence of the divine is a profound expression of mortal’s relation to the holy. It is implied in every genuine act of faith, in every state of ultimate concern. Entering the sanctuary means encountering the holy. Here the infinitely removed makes itself near and present, without losing its remoteness. For this reason, the holy has been called the entirely other, namely, other than the ordinary course of things or other than the World which is determined by the cleavage of subject and object. The holy transcends this realm; this is its mystery and its unapproachable character. There is no conditional way of reaching the unconditional; there is no finite way of reaching the infinite. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
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Is Heaven a Physician?
You are not going to walk away from here with any answers. Get angry at me. Go ahead. Some night, many years from now, maybe someone will choose to explain what happened, but for now you have to accept what you have seen. You no longer need to worry. The diamonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the power to take over the whole person. Pleasures of the flesh and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The diamonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both. When this power goes awry and one element usurps control over the total personality, we have daimon possession, the traditional name through history for psychosis. The daimonic is obviously not an entity but refers to a fundamental, archetypal function of human experience—an existential reality in modern mortals and, so far as we know, in all mortals. The diamonic is the urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself, perpetuate and increase itself. The diamonic becomes evil when it usurps the total self without regard to the integration of that self, or to the unique forms and desires of others and their need for integration. It then appears as excessive aggression, hostility, cruelty—the things about ourselves which horrify us most, and which we repress whenever we can or, more likely, project on others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
However, these are the reverse side of the same assertion which empowers our creativity. All life is a flux between these two aspects of the daimonic. We can repress the daimonic, but we cannot avoid the toll of apathy and the tendency toward later explosion which such repression brings in its wake. If we do not acknowledge our emotional side, learn how to cultivate and appreciate it, then we lose out on an important part of life. Human beings are not mechanical or machinelike. They have a full range of emotional responses. If we are honest, most of us probably would admit that we would prefer a bit more feeling in the people around us. There must be a reason why emotions are part of human nature, though we cannot fully explain it. Probably there are survival values attached to certain strongly felt emotions such as fear, anger, surprise, and sorrow. However, even beyond this, a human being meeting the variety of experiences life presents cannot help but realize that a great part of really experiencing life is emotional and sensate and intuitive, as we well as merely cognitive. The Greek concept of daimon—the origin of our modern concept—included the creativity of the poet and artist as well as that of the ethical and religious leader, and is the contagious power which the lover has. Ecstasy, a divine madness, seizes the creative person. This is an early form of the puzzling and never-solved problem of the intimate relationship between the genius and mad person. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Some people believe their daimon is a kind of guardian. The daimonic is not conscience; for conscience is largely a social product, related to the cultural mores and, in psychoanalytic terms, to the power of the superego. The daimonic refers to the power of nature rather than the superego, and is beyond good and evil. Nor is it mortal’s recall to oneself, for its source lies in those realms where the self is rooted in natural forces which go beyond the self and are felt as the grasp of fate upon us. The daimonic arises from the ground of being rather than the self as such. It is shown particularly in creativity. Speaking of the tremendous power emanating from daimonic persons, all untied moral powers do not prevail against them. And they cannot be overcome expect by the Universe itself which they have challenged to combat. Happiness—or eudaimonism—in the Greek language was the result of being blesses with a good genius. Happiness is to live in harmony with one’s daimon. Nowadays, we would relate eudaimonism to the state of integration of potentialities and other aspects of one’s being, with behavior. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
The daimon gives individual guidance in particular situations. The daimonic was translated into Latin as genii (or jinni). This is a concept in Roman religion from which our word genius comes and which originally meant a tutelar deity, a sprit presiding over the destiny of a person, and later became a particular mental endowment or talent. As genius (its root being the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, so the daimonic voice of the generative process within the individual. The daimonic is the unique pattern of sensibilities and powers which constitutes the individual as a self in relation to one’s World. It can speak in dreams and to the sensitive person in conscious meditation and self-questioning. The deteriorated form of this concept, consisting of the belief that we are taken over by little demons flying around equipped with horns, is a projection of inner experience outward, reified into an objective reality. It was entirely right that the Enlightenment and Age of Reason, in the flush of their success in making all life reasonable, should have thrown this out, and have regarded it as a deteriorated and unproductive approach to mental illness. However, only during the last couple of decades has it been clearly impressed upon us that in discarding the false demonology, we accepted, against out intention, a banality and a shallowness in our whole approach to mental disease. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
This banality was specifically damaging to our experience of love and will. For the destructive activities of the daimonic are only the reverse side of its constructive motivation. If we throw out our devils, we had better be prepared to bid goodbye to our angels as well. In the daimonic lies our vitality, our capacity to open ourselves to the power of eros. We must rediscover the daimonic in a new form which will be adequate to our own predicament and fructifying for our own day. And this will not be a rediscovery alone but a recreation of the reality of the daimonic. The daimonic needs to be directed and channeled. Here is where human consciousness becomes so important. We initially experience the daimoinc as a blind push. It is impersonal in the sense that it makes us nature’s tool. It pushes us toward the blind assertion of ourselves, as in rage, or toward the triumph of the species. When I am in a rage, it could not matter to me less who I am or who you are; I want only to strike out and destroy you. However, consciousness can integrate the daimonic, make it personal. This is the purpose of psychotherapy. The daimonic fights against death, fights always to assert its own vitality, accepts no three-score and ten or other timetable of life. It is this daimonic which is referred to when we adjure someone who is seriously ill not to give up the fight. The daimonic will never take a rational no for an answer. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
The daimonic will never take a rational no for an answer. In this respect the daimonic is the enemy of technology. It will accept no clock time or nine-to-five schedules or assembly lines to which we surrender ourselves as robots. If the daimonic is shown particularly in creativity, we should find the clearest testimonies to its presence in poets and artists. Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through the depts which push the self to a new place. Every poet is the Devil’s party. To live is to war with trolls in the heart and soul. To write is to sit in judgment on oneself. And in my heart the daemons and the gods wage an eternal battle. The daimonic is basically the other Will, which is believed to be both a force outside the being which is at the same time oriented into one’s personal being. These theories, of course, came about in a chaotic time of psychological and spiritual upheaval when the medieval period was dying and the modern not yet born. It was a time of actual fear among people of witchcraft, sorcerers, and others who claimed to know how to consort with the demons. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Reclaiming the Sacredness, Magnificence, and True Power of Healthy Humanity!
I cannot wait for this. If you have a mind to talk for once, I want to hear it. Carry on as if I was not here to cheer you along. It is the lack of faith in humanity which makes it possible for the authoritarian systems to conquer mortals, leading them on to have faith in an idol rather than in one’s self. However, knowing this, do you ever feel trapped and longing to escape, trying to bury out the thought it your head, you pick up a book and tear through the pages, as if you will reach some kind of salvation by the time the book is over. Before you know, you have read hundreds of books, but are still in the same position, but mentally, you realized you have grown. To regain your privacy, you stop sharing things on social media, stop talking about your day, hobbies, what movie you are watching and stop replying to comment. And you pray, hoping that God will save you and elevate you to a higher plane. There is really nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, but you have a picture in your mind of where you would like to be, and have worked hard enough to get there, but are not quite there yet. No telling how long it will take, you keep the visions of your dreams the main focus in your day. Cognitive dissonance means literally clashing ideation, a situation in which disharmony (or dissonance; both terms come from the field of music) exists within the cognitive structures, in our ideas, beliefs, values, or thought processes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Cognitive dissonance is a complicated motivational force. Though there is no implication that this is an innate need, we know that it operates powerfully in the lives of many of us. When a person’s beliefs come into conflict with his or her behavior, we say the person is in a state of internal disharmony: cognitive dissonance. The need is to reduce the conflict, to harmonize the dissonance. We take as our illustration a young woman of thirty who came to consult with me some years ago and was my patient for a brief period. A graduate of one of the best New England girls’ colleges, she had grown up in a well-to-do suburb, was intelligent and attractive, and seemed in every way a typically nice girl. In college, she had absorbed what had then been the generally accepted belief in togetherness and the family, and had chosen as her goal to get married on graduation and immediately raise a large family. She had admirably lived up to her plan by marrying her boy friend from a neighboring college on commencement day, and then had five children, spaced one every two years just as she had planned. However, when she came to me at the age of thirty, she revealed that she was in love and having an affair with an auto science engineer, with whom, for the first time in her life, she was experiencing strong passion. She reported that she had never loved her husband but had contempt for him. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
By the time she considered psychotherapy (on the urging of friends), she had gone home with her five children to live with her parents in the suburbs—a curious and pathetic denouncement to what had once been such brave plans. However, this was her means of reducing the dissonance—of bringing herself back into cognitive harmony, or consonance—by changing her behavior. Cognitive dissonance is a very complex, yet very common, motivational situation wit which we have to contend. The young lady and I were not able to do much effective therapy because she felt that love with this auto science engineer to be sacred and she did not wish to go into it. When I happened to see her some years later, she seemed a faded middle-aged woman working dutifully to support her children. This daughter of upper middle-class suburbia had gotten herself into a situation which was little susceptible of solution, is not less so, than the old-time prototype of the lost girl who has a child out of wedlock. The reason was certainly not lack of information or lack of planning and responsibility. A modern, intelligent woman, my patient with her five children seemed in many ways as trapped as her forebears in Victorian times before the emancipation of women and the invention of contraceptives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
The mere capacity for family planning is not an obviation of the tragic. The psychological meaning of contraception is the expanding of the realm of personal responsibility and commitment. However, far from being easier, this personal relationship may have to carry more weight and may therefore, be harder. Since contraception allays anxiety about pregnancy in a given act of intercourse, it seems to be used in out culture as a symbol that we have left behind us once and for all the tragic aspect of love in the form of pleasure of the flesh. Now I am certainly in favor of contraceptives and the planning of procreation—a point so obvious it ought not need to be made. However, this almost universally accepted principle of birth control should not blind us to the fact that contraception, great boon to pleasures of the flesh as it is, does not change one white the basic issue about which we are talking. Although it frees the individual from the immediate biological enchainment of pregnancy, it may well increase one’s psychological ambivalence. The tragic dimension of pleasures of the flesh and love is just as prevalent as it always was, even with contraception, but is raised out of the automatic, biological realm to the psychological realm. This is where tragedy should be any way; it is not the biological facts of life itself, such as death and procreation, that give the tragic dimension, but how we as human beings relate to these inescapable necessities of human fate. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
The tragic is always a psychological and spiritual issue. There is also the dilemma of personal responsibility which comes from the freedom to choose to have a baby or not. It has been possible to plan babies for the last hundred years, and though we have acted upon that power, we have never accepted the psychological and personal responsibility for it. Our blithe evasion of that issue comes out in the guilt we feel as a whole society toward our children. We do everything for them, we cater to their development and their whims, we count it a sign of our broadmindedness and virtue that we give in to them on ever moral issue so that the poor children have an impossible time trying to find something about these always-giving-in parents against which they can revolt. When they go away, we say, “Have a good time,” and we get worried if they do not have a good time and worried if they have too good a time. And all the while we are secretly envious of them and their youth and resentful at how good they have it as compared with how hard we had it. Through all of this treating our youth like little royalty, heirs apparent to Heaven knows what, we are the maid-in-waiting, chauffeurs, cooks, nurses, doctors, bottomless money-bags, home teacher, camp leaders—until it is no wonder our children stand up and scream, “For Heaven’s sake, leave us alone!” #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
And that is the biggest threat of all to us—for we are filled with some nameless, pervasive guilt about our children and cannot let go. And guilt we are expiating is not about some specific thing we did or did not do in rearing them; it is about the basic fact of having children in the first place. For no longer does God decide we are to have children; we do. And who has even begun to comprehend the meaning of that tremendous fact? Or imagine the couples—and, with the need for population control, there will perforce be many—who will plan to have only one baby: consider the tremendous psychic weight this poor infant will have to carry. As we see in our therapy, particularly wit professional people who have had their one child, there is great temptation to overprotect the infant. When he calls, the parents run; when he whimpers, they are abashed; when he is sick, they are guilty; when he does not sleep, they look at thought they are going to have nervous breakdowns. The infant becomes a little dictator by virtue of the situation he is born into, and could not be anything ese if he wanted to. And there is, of course, the always complicating and contradictory fact that all this attention actually amounts to a considerable curtailing of the child’s freedom, and he must, like a prince born into a royal family, carry a weight for which children were never made. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Contraception, like all devices and machines, can increase our range of freedom and choice. However, the new freedom and power thus given to us also increases our ambivalence and anxiety, an ambivalence which now expresses itself in the banalization of pleasures of the flesh and love. As the girls who, in these days of the birth patrol bill, are exercising more freedom with their intimacy, for many it seems it is just too much trouble to say no. To make something banal, to undercut its significance, to say it does not matter, is the method par excellence of avoiding anxiety. Is not the upshot of the situation that contraception is misused to serve a detached, indiscriminate, here-today-and-gone-tomorrow attitude toward pleasures of the flesh? Surely an act which carries as much power as the pleasures of the flesh, and power in the critical area of passing on one’s name and species, cannot be taken as banal and insignificant expect by doing violence to our natures, if not to nature itself. With contraception, pleasures of the flesh can become, at least in some instances, a purely personal relationship. And the challenge this presents to us is no less than finding the meaning of this personal relationship. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
Let us be very specific. There are no such things as homosexuals. To classify these people as such, to give them a name, is to dehumanize and thingify them. They are human beings. They are people, anatomically, physiologically, and emotionally the same as people who are considered heterosexual. Medical experts have found only an infinitesimal number of people whose hormones or genital structures seem to predispose them to what is called homosexuality. The majority of homosexual human beings have acquired a preference, a need for, a liking for pleasures of the flesh with members of their own gender. Through some learning experience, through some emotional reaction, they have found it easier, more comfortable, more tolerable, to have sexual involvement with their own sex. Each human being is born with the latent potential of loving anyone, of either sex. You have studied physiology and anatomy in any detail know that each of us caries not only hormones of the opposite sex, but primitive or vestigial sex organs of the opposite sex. Through combinations of experiences, through associations or traumas or accidental combinations, some people come to prefer the sexual companionship of their own gender. Some have actual fear of disgust of the opposite sex. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
In many cases, we find deep-seated hostility. These reactions can occur without any strong feelings for their own sex, but because of loneliness, or sexual drive, through happenstance combination (like the military, parochial school, private school, fraternities, or camps) they are involved in close associations with members of the same gender. In a friendship, there is usually a strong need for expression of affection. Often the close non-erotic love of two same-sex people is mistake by the participants or by observers as homosexual. Some people are sensitive and affection with old friends and because they may greet them with a big bearhug or a kiss on the cheek—an honest and authentic display of affection between old friends, observers might find it offensive. Quite likely, not a few many have been concerned about their own sexual identity. Certainly our experience tells of many people who are overly concerned with the sexuality of others convinces us that they are in much conflict over their own, but people who openly tolerate others are generally secure in their own being. Many men, feeling strong ties or inclination of affection toward their fathers, brothers, friends, and acquaintances, are quite certain that they are interested in men. They are not convinced of any overt action on their part, but because their upbringing has made it difficult for them to show affection to anyone, especially to a member of the same sex. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
Women in this country are a bit more comfortable with contact and displayed affection among women. Yet, there is this same panic among many women, too. The panic may occur for two social reasons: many religious teach that homosexual involvement is a sin; and most countries in western civilization make it an illegal behavior. Great Britain, however, has recently changed its attitude toward homosexuality, viewing it now as a medical or emotional situation and not a matter of legalistics. And gay marriage is not legal in much of the United States of America. Among the underground press in this country, over the past ten years, there has been a growing pressure to get society to let up on those who choose sexual partners that are different from those we call normative. The Gay Liberation Front has linked arms and forces with the Women’s Liberation Movements and the radical liberation groups. Are people who live homosexual lives happy? This is a difficult question to answer. Our clinical experience has included psychotherapy with both males and females with homosexual love-lives. Obviously, the person coming to mental health clinic is unhappy about something. Usually the person who brings us one’s sexual life for treatment is dissatisfied or unhappy about some aspect of it, even if it is only the reaction one gets from the larger society. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Treatment is difficult, but certainly not impossible. The person with either a homosexual love-life or homosexual panic, who is motivated to explore his or her feelings about it and about oneself, can come to a point where on may choose whichever form of sex life one pleases. A growing body of homosexuals are learning to accept their different preferences, and with the acceptance comes the ability to lead productive, happy lives. All of us have experienced the pain associated with a physical injury or wound. When we are in pain, we typically seek relief and are grateful for the medication and treatments that help to alleviate our suffering. The Lord’s truth is that not altered by fads, popularity, or public opinion polls. No matter what, we are told to love our neighbor as ourselves and not to judge them. Keep loving. Keep trying. Keep trusting. Keep believing. Keep growing. Heaven is cheering you on today, tomorrow, and forever. Truly the Spirit of the Lord as been here in rich abundance. We all have to come down from peak experiences to deal with the regular vicissitudes of life. Please do not be cast down in spirit and do not give up. God wants all of his children to have hope and inspiration. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
One of the most significant insights is that a great many of our motives—what our real reasons—are not fully known to us, not only because of our lack of information but because our consciousness will not recognize them. Obedience to the law of chastity will increase our happiness in mortality and make it possible our progress in eternity. Chasity is very important to God. Chasity is sexual purity. All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of Heavenly parents, and has a divine nature and destiny. Those who are chaste are morally clean in their thoughts, words, and actions. Chasity means not having sexual relations before marriage. It also means complete fidelity to husband or wife during marriage. Unconscious motivation may explain many of the things we say, do, or commit ourselves to. We are agents blessed with moral agency and are define by our divine heritage as children of God—and not by sexual behaviors, contemporary attitudes, or secular philosophies. As we look beyond mortality and into eternity, it is easy to discern that the counterfeit companionship advocated by the adversary is temporary and empty. “Use boldness, but not overbearance; and also see that ye bridle all your passions, that ye may be filled with love; see that ye refrain from idleness,” reports Alma 38.12. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Love increases through righteous restraint and decreases through impulsive indulgence. We are promised that, as we pursue the pathway of virtue, the Holy Ghost shall be our constant companion. Our innate longing to belong is fulfilled in righteousness as we walk in the light with hope. However, the industrialist concentrates on machines and neglects mortals, who are the producer and developer of the machine and, obviously, has far greater potentialities. One will not consider the fact that undeveloped geniuses are doing manual jobs in one’s plant where they have neither the opportunity nor are given the incentive to develop themselves to genius or even to normal intelligence and skill. The lack of interest of the worker in one’s work creates dissatisfaction which either leads to a decrease in the productiveness of the worker, or to industrial strife and class struggle. America is at the crossroads in this matter. A decision must be made, and soon. There is much lack of understanding by the people generally, yet they must choose. On their decision rests the future of the United States, and of the individual. In industry, the goal of the company’s operation that is stated in the by-laws is to make a profit, and profit only. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
However, it is important that incentive for work are recognized. Workers want safety, seniority, security, and bargaining power. This will allow them to have a sober and realistic appreciation of the economic and human facts of Capitalism. People should be rewarded for all the things they do well that are of help, and penalized if one does not do as well as others in all these same ways. One is a member the team, and is rewarded or penalized, depending on what one can do and does do in all opportunities to win the game. The person is rated by all those who have accurate knowledge of some phase of his or her work. The best employee gets the praise and the standing one warrants and craves. In the bonus plan, one is rewarded in direct proportion to one’s contribution to the success of the company. The principle involved in incentive management is in one respect drastically different from that of traditional Capitalism. The worker’s wages, instead of being independent from the efforts and results of one’s work, are related to it. One participates in increasing profits, while the stockholder gets a regular income which is not quite as directly related to the earnings of the company. The company record show clearly that this system leads to increased productivity of the worker, low labor turnover, and absence of strikes. This system of incentive management is the most logical consequence of the capitalistic system. Capitalism in which the dissatisfaction of the worker is overcome by making one feel that one too is a capitalist, and an active participant in the system. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Randolph Harris II International Institute 