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Celibacy, Chasity, and Monogamy—The American Way of Life in to the Concepts of Cultural Anthropology
Heaven and Earth had been moved. It was sweeter than any rose in the Winter. The clothes and shoes make her very happy. She looked like Miss America. Most likely she had not been feeling well for so long that all her own clothes are gone. Who knows? If we want to define happiness by its opposite, we must define it not in contrast to sadness, but in contrast to depression. What is depression? It is the inability to feel, it is the sense of being dead, while our body is alive. It is the inability to experience joy, as well as the inability to experience sadness. A depressed person would be greatly relieved if one could feel sad. A state of depression is so unbearable because one is incapable of feeling anything, either joy or sadness. If we try to define happiness try to define happiness in contrast to depression, we have to define joy and happiness as that state of intensified vitality that fuses into one whole our effort both to understand our fellow mortals and be one with them. Happiness consists in our touching the rock bottom of reality, in the discovery of our self and our oneness with others as well as our differences from them. Happiness is a state of intense inner activity and the experience of the increasing vital energy which occurs in productive relatedness to the World and to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
A woman in late twenties had come for treatment because of sever lack of feeling, blockage in spontaneity—both of which made intimate relations a difficult problem for her husband and herself and a self-consciousness which at times paralyzed her. She was the daughter of one of the antiquated aristocratic American families of considerable stature, a family in which her masochistic mother and prestigious father and three senior brothers constituted a rigid structure in which she had to grow up. She had been forbidden to explore, to think or to wonder about pleasures of the flesh, and this crippled her capacity for passionate intimacy. Some will say that we are making too much of pleasures of the flesh, overlooking, platonic love relationships—the profound love mortals have expressed for ideals, country, race, humankind, God, and altruistic, self-sacrificing love. We are not intentionally overlooking any form of love except insofar as our emphasis is on the total expression of self. Many forms of love, beautiful as they may be, deny pleasures of the flesh—or try to. Between two people, an enormous amount of communication goes on. There are contact, moments of closeness, gestures, glances, intimations. True love is honestly and beautifully expressed through open communication. Love can be so deeply fulfilling and so beautiful that we wonder why anyone would want or need to minimize it, cheapen it, deny it. #RandolpHarris 2 of 19
In therapy, the young lady learned—with her rational treatment—to inquire of herself the reason why she was emotionally paralyzed in this or that situation, what was occurring when she felt to passion for romantic intimacy, and she became able to experience and express her anger, passion for romantic intimacy, and other feelings with considerable freedom. This was assisted by a good deal of useful inquiry into her childhood, where Dr. Freud believes is where most problems stem from, and the difficult traumas she had sustained in this overtly-structured family, and it was accompanied by a beneficial effect on her practical living. However, at a certain stage, we hit a stalemate. She kept asking the reason why, but it no longer made any change in her; her emotions seemed to be their own reason for being. The session to which I shall now refer came during a period when she was working on the possibilities of a genuine love with her husband. She reported that the previous night she had felt flirtations with her husband and in that mood had asked him to reach down the back of her dress and take out a sales tag that was still there. Later in the evening when she was drafting checks at her desk, he unexpectedly threw his arms around her. She, furious at being interrupted, scratched a line across his face with her pen. In telling me about this, she tossed off some ready-at-hand explanations of her anger as due to her brothers’ having taken advantage of her as a child no matter what she was doing. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
When I questioned this by asking what she was using her feelings for in the incident, she flared up in anger: I was taking away her “free spontaneity.” Did I not see she must “trust her instincts?” Had we not spent a good deal of time helping her learn to feel, and so what did I mean by asking her what she was doing with her feelings? And what is more, the question sounded just like her family’s telling her to be responsible. She finished the attack with the expostulation, “Feelings are feelings!” We can readily see the contradiction she is caught in. She had effectively ruined the evening with her husband. Ostensibly seeking the possibilities of a genuine love between them, she had accomplished exactly the opposite. She pulls her husband toward her with one had and quickly draws him away with the other. She justifies this contradictory behavior by an assumption which is very common in our day, namely, that feeling is a subjective push from inside you, emotions (the term coming from e-movere, to move out) are forces which put you into motion, and so are to be emoted in whatever way you happen to feel at the moment. This is probably the most prevalent unanalyzed assumption about emotions in our society. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The assumption that we all have built up emotions ready to explode at any moment takes it model from a kind of glandular hydraulics—we have an inner secretion of adrenalin and need to let off our angry, or gonadal excitement and must find an object to express our pleasures of the flesh. It fits the popularly accepted mechanical model of the body as well as the more sophisticated deterministic models that many of us were exposed to in our first courses in psychology and physiology. What we are not told—because practically nobody saw it—is that this is a radically solipsistic, schizoid system. It leaves us separated like monads, alienated, with no bridge to any persons around us. We can emote and have pleasures of the flesh from now until doomsday and never experience any real relationship with another person, only literally a doomsday. It does not decrease the horror of the situation to realize that a great many people, if not most in our society, experience their emotions in just this lonely way. To feel, then, makes their loneliness more painful rather than decreasing it, so they stop feeling. What is omitted in my patient’s (and our society’s) view is that emotions are not just a push from the rear but a pointing toward something, an impetus for forming something, a call to mold the situation. Feelings are not just a chance state of the moment, but a pointing toward the future, a way I want something to be. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Except in the most severe pathology, feelings always occur in a personal field, an experience of one’s self as personal and an imagining of others even if no one else is literally present. Feelings are rightfully a way of communicating with the significant people in our World, a reaching out to mold the relationship with them; they are a language by which we interpersonally construct and build. That is to say, feelings are intentional. The first aspect of emotions, as forces which push, has to do with the past and is correlated with causality and the determinism of one’s past experience, including the infantile and archaic. This is the regressive side of emotions about which Dr. Freud has taught us so much of lasting importance. In this respect, the investigation of the childhood of the patient, and the re-experiencing of it, as a sound and essential role in enduring psychotherapy. The second view, in contrast, starts in the present and points toward the future. It is the progressive aspect of emotions. Our feelings, like the artist’s paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the Word. Our feelings not only take into consideration the other person but are in a real sense partially formed by the feelings of the other persons present. We feel in a magnetic field. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
A sensitive person learns, often without being conscious of doing so, to pick up the feelings of other persons around one, as a violin string resonates to the vibration of every other musical string in the room, although in such infinitesimally small degrees that it may not be detectable to the ear. Every successful lover knows this by instinct. It is an essential—if not the essential—quality of the good therapist. In dealing with the first aspect of emotions it is entirely sound and accurate to ask the reason why. However, the second aspect requires asking the purpose for. Dr. Freud’s approach is roughly correlated with the former, and he would, no doubt, have denied my use of purpose here. Plato’s and the Greek concept of eros is correlated with the second: emotion is attraction, a pulling toward; my feelings are aroused by virtue of goals, ideals, possibilities in the future which grasp me. The distinction is also made in modern logic; the reason is the consideration in the past which explains why you are doing this or that, and purpose, in contrast, is what you want to get out of doing it. The first concept is correlated with determinism. The second refers to your opening up to new possibilities. It is thus correlated with freedom. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
We participate in the forming of the future by virtue of our capacity to conceive of and respond to new possibilities, and to bring them out of imagination and try them in actuality. This is the process of active loving. It is the eros in us responding to the eros in others and in the World of nature. To return to my patient: She experienced a hopelessness in the above session, arising out of her dim awareness of the trap she was caught in. Two sessions later she was to say, “I have always looked for reasons I feel such and such towards Harry. I believed that was what was important—that process would lead to a nirvana. Now I have run out of reasons. Maybe there are not any.” It is interesting that her last phrase is more brilliant than she realized. For it is true, both in therapy and in life, when we get to the stage where our essential needs are mostly met and we are not need-drive, that “there are not any reasons” in the sense that reasons lose their relevancy. The conflict becomes stalemate and boredom on one hand, or on the other, the opening of one’s self to new possibilities, the deepening of consciousness, the choosing and committing of one’s self to new ways of life. The distinction between reason why and purpose clicked strongly with my patient and released in her several important insights. To her considerable surprise, one of these was a radical shift in the meaning she gave to responsibility. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Now she saw it not as merely the external and passively-received expectations from family, but as an active responsibility to herself in being aware of the power she was exerting that evening with her husband. Responsibility now consisted of her choosing what she wanted of her life with him and elsewhere. It is no doubt safe to say—again excepting severely pathological individuals—that all emotions, no matter how contradictory they appear on the surface, have some kind of unity in the Gestalt which constitutes the self. The clinical problem—as in the case of the anxious child who is forced to act lovingly toward parents who are actually hostile and destructive toward him—is that the person cannot or will not let himself be aware of what he feels or is doing with his feelings. When my patient was able to analyze her two contradictory acts that evening toward her husband, it turned out that both were motivated by anger toward him and men in general, she setting up the situation to prove the man is the villain. Both actions presuppose the man as the authority figure (which she was doing with me in the nirvana process of therapy). And, in the meantime, she remains the whim-directed, willful child. She could cope with men on the basis of the childhood pattern, but—as came out in pronounced anxiety in subsequent sessions—could she cope with them as an adult? #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
We have arrived in the Airbus A380 of eros, if I may put it so, at a new concept of causality. No longer are we forced to understand the human being in terms of a billiard-ball cause-and-effect, based solely on the explanations of reason why and susceptible to rigid prediction. Indeed, Aristotle believed that the motivation of eros was so different from the determinism of the past that he would not even call it causality. In Aristotle we find the doctrine of the universal eros, which drives everything towards the highest form, the pure actuality which moves the World not as a cause (kinoumenon) but as the object of love (eromenon). And the movement he describes is a movement from the potential to the actual, from dynamis to energeia. I am proposing a description of human beings as given motivation by the new possibilities, the goals and ideals, which attract and pull them toward the future. This does not omit the fact that we are all partially pushed from behind and determined by the past, but it unites this force with its other half. Eros gives us a causality in which reason why and purpose are united. The former is part of all human experience since we all participate in the finite, natural World; in this respect, each of us, in making any important decision, needs to find out as much as one can about the objective facts of the situation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
This realm is particularly relevant in problems of neurosis in which past events do exercise a compulsive, repetitive, chainlike, predictable effect upon the person’s actions. Dr. Freud was right in the respect that rigid, deterministic causality does work in neurosis and sickness. However, he was wrong in trying to carry this over to apply to all human experience The aspect of purpose, which comes into the process when the individual can become conscious of what he or she is doing, opens one to a new and different possibilities in the future, and introduces the elements of personal responsibility and freedom. It follows that happiness cannot be found in the state of inner passivity, and in the consumer attitude which pervades the life of the alienated mortal. Happiness is to experience fullness, not emptiness which needs to be filled. The average mortal today may have a good deal of fun and pleasure, but in spite of this, one is fundamentally depressed. Perhaps it clarifies the issues if instead of using the word depressed we use the word bored. Actually there is very little difference between the two, expect a difference in degree, because boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers and the sense of un-aliveness. Among the evils of life, there are few which are as painful as boredom, and consequently every attempt is made to avoid it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
It can be avoided in two ways; either fundamentally, by being productive, and in this manner experiencing happiness, or by trying to avoid its manifestations. The latter attempts seems to characterize the chasing after fun and pleasure in the average person today. One senses one’s depression and boredom, which becomes manifest when one is alone with oneself or with those closet to him or she. All our amusements serve the purpose of making it easy for one to run away from oneself and from the threatening boredom by taking refuge in the many ways of escape which our culture offers one; yet covering up a symptom does not do away with the conditions which produce it. Aside from the fear of physical infirmary, or of being humiliated by the loss of status and prestige, the fear of boredom plays a paramount role among the fears of modern mortals. In a World of fun and amusement, one is afraid of boredom, and glad when another day has passed without mishap, another hour has been killed without one having become aware of the lurking boredom. From the standpoint of normative humanism we must arrive at a different concept of mental health; the very person who is considered healthy in the categories of an alienated World, from the humanistic standpoint appears as the sickest one—although not in terms of individual sickness, but of the socially patterned defect. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Mental health, in the humanistic sense, is characterized by the ability to love and to create, by the emergence from the incestuous bonds to family and nature, by a sense of identity based on one’s experience of self as the subject and agent of one’s powers, by the grasp of reality inside and outside of ourselves, that is, by the development of objectivity and reason. The aim of life is to live it intensely, to be fully born, to be fully awakre. To emerge from the ideas of infantile grandiosity into the conviction of one’s real though limited strength; to be able to accept the paradox that every one of us is the most important thing there is in the Universe—and at the same time not more important than a bird or a leaf falling from a tree. To be able to love life, and yet to accept death without terror; to tolerate uncertainty about the most important questions with which life confronts us—and yet to have faith in our thought and feeling, in as much as they are truly ours. To be able to be alone, and at the same time one with a loved person, with every person on this Earth, with all that is alive; to follow the voice of our conscience, the voice that calls us to ourselves, yet not to indulge in self hate when the voice of conscience was not loud enough to be hear and followed. The mentally healthy person is the person who lives by love, reason and faith, who respects life, one’s own and that of one’s fellow mortals, animals, and other living an inanimate objects. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The alienated person, as we have tried to describe, cannot be healthy. Since one experiences oneself as a thing, an investment, to be manipulated by oneself and by others, one is lacking a sense of self. This lack of self creates deep anxiety. The anxiety engendered by confronting one with the abyss of nothingness is more terrifying than even the tortures of Hell. In the vision of Hell, I am punished and tortured—in the vision of nothingness I am driven to the border of madness—because I cannot say I am any more. If the modern age has been rightly called the age of anxiety, it is primarily because of this anxiety engendered by the lack of self. Inasmuch as I am as you desire me—I am not; I am anxious, dependent on approval of others, constantly trying to please. The alienated person feels inferior whenever he or she suspected oneself of not being in line. Since one’s sense of worth is based on approval as the reward for conformity, one feels naturally threatened in one’s sense of self and in one’s self-esteem by any feeling, thought or action which could be suspected of being a deviation. Yet, inasmuch as one is human and not an automaton, one cannot help deviating, hence one must feel afraid of disapproval all the time. As a result one has to try all the harder to conform, to be approved of, to be successful. Not the voice of one’s conscience gives one strength and security but the feeling of not having lost the close touch with the herd. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Another result of alienation is the prevalence of a feeling of guilt. It is, indeed, amazing that in as fundamentally irreligious a culture as our, the sense of guilt should be so widespread and deep-rooted as it is. The main difference from, let us say, a Calvinistic community, is the fact that the feeling of guilt is neither very conscious, nor does it refer to a religiously patterned concept of sin. However, if we scratch the surface, we find that people feel guilty about hundreds of things; for not having worked hard enough, for having been too protective—or not protective enough for Mother, or for having been too kindhearted to a debtor; people feel guilty for having done good things, as well as for having done bad things; it is almost as if they had to find something to feel guilty about. What could be the cause of so much guilt feeling? It seems that there are two main sources which, though entirely different in themselves, lead to the same result. The one source is the same as that from which the feelings of inferiority spring. Not to be like the rest, not to be totally adjusted, makes one feel guilty toward the commands of the great It. The special private happiness of the free person comes from one’s ways that help one be present in what one is doing. When I feel most pressured, most unfree, it is usually because I am not there as me. I do not mean that I am not in what I am doing, necessarily. I mean that I am driving myself, treating myself as an object, a tool, an instrument. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The other source of guilt feeling is mortal’s own conscience, one senses one’s gifts or talents, one’s ability to love, to think, to laugh, to cry, to wonder and to create, one senses that one’s life is the once chance one is given, and that if one loses this chance one has lost everything. One lives in a World with more comfort and ease than one’s ancestors ever knew—yet one senses that, chasing after more comfort, one’s life runs through one’s fingers like sand. One cannot help feeling guilty for the waste, for the lost chance. This feeling of guilt is much less conscious than the first one, but one reinforces the other. Thus, alienated mortals feel guilt for being themselves, and for not being oneself, for being alive and for being an automaton, for being a person and for being a thing. Alienated mortals are unhappy. Consumption of fun serves to repress the awareness of one’s unhappiness. One tries to save time, and yet one is eager to kill the time one has saved. One is glad to have finished another day without failure or humiliation, rather than to greet the new day with the enthusiasm which only the “I am I” experience can give. One is lacking the constant flow of energy which stems from productive relatedness to the World. Having no faith, being impaired from hearing the voice of conscience, and having a manipulating intelligence but little reason, one is bewildered, disquieted and willing to appoint to the position of a leader anyone who offers one a total solution. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Can the picture of alienation be connected with any of the established pictures of mental illness? In answering this question we must remember that the mortal has two ways of relating oneself to the World. One in which one sees the World as one needs to see it in order to manipulate it or use it. Essentially this is sense experience and common-sense experience. Our eye sees that which we have to see, our ear hears what we have to hear in order to live; our common sense perceives things in a manner which enables us to act; both senses and common sense work in the service of survival. In the matter of sense and common sense and for the logic built upon them, things are the same for all people because the laws of their use are the same. The other faculty of mortals is to see things from within, as it were; subjectively, formed by my inner experience, feeling, mood. Ten painters paint the same tree in one sense, yet they paint ten different trees in another. Each tree is an expression of their individuality while also being the same tree. In the dream we see the World entirely from within; it loses its objective meaning and is transformed into a symbol of our own purely individual experience. The person who dreams while awake, that is, the person who is in touch only with one’s inner World and who is incapable of perceiving the outer World in its objective-action context, is insane. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The person who can only experience the outer World photographically, but is out of touch with one’s inner World, with oneself, is the alienated person. Schizophrenia and alienation are complementary. In both forms of sickness one pole of human experience is lacking. If both poles are present, we can speak of the productive person, whose very productiveness results from the polarity between an inner and an outer form of perception. Our description of the alienated character of contemporary mortals is somewhat one-sided; there are a number of beneficial factors which I have failed to mention. There is in the first place still a humanistic tradition alive, which has not been destroyed by the in-human process of alienation. However, beyond that, there are signs that people are increasingly dissatisfied and disappointed with their way of life and trying to regain some of their lost selfhood and productivity. Millions of people listen to good music in concert halls or over the radio, an ever-increasing number of people paint, do gardening, build their own boast or houses, indulge in any number of do it yourself activities. Adult education is spreading, and even in business the awareness is growing that an executive should have reason and not only intelligence. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
However promising and real as all these trends are, they are not enough to justify an attitude which is to be found among a number of very sophisticated writers who claim that criticisms of our society, such as the one which has been offered ere, are dated and archaic; that we have already passed the peak of alienation and are now on our way to a better World. Appealing as this type of optimism is, it is nevertheless only a more sophisticated for of the defense of the status quo, a translation of the praise of the American Way of Life into the concepts of a cultural anthropology which, has been enriched and goes beyond to assure mortals that there is no reason for serious worry. “It’s raining, it’s pouring, a black sky is falling. It’s cold tonight. You gave me your answer. Goodbye. Now I am all on my own tonight. And when the big wheel starts to spin, you can never know the odds if you do not play to win. We were in Heaven you and I, when I lay with you and close my eyes, our fingers touch the sky. I’m sorry, baby. You were the Sun and Moon to me. I will never get over you, you will never get over me,” reports Sun and Moon by Above and Beyond. As self-acutalizers grow older, they tend to be more and more interested in cognitive (thinking/learning) and esthetic (art, music, literature, philosophy) activities. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
As the Formula Runs in the Brave New World: Everybody is Happy Nowadays!
The problem with you is you think you are still human. I came quite close to losing my mind. Did anyone have a clue as to the crash and thunder inside me? I locked the casket of my heart. I punished it. I endured it. Motivation researchers are those harlot social scientists who, in impressive psychoanalytic and/or sociological jargon, tell their clients what their clients want to hear, namely, that appeals to human irrationality are likely to be far more profitable than appeals to rationality. There is a myth of inborn behaviors based on race, nationality, ethnic group, or gender and it is one of the stubornest fantasies around. It has become so much a part of our thinking and is partially validated just often enough that we sometimes wonder if we will ever rid ourselves of it. Currently, a number of psychologists are engaged in research to discover what, if any, motivations are inborn in human beings. For instance, several are interested in the question of whether violent, aggressive behaviors are inborn or acquired. The arguments rage as both sides pile up mountains of evidence. For instance, if a man is born with an extra Y chromosome, does this cause him to be more aggressive, more hostile, to get into difficulty more often with society? Some of the evidence says yes. For instance, a startling number of convicted violent criminals have been found to have this extra chromosome. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Other psychologists think the evidence is still much too sketchy to justify a scientific conclusion. Adam fell that mortals might be; and mortals are, that they might have joy. Who put it together with love and purpose? Pleasing work of God heals wounded souls. We all have the ability to choose eternal life according to will of the Holy Spirit. It is possible that existentialism will not only enrich psychology. It may also be an additional push toward the establishment of another branch of psychology, the psychology of the fully evolved and authentic Self and its ways of being. Someone better than us, has to be—somebody better than every creature who walks the Earth, somebody who shows compassion. Human beings can sometimes transcend their physical needs. “Behold, the Lord hath redeemed my soul from hell; I have beheld his glory, and I am encircled about eternally in the arms of his love,” 2 Nephi 1:15. Although the satisfaction of the physical needs is indeed the indispensable precondition of a satisfactory existence, in itself it is not enough. In order to be content, mortals must also have the possibility of developing their intellectual and artistic powers to whatever extent accords with their personal characteristics and abilities. Human behavior is governed by many types of motives. Some of these are physiological, but many more are acquired and learned through social interaction, personal experiences, and growth experiences. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Those human impulses which have seemed throughout history to be deepest, to be most instinctive and unchangeable, to be most widely spread throughout humankind, i.e., the impulse to hate, to be jealous, to be hostile, to be greedy, to be egoistic and selfish are now being discovered more and more clearly to be acquired and not instinctive. They are almost certainly neurotic and sick reactions to bad situations, more specifically to frustrations of our truly basic and instinctlike needs and impulses. Some individuals seem to bypass or ignore their physiological needs and do things that actually indicate they are operating at higher levels of motivation. For example, some parents give up their own food for the sake of their children; many individuals sacrifice their lives for friends or for causes; and there are less affluent people in every part of the World who have been able to actualize their potentials, even though lower needs to not seem to be met. The apparent paradox leads to the conclusion that some people are more evolved than others. Transcendence is the father reaches of human nature and it deserves far more attention and study than psychologists have heretofore given them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Tension, whether large or small, is painful. It causes discomfort. We want to stop it. So, to reduce the tension, we search out a goal, an incentive. The goal must have two qualities: it must actually satisfy the need, and it must be something the individual recognizes as being able to meet that need. The achievement of the goal result in satisfaction and a return to homeostasis (a state of balance or equilibrium among the various bodily processes). So tell yourself, you need to make at least $9,000.00 a month, save up $120,000.00 and have good credit to buy a $500,000.00 house, so do not take out student loans. “And not choose eternal death, according to the will of the flesh and the evil which is therein, which giveth the spirit of the devil power to captivate, to bring you down to hell, that he may reign over you in his own kingdom,” 2 Nephi 2.29. Many of our strongest motivations can be traced back to one or more of the physiological needs. For example, being deprived of food and shelter in childhood can set a lifetime pattern for individual: they are always trying to get enough food, money, or clothing, no matter what their income, and they may even hoard food or money in the attempt. Their reasoning—strange to those of us who have never felt this deprived—is that they must always keep on hand a sufficient supply of food, clothing, or money—just in case. This is called the functional autonomy of motives—when a motive ends up as a goal in and of itself, long after the basic need has been satisfied. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Physiological needs persist throughout our lives, but for most of us the first two or three years of life are the only period when satisfying them seems more important to our existence than anything else. This is not true for the 40 percent of the World’s people who go to be (if they have a bed) with their stomachs empty. They may live to be adults, but as long as they are so poor, most of them will find it hard to pay much attention to anything else except getting enough food to stay alive. The most basic physiological motives are those that keep the body going. They work to regulate the body’s homeostatic processes. They arise out of such basic needs as the needs for food, liquid, and air. The need for nutriments to supply energy and to build and rebuild body cells activates the drive we call hunger. Other needs may become more pressing and may overrule the need for food. On the other hand, being deprived of food for a long period of time may make the hunger drive so strong that other drives are not even felt. In studies of semi-starvation conducted during the Second World War, volunteers were kept for six months on a bare subsistence diet that resulted in an average weight loss of 25 percent. I mean, if the old resignation of the Savage Garden was wrong, what has replaced it? #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Well, the subjects showed marked personality changes, such as increased irritability, extreme fascination with food, cookbooks, recipes, and each other’s mail (in hopes of receiving a package containing somebody’s mother’s homemade cake or cookies or some cold hard cash); and loss of interest in health, exercise, reading, pleasures of the flesh, love, and family. In addition to a general need for food, the hunger drive can result in a specific hunger for a particular food. This may be the result of learned preferences. There is some evidence, however, that these specific hungers may be as important physiologically as they are psychologically. They may be based upon the body’s particular needs, such as for sugar during a sugar-free diet, or for salt during a salt-free diet. Studies that show naïve or very young subjects, given a wide choice of many food, often choose those that their bodies most need. In addition to deficiencies or blood-sugar imbalances, we can also be stimulated to feel hunger by thinking about food, smelling food, or seeing others eating. Many people are above average weight because they use food as a substitute to meet other needs. Statistics very as to how long the average adult can go without any form of food. They ran from a few days to over a month (the latter depending upon some regular intake of water). #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
The cells of our body require a specific fluid level, just as does the battery of your car. Without the optimum amount of water, dehydration results. Dehydration is the loss of water or other moisture by an organism. The need for liquid results in the drive called thirst. The goal of this drive is the intake of fluid (water, cranberry juice, soda pop, milk—any of them will do; our preferences are learned). Like hunger, the thirst drive is largely triggered by the chemical balance of body tissues. Any imbalance is relayed to the hypothalamus, which sets off the drive. The maximum amount of time the average adult can go without fluids is a week or less, a much shorter time than people can go without food. Lack of air flow results in strangulation. The need for air differs from some other physiological needs in that breathing is an automatic response, controlled by the autonomic nervous system. It is estimated that the brain cannot survive more than three minutes without oxygen in the blood steam. You secret is utterly safe. It will be exactly the way you want it. Wait a safe period of time. “May the Lord bless thee forever, for they seed shall not utterly be destroyed,” reports 2 Nephi 3.3. The use and fatigue of the physical body and the brain creates a need for a period of rest, recuperation, and restoration of energies. This need is met by sleep. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
During this period of sleep, stress on muscle cells is reduced and gross neural activity is reduced. Of course, the nervous system is never completely shut down at any time during life. The brain, for instance, continues to function and is stimulated by dreaming. Studies of people deprived of sleep sow that subjects experience increased irritability, reduction of cognitive function (measured by before-and-after intelligence tests), restlessness, and a tendency to hallucinate. Although defunct Governor of California, Jerry Brown, thinks it is funny to experiment on people and not allow some to use the restroom until it causes internal damage, elimination of body wastes—urination and defecation—is a response to tensions in inner organs and is essential to good health. It is not known how long a person can go without elimination before harm or death occurs. If we lived alone, perhaps all our needs would be basic physiological needs. However, because we live in groups, many of our needs—even our physiological needs—require other people for their fulfillment. Some physiological motives are affected by learning, and by the needs, wishes, or demands of others. For instance, elimination of bodily wastes is done (after the first few months) according to certain social and cultural formulas: we are told how, when, and where to urinate and defecate. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
We learn which of all the possible foods available are properly called “food” by the people with whom we live. However, these are still basically purely physiological motives. Some motives, on the other hand, can only be correctly identified as physiological/social in nature, so much do they depend upon social factors. Let us considered as primarily physiological/social needs and to some degree, those called love and belongingness needs. I cannot live in a shadow World. I have to be there for all the ordinary people, signing contracts, rolling out blue prints, calling doctors all over the country, flying to Switzerland and Vienna to interview physicians who want to work in the ideal medical center, the medical center that surpasses every other in its equipment, its laboratories, its staff, its comforts, it protocols and projects. It is to rivet me to the sane World, it is to push my own medical visions to the very limits. Now remember we were talking about men with an extra Y chromosome? Well, Electrical Brain Stimulation (Abbreviated EBS or ESB) are microelectrodes, or tiny electrical receptors, they can be inserted into various portions of the brain. The brain can then be stimulated with low-voltage electricity. This activates the brain externally, without the controls of the nervous system. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
EBS has been instrumental in providing a whole new range of insights into brain processes and behavior. For example, electrical stimulation of certain portions of the limbic system produces all the symptoms of certain emotions, such as fear, anger, anxiety; certain drives, such as hunger, thirst, excitation, and pain; and certain reasons, such as intense pleasure. What began as research into motivation, learning, and emotion has now evolved into a technique to simulate internal processes. EBS helps neurologists assist people with such problem behaviors as unmanageable rage or anxiety. Stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain produces feelings so intense that this stimulation can be used as a reward in conditioning and it has been determined that anti-depressants can curb harsh behavior in some people because they produce serotonin, which will make them feel more at ease. The brain is so powerful, so energetic is the brain that it utilizes about 75 percent of the body’s blood sugar and oxygen. (You can take advantage of this fact the next time you take an examination or do other brain work by increasing your intake of glucose—especially in the form of honey, as many athletes do—and take several deep breaths just beforehand). #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Individuals who have suffered brain injuries can be observed. If such a person cannot move a portion of his or her body, for instance, or cannot speak, and no other explanation fits, the assumption may be made that the damaged portion of the brain is related to the damaged or missing function. The nervous system is actually made up of several systems, each responsible for specialized functions. The central nervous system is the center for operations of the nervous system as a whole. It is made up of the brain and the spinal cord. The spinal cord is a bundle of nerves, about the diameter of a pencil in size, running from the center of the brain down to the tip of the spinal column (or backbone). The spinal cord is vitally important to most bodily movement. Damage to it can result in paralysis of part of the body. It helps all manner of human beings, it embraces them, it is real to them, real, that is what is important. I could not let go, I could not ever retreat into nightmares or scribblings in my room, I could not ever fail my interns and residents, my laboratory assistants, my research teams, and you know, with my background, the neurosurgeon, the scientist at heart, I brought to every aspect of this giant organism a personal approach; I could not run away, I could not fail, I cannot fail now, I cannot be absent, I cannot. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
The concept of self-love seems at first to be a contradiction in terms. If love involves giving and getting, how can one person do both? And how can one do both within one person? The ability to love means to break down any divisions between the subject and the object; as in the concept of the Earth and Sky, mutually complementary halves become one whole with no real or important line between them. This is done, paradoxically, without either half (or either partner) losing its identity. The Earth does not become the Sky, nor does the Sky become the Earth: they only complete each other. There is unity without sameness. In the attitude a person has toward oneself, the distinction between I, the subject, and Me, the object, is only an academic exercise. “I” describes the active, knowing part of self; “Me” describes the known part of self. Both terms are fictions created for purposes of discourse. I can love myself, and indeed, I must love myself if I am to talk about any meaningful complementary relationship with another person. If I do not know, care about, respect, and respond to my needs, then I do not love myself and certainly cannot love someone whom I experience less intimately. Furthermore, an unloved package is more likely to be a burden than a gift. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
So, in spite of the seeming paradox, the person who loves others loves oneself. One loves others because one loves oneself. To become familiar with the fullest meanings of love, you must begin at home. The child who knows the affection, the caring, the respecting, the involving of loving parents begins to gain emotional as well as rational understanding of the love process, even though one may never be able to articulate or explain it, either to oneself or to others. But, one knows in the intuitive sense that one is loved and one becomes to value what is one’s parents value—in this case, oneself. However, the Canadian rapper Drake, in his song God’s Plan declares, “I only love my bed and my mom,” such a combination would lead one to believe he is suffering from an Oedipus complex. The fixation to the mother was recognized by Dr. Freud as the crucial problem of human development, both of the race and of the individual. The intensity of the fixation to the mother is derived from the little boy’s sexual attraction to her, as the expression of the incestuous striving inherent in his nature. People with an Oedipus complex usually have a hostile relationship to the father as a result of sexual rivalry with him. This is why in romantic situations, women will be turned off if you tell them they remind them of your mother. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The ultimate aim of the socialization process, as it relates to dependency, is for the child to be fond of the mother rather than passionately attached to her, to be pleased by her attention and interest but not incessantly to demand it. It is possible that Drake’s father projected into the boy the sexual feeling of the adult man; the little boy having sexual desires, was supposed to be sexually attracted to the woman closet to him, and only by the superior power of the rival, in this case his father, in the triangle, is he forced to give up his desire, without ever recovering fully from this frustration. The depth and intensity of the irrational affective tie to the mother, the wish to return into her orbit to remain a part of her, the fear of emerging fully from her. The Oedipus complex is the acknowledgment and the denial of the crucial phenomenon of man’s longing for mother’s love. However, another problem is when someone has their eyes on a young man, and ruins all his relationships and friendships, to where he only has contact with his mother. This usually happens when an obsessive man has a fix on a young man, who is not interested in him, at all. So, he tries to keep the young man in an adolescent state in hopes that an unlikely dependence will form. An individual who is neurotic has an emotional condition characterized by much anxiety and conflicting motives; this condition is often stimulated by choices that all seem bad. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Incest or trying to force relationships in American society is not healthy, and is actually illegal. When a young man is not allowed to grow and develop and form relationships, friendships, and a career of his choice he will never truly be happy. There will always be some anger or bitterness about being stuck in a place with no one he can actually relate to. Humans are in need of the kind of love that makes them feel comfortable, not like they are being held hostage or in enemy hands. When people can develop relationships they want, this kind of experience builds in them the first pleasurable sensations and satisfactions that are part of an emerging concept of self. When this develops in the normal, ordinary way, the child comes to know and accept and love himself. Happiness is another, and one of the more popular concepts by which mental health is defined today. As the formula runs in the Brave New World: “Everybody is happy nowadays.” What is meant by happiness? Most people today would probably answer the question by saying that to be happy is to have fun or to have a good time. The answer to the question is, “What is fun?” depends somewhat on the economic situation of the individual, and more, on one’s education and personality structure. Economic differences, however, are not as important as they may seem. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The good time of society’s upper strata is the fun model for those not yet able to pay for it while earnestly hoping for that happy eventuality—and the good time of society’s lower strata is increasingly a less affluent imitation of the upper strata’s, differing in cost, but not so much in quality. What does this fun consist in? Going to the movies, parties, ball games, listening to a state of trance (ASOT 811) and watching television, taking a rise in the car on Sundays, dining out, sleeping late on Sunday mornings (but we know many of you have church on Saturday and/or Sunday mornings), and traveling for those who can afford it. If we use a more respectable term, instead of the word fun, and having a good time, we might say that the concept of happiness is, at best, identified with that of pleasure. Taking into consideration our discussion of the problem of consumption, we can define the concept somewhat more accurately as the pleasure of unrestricted consumption, and push-button power and laziness. From this standpoint, happiness could be defined as the opposite of sadness or sorrow, and indeed, the average person defines happiness as a state of mind which is free from sadness or sorrow. This definition, however, shows that there is something profoundly wrong in this concept of happiness. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
A person who is alive and sensitive cannot fail to be sad, and to feel sorrow many times in one’s life. This is so, not only because of the amount of unnecessary suffering produced by the imperfection of our social arrangements, but because of the nature of human existence, which makes it impossible not to react to life with a good deal of pain and sorrow. Since we are living beings, we must be sadly aware of the necessary gap between out aspirations and what can be achieved in our short and troubled life. Since death confronts us with the inevitable fact that either we shall die before our loved ones of they before us—since we see suffering, the unavoidable as well as the unnecessary and wasteful, around us every day, how can we avoid the experience of pain and sorrow? The effort to avoid it is only possible if we reduce our sensitivity, responsiveness and love, if we harden our hearts and withdraw our attention and our feeling from others, as well as form ourselves. “And out of weakness one shall be made strong, in that day when my work shall commence among all my people,” reports 2 Nephi 3.13. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Love’s Depth is Often Tested in Crisis: Such Creativity is as Close as Mortals Ever Get to becoming Immortal
I know you have survived centuries. You have even survived yourself. You went into a desert place like Christ. You did not die because your blood is too strong. You are afraid you cannot die. Everything you have believed in has been shattered You tell yourself you have no illusions, but that is not true. Mutuality, the giving-taking circle, replenishes and nourishes and assists the growth of each person in any relationship. What becomes of reason, conscience and religion in an alienated World? Superficially seen, they prosper. There is hardly any illiteracy to speak of in the Western countries; more and more people go to college in the United States; everybody reads the newspaper and talks reasonably about World affairs. As to conscience, most people act quite decently in their narrow personal sphere, in fact surprisingly so, considering their general confusion. As far as religion is concerned, it is well known that church affiliation is higher than ever, and the vast majority of Americans believe in God—or so they say in public-opinion polls. However, one does not need to dig too deeply to arrive at less pleasant findings. If we talk about reason, we must decide what human capacity we are referring to. As I have suggested before, we must differentiate between intelligence and reason. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
By intelligence I mean the ability to manipulate concepts for the purpose of achieving some practical end. The chimpanzee—who puts the two sticks together in order to get to do the job—uses intelligence. So do we all when we go about our business, figuring out how to do things. Intelligence, in this sense, is taking things for granted as they are, making combinations which have the purpose of facilitating their manipulations: intelligence is thought in the service of biological survival. Reason, one the other and, aims at understanding; it tries to find out what is behind the surface, to recognize the kernel, the essence of the reality which surrounds us. Reason is not without a function, but its function is not to further physical as much as mental and spiritual existence. However, often in individual and social life, reason is required in order to predict (considering that prediction often depends on recognition of forces which operate underneath the surface), and prediction sometimes is necessary even for physical survival. “Therefore, go to your homes, and ponder upon the things which I has said, and ask the Father, in my name that you may understand, and prepare your minds for the morrow, and I come unto you again, reports 3 Nephi 17.3. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Reason requires relatedness and a sense of self. If I am only the passive receptor of impressions, thoughts, opinions, I can compare them, manipulate them—but I cannot penetrate them. I deduce the existence of myself as an individual from the fact that I think. I doubt, so hence I think; I think, hence I am. The reverse is true, too. Only if I am I, if I have not lost my individuality in the It, can I think, that is, can I make use of my reason. It might be maintained that the reasoning necessary for the knowledge of God is, as a matter of fact, too difficult for frail and mortal human beings to manage. Closely related to this the lacking sense of reality which is characteristic of the alienated personality. To speak of the lacking sense of reality in modern mortals is contrary to the widely held idea that we are distinguished from most periods of history by our greater realism. However, to speak of our realism is almost like a paranoid distortion. What realists, who are playing wit weapons which may lead to the destruction of all modern civilization, if not of our Earth itself! If an individual were found doing that, he or she would be locked up immediately, and if one prided oneself on one’s realism, the psychiatrists would consider this an additional and rather serious symptom of a diseased mind. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
However, quite aside from this—the fact is that modern humans exhibit an amazing lack of realism for all that matters. For the meaning of life and death, for happiness and suffering, for feeling and serious thought. One has covered up the whole reality of human existence and replaced it with one’s artificial, prettified picture of a pseudo-reality, not too different from the savages who lost their land and freedom for glittering glass beads and paper. Indeed, one is so far away from human reality, that one can say with the inhabitants of the Brave Knew World: “When the individual feels, the community reels.” Another factor in contemporary society already mentioned is destructive to reason. Since nobody ever does the whole job, but only a fraction of it, since the dimension of things and of the organization of people is too vast to be understood as a whole, nothing can be seen in its totality. Hence the laws underlying the phenomena cannot be observed. Intelligence is sufficient to manipulate properly one sector of a larger unit, whether it is a machine or a state. However, reason can develop only if it is geared to the whole, if it deals with observable and manageable entities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Just as our eyes and ears function only within certain quantitative limits of wave length, our reason too is bound by what is observable as a whole and in its functioning. To put it differently, beyond a certain order of bigness, concreteness is necessarily lost and abstractification takes place; with it, the sense for reality fades out. The first one to see this problem was Aristotle, who thought that a city which transcended in number what we would call today a small town was not livable. In observing the quality of thinking in alienated mortals, it is striking to see how one’s intelligence has developed and how one’s reason has deteriorated. Mortals take their reality for granted; they want to eat it, consumer it, touch it, manipulate it. Mortals do not even ask what is behind it, why things are as they are, and where they are going. One cannot eat the meaning, one cannot consume the sense, and as far as the future is concered—apres nous le deluge! Even from the nineteenth century to our day, there seems to have occurred an observable increase in stupidity, if by this we mean the opposite to reason, rather than to intelligence. In spite of the fact that everybody reads the daily paper religiously, there is an absence of understanding of the meaning of political events which is truly frightening, because our intelligence helps us to produce weapons which our reason is not capable of controlling. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Indeed, we have the know-how, but we do not have the know-why, nor the know-what-for of what we are creating. We have many persons with good and high intelligence quotients, but our intelligence tests measure the ability to memorize, to manipulate thoughts quickly—but not to reason. All this is true notwithstanding the fact that there are mortals of outstanding reason in our midst, whose thinking is as profound and vigorous as ever existed in the history of the human race. However, they think apart from the general herd thought, and they are looked upon with suspicion—even if they are needed for their extraordinary achievements in the natural sciences. The new automatic brains are indeed a good illustration of what is meant here by intelligence. They manipulate data which are fed into them; they compare, select, and eventually come out with results more quickly or more error-proof than human intelligence could. However, the condition of all this is that the basic data are fed into them beforehand. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
What the electric brain cannot do is think creatively, even with its algorithms and predictions, the computer cannot arrive at an insight into the essence of the observed fact, to go beyond state with which it is fed. It cannot feel and ask questions for further understanding. It does not have emotions. It does not care. It cannot put itself in one’s situation and consider some circumstanced may cause some people to work ten times harder than the average person their age, or that recalling certain things can be painful. The computer does not care. The machine can duplicate or even improve on intelligence, but it cannot simulate reason, and it can be hacked and manipulated and cause great harm and bodily damage to many without being held responsible because it is not a unique biological unit. Therefore, the machine can repeat the same mistake over and over without people demanding it to be dismantled, or greater control placed over it because statistically, it proves well and is better than a human. Ethics, at least in the meaning of the Greco-Judaeo-Christian tradition, is inseparable from reason. Ethical behavior is based on the faculty of making value judgments on the basis of reason; it means deciding between good and evil, and to act upon decision. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Use of reason presupposes the presence of self; so does ethical judgment and action. Furthermore, ethics, whether it is that of monotheistic religion or that of secular humanism, is based on the principle that no institution and no thing is higher than any human individual; that the aim of life is to unfold mortal’s love and reason and that every other human activity has to be subordinated to this aim. How then can ethics be a significant part of a life in which the individual becomes an automaton, in which one serves the big It? Furthermore, how can conscience develop when the principle of life is conformity? Conscience by its very nature is nonconforming; it must be able to say this “no” it must be certain in the rightness of the judgment on which the no is based. To the degree to which a person conforms one cannot hear the voice of one’s conscience, must less act upon it. Conscience exists only when mortals experience themselves, as mortal, not as a thing, as a commodity. So calling a person by their title kind of robs them of their humanity and turns them into an object, and that can lead to condescendence, depending on what the individual does for a living and how society views their career or lifestyle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Concerning things which are exchanged on the market there exists another quasi ethical code, that of fairness. The question is, whether they are exchanged at a fair price, no tricks and no force interfering with the fairness of the bargain; this fairness, not good and evil, is the ethical principle of the market and it is the ethical principle governing the life of the marketing personality. The principle of fairness, no doubt, makes for a certain type of ethical behavior. You do not lie, cheat nor use force—you even give the other person a chance—if you act according to the code of fairness. However, to love your neighbor, to feel one with him, or her, or them, to devote your life to the aim of developing your spiritual powers, is not part of the fairness ethics. We live in a paradoxical situation: We practice fairness ethics, and profess Christian ethics. Must we not stumble over this obvious contradiction? Obviously, we do not stumble. What is the reason? Partly, it is to be found in the fact that the heritage of four thousand years of the development of conscience is by no means completely lost. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
On the contrary, in many way the liberation of mortals from the powers of the feudal state and Church, made is possible for this heritage to be brought to fruition and in the period between the eighteenth century and the twenty-first century it blossomed as perhaps never before. We still are part of this process—but given our own twenty-first century condition of life, it seems that there is no new bun which will blossom when this flower has wilted. Another reason why we do not stumble over the contradiction between humanistic ethics and fairness ethics is based in the fact that we reinterpret religious and humanistic ethics in the light of fairness ethics. A good illustration of this interpretation is the Golden Rule. In its original Jewish and Christian meaning, it was a popular phrasing of the Bible maxim to love thy neighbor as thyself. In the system of fairness ethics, it means simply when you exchange, be fair. Give what you expect to get. Do not cheat! No wonder the Golden Rule is the most popular religious phrase of today. It combines two opposite system of ethics and helps us to forget the contradiction. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
While we still live from the Christian-humanistic heritage it is not surprising that the younger generation exhibits less and less of the traditional ethics and that we come across a moral barbarism among our youth which is in complete contrast to the economic and educational level society has reached. Today, while revising this manuscript, I read two items. One in The New York Times, regarding the fact of the murder of a man, cruelly trampled to death by four teenagers of average middle-class families. The other in Time magazine, a description of the new Guatemalan chief of police, who as former chief of police under the Ubico dictatorship had perfected a head-shrinking steel skull cap to pry loose secrets and crush improper political thoughts. His picture is published with the caption “For improper thought, a crusher.” Could anything be more insanely insensitive to extremes of sadism than this flippant line? It is surprising when in a culture in which the most popular news magazine can write this, some teenagers have no scruples about beating a man to death? Is the fact that we show brutality and cruelty in comic books and movies, because money is made with these commodities, not enough of an explanation for the growing barbarism and vandalism in our youth? #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Our movie censors watch that no sexual scenes are shown, since this could suggest illicit sexual desires. How innocent would this result be in comparison with the dehumanizing effect of what the censors permit and the churches seem to object to less than to the traditional sins. Yes, we still have an ethical heritage, but it will soon be spent and will be replaced by the ethics of the Brave New World, or 1984, or New Jack City or Minority Report unless it ceases to be a heritage and is re-created in our whole mode of life. At the moment, it seems that ethical behavior is still to be found in the concrete situation of many individuals, while society is marching toward barbarism. Much of what has been said about ethics is to be said about religion. Of course, speaking of the role of religion among alienated mortals, everything depends on what we call religion. If we are referring to religion in its widest sense, as a system of orientation and an object of devotion, then, indeed, every human being is religious, since nobody can live without such a system and remain sane. Then, our culture is as religious as any. Our gods are the machine, and the idea of efficiency; the meaning of our life is to move, to forge ahead, to arrive as near to the top of the pyramid as possible. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
However, if religion we mean monotheism, then, indeed, our religions is not more than one of the commodities in our show windows. Monotheism is incompatible with alienation and with our ethics of fairness. It makes mortal’s unfolding, one’s salvation, the supreme aim of life, an aim which never can be subordinated to any other. Inasmuch as God is unrecognizable, indefinable, and indefinable—which means he is not and can never be considered a thing. The fight between monotheism and idolatry is exactly the fight between the productive and the alienated way of life. Our culture is perhaps the first completely secularized culture in human history. We have shoved away awareness of and concern with the fundamental problems of human existence. We are not concerned with the meaning of life, with the solution to it; we start out with the conviction that there is no purpose except to invest life successfully and to get it over with without major mishaps. That is why people try to live right and obey God’s commandments. The majority of us believe in God, take it for granted the God exists. The rest, who do not believe, take it for granted that God does not exist. Either way, God is taken for granted. Neither belief nor disbelief cause any sleepless nights, nor any serious concern. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
In fact, whether a mortal in our culture believes in God or not makes hardly any difference either from a psychological or from a truly religious standpoint. In both instances one does not care—either about God or about the answer to the problem of one’s own existence. Just as humanly love has been replaced by impersonal fairness, God has been transformed into a remote General Director of Universe, Inc.; you know that God is there, God runs the show (although it probably would run without God too), you never see God, but you acknowledge God’s leadership while you are doing your part and paying your fair share or what seems to be more than fair. The religious renaissance which we witness in these days is perhaps the worst blow monotheism has yet received. Is there any greater sacrilege than to speak of the Man upstairs, to teach to pray in order to make God your partners in business, to sell religions with the method and appeals of a new BMW or Buick? In view of the fact that the alienation of modern mortals is incompatible with monotheism, one might expect that ministers, priests and rabbis would form the spearhead of criticism of modern Capitalism. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
While it is true that from high Catholic quarters and from a number of less highly placed ministers and rabbis such criticism has been voiced, all churches belong essentially to the conservative forces in modern society and use religion to keep mortals going and satisfied with a profoundly irreligious system. The majority of them do not seem to recognize that this type of religion will eventually degenerate into overt idolatry, unless they begin to define and then to fight against modern idolatry, rather than to make prenouncements about God and thus to use God’s name in vain—in more than one sense. The courage to be in all its forms has, by itself, revelatory character. It shows the nature of being, it shows that the self-affirmation of being is an affirmation that overcome negation. In a metaphorical statement (and every assertion about being-itself is either metaphorical or symbolic) one could say that being include nonbeing but nonbeing does not prevail against it. Including is a spatial metaphor which indicates that being embraces itself and that which is opposed to it, nonbeing. Nonbeing belongs to being, it cannot be separated from it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
We could not thing being without a double negation: being must be thought as the negation of the negation of being. This is why we describe being best by the metaphor power of being. Power is the possibility a being has to actualize itself against the resistance of other beings. If we speak of the power of being-itself we indicate the being affirms itself against nonbeing. In our discussion of courage and life we have mentioned the dynamic self-affirmation of being—itself wherever it spoke dialectically, notably in Neoplatonism, Hegel, and the philosophers of life and process. Theology has done the same whenever it took the idea of the living God seriously, most obviously in the trinitarian symbolization of the inner life of God. In spite of the static definition of substance (the name for the ultimate power of being), it unites philosophical and mystical tendencies when we speak of the love and knowledge with which God loves and know himself through the love and knowledge for finite beings. Nonbeing (that in God which makes his self-affirmation dynamic) opens up the divine self-seclusion and reveals him as power of love. Nonbeing makes God a living God. Without the No he as to overcome in himself and in his creature, the divine Yes to himself would be lifeless. There would be no revelation of the ground of being, there would be no life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
However, where there is nonbeing there is finitude and anxiety. If we say that nonbeing belongs to being-itself, we say that finitude and anxiety belong to being-itself. Wherever philosophers or theologians have spoke of the divine blessedness they have implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) spoken of the anxiety of finitude which is eternally taken into the blessedness of the divine infinity. The infinite embraces itself and the finite, the Yes includes itself and the No which it takes into itself, blessedness comprises itself and the anxiety of which it is the conquest. All this is implied if one says that being includes nonbeing and that through nonbeing it reveals itself. It is a highly symbolic language which mist be used at this point. However, its symbolic character does not diminish its truth; on the contrary, it is a condition of its truth. To speak unsymbolically about being-itself is untrue. The divine self-affirmation is the power that makes the self-affirmation of the finite being, the courage to be, possible. Only because being-itself has the character of self-affirmation inspite of nonbeing is courage possible. Courage participates in the power of being which prevails against nonbeing. One who receives this power in an act of mystical or personal or absolute faith is aware of the source of one’s courage to be. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Mortals are not necessarily aware of this source. In situations of cynicism and indifference one is not aware of it. However, it works in one as long as one maintains the courage to take one’s anxiety upon oneself. In the act of the courage to be the power of being is effective in us, whether we recognize it or not. Every act of courage is a manifestation of the ground of being, however questionable the content of the act may be. The content may hide or distort true being, the courage in it reveals true being. Not arugments but the courage in it reveals true being. Not arguments but the courage to be reveals the true nature of being-itself. By affirming our being we participate in the self-affirmation of being-itself. There are no valid arguments for the existence of God, but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being, whether we know it or not. If we know it, we accept acceptance consciously. If we do not know it, we nevertheless accept it and participate in it. And in our acceptance of that which we do not know the power of being is manifest to us. Courage has revealing power, the courage to be is the key to being itself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Love’s depth is often tested in crisis. In addition to courage, there must be caring for us to manifest our true divine heritage. We must care, be concerned, about other people’s well-being, their growth, their health, their ups and downs. A deeply felt and often expressed statement, verbal or not, that we convey to each other when we love is “I care about you, how you are, what happens to you, about protecting you, about seeing your grow and become everything you can be.” And it goes a bit further: “I hurt when you hurt: I feel your joy, your sorrow, your ecstasy, your loss, your fear, and your confidence.” The caring aspect of love is seen most vividly in the love expressed by a mother for her child. You birth the baby, carrying him or her on your hip like the child is apart of you and watch the being grow. The child is not yet a full partner in the love relationship; he or she is a recipient of the mother’s affection, concern and tenderness. What satisfies the mother, though, is response. The child can smile when filled or comfortable. One can gurgle and good and wave his or her arms when he or she see her coming. These simple expressions are sufficient for most of us. However, in a mature and authentic love relationship, if one person is inadequate or poorly equipped in responding, the other person may find that one cannot continue giving. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
When it comes to romance, there is good basis in mortal’s ancient wisdom for the urge we all feel in eros to unite with the beloved, to prolong the delight, to deepen the meaning and treasure it. This holds in our relationships not only with persons but with objects, like a machine we are making or a house we are building or a vocation to which we are devoted. Love is neither mortal nor immortal, but a mean between the two…He is a great spirit (daimon) and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal. He is the mediator who spans the chasm which divines mortals and gods, and therefore in him all is bound together. Eros is not a god in the sense of being above mortals, but the power that binds all things and all mortal together, the power informing all things. It means to give inward from, to seek out by the devotion of love the unique form of the beloved person or object and to unite one’s self with that form. Eros also incites mortals in the yearning for knowledge and drives one passionately to seek union with truth. Through eros, we not only become poets and inventors, but also achieve ethical goodness. Love, in the form of eros, is the power which generates, and this generation is a kind of eternity and immortality—which is to say that such creativity is as close as mortals ever get to becoming immortal. #RandolpHarris 20 of 20
Its Past Enlightened to Perceive New Periods of Recollect
Indeed people’s charms should not go to waste, that is my motto, may it never have dire consequences for the mortal World. As I have pointed out before, anonymous authority and automation conformity are largely the results of our mode of production, which requires quick adaptation to the machines, disciplined mass behavior, common taste and obedience without the use of force. Another facet of our economic system, the need for mass consumption, has been instrumental in creating a feature in the social character of modern mortals which constitutes one of the most striking contrasts to the social character twenty first century. I am referring to the principle that every desire must be satisfied immediately, no wish must be frustrated. The most obvious illustration of this principle is to be found in our system of buying on the installment plan. In the nineteenth century you bought what you needed, when you had saved the money for it; today you buy what you need, or do not need, on credit, and the function of advertising is largely to coax you into buying and to whet your appetite for things, so that you can be coaxed. You live in a circle. You buy on the installment plan, and about the time you have finished paying, you sell and you buy again—the latest model. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The principle that desires must be satisfied without much delay has also determined sexual behavior, especially since the end of the First World War. A crude form of misunderstood Freudianism used to furnish the appropriate rationalizations; the idea being that neuroses result from repressed sexual strivings, that frustrations were traumatic, and the less you repressed the healthier you were. Even parents anxious to give their children everything they wanted lest they be frustrated, acquired a complex. Unfortunately, many of these children as well as their parents landed on the analyst’s couch, provided they could afford it. The greed for things and the inability to postpone the satisfaction of wishes as characteristic of modern mortals has been stressed by thoughtful observers, such as Max Scheler and Bergson. It as been given its most poignant expression by Aldous Huxley in the Brave New World. Among the slogans by which the adolescents in the Brave New World are conditioned, one of the most important ones is “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.” It is hammered into them, “two hundred repetitions, twice a week from fourteen to sixteen and a half.” This instant realization of wishes is felt as happiness. “Everybody’s happy nowadays” is another of the Brave New World slogans; people “get what they want and they never want what they can’t get.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
This need for the immediate consumption of commodities and the immediate consummation of sexual desires is coupled in the Brave New World as in our own. It is considered immoral to keep one love partner beyond a relatively short time. Love is short-lived sexual desire, which must be satisfied immediately. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much. There is no such thing as a divided allegiance; you are so conditioned that you cannot help doing what you ought to do. And what you out to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really are not any temptations to resist. This lack of inhibition of desires leads to the same result as the lack of overt authority—the paralysis and eventually the destruction of the self. If I do not postpone the satisfaction of my wish (and am conditioned only to wish for what I can get), I have no conflicts, no doubts; no decision has to be made; I am never alone with myself, because I am always busy—either working, or having fun. I have no need to be aware of myself as myself because I am constantly absorbed having pleasure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
I am—a system of desires and satisfaction; I have to work in order to fulfill my desires—and these very desires are constantly stimulated and directed by the economic machines. Most of these appetites are synthetic; even sexual appetite is by far not as natural as it is made out to be. It is to some extent stimulated artificially. And it needs to be if we want to have people as the contemporary system needs them—people who feel happy, who have no doubts, who have no conflicts, who are guided without the use of force. Having fun consists mainly in the satisfaction of consuming and taking in; commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed. The World is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones—and the eternally disappointed ones. How can we help being disappointed if our birth stops at the breast of the mother, if we are never weaned, if we remain overgrown babes, if we never go beyond the receptive orientation? So people do worry, feel inferior, inadequate, guilty. They sense that they live without living, that life runs through their hands like sand. How do they deal with their troubles, which stem from the passivity of constant taking in? #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
By another form of passivity, a constant spilling out, as it were: by talking. Here, as in the case of authority and consumption, an idea which once was productive has been turned into its opposite. Who we are—what our identities will be—is not a given, not fully decided at birth. Newborn infants are not miniature adults or people seeds, that only require a sprinkling of water to grow to their fullest stature. On the other hand, as unlike the adults they will become that infants are, they are not wholly, either. Just how much of our identities are we born with? How much is nurtured through processes and forces outside of ourselves? Perhaps we can most accurately say that people are born with potentials that develop as they grow into adult human beings. The terms we use to describe the life process—changing, growing, evolving, transforming, unfolding, becoming, realizing, actualizing, blooming, blossoming, flowering—reveal this belief that at birth we both are and are not all that we will become. Many theorists have tried to describe the processes through which people develop. However, these detailed systems cannot explain the study of the human life cycle with certainty to all the questions arise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Too many questions of philosophy and cannot, at least now, be answered by science. They do, though, add important insight and knowledge to our study of the ways in which we grow into being. Most people live in the confidence that out technological developments have largely freed us from the risks of unchosen pregnancy and venereal disease and, therefore, ipso facto, the anxiety people used to feel about sex and love is now banished forever to the museum. The vicissitudes about which the novelists of previous centuries wrote—when a woman gave herself to a man, it meant illegitimate pregnancy and social ostracism, as in The Scarlet Letter; or the tragic break-up of the family structure and the experience of death by suicide, as in Anna Karenina; or venereal disease, as in the market place of social reality—have been outgrown. Now, thank God and science, we tell ourselves, we are rid of all that! The implication is that sex is free and that love is easy and comes in readily procurable packages like what the students call “instant Zen.” And any talk of the deeper conflicts which used to be associated with the tragic and daimonic elements is anachronistic and absurd. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
However, I shall be impolite enough to ask, May there not be a gigantic extensive repression underlying all this? A repression not of sex, but of something underlying body chemistry, some psychic needs more vital, deeper, and more comprehensive than sex. A repression that is socially sanctioned, to be sure—but just for that reason harder to discern and more effective in its results. I am obviously not questioning contemporary medical and psychological advances as such: no one in his or her right mind would fail to be grateful for the development of contraceptives, estrogen, and cures for venereal disease. And I count it good fortune indeed to be born into this age with its freedom of possibilities rather than in the Victorian period with its rigid mores. However, that issue is fallacious and a red herring. Our problem is more profound and starkly real. We pick up the morning paper and read that there are a million illegal abortions in enlightened America each year; that premarital pregnancies are increasing on all sides. One girl out of six who is now thirteen will, according to present statistics, become illegitimately pregnant before she is twenty—two and half times the incidence of ten year ago. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The increase is mainly among the girls of the proletarian classes, but there is enough increase among girls of middle and upper classes to prove that this is not a problem solely of disadvantage groups. Some people believe that we are what we are at birth. Nature, through heredity, determines everything. We look, act, feel, do, and believe what we do because of our genetic makeup. Others believe that regardless of what we are born with, it is the impact of our environment, of the way we are nurtured, that really determines who and what we become. What we learn or acquire through conditioning and experience makes up what we are. Most people now believe that both nature and nurture play important roles in shaping our behavior. We are confronted by the curious situation of the more birth control, the more illegitimate pregnancies. As the reader hastens to cry that what is necessary to change barbaric abortion laws and give more sex education, I would not disagree; but I could, and should raise a caveat. The blanket advising of more sex education can act as a reassurance by means of which we escape having to ask ourselves the more frightening question. May not the real issue be not on the level of conscious, rational intentions at all? May it not be in a deeper realm of what I shall later call intentionality? #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Some women use their sex to gain personal affirmation. They are desired, and that is almost enough…a child is a symbol that she is a woman, and she may gain from having something on her own. This struggle to prove one’s identity and personal worth may be more outspoken with less affluent young women, but it is just as present in middle-class young ladies who can cover it up better by socially skillful behavior. Let us take as an example a female patient from an upper middle-class background with whom I whom I worked. Her father had been a banker in a small city, and her mother a proper lady who has always assumed a Christian attitude toward everyone but who seemed, from the data which came up in therapy, to be usually rigid and had actually resented having this girl when she was born. My patient was well educated, already in her early thirties a successful editor in a large publishing house, and obviously was not the slightest deficient in knowledge of sex or contraception. Yet she had two illegitimate pregnancies in her mid-twenties several years before she began treatment with me. Both of these pregnancies gave her painful feelings of guilt and conflict, yet she went from one directly into another. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
She had been married for two years in her early twenties to a man who, an intellectual like herself, was emotionally detached, and each had tried by various kinds of aggressive-dependency nagging to get the other to infuse some meaning and vitality into an empty marriage. After her divorce, while she lived alone, she volunteered to do some evening reading to those who were visually impaired. She became pregnant by the young visually impaired man to whom she read. Though this, and its subsequent abortion, upset her greatly, she became pregnant again shortly after her first abortion. Now it is absurd to think that we can understand this behavior on the basis of sexual needs. Indeed, the fact tat she did not feel sexual desire was actually more influential in leading her into the sexual relations which caused the pregnancies. We must look to her image of herself and her ways of trying to find a meaningful place for herself in her World id we are to have any hope of discovering the dynamics of the pregnancies. She was, diagnostically speaking, what is called a typically contemporary schizoid personality: intelligent, articulate, efficient, successful in work, but detached in personal intercourse and afraid of intimate relationships. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
She had always thought of herself as an empty person who never could feel much on her own or experience anything lasting even when she took psychedelics—the kind of person who cries out to the World to give her some passion, some vitality. Attractive, she ad a number of men friends but the relationships with them also had a dried up quality and lacked the zest for which she fervently longed. She described sleeping with the one with which she was most intimate at the time as if they were two animals clinging together for warmth, her feeling being a generalized despair. She had a dream early in therapy which recurred in varying form, of herself in one room and her parents in the next room separated by a wall which went not quite up to the ceiling; and no matter how hard she knocked on the wall or cried out to them in the dream, she could not get them to hear her. She arrived for her therapy hour one day having just come from an art exhibit, to tell me she had discovered the symbol most accurately describing her feelings about herself: the lonely figures of Edward Hopper, in his paintings in which there is only one figure—a solitary girl usherette in a brightly lighted and plush but entirely empty theater; a woman sitting alone by an upper window in a Victorian house at the shore in the deserted off-season; a lone person in a rocking chair on a porch not unlike the house in the small city in which my patient grew up. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Edward Hopper’s paintings, indeed, give a poignant meaning to the quiet despair, the emptiness of human feeling and longing which is referred to by that cliché alienation. It is touching that her first pregnancy came in a relation with a human being who was visually impaired. We are impressed here by her elemental generosity in wanting to give him something and to prove something also to herself, but most of all we are struck by the aura of blindness surrounding the whole event of getting pregnant. She was one of the many person in our World of affluence and technological power who moved, humanly speaking, in a World of the blind, where nobody can see another and were our touching is at best a sightless fumbling, moving our fingers over the body of another trying to recognize him or her, but unable in our own self-enclosing darkness to do so. We could conclude that she became pregnant to establish her own self-esteem by proving somebody wants her—as her husband did not; to compensate for her feelings of emotional poverty—which pregnancy does quite literally by filling up the womb if we take the womb (hysteria) as a symbol of vacuum of emotions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Furthermore, the young lady may have wanted to get pregnant to expression her aggression against her mother and father and their suffocating and hypocritical middle-class background. All of the which goes without saying. However, what the deeper defiance required by, and indeed built into, the self-contradiction in her and in our society which belie our rational, well-meaning intentions? It is absurd to think that this girl, or any girl, gets pregnant simply because she does not know better. This woman lives in an age where, for upper-class and middle-class girls like her, contraceptives and sex knowledge were never more available, and her society proclaims on all sides that anxiety about sex is archaic and encourages her to be free of all conflict about love. What of the anxiety which comes precisely from this new born freedom? Anxiety which places a burden on individual consciousness and capacity for personal choice which, if not insoluble, is great indeed; anxiety which in our sophisticated and enlightened day cannot be acted out like the hysterical women of Victorian times (for everyone nowadays ought to be free and uninhibited) and therefore turns inward and results in inhibiting feelings, suffocating passion in place of the inhibition of actions of the nineteenth-century woman. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The girls and women in this predicament are partial victims of a gigantic repression in themselves and in our society—the repression of eros and passion and the over availability of sex as a technique for repression. A corollary is that our dogmatic enlightenment contains elements within it which rob us of the very means of meeting this new and inner anxiety. We are experiencing a return of the repressed, a return of an eros which will not be denied no mater how much it is bribed on all sides by sex: a returned of the repressed in a primitive way precisely designed to mock our withdrawal of feelings. The same is found in out work with men. A young psychiatrist, in his training analysis, was preoccupied mainly with the fear that he was homosexual. Now in his middle twenties, he had never had sexual relations with a woman, and though he had not been a practicing homosexual, he had been approached by enough men to make him think that he emanated that “aura.” During his therapy, he became acquainted with a woman and in due course they begin having sexual relations. At least half the time they did not use contraceptives. Several times I brought to his attention the fact that the was fairly sure to get pregnant; he—knowing all about this from his medical training—would agree and thank me. #RandolpHarris 14 of 19
However, when he still had intercourse without contraception and once was very anxious when the woman missed her menstrual cycle, I found myself vaguely anxious, too, and irritated at how stupid her seemed to be. I caught myself up with the realization that, in my naivete, I was missing the whole point of what was going on. So I broke in, “It seems you want to make this woman pregnant.” He at first emphatically contradicted me, but then he paused to ponder the truth of my statement. All talk of methods and what they ought to do was of course irrelevant. In this man, who had never been able to feel himself masculine, some vital need was pushing him not just to prove himself a man—of which impregnating a woman is much more decisive than merely the capacity to have intercourse—but to get some hold on nature, experience a fundamental procreative process, give himself over to some primitive and powerful biological process, partake of some deeper pulsations in the cosmos. We shall not understand these problems except when we see that our patients have been robbed of precisely these deeper sources of human experience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
We observe in many of these illegitimate pregnancies—or their equivalent—a defiance of the very socially-ordered system which takes away affect, where technology is felt to be a substitute for feelings, a society which calls persons forth to an arid and meaningless existence and gives them, particularly the younger generation, an experience of personalization which is more painful than illegal abortion. No one who has worked with patients for a long period of time can fail to learn that the psychological and spiritual agony of depersonalization is harder to bear than physical pain. And, indeed, they often clutch at physical pain (or social ostracism or violence or delinquency) as a welcome relief. Have we become so civilized that we have forgotten that a girl can yearn to procreate, and can do so not just for psychobiological reasons but to break up the arid desert of feelingless existence, to destroy for one if not for all the repetitive pattern of fucking-to-avoid-the-emptiness-of-despair (“What shall we do tomorrow?” as T.S. Eliot has a rich courtesan cry, “What shall we ever do?”). Or that she can yearn to become pregnant because tee art is never fully converted to a passionlessness, and she is driven to an expression of that which is denied her and which she herself consciously denies in our age of the cool millennium. At least being pregnant is something real, and it proves to the girl and to the man that they are real. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Alienation is felt as a loss of the capacity to be intimately personal. As I hear these people, they are crying, “We yearn to talk but our dried voices are birds feet over broken glass. We go to bed because we cannot hear each other; we go to bed because we are too shy to look in each other’s eyes, and in bed one can turn away one’s head.” It should not be surprising that a revolt is occurring against the mores which people think cause alienation; a defiance of social norms which promise virtue without trying, sex without risk wisdom without struggle, luxury without effort—all provided that they agree to settle for love without passion, and soon even sex without feeling. The denial of the daimonic means only that the Earth Spirits will come back to haunt us in a new guise; Gaea will be heard, and when the darkness returns the black Madonna will be present if there is no white. The error into which we have fallen obviously consists not of our scientific advances and enlightenment as such, but the using of these for a blanket allaying of all anxiety about sex and love. Marcuse holds that in a nonrepressive society, as sex develops it tends to merge with eros. It is clear that our society has done just the opposite: we separated sex from eros and then tried to repress eros. The passion which is one element of the denied eros then comes back from its repression to upset the person’s whole existence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The significant self is one who has come through the ravages of an insignificance-producing technology, has learned to accept and know oneself, has come to appreciate one’s place in the scheme of things (nature and other people), and as learned how to integrate the various sides of oneself in an authentic and honest fashion. The person who is struggling to be oneself and know oneself and enjoy being alive ever comes back, full circle, to the beginning, to that vaguest of all concepts: Love. Love, more than being a mere feeling, idea, ideal, or notion, is the most complex experience in all human life. It is the cause of more joy and also more misery than anything else we can know. What do we mean by love? Do any two people mean the same thing by it? Look at the confusion engendered by the simple expression of “I love you”: Sometimes it means: I desire you or I want you sexually. It may mean: I hope you love me or I hope that I will be able to love you. Often it means: It may be that a love relationship can develop between us or even I hate you. Often it is a wish for emotional exchange: I want your admiration in exchange for mine or I give my love in exchange for some passion or I want to feel cozy and at home wit you or I admire some of your qualities. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
A declaration of love is mostly a request: I desire you or I want you to gratify me or I want your protection or I want to be intimate with you or I want to exploit your loveliness. Sometimes it is the need for security and tenderness, for parental treatment. It may mean: My self-love goes out to you. However, it may also express submissiveness: Please take me as I am or I feel guilty about you. I want through you to correct the mistakes I have made in human relations. It may be self-sacrifice and a masochistic wish for dependency. Saying I love you to someone may also be a way of saying good-bye to a person you have wronged, someone you have set up, when you know something is about to happen to them. However, it also may be a full affirmation of the other, taking responsibility for mutual exchange of feelings. It may be a weak feeling of friendliness, it may be the scarcely even whispered expression of ecstasy. “I love you,” wish, desire, submission, conquest: it is never the word itself that tells the real meaning here. “Wherefore, hear my voice and follow me, and you shall be a free people, and ye shall have no laws but my laws when I come, for I am your lawgiver, and what can stay my hand?” reports Doctrines and Covenants 38.22. It would be nice for people to recognize who one is and what one does, to recognize the individual as a person, and enjoy what we are sharing with them. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
You Love No One but Still You Lost My Heart Like the Petals from a Rose—My Soul is at Liberty and Became so Wondrous Dear!
To return to the inescapable question of Salvation, yes, I do remain rooted in a relativistic Universe, no matter how spectacularly defined I have become as to form and function, and I find myself within the same dimension. The German word for resolve is Entschossenheit, and it points to the symbol of unlocking what anxiety, subjection to conformity, and self-seclusion have locked. Once it is unlocked, one can act, but not accord to norms given by anybody or anything. Nobody can give directions for the actions of the resolute individual—no God, no conventions, no laws of reason, no norms or principles. We must be ourselves, we must decide where to go. Our conscience is the call to ourselves. It does not tell anything concrete, it is neither the voice of God nor the awareness of eternal principles. It calls us to ourselves out of the behavior of the average mortal, out of daily talk, the daily routine, out of the adjustment which is the main principle of the conformist courage to be as a part. However, if we follow this call we become inescapably guilty, not through moral weakness but through our existential situation. Having the courage to be as ourselves we become guilty, and we are asked to take this existential guilt upon ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Meaninglessness in all its aspects can be faced only by those who resolutely take the anxiety of finitude and guilt upon themselves. There is no norm, no criterion for what is right and wrong. Resoluteness makes right what shall be right. The essence of mortals is their existence. That idea can be the most despairing and the most courageous idea in all of Existentialism. What it says is that there is no essential nature of mortals, expect in the point that one can make of oneself what one wants. Humans create what they are. Nothing is given to them to determine their creativity. The essence of one’s being—the should-be, the ought-to-be, –is not something which one finds; one makes it. Mortals are what they make of themselves. And the courage to be as oneself is the courage to make of oneself what one wants to be. We are surrounded by things of whose nature and origin we know nothing. The telephone, radio, phonograph, and all other complicated machines are almost as mysterious to us as they would be to a mortal from a primitive culture; we know how to use them, that is, we know which button to turn, but we do not know on what principle they function, expect in the vaguest terms of something we once learned at school. And things which do not rest upon difficult scientific principles are almost equally alien to us. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
We do not know how bread is made, how cloth is woven, how a table is manufactured, how a glass is made. We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them. Our way of consumption necessarily results in the fact that we are never satisfied, since it is not our real concrete person which consumes a real or concrete thing. We this develop an ever-increasing need for more things, for more consumption. It is true that as long as the living standard of the population is below a dignified level of subsistence, there is a natural need for more consumption. It is also true tat here is a legitimate need for more consumption as mortals develop culturally and has more refined needs for better food, objects of artistic pleasure, books, etc. However, our craving for consumption has lost all connection with the real needs of mortals. Originally, the idea of consuming more and better things was meant to give mortals a happier, more satisfied life. Consumption was a means to an end, that of happiness. It now has become an aim in itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The constant increase of needs forces us to an ever-increasing effort, it makes us dependent on these needs and on the people and institutions by whose help we attain them. Each person speculates to create a new need in the other person, in order to force one into a new dependency, to a new form of pleasure, hence to one’s economic ruin. Wit a multitude of commodities grows the realm of alien things which enslave mortals. Mortals today are fascinated by the possibility of buying more, better, and especially, new things. One’s is consumption-hungry. The act of buying and consuming has become a compulsive, irrational aim, because it is an end in itself, with little relation to the use of, or pleasure in the things bought and consumed. To buy the latest gadget, the latest model of anything that is on the market, is the dream of everybody, in comparison to which the real pleasure in use is quite secondary. Modern mortals, if one dared to be articulate about one’s concept of Heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the World, showing new things and gadgets, and oneself having plenty of money with which to buy them. One would wander around open-mouthed with dreamy eyes in this Heaven of gadgets and commodities, provided only that there were every more and newer things to buy, and perhaps that one’s neighbors were just a little less privileged than he or she. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Significantly enough, one of the older traits of middle-class society, the attachment to possessions and property, has undergone a profound change. In the older attitudes, a certain sense of loving a possession existed between a mortal and their property. It grew on the individual. One was proud of it. One took good care of it, and it was painful when eventually one has to part from it because one could not use it anymore. There is very little left of this sense of property today. One loves the newness of the things bought, and is ready to betray it when something newer has appeared. There is this receptive orientation, in which the aim is to receive, to drink in, to have something new all the time, to live with a continuously open mouth, as it were. This receptive orientation is blended with the marketing orientation, while in the nineteenth century the hoarding was blended with the exploitative orientation. The alienated attitude toward consumption not only exists in our acquisition and consumption of commodities, but it determines far beyond this employment of leisure time. What are we to expect? If a mortal works without genuine relatedness to what one is doing, if one buys and consumes commodities in an abstractified and alienated way, how can one make use of one’s leisure time in an active and meaningful way? One always remains the passive an alienated consumer. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
People consume ball games, moving pictures, newspapers and magazines, books, lectures, natural scenery, social gatherings, in the same alienated and abstractified way in which one consumes the commodities one has bought. One does not participate actively, one wants to take in all there is to be had, and to have as much as possible of pleasure, culture and what not. Actually, one is not free to enjoy one’s leisure; one’s leisure-time consumption is determined by industry, as are the commodities one buys; one’s taste is manipulated, one wants to see and hear what one is conditioned to want to see and to hear; entertainment is an industry like any other, the customer is made to buy fun as one is made to buy dresses and shoes. The value of the fun is determined by its success on the market, not by anything which could be measured in human terms. In any productivity and spontaneous activity, something happens within myself while I am reading, looking at scenery, talking to friends, etcetera. I am not the same after the experience as I was before. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
In the alienated form of pleasure something happens within myself, and all that is left are memories of what I have done. One of the most striking examples for this kind of pleasure consumption is the taking of snapshots, which has become one of the most significant leisure activities. The Kodak slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest,” which since 1889 has helped so much to popularize photography all over the World, is symbolic. It is one of the earliest appears to the push-button power-feeling; you do nothing, you do not have to know anything, everything is done for you; all you have to do is press the button. Indeed, the taking of snapshots has become one of the most significant expressions of alienated visual perception, of sheer consumption. The tourist with one’s camera is an outstanding symbol of an alienated relationship to the World. Being constantly occupied with taking pictures, actually one does not see anything at all, except through the intermediary of the camera. The camera sees for the individual, and the outcome of one’s pleasures trip is a collection of snapshots, which are the substitute for an experience which one could have had, but did not have. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Our actual helplessness before the forces which govern us appears more drastically in those social catastrophes which, even though they have denounced as regrettable accidents each time, so far have never failed to happen: economic depressions and wars. These social phenomena appear as if they were natural catastrophes, rather than what they really are, occurrences made by mortals, but without intention and awareness. The anonymity of the social forces is inherent in the structure of the capitalist mode of production. In contrast to most other societies in which social laws are explicit and fixed on the basis of political power or tradition—Capitalism does not have such explicit laws. It is based on the principles that is only everybody strives for oneself on the market, the common good will come out of it, order not anarchy will result. There are, of course, economic laws which govern the market, but these laws operate behind the back of the acting individual, who is concerned only with one’s private interests. You can try to guess these laws of the market as a Calvinist in Geneva tried to guess whether God had predestined him for salvation or not. However, the law of the market, like God’s will are beyond the reach of your will and influence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Science cannot explain why the World makes scientific sense. It cannot explain why we are here, or, now that we are here, what we should do about it. For a moment, let us imagine what thinking must have been like for the firs people who were aware that they were aware. They had no words to describe the World they were experiencing. Because we think in symbols, it is difficult for us to imagine what those early people, who had no symbols, thought, but we can try. The first people began to collect information about the World. They saw a large, bright object move across the sky. It had a profound effect upon their bodies. While it was there, they felt warm, and they could see. In its absence, the World became dark and cold. As time passed, those first human beings saw the trees drop their leaves and die. Then, magically, the trees came back to life in brilliant colors and alluring smells. Finally, those trees produced an object that was good to eat. Then the trees appeared to die, only to return to give birth again and again. Try to imagine how awed early people must have been by these simple events. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The first humans were becoming aware. However, they had no word-symbols to express that awareness in thought or speech. Then perhaps one day two human beings both made a similar sound while grabbing for the same fruit. They walked on apart, but perhaps one of these people heard yet another person make the same sound, and, magically, the picture of the fruit appeared in the mind of this early human being. It was probably through random events such as this that people began the process of naming objects and understanding their World. The limits of our language mean the limits of our World. A new World is the beginning of a new language. A new language is the seed of a new World. The relationship the artist and the neurotic, often considered mysterious, is entirely understandable from the viewpoint presented here. Both artist and neurotic speak and live from the subconscious and unconscious depths of their society. The artist does this absolutely, communicating what one experiences to one’s fellow people. The neurotic does this negatively. Experiencing the same underlying meanings and contradictions of one’s culture, one is unable to form one’s experiences into communicable meaning for oneself and one’s fellows. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Art and neurosis both have a predictive function. Since art is communication springing from unconscious levels, it presents to us an image of a person which is as yet present only in those members of the society who, by virtue of their own sensitized consciousness, live on the frontier of their society—live, as it were, with one foot in the future. The artist anticipates the later scientific and intellectual experience of the race. The water reeds and ibis legs painted in triangular designs on Neolithic vases in ancient Egypt were the prediction of the later development of geometry and mathematics by which the Egyptian read the stars and measured the Nile. In the magnificent Greek sense of proportion of the Parthenon, in the powerful dome of Roman architecture, and in the medieval cathedral, one can trace how, in a given period of history, art expresses the meanings and trends which are as yet unconscious, but which will later be formulated by the philosophers, religious leaders, and scientists of the society. The arts anticipate the future social and technological development by a generation when the change is more superficial, or by centuries when the change, as the discovery of mathematics, is profound. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
By the same token, we find the artists expressing the conflict in the society before these conflicts emerge consciously in the society as a whole. The artist—who is the antennae of the race—is living out, in forms that only one can create, the depths of consciousness which one experiences in one’s own being as one struggles with and molds one’s World. Here we are plunged immediately into the center of the issues for the World presented by our contemporary painters and dramatists and other artists is a schizoid World. They have presented the condition of our World which makes the tasks of living and willing peculiarly difficult. It is a World in which, amid all the vastly developed means of communication that bombard us on all sides, actual personal communication is exceedingly difficult and rare. The most significant dramatists of our time are those who take as their subject matter precisely this loss of communication between persons is all but destroyed. We live out our lives talking to tape recorder; our existence become more lonely as the digital assistants, radios and TV’s and computers and mobile phones and telephone extensions in our house become more numerous. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Ionesco has a scene in his play, The Bald Soprano, in which a man and a woman happen to meet and engage in polite, if mannered, conversation. As they talk they discover that they both came down to New York on the ten o’clock train that morning from New Haven, and, surprisingly, the address of both is the same building on Fifth Avenue. Lo and behold, they also live in the same apartment and both have a daughter seven years old. They finally discover to their astonishment that they are man and wife. We find the same situation among the painters. Cezanne, the acknowledged father of the modern art movement, a man who in his own life was as undramatic and bourgeois as only a middle-class Frenchman can be, paints this schizoid World of spaces and stones and trees and faces. He speaks to us out of the Old World of mechanics but forces us to live in the new World of free-floating spaces. Here we are beyond causes and effects, both come together in the simultaneity of an eternal Cezanne who is at the same time the formula of what he wanted to be and what he wanted to do. There is a rapport between Cezanne’s schizoid temperament and his work because the work reveals a metaphysical sense of the infirmary. In this sense to be schizoid and to be Cezanne come to the same thing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Only a schizoid man could paint a schizoid World; which is to say, only a man sensitive enough to penetrate to the underlying psychic conflicts could present out World as it is in its deeper forms. However, in the very grasping of our World by art there is also our protection from the dehumanizing effects of technology. The schizoid character lies in both the confronting of the depersonalizing World and the refusing to be depersonalized by it. For the artist finds deeper planes of consciousness where we can participate in human experience and nature below superficial appearances. The case may be clearer in Van Gogh, whose psychosis was not unconnected with his volcanic struggle to paint what he perceived. Or in Picasso, flamboyant as he may seem to be, whose insight into the schizoid character of our modern World is seen in the fragmented bulls and torn villagers in Guernica, or in the distorted portraits with mislocated eyes and ears—paintings not named but numbered. This is the first age in which the artist does not have a community; one must now, like all of us, make one’s own. The artist presents the broken image of mortals but transcends it in the very act of transmuting it into art. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
It is one’s creative act which gives meaning to the nihilism, alienation, and other elements of modern mortal’s condition. Thus the illness ceases to be an absurd fact and a fate, and becomes a general possibility of human existence. The neurotic and the artist—since both lived out the unconscious of the race—reveal to us what is gong to emerge endemically in the society later on. The neurotic feels that same conflicts arising from one’s experience of nihilism, alienation, and so on, but one is unable to give them meaningful form; one is caught between one’s incapacity to mold these conflicts into creative works on one hand and one’s inability to deny them on the other. The neurotic is the artiste manqué, the artist who cannot transmute one’s conflicts into art. To admit this as a reality not only gives us our liberty as creative persons but also the basis of our freedom as human beings. By the same token, confronting at the outset the fact of the schizoid state of our World may give us a basis for discovering love and will for our own age. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Yet, people use different kinds of ploys to avoid intimate confrontation and interaction with other people. Some of these actions are Rituals we all use casually: “Hi; nice weather; right?” “Think it will rain?” “Wonderful party; we sure enjoyed ourselves,” “How are things with you?” These are familiar sayings; we all use them. They are Rituals when we do not much care about the answers or when we use these words to fill in awkward gaps in out time- and space-structuring. After Rituals come the Pastimes, activities used to full up time or space: Homework, TV Viewing, Dating, Fixing the Car, Solitaire, Eating Dinner. In other words, any activity in which we engage for the express purpose, conscious or otherwise, of avoiding intimate encounter is simply a Pastime. When we view TV in order to not talk to our family or spouse, we are indulging in an action that is less than authentic or sincere. Finally, the Games themselves. These are complex maneuvers, usually motivated by unconsciousness, designed to being about some kind of Payoff. The Payoff may be a put-down of someone else, or even of yourself. The Payoff may be a breaking off of a relationship that is too threatening or anxiety-producing. The Payoff may be getting somebody else hurt or wounded. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
It is also time we all recognize that psychotherapists are human beings, nothing more. Sometimes therapists, out of their Child’s need for extra credit, or their Parent’s need to be authoritative, will encourage games in the process of therapy, without realizing that they are playing them. Any therapist who has excessive needs for respect or worship is falling into a manipulative trap and may be exploiting his or her clients for one’s own self-enhancement. This is hardly self-actualizing behavior. Of course, sometimes clients put their therapists in a god-like role, either because they need an authority-father-figure to relate to, or as a way of conning the therapist. Sometimes a client can build the therapist up by flattering him or her (“You are Uncommonly Perceptive, Doctor”) as a way of keeping the focus on him or her, or so the therapist, out of some distorted sense of obligation, will not dig any deeper into one’s life. Therapy is a situation that is liable to the same pitfalls as any other interpersonal relationship. We still should be impressed with the need for human beings to develop the ability to be intimate with each other. Self-Disclosure is important for optimum mental health, or psychological wholeness, comes about when a person is able to disclose important feelings, ideas, fears, wishes, or memories to at least one significant person. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Self-disclosure should be at the level of intimacy, that is, real authentic, un-defensive, and part of the very person being of the individual. This is important in order that we experience the feeling of closeness of being personal with one other human being. The surprising truth is that our weaknesses can be a blessing when they humble us and turn us to Christ. Discontent becomes divine when we humbly approach Jesus Christ with our want, rather than hold back in self-pity. In fact, Jesus’s miracles often begin with a recognition of want, need, failure, or inadequacy. The truth is that each of us is one generation away from Deity—each is a child of God. And just as God has done with both prophets and ordinary men and women through the ages, so Heavenly Father intends to transform us. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what he is doing. God is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
However, then you see God is building quite a different house from the one you thought of. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but God is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. Because of our Savior’s atoning sacrifice, we can be made equal to the tasks that lie ahead. Divine discontent can move us to act in faith, follow the Savior’s invitations to do good, and give our lives humbly to him. “Behold, thou shalt not suffer these things which ye have seen and heard to go forth in the World, until the time cometh that I shall glorify my name in the flesh; wherefore, ye shall treasure up the things which ye have seen and heard, and show it to no mortal,” reports Ether 3.21. Modern cynics are not ready to follow anybody. They have no belief in reason, no criterion of truth, no set of values, no answer to the question of meaning. They try to undermine every norm put before them. Their courage is expressed not creatively but in their form of life. They courageously reject any solution which would deprive them of their freedom of rejecting whatever they want to reject. The cynics are lonely although they need company in order to show their loneliness. They are empty of both preliminary meanings and an ultimate meaning, and therefore easy victims of neurotic anxiety. Much compulsive self-affirmation and much fanatical self-surrender are expressions of the noncreative courage to be as oneself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
However, in the crucible of Earthly trials, patiently move forward, and the Savior’s healing power will bring you light, understanding, peace, and hope. “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each person should give what one has decided in one’s heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. A it is written: He has scattered abroad his gifts to the poor; his righteousness endures forever,” reports 2 Corinthians 9.6-9. We search for happiness. We long for peace. We hope for love. And the Lord showers us with amazing abundance of blessings. However, intermingled with the joy and happiness, one thing is certain: there will be moments, hours, days, sometimes years when our souls will be wounded. “Let you in, into my World. I gave you things you said you deserved, but you took all I had and through it back in my face. Through the hardest time was possible place. I know that I was not to blame. So go ahead and take everything. When it is over, I will still be standing because I was here from the start. You love no one, but still you lost my heart. With all my plans, you followed me. You crossed you heart and said you believed,” reports Gareth Emery and Emma Hewitt – Take Everything. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
It was a Boundless Place to Me as if I Breathed Superior Air–I Think that Earth Seems so to those in Heaven Now
Remember, this is an exposition of souls, a bartering of extraordinary revelations. Oh, let me get it straight. I triumph over death, and we gather here to listen to the personal memories. Many conflicts people see psychotherapists for generally are based upon some aspect of love or will gone wrong. Because of this, every therapist is, or ought to be, engaged in research all the time—research, as the word itself states, as a “search” for the sources. With experimental psychology, the data that is uncovered is impossible to formulate mathematically and it sometimes comes from people who represent psychological misfits of the culture. At the same time, philosophers insist that no model of mortal can be based centrally on data from neuroses or character disorders. And a rational person might agree to these cautions. However, neither these psychologist in their laboratories nor those philosophers in their studies can ignore the fact that we do get tremendously significant and often unique data from persons in therapy—data which are revealed only when the human being can break down the customary pretenses, hypocrisies, and defenses behind which we all hide normal social discourse. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
It is only in the critical situation of emotional and spiritual suffering—which is the situation that leads them to see therapeutic help—that people will endure the pain and anxiety of uncovering the profound roots of their problems. There is also the curious situation that unless we are oriented toward helping the person, one will not, indeed in some ways cannot, reveal the significant data. Unless the interviews are designed to help the person, you will get artifacts, not real data. True, the information we get from our patients may be hard or even impossible to codify more than superficially. However, this information speaks so directly out of the human being’s immediate conflicts and one’s living experience that its richness of meaning more than makes up for its difficult in interpretation. It is one thing to discuss the hypothesis of aggression as resulting from frustration, but quite another to see the tenses of a patient, one’s eyes flashing in anger or hatred, one’s posture clenched into paralysis, and to hear one’s half-stifled gaps of pain from reliving the time a score of years ago when one’s father whipped him, because through no fault of his own, his car was stolen—an event giving rise to a strong sense of displeasure which for that moment encompasses every parental figure in one’s whole World, including me in the room with him. Such data are empirical in the deepest meaning of the term. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
With respect to the question of basing a theory of mortals on data form misfits I would, in turn, challenge my colleagues: Does not every human conflict reveal universal characteristics of mortals as well as the idiosyncratic problems of the individual? Sophocles was not writing merely about one individual’s pathology when he showed us, step by step, through the drama of King Oedipus, the agonizing struggle of a mortal to find out “who I am and where I came from.” Psychotherapy seeks the most specific characteristics and events of the given individual’s life—and any therapy will become weakened in vapid, existential, cloudy generalities which forgets this. However, psychotherapy also seeks the elements of the human conflict of this individua which are basic to the perdurable, persistent qualities of every mortal’s experience as a human—and any therapy will tend to shrink the patient’s consciousness and make life more banal for one if it forgets that. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Psychotherapy reveals both the immediate situation of the individual’s disturbance and the archetypal qualities and characteristics which constitute the human being as human. It is the latter characteristics which have gone awry in specific ways in a given patient and have resulted in the former, one’s psychological problems. The interpretations of a patient’s problems in psychotherapy is also a partial revelation of mortal’s self-interpretation of oneself through history in the archetypal forms in literature. Aeschylus’ Orestes and Goethe’s Faust, to take two diverse examples, are not simply portrayals of two given characters, one back in Greece in the fifth-century B.C. and the other in eighteenth-century Germany, but presentations of the struggles we all, of whatever century or race, go through in growing up, trying to find identity as individual beings, striving to affirm our being with whatever power we have, trying to love and create, and doing our best to meet all the other events of life up to and including our own death. One of the values of living in a transitional age—an age of therapy—is that it forces upon us this opportunity, even as we try to resolve our individual problems, to uncover new meaning in perennial mortals and to see more deeply into those qualities which constitute that human being as human. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Our patients are the ones who express and live out the subconscious and unconscious tendencies in the culture. The neurotic, or person suffering from what we now call character disorder, is characterized by the fact that the usual defenses of the culture do not work for one—a generally painful situation of which one is more or less aware. The neurotic or the person suffering from character disorders is one whose problems are so severe that one cannot solve them by living them out in the normal agencies of the culture, such as work, education, and religion. Our patient cannot or will not adjust to the society. This, in turn, may be due to one or both of the two following interrelated elements. First, certain traumatic or unfortunate experiences have occurred in one’s life which make one more sensitive than the average person and less able to live with and manage one’s anxiety. Second, one may posses a greater than ordinary amount of originality and potential which push for expression and, when blocked off, make one ill. Life can sometimes be full of images of meaninglessness and despair. In some areas that is all people witness; in other regions the negativity is less unconditional. However, it seldom becomes beneficial: even comparatively optimistic solutions are undermined by doubt and by awareness of the ambiguity of all solutions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It is astonishing that we can have so much widespread dysfunction in a country whose prevailing courage is the courage to be as a part in a system of political conformity. What does this mean for the situation of American and with it of humankind as a whole? One can easily play down the importance of the phenomenon. One can point to the unquestionable fact that even the largest crowds of people are an infinitely small percentage of the American population. One can dismiss the significance of the attraction unity that many have been calling an imported fashion, doomed to disappear very soon. This is possibly, but not necessarily entirely true. It may be that the comparatively few (few even if one adds to them all the cynics and despairing ones in our institutions of higher learning) are a vanguard which precedes a great change in the spiritual and social-psychological situation. It may be that the limits of the courage to be as a part have become visible to more people than the increasing conformity shows. If this is the meaning of appeal that Existentialism has on the stage, one should observe it carefully and prevent it from becoming the forerunner of a collectivist forms of the courage to be as a part—a threat which history has abundantly proved to exist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
The combination of the experience of meaninglessness and the courage to be as oneself is the key to the development of spiritual life. Reality can be disrupted when the categories which constitute ordinary experience have lost their power. The category of substance is lost: souls are twisted like ropes; the casual interdependence of things is disregarded: things appear in a complete contingency; temporal sequences are without significance, it does not matter whether an event has happened before or after another event; the spatial dimensions are reduced or dissolved into a horrifying infinity. The organic structures of life are cut into pieces which are arbitrarily recomposed: limbs are dispersed, colors are separated from their natural carriers. The psychological process is reversed: one lives from the future to the past, and this without rhythm of any kind of meaningful organization. The World of anxiety is a World in which the categories, the structures of reality, have lost their validity. Everybody would be dizzy if causality suddenly ceased to be valid. Spirituality has been attacked as a forerunner of totalitarian systems. The answer that all totalitarian systems have started their careers by attacking religion is insufficient, for one could say that the totalitarian systems fought spirituality just because they tried to resist meaninglessness they thought it expressed. The real answer lies deeper. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Spirituality is not propaganda but revelation. We should welcome feelings of divine discontent that call us to a higher way, while recognizing and avoiding Satan’s counterfeit—paralyzing discouragement. This is a precious space into which Satan is all too eager to jump. We can choose to talk the higher path that leads us to seek for God and his peace and grace, or we can listen to Satan who bombards us with messages that we will never be enough; rich enough, smart enough, beautiful enough anything enough. Our discontent can become divine—or destructive. One way to tell divine discontent from Satan’s counterfeit is that divine discontent is not an invitation to stay in our conform zone, nor will it lead us to despair. I have learned that when I wallow in thoughts of everything I am not, I do not progress and I find it much more difficult to feel and follow the Spirit. It shows that the reality of our existence is as it is. It does not cover up the reality in which we are living. The question therefore is this? Is the revelation of a situation propaganda for it? If this were the case all religion would have to become dishonest beautification. The situation propagated by totalitarianism is dishonest beautification. It is an idealized naturalism which is preferred by some because in their minds, it removes the evil and sins they have committed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
People who are truly loving and have the spirit of God are able to see the meaninglessness of our existence, but at the same time they have the courage to face it and to express it in their souls and hearts. They have the courage to be themselves. “If anyone you lack wisdom, let one ask of God, that gives to all mortals liberally, and upbraided not; and it shall be given to one,” reports James 1.5. Confidence is not just the emotional state of an individual. It is a view of other people’s confidence, and of other people’s perceptions of other people’s confidence. It is also a view of the World—a popular model of current events, a public understanding of the mechanism of economic change as informed by the news media and popular discussions. High confidence tends to be associated with inspirational stories, stories about new business initiatives, tales of how others are getting rich. New era stories have tended to accompany the major booms in stock markets around the World. The economic confidence of times past cannot be understood without reference to the details of these stories. As years go by we forget these stories of the past, and thus we tend to be mystified by the causes of past stock market moves and macroeconomic fluctuations. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The complexity of the different new era stories through time suggests that differences in confidence have had many effects on the economy beyond an impact on consumption and investment. Changes in these stories, like the young people making fortunes are a contemporary reenactment of the nineteenth-century Gold rush, will affect the expectations for personal success in business, for the success of entrepreneurial ventures, and for payoffs to human capital investments. The process of consumption is as alienated as the process of production. In the first place, we acquire things with money; we are accustomed to this and take it for granted. However, actually, this is a most peculiar way of acquiring things. Money represents labor and effort in an abstract form; not necessarily my labor and effort, since I can have acquired it by inheritance, by unknown means, by luck, or any number of ways. However, even if I have acquired it by my effort (forgetting for the moment that my effort might have brought me the money were it not for that fact that I employed mortals), I may have acquired it in a specific way, by a specific way, by a specific kind of effort, corresponding to my skills and capacities, while, in spending, the money is transformed into an abstract form of labor and can be exchanged against anything else. Provided I am in the possession of money, no effort or interest of mine is necessary to acquire something. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
If I have the money, I can acquire an exquisite painting, even though I may not have any appreciation for art; I can buy the best phonograph, even through I have no musical taste; I can buy a library, although I use it only for the purpose of ostentation. I can buy an education, even though I have no use for it except as an additional social asset. I can even give away the painting or the books I bought, and aside from a loss of money, I suffer no damage. Mere possession of money gives me the right to acquire and to do with my acquisition whatever I like. The human way of acquiring would be to make an effort qualitatively commensurate with what I acquire. The acquisition of bread and clothing would depend on no other premise than that of being alive; the acquisition of books and paintings, on my effort to understand them and my ability to use them. How this principle could be applied practically is not the point to be discussed here. What matters is that the way we acquire things is separated from the way in which we use them. The alienating function of money in the process of acquisition and consumption is beautifully described: Money transforms the real human and natural powers into merely abstract ideas, and natural powers into merely abstract ideas, and hence imperfections, and on the other hand it transforms the real imperfection and imaginings, the powers which only exist in the imagination of the individual into real powers. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Money transforms loyalty into vice, vices into virtue, the slave into the master, the master into the slave, ignorance into reason, and reason into ignorance. One who can buy as a mortal, and one’s relation to the World as a human one, and you can exchange love only for love, confidence for confidence, etc. If you wish to enjoy art, you must be an artistically trained person; if you wish to have influence on other people, you must be a person who had a really stimulating and furthering influence on other people. Every one of your relationships to mortals and to nature must be a definite expression of your real, individual life corresponding to the object of your will. If you love without calling forth love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means of an expression of life as a loving person you do not make of yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent, a misfortune. However, beyond the method of acquisition, how do we use things, once we have acquired them? With regard to many things, there is not even a pretense of use. We acquire them to have them. We are satisfied with useless possession. The expensive dining set manufactured by David Michael or the Baccarat Crystal Medicis Bronze Vase which we never use for fear they might break, the mansion with many unused rooms, the fleet of new and rare BMWs and Mercedes-Benz and the servants, like the ugly brick-a-brac of the lower-middle-class family, are so many examples of pleasure in use. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
However, this satisfaction is possessing per se was more prominent in the nineteenth century; today most of the satisfaction is derived from possession of things-to-be-used rather than of things-to-be-kept. This does not alter the fact, however, that even in the pleasure of things-to-be-used the satisfaction of prestige is a paramount factor. The car, the refrigerator, the television set are for real, but also for conspicuous use. They confer status of the owner. How do we use the things we acquire? Let us begin with food and drink. We eat bread made from 23-carat gold and champagne because it appeals to our phantasy of wealth and distinction—being so unique and luxurious. Actually, we eat a phantasy and have lost contact with the real thing we eat. Our palate, our body, are excluded from an act of consumption which primarily concerns them. We drink labels. We drink labels. With a bottle of Royal DeMaria Chardonnay Icewine 2000 we drink the picture of the pretty boy and girl who drink it in the advertisement, we drink the slogan of the pause the refreshes, we drink the great Canadian habit; least of all do we drink with our palate. All this is even worse when it comes to consumption of things whose whole reality is mainly the fiction the advertising campaign has created, like healthy soap or dental past. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The act of consumption should be a concrete human act, in which or sense, bodily needs, out aesthetic taste—that is to say, in which we as concrete, sensing, feeling, judging human beings—are involved; the act of consumption should be meaningful, human, productive experience. In our culture, there is little of that. Consuming is essentially the satisfaction of artificially stimulated phantasies, s phantasy performance alienated from our concrete, real selves. Most people have parents who encourage these kinds of behaviors. More importantly, their parents encouraged self-reliance, strong social conscience, autonomy, and self-respect. The parents, for the most part, liked their children. This appreciation and affection communicated itself to the children, and they grew up feeling secure and confident. The balance between autonomy and social responsibility was achieved in the interaction process of the growing up, of playing, of schooling, and of working. This was not so much a matter of parents causing or determining actualizing behavior; they simply created the kind of climate in which self-fulfillment blossomed. Since many of us have not had such a childhood, is it too late for us? #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Too often, those of us who had bad breaks in childhood grow up bitter, cynical, or resentful, or we manipulate with the excuses theses negative experiences provide. We cop an ideological plea, which says: “What do you expect of me? I have had a rough life. I am not capable of honesty, openness, a good feeling about my fellow mortals.” We claim exemption from authentic and responsible living on the grounds that we are crippled or disadvantaged. Do you recall the song in the play and film West Side Story “Gee, Officer Krupke”? In this song members of a New York street gang tell a police officer that they cannot help being bad, because they were raised in slums, in broken homes, “my father was a junkie, my mother was a tramp.” Cute as the song is, it represents what a lot of manipulators do today: disavow any responsibility for being full-functioning, creative, and effective members of the human society with the excuse that they had a rough time of it in their childhood. Truly, a negative traumatic childhood may interfere or slow down the process of self-fulfillment. However, what of the mature, responsible person lying dormant beneath the excuses? The time for extolling and reinforcing excuses is past: the need of the times is for responsible, reality-oriented people. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Every now and then, we will recognize that we have been the instruments in the hands of God and we will be grateful to know that the Holy Ghost working through us is a manifestation of God’s approval. Divine discontent leads to humility, not to self-pity or the discouragement that comes from making comparisons in which we always come up short. Covenant-keeping people come in all sizes and shapes; their families, their life experiences, and their circumstances vary. “The Lord will be merciful unto them; yea, he will lengthen out their days and increase their seed,” reports Helaman 7.24. With Christ’s help, we can do all things. The scriptures promise that we will find grace to help in time of need. “And there is something we leave behind to join the ride. I could not wait but did not realize I would never come back. And the calling is taking over and it lasts more than awhile. This is another reason I will not be around to say good night, so do not write me I will call you. For all of my life I have been lost satellite. It is all a waste of time with me before I get it right. And I miss you paradise, although you are over, and I miss you paradise. I know you are over. I lie awake and I count the hours passing by. Too many questions that will not be answered here tonight, and they rise in waves before you and the force opens your eyes,” reports Emma Hewitt (Miss You Paradise). #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Reflection on the Mysteries of the Soul—To Know Just How He Suffered Would be Dear
Open the celestial doors, guardians of the galaxy, so that we may see the treasure of beauty that she brings. Let there be Heaven on Earth, a harmonic galaxy. I was bitterly full of desire. It was unspeakable to need someone in this way. I closed my eyes and listened to the night. Ravenous, repulsive creatures singing magnificently. And working the soft fertile Earth, creatures of such loathsomeness I could not dwell on it. And the clatter of the riverfront train unendingly. And then the absurd song of the calliope on the riverboat that took the tourists up and down the waterway as they feasted and laughed and dance and sang. I believe I caused the infirmary myself. In my attempt to penetrate the other World I met its natural guardians, the embodiment of my own weakness and faults. In my case the personal self had grown porous because of my dimmed consciousness. I wanted to enter death without going mad and I stood before the Sphinx: either thou into the abyss or I! If you say they are fair game, then they are fair game, and that is good enough for me, Beloved Boss. I cannot tell my own heart and soul what I am feeling now, how much I crave this little battle. I cannot find the words, it is so raw, so rooted inside me! It goes way back into the human part of me that is not going to die, does it not? Then came illumination. A larger and more comprehensive self emerged and I could abandon the previous personality with its entire entourage. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
I saw this earlier personality could never enter transcendental realms. A new life began for me and from now on I felt different from other people. A self that consisted of conventional lies, shams, self-deceptions, memory images, a self like that of other people, grew in me again but behind and above it stood a greater and more comprehensive self which impressed me with something of what is eternal, unchanging, immortal and inviolable and which ever since that time has been my protector and refuge. I lay amongst the flowers, and there were no thorns on the roses. Time had stopped. And the distant commotions of the house did not matter. She was fulfilled. She was the vampire in my dream. She was the Perfect Pearl, caught speechless in the miracle and staring down at me, wondering only what had become of me, as another fledgling of mine had done long ago—but understand dangers are only temporary. When the internal battles are waged, they struggle often takes its toll, as in all battles, on the battlefield itself. The battlefield is the person. Christians will recall St. Paul complaining that he was often at odds with himself. “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
The conflicts that go on inside each of us are the mixed motives we have, the competing needs, the differing ideas and attitudes. They are not competing or differing selves struggling it out. We are whole persons, but there are many conflicting elements in each of us. Sometimes the rational part of us is in fierce competition with the emotional or the physiological parts. The result often seems to be a disintegration of the self, or behavior that seems to point to disintegration. To settle the conflicts, we often compromise parts of our selfhood. At times we play as if there were no conflict. “I am alright, Jack!” and “Stiff upper lip” are some of the terms our British cousins employ to portray a stolid, unperturbed façade, while inside the battle goes on. The romantic movement has produced a concept of individuality which is equally to be distinguished from the medieval concept and from that of the Enlightenment and contains elements of both. The individual is emphasized in one’s uniqueness, as an incomparable and infinitely significant expression of the substance of being. Not conformity but differentiation is the end of the ways of God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Self-affirmation of one’s uniqueness and acceptance of the demands of one’s individual nature are the right courage to be. This does not necessarily mean willfulness and irrationality, because the uniqueness of one’s individual nature are the right courage to be. This does not necessarily mean willfulness and irrationality, because the uniqueness of one’s individuality is possessed by its creative possibilities. However, the danger is obvious. The romantic irony elevated the individual beyond all content and made one empty: one was no longer obliged to participate in anything seriously. In a person like Friedrich von Schlegel the courage to be as an individual self produced complete neglect of participation, but it also produced, in reaction to the emptiness of this self-affirmation, the desire to return to a collective. Friedrich von Schlegel, and with him many extreme individualists in the last hundred years became Roman Catholics. The courage to be as oneself broke down, and one turned to an institutional embodiment of the courage to be as a part. Such a turn was prepared by the other side of romantic thought, the emphasis on the collectives and semicollectives of the past, the ideal of the organic society. Organism, as has so often happened in the past, became the symbol of a balance between individualization and participation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
However, its historical function in the early 19th century was to express not the need for a balance, but the longing for the collectivist pole. It was used by all reactionary groups of this period who, be it for political or for spiritual reasons or both, tried to re-establish a new Middle Ages. In this way the romantic movement produced both a radical form of the courage to be as oneself and the (unfulfilled) desire for a radical form of the courage to be as a part. Romanticism as an attitude has outlived the romantic movement. So-called Bohemianism was a continuation of the romantic courage to be as oneself. Bohemianism continued the romantic attack on the established bourgeoisie and its conformism. Both the romantic movement and its Bohemian continuation have decisively contributed to present-day Existentialism. However, Bohemianism and Existentialism have received elements of another movement in which the courage to be as oneself was pronounced naturalism. The word naturalism is used in many different ways. For our purpose it suffices to deal with that type of naturalism in which the individualistic form of the courage to be as oneself is effective. The phrase romantic naturalist seems to be a contradiction in terms. The self-transcendence of romantic imagination and the naturalistic self-restriction to the empirically given appear to be separated by a deep gap. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
However, naturalism means the identification of being with nature and the consequent rejection of the supernatural. This definition leaves the question of the nature of the natural wide open. Nature can be described mechanistically. It can be described organologically. It can be described in terms of necessary progressive integration or of creative evolution. It can be described as a system of laws or of structures as a mixture of both. Naturalism can take its pattern from the absolutely concrete, the individual self as we find it in mortals, or from the absolutely abstract, the mathematic equations which determine the character of power fields. All this and much more can be naturalism. However, not all of these types of naturalism are expressions of courage to be as oneself. Only if the individualistic pole in the structure of the natural is decisive can naturalism be romantic and amalgamate with Bohemianism and Existentialism. This is the case in the voluntaristic types of naturalism. (If nature (and for naturalism this means “being”) is seen as the creative expression of an unconscious will or as the objectivation of the will to power or as the product of the elan vital, then the center of will, the individual selves, are decisive for the movement of the whole. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
In individuals’ self-affirmation life affirms itself or negates itself. Even if the selves are subject to an ultimate cosmic destiny they determine their own being in freedom. A large section of American pragmatism belongs to this group. In spite of American conformism and its courage to be as a part, pragmatism shared many concepts with that perspective more widely known in Europe as the philosophy of life. Its ethical principle is growth, its educational method is self-affirmation of the individual self, its preferred concept is creativity. The pragmatist philosophers are not always aware of the fact that courage to create implies the courage to replace the old by the new—the new for which there are no norms and criteria, the new which is a risk and which, measured by the old, is incalculable. Their social conformity hides from them what in Europe was expressed openly and consciously. They do not realize that pragmatism in its logical consequence (if not restricted by Christian or humanistic conformity) leads to that courage to be as oneself which is proclaimed by the radical Existentialist. The pragmatist type of naturalism is in its character, though not in its intention, a follower of romantic individualism and a predecessor of Existentialist independentism. The nature of the undirected growth is not different from the nature of the will to power and of the elan vital. However, the naturalists themselves are different. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
The European naturalists are consistent and self-destructive; the American naturalists are saved by happy inconsistency: they still accept the conformist courage to be as a part. One of the goals of significant selfhood is that all the players play together. When a person is living authentically, one of the things that comes through is that all one’s systems are “Go” and that they work in some sort of integrated, total fashion. It all sounds so mysterious, so mystical or magical. Is it? There may be nothing magical at all. It is living your authentic existence, being truly, fully, real-ly all that you are. Authentic being means being oneself, honestly, in one’s relation with one’s fellows. It means taking the first step at dropping pretenses, defenses, and duplicity. It means an end to play it cool, an end to using one’s behavior as a gambit designed to disarm the other fellow, to get one to reveal oneself before you disclose yourself to that individual. This invitation is fraught with risk, indeed, it may inspire terror in some. Yet, while some honesty with others (and thus with oneself) may yield scars, it is likely to be an effective preventative both of mental illness and of certain kinds of physical sickness. Honesty can be literally a health-insurance policy. Mental illness is not something that comes from being dishonest and alienated from your fullest experience of self; mental illness is being dishonest and alienate from self and others. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
When you are split off from who you are and thus from others, this psychopathology (sickness of the psyche or behaving self). If you are playing false with yourself and if this causes you to play false with others, you are not effectively functioning, nor actualizing yourself. “Grow exceedingly in the knowledge of God; yea, do begin to keep his statues and commandments, and walk in truth and uprightness before him,” reports Helaman 6.34. And thus we see that the Spirit of the Lord will begin to withdraw from mortals, because of the wickedness and the hardness of their hearts. The self in conflict often displays behaviors that other people cannot predict, and may be alarmed by. Sometimes, the behavior takes the simple form of forgetfulness. At other times, it may resemble the anxiety-possessed behavior described in the various neurotic classifications. In a number of cases, the person acts out behaviors that resemble the stereotyped “crazy” behavior of those who are labeled psychotic. If the person living falsely, inauthentically, in continual self-alienation is labeled mentally ill, then what do we call the person who is functioning fully, experiencing maximally, living and loving in the most satisfying manner possible? The term authenticity describes the reality-oriented personal and social life of the healthy person. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Closely related to this sense of intellectual and moral conscience is another trait characteristic of the nineteenth century: the sense of pride and mastery. If we look today at the pictures of the nineteenth-century life, the moral with the beard, the tall silk hat and walking cane, we are easily struck by the ridiculous and negative aspect of nineteenth-century male pride—a man’s vanity and naïve belief in oneself as the highest accomplishment of nature and of history; but especially if we consider the absence of this trait in our own time, we can see the beneficial aspects of this pride. Mortals had the feeling of having put oneself into the saddle, so to speak, of having freed oneself from domination by natural forces, and for the first time in history having become their master. One had freed oneself from the shackles of medieval superstition, had even succeeded in the hundred years between 1814 and 1914 in creating one of the most peaceful periods history has ever known. One felt oneself to be an individual, subject only to the laws of reason, following only one’s own decisions. The exploitative and hording attitude caused human suffering and lack of respect for the dignity of mortals; it caused Europe to exploit Africa and Asia and her own working class ruthlessly without regard for human values. The other pathogenic phenomenon of the nineteenth century, the role or irrational authority and the need to submit to it, led to the repression of thoughts and feelings which were tabued by society. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
The most obvious symptom was the repression of physical intimacy and all that was natural in the body, movements, dress, architectural style, and so on. This repression resulted, as Dr. Freud thought, in various forms of neurotic pathology. The courage to be as oneself in all these groups has the character of the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self in spite of the elements of nonbeing threatening it. The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self-affirmation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the Universe. One mediates the power of being which are concentrated in one. One has them within oneself in knowledge and one transforms them in action. One directs the courage of one’s life, and one can stand tragedy and death in a heroic affect and a love for the Universe which one mirrors. Even the loneliness is not absolute loneliness because the contents of the Universe are in one. If we compare this kind of courage with that of the Stoics we find that the main point of difference is in the emphasis of the uniqueness of the individual self in the line of thought which starts in the Renaissance and is guided by the romantics to the present. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
In Stoicism it is the wisdom of the wise mortal which is essentially equal in everyone of which one’s courage to be arises. In the modern World it is the individual as individual. Behind this change is possessed the Christian valuation of the individual soul as eternally significant. However, it is not this doctrine which gives the courage to be to modern mortals but doctrines of the individual in one’s quality as mirror of the Universe. “His people easy to be entreated, firm to keep the commandments of God, and slow to be led to do iniquity; and they were quick to hearken unto the Word of the Lord—yea, if my days could have been in those day, then would my soul have had joy in the righteousness of my people,” reports Helaman 7.7-8. Enthusiasm for the Universe, in knowing as well as in creating, also answers the question of doubt and meaninglessness. Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge. And meaninglessness is no threat so long as enthusiasm for the Universe and for mortals as its center is alive. The anxiety of guilt is removed: the symbols of death, judgment, and hell are put aside. Everything is done to deprive them of their seriousness. The courage of self-affirmation will not be shaken by the anxiety of guilt and condemnation. In later romanticism another dimension of the anxiety of guilt and its conquest was opened up. The destructive trends in the human soul were discovered. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The second period of the romantic movement, in philosophy as well as in poetry, broke away from the ideas of harmony which were decisive from the Renaissance to the classicists and early romantics. A kind of demonic realism was born, which was tremendously influential on Existentialism and depth of psychology. The courage to affirm oneself must include the courage to affirm one’s own demonic depth. This contradicted radically the moral conformism of the average Protestant and even of the average humanist. However, it was avidly accepted by the Bohemian and the romantic naturalists. The courage to take the anxiety of the demonic upon oneself in spite of its destructive and often despairing character was the form in which the anxiety of guilt was conquered. However, this was possible only because the personal quality of evil had been removed by the preceding development and could not be replaced by the cosmic evil, which is structural and not a matter of personal responsibility. The courage to take the anxiety of guilt upon oneself has become the courage to affirm the demonic trends within oneself. This could happen because the demonic was not considered unambiguously negative but was thought to be part of the creative power of being. The demonic as the ambiguous ground of the creative is a discovery of the later period of romanticism, which over the bridges of Bohemianism and naturalism was brought to the Existentialism of the 20th century. Its confirmation in scientific terms was depth psychology. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
In some respects all of these forms of individualistic courage to be are forerunners of the radicalism of the 20th century, in which the courage to be as oneself was brought to most powerful expressions in the Existentialist movement. The survey given shows that the courage to be as oneself is never completely separated from the other pole, the courage to be as a part; and even more, overcoming isolation and facing the danger of losing one’s World in the self-affirmation of oneself as an individual are a way toward something which transcends both self and World. Ideas like the microcosm mirroring the Universe, or the monad representing the World, or the individual will to power expressing the character of will to power in life itself—all these point to a solution which transcends the two types of the courage to be. We need to emphasize the necessity for abolishing exploitation and transforming the working person into an independent, free and respected human being. If economic suffering were abolished, and if the working people were free from the domination of the capitalist, all the beneficial achievement of the nineteenth century would come to their full fruition, while the vices would disappear. Complete freedom from irrational authorities will usher in a new millennium. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
The working class, instead of falling behind in the economic development of the whole society, should have an increasing share in national wealth, and it is a perfectly valid assumption that provided no major catastrophe occurs, there will, in about one or two generations, be no more marked poverty in the United States of America. Closely related to the increasing abolishment of economic suffering is the fact that the human and political situation of the worker has changed drastically. People can no longer be ordered around, fired, abuse, as one was one hundred years ago. Looked upon from the standards of a World Class Leader, we have achieved almost everything which seems to be necessary for a saner society, and indeed, may people who still think in terms of the past century are convinced that we continue to progress. Consequently they also believe that the only threat to further progress lies in authoritarian societies, like California which, with its ruthless economic exploitation of workers and businesses for the sake of quicker accumulation of capital and the ruthless political authority necessary for the continuation of exploitation, resembles in many ways the early form of Capitalism, where workers were forced to work and mistreated and not looked at as human. However, we are not in danger of becoming slaves anymore, but of becoming robots. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
There is no overt authority which intimidates us, but we are governed by the fear of the anonymous authority of conformity. We do not submit to anyone personally; we do not go through conflicts with authority, but we have also no convictions of our own, almost no individuality, almost no sense of self. Quite obviously, the diagnosis of our pathology cannot follow the lines of the nineteenth century. We have to recognize the specific pathological problems of our time in order to arrive at a vision of that which is necessary to save the Western World from increasing insanity. “Excuse me, if I right all my wrongs. Excuse me, if I give up on being strong. I have been running blind, weighed down by denial. Still you were there right beside me. Never thought I would have someone like you. Never thought you would be the one to save me. Now I am ready to believe you always. Say I am worthy and I can finally say I agree. How I try to defy?” reports RAM and Susana (Someone Like you). Obedience means that I have completely placed my trust in the atonement, and my obedience is immediately met by the delight of the supernatural grace of God. “Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my finger for battle. He is my loving God and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield, in whom I take refuge, who subdues peoples under me,” reports Psalm 144.1-2. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
It is painful work to get in step with God and to keep pace with him—it means getting your second wind spiritually. The individual person is merged into a personal oneness with God, and God’s stride and his power alone are exhibited. We have the vision of God and a very clear understanding of what God wants. “Dusk till dawn this is where we belong, waiting for the Sun. Night till day, this is what I would say, our light will not fade away. I cannot breathe, I am falling to my feet, you are that I believe. Stay with me. I cannot see the fire next to me because you are all that I believe,” reports John O’Callaghan featuring Deidre McLaughlin (Stay With Me). If you are going through a time of discouragement, there is a time of great personal growth ahead. We may discover that there are ways to be spiritual that do not counter the soul’s needs for body, individuality, imagination, and exploration. Eventually we might find that all emotions, all human activities, and all spheres of life have deep roots in the mysteries of the soul, and therefore are holy. Still another way to be spiritual and soulful at the same time is to hear the words of formal religion as speaking to and about the soul. It further signals incarnation of the divine within moral life. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
No Cause to be Awake as My Best was Gone to Sleep and Morn a New Politeness Took and Failed to Wake them
Life cannot be understood in the light of merely contributing factors as a frontier situation, the need to amalgamate many nationalities, the long isolation from active World politics, the influence of religion and so on. In order to understand life one must ask: Which is the type of courage underlying certain features which have endured throughout history, how does it deal with the anxieties in human existence and how is it related to the manifestation of the courage to be as oneself? Broadly, one who leads a marginal existence lives on the borders of one group (the individual may be a nominal member) but practices the lifestyle of a different group. Visually a mortal may obviously be a member of the African American race but he or she lives, works and plays in an all-White environment (as do many African American children in suburbia). As a neighbor, co-worker, friend, one is often faced with a conflict of roles. In addition to having to decide whether one is a spokesperson for one group or the other, one may carry inside of oneself the tension of not fully knowing who he or she is, or of not liking who he or she is. Many young people are faced with the task of keeping the best of their heritage while moving into the present and future. The marginal person is often forced to sort among the various aspects of oneself and live out only those that are easiest. However, the conflicts can be devastating. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
Present-day America has received, since the 1930’s, influences from Europe and Asia which represent extreme forms of the courage to be as oneself, like Existentialist literature and art, or attempts to overcome the anxiety of our period by different forms of transcendent courage. However, these influences are still limited to the intelligentsia and to people whose eyes have been opened by the impact of the World historical events to the questions asked by Existentialism. They have not reached the masses of people in any social group and they have not changed the basic trends of feeling and thought and the corresponding attitudes and institutions. On the contrary, the trends toward being as a part and toward affirming one’s being by participation in given structures of life are rapidly increasing. Conformity is growing, but it has not yet fully manifested. The economic system which has become dominant in the West since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is Capitalism. Common features of Capitalism are: the existence of politically and legally free people; the fact that free mortals (workers and employees) sell their labor to the owner of capital on the labor market, by contract; the existence of the commodity market as a mechanism by which prices are determined and the exchange of the social product is regulated; the principle that each individual acts with the aim of seeking profit for oneself, and yet that, by the competitive actions of many, the greatest advantage is supposed to accrue for all. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
While these features are common to Capitalism throughout the last few centuries, the changes within this period are as important as are the similarities. The technique and industry were in the beginning compared with the development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and at the same time the practices and ideas of medieval culture still had a considerable influence on the economic practices of this period. Thus it was supposed to be un-Christian and unethical for one merchant to try to lure customers from another by force of lower prices or any other inducements. If there were overgrown tradesmen who had more money than their competitors, and thus were not forced to use credit, bought their wares directly from the producer, transported them himself, instead of through a middleman, and sold them directly to the retailer, thus enabling the latter to sell the material for one penny cheaper per yard. The result of this whole method is only to enrich this covetous man, and to enable another person to buy his cloth a little cheaper, a very small advantage which is in no relation to the damage done by the businessman. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
We find similar prohibitions against underselling in ordinances in Germany and France throughout the eighteenth century. It is well known how skeptical people were in that period toward new machines, inasmuch as they threatened to take work away from mortals. Machines were considered the pernicious enemy of labor because they would diminish the number of workers. The various attitudes just mentioned are based on principles which had determine the life of mortals for many centuries. Most important of all was the principle that society and economy exist for mortals, and not mortals for them. If it hurt the group within the society, no economic progress was supposed to be healthy that could do such a thing. Needless to say this concept was closely related to traditionalist thoughts in so much as the traditional social balance was to be preserved, and any disturbance was believed to be harmful. By transforming the courage to accept fate passively into an active wrestling with fate, it actually prepared the way of courage in America. In the symbolism of Renaissance art fate is represented as the wind blowing on the sails of a vessel, while mortals stand at the steering wheel and determines the direction as much as it can be determined under the given conditions. Mortals try to actualize all their potentialities; and their potentialities are inexhaustible. For mortals are the microcosm, in whom all cosmic forces are potentially present, and who participates in all sphere and strata of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
Through mortals the Universe continues the creative process which first has produced one as the aim and the center of creation. Now mortals have to shape their World and themselves, according to the productive powers given to them. In humans, nature comes to its fulfillment, it is taken into their knowledge and their transforming technical activity. In the visual arts, nature is drawn into the human sphere and mortals are posited in nature, and both are shown in their ultimate possibilities of beauty. The bearer of this creative process is the individual who, as an individual, is a unique representative of the Universe. Most important is the creative individual, the genius, in whom, the unconscious creativity of mortals breaks into the consciousness of mortals like Pico della Mirandola, Leonardo da Vinci, Giordano Bruno, Shaftesbury, Sarah Winchester, William Randolph Hearst, Goethe, Juila Morgan, Harriet Tubman, Schelling were all inspired by this idea of a participation in the creative process of the Universe. In these people enthusiasm and rationality were untied. Their courage was both the courage to be as oneself and the courage to be as a part. The doctrine of the individual as the microcosmic participant in the creative process of the macrocosm presented them with the possibility of this synthesis. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
Through God’s compassion, kindness, and love, we will all receive more than we deserve, more than we can ever earn, and more than we can ever hope for. We believe in truth, justice, and mercy and that good will win in the end. However, in this fallen World, things are not always fair or equal. For some, this is a difficult concept to swallow. At times, greater faith is necessary to maintain course and perspective. Most of us experience some measure of what is called the furnace of affliction. Though the justice and mercy of a loving Father in Heaven, the refinement and sanctification possible through challenges can help us achieve what God desires us to become. However, when a person is not rewarded for their efforts, on someone suffers from infirmary, the think that life is not fair. As adults our sense of fairness gets offended when we perceive the way people in power seem to get away with things. Why should some people be born into affluence, while some are born into poverty? Why should some people be healthier, prettier or more charismatic than others? The World has never been fair. Our lives might not look like the way we imagine they should be. “My God hath been my support; he hath led me through mine afflictions in the wilderness; and he hath preserved me upon the waters of the great deep. God hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh. God has confounded mine enemies, unto the causing them to quake before me,” 2 Nephi 4.20-12. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
Mortal’s productivity moves from potentiality to actuality in such a way that everything actualized has potentialities for further actualization. This is the basic structure of progress. In parts of the ancient World, some people see the movement from potentiality to actuality as vertical, going from the lower to higher forms of being. In modern progressivism the movement from potentiality to actuality is horizontal, temporal, futuristic. And this is the main form in which the self-affirmation of modern Western humanity manifested itself. “For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my firstborn in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility,” reports 2 Nephi 2.11. It was courage, for it had to take into itself an anxiety which grew with the growing knowledge of the Universe and our World within it. The Earth had been thrown out of the center of the World by Copernicus and Galileo. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
It had become small, and in spite of the heroic affect which Giordano Bruno divided into the infinity of the Universe a feeling of being lost in the ocean of cosmic bodies and among the unbreakable rules of their motion crept into the hearts of many. The courage of the modern period was not simple optimism. It had to take into itself the deep anxiety of nonbeing in a Universe without limits and without a humanly understandable meaning. This anxiety could be taken into the courage but it could not be removed, and it came to the surface any time when the courage was weakened. This is the decisive source of the courage to be as a part in the creative process of nature and history, as it developed in Western civilization and, most conspicuously, in the New World. However, it underwent many changes before it turned into the conformistic type of the courage to be as a part which characterize present-day American system. The cosmic enthusiasm of the Renaissance vanished under the influence of Protestantism and rationalism, and when it reappeared in the classic-romantic movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries it was not able to gain much influence in industrial society. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
The synthesis between individuality and participation, based on the cosmic enthusiasm, was dissolved. A permanent tension developed between the courage to be as oneself as it was implied in Renaissance individualism and the courage to be as a part as it was implied in Renaissance Universalism. Extreme forms of liberalism were challenged by reactionary attempts to re-establish a medieval collectivism or by attempts to produce a new organic society. Liberalism and democracy could clash in two ways: liberalism could undermine the democratic control of society or democracy could become tyrannical and a transition to totalitarian collectivism. Besides these dynamic and violent movements, a more static and unaggressive development could take place: the rise of a democratic conformity which restrains all extreme forms of the courage to be as oneself without destroying the liberal elements that distinguish it from collectivism. This was, above all, the way of Great Britain. The tension between liberalism and democracy also explains many traits behind the American democratic conformism. However, behind all these changes remained one thing, the courage to be as part in the productive process of history. And this is what makes the present-day American courage one of the great types of the courage to be as a part. Its self-affirmation is the affirmation of oneself as a participant in the creative development of humankind. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
There is something astonishing in the American courage for an observer who comes from Europe: although mostly symbolized in the early pioneers it is present today in the large majority of people. A person many have experienced a tragedy, a destructive fate, the breakdown of convictions, even guilt and momentary despair: one feels neither destroyed nor meaningless nor condemned nor without hope. When the Roman Stoic experienced the same catastrophes, they took them with the courage of resignation. The typical American, after one has lost the foundations of one’s existence, works for new foundations. This is true of the individual and it is true of the nation as a whole. One can make experiments because an experimental failure does not mean discouragement. The productive process in which one is a participant naturally includes risks, failures, catastrophes. However, they do not undermine courage. “Do you supposed that the Lord will still deliver us, while we sit upon our thrones and do not make use of the means which the Lord has provided for us?” reports Alma 60.21. This means that it is the productive act itself in which the power and the significance of being is present. This is a partial answer to a question often asked by foreign observers, especially if they are theologians: the question For What? #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
What is the end of all the magnificent means provided by the productive acidity of American society? Have not the means swallowed the ends, and does not the unrestricted production of means indicate the absence of ends? Even many born Americans are today inclined to answer the last question affirmatively. However, there is more involved in the production of means. It is not the tools and gadgets that are the telos, the inner aim of production; it is the production itself. The means are more than means; they are felt as creations, as symbols of the infinite possibilities implied in mortal’s productivity. Being—itself is essentially production itself. The way in which the originally religious word creative is applied without hesitation by Christian, and non-Christian, alike to mortal’s productive activities indicates that the creative process of history is felt as divine. As such it includes the courage to be as a part of it. “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of the Lord’s throne; love and faithfulness go before you. Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you, who walk in the light of your presence, O LORD. They rejoice in your name all day long; and they exult in your righteousness” reports Psalm 89.14-16. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
Not Knowing When the Dawn Will Come I Opened Every Door so Heaven Would Look Upon Us
I wrapped myself in comforting phantasms and envisioned bowers of love, places of Divine safety foreordained beyond good and evil. In reaction to the predominance of the courage to be as oneself in modern Western history, movements of a neocollectivist character has arisen: fascism, Nazism, and communism. It is all an attempt to put a leader or a group above God and dedicate oneself to the mission of the authority figure or the group. America is a Capitalistic country, but we currently have democrats who cannot seem to respect the laws and government of the land. They feel that they have taken the only right way in which to reach their own fulfillment. If these democrats affirm themselves by affirming the collective in which they participate, they receive themselves back from the collective, filled and fulfilled by it. They give much of what belongs to their individual self, perhaps its existence as a particular being in time and space, but these liberals receive more because their true being is enclosed in the being of the group. In surrendering themselves to the cause of the collective liberals surrender that in them which is not included in the self-affirmation of the collective; and this they do not deem worthy of affirmation. In this way the anxiety of the individual nonbeing is transformed into anxiety about the collective, and anxiety about the collective is conquered by the courage to affirm oneself through participation in the collective. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
As in every human being the anxiety of fate and death is present in the convinced Communist, which many democrats are becoming. No being can accept its own nonbeing without a negative reaction. The terror of a totalitarian democratic state would be meaningless without the possibility of producing terror in its subjects, and they are doing this by threatening to vanquish law enforcement and criticizing branches of government who are defending us and also passing laws to prevent branches of law enforcement from protecting us, and at the same time legalizing drugs and letting dangerous criminals out of jail early. This is fear is also reinforced with the threat of open boarders, and people fear that their safety is being compromised and the ways of the Wild, Wild, West may be becoming back where it is everyone for themselves because there will be no one there to protect the, no privacy, no laws, and that their personal property will be liquidated for the collective as well as their wages renegotiated to the point where doctors are making the same wages as the cashier at the local Steak N Shake. In some countries, doctors are working for free and being paid as little as $8 USD per hour because of budget problems. Through the participation in the communist type of government he liberals are trying to form, one affirms that which may become destructive fate or even cause the death for oneself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
A more penetrating analysis shows the following structure in the democratic plan: Participation is partial identity, partial nonidentity. Fate and death may hurt or destroy part of oneself that is not identical with the collective in which one participates. However, there is another part according to the partial identity of participation. And this other part is neither hurt nor destroyed by the demands and actions of the whole. It transcends fate and death. It is eternal in the sense in which the collective is considered to be eternal, namely as an essential manifestation of being universal. All this need not be conscious in the members of the collective. However, it is implicit in their emotions and actions as they replace God with their leader and this moment, this Earth is all they have. Therefore, they are infinitely concerned about the fulfillment of the group. And from this concern they derive their courage to be. However, the term eternal and immortal should not be confused with finite. Immortal is the soul, but not yet the body and that would the body would go on living indefinitely. Eternal is living forever with God, leaving this planet and the body behind and having the power to create our own Worlds. #RandolpHarris 3 of 15
Finite is what we currently are. Our physical bodies can only live for so long. There is no idea of the individual mortality in old and new collectvism. The collective in which one participates replaces individual immortality. One the other hand, it is not a resignation to annihilation—otherwise no courage to be would be possible—but it is something above both immortality and annihilation; it is the participation in something which transcends death, namely the collective, and through it, in being-itself. One who is in this position feels in the moment of the sacrifice of one’s life that one is taken into the life of the collective and through it into the life of the Universe as an integral element of it, even if not as a particular being. The liberal political party has become a serious alternative to Christianity, and the anxiety of fate and death is taken into the courage to be as a part. The meaning of life for them is the meaning of the collective. Even those who live as victims of the terror at the lowest level of the social hierarchy do not doubt the validity of the democratic principles. What happens to them is a problem of fate and demands the courage to overcome the anxiety of fate and death and not the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness. This is one of the reasons for the expulsion and prohibition of most of the modern forms of expression in many developed nations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
There have been some benefits from communism in the arts and literature, but it not a system most Americans want to participate in. However, the democrats are using the immigration debacle to make their party look humane, when all they want is to get sympathy and votes and enforce their communist rule, where the people have no say. And it is not their person sin that produces anxiety of guilt, anything they do is seen as necessary means to gain power. The collective, in this respect, replaces for themselves the God of judgment, repentance, punishment, and forgiveness. To the collective they accept judgment and punishment. To it they direct their desire for forgiveness and their promise of self-transformation. If one is accepted back by it, their guilt is overcome and a new courage to be is possible. These most striking features in the communist way of life can hardly be understood if one does not go down to their ontological roots and their existential power in a system which is based on the courage to be as a part. “The Lord had blessed them so long with the riches of the World that they had not been stirred up to anger, to wars, nor to bloodshed; therefore they began to set their hearts upon their riches; yea, they began to seek to get gain that they might be lifted up one above another; therefore they began to commit secret murders, and to rob and to plunder, that they might get gain,” reports Helaman 6.17. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Mental health cannot be discussed meaningfully as an abstract quality of abstract people. If we are to discuss now the state of mental health in contemporary Western mortals, and if we are to consider what factors in one’s mode of life make for in-sanity and what others are conducive to sanity, we have to study the influence of the specific conditions of our mode of production and of our social and political organization on the nature of mortals; we have to arrive at such a picture of the personality of the average mortal living and working under these conditions. Only if we can arrive at such a picture of the social character, tentative and incomplete as it may be, do we have a basis on which to judge the mental health and sanity of modern mortals. What is mean by social character? I refer in this concept to the nucleus of the character structure which is shared by most members of the same culture in contradistinction to the individual character in which people belong to the same culture differ from each other. The concept of social character is not a statistical concept in the sense that it is simply the sum total of character traits to be found in the majority of people in a given culture. It can be understood only in reference to the function of the social character which we shall now proceed to discuss. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Each society is structuralized and operates in certain ways which are necessitated by a number of objective conditions. These conditions include methods of production and distribution which in turn depend on raw materials, industrial techniques, climate, size of population, and political and geographic factors, cultural traditions and influences to which society is exposed. These is no society in general, but only specific social structures which operate in different and ascertainable ways. Although these social structures do change in the course of historical development, they are relatively fixed at any given historical period, and society can exist only by operating within the framework of it particular structure. The members of the society and/or the various classes or status groups within it have to behave in such a way as to be able to function in the sense required by the social system. It is the function of the social character to shape the energies of the members of society in such a way that their behavior is not a matter of conscious decision as to whether or not to follow the social pattern, but one wanting to act as they have to act and at the same time finding gratification in acting according to the requirements of the culture. In other words, it is the social character’s function to mold and channel human energy within a given society for the purpose of the continued functioning of this society. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Modern, industrial society, for instance, could not have attained its ends had it not harnessed the energy of free mortals for work in an unprecedented degree. Mortals had to be molded into a person who was eager to spend most of their energy for the purpose of work, who acquired discipline, particularly orderliness and punctuality, to a degree unknown in most other cultures. It would not have sufficed if each individual had to make up one’s mind consciously every day that one wanted to work, to be on time, etcetera, since any such conscious deliberation would lead to many more exceptions than smooth functioning of society can afford. Nor would threat and force have sufficed as a motive, since the highly differentiated tasks in modern industrial society can in the long run only be the work of free mortals and not of forced labor. The necessity for work, for punctuality and orderliness had to be transformed into an inner drive for these aims. This means that society had to produce a social character in which these strivings were inherent. “Yea, O God, and thou wast merciful unto me when I did cry unto thee in my field; when I did cry unto thee in my prayer, and thou didst hear me. And again, O God, when I did turn to my house thou didst hear me in prayer. Yea, O God, thou hast been merciful unto me, and heard my cries in the midst of thy congregations,” reports Alma 33.5-6 and 9. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
The genesis of the social character cannot be understood by referring to one single cause but by understanding the interaction of sociological and ideological factors. Inasmuch as economic factors are less easily changeable, they have a certain predominance in this interplay. This does not mean that the drive for material gain is the only or even the most powerful motivating force in mortals. It does mean that the individual and society are primarily concerned with the task of survival, and that only when survival is secured can they proceed to the satisfaction of other imperative human needs. The task of survival implies that mortals have to produce, that is, one has to secure the minimum of food and shelter necessary for survival, ad the tools needed for even the most rudimentary process of production. The method of production in turn determines the social relations existing in a given society. It determines the mode of practice in life. However, religious, political and philosophical ideas are not rooted in the social character, they in turn also determine, systematize and stabilize the social character. “See that ye take care of these sacred things, yea, see that ye look to God and live. Go unto this people and declare the word, and be sober,” reports Alma 37.47. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Let me state again, in speaking of the socioeconomic structure of society as molding mortal’s character, we speak only of one pole in the interconnection between social organization and mortal. The other pole to be considered is mortal’s nature, molding in the social conditions in which one lives. The social process can be understood only if we start out with the knowledge of the reality of mortals, one’s psychic properties as well as one’s physiological ones, and if we examine the interaction between the nature of humans and the nature of the external conditions under which one lives and which one has to master if one is to survive. While it is true that mortals can adapt themselves to almost any conditions, one is not a blank sheet of paper on which culture writes its text. Needs like striving for happiness, harmony, love and freedom are inherent in one’s nature. They are also dynamic factors in the historical process which, it frustrated, tend to arouse psychic reactions, ultimately creating the very conditions suited to the original strivings. As long as the objective conditions of the society and the culture remain stable, the social character has a predominantly stabilizing function. If the external conditions change in such a way that they do not fit any more with the traditional social character, a lag arises which often changes the function of character into an element of disintegration instream of stabilization, into dynamite instead of a social mortar, as it were. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Provided this concept of the genesis and function of the social character is correct, we are confronted with a puzzling problem. Is not the assumption that the character structure is molded by the role which the individual has to play in one’s culture contradicted by the assumption that a person’s character is molded in one’s childhood? Can both views pretend to be true in view of the fact that the child in one’s early years of life has comparatively little contact with society as such? This question is not as difficult to answer as it may seem at first glance. We must differentiate between the factors which are responsible for the particular contents of the social character and the methods by which the social character is produced. The structure of society and the function of the individual in the social structure may be considered to determine the content of the social character. The family on the other hand may be considered to be the psychic agency of society, the institution which has the function of transmitting the requirements of society to the growing child. The family fulfills this function in two ways. First, and this is the most important factor, by the influence the character of the parents has on the character formation of the growing child. Since the character of most parents is an expression of the social character, they transmit in this way the essential features of the socially desirable character structure to the child. The parents’ love and happiness are communicated to the child as well as their anxiety or hostility. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
In addition to the character of the parents, the methods of childhood training which are customary in a culture also have the function of molding the character of the child in a socially desirable direction. There are various methods and techniques of child training which can fulfill the same end, and on the other hand there can be methods which seem identical but which nevertheless are different because of the character structure of those who practice these methods. By focusing on methods of child training, we can never explain the social character. Methods of child training are significant only as a mechanism of transmission, and they can be understood correctly if we understand first what kinds of personalities are desirable and necessary in any given culture. The problem, then, of the socioeconomic conditions in modern industrial society which create the personality of modern Western mortals and are responsible for the disturbances in one’s mental health require an understanding of those elements specific to the capitalistic mode of production, of an acquisitive society in an industrial age. Sketchy and elementary as such a description by noneconomist must necessarily be, I hope it is nevertheless sufficient to form the basis for the following analysis of the social character of mortals in present-day Western society. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Our individual accomplishments, opinions, and contributions enable us to know our own unique identity and to take pleasure in feeling that we are significant member of the human family. However, at times, differences in the way we act, look, dress, or think can separate us from those around us. The young person who want to repudiate his group identities can go to the extremes of grab and speech that show the World that he does not want to be just another one of the crowd, another manipulable warm body. Since society needs solidarity and conformity to get its work done, people tend to react to the nonconformer in a number of different ways. There can be the hostile, resentful reactions that were illustrated in the climax of the great film of 2001, Romeo Must Die. Here, two major families of relatively conforming parties are competing for land it starts a war, especially when their child starting dating. Sometimes we simply point the finger of scorn: “Why do you not shape up, you weirdo?” When are you going to rejoin the human race?” This attempt may not be so much to get them to conform as to make them feel contemptible, lowly. Often, the reaction is exile, driving the nonconformers away. They can be figuratively ridden out of town on a rail, or literally made to feel that their presence is noxious and that they would be doing everyone a favor by moving on. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
There are, of course, other ways, but the overall pattern is one of separating the nonconformer from the conforming group. It seems that may people living conforming, comfortable, not too differentiated lives are ill at ease, awkward, uncomfortable, or even angry with those who choose to live differently. Often these nonconformers live differently because they are trying to experience more of their total selfhood than the larger group is willing to risk. There is a variety of reactions on the part of the nonconformers, too. Many of them choose to drop out, to live apart from the larger group. They set up housekeeping in solitary camps, abandoned cars, or communes, or they drift from place to place, disdaining to take on the way of life of those they feel are only experiencing themselves partially. Naturally, not all the drop-outs are in the category of self-actualizers, but an increasing number of young people do feel that this is the only way to grow. Again, knowing who the true hippie or hipster is and who the commercializers or opportunist are is a matter of becoming personally acquainted with them. Separateness is not an emotional illness per se. It is a conscious choice on the part of the separated or a conscious movement on the part of the larger group. It consists of creating separate and different living spaces for each of them. It may be an opportunity for the separated one to grow in selfhood, or it may lead to marginality. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
However, seeking and receiving the acceptance of the Lord will lead to the knowledge that we are chosen and blessed by him. The feeling of being accepted by someone we love is a basic human need. Being accepted by good people motivates us. It increases our sense of self-worth and self-confidence. Those who cannot find acceptance from desirable sources often seek it elsewhere. They may look at people who are not interested in their well-being. They may attach themselves to false friends and do questionable things to try to receive the acknowledgment they are seeking. They may seek acceptance by wearing a particular brand of clothing to generate a feeling of belonging or status. For some, striving for a role or a position of prominence can also be a way of seeking acceptance. They may define their worth by a position they hold or a status they obtain. Seeking acceptance from the wrong sources or for incorrect reasons puts us on a dangerous path—one that is likely to lead us astray and even to destruction. Instead of feeling cherished and self-confident, we will eventually feel abandoned and inferior. Therefore, see that you look to God and live. The ultimate source of empowerment and lasting acceptance is our Heavenly Father and his son, Jesus Christ. They know us. They love us. They do not acceptance of because of our title or position. They do not look at our status. They look into our hearts and accept us for who we are and what we are striving to become. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Not with a Club the Heart is Broken, Nor with a Stone—I think that Earth Seems so to those in Heaven!
Oh, and it is the same old beat with you, Erich, you Devil, you want to do it, you want to, you want to see it, you greedy little beast, you cannot give her over to the Angels and you know they are waiting! You know the God who can sanctify her suffering has purified her an will forgive her last cries. Mental health is to be determined objectively and society has both a furthering and a distorting influence on mortals, contradicts not only the relativistic view, discussed in the past, but two other views which I want to discuss now. One, decidedly the most popular one today, wants to make us believe that contemporary Western society and more especially, the American way of life corresponds to the deepest needs of human nature and that adjustments to this way of life means mental health and maturity. Social psychology, instead of being a tool for the criticism of society, thus becomes the apologist for the status quo. The concept of maturity and mental health in this view, corresponds to the desirable attitude of a worker or employee in industry or business. Maturity is the ability to stick to a job, the capacity to give more on any job than is asked for, reliability, persistence to carry out a plan regardless of the difficulties, the ability to work with other people under organization and authority, the ability to make decisions, a will to life, flexibility, independence, and tolerance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
Maturity is the virtues of a good worker, employee or soldier in the big social organizations of our time; they are the qualities which are usually mentioned in advertisements for a junior executive. To one, and many others who think like one, maturity is the same as adjustment to our society, without ever raising the question whether this adjustment is to a healthy or a pathological way of conducting one’s life. “And now my beloved beings, I had said these things unto you that I might awaken you to a sense of your duty to God, that ye may walk blameless before him, that ye may walk after the holy order of God, after which you have been received,” reports Alma 7.22. If you remain true, you will get the sign that God is with you. When you come to your wits’ end and feel inclined to panic—do not! Stand true to God, and he will bring out his truth in a way that will make your life an expression of worship. Put into practice what you have learned. Make a determination to trust in God. “The house of the LORD God is to be here,” reports 1 Chronicles 22.1. If you have always prided yourself on your sensitivity to the needs of others, you may find resistance when you adopt toughness. Sometimes when people look at it, it is like someone turned on the Christmas lights, it makes them giddy and full of joy. Will you be accepted? #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Maturity is the same as adjustment to our society, without ever raising the question whether this adjustment is to a healthy or a pathological way of conducting one’s life. However, in contrast to this view is the one which runs from Dr. Freud, and which assumes a basic and unalterable contradiction between human nature and society, a contradiction between human nature and society, a contradiction which follows from the alleged asocial nature of mortals. For Dr. Freud, mortals are driven by two biologically rooted impulses: the craving for sexual pleasure, and for destruction. The aim of one’s sexual desire is complete sexual freedom, that is, unlimited access to all women and men one might find desirable. Some mortals discovered by experience that sexual (genital) love affords them their greatest gratification, so that it becomes in affect the prototype of all happiness to him or her. These types of people must have been impelled to seek their happiness further along the path of sexual relations, to make genital erotism the central point of one’s life. Primitive humans have yet to cope with no, or exceedingly few restrictions to the satisfaction of those basic desires. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
Primitive mortals can give vent to their aggression, and there are few limitations to the satisfaction of one’s sexual impulses. In actual fact, most primitive mortals knew nothing of any restrictions on their instincts, some do not even “feel” that they have instincts. Civilized humans have exchanged some part of their changes of happiness for a measure of security. The happy savage’s aggressiveness has two sources: one, the innate striving for destruction (death instinct) and the other the frustration of one’s instinctual desires, imposed upon him or her by society. While mortals may channel part of one’s aggression against oneself, through the Super-Ego, and while a minority can sublimate their sexual desire into love of humanity, aggressiveness remains ineradicable. Mortals will always compete with, and attack each other, if not for material things, then for the prerogatives in sexual relationships, which must arouse the strongest rancor and most violent enmity among men and women who are otherwise equal. Let us suppose this were also to be removed by instituting complete liberty in sexual life, so that the family, the germ-cell of culture, ceased to exist; one could not, it is true, foresee the new paths on which cultural development might then proceed, but one thing one would be bound to expect and that the ineffable feature of human nature would follow wherever it led. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Since for Dr. Freud love is in its essence sexual desire, he is compelled to assume a contradiction between love and social cohesion. Love, according to him, is by its very nature egotistical and antisocial, and the sense of solidarity and humanly love are not primary feelings rooted in mortal’s nature, but aim-inhibited sexual desires. One the basis of his concept of mortals, that of their inherent wish for unlimited sexual satisfaction, and of his destructiveness, Dr. Freud must arrive at a picture of the necessary conflict between civilization and mental health and happiness. Primitive mortals are healthy and happy because one is not frustrated in one’s basic instincts, but one lacks the blessings of culture. Civilized humans are more secure, enjoy art and science, but they are bound to be neurotic because of the continued frustration of one’s instincts, enforced by civilization. For Dr. Freud, social life and civilization are essentially in contrast to the needs of human nature as he sees it, and mortals are confronted with the tragic alternative between happiness based on the unrestricted satisfaction of one’s instincts, and security and cultural achievements based on instinctual frustration, hence conducive to neurosis and all other forms of mental sickness. Civilization, to Dr. Freud, is the product of instinctual frustration and thus the cause of mental illness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Dr. Freud’s concept of human nature as being essentially competitive (and asocial) is the same as we find it in most authors who believe that the characteristics. Dr. Freud’s theory of the competitive struggles for survival. It can also be translated into the sphere of economy. There are basically two types of people, the homo sexual is and the homo economicus. One is after sex, the other is after money. Both the economic mortal and the sexual mortal are convenient fabrications whose alleged nature—isolated, asocial, greedy and competitive—makes Capitalism appear as the system which corresponds perfectly to human nature, and places it beyond the reach of criticism. The necessary conflict between human nature and society, imply the defense of contemporary society and they both are one-sided distortions. Furthermore, most ignore the fact that society is only in conflict with the asocial aspects of mortals, partly produced by itself, but often also with one’s most valuable human qualities, which is suppresses rather than furthers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
An objective examination of the relation between society and human nature must consider both the furthering and the inhibiting impact of society on humans, taking into account the nature of mortals and the needs stemming from it. The neglected pathogenic function of modern society needs to be highlighted. Many of the self-defeating behaviors are motivated by conscious needs. For instance, there appear to be people all around us who have a strong dislike for themselves. In each of us there may be a tinge of dislike for some aspect of our self: freckles, hair, teeth, vocabulary, color, accent. However,most of us manage to combine our dislike of parts of ourselves with very good feelings about the rest of the package. A few people, though, manage to reach a point where they entertain active hatred for their entire beings. They manage to pull off some of the greatest self-defeating stunts since the six hundred marched into the Valley of Death in the Crimean War! Some of these people do it with alcohol, using it precisely because they know it will put them into a state in which they will commit self-defeating or losing behavior. They drink to get courage or strength enough to hurt themselves. There are many who do the same with drugs of various kinds. Again, this is not to dispute the physiological factors of addiction or habituation. It is simply to emphasize that even before the physiological hook gets into some people, they hook themselves onto a drug or habit that will inevitably bring them down. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
An example of the conscious needs that motivate self-defeating behavior is dependency. Some people refuse to take their medicine because they like or need to be dependent on their doctors or they need their family’s concerns. Others get themselves in trouble with authorities because they need to keep themselves tied to their parents or spouses; they build a bond of trouble-rescue-restriction-release-trouble, a cycle that repeats itself week after month after year in some cases. Why? It is a bit too simple to say that the needs are always entirely conscious or even always entirely unconscious.Just as our physiques are three-dimensional, our complexities encompass behaviors that have horizontal, vertical, and depth dimensions as well. Add to this the dimensions that we call time and space and you have a model of human behavior that cannot be sketched on a flat piece of paper. Therefore, we must keep in mind the person, who will play more roles in one’s life, but—like an actor—the mortal is one person and all one’s roles are the individual, too. This multi-dimensioned person is each of us. Mixed in with all the motivations we have described as being universal are the ones that are unique to each of us. There is, therefore, no one answer to the “why?” of the behavior, whether it is the behavior of one or many. It may be instructive, but only instructive, to see what may cause actions in particular cases. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
If a mortal has a strong need to enter into complicated situations from which one cannot extricate oneself, we may uncover some of the reasons why, but only some of them. If you do something, even after an authority figure has told you to stop, changes are that among your individually unique needs is the need to engage in whatever destructive behavior you have been warned to stop, apparently this need is stronger than your need to stay out of danger. Some people engage in bad behavior because they feel a strong need to be punished. They feel that they can only be satisfied or happy when they are being pushed out or put into a situation where they are in some sort of danger of losing out. When these types of people win or achieve something, they feel and empty, hollow sort of triumph. Only when these individuals have guilt so ingrained in their being are punishing themselves or being punished can they admit to feelings of satisfaction. It is hard for guilt given people to admit this to friends. Not even their wives or husbands have ever heard them say these things, but their spouses notice over the years that they only seem completely happy and at ease when they are being pressured, when they are driving themselves to take on unnecessary extra work. It seemed to one woman that her husband was “trying to kill himself,” with his overly emotional and wild criminal behaviors. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
Dr. Freud thought we each have an instinctive death wish. We do not find the evidence for this to be either conclusive or impressive. However, we know that many people learn to deal with their guilt feelings or their negative self-concepts by punishing themselves or by being punished. Without using the term as a diagnosis, this behavior is often called masochism. A person who is still doing something dangerous, even after being warned not to, is a symbol of all the things one does that one has been told one should not do. One is almost totally absorbed by and concerned with guilt. The diagnosis of potential death and danger us almost like a priestly issue of penance: this is what one must undergo to purge oneself of one’s guilt. Some people are begging to be punished because they want to get their just desserts, which could even be death, for being the bad person they are. “No, I insist on paying the full price. I will not take for the LORD what is yours, or sacrifice a burnt offering that costs me nothing,” reports 1 Chronicles 21.24. This long example, we repeat, deals only with one person. It is not meant to explain all people who engage in risky behaviors or careers, all compulsive people, or to condemn all teachings about guilt. It is, however, instructive. Guilt, as experienced by most of us, is the feeling we have when we have let ourselves down, when we have not lived up to our own expectations. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
As such, it is a good motivator: guilt enables us to shift our gears and try a different speed or direction in our behavior. We should feel guilt for committing certain social indiscretions or violations of necessary and expected behaviors. If I step on the foot a woman by accident, both my love for people and my social responsibility will produce guilt feelings. Hopefully, I will be a more careful walker in the future. However, if I tore up my feet, sold my shoes, and swore never to go near people again, I would probably be labeled neurotic—given to extreme guilt reactions. When anxiety and other strong emotions produce fears or self-defeating responses in us, we are experiencing a form of neurosis. This particular problem in living is quite common in the lives of most of us. Each of us at times, precisely because we view our many facets as separate, lets this imagined separateness become virtually real. As the gaps in our thinking about our selves grow, so the gaps and distortions really grow in our everyday behavior. It we imagine that we have a good self and a bad self, any attempt to emphasize the one we want or need to emphasize exaggerates our behaviors in that direction, almost as if we were to say: “See? That other part of me does not even exist!” #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Of course it exists, It is just as real and as important apart of your total self as any other part. However, it is only a part. However,it is only a part. It is so interwoven and inextricably tied in with all the other facets that often you do not know which one is which. That in itself is not bad, either. Rather than trying to single out which part is which, one would be much better off simply accepting and living with the entire package. However, this is so simple to say and so difficult to do. We are encouraged by our society’s values, by its mores, by so many things, to live only partially. Some of the negative consequences of such splitting up are separateness, marginality, and alienation. “There is a God, and he created all things, both the Heavens and the Earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon,” reports 2 Nephi 2.14. As children of our Heavenly Father, we have been blessed with the gift of moral agency, the capacity and power of independent action. Endowed with agency, we are agents, and we primarily are to act and not merely be acted upon—especially as we seek learning by study and also by faith. As gospel learners, we should be doers of the word, and not just hearers only. Our hearts are open to the influence of the Holy Ghost as we properly exercise agency and act in accordance with correct principles—and we thereby invite God’s teachings and testifying power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Randolph Harris II International Institute 