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I am as You Desire Me and When Night is Almost Done, Sunrise Grows so Near that We Can Touch the Spaces—it is Time to Smooth the Hair!
The night sounds were at one particular and at the same time a deep hum on the warm breeze, and the Moon was high, sometimes penetrating a break in the garden that suddenly revealed its beautiful glistening light more subtly. I looked at the scattered stars—so cunningly bright in the Cresleigh Rocklin Trails night. And I loved them, as usual. What a comfort was it to be discovered in the endless Universe, a marvelous being on a beautiful blue, green and white diamond of revolving divinity, whose forefathers had read patterns and meanings into these countless unknowable points of cold white fire, which gave us faith with their entrancing, dramatic display of twinklingly glimmers of light. Thankful they shine over us to guide lost soul back to Heaven as they illuminate the pastureland, the distant clusters of over, and cast glory on the warmly lighted houses. My soul is with the garden tonight. The most important fact for understanding both the character and the secret religion of contemporary human society is the change in the social character form the earlier era of capitalism to the twenty-first century. The authoritarian-obsessive-hoarding character that has begun to develop in the sixteenth century, and continued to be the dominant character structure at least in the middle classes until the end of the nineteenth century, was slowly blended or replaced by the marketing character. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
I have called this phenomenon the marketing character because it is based on experiencing oneself as a commodity, and one’s value not as use value but as exchange value. The living being becomes a commodity on the personality market. The principle of evaluation is the same on both the personality and the commodity markets: on the one, personalities are offered for sale; on the other, commodities. Value in both cases is their exchange value, for which use value is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Although the proportion of skill and human qualities on the one hand and personality on the other hand as prerequisites for success varies, the personality factor always plays a decisive role. Success depends largely on how well personal sell themselves on the market, how well they get their personalities across, how nice a package they are; whether they are cheerful, sound, aggressive, reliable, ambitious; furthermore, what their family backgrounds are, what clubs they belong to, and whether they know the right people. The type of personality required deepens to some degree on the special field in which a person may choose to work. A stockbroker, a salesperson, a secretary, a railroad executive, a college professor, or a hotel manager must each offer a different kind of personality that, regardless of their differences, must fulfill one condition: to be in demand. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
What shapes one’s attitude toward oneself is the fact that skill and equipment for performing a given task are not sufficient; one must be able to put one’s personality across in competition wit many others in order to have success. If it were enough for the purpose of making a living to rely on what one knows and what one can do, one’s self-esteem would be in proportion to one’s capacities, that is, to one’s use value. However, since success depends largely on how one sells one’s personality, one experiences oneself as a commodity or, rather, simultaneously as the seller and the commodity to be sold. A person is not concerned with his or her life and happiness, but with becoming salable. The aim of the marketing character is complete adaptation, so as to be desirable under all conditions of the personality market. The marketing character personalities do not even have egos (as people in the nineteenth century did) to hold onto, that belong to them, that do not change. Foe they constantly change their egos, according to the principle: “I am as you desire me.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Those with the marketing character structure are with goals, moving, doing things with the greatest efficiency: if asked why they must move so fast, why things have to be done with the greatest efficiency, they have genuine answers, such as, “To keep you from unnecessarily having to wait behind fifty people when your order is always ready,” or “Because this is what the manufacture recommends for safety reason and optimal performance,” or “In order to promote from within and employee retention,” or “This is the way to maximize profits, keep shareholders and customers happy, and it helps the company grow,” and that is much better than rationalizations. Many people are also getting back to having more interest (at least subconsciously) in philosophical or religious questions, such as why one lives, and why one is going in this direction rather than in another. They have their developing consciousness that is opening up to the infinite idea of God and eternal life, and are developing a self, a core, and a sense of identity. However, if people are having an identity crisis it is produced by the fact that its members have become selfless instruments, whose identity rests upon their participation in the corporations (or other giant bureaucracies), as a primitive individual’s identity rests upon memberships in the clan. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
We have to make sure our character either loves or hates. These old-fashion emotions have to fit into a character structure that functions almost entirely on the cerebral level and accepts feeling, whether good or evil ones, because they are what assist us with the marketing characters’ main purpose: selling and exchanging—or to put it even more precisely, functioning according to the logic of the Universal Soul, of which we are a part, and we must of course be concerned with how well we function, as indicated by our advancement in the bureaucracy. Since we are in marketing and people can sense and feel us, we must have deep attachment to ourselves and to others, we have to care, in a deep sense of the word, because we want our reactions to feel real and for people to like us. This may also explain why we are concerned with dangers in our communities and ecological catastrophes, even when the data that point to these dangers is being hidden. That we are concerned with our community, people in it, and the environment might still be explained by the idea that we have great courage and unselfishness; and that we have a concern for our children and grandchildren is included in such an explanation. The expressiveness of concern on all these levels is the result of the increase of emotional bonds, even to people were merely associate with as well as those nearest to us. The fact is, we are close to marketing characters; and we are close to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Many contemporary human beings love to buy and consume, and they are so attached to what they buy, and this significant display of the marketing character phenomenon is so appear with how architects design homes, then builders furnish them so you can see the many lovely moments you can have in a house with similar items. The marketing character is seen in how people groom and educate their children to make them as attractive and respectful as possible in faith that they will lead a successful life. And look at the prestigious cars people buy, not only for the comfort and safety they give, but for the style and brand recognition. For many people, they love their car as much as their dogs or other pets. The things we own are utterly indispensable, along with our friends and relations, who are irreplaceable, too, since some deeper bind exists to tall of them. The marketing character goal, proper functioning under all circumstances, makes us respond to the World mainly cerebrally. Reason in the sense of understand is an exclusive quality of Homo sapiens; controlling intelligence as a tool for the achievement of practical purposes is common to animals and humans. Controlling intelligence without reason is dangerous, however, because it makes people move in directions that may be self-destructive from the standpoint of reason. In fact, the more brilliant the uncontrolled intelligence is, the more dangerous it is. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
It was no less a scientist than Charles Darwin who demonstrated the consequences and the human tragedy of a purely scientific, alienated intellect. He writes in his autobiography that until his thirtieth year he had intensely enjoyed music and poetry and pictures, but that for many years afterward he lost all his taste for these interests: “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact…The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” The process Darwin describes here has continued since his time at a rapid pace; the separation from reason and hearts is not something we want. We have to put God first, have love in our hearts, and we can still have nice material possessions. However, it is a loss of special interest that this deterioration of reason had taken place in the majority of the leading investigators in the most exacting and revolutionary sciences (in theoretical physics, for example) and that they were people who were deeply concerned with philosophical and spiritual questions. I refer to such individuals as Martin Luther, Francis Bacon, Harriet Tubman, Buddha, Empress Dowager Cixi, Sarah and William Winchester, William Randolph Hearst, Albert Einstein, N. Bohr, L. Szillard, W. Heisenberg, E. Schrodinger. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
The supremacy of cerebral, controlling thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life. Since it is not cultivated or needed, but rather an impediment to optimal functioning, emotional life has remained stunted and never matured beyond the level of a child’s. As a result the marketing characters are peculiarly naïve as far as emotional problem are concerned. They may be attracted by emotional people, but because of their own naivete, they often cannot judge whether such people are genuine or fakers. This may explain why so many pseudo human beings can be successful in the spiritual and religious fields; it may also explain why politicians who portray strong emotions have a strong appeal for the marketing character—and why the marketing character cannot discriminate between a genuinely religious person and the public relations product who fakes strong religious emotions. The term marketing character is by no means the only one to describe this type. It can also be described by the term alienated character; persons of this character are alienated from their work, from themselves, from other human beings, and from nature. In psychiatric terms the marketing person who is detached and not genuine could be called a schizoid character; but the term may be slightly misleading, because a schizoid person living with other schizoid persons and performing well and being successful, because of one’s schizoid character entirely lacks the feeling of uneasiness that the schizoid character has in a more normal environment. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
In a study of two hundred and fifty executives, managers, and engineers in two of the best-run large companies in the United States, it was discovered that many of these people are found to possess features of the cybernetic person, particularly the predominance of the cerebral along with the underdevelopment of the emotional sphere. Considering that the executives and managers are and will be among the leaders of American society, the social importance of this study is substantial. It was found that 0 percent of these people had a deep scientific interest in understanding, dynamic sense of the work, animated. 22 percent were centered, enlivening, crafts-person- like, but lacks the deeper scientific interest in the nature of things. 58 percent found the work itself stimulates interest, which is not self-sustained. 18 percent were moderate productive, not centered. Interest in work is essentially instrumental, to ensure security, income. 2 percent are passive unproductive, diffused. 0 percent rejecting of work, rejects the real World. Two features are striking: deep interest in understanding (reason) is absent, and for the vast majority either the stimulation of their work is not self-sustaining or the work is essentially a means for ensuring economic security. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
In complete contrast is the picture of what we call the love scale. 0 percent were loving, affirmative, creatively stimulating. 5 percent were responsible, warm, affectionate, but not deeply loving. 40 percent possessed moderate interest in another person, with more loving possibilities. 41 percent were found to have conventional concern, decent, and are role oriented. 13 percent are passive, unloving, uninterested. And 1 percent were considered to be rejecting of life, hardened heart. No one in the study could be characterized as deeply loving, although 5 percent show up as being warm and affectionate. All the rest are listed as having moderate interest, or conventional concern, or as unloving, or outright rejecting of life—indeed a striking picture of emotional underdevelopment in contrast to the prominence of cerebralism. The cybernetic religion of the marketing character corresponds to that total character structure. Hidden behind the façade of agnosticism or Christianity is a thoroughly pagan religion, although people are not conscious of it as such. This pagan religion is difficult to describe, since it can only be inferred from what people do (and do not do) and not from their conscious thoughts about religion or strict doctrines of religious organization. Most striking, at first glance, is that mortals have made themselves into a god because one has acquired the technical capacity for a second creation of the World, replacing the first creation by the God of traditional religion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
We can also formulate: We have made the machine into a god and have become godlike by serving the machine. It matters little the formulation we choose; what matters is that human beings, in the state of their greatest real impotence, imagine themselves in connection with science and technique to be omnipotent. This aspect of cybernetic religion corresponds to a more hopeful period of development. However, the more we are caught in our isolation, in our lack of emotional response to the World, and at the same time the more unavoidable a catastrophic end seems to be, the more malignant becomes the new religion. We cease to be the masters of technique and become instead its slaves—and technique, once a vital element of creation, shows its other face as the goddess of destruction (like the Indian goddess Kali), to which men and women are willing to sacrifice themselves and their children. While consciously still hanging onto the hope for a better future, cybernetic humanity represses the fact that they have become worshippers of the goddess of destruction. “And thus we see the great call of diligence of people to labor in the vineyards of the Lord; and thus we see the great reason of sorrow, and also rejoicing—sorrow because of death and destruction among mortals, and joy because of the light of Christ unto life,” reports Alma 28.14. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
This thesis has many kinds of proof, but none more compelling than these two: that the great (and even some smaller powers continue to build nuclear weapons of ever-increasing capacity for destruction and do not arrive at the one sane solution—destruction of all nuclear weapons and the atomic energy plants that deliver the material for nuclear weapons—and that virtually nothing is done to end the danger of corruption, economic and ecological catastrophe. In short, nothing serious is being done to plan for the survival of the human race. “And thus we see how great the inequality of mortals is because of sin and transgression, and the power of the devil, which comes by cunning plans which he hath devised to ensnare the hearts of mortals,” Alma 28.13. Attitudes of superiority provide another way of expressing anger indirectly. It is quite hostile after all to say to another person, in effect, “I am so more better than you and any opinions or feelings you may have count for nothing, my human!” And when such superiority feelings are used cleverly, such as portraying oneself as condescendingly tolerant of another, they become a powerful and cutting weapon. Many mortals who feel themselves to be trained in logic and the scientific method use this distancing device with great effectiveness. Such a mortal will convey the feeling to one’s wife that there is something suspect about any emotional reaction she may have. “After all,” he says, “you have to approach life rationally. You are letting your emotions influence your judgment.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
And, of course, the wife may turn the tables and adapt her own superior attitude and declare, “Well, I was just reading in a book the other day that it is important and right to show our emotions. So there!” (Well, of course she is right, but she is using it in an assertive way, which could lead to a fight!) Sometimes we express hostility indirectly by misplacing our anger. We may nag and express irritation about many little things, while avoiding the genuine anger which we are afraid to reveal. For example, a wife might “pitch a fit” continually about her husband not fixing the things on the “honey do list,” when she is really afraid that if he lets it go too long, it might reflect poorly on him as an employee and create a lack of advancement in the company organization when his boss comes over for dinner or finds out about it otherwise, as it is a small community. Sometimes we misplace our hostility to other people. Often this involves a pecking order in which we misplace anger from a person who is a considerable threat to us, like a spouse or a boss, and place it on someone less threatening, like our children, who in turn may pull the display deviant behavior as a result. We sometimes express anger indirectly by projecting it onto another person and seeing that individual as being hostile toward us. This process, too, serves the purpose of maintaining emotional distance, for if we can purpose of maintaining emotional distance, for is we can preserve the idea that another person is unfriendly and hostile there is little danger of our becoming close. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
In fact, the person may become increasingly unfriendly and hostile as one reacts to our reactions to one’s imagined hostility. A discussion of the costs we pay in damage to ourselves and damage in our relations with others when we suppress anger cannot be concluded without a discussion of the violent explosions that sometimes occur. And the fact that such explosions do occur is often frightening to those who sense something of this potential violence within themselves. It is not unusual to feel as one man who stated, “I have so much anger bottled up in me that I am afraid if I ever let myself express it, it would be the point of no return.” Often this fear has little or no basis in fact. It serves as an excuse for imposing control on ourselves. We are really afraid of an open relationship in which we could express our anger freely. The fear that we will do violence is substituted to give ourselves a more plausible reason for not being genuine. On the other hand, the fear of violence may have some basis of truth. The fallacy of continuing a rigid control of our anger, however, is that this simply increase the inner tension and makes the possibility of violence more real. The frequently used analogy of the steam boiler under pressure is probably the most appropriate one. If hostility is permitted to build up and none of the pressure is allowed to escape, the possibility of an explosion increases. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The person who fears violence within oneself may need to consult professional help immediately to assess the reality of his or her fear and help him or her to find safe ways to dissipate the inner pressure. Nick was such a person. He was in construction work; and when irritating situations arose on the job, he often became frightened with himself. He seethed with so much anger, particularly toward his foreman on these occasions, that he was afraid he might end the life of one of them if he ever got carried away and began to express his feelings. The therapist he sought out helped him talk through a lot of his feelings, including a huge backlog of anger toward his father that he had probably misplaced on the foreman. Nick also discovered that he could talk over some of his irritations with his boss and that when he did this his feeling of wanting to do violence disappeared even when he and his boss did not reach complete agreement. In brief, we are trying to help people become more intelligent, widely informed, concerned wit basic problems, cleaver and imaginative, socially effective and personally dominant, verbally fluent, and possessed of initiative. Instead of being seen as conforming, rigid and stereotyped, uninsightful, commonplace, apathetic, and dull. Whatever you believe to be truth about God, declare to be the Truth about yourself. Know that the power within you is God, and the law of good establishing right action in your life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Peruse How Infinite I am to No One that You Know!
I paced, having just risen from my secret hiding place, and I mourned bitterly for another true believer. You bet I have got on my black velvet frock coat (close-up: tapered at the waist, brass buttons) and my motorcycle boots, and a brand-new linen shirt loaded with lace at cuffs and throat (pity the poor slob who snickers at me on account of that!), and I have not cut my shoulder-length-blond mane tonight, which I sometimes do for variety, and I have chucked my violet glasses because who cares that my eyes attract attention, and my skin’s still dramatically tanned from the raw Sun of the Gobi Desert. An American Church is having its annual business meeting. Reports of the various church organizations read in monotonous tones suggest that the meeting is occurring more because someone believes it necessary rather than because of any vital interest. Sparks of life appear briefly. A momentary flurry arises over whether the women’s donation from the proceeds of their annual bazaar should be sent to foreign missions or put in the fund for a new carpet in the sanctuary. However, this sporadic flash hardly ruffles the surface as the meeting drones on drearily. Finally, the last report ends; the congregation stirs restlessly. The moderator now also appears anxious to be done. He asks routinely if there is other business as he gathers up his papers. He looks up, surprised, when a man at the back of the room stands up. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
The room rustles with curiosity as the man steps to the aisle and makes his way forward. Something about him commands attention. It is not the way he is dressed. His clothes are average enough—clean and neat, but with a careless air, as though he did not give much thought to them. It is more the man himself. His determined stride speaks of strength. His face is somewhat flushed. The room is quiet by the time he reached the front and turn around. Then he begins to speak: “I am sick and tired of this church—and you people! You are miserable frauds and hypocrites! You talk fine word about loving one another, then you cut each other to pieces behind each other’s backs. You do not even have the courage to let people know to their faces how you really feel about them. It is disgusting! What miserable frauds you are! Oh, you have a beautiful building here. And you are fine-looking and well-dressed people, but your church is dead inside, and you are dead inside, full of rottenness and pretense! You ‘fine Christians’ are just about as low as you can get!” If such an event really happened, can you imagine the shock and surprise of the congregation? At the very least it would be safe to say that no one in the room would any longer be bored! Most of those present would probably be critical. Some might say, “Well, there may be some truth in what he is saying. However, why does he have to get so worked up about it? That is not going to accomplish anything!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Above all else there would probably be a reaction of fear on the part of the audience. The intensity of the man’s anger would be frightening, for we are not used to hearing such feelings so clearly expressed, particularly in this setting. And there would be fear about what it would mean to the church, fear that the congregation would be split asunder by the angry blast and the reaction that would follow. And for those who would disagree with the man and feel their anger mount within themselves, there would be fear of their own feelings and how they might express them. For we have learned to be afraid of our anger. Yet it is an interesting, though usually ignored, fact that the founder of the Christian faith is portrayed in the New Testament as having become as angry with the religious leaders of his day as was this “fictional” character. And Jesus expressed his anger just as openly and as vehemently. The anger rings through unmistakably, especially when it is translated into the modern vernacular, as Phillips has done. Here are some of the phrases from the twenty-third chapter of the Gospel of Mathew that are attributed to Jesus: “Alas for you, you scribes and Pharisees, play actors. You blind leaders…you blind fools…you utter frauds…what miserable frauds you are…white-washed tombs, which look fine on the outside but inside are full of deadmen’s bones and all kinds of rottenness. You are a mass of pretense and wickedness…You serpents, you viper’s brood, how do you think you are going to avoid being condemned to the rubbish heap…On your hands is all the innocent blood spilled on this Earth.” (Philips) #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
It is not surprising that the church has tended to ignore the angry Jesus in its use of him as an example of a mature and creative person. For the Christian church, most other religious groups, and our culture in general have been mistrustful of feelings of anger and frightened of any spirit of freedom that would encourage its direct expression. The message comes to us in many ways and from many sources. We are encouraged to feel guilty of wrong doing, or immature, or temperamental and unstable when we are aware of feelings of anger, especially when we give in to these emotions and express them. Listen to some of the ways we persuade ourselves to avoid anger in various relationships. “Parents, never become angry with your children. Their personalities will be warped, and they will feel rejected. Above all, do not punish them while you are angry. If you have to punish them, do it on cold blood!” “Children, never get angry with your folks. You must respect them and to be angry is to be disrespectful. Furthermore, if you are angry at them, they will not love you.” “Husbands and wives, do not get mad at each other. A happy marriage comes only when you ignore the things that irritate you and choke down any anger you feel. Above all, never let the children hear you in any kind of disagreement.” “Bosses, do not tolerate anger from your employees. If you allow them to get away with any expression of anger, they will never respect you.” “Employees, never let the boss see you are angry at him or her. Swallow your anger. You may get ulcers, but you will keep your job longer.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
You see how we handle this business of anger? We say it is wrong to feel angry and dangerous to our relationships to express it. Thus we have made the suppression of anger in our society ideal. This attitude is expressed in a letter written to the editor of a magazine in which an article by the author of this book, “The Creative Use of Anger,” appeared. The correspondent wrote: “Perhaps I am psychologically abnormal, I do not know. But this I do know, that is, like the husband mentioned, I has scolded my wife so angrily as to hurt her and make her cry, I should feel that I had definitely sinned and ought to seek forgiveness both from her and from God; and the shame my behavior would have stayed with me a long time.” Self-expression is a popular word, but somewhat indefinite. One speaks of his better self, implying the existence of some other less good. Which one ought we to express? I, for one, feel that whenever an unworthy emotion (and I include here anger toward one’s nearest and dearest) is expressed in action, a person is really degrading himself. This is an excellent statement of the attitude that would be expected to develop from the explicit and implicit teachings of most representatives of the Christian church. “For verily, verily I say unto you, one that hath the spirit of contention is not for me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of people to contend with anger, one with another,” reports 3 Nephi 11.29. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
And a similar attitude tends to be adopted by most of us whether we are religiously oriented or not. One man was describing how he avoided express any anger or irritation toward his wife. When he was asked if he were afraid of his anger, his reply was immediate, “Of course I am. Everybody should be. When I’m angry I say things I don’t mean. And that’s not good.” And often we frown at or laugh at (which may be much worse) those who become concerned enough over matters to express anger. Often, for example, in public hearings on community issues the person who becomes emotionally involved enough to speak heatedly about an issue are subject them to ridicule; and their ideas are frequently discounted because they are expressed angrily. The implication is made that the person got carried away with his or her emotions. Therefore, what the person said must not have made sense. Yet in fact we often speak most lucidly in the heat of emotion. Somehow we have a sort of pseudoscientific attitude by which we fulfill our need to suppress anger. We have concluded that when the ideas are presented logically, rationally, and without emotion they must be objective and therefore nearer the truth than ideas about which we become excited and emotional. Keep in mind at all times, God is the only power and the only presence there is, and God is right where I am. I live and move and have my being in God. God’s being moves through me and manifests itself in what I am doing. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
What is so Frightening about Freedom? We Cherish it. We Fight for it. Yet We Run from it and Go to Great Lengths to Avoid an Awareness of it. Why?
Hello, you have the most amazing digs. I simply love your paintings. We also express our fear of freedom by seeing much of our lives in terms of demands and obligations. Few of us can claim we lack talent, for whatever shortage of abilities we may have, most of us have a real knack for playing this game! Getting along in the World as it is, adequate degree of social conformity, capacity to adapt to a wide range of conditions, ability to fit in—this kind of adjustment is not an unmixed blessing; the unadjusted complex person, who does not fit in very well in the World as it is, sometimes perceives the World more accurately than does one’s better adjusted fellow. Deceitfulness is identified with duplicity, lack of frankness, guile, subterfuge. Again, one recalls the adjective self-descriptions of the complex people: gloomy, pessimistic, bitter, dissatisfied, demanding, pleasure-seeking, spendthrift. There is certainly some suggestion here of early deprivation, of pessimism concerning the source of supply, which is seen as untrustworthy and which must be coerced, or perhaps tricked, into yielding. It is as though the person had reason to believe that one would not get what was coming to one unless one made sure that one did, by whatever device might be available. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
It is this lack of infantile trust that leads to adult duplicity and craftiness. One aspect of complexity then (and perhaps a penalty sometimes attaching to it) is, to render it in the common phrase, a sort of “two-facedness,” an inability to be wholly oneself at all times. The more simple, natural, and likeable person finds it easier to be always oneself. As compensation, the complex person may possess the capacity to be ironic or sardonic, which can be valuable attitudes. The preference for complexity is clearly associated with originality, artistic expression, and excellence of esthetic judgment. Originality was one of the three criterion variables around which the assessment research program was organized, and every subject was rated by the faculty members of one’s department on the degree or originality one had displayed in one’s work. It is Saturday afternoon and the wife says, “Matthias, how about watching the kids for the rest of the afternoon while I go shopping?” Now, Matthias may not feel at all enthusiastic about this plan for his afternoon. However, there is a good chance that he will feel some obligation (“After all, she does work pretty hard, too!”) and will agree (by a grunt) with the proposal. However, he may also feel that she has made an unreasonable demand. So he makes a few grumbling “bitches” about it, and the wife goes off feeling hurt, angry, or guilty, with some of the fun taken out of her expedition. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
By playing the demand-obligation game Matthias has blinded himself to the alternatives that he had. What are some of the things he might have said? “Honey, I was just going to call a couple of the guy and get together with them. How about calling a baby-sitter?” Or, “Gee, I was looking forward to spending the afternoon with you and the kids. Is there any other time you could do it?” Or, “I was planning to do somethings around the house that I can’t do if I have to watch the kids. Please call in a sitter.” Of course, there is always the chance, and perhaps not so remote either, that if Matthias were aware of his alternatives and felt free to exercise them, he might genuinely enjoy playing with the children for the afternoon, but with the help of the demand-obligation game he manages to keep himself miserable and unfree. If you think you do not play this game, look at your gift-giving habits. See how often you tell yourself that a gift is expected or that you owe it to a person, thereby blunting your enjoyment in giving as an expression of your love. One of the tricky aspects of the demand-obligation game is that, when we rebel against what others expect of us and against our own feelings of obligation, we are no more free than when we accede to them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
If Matthias flatly refuses to stay home with the children because it is expected of him, he has not really acted freely on the basic question of whether he would enjoy that time with his youngsters. Probably many hipster types are so busy rebelling against society’s expectations that they are not free to ask themselves whether they are living the life most satisfying to themselves. Whenever we perceive life primarily in terms of others’ expectations, we are less than fully free. Not being ourselves with others is another way we often express our fear of freedom. None of us is completely ourselves all of the time in our encounter with others, and no doubt some lack of candor is often necessary, even desirable, in our complicated society. However, we overwork if, for we constantly tell ourselves in all kinds of situations that we cannot really be ourselves. We say that we cannot be genuine with another because: “He’s not really capable of understanding how I feel.” Or: “He wouldn’t love me any more.” Or: “She is too mature [or too young] to understand what I’m talking about.:” Or: “He hasn’t read as much about these psychological things as I have, and it would be completely over his head if I told him how I feel.” Or “He has so many troubles at the office I don’t want to burden him with my feelings about what goes on here at home.” Or: “She reacts emotionally whenever I say how I feel, so I’ve just learned to keep my mouth shut.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Many other things some of us do could be interpreted as expressions of our fear of freedom. Some people live vicariously, substituting imaginary lives for the adventure of living: “I guess I read an average of six of seven mystery novels a week.” Psychosomatic illnesses probably perform this, among other, services: “I’m sorry, but I have another one of my sick headaches tonight and just can’t go out. Intellectualism provides a way of substituting rumination for spontaneous living: “Doctor, I’ve read just about every psychology book I can get my hands on. I can’t understand why I keep on having troubles.” Perhaps a person must have more commerce with oneself and one’s feeling states and less with the environment during childhood if one is later to have sufficient communication with one’s own depths to produce original thought. In this view, originality evidenced in maturity is to some extent dependent upon the degree to which the person in early childhood is faced with a complicated relationship to the maternal source of supply, combined with one’s capacity to persist at and eventually to achieve some mastery of this earliest problem situation. The argument would be that this primitive experience of phenomenal complexity sets a pattern of response which results in slower maturation, more tentativeness about the final form of organization, a resistance to early crystallization of the personality, and finally, greater complexity in one’s view both of the outer and of the inner Worlds. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Perhaps such speculation is unwarranted, however, and in any case it is clear that a great many other factors are involved in determining originality. What can be said is that originality and artistic creativeness and discrimination are related to the preference for complexity. The complex person’s greater flexibility in thought process is shown by a correlation with rated rigidity, defined as inflexibility of thought and manner; stubborn, pedantic, unbending, firm. That repressive overcontrol may sometimes be associated with the preference for simplicity has already been indicated by the correlation of complexity with constriction, and by another correlation with impulsiveness. It is shown also in the relation of the complexity measure to psychiatric variables that are scaled with hysteria, which also correlates with Schizophrenia and psychopathic deviate. Thus complexity goes along both with lack of control impulse and with the failure of repression which characterizes the schizophrenic process. This is by no means to suggest that because a person is complex, unresponsive, and lazy that they show schizophrenic tendencies of a pathological degree, but it is reasonable to supper that it correlates the sort of free-floating symbolic activity and frank confrontation and expression of the unconscious that is often so startling present in schizophrenic patients. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Healthy people are usually able to repress aggressive and erotic impulses, or to render them innocuous by rationalization, reinterpretation, or gratification in a substitutive manner which will not cause conflict. At the risk of being over-simple, we might say that preference for the complex in the psychic life makes for a wider consciousness of impulse, while this sort of simplicity, when it is preferred, is maintained by a narrowing of that consciousness. The perceptual decision in favor of admitting complexity may make also for greater subjectively experienced anxiety. To tolerate complexity, one must very often be able to tolerate anxiety as well, this finding would seem to day. The person who prefers complexity is socially nonconformist. With all the ways people have of expressing their fear of freedom it may be fair to say that the most unlimited ability that the human being has is that of building cage around itself. And once we build our cage, we work hard to keep them in constant report. What is so frightening about freedom? We cherish it. We fight for it. Yet we run from it and go to great lengths to avoid an awareness of it. Why? One reason we are afraid of freedom is that we do not trust ourselves. If we were not restricted in some way, we are afraid of what we would do. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
One woman described a lifelong fear of high places. When she began to explore her feelings further, she became aware that she had always been afraid that if the opportunity presented itself, she might jump to her death. By being afraid of and avoiding such places she was able to bypass the risk that her mistrust of herself told her was involved. Another young wife and mother suffers considerable inconvenience because she has never learned to drive. As she talked about it, it became clear that the freedom to come and go as she pleases is too frightening. “I’m afraid of what I might do,” she said. “I might start running around be begin neglecting my home and family.” And so she keeps herself immobile and as dependent on her husband as possible. All of us, no doubt, have some kind of fear like this. We are afraid that is we ever let ourselves go we would be likely to run wild or become savages, or lazy, no-good transients, or neglecting parents. It follows, of course, that our distrust of ourselves is rooted in our self-hate. It is as though we were constantly warning ourselves to be on guard against ourselves: “Look out, now, this guy is no damn good. Let him our of your sight and he’s liable to do most anything. Keep him hobbled. And do not let down your guard for a moment.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
In reality, however, it is not the genuinely free person who runs wild, becomes a savage, or lack the motivation to be productive. On the contrary, behavior that is destructive to the self or to others is an indication that the person is enslaved to repressed feelings that drive one and that one cannot face openly. Such behavior is the by-product of self-hate. If we have lived our lives denying freedom to ourselves, perhaps there is some justification for our mistrust or freedom. Just as a bid who has spent all its life in a cage might bewildered if released and not to know how to handle life in the wild, so we, too, may not be very well prepared to handle freedom. Many people need professional help as they seek to grant themselves greater personal freedom. A second reason we are afraid of freedom is that freedom, like love, means vulnerability. When we are free and spontaneous in our relationships with others, our guard is down. We are open to the possibility of being hurt. Consequently, we often keep ourselves bound emotionally. Coupes often have the mystifying and frustrating experience of discovering shortly after marriage that they no longer have such a strong, delicious desire for each other as they had before. Sometimes they immediately conclude that they no longer love each other. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
This is probably incorrect, for love is not so unstable a quality as all that. What has happened is that the couple has become frightened, since marriage is so intense a relationship with so much potential for being hurt. They react to their fear by unconsciously cutting off their freedom to experience and express their love. And, of course, they discover all kinds of misleading and irrelevant reasons for their change of feelings. Sometimes we pick safe moments to be free. One wife complained that the only time her husband was affectionate was invariably when he was about to leave for work. At that moment he would become the loving, cuddly teddy bear of a husband whom she had dreamed of all her life. At practically all other times he would be cool and aloof. It appears evident that he felt free to be loving at that moment when he just had to leave within quick five minutes. For then it was relatively safe for his love to come out of hiding. It could not possibly lead to anything further, which might mean more vulnerability. He could hug her and run! And she was left thinking to herself, “Fell well my lonely one, nothing else here can be done. So hit the freeway. I don’t ever want to see you again. You didn’t do me right, so a long good-bye tonight. Maybe in some other life, I will see you again. I will bet the Dow Jones if you didn’t come back, I’ll be just fine. Imagine how crushed she was for you to say I was not the one. My friends say I was in denial defending you as a perfect friend, but no one was held prisoner. It’s you again! Maybe someday in your dreams, my love, maybe you can say ‘Damn, it’s you again!’” (Hit the Freeway by Toni Braxton). #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
So our fear of freedom does make some kind of sense, emotionally. We feel we cannot be trusted with freedom and to be free is to risk being hurt. However, understanding why we fear freedom does not make it any less desirable as a goal in life. For in actuality our enslavement to fear is more hurtful to us than freedom. Avoidance of freedom exacts a heavy toll in our lives. Some readers may have been thinking, during our discussion of the los of the center of values in our society, that what is necessary is simply to work out a new set of values. And others may have the thought, “There is nothing wrong with the values of the past—such as love, equality and human fellowship. We need simply to bring these values back again. Both of these pints miss the central problem—namely, that modern mortals have to a great extent lost the power to affirm and believe in any value. No matter how important the content of the values may be, or how suitable this or that value may be on paper, what the individual needs is a prior capacity, namely, the power to do the valuing. The triumph of barbarism in such movements as Hitlerian fascism did not occur because people forgot the ethical traditions of our society as one might misplace a code. The humanistic values of liberty and the greatest good for the greatest number, the Hebrew Christian values of community and love for the stranger, were still in the textbooks, were still taught in Saturday and Sunday school, and no archeological expedition was needed to unearth them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
People rather have lost the value of individual competition, the pursuit of competitive enterprise, and individual effort and initiative, and the inner capacity to affirm, to experience values and goals as real and powerful for themselves. There is, furthermore, something artificial about setting out to find a center of value, as though one were shopping for a new coat. The endeavors to discover values outside oneself generally slide the individual directly into the question of what the group expects of one—what the style these days, in values as in coats? And this, as we have seen, has been part-and-parcel of the trends toward emptiness in our society. There is even something wrong in the phrase discussion of values. One never receives one’s convictions about values through intellectual debates. The things in a person’s life which one actually does value-one’s children and one’s love for them and theirs for one, the pleasure one has in drama or listening to music or playing gold, the pride one has in one’s work—all these one accepts as realities. One would regard any theoretical discussion of the value of one’s loving one’s children, or one’s pleasure in music, for example, as irrelevant if not impertinent. If you pushed one, one would say, “I value the love of my children because I actually experience it,” and if you pressed far enough to irritate one, one might well say, “If you have not experienced it yourself, I cannot explain it to you.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
In actual life the real value is something we experience as connected with the reality of our activity, and any verbal discussion is on a quite secondary level. We do not mean to psychologize values, or to imply that anything toward which one is inclined at the moment is good and true. Nor are we implying any depreciation of the role of the sciences of mortal, as well as philosophy and religion, in clarifying values. Indeed, I believe that the combined contributions of all these disciplines are requires for the solution of our crucial problem of what values modern mortals can live by. However, we do mean to emphasize that unless the individual oneself can affirm the value; unless one’s own inner motives, one’s own ethical awareness, are made the starting place, no discussions of values will make much real difference. Ethical judgment and decision must be rooted in the individual’s own power to evaluate. Only as one oneself affirms, on all levels of oneself, a way of acting as part of the way one sees reality and chooses to relate to it—only thus will the value have effectiveness and cogency for one’s own living. For this obviously is the only way one can or will take responsibility for one’s action. And it is the only way that one will learn from one’s action how better to act next tie, for when we act by rote or rule we close our eyes to the nuances, the new possibilities, the unique ways in which every situation is different from every other. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Furthermore, it is only as the person chooses the action, affirms the goal in one’s own awareness, that one’s action will have conviction and power, for only then will one really believe in what one is doing. For one thing, our fear of freedom results in inner tension. We have a virtually irrepressible desire to be more spontaneous and free. Since this desire is frightening, a conflict situation is present. We have to expend great amounts of energy keeping our cages in constant repair. Energy thus expanded in maintaining rigid control of ourselves puts a strain on us physically and emotionally. No doubt many physical and emotional problems are associated with this strain. Our fear of freedom also frequently leads to numbness of oneself. When we do not feel free to be ourselves, one way out is gradually to cut ourselves off from awareness of our feelings. Extreme instances of this occur in certain schizophrenic patients who seem totally incapable of experiencing a genuine emotion of any kind. Life and the freedom to feel have become so frightening that they have retreated into a World where there is no feeling. However, deadness to the self is not limited to such individuals. All of us in some degree have retreated from complete awareness. And to this extent we have deprived ourselves of the opportunity of living life at its fullest. Often this numbness affects our relations with others, and we find it difficult to sense how we really feel toward others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Apparently, even the most basic sense can become somewhat dulled, giving all of life a kind of gray bleakness. And it is not unusual for a person who has been making progress in psychotherapy to report a new sense of awareness. The grass may seem greener. Natural beauty, unnoticed before, is seen with new eyes; and there is a fresh feeling of aliveness in one’s body. Fear from freedom also often cuts us off from the experience of love. When we are not free to be ourselves, we are staying at a distance from others. Since we do not let others see us as we are and since we withhold our true feelings from them, we make it almost impossible for them and ourselves to feel emotionally close. And if the other person, in spite of our masks, appears to care for us, we always have an out. We can say, “He doe not love me for what I am. I have seduced him into caring for me, and he likes me only because of what I let him see of me. If we really knew me, he would no longer care for me.” Thus we persuade ourselves that we dare not give up our slavery to our masks. And at the same time we also protect ourselves from making the frightening discovery that those who love us, love us in spite of—not because of—the masks we wear. In this way we perpetuate our fear of spontaneity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Our fear of freedom is especially evident in two particular areas that deserve individual examination. We are afraid of the freedom to be angry and of the freedom to be aware of and enjoy of pleasures of the flesh feelings. Pleasure, joy, and happiness all involve a sense of well-being, a sense of being up, and having good feelings toward yourself and/or others. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. The price we pay for avoiding the pain of being fully alive is that we are excluded from the pleasure as well. Preference for simplicity is associated with social conformity, respect for custom and ceremony, friendliness toward tradition, somewhat categorical moral judgment, an undeviating patriotism, and suppression of such troublesome new forces as inventions that would temporarily cause unemployment. It seems evident that, at its best, preference for simplicity is associated with personal stability and balance, while at its worst it makes for categorical rejection of all that threatens disorder and disequilibrium. In its pathological aspect it produces stereotyped thinking, rigid and compulsive mortality, and hatred of instinctual aggressive and erotic forces which might upset the precariously maintained balance. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
There is a passage in Hugo’s Les Miserables which is remarkably coincident with these observations. It occurs at that point in the narrative when Javert, the single-minded and merciless representative of the law, has turned his own World upside-down by allowing Jean Valjean, the outlaw whom he has so relentlessly pursued, and whom he finally had in his grasp, to escape. He says to himself, in this surprising moment, “There is something more than a duty.” At this, “he was startled; his balances were disturbed; one of the scales fell into the abyss, the other flew into the sky.” To be obliged to acknowledge this: infallibility is not infallible, there may be an error in the doctrine, all is not said when a code has spoken, society is not perfect, authority is complicate with vacillation, a cracking is possible in the immutable, judges are mortal, the law may be deceived, the tribunals may be mistaken…to see a flaw in the immense blue crystal of the firmament! Certainly it was strange, that the fireman of order, the engineer of authority, mounted upon the blind iron-horse of the rigid path, could be thrown off by a ray of light! that the incommutable, the direct, the correct, the geometrical, the passive, the perfect, could bend! Until now all that he had above him has been in his sight a smooth, simple, limpid surface; nothing there unknown, noting obscure; nothing which was not definite, coordinated, concatenated, precise, exact, circumscribed, limited, shut in, all foreseen; authority was a plane; no fall in it, no dizziness before it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Javert had never seen the unknown except below. The irregular, the unexpected, the disorderly opening of chaos, the possible slipping into an abyss; that belonged to inferior regions, to the rebellious, the wicked, the miserable. This passage brings together many observations made intuitively by Hugo and arrived at in more pedestrian manner in this research. A precise simplicity is seen to be related to authority, stick doctrines, tradition, morality, constriction, and repression. The opposite of all these things is typified by the flaw in the crystal, by the irregular, by disorderly chaos, by such qualities as are to be found in the inferior regions, where reside the rebellious, the wicked, and the miserable. The emphasis here is pathological, and the dichotomy absolute, but if we extend the range into normal behavior and admit the many shortcomings of the typology, there is considerable agreement between Hugo’s intuition and this set of correlations. We would suggest that the types of perceptual preference we have observed are related basically to a choice of what to attend to in the complex of phenomena that makes up the World we experience; for the World is both stable and unstable, predictable and unpredictable, ordered and chaotic. To see it predominantly as one or the other is a sort of perceptual decision. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
One may attend to its ordered aspect, to regular sequences of events, to a stable center of the Universe (the Sun, the church, the state, the home, the parent, God, eternity, etc.), or one may instead attend primarily to the eccentric, the relative, and the arbitrary aspect of the World (the briefness of the individual life, the blind uncaringness of matter, the sometime hypocrisy of authority, accidents of circumstance, the presence of evil, tragic fate, the impossibility of freedom for the organism capable of conceiving freedom, and so on). Either of these perceptual decisions may be associated with a high degree of personal effectiveness. It is as though there is an effective and an ineffective aspect of each alterative. Our thinking about these various aspects is as yet based only upon clinical impressions of our subjects, but it is perhaps worth recording while we go on with the business of gathering more objective evidence. At its best, the decision in favor of order makes for personal stability and balance, a sort of easy-going optimism combined with religious respect for authority without subservience to it. This sort of decision will be made by persons who from an early age had good reason to trust the stability and equilibrium of the World and who derived inner sense of comfort and balance from their perception of an outer certainty. #Randolphharris 19 of 21
At its worst, the decision in favor of order makes for categorical rejection of all that threatens disorder, a fear of anything might being disequilibrium. Optimism becomes a matter of policy, religion a prescription and a ritual. Such a decision is associated with stereotyped thinking, rigid and compulsive morality, and hatred of instinctual aggressive and erotic forces which might upset the precariously maintained balance. Equilibrium depends essentially upon exclusion, a kind of perceptual distortion which consists in refusing to see parts of reality that cannot be assimilated to some preconceived system. The decision in favor of complexity, at its best, makes for originality and creativeness, a greater tolerance for unusual ideas and formulations. The sometimes disordered and unstable World has its counterpart in the person’s inner discord, but the crucial ameliorative factor is a constant effort to integrate the inner and outer complexity in a high-order synthesis. The goal is to achieve the psychological analogue of mathematical elegance: to allow into the perceptual system the greatest possible richness of experience, while yet finding in this complexity some over all patter. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Such a person is not immobilized by anxiety in the face of great uncertainty, but is at once perturbed and challenged. For such an individual, optimism is impossible, but pessimism is lifted from the personal to the tragic level, resulting not in apathy but in participation in the business of life. At its worst, such a perceptual attitude leads to grossly disorganized behavior, to surrender to chaos. It results in nihilism, despair, and disintegration. The personal life itself becomes simply an acting out of the meaninglessness of the Universe, a bitter joke directed against its own maker. The individual is overwhelmed by the apparent insolubility of the problem, and find the disorder of life disgusting and hateful. One’s essential World-view is thus depreciative and hostile. The Universe is a spiritual system and we are part of it; God is right where we are and is discovered at the center of our own being. Turning from everything that denies this and quietly contemplating the Perfection of the Inner Mortal, who is an incarnation of God, we meet the Great Reality in the only place we shall ever discover it, within our own hearts and souls and minds. The immediate availability of good conscious is the practical application of spiritual thought as a force to the solution of human problems; the inevitable necessity that good shall come to every soul; this leads to the belief in immortality and the continuity of the individual stream of consciousness, and eternal expansion of the individual life. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
All a Little too Incredible–She Was Not Altogether in Love and Looking Around for a Philosophy Which Would Bring Contentment!
She was painfully confused, trying to crush her sobs, trying to crush her rage against me. The word “crisis” is Greek in origin, and in that language its primary meaning is “decision.” In medical pathology, a crisis is that point in the course of a disease at which a decisive change occurs, leading either to recovery or to death. In general, a crisis is a turning point, the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. In speaking of “the crisis in belief,” I refer to a point in the course of individual development at which the person must decide for oneself whether the picture one has been given of the nature of the World is a true one. It is the point at which one is called upon to think for oneself about the important matters of cosmology and ethics. It is time of decision about the meaning of life, the existence of God, the coerciveness of moral law, the place of mortals in nature, the freedom of the individual will, and all other great issues with which philosophy deals. Not all of us are philosophers, of course, but if we are human we must have a philosophy. Our intellect demands that experience should be accounted for; the need for things to be intelligible is a basic human need. Thus we are all, willy-nilly, philosophers of a sort, in the sense that we tell ourselves one story or another about most of the enduring issues with which systematic philosophy deals, and without which we cannot face life with any sense that it has meaning and worth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The crisis in belief need not occur at any special age, and in fact it need not occur very conspicuously at all. For most people, however, it comes with adolescence, and it is ushered in partly by the challenge that the newly awakened and intense pleasures of the flesh and aggressive urges of puberty offers to morality and the civilized code of the pleasures of the flesh. It is a function as well, I think, of the growth of intelligence, which is beginning to reach full power concurrently with physiological maturation. It comes at that period when the mind, like the body, is getting ready to leave home in search of a new home of its own. Less dualistically, we may say that the maturing human form, freeing itself, under the push of natural development, of the habitat of its childhood, emerges into a new World in which it is no longer provided for and ministered to, but in which it must seek its own sustenance and meaning, and must choose anew for itself. With choices comes responsibility, self-valuation, and self-affirmation or self-rejection. The crisis in belief is often a time of categorical repudiation or total acceptance, of radical chance of rigid stasis. It is no exaggeration to say that it is a time of the greatest psychological danger, in which the integrity of the self is challenged, and in which old selves die and new selves are born. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
As psychologist interested in the way in which psychological forms develop, and therefore, I shall add, intensely interested in the individual life, we assessors necessarily pay a great deal of attention to that part of the individual’s history in which one was faced with a serious crisis of development. The work of assessment requires us to understand how a person came to one’s beliefs about the nature of the World and one’s own place in it, and how solidly founded and ready for action one’s philosophy of life really is. I need hardly say that in order to arrive at such an understanding we must not only inquire deeply into one’s beliefs on great issues, but must synthesize what we know of the nature and genesis of those beliefs with what we have been able to understand about one’s entire character and life history. Moral posture and beliefs about the cosmos are themselves frequently determined at least in part by psychodynamic forces, and a complete personality formulation gives an account not only of what actions our philosophy determines, but what forces our philosophy is determined by. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The question of the existence of God is of course of central importance, in terms both of its implications for the nature of belief or disbelief in Providence, in Heavenly justice and mercy, in life after death, and in the efficacy of prayer, and hence in the dependability of a benevolent supernatural power. It is designed to elicit opinions and feelings and determinism, theism, good and evil, and the like. One problem, for example, describes events leading up to a criminal action, in which the external and internal determinants of the person’s behavior were made manifest. This problem served as the point of departure for discussion of individual responsibility in affairs in which individual appeals compelled by forces within and without to act in an apparently irresponsible way. Another problem concerned a man shipwrecked along on a desert island, with certain knowledge that he could never get off it. The question then was, could such a man, being part of no human community, do an evil action? This immediately led into the difficult problem of the locus of ethical sanctions, whether in society or in the individual, which in turn, of course, is central to the psychological problem of the internalization or externalization of the superego, with all its implications for the management of aggression and sexuality, and anarchic impulse in general. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
There was this woman who was rated by the assessment staff as being exceptionally well adjusted, and indeed her life seemed agreeably proportioned with secure community position, healthy and happy children, a professionally successful husband, and constructive social service activities through which she expressed something of her individuality and in which she felt worthwhile. This woman said that she decided to drop religion early in college, having reached a conclusion that it was all a little too incredible. Chapel services were compulsory at the college at that time, and she always went to services, taking along an interesting non-religious book to read during the sermon. Shortly after graduation she married a man of exceptional eligibility in terms of the status symbols of that time and place, but with whom, she confessed she was not altogether in love. She had two children, and while they were still very young, she began to feel quite unhappy, always worn-out and cross. She began, she says, “looking around for a philosophy which would bring contentment.” She found it in Lecomte du Nouy’s book, Human Destiny, which she says enabled her to feel justified in returning to church membership and to religious belief. She now believes in a personal God, to whom she prays and in whom she finds support. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Of her belief, she says, “It’s satisfactory enough, and it fills a definite need. Sometimes I wonder, though, whether I just thought it all up to fill a gap in my life.” She does not believe in the after-life. However, she says that her unbelief in this respect is not complete or final; I may some day, in the future, come to believe in an after-life as well.” The implication was that if she needed to believe it, she would believe it. That she suspects that she has perhaps made rather too much of a good thing out of the flexibility is indicated, however, in her Thematic Apperception Test (which is a psychological personality test) stories, several of which communicate a sense of shallowness (as she sees it) and a lack of profound meaning in her life. On Card 19, for example, she tells this story, which purports to deal with a single day in a girl’s life, but which suggests the emotional tone of the subject’s own life in its totality, as she perceives it: Virginia has had a thrilling say. She has had a good start on learning to ski. She emerged with no broken bones or even sprains, though she had a glorious day of climbing, sliding, leaping, staggering, and falling with her legs, skis, and ski poles all mixed up. The air was so clear, so wonderful—not as cold as all her friends had told her the horrid north would be. And how nice Johnny Evans was. So friendly, no more and no less. Everyone laughed a lot, and they the most of all. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Better get ready, now! The day is by no means over. Square dancing tonight, with Johnny and all the others, then the long ride home, and serious business—job hunting in a day or two. “How silly I was,” thought Virginia, “to be so childishly frightened about my luck up north. It’s just like anywhere!” But will Virginia find her grandfather’s watch with the lost ruby of the Whitehall family? Or trace her friend Johnny’s surprising ancestry? Read the December issue of Bang to find out!!! This story, like all complex symbolic productions, may be interpreted at many levels of meaning. I find it most touching and poignant, and to interpret it is in some sense a shame. Yet: she tells us that she has emerged happily from the first years of her feared adulthood (the horrid north) with no damage done (no broken bones, or even sprains; in fact, it has been a glorious and exciting and lucky day up north). However, the day is not yet over; indeed, it is “by no means over.” There are things not yet found our; Johnny, for instance, though is so nice and friendly (no more and no less) has a surprising ancestry (where did the beasts begin?). And then there is the lost ruby which should pass on from generation to generation, encased in a patriarchal time-piece (this jewel of sexuality, agent of transmission of the matter of life through the generations). And fear with it, that true generation has not passed through her, or seized her for its fulfillment. And the final sentence: “Read the December issue of Bang to find out”: the sum of the tale. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
A “bang” is, of course, what one gets out of life, and December is the last issue of the year. The final crisis of selfhood is still before her, and the very facility of her adjustment seems to represent the greatest danger to her integrity. So far as religion is concerned, I vaguely believe this woman would have evolved a very different interpretation of experience out her transitory atheism if she had had the courage to sound her own depths instead of accepting pragmatically what seemed to satisfy her immediate needs. As things stand, I believe that she perceives herself unconsciously as having forfeited profound experiences in the interests simply of facile adjustment. (Which is not to say that she is right in his self-perception; the story is a deeply experienced one.) I should perhaps pause at this point to make it plain, if it is not already so, that we are not here concerned with the validity of religious beliefs in their cognitive aspect. Rather, we are concerned with the depth of feeling with which a cognitive belief is experienced and with the question of integration or dissociation of such feelings in the structure of the self. Quite another aspect of this problem is the deepening of religious faith in persons who have not experienced doubt, but who have rather experiences semi-mystical confirmation, or even transfiguration of their beliefs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
In general, however, it should be noted that I am addressing myself to these problems as a psychologist interested in inner experience, and not as a philosopher interested in discerning the truth about the outer cosmos (if there can be such a true difference). Speaking as a psychologist, then, what I find primarily in this subject in both these ways of resolving the crisis in belief (i.e., in the atheistic resolution and in the repudiation of a transitory atheism in favor of a return to religion) is an acceptance of emotional polarities as being genuine oppositions which necessitate a choice between them. This slavery to the antinomies shows itself wherever repudiation is necessary to the maintenance of some way of living, whether it be in matter of private philosophy, religious belief, ethnic group-membership, affairs of the heart, allegiances to opposed scientific theories, esthetic preferences, or psychodynamic mechanisms. Rebellion is a form of submission, suppression of impulse is a form of belief. Essentially what I think we have observed in this crisis is not resolution at all, in the sense of estrangement of a higher-level integration, but rather perpetuation of the conflict through acceptance of polarities as real, and deferment of the decision to a later point in life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Women who have indeed settled the crisis belief communicate quite a different sense of selfhood from the case we have considered, and they have much greater serenity and spontaneity, and freedom of both feeling and thought, in their make-up. I need hardly say that in the assessment of the strength of any personality it is most important to know what is settled and what is unsettled, which crises are past and which are present or still ahead. Our fear of freedom also expresses itself in other ritualistic and compulsive behavior. So, for example, when a person—like Lady Macbeth—has a compulsion to wash one’s hands many times a day, the behavior not only provides a symbolic way of dealing with guilt feelings, but is also gives the person something with which to be preoccupied. It is almost as though he has an unconsciously concluded that “idle minds [and hands] are the devil’s workshop” and has substituted a meaningless activity to keep us both busy. All of us probably do some of this sort of thing in one way or another, f it is only making a game of stepping on every crack (or avoiding stepping on any cracks) in the sidewalk. Some executives become busier and busier, having to work longer and longer hours. Although they may not be consciously aware of it, they may be doing this because they feel much more comfortable and safe at work than they do in their free time when they could be with their families or engaged in other exciting, but frightening, activities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Extreme emphasis on cleanliness and its preservation often performs similar functions. One young woman described how her mother had set aside the living room of the hose so that no member of the family entered it except on Christmas and Easter. Although there was no physical barrier to the room, even the family dog avoided it, because he somehow got the message that to enter it was to invite disaster. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “the cleaning lady was a very important part of our household because she got to go in there very week!” One wonders how the parents feel about their perfectly preserved living room with its unmarred furniture now that the children are married and gone. It certainly represents some lost opportunities in living. However, living is frightening. Fear of freedom can always be expressed in other specific fears that limit our freedom. Many such fears have been catalogued and given phobia names. There is fear of open places, closed places, high places, crowds, snakes, spiders, heart attack, death, being alone, and so forth. All of us experience some of these fears. They may be very mild or very intense. There may be considerable grounds for them in reality, or they may be quite unrealistic. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Much can probably be said about the symbolic meaning and origin of these fears in our lives, but their function appears to be that of limiting our freedom. Any one of these fears, if taken seriously, can limit our activities. And even if we attempt to ignore them and act in spire of them, they are likely to enter our minds and keep us from enjoying freedom. A young married woman tells how she becomes very uneasy whenever she goes a few miles from home. And she remains anxious until she returns. It is easy to see how she might live out her life in a geographical box if she does not find relief from this fear. She might well deprive herself of a whole World of adventure. A young executive was bothered daily by the fear that his children would die. Every morning, before leaving on the long commuting trip to his office, he would have to go into each child’s room and check to make sure each was breathing. During the working day the fear would frequently recur and he would call home to check up on things. To go out of town on a business trip of several days would be almost intolerable. This he kept himself in bondage. He was too preoccupied with his fear to relax with his children or fully express his love for them or allow himself the freedom to enjoy them while he had them. Fatherhood was more frightening than it was fun. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Love and will take place within the forms of the society. These forms are the myths and symbols viable at that period. The forms are the channels through which the vitality of the society flows. Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry is aware, the forms ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it. And the present revolt against forms only proves the point in reverse: in our transitional age, we are hunting, exploring, reaching about, struggling to assert whatever we can find in the experiment for some new forms. In homely illustration, Duke Ellington recounts that when we writes music, he must keep in mind that his trumpeter cannot hot the very high notes securely, whereas the trombonist is very good at them; and writing under these impediment, he remarks, “It’s good to have limits.” Not only with strength and passion, but other forms of love as well: full satisfaction means the death of the human being; love runs itself out with the death of lovers. It is the nature of creativity to need form for its creative power; the impediment thus has a beneficial function. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
These forms of the society are molded and presented first of all by the artist. It is the artists who teach us to see, who break the ground in the enlargement of our consciousness; they point the way toward the new dimensions of experience which we have, in any given period, been missing. This is why looking at a work of art gives us a sudden experience of self-recognition. Giotto, precursor to that remarkable birth of awareness known as the Renaissance, saw nature in a new perspective and for the first time painted rocks and trees in three-dimensional space. This space had been there all the time but was not seen because of medieval mortal’s preoccupation with their vertical relationship to eternity reflected in the two-dimensional mosaics. Giotto enlarged human consciousness because one’s perspective required an individual mortal standing at a certain point to see this perspective. The individual was now important; eternity was no longer the criterion, but the individual’s own experience and one’s own capacity to look. The art of Giotto was a prediction of the Renaissance individualism which was to flower a human years later. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The new view of space pictures by Giotto was basic for the new geographical explorations of oceans and continents by Magellan and Columbus, which changed mortal’s relation to their World, and for the explorations in astronomy by Galileo and Copernicus, which changed mortal’s relations to the Heavens. These new discoveries in space resulted in a radical upheaval of mortal’s image of oneself. Ours is not the first age to be confronted with loneliness arising from mortal’s discovery of new dimensions of external space and similarly requiring new extensions of one’s own mind. The psychological upheaval and spiritual loneliness were shaped mainly by its consequence. On beholding the blindness and misery of mortals, on seeing all the Universe unknow, and mortals without light, left to themselves, as it were astray in this corner of the Universe, knowing not who has set one here, what one is here for, or will become of one when one dies, incapable of all knowledge, I begin to be afraid, as a man who has been carried while asleep to a fearful desert island, and who will awake not knowing where he is and without any means of quitting the island. Just as mortals of the past were able to find the new planes of consciousness which did, to some extent, fill the new reservoirs of space, so in our day a similar shift is necessary. “Now, behold, I say unto you, if I had not been born of God I should not have know these things; but God has, by the mouth of his holy Angel, made these things known unto me, not of any worthiness of myself,” reports Alma 36.5. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
The Knowledge Which We Seek, the Answers for Which We Yearn, and the Strength Which We Desire
Believe me, our little consultation will not take long. We have strong obligations. We will call or come just as quickly as we can. As we turn to examine some major escape hatches, we see that some people escape from feelings of self-hate by developing physically illness. One patient, age 31, was a tall, athletically-built man of rather prepossessing appearance. He speaks in an intelligent, competent manner. He was obviously very tense, however, and seemed to be controlling himself only with some effort. He displayed a certain amount of hostility toward the testing procedure, but was overly cooperative and uncomplaining. The patient’s personality inventory is typical of the most clear-cut cases of psychopathy or impulse neurosis. Basic to the personality structure is a very deep and primitive oral fixation, with subsequent reaction formation against it. Direct satisfaction of libidinal impulses is sought, rather than repression or substitution. Conflicts tend to be acted out, and there is a constant flight from anxiety rather than an attempt to endure it. Associated with the underlying orality and passivity is considerable hostility which is also expressed orally (by such means as sarcasm, invective, and biting). What is most feared is the passivity, and dominance-submission is the characteristic conflict. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
There is a considerable tendency toward self-dramatization. The primitive oral longing may lead to alcoholism or drug addiction, and pleasures of the flesh in such cases are usually polymorphous perverse. Such anxiety as is not handled by character defenses may be expressed gastrointestinally. There is a poverty of inner resources, an inability to sublimate or obtain substitutive gratification. Impulses are responded to in an uncontrolled fashion. Depression and anxiety are evident, the depression being the more prominent of the two. There is a good deal of preoccupation with pleasures of the flesh, and judgment defect manifests itself chiefly in that area. Otherwise, contact with reality is good. The patient had been divorced once, and he was not married to the woman with whom he was presently living, although they had been living together for several years. He came into the clinic purely on an impulse, although he had occasionally entertained the idea in the past because of vague feelings of dissatisfaction with certain aspects of his own behavior, such as his promiscuity, his predilection for comfort women, and his tendency to look for unusual forms of excitement and entertainment when he was inebriated. His common-law wife was fairly tolerant of these failings, but he was worried that sooner or later he would get in trouble with law enforcement, which would interfere with his profession as a teacher. He appeared to have no particular anxiety or neurotic symptoms. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The research that has been done into psychosomatic illness makes it evident that the body operates as a total organism and that most physical illness can either be caused or greatly modified by emotional factors. Two primary unconscious motivations appear to underlie such illness. In the first place, it seems evident that there is often a need to push one’s self. The person uses physical illness as an unconscious way of expressing one’s self-hate. Another motivation seems to be that of asking for help. It is almost as if the person were saying to the World, “Will not somebody please take care of me?” The therapist reported that the therapeutic interviews were generally “very man to man…the patient manipulated the situation so that we seemed to be sort jolly buddies rather than patient and doctor. He refused to admit of any professional distance between us.” The interviews were more like casual chats than therapeutic sessions. There was, nevertheless, a very strong transference. As the transference increased in intensity, and the patient’s passive desires got closer to the surface, his acting out of this conflict began to take a very hostile form. Therapists often report that they experience a great deal of trouble dealing effectively with physical illness caused by emotional difficulties. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
It can be hard to deal with probably because the individual, in being ill, usually does satisfy some of the needs that motivate the illness in the first place. On one occasion, the patient came in drunk, having been drinking all night. At this time, he gave vent to considerable hostility, its first objection being the psychological tests and the psychologist. When the therapist pointed out that this too might be displaced, the patient turned violently upon the therapist himself, and began to compare psychologists very favorably with psychiatrists. The patient’s hostility was evinced plainly in his expressive movement during this hour, as he began many aggressive gestures which he quickly inhibited. Finally, he broke down and cried. Afterward, he said he felt better, “like after sleeping with a woman.” Following this, a good deal of passive homosexual material emerged in his associations, and this was dealt with very effectively and in an anxiety reliving manner by the therapist. The patient does succeed in pushing himself, and he often gains attention and care as a result of the illness. Both of these psychological gains, of course, are not ultimately satisfying, for there is usually growing resentment on the part of those who care for the ill person. This resentment is likely to be expressed in some form or other. Thus the stage is set for further feelings of rejection, more self-hate, and more pronounced physical problems. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The cycle generally goes this way: Feelings of rejection, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape into physical symptoms or illness, and further rejection (who likes somebody who is sick and complaining all the time?). When a person has been severely emotionally damaged as a child, the escape from self-hate may take the form of a severe mental illness, or psychosis. In this instance the feelings a person has about one’s self are so intolerable and life is so frightening that the person may escape into a fantasy World. One exchanges reality for unreality. All the gain that the therapist would claim for this patient after six months of psychotherapy was that the patient had been rendered more available for treatment. In view of the extreme difficulty of working with such psychopathic character disorders, this modest gain is indeed rather praiseworthy. Perhaps the escape from self-hate is seen most clearly in instance where the person becomes someone else in one’s imagination, someone who is powerful, good, or important in some way. One may acquire an unshakable belief that one is Jesus, Napoleon, the Virgin Mary, Queen Elizabeth, Beyonce, Brad Pitt, Aaliyah, Reese Witherspoon, Paris Hilton, The Weekend, Drake, Elvis, Olivia Newton John, or some the famous person. The immediate gain from the illness is obvious. The person is no longer the hated self who seemed worthless, hopeless, and a failure. Now one can look on one’s self as an individual of great important and significance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In spite of all our advances in the understanding and treatment of mental illness, however, the psychotic person is almost certain to experience further feelings of rejection. Society will almost surely deem it necessary to segregate one’s self from normal people, at least during the acute phases of the illness. When one does return to society, one is likely to be regarded with suspicion, prejudice, and fear, with little understanding or even tolerance of one’s emotional problems. Again the cycle rejection cycle might start. Feelings of rejection, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape into mental illness, further rejection (why can he not snap out of it and face life like everybody else does?). Alcoholism and other forms of addiction provide other ways of attempting to escape from feelings of self-hate. For a large majority of people, the use of alcohol is a pleasant way to become more like the person they long to be. With the glowing warmth of two or three drinks, many people are able to talk more freely and enjoy their friends more openly. Usually too frightened of their love to reveal it, they are able to express their care more openly and with more feeling. The potential alcoholic, on the other hand, begins to rely on drinking as a way to avoid facing feelings of inadequacy, failure, and worthlessness. The alcohol numbs one to these feelings and, at least in the initial stages, helps one to escape one’s feeling of mediocrity and self-hate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
One is less aware of one’s fear of suffering further rejection and so one mixes more with people, somewhat mitigating the terrible loneliness experiences in sober hours. Feelings of rejection, lead to feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape to alcoholism, further rejection (he used to be funny when he was drinking, but it seems now like he is drunk all the time and everybody suffers”), then further feelings or worthlessness ensue. However, when one is sober again, feelings of self-hate come closer to the surface, fortified now by guilt feelings about the meaningless waste of one’s hours of drunkenness. The only answer to the resulting moodiness and sense of emptiness seems to be possessed in resorting to drinking. Eventually the alcohol provides a more or less permanent escape from self-hate. Thus the alcoholic become more and more addicted. Meanwhile, one encounters ever more frequent rejection and one after another of his or her friends, and finally one’s family find one’s drinking and one’s behavior while intoxicated increasingly unbearable and desert the individual. The only way of gaining relief from these further feelings of rejection, or so it seems to one, comes through further drinking. And so the cycle runs it course. Homosexuality is another way of escaping feelings of self-hate. Sometimes have been cut off from both skills and the emotions of male existence. Yet, they also undoubtedly long for some kind of place in the male World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
With women, some of these men seem, superficially at least, very much at ease. They share many interests more typical of women in our culture. One may be artistic and creative. Yet, in relationships with girls that might have become intimate and meaningful at a deeper level, tend to become guarded and aloof. It is evident that one has a profound fear of being subtly manipulated and controlled by women, as one’s mother may have done (being made to do the household chores and care for the other kids, cook meals, becoming a pseudo mother, and without any male influence around). All women are seen by the male as threats to his individuality. It is not surprising that, when one is approached at college or work by men with similar problems, one falls quickly into homosexual practices. Though he later married, he seemed unable either to give up his homosexuality completely or to achieve genuine intimacy with his wife, although they were able to have pleasures of the flesh. After several years of attempting to make a satisfying married, she finally left him. With this individual, as with other homosexuals, his sexual relationship with men probably gave him some escape from his feelings of inability to satisfy his need for love and his feelings of worthlessness as a male. However, his escape into homosexuality led to further rejection by parents, other relatives, friends, and acquaintances who proved typically intolerant of problems with pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
As often is the case, even he and his homosexual partners tended to despise each other. Such rejection seemed to lead only to the search for the reassurance of new sexual partners in an unbroken cycle of rejection. Feelings of rejection, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, escape into homosexuality, further rejections (he is different from other men. He is repulsive to me) and more feelings of worthlessness. No attempt is being made here to explain fully why a person chooses one escape from self-hate rather than another, as, for example, why one person becomes an alcoholic and another becomes a braggart or develops symptoms of physical illness. There are many complex reasons for these differences. Some of them certainly have to do with the kind of rejection that is experienced. Chance occurrences may lead to the expression of one symptom rather than another. For example, it is possible that the man, the homosexual just described, might have become an alcoholic if her had not been approached by an experienced homosexual and if his rigid religious training had not discouraged any experimentation with drinking. The purpose here, however, is to show that feelings of rejection, worthlessness, and self-hate lie at the root of these problems, whatever the various nuances may be. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
There is also room for inborn differences within this general pattern. Perhaps, for example, it is possible that some people are chemically more susceptible to alcoholic addiction than others. This would not mean that alcoholism would be a certainty for such a person even if it were found that such potentials occur. Without the need to escape from severe feelings of inadequacy and self-hate, the individual would not likely become an alcoholic. “The male patient then stood up, heaved a sigh and headed for the door. I asked if he needed a ride back home and he murmured that his car had brought him down town.” There is something creative in psychotherapy thus carried on. To the old patterns of perception and action is added a force for change, so that they gradually become something quite different, though retaining many of their former elements. It is important for people to learn to accept things at face value, and there should be a willingness to let the other person be as he or she wished, combined with an insistence on yourself being as you wish. It may sound absurd because the aim of psychotherapy is to induce changes in the behavior of the patient. Do we not want one to have fewer symptoms, better relations with people, a constructive set of social values, a happier out look on life? While we may have all of these desires as secondary goals for the patient, we must wish for one, above all else, and is necessary even at the expense of those secondary goals, simply that one be free to choose what one wants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The patient may in the end choose to be much as one was in the beginning; the difference should be that one chooses freely and is not compelled by one’s own blind needs. It is, indeed, our faith that there are many things, to us undesirable, that free mortals would not choose for oneself; but we must be willing, in the final analysis and to state the case in its most extreme form, to grant the other’s right to choose destruction and evil, if one does so freely. If we accept this principle, we will not pity the patient, nor hold ourselves wise or good as compared to him or her, nor wish to impart on the individual our own virtues or visions. Rather, we will wish only to help one to understand who he or she is as a person, that one may be made more free to choose, and less the slave of one’s own history. Humans are generally ethical beings: but one’s achievement of ethical awareness is not easy. One does not grow into ethical judgment as simply as the California Golden Poppy (flower) grows toward the Sun. Indeed, like freedom and the other aspects of mortal’s consciousness of self, ethical awareness is gained only at a price of inner conflict and anxiety. With the loss of innocence and the rudimentary beginnings of ethical sensitivity, the person falls heir to the particular burdens of self-consciousness, anxiety and guilt feelings, but this awareness may not appear till later—that one is of dust. That is to say, when one realizes the one will some time die; one becomes conscious of one’s own finiteness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The fall of man is seen as a fall upward because learning of right and wrong represent the birth of the psychological and spiritual person. The beginning of wisdom is the admission of one’s ignorance, and mortals can creatively use their powers, and to some extent transcend their limitations, only as one humbly and honestly admits these limitations to begin with so we do not become infected with false pride. Every society must have the influences which being ideas and ethical insight into birth, and the institutions which conserve that values of the past. No society would survive long without both new vitality and old forms, change and stability, the prophetic religion which attacks existing institutions and the priestly religion which protects the institutions. Many human beings are struggling toward enlarged self-awareness, maturity, freedom and responsibility, and some have the tendency to remain a child and cling to the protection of parents or parental substitutes. In capitalism, it is required for its functioning that there must be a strict obedience of the individuals to the laws, those that serve their true interests as well as those that do not. How oppressive or how liberal the laws and what the means for their enforcement are make little difference with regard to the central issue: the people must learn to fear authority, and not only in the person of the law enforcement officers because they carry weapons. This fear is not enough of a safeguard for the proper functioning of the state; the citizen must internalize this fear and transform obedience into a moral and religious category: sin. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
People respect the laws not only because they are afraid but also because they feel guilty for their disobedience. This feeling of guilt can be overcome by the forgiveness that only the authority itself can grant. The conditions for such forgiveness are: the sinners repents, is punished, and by accepting punishment submits again. The sequence: sin (disobedience), feelings of guilt, new submission (punishment), forgiveness is a brutal cycle, inasmuch as each act of disobedience leads to increased obedience. A knowledge of truth and the answers to our greatest questions come to us as we are obedient to the commandments of God. We learn obedience throughout our lives. Beginning when we are very young, those responsible for our care set forth guidelines and rules to ensure our safety. Life would be simpler for all of us if we would obey such rules completely. Many of us, however, learn through experience the wisdom of being obedient. There are rules and laws to help ensure our physical safety. Likewise, the Lord has provided guidelines and commandments to help ensure our spiritual safety so that we might successfully navigate this often-treacherous moral existence and return eventually to our Heavenly Fathers. The Savior demonstrated genuine love of God by living the perfect life, by honoring the sacred mission that was his. Never was he haughty. Never was he puffed up with pride. Never was he disloyal. Jesus as humble, sincere, and obedient. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Who Has Not Found Heaven for Where Your Treasure is Will be Your Heart?
And then the room was empty. Perfectly empty. I turned, disconsolate and shuddering, and put my head down on my arm, as if I could go to sleep on my desk. I was considering William James, that psychologist-philosopher American-man-of-genius, who struggled all his life with the problem of his will. One of my esteemed colleagues, writing of James’s severe depression and the fact that for a number of years he was on the verge of suicide, asks us not to judge him harshly for those aspects of maladjustment. I take a different view. I believe that understanding the depressions James suffered and the way he dealt with them increases our appreciation and admiration for him. True, all his life he was plagued by vacillation and an inability to make up his mind. In his last years, when he was struggling to give up his lecturing at Harvard, he would write in his diary one day, “Resign,” the next day, “Don’t resign,” and the third day, “Resign” again. James’s difficulty in making up his mind was connected with his inner richness and the myriad of possibilities for him in every decision. However, it was precisely James’s depressions—in which he would often write of his yearning for “a reason for wishing to live four hours longer”—which forced him to be so concerned with will, and precisely in the struggle against these depressions that he learned so much about human will. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
William James believed—and, as a therapist, I believe that his judgment here is clinically sound—that it was own discovery of the capacity to will which enabled him to live a tremendously fruitful life up to his death at sixty-eight, despite his depressions and hos continual affliction with insomnia, eye troubles, back disorders, and so on. In our own “age of this disordered will,” as it has been termed, we turn to William James with eagerness to find whatever help he can give us with our own problem of will. He begins his famous chapter on will, published in 1890, by summarily dismissing wish as what we do when we desire something which is not possible for achievement, and contrast it with will, which exists when the end is within our power. If with the desire there is a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply wish. I believe that this definition is one of the places where James’s Victorianism shows through; wishes are treated as unreal and immature. Obviously, no wish is possible when we first wish it. It becomes possible only as we wish it in many different ways, and through considering it from this side and that, possibly over a great period of time, we generate the power and take the risk to make it happen. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, then James launches into what turns out to be one of the most thrilling treatises on will in literature, which I can only touch on. There is, first, the primary type, which is distinguished by the fact it does not require a whole series of decisions. We desire to change our shirt or begin to write on paper, and once we start, a whole series of movements is set going by itself; it is ideomotor. This primary will requires absence of conflict. James is here trying to preserve spontaneity. He is taking his stand against Victorian Will power, the exercise of the separate faculty called will power which must have failed him dismally in his own life and led him into the paralysis which expressed itself in his depressions. Now we know in our day a lot more about this so-called absence of conflict, thanks chiefly to psychoanalysis, and that infinitely more is going on in states which seem without conflict. He then touches on the healthy will which he defines as action following vision. The vision requires a clear concept and consists of motives in their right ratio to each other—which is a fairly rationalistic picture. Discussing unhealth will, he rightly focuses on the obstructed will. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Obstructed will, one illustration of this that James cites is the state that exists when our eyes lose focus and we are unable to rally our attention. We sit blankly staring and do nothing. The objects of consciousness fail to touch the quick or break the skin. Great fatigue or exhaustion marks this condition; and an apathy resembling that then brought about is recognized in asylums under the name of abulia as a symptom of mental disease. It is interesting that he relates this apathy only to mental disease. I, for one, believe this is the chronic, endemic, psychic state of our society in our day—the neurotic personality of our time. The question then boils down to: Why does not something interest me, reach out to me, grasp me? And James then comes to the central problem of will, namely attention. I do not know whether he realized what a stroke of genius this was. When we analyze will with all the tools modern psychoanalysis brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or intention as the seat of will. The effort which goes into the exercise of the will is really effort to attention; the strain in the willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, for instance, the strain of keeping the attention focused. The once-born type of well-adjusted person does not a lot. This leads one to a surprising, though very keen, statement of an identity between belief, attention, and will. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Will and belief, in short, meaning a certain relation between objects and the Self, are two names for one and the same psychological phenomenon. The most compendious possible formula perhaps would be that our belief and attention are the same fact. James then beguiles us with one of his completely human and Earthly illustrations. I cite it in detail because I wish to come back to it in discussing the unfinished aspects of James’ concept of will: We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how they very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. [The scene is New England before the advent of central heating.] Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, “I must get up, this ignominious,” and so on. However, still the warm couch feels too delicious, and the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of the decisive act. Now how do we get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, “Hollo! I must lie here no longer” and idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the col during the period of struggle which paralyzed our activity. James concludes that the moment the inhibition ceases, the original idea exerts its effect, and up we get. He adds, with typical Jamesian confidence, that “This case seems to me to contain in miniature form the data for an entire psychology of volition.” Let us now take, for our special examination, James’s own example. We note that then he gets to the heart of the problem of will in this illustration there comes a remarkable statement. He writes, “We suddenly find that we have got up.” That is to say, he jumps over the whole problem. No decision at all occurs, but only a fortunate lapse of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
However, I ask, what went on in that fortunate lapse of consciousness? True, the paralyzing bind of his ambivalence was released. However, that is a negative statement and does not tell us why anything else happened. Surely we cannot call this just a lucky instant, as James does, or a happenstance! If our basis for will rests on the mere luck or happenstance, our house is built upon the sands indeed, and we have no basis for with at all. Now I do not mean to imply that so far James, in this example, has not said something. He has, and it is very important: the whole incident shows the bankruptcy of Victorian will power, will consisting of a faculty which is based upon our capacity to force our bodies to act against their desires. Victorian will power turned everything into a rationalistic, moralistic issue, for instance, the attraction of the warmth of the bed, the giving in to of which is ignominious, as opposed to the so-called supergo pressure to be upright, that is, up and working. Dr. Freud described at length the self-deceit and rationalization involved in Victorian will power and I believe, dethroned it once and for all. The example shows James’s own struggle against the paralyzing effects of Victorianism, in which the goal becomes twisted into a self-centered demonstration of one’s own character and the real moral issue get entirely lost in the shuffle. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
So we return to our crucial question. What went on in that fortunate lapse of consciousness? James only tells us that we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life. Ah, here lies our secret! Psychotherapy has brought us a good deal of data about that revery which James did not have—and I do not believe that we fall into it at all. For purposes of clarity, I shall state here my own argument concerning unfinished business in James’s concept of will. I as it is also omitted by us in contemporary psychology. The answer does not lie in James’s conscious analysis or in Dr. Freud’s analysis of the unconscious, but in a dimension which cuts across and includes both conscious and unconscious, and both cognition and conation. Along with rediscovering our feelings and wants, we also should recover our relation with the subconscious aspects of ourselves. As modern mortals have given up sovereignty over their bodies, so also have they surrendered the unconscious side of their personality, and it has become almost alien to them. When we cut off an exceedingly great and significant portion of the self, we are then no longer able to use much of the wisdom and power of the unconscious. It puts us in the position of trying to drive a BMW 5 series with the reins attached to only one wheel. Though the tendencies and intuitions in the unconscious are blocked off from our conscious awareness, they are still part of the self and accessible in various degrees to being made conscious. The sooner we recover sovereignty in that portion of the kingdom the better. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Understanding dreams is of course a subtle and complex matter—though it is not so complex as one would think when one reads about the esoteric symbols in much modern dream interpretation. These esoteric symbols put the whole problem back into a foreign language again—and that is another way, perhaps the typically modern way, of surrendering our sovereignty over the unconscious aspects of ourselves. As though we were saying the authorities and those who know the magic answers can understand our dreams, but we cannot ourselves! Dr. Erich Froom’s book, The Forgotten Language, points out that dreams, like myths and fairy tales, are not all a foreign language, but are in reality part of the one universal language shared my all humankind. Dr. Fromm’s book is to be recommended to the nontechnical reader who wishes to relearn something about this subconscious language of his fatherland. Dreams are expressions not only of conflicts and repressed desires, but also of previous knowledge that one has learned, possibly many years before, and thinks one has forgotten. Even the unskilled person, if one takes the attitude that what one’s dreams tell one is not simply to be rejected as silly, may get occasional useful guidance from one’s dreams. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
And the person who has become skillful in the understand of what one is saying to oneself in one’s dreams can get from them, from time to time, marvelously valuable hints and insights into solutions to problems. The more self-awareness a person has, the more alive one is. The more consciousness, the more self. Becoming a person means this heightened awareness, this heightened experiences of “I-ness,” this experience that it is I, the acting one, who is the subject of what is occurring. This view of what it means to become a person, in conclusion, saves us from two errors. The first is passivism—letting the deterministic forces in one’s experience take the place of self-awareness. It must be admitted that some tendencies in the older forms of psychoanalysis can be used to rationalize passivism. It was the epoch-making discovery of Dr. Freud to show how much every person is pushed by unconscious fears, desires and tendencies of all sorts, and that mortal is really much less a master in the household of one’s own mind than in the Victorian mortal of will power fondly believed. However, a harmful implication was carried along with this emphasis on the determinism of unconscious forces, which Dr. Freud himself partly succumbed to. The early psychotherapist Dr. Grodeck, for example, wrote, “We are lived by our unconscious,” and Dr, Freud in a letter commended him for his emphasis on the passivity of the ego. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
However, we must underline to correct a partial misunderstanding, that the over-all purpose of Dr. Freud’s exploration of the unconscious forces was to help people bring these forces into consciousness. The goal of psychoanalysis, as he said time and again, was to make the unconscious conscious: to enlarge the scope of awareness; to help the individual become aware of the unconscious tendencies which have tended to push the self around like mutinous sailors who have seized power below the deck of the ship; and this to help the person consciously direct one’s own ship. Hence the emphasis on the heightened awareness of one’s self, and the warning against passivism, have much in common with the over-all purpose of Dr. Freud’s thought. The other error of this view of the person enables us to avoid is activism—that is, using activity as a substitute for awareness. By activism we mean the tendency, so common in this country, to assume that the more one is acting, the more one is alive. It should be clear that when we have used the term “the active I,” we have not meant busyness or merely doing things. Many people keep busy all the time as a way of covering up their anxiety; their activism is a way of running from themselves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
People who are busy so they have something to focus on and as a result are distracted from their problems get a pseudo and temporary sense of aliveness by being in a hurry, as though something is going on if they are but moving, and as though being busy is a proof of one’s importance. Chaucer has a sly and astute comment about this type, represented in the merchant in Canterbury Tales, “Methinks he seemed busier than he was.” It is true, however, when life is not going the way you like it and you have a lot of problems that you cannot resolve on your own, being busy gives you a sense of purpose, it makes life worth living and it makes the days rip by life a vampire speed reading a novel. You wake up, stay busy, and before you know it is bed time, you are one day closer to being free. Keeping busy is the only reason some people are still alive. Our emphasis on self-awareness certainly includes actin as an expression of the alive, integrated self, but it is the opposite to activism—the opposite, that is, to acting as an escape from self-awareness. Aliveness often means the capacity not to act, to be creatively idle—which may be more difficult for most modern people than to do something. To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Self-awareness, as we have proposed it, brings back into the picture the quieter kinds of aliveness—the arts of contemplation and meditation for example, which the Western World, to its peril, has all but lost. It brings a new appreciation for being something rather than merely doing something. With such a relation to oneself, work for us modern mortals—who are the great toilers and producers—will not be an escape from ourselves or a way of trying to prove our worth, but a creative expression of the spontaneous powers of person who has consciously affirmed one’s relatedness to one’s World and one’s fellow mortals. The nature of faith justifies the history of religion and makes it understandable as a history of mortal’s ultimate concern, of one’s response to the manifestation of the holy in many places in many ways. A divine figure ceases to create reply, it ceases to be a common symbol and loses its power to move for action. Symbols which for a certain period, or in a certain place, expressed truth of faith for a certain group now only remind of the faith of the past. They have lost their truth, and it is an open question whether dead symbols can be revived. Probably not for those to whom they have died! A symbol of faith is infinite because it is not idolatrous. However, the human mind is a continuously working factory of idols. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Everything said about faith is derived from the experience of actual faith, of faith as a living reality, or in a metaphoric abbreviation, of the life of faith. Without the manifestation of God in mortals the question of God and faith in God are not possible. There is no faith without participation. Since the life of faith is life in the state of ultimate concern and no human being can exist completely without such a concern, we say: Neither faith nor doubt can be eliminate from mortals as mortals. Faith and doubt have been contrasted in such a way that the quiet certainty of faith has been praised as the complete removal of doubt. There is, indeed, a serenity of the life in faith beyond the disturbing struggles between faith and doubt. To attain such a state is a natural and justified desire of every human being. Doubt is not overcome by repression, but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself as an expression of its own finitude and affirms the content of an ultimate concern. Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible. All this is declared about living faith, of faith as actual concern, and not of faith as a traditional attitude without tensions, without doubt and without courage. Faith in this sense, which is the attitude of many members of the churches as well as of society at large. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
In mystical literature the vision of God is described as the stage which transcends the state of faith either after the Earthly life or in rare moments within it. In the complete reunion with the divine ground of being, the element of distance is overcome and with it uncertainty, doubt, courage and risk. The finite is taken into the infinite; it is not extinguished, but it is not separated either. This is not the ordinary human situation. To the state of separated finitude belong faith and the courage to risk. The risk of faith is the concrete content of one’s ultimate concern. Jesus and Satan appear as representative of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and mortals. Jesus is the representative being, and his manifestation is a symbol of the Savior of humanity. The World has followed Satan’s principles, since the time of the gospels. Yet even the victory of these principles could not destroy the longing for the realization of full being, expressed by Jesus as well as by many other great Masters who lived before him and after him. When you use things with a hardened heart, you use what is alien to you, and that indulgent, selfish use is avarice, which is the root of all evil. Some people hold to their selfish nature, and they may have the name of being saintly on the basis of the external appearances, but inside they are asses, because they do not grasp the meaning of divine truth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
However, this does not mean that we should not have anything, it just means that we should not be bound by anything. God wants to act in the soul, and he himself must be in the place in which he acts—and that he would like to do. Everything and anything can become an object of craving: things we use in daily life, property, rituals, good deeds, knowledge, and thoughts. While they are not in themselves bad, they become bad; that is, when we hold onto them, when they become chains that interfere with our freedom, they block our self-realization. People need to uncover their most hidden secrete ties of selfishness, of intentions, and opinions. However, the fact of the matter is most people will not analyze their behavior nor recognize their own errors until they are faced with extreme hardship. It is not a character building exercise, but it reveals your truth self. Some people walk away from their trials and tribulations a much better person, others walk away from their trials and tribulations with a spirit of lack and limitation and will do whatever they can to prosper, even if it means hurting their own family to get ahead in the World. Therefore, people should not consider so much what they are to do as what they are. Thus take care that your emphasis is laid on being good and not on the number or kind of things to be done. Emphasize rather the fundamentals on which your work rests. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Our being is the reality, the spirit that moves us, the character that impels our behavior; in contrast, the deeds or opinions that are separated from our dynamic core have no reality. We are to be active in the classic sense of the productive expression of one’s human powers, not in the modern sense of being busy. Activity means to go out of oneself. Run into peace. The person who is in the state of running, of continuous running into peace is a Heavenly person. One continually runs and moves and seeks peace in running. The active vessel is alive and it grows and it is filled and never will be full. Out of this criterion comes the message which is the very heart of Christianity and makes possible the courage to affirm faith in the Christ, namely, that in spite of all forces of separation between God and mortals this is overcome from the side of God. One of the forces of separation is a doubt which tries to prevent the courage to affirm one’s faith. Although we are never able to bride the infinite distance between the infinite and the finite from the side of faith, this alone makes the courage of faith possible. The risk of failure, of error and of idolatrous distortion can be taken, because the failure cannot separate us from what is our ultimate concern. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Tales from Another World Like Some Old Fashioned Miracle When Summer Time is Done
The Legacy was established very early on. You make me dream in colour. You breathe me back to life again. I feel the secrets on your skin. I need your heart to let me. All my life when I close my eyes, it has always been in black and white, but tonight you make me dream in colour. You wanted to keep the family name, whether you married or not. When they were pure, before they knew about humankind or had any mixture with it, they were telepathic, curious by nature and hardwired with a tremendous amount of basic historical and intellectual knowledge. These Angels are born knowing about the species itself. However, their naivete, simplicity and lack of aggression are their vulnerabilities. They are also extremely sensitive to rhythm and music. You can almost paralyze an Angel when you utter a long rhyme or sing a rhythmic song. That is why they love music by The Weekend, Aaliyah, are frequently rumored to be seen dancing at ASOT P2 (A State of Trance), so say Armin Van Buuren especially made ASOT 900 P2 in three parts to attract and uplift and angelic energy on Earth. In the achieving of consciousness of one’s self, most people must start back at the beginning and rediscover their feelings. It is surprising how many people have only a general acquaintance with that they feel—they tell you they feel “fine” or “lousy,” as vaguely as through they were saying “Great Britain is in the story.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Their connection with their feelings is as remote as if over a long-distance telephone. They do not feel directly but only give ideas about their feelings; they are not affected by their affects; their emotions give them no motion. Like Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” they experience themselves as “Shape without form, shade without colour, paralyzed force, gesture without motion.” In psychotherapy when such persons are unable to experience their feelings, they often have to learn to feel by answering the question day after day, “Just how do I feel right now?” What is most important is not how much one feels, and we certainly do not mean that it is necessary to effervesce; that is sentimentality rather than sentiment, affectation and not affect. Rather what is important is the experience that is “I,” the active one, who is doing the feeling. This carries with it a directness and immediacy of feeling; one experiences the affect on all levels of one’s self. One feels with a heightened aliveness. Then instead of one’s feeling being limited like notes in a bugle call, the mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony produced by Armin van Burren in ASOT 900 P2. This also means that we need to recover our awareness of our bodies. An infant gets part of one’s early sense of personal identity through awareness of one’s body. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The body as experienced by the infant is the first core of the self. The baby reaches one’s leg time and again, and sooner or later there is the experience, “Here is the leg; I can feel it and it belongs to me.” Children understand that toilet experiences are naughty, and they are often connected with feelings of pleasures of the flesh. Since children are taught toilet functions and pleasures of the flesh are naughty and taboo, this would clearly imply that is the child fudges one’s pants or has a dishonorable discharge or experience pleasures of that flesh that this would imply, “Your image of yourself is dirty.” However, this undoubtedly is one important part of the origin of the tendency to despise the self in our society if we engage in these forbidden behaviors in public, where others can see us, or when we are not supposed to. This is why we have invented indoor plumbing and bathrooms and religious school teaches, “The Lord delights in Chasity,” reports Jacob 2.38. Still, the ability to be aware of one’s body has a great importance all through life. It is a curious fact that most adults have so lost physical awareness that they are unable to tell how their legs feels if you should ask them, or their ankle, or their middle finger or any other part of the body. In our society the awareness of the different part of the body is generally limited to some borderline schizophrenics and other sophisticated people who have come under the influence of yoga or other Eastern exercises. Most people act on the principle, “Let hands or feet feel as they may, I must get off to work.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
As a result of several centuries of suppressing the body into an inanimate machine, subordinated to the purposes of modern industrialism, people are proud of paying no attention to the body. People have become so accustomed to treating the body as an object for manipulation, as though it were a BMW M5 and they can drive it until it runs out of gas and without preforming the recommended and require maintenance without expecting some calamitous and potentially fatal consequences. And the only concern they give it is a thought each week as perfunctory as a phone call to a relative to ask how he or she is, but with really no intention of taking the answer seriously. Nature then comes along, if we may speak metaphorically, and knocks the person down with colds or the swine influenza or more severe illnesses, as thought she were saying, “When will you learn to listen to your body?” The impersonal, separated attitude toward the body is shown also in the way most people, once they become physically ill, react to the sickness. They speak in the passive voice—“I got sick,” picturing their body as an object just as they would say, “I got hit by a red Toyota Celica GT.” Then they shrug their shoulders and regard their responsibility fulfilled if they go to bed and place themselves completely in the hands of the doctor and the new medical drugs. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Thus they use scientific progress as a rationalization for passivity: they know how germs or virus or allergies attack the body, and they also know how penicillin or sulfa or lialda cures them. The attitude toward disease is not that of the self-aware person who experiences one’s body as part of oneself, but of the compartmentalized person who might express one’s passive attitude in a sentence like, “The pneumococcus made me sick, but the penicillin made me well again.” Also, people may not take their health serious, even if they are born with special needs. For instance, in families dominated by women or uneducated men, may not understand why a boy with a spinal injury is treated fragilely and expected to get an education. People with spinal injuries are not as strong as others and cannot do manual laboring. Even doing too much ironing can cause unbearable that could leave them disfigured. However, because people do not take their conditions seriously, they often push themselves harder than they should, as we all believe doctors and nurses can fix anything. Yet, our medical technology is not as advanced as people think it is, in some cases. Also, your doctor may not want to perform certain procedures or treatments because they may not be sure that your body can handle it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
So we should not surrender our sovereignty over one’s body. When one does surrender autonomy one opens oneself to psychosomatic ills of all sorts. Many disturbances of bodily function, beginning in such simple things as incorrect walking or faulty posture or breathing, are due to the fact that people have all their lives walked, to take only one simple illustration, as though they were machines, and have never experienced any of the feelings in their feet or legs or rest of the body. The correcting of the malfunction of one’s legs, for example, often requires that one learn again to feel what is happening when one walks. In the overcoming psychosomatic ills or chronic diseases like tuberculosis, it is essential to learn to listen to the body in dedicating when to work and when to rest. It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what one’s body is saying. To tuned to the responses throughout one’s body, as well as to be tuned to one’s feelings in emotional relations with the World and people around him, is to be on the way to a health which will not break down periodically. Furthermore, your medical conditions are something you may want to keep private and not even share with close family members because they may not be able to keep secrets and you never know who they are talking to and people could use that information to exploit, extort you and violate your privacy even further. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Not only do people separate the body from the self in using it as an instrument for work, but they likewise separate it from the self in their pursuit of pleasure. The body is treated as a vehicle of sensation, from which one can get certain pleasures and cleansing sensations if skillfully handled, just as though one were tuning a television set. We are proposing welcoming the body back into the union with the self. This means as already suggested recovering an active awareness of one’s body. It means experiencing one’s body—the pleasure of eating or resting or the exhilaration of using toned-up muscles or the gratification of honoring who we are—as aspects of the acting self. It is not the attitude of “My body feels” but “I feel.” We propose, furthermore, placing the self in the center of the picture of bodily health: it is “I” who grow sick or achieve health. We propose the active rather than passive voice in illness; the antiquated expression “I sicken” is accurate. Fortunately in at least one infirmary the active verb is still used for the process of getting well—tuberculosis patients say “I cured” at such-and-such a sanatorium. We propose that illnesses, whether physical or psychological, be taken not as periodic accidents which occur to the body (or to the “personality” or “mind”), but as nature’s means of re-educating the whole person. “Be determined in one mind and in one heart, united in all things, that ye may not come down into captivity; that ye may not be cursed with a sore cursing; and also, that ye may not incur the displeasure of a just God upon you, unto the destruction, yea, the eternal destruction of both soul and body,” reports 2 Nephi 1.22. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Using infirmary and disability and special needs as a re-education is illustrated in a letter a patient with tuberculosis wrote to a friend: “The disease occurred not simply because I overworked, or ran athwart some T.B. bugs, but because I was trying to be something I was not. I was living as the great extrovert, running here and there, doing three jobs at once, and leaving undeveloped and unused the side of me which would contemplate, would read and think and invite my soul rather than rushing and working at full speed. The disease comes as a demand and an opportunity to rediscover the lost functions of myself. It is as though the disease were nature’s way of saying, ‘You mist become your whole self. To the extent that you do not, you will be ill; and you will become well only to the extent that you do become yourself.’” Some people never let themselves heal because they are afraid that they could be forced to work at anymore and are always preparing for that and as a result never recover and end up getting worse or dying. We may add that it is an actual clinical fact that some person, viewing their illnesses as an opportunity for re-education, become more healthy both psychologically and physically, more fulfilled as persons, after a serious illness than before. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
This way of experiencing illness and health will help us overcome the dichotomy between body and mind which has so bedeviled modern mortals. A serious injury or a long term illness is not like a communicable disease where 90 percent of the time you can take 500 milligrams of Ciprofloxacin, twice daily, and not drink any alcohol for fourteen days and be fully recovered. Neural birth defects, spinal fractures, and inflammatory conditions, illnesses people catch from serving their country or working in coals mines can be lifelong complications, and in many cases lead to premature death. And it can be torture for a person suffering from these conditions. They take medication daily, but their bodies take months, years, or longer to get back to a state of harmony and it can be frustrating because people expect them to be strong and sturdy and they are judged on how good they look externally, not how they feel inside. And I am not judging anyone, any illness, even if it can be cured in two weeks may seem like the end of the World to some people. It is devastating when you do not know what is going on with your body or are exposed to agents you did not expect to be affected by. When one looks at the different illnesses from the perspective of the self, one sees that physical, psychological and spiritual (using the last term to refer to despair and the sense of meaninglessness in life) diseases are all aspects of the same difficulty of the self in finding itself in its World. It is well known, for example, that the different kinds of illness may serve interchangeable purposes for the individual. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Physical illness may relieve psychological troubles by giving some focus for floating anxiety—the person then has something concrete to worry about, and that is a lot less painful tan vague floating anxiety; or by giving needed respite from responsibility to those who have not learned to assume responsibility maturely. And many a person, through a bout of influenza or more serious disease, has relieved one’s guilt feelings, however unconstructive such a method may be. Thus so long as scientific progress takes away diphtheria, tuberculosis and other diseases—a consummation devoutly to be wished—without helping people to get over their anxiety, guilt, emptiness and purposelessness, sickness is only forced into a new channel. That may sound like a rash statement, but in principle I believe it is true. The struggle against disease in the compartmentalized way is like Hercules’ battle against the seven-headed Hydra—every time he cut off one head, another grew in its place. The battle for health must be won on the deeper level of the integration of the self. Certainly it is no depreciation of the great value of the new medical discoveries to emphasize that we shall makes lasting progress in health only to the extent that we go beyond finding means of killing germs and bacilli and external organisms which invade the body, and discover means of helping ourselves and other people so to affirm their own beings that they will not need to be sick. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Noting but a wish can set the mental apparatus in motion. The wish is assumed to be for force in other, more or less deterministic, psychological systems as well. Wish is present as the desire and need to reduce tension, an emphasis surprisingly akin to Dr. Freud’s definition of pleasure as the reduction of tension. In general, our sciences of mortals assume the usual adaptational and evolutionary wishes, that people wish to survive and live long and pain free. The word wish, let us hasten to say in view of the fact that in our post-Victorian day we still tend to impoverish the term by making it a concession to our immaturity or infantile needs, may been seen in process much more extensive than the residue of childhood. The correlates of wish can be found in all phenomena of nature down to the most minute pattern of atomic reaction; for example, in what Alfred North Whitehead and Paul Tillich call the negative-positive movements in all particles of nature. Tropism is one form, in its etymological sense of the innate tendency in biological organisms to turn toward. If, however, we stop with wish as this more or less blind and involuntary movement of particle toward another or of one organism toward another, we are inexorably pushed to Dr. Freud’s pessimistic conclusion of the death instinct taken literally, namely, the inevitable tendency of organisms to move back to the inorganic state. If wish is only a force, we are all involved in an abortive pilgrimage which consists of simply moving back to the state of the inorganic stone again. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
However, wish also has the element of meaning. Indeed, it is the particular confluence of force and meaning which constitutes the human wish. This meaning element is certainly present in Dr. Freud’s concept of wish and is one of his central contributions, even though he speaks, contradictorily, as though wish were only blind force. He was able to use the wish with such fecundity—particularly in fantasies, free associations, and dreams—because he saw in it not simply a blind push but a tendency which carried meanings. Despite the fact that when he writes about wish fulfillment and satisfaction of libidinal needs, and talks as if the wish were only an economic quantity, a force by itself the context he assumed is the point of the meeting of meaning with force. In the first few weeks of life, for example, the infant may be thought of as indiscriminately and blindly pushing its mouth to a warm bottle of delicious milk or formula, or a pacifier. However, with the emergence and development of consciousness and the capacity to experience one’s self as subject in a World of objects, new capacities arise. Chief among these is the use of symbols and the relating to life by way of symbolic meanings. From then on, the wish is more than merely a blind push; it carries a meaning as well. The bottle becomes the source of the natural food supply attached to the mother—and how different the words are! The former is an anatomical description of the part of the body that gives us our rations for survival. The latter is a symbol which brings in total experience—the warmth, the intimacy, even the beauty and possible love which goes with feminine care. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
I am aware of the difficulties this dimension of symbolic meaning introduces for a natural science of mortals. Nevertheless, we must take mortals, our object of study, as we find one—a creature who relates to one’s life by way of symbolic meanings which are one’s language. It is this methodologically unsound and empirically inaccurate to reduce the wish to mere force. After the emergence of consciousness in mortals, wishes are never merely needs, nor merely economic. I am captivated by the beauty of one woman, not by another; it is never just a matter of sheer, stored-up quantities of libido, but rather my energetic field of chemistry force channeled and formed by the diverse meanings the first woman has for me. We should qualify our never in the previous sentence with two exceptions. One is artificial situations, like soldiers stationed in the arctic for twelve months, in which certain aspects of experience are simply and consciously bracketed. Another exception is in pathology, when a person is driven by indiscriminate pleasures of the flesh toward any male or female, like our friend Victorian Grayson. However, here we have a state of my point that indiscriminate pleasures of the flesh goes against a significant element in the wish. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
I do not know what Louis XVI was bracketing when he said, “Any woman will do, just give her a bath and send her to a dentist.” However, I do not know when people are not kings and not radically disturbed have pleasures of the flesh with someone fairly frivolously, let us say, in a chance meeting or in carnival, they find themselves afterwards investing the other person, possibly only in fantasy, with tenderness or virtue or special attribute that have some meaning for them. Disgust is also an expression of a humanly meaningful wish or, more specifically, a frustration of it. In instances of almost purely anonymous pleasures of the flesh, as it occurs for example in come clandestine relationships, the later reaction in which the person feels disgust also demonstrates the point we are making. My experience as a therapist suggests that the human being has to make the creature with whom one experience pleasures of the flesh with in some way personal, even if only in fantasy, or else suffer depersonalization oneself. This carries the corollary that discussions and approaches in therapy based on such concepts as control of id impulses and integration of primary purpose all miss the point. Is there ever a such things as a primary process as such? Only in very sever pathology or in our own abstracted theory. The former is the situation in which meaningful symbolic process break down, as in our patients; the latter is when our own symbolism is used as therapists. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
What we have is not an organism constituted by primary processes and the control of them, but human beings whose experience involves wishes, drives, and needs experienced and known by him, and by us if we can understand him, in symbolic meanings. It is the symbolic meanings that have gone awry in neurosis, and not the id impulse. The human wish, we are saying, is not merely a push from the past, not merely a call from primitive needs demanding satisfaction. It also has in it some selectivity. It is a forming of the future, a molding by a symbolic process which includes both memory and fantasy, of what we hope the future will be. The wish is the beginning of orienting ourselves to the future, an admission that we want the future to be such and such; it is a capacity to reach down deep into ourselves and preoccupy ourselves with a longing to change the future. Note that I say beginning, not the end; I am perfectly aware of wish fulfillment, wishes as a substitute for will, and so on. I am saying that there is no will without a prior wish. The wish, like all symbolic processes, has a progressive element, a reaching ahead, as well as a regressive pole, a propulsion from behind. The wish thus carries its meaning as well as its force. Its motive power lies in the conjunction of this meaning and force. We can now understand why William Lynch should hold that “to wish is the most human act.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Loving also has two meanings, depending upon whether it is spoken of in the mode of having or in the mode of being. Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as love. Love is abstraction perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the bird, the tomato, the architecture, the landscape design, the idea, the hair, the lips, the eyes, the nose, the BMW X5. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self-increasing. When love is experienced in the mode of having it implies confining, imprisoning, or controlling the object one loves. It is strangling, deadening, suffocating, killing, not life-giving. What people call love is mostly misuse of the word, in order to hide the reality of their not living. How many parents love their children is still an entirely open question. Lloyd de Mause has brought out that for the past two millennia of Western history, even in cities like Sacramento, California USA, there have been reports of cruelty against children, ranging from physical to psychic torture, carelessness, sheer possessiveness, and sadism, so shocking that one must believe that loving parents are the exception rather than the rule. We have been given a glimpse into this reality when we hear what some adults had survived in their childhood. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Like the story of Victorian Grayson, who at the tender age of fifteen was slapped by her mother and tossed out of the house like a rag doll because the mother assumed it was more probable her developing daughter was trying to seduce her man, than her man tried to force himself on to her daughter. We also have to remember that not all people have children out of love. Some have children out of necessity, to secure an economic future for themselves. Some have children out of obligation. Very few people actually fall in love and plan to have children because they desire a family at that time. Usually, family planning is most done by people who have problems conceiving. Most kids are a random gift from God. Some people also have to have more kids than they desired because their first marriage did not work out, or because the father or mother wants a certain gender, sometimes to pass on the family name or for more dubious reasons. The same may be said of marriages. Whether their marriage is based on love or, like traditional marriages of the past, on social convenience and custom, the couple who truly love each other seem to be the exception. What is social convenience, custom, mutual economic interest, shared interest in children, mutual dependency, or mutual hate of fear is consciously experienced as love—up to the moment when one or both partners recognize that they do not love each other, and that they never did. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Today one can note some progress in this respect: people have become more realistic and sober, and many no longer feel that being attracted to someone by pleasures of the flesh means to love, or that a friendly, though distant, team relationship is a manifestation of loving. This new outlook has made for greater honesty—as well as more frequent change of partners. It has not necessarily led to a greater frequency of loving, and the new partners may love to the illusion of having love can be often be observed in concrete detail in this history of couple who have falling in love. The word “falling” in the phrase “falling in love” is a contradiction in itself. Since loving is a productive activity, one can only stand in love or walk in love; one cannot “fall” in live, for falling denotes passivity. During courtship neither person is yet sure of the other, but each tries to win the other. Both are alive, attractive, interesting, even beautiful—inasmuch as aliveness always makes a face beautiful. Neither yet has the other; hence each one’s energy is directed to being, for instance, to giving to and stimulating the other. With the act of marriage the situation frequently changes fundamentally. The marriage contract gives each partner the exclusive possession of the other’s feelings, monogamy, and care. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Nobody has to be won over any more, because love has become something one has, a property. The two cease to make the effort to be lovable and to produce love, hence they become boring, and hence their beauty disappears. They are disappointed and puzzled. Are they not the same persons any more? Did they make a mistake in the first place? Each usually seeks the cause of the change in the other and feels defrauded. What they do not see is that they no longer are the same people they were when they were in love with each other; that the error that one can have love has led them to cease loving. Now, instead of loving each other, they settle for owning together what they have: money, social standing, home, children, a BMW 760Li. Thus, in some cases, the marriage initiated on the basis of love become transformed into a friendly ownership, a corporation in which the two egotisms are pooled into one: that of “family.” When a couple cannot get over the yearning for the renewal of the precious feeling of loving, one or the other of the pair may have the illusion that a new partner (or partners) will satisfy their longing. They feel that all they want to have is love. However, love to them is not an expression of their being; it is a goddess to whom they want to submit. They necessarily fail with their love because love is a child of liberty (as an old French song says), and the worshiper of the goddess of love eventually becomes so passive as to be boring and loses whatever is left of his or her former attractiveness. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
This description is not intended to imply that marriage cannot be the best solution for two people who live each other. The difficulty does not lie in marriage, but in the possessive, existential structure of both partners and, in the last analysis, of their society. The advocates of such modern-day forms of living together as group marriage, changing partners, non-monogamous relationships, and so forth, try, as far as I can see, only to avoid the problem of their difficulties in loving by curing boredom with ever new stimuli and by wanting to have more lovers, rather than to be able to love one. “The city feels clean this time of night, just empty streets, and me walking home to clear my head. I know it came as no surprise. I am affected more than I had guessed on what was said. If the smile is not meant to be, if the heart is not ready to open. If we make it, I will not see it is broke. If the smile is not meant to be, if the heart is not ready to open, if we make it I will not see how it is broke. It is the quiet before the dawn and I am half past making sense of it, was I wrong? Should I claim to give it all? In a World where not much ever seems to last long, if the smile is not meant to be, if the heart is not ready to open, if we make it I will not see it is broken,” reports Empty Streets by Late Night Alumni. This is the time to move forward in faith. Get up every morning knowing you are anointed. You are equipped. You are empowered. You have everything you need to fulfill your destiny. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
God Permits Industrious Angels the Gleam of an Heroic Act that the Future Never Spoke
I felt her strength recede, and her eyes misted. A great glowing fire was quelled, and I had done it, and an ever present grief enfolded it. A protective surge rose in me and the wild fantasies reigned again inside of me as if no one else was present. The goal for every human being is to become a person. Every organism has one and only one central need in life, to fulfill its own potentialities. The acorn becomes an oak, the puppy become a dog and makes the fond and loyal relations with its human family which befit the dog; and all that is required of the oak tree and the and the dog. However, if the human being’s task in fulfilling one’s nature is much more difficult, for one must do it in self-consciousness. That is, human development is never automatic but must be to some extent chosen and affirmed by oneself. Among the works of mortals, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and in beautifying, the first importance surely is mortals themselves. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. We should also mention that there is a tendency of the inward forces which make mortals a living thing, namely that mortals do not grow automatically like a tree, but fulfills their potentialities only as one in his own consciousness plans and chooses. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Fortunately the long protracted period of infancy and childhood in human life—in contrast to the condition of the acorn, which is on its own as soon as it falls to the soil, or of the puppy which must fend for itself after a few weeks—prepares the child for this difficult task. One is able to acquire some knowledge and inner strength so that as one must begin to choose and decide, one has some capability for it. Mortals, furthermore, must make their choices as an individual, for individuality is one side of one’s consciousness of one’s self. We can see this point clearly when we realize that consciousness of one’s self is always a unique act—I can never know exactly how you see yourself and you never can know exactly how I relate to myself. This is the inner sanctum where each mortal must stand alone. This fact makes for much of the tragedy and inescapable isolation in human life, but it also indicates again that we must find the strength in ourselves to stand in our own inner sanctum as individuals. And this fact means that, since we are not automatically merged with our fellows, we must through our own affirmation learn to love each other. If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick, just as your legs would wither away if you never walked. However, the power of your legs is not all you would lose. The flowing of your blood, your heart action, your whole organism would be the weaker. And in the same way if mortals do not fulfill their potentialities as a person, one becomes to that extent constricted and ill. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
This is the essence of neurosis—the person’s unused potentialities, blocked by hostile conditions in the environment (past or present) and by one’s own internalized conflicts, turn inward and cause morbidity. Neurosis does not deny the existence of reality, it merely tries to ignore it. Energy is Eternal Delight; one who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. In contrast, joy is the affect which comes when we use our powers. Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal for life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity, who is able to affirm one’s being, if need be, against all others beings and the whole inorganic World. This power in its ideal form is shown in the life of a Socrates, who was so confident in himself and his values that he could take his being condemned to death not as a defeat but as a greater fulfillment than compromising his beliefs. However, we do not wish to imply such joy is only for the heroic and the outstanding; it is as present qualitatively in anyone’s act, no matter how inconspicuous, which is done as an honest and responsible expression of one’s own powers. The way to love other people is to express what we feel—anger and love—without aiming to hurt feelings. Open but reverent communication is now to make love in our lives. “The Lord has poured out his Spirit and caused hearts to be filled with joy,” reports Mosiah 4.20. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
If we assumed a complete indeterminism, for instance, that we could make ourselves over in bland freedom by any New Year’s whim or resolution, no one would need to bother to come for psychotherapy. Actually, we find that people’s problems are stubborn, recalcitrant, and troublesome—but we find they can change. And so we need to look further for what changes them. Academic psychologists tended also, no matter what the individual psychologist oneself believed about one’s own ethical actions, to accept the position that as psychologists we are concerned only with what is determined and could be understood in a deterministic framework. This limitation of perception inevitably tended to put blinders on our perception; we made our person over into the image of what we let ourselves see. Psychologists tended to repress the problem of power, particularly irrational power. We took literally Aristotle’s dictum that mortals are a rational being by assuming that they are only that, and that irrationality is merely a temporary aberration to be overcome by right education of the individual or, if the pathology is somewhat more severe, by re-education of one’s maladjusted emotions. There is, of course, a psychological concern with power, has generally been taken as merely a subhead to one’s beliefs in society inferiority and the struggle for security. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Dr. Freud’s assumptions about primitive cannibalism and the aggressive instinct have the element of power in them. However, this also tends to be a rationalize away in that it is used in referring only to severe pathology. The repression of power enable psychology more readily to discard will and hold to a theoretical determinism, since the critical element of the soul and effects of determinism did not then come out into the open. However, in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, where therapists deal with living, suffering people, the problem of the undermining of will and decision become increasingly critical. For the theory and process of psychoanalysis and most other forms of psychotherapy inevitably play into the passive tendencies of the patient. There are built-in tendencies in psychoanalysis itself that sap its vitality and tends to emasculate not only the reality with which psychoanalysis deals but the power and inclination of the patient to change. In the early days of psychoanalysis, when revelations of the unconscious have an obvious shock value, this problem does not come out into the open as much. And in any case with hysterical patients, who formed the bulk of those Dr. Freud worked with in his early formative years, there does not exist a special dynamic in what Dr. Freud could call repressed libido, pushing expression. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
However, now, when most of our patients are compulsive of one for or another, and everybody knows about the Oedipus complex, and our patients talk about pleasures of the flesh with an apparent freedom which would have shocked Dr. Freud’s Victorian patients off the couch (and, indeed, talking about pleasures of the flesh is the easiest way of avoiding really making any decisions about love and passionate intimacy relatedness), the predicament resulting from the undermining of will and decision can no longer be avoided. The repetition compulsion, a problem that has always remained intractable and insoluble within the context of classical psychoanalysis, is in my judgment fundamentally related to this crisis of will. Other forms of psychotherapy do not escape the dilemma of psychoanalysis, namely that the process of psychotherapy itself has built-in tendencies which invite the patient to relinquish one’s position as the deciding agent. The very name “patient” proposes it. Not only do the automatic, supportive elements in therapy have this tendency, but so does the temptation, to which patient and therapist easily succumb, to search for everything else as responsible for one’s problems rather than one’s self. To be sure, psychotherapists of all stripes and schools realize that sooner or later the patient must make some decision, learn to take some responsibility for oneself; but the theory and the technique of most psychotherapy tends to be built on exactly the opposite premise. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
The freedom to make choices experienced by a human being has nothing whatever to do with free will as a principle governing human behavior but is a subjective experience which is itself causally determined. Freedom may presumably be an illusion. Choice and responsibility are illusions caused by prior states but, in turn, causal of future acts. However, here we arrive at the radical inconsistency—as therapists, the analysts could not help recognizing that the patient’s act of choosing is of central importance. Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to choose one way or the other. Toward the end of analysis the therapist may find oneself wishing that the patient were capable of more push, more determination, a greater willingness to make the best of it. Often this wish eventuates in remarks to the patient: People must help themselves; nothing worth while is achieved without effort; you have to try. Such interventions are seldom included in case reports, for it is assumed that they possess neither the dignity nor effectiveness of interpretation. Often an analyst feels uncomfortable about such appeals to volition, as though one were using something one did not believe in, and as though this would have been unnecessary had only one analyzed more skillfully. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Psychoanalysts then found themselves in the curious, anomalous position of believing that the patient must have an illusion of freedom in order to change, and they therefore must cultivate this illusion, or at least do obeisance to it. The paradox, for example, is as psychotherapy progress the experience of freedom encases, so that successfully analyzed people report experiencing more freedom in the conduct of their lives than they did prior to psychotherapy. If this freedom is illusory, the purpose of therapy, or at least the result of successful therapy, is to restore an illusion even though most therapists believe that successful therapy increases the accuracy with which the patient perceives oneself and one’s World. Some analysts, indeed, admit openly that they are engaged in the cultivation of an illusion, and undertake to rationalize this in their theory. Consider what this means. We are told that an illusion is most significant in effecting personality change; that truth is not is most significant in effecting personality change; that truth is not fundamentally (or is only theoretically) relevant to actions, but illusion is. Thus, we are to strive not for truth but for an illusion. We are to believe in definitions of the World by which we cannot live. Or, if we do try strictly to live by them, we shall slide back into passive impotence that leads to apathy and depression. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
I do not need to labor the point that this resolution of the dilemma is untenable. Even we analysts could not live by such an illusion—for how is it possible (without considerable pathology) to commit one’s self if one knows in advance one is committing oneself to an illusion? Furthermore, if patients need to believe in illusions, the possibilities of illusions are, unlike truth, infinite—who is to decide which illusions are, unlike truth, infinite—who is to decide which illusion which works? If so, then our concept of truth has been wrong; for if the illusion genuinely works, it cannot be entirely illusion. Indeed, the statement that the illusions is most decisive for change is essentially an antirational (and thus, anti-scientific) one, for it implies that at the level of behavior the truth or falsehood of a concept is irrelevant. This cannot be accepted; if it seems to be true, there must be some truth in what we call illusion and some illusion in what we call truth. Another solution has been proposed from a different angle. Recognizing that freedom and will have to be given some place in the psychoanalytic structure of personality, the later ego analysts have developed the concept of the autonomy of the ego. The ego, then, is assigned the function of freedom and choice. However, the ego is, by definition, a part of the personality; and how can a part be free? #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
When we consider the autonomy of the unconscious, and the autonomy of the body, each of these would have a partial truth. However, would not each also be importantly wrong? Neither the ego nor the body nor the unconscious can be autonomous, but can only exist as parts of a totality. And it is in this totality that will and freedom must have their base. I am convinced that the compartmentalization of the personality into ego, superego, and id is an important part of the reason why the problem of will has remained insoluble within the orthodox psychoanalytic tradition. We know in our practice of psychoanalysis that lack of freedom is shown in all aspects of the patient’s organism. It is shown in one’s body (muscular inhibitions) and in what is called unconscious experience (repression) and in one’s social relationships (one is unaware of others to the extent one is unaware of oneself). We also know experientially that as this person gains freedom in psychotherapy, one becomes less inhibited in bodily movements, freer in one’s dreams, and more spontaneous in one’s unthought-out, involuntary relations with other people. This means that autonomy and freedom cannot be the domain of a special part of the organism, but must be a quality of the total self—the thinking—feeling—choosing—acting organism. Will and decision are inseparably linked with is as well as ego and supergo, if we are to use Dr. Freud’s terms. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Something of profound significance is going on—in spontaneity, feeling, symbolic meanings—in each decision one makes prior to anything which might be termed an ego function. A strong ego is not the cause of decisions but the result. Dos not the concept of autonomy of the ego have the same difficulties as the old one of free will, in positing some special part or organ of the personality as the seat of choice? If we strip the concept of its sophisticated clothes, it become something akin to the place where the soul is located. To be sure, ego psychoanalysis has the positive aspect of reflecting the pressing concerns of contemporary mortals with one’s problems of autonomy, self-direction, and choice. However, it is also caught in the contradictions with which these problems inescapably confront us. Psychoanalysis and psychology, in all their representations, reveal, with the inconsistency and contradiction which lie therein, the dilemma of will and decision that Western mortals today experiences. It is a sign Dr. Freud’s usual honesty that he frankly states that he is trying to give the patient freedom to choose even tough he knows this is directly contradictory to his theory. He did not quail before contradiction nor leap to too easy a solution. However, as the culture has evolved since Dr. Freud, it has become less and less possible to survive in this contradiction. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
We must consider the fact that we have omitted a dimension of human experience which is important, indeed critical, to human will. Let us assume that I am an omnipotent physiologist with a complete knowledge of the physiology, chemistry, and molecular activities of your brain at any given moment. With this knowledge I can then predict precisely what you will do as a result of the operation of your brain’s mechanisms, since your behavior, including your conscious and verbal behavior, is completely correlated with your neural functioning. However, this only applies if I do not tell you my prediction. Suppose that I tell you what you will do as a result of my complete knowledge of your brain. In doing this I shall have changed the physiology of your brain by furnishing it with this information. This makes it possible for you then to behave in a way quite different from my prediction. If I were to try to allow beforehand for the effects of telling you my prediction, I would be doomed to an endless regression—logically chasing my own tail in an effort to allow for the effects of allowing for the effect of allowing for the effects, indefinitely. Human awareness and consciousness—that is, knowing—introduce unpredictable elements into our being. And mortals are the creature who obstreperously insists on knowing. The change of consciousness which this involves is both outside and inside, consisting of forces operating on the World and the attitude of the person who is attending to these forces. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
We can note that one’s awareness would involve such things as becoming aware of forgotten and buried events in such things as becoming aware of forgotten and buried events in childhood and other aspects of the depth experiences which emerge in therapy. This is—to predict our later discussion—the problem of intentionality in contrast to mere intention. Intentionality, in human experience, is wat underlies will and decision. It is not only prior to will and decision but makes them possible. Why it has been neglected in Western history is clear enough. Ever since understanding has been separated from will, science has proceeded on the basis of this dichotomy, and we tried to assume that facts about human beings could be separated from conation. Particularly since Dr. Freud, this is no longer possible—even though Dr. Freud, without full justice to his own discoveries, clung to the old dichotomy in scientific theory. Intentionality does not rule out deterministic influence, but places the whole problem of determinism and freedom on a deeper plane. The moral types of faith are characterized by the idea of the law. God is the God who has given the law as a gift and as a command. He can be approached only by those who obey the law. There are, of course, laws in the sacramental and mystical types of faith, and no one can reach the ultimate without fulfilling these laws. However, there is an important difference between the laws in the two types of faith. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The law in the ontological types of faith demands subjection to ritual methods or ascetic practices. The law in the moral type demands moral obedience. The difference, certainly, is not absolute. For the ritual law includes moral conditions and the ethical laws includes ontological conditions. However, the difference is sufficient to make understandable the rise of the various great religions. They follow the one or the other type. One can distinguish the juristic, the conventional and the ethical in the mortal types of faith. The juristic type id most strongly developed in other countries; the ethical type is represented by Jewish prophets. The faith of a Christian is faith in revelation given by prophets in the Bible, and this revelation is the ultimate concern. The revelation preached by prophets are largely ritual, social, and spiritual laws. The ritual laws point to the sacramental stage out of which all religions and cultures have arisen. The social laws transcend the ritual elements and produce a holiness of what ought to be. And the spiritual laws teach us why it is important to keep our covenants with God. These laws permeate the whole life. Their source is a matter of ultimate concern, the prophet; their content is identical with God’s commands. The law is always felt as both a gift and a command. Under the protection of the law, life is possible and satisfying. This is true of the average person who believes in God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
When we love the spirit and letter of the law, the things of eternity can distill upon our souls like the dews from Heaven. With daily obedience and refreshing living water, we find answers, faith, and strength to meet everyday challenges and opportunities with gospel patience, perspective, and joy. This is possible through the covenant between God and the nation, and the ritual law in all its richness and abundance of sacramental activities. The law of justice is the way of reaching God. The divine law is of ultimate concern, as it is the central content of faith. As we keep the best of familiar patterns while seeking new and holier ways to love Go and help us and others prepare to meet him, it gives rules for a continuous actualization of the ultimate concern within the preliminary concerns of the daily life. The ultimate shall always be present and remembered even in the smallest activities of the ordinary life. On the other hand, all this is worth nothing if it is not united with obedience to the moral law, the law of justice, and righteousness. The final criterion for the relation of mortal to God is subjection to the law of justice. It is the greatest invitation from God and is full of love and possibility because Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
We are fighting for freedom from sacramentally consecrated bondage and for justice for every human being. It is faith that allows this superior power of reason to unite with justice and truth. This revolutionary movement gives the World tremendous power, as this type of faith is a state of ultimate concern and total devotion to this concern. The connections in the case of being are neither mechanical nor purely logical, but alive. In this assurance by God’s grace we may be perfected, experience peace, and promise that we will continue to flow forward with faith and confidence in the Lord even when things do not go as we hope, expect, or perhaps deserve, through no fault of our own, even after we have done our best. Remembering in the mode of being implies brining to life something one saw or heard before. Life can be filled with faith, joy, happiness, hope, and love when we exercise the smallest amounts of real faith in Christ. This will allow people to respond spontaneously and productively; they forget about themselves, about the knowledge, the positions they have. Their pride does not stand in their way, and it is precisely for this reason that they can fully respond to other people’s and their ideas. They give birth to new ideas, because the are not holding onto anything, but faith in God, and this can produce and give. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
While the having (material) persons rely on what they possess, the being persons rely on their faith in God and that fact that they are, that they are alive and that something new will be born if only they have the courage to let go and to respond. They come fully alive in the conversation, because they do not stifle themselves by anxious concern with what they have. Their own aliveness is infections and often helps the other person to transcend self-importance. Thus the conversation ceases to be an exchange of commodities (information, knowledge, status) and becomes a dialogue in which it does not matter any more who is right. The Lord helps us and blesses us and we learn to treasure our many precious gifts from God. God has enhanced our knowledge, culminated experience, rummaged our memories, enhanced our knowledge, and deepened our insight into human nature and we have gained knowledge of ourselves. We are inspired and come away with cultural property. When we are this deep in our faith, we are like a well-informed guide at a museum. We learn to hear so that we can distinguish when God speaks to our brains and hearts. “The Spirit of God, is also the spirit of freedom,” reports Alma 61.15. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Of All the Sounds Despatched Abroad there is Not a Change to Me
And just what crazy half-illuminated Afterlife are you from! The Great Promise of Unlimited Progress—the promise of domination of nature, of material abundance, of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and of unimpeded personal freedom—has sustained the hopes and faith of the generations since the beginning of the industrial age. To be sure, our civilization began when the human race started taking active control of nature; but that taking control remained until the advent of the industrial age. Within industrial progress, from the substitution of mechanical and then nuclear energy for animal and human energy to the substitution of the computer for the human mind, we could feel that we were on our way to unlimited production and, hence, unlimited consumption; that technique made us omnipotent; that science made us omniscient. We were on our way to becoming gods, supreme beings who could create a second World, using the natural World only as building blocks for our new creation. Men and women experienced a new sense of freedom; they became masters of their own lives: feudal chains had been broken and one could do what one wished, free of every shackle. Or so people felt. And even though this was true only for the upper and middle classes, their achievement could lead others to the faith that eventually the new freedom could be extended to all members of society, provided industrialization kept up its pace. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
The achievement of wealth and comfort for all was supposed to result in unrestricted happiness for all. The trinity of unlimited production, absolute freedom, and unrestricted happiness formed the nucleus of a new religion, Progress, and a new Earthly City of Progress was to replace the City of God. It is not at all astonishing that this new religion provided its believers with energy, vitality, and hope. The grandeur of the Great Promise, the marvelous material and intellectual achievement of the industrial age, must be visualized in order to understand the trauma that realization of its failure is producing today. For the industrial age has indeed failed to fulfill its Great Promise, and ever growing numbers of people are becoming aware that: unrestricted satisfaction of all desires is not conducive to well-being, nor is it the way to happiness or even maximum pleasure. The dream of being independent masters of our lives ended when we began awakening to the fat that we have all become cogs in the bureaucratic machine, with our thoughts, feelings, and tastes manipulated by government and industry and the mass communications that they control. Economic progress has remained restricted to the rich nations, and the gap between rich and poor nations has ever widened. Technical progress itself has created ecological dangers and the dangers of nuclear war, either or both of which may put an end to al civilization and possibly to all life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
If we consider separately the technical and the social aspects of the work situation, we find that many types of work would be attractive as far as the technical aspect is concerned, provided the social aspects were satisfactory; on the other hand, there are types of work where the technical aspects can by its very nature not be interesting, and yet where the social aspect of the work situation could make it meaningful and attractive. Starting with the discussion of the first instance, we find that there are many people who would, for example, take keen pleasure in being a locomotive engineer. However, although railroad engineering is one of the highest paid and most respected positions in the working class, with the average salary of nearly $88,680.00, it is, nevertheless, not the fulfillment of the ambition of those who are looking for stability because of the increasing threat to fossil fuels. No doubt, many a business executive would find more pleasure in being a railroad engineer than in their own work if the social and political context of the career were different. Let us take another example: that of the waiter in a restaurant. This job could be an exceedingly attractive one for many people, provided in social and political prestige and political context were different. With mandatory pay increases and mandated healthy insurance, this could affect how much people eat out and tip, so it could decrease the amount people take home in tips. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
Being a waiter permits of constant interpersonal intercourse, and to people who like food, it gives pleasure to advise others about it, to serve it pleasantly, and so on. Many a person would find much more pleasure in working as a waiter than in sitting in one’s office over meaningless figures and scripts were it not for low appreciation socially of what services are being provided and the income insecurity of this job. Again, many others would love the job of a cab driver, as in New York City they can make $90,766.00 a year, were it not for its negative social and economic aspects now that ride sharing is more readily available and trendy. It is often said that there are certain types of work which nobody would want to perform unless it was part of their family heritage or unless they were forced to do so because of economic necessity due to the health and safety risks involved; the work of a miner is often given as an example. Generally, oil and gas and mining; construction; manufacturing; and wholesale trade, transportation, warehousing and waste handling are fairly high paid careers. Compensation in these sectors average $58,000.00 a year; in oil and gas, pay tops $100,000.00. However, considering the diversity of people, and of their conscious and unconscious fantasies, it seems that there would be a considerable number of people for whom working within the Earth, and extracting its riches would have a great attraction were it not for the social, political, and financial disadvantages of this work. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
When you take into consideration that you are risking your life and healthy and there is growing instability in the field, due to the political climate, one is being asked to potentially give up a lot. There is hardly any kind of work which would not attract certain types of personalities, provided it were freed from the negative aspects, socially, politically, and economically. However, even granted that the foregoing considerations are correct, it is undoubtedly true that much of the highly routinized work which is required by mechanized industry cannot in itself be a source of pleasure or satisfaction. Here again the differentiation between the technical and the social aspects of the work proves to be important. While the technical aspects may indeed by uninteresting, the total work situation may offer a good deal of satisfaction. Here is another example which serve to illustrate this point. Let us compare a housewife or househusband who takes care of the house and does the cooking, with a housekeeper who is paid for doing exactly the same work. Both for the housewife or househusband and the housekeeper, the work in its technical aspects is the same, and it is not particularly interesting. Yet it will have an entirely different meaning and satisfaction for the two, provided we think of a woman or a man with a happy relationship to their partner and children, and of an average housekeeper, who has no sentimental attachment to his or her employer. To the former, the work will not be drudgery, while to the latter it will be exactly that, and the only reason for doing it is that one needs the money paid for it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
The reason for this difference is perception between the housekeeper and the housewife or househusband is obvious: while the work is the same in its technical aspects, the work situation is entirely different. For the housewife or househusband, it is part of one’s total relationship to one’s partner and children, and in this sense one’s work is meaningful. The housekeeper does not participate in the satisfaction of this social aspect of the work. An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it. Clearly we can see that learning and comprehension is a process that can be accomplished through instruction, it can also be brought about through other methods. How important is learning? It occurs all the time, whether we are aware of it or not. In addition to physiological and maturational development, it is the process through which we change and become the people that we are. The first step in overcoming problems is to understand their causes. What has been happening in our Western World that individuals and nations should be buffeted about by so much confusion and bewilderment? To dare to face the situation, we have to become superhuman, but the superhuman with the superhuman power has not risen to the level of superhuman reason. To the degree which one’s power grows one becomes more and more a poor mortal. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
It must shake up our conscience that we become all the more inhuman the more we grow into superhumans. The values and goals of Western society are in a state of transition. What, specifically, are the values that we have lost? One of the two central beliefs in the modern period since the Renaissance has been in the value of individual competition. The conviction was that the more a mortal worked to further one’s own economic self-interest and to become wealthy, the more one would contribute to the material progress of the community. This famous laissez-faire theory in economics worked well for several centuries. It was true through the early and growing stages of modern industrialism and capitalism that for you or me to strive to become rich by increasing our trade or building a bigger factory would eventually mean the production of more material goods for the community. The pursuit of competitive enterprise was a magnificent and courageous idea in its heyday. However, in modern times considerable changes have occurred. In our preset day of giant business and monopoly capitalism how many people can become successful as individual competitors? There are very few groups left who, like doctors and psychotherapists and some farmers, still have the luxury of being their own economic bosses—and even they are subject to the rise and fall of prices and the fluctuating market like everyone else. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
The vast majority of working people and capitalists alike, professional people or business people, must fit into broad groups such as labor unions or big industries or university systems, or they would not survive economically at all. We have been taught to strive to get ahead of the next mortal, but actually today one’s success depends much more on how well one learns to work with one’s fellow workers. I have just read that even the individual crook cannot make out very well on one’s own these days: one has to join a racket! Looking at the fake news media and how they now collaborate with private and even government institutions, we can see it is true. We do not mean that something is wrong with individual effort and initiative as such. Indeed, the chief argument is that unique powers and initiative of each individual must be rediscovered, and used as a basis for work which contributes to the good of the community, rather than melted down in the collectivist pot of conformity. Scientific and other advances have made us much more closely interdependent in our nation as well as in our World, and individualism must become a different thing from each person for oneself and the devil take the hindmost. If you or I had a farm to carve out of the frontier forest two centuries ago, or possessed a little capital with which to start a new business last century, the philosophy of each person for oneself would have brought out the best in us and resulted in the best for the community. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
This brings us to the relation between the soul and the special problem of modern Western mortals, namely, the tendency to get absorbed in the herd, lost in das Mann. The soul is an anonymity. The impersonal soul makes us all anonymous—nature draws no distinction between me and any illiterate peasant who also is its tool in its relentless drive toward self-increase, who copulates and begets offspring to perpetuate the race, and who can experience rage to keep oneself alive long enough to serve as nature’s procreator. Speaking psychoanalytically, this is the soul in the form of the is. In our bourgeois, industrialized society, mortal’s most effective way of evading the soul is by losing oneself in the herd. Right now God is breathing on your dreams. He is going to multiply what you have. He will multiply your talent, your resources, and your creativity. This is not the time to shrink back in fear. This is the time to move forward in faith. Get up every morning knowing you are anointed. You are equipped. You are empowered. You have everything you need to fulfill your destiny. However many blessings we expect from God, his infinite liberality will always exceed all our wishes and our thoughts. God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them. I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
I Lost a World the Other Day and a Rich Man Might Notice
These are mortals and with mortals we have a certain eternal patience. Nothing is as it was. Curb your strength. Curb your old mortal envy and spite. They have no place here. Do you not realize the power you have now? What is at stake here is the rest of your family. Many philosophers all agreed in the most severe criticism of the modern culture and most of them visualized the possibility of the advent of an age of barbarism. They had a premonition that the people would no longer believe in principles, but would probably believe in a savior. We are under no illusions and do not expect to wake up one morning to see the resurrection of freedom in our country, as it by a stroke of magic. Enough individuals as well as nations have to become interested in civilization and true enlightenment. The former is easy and meets with approval; the latter requires rigorous efforts. Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives. This World is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! If the laborer gets no more than wages which one’s employer pays one, one is cheated, one cheats oneself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular which is to go down perpendicularly. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
The aim of the laborer should be, not to get one’s living, to get a good job, but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a person who does your work for money, but one who does it for love of it. The ways in which most people get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shrinking of the real business of life—chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better. Do we call this the land of the free? If we continue the salves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? It is a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children’s children who may perchance be really free. We tax ourselves unjustly. There is a part of us which is not represented. It is taxation without representation. We quarter troops, we quarter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves. We quarter our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the latter’s substance. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Those things which now most engage the attention of mortals, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like corresponding functions of the human body. Our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering, of that which we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the eloquence of the ever-glorious morning? This is not an exorbitant demand, surely. In modern industrial society the individual and the group have ceased to function satisfactorily; they live in a condition of anomie, that is, a lack of meaningful and structuralized social life; the individual follows more and more a restless movement, a planless self-development, an aim of living which has no criterion of value and in which happiness lies always in the future, and never in any present achievement. The ambition of mortals, having the whole World for one’s customer, becomes unlimited, and one is filed with disgust, with the futility of endless pursuit. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
As a result, a genuine social order has disappeared, the state emerging as the only collective organizing activity of social character. The individual, free from all genuine social bonds, finds oneself abandoned, isolated, and demoralized. Society becomes a disorganized dust of individuals. Many workers in modern industry do not give their best energies because they lack interest in their work, owing to their nonparticipation in control. The only way out of the crisis of modern society, a change in moral values. As we try to understand the role of emotion in our lives, we know that our feelings and moods often act as motivational factors. Our feelings and moods can cause us to want or need certain things; they cause us to do certain things in order to being about what we desire. Whether the need to attack or hurt others is an innate motive or a learned one is still being debated. The arguments for the innate point of view are derived from studies of lower animals, which seem to be born with a drive to attack any animal that enters their territory or threatens their young. Other arguments for it come from the observations that extreme situations can overcome great amounts of cultural conditioning, so that a well-mannered, even pacifistic (the belief that war or any kind of fighting is morally wrong) person might, under the right conditions, be made to fight and even kill. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Apparently there are aggression centers in the midbrain that can be electrically stimulated, forcing the person to act aggressively. However, there appear to exist equally powerful inner forces that lead to nonaggressive, highly cooperative behaviors. The average person, we are sure, is convinced that aggression is probably an innate force in human beings, since we see so much of it in the World around us, and so little cooperation and self-sacrifice. Industry itself has come to hold a position of exclusive predominance among human interest, which no single interest, and least of all the provision of the material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Like a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the process of one’s own digestion that one goes to one’s grave before one has begun to live, industrialized communities neglect the very objects for which it is worthwhile to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation with the means by which riches can be acquired. It is a poison which inflames every wound and turns each trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer. Society will not solve the particular problems of industry which afflict it, until that poison is expelled, and it has learned to see industry itself in the right perspective. It must regard economic interests as one element in life, not as the whole of life. It must persuade its members to renounce the opportunity of gains which accrue without any corresponding service, because the struggle for them keeps the whole community in a fever. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
We must learn to organize industry that the instrumental character of economic activity is emphasized by its subordination to the social purpose for which it is carried on. Just as our political and economic studies have for the past 300 years tended to take account only the economic functions involved in living, so also in our actual living we have inadvertently allowed pursuit of economic development to lead us in a condition of extensive social disintegration. It is probable that the work of a mortal does represent one’s most important function in the society; but unless there is some sort of integral social background to one’s life, one cannot even assign a value to one’s work. The belief of the individual in one’s social function and solidarity with the group—one’s capacity for collaboration in work—these are disappearing, destroyed in part by the rapid scientific and technical advance. With this belief, one’ sense of security and of well-being also vanished, and one begins to manifest those exaggerated demands of life where money is king. Very little progress has been made in understanding of the problem. Whereas, in the material and scientific spheres we have been careful to develop knowledge and technique, in the human and sociopolitical, we have contented ourselves with haphazard guess and opportunists fumbling. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
We are faced with the fact, then, that in the important domain of human understanding and control we are ignorant of the facts and their nature; our opportunism in administration and social enquiry has left us incapable of anything but impotent inspection of a cumulative disaster. So we are compelled to wait for the social organism to recover or perish, without adequate medical assistance. The major error of the last two centuries is that a total society can be organized upon an economic motive, upon profit. It has demonstrated that humans do not live by bread (money) alone. Because the corporation can offer only bread or cake, it has proved incompetent to meet the demands of the good life. Real societies possess meanings that give some substance of idealism to mortals in their journey between mortal and eternal life. Those meanings cannot be embraced by expanding the economic motive. If the corporation is to survive, it will have to be endowed with a moral role in the World, not merely an economic one. From this point of view, the challenge to management is salutary and hopeful. It is a route, perhaps the only available one, for saving the values of our democratic society, and the contemporary industrial system as well. In some way, the corporation and its labor force must become one corporate group and cease to be a house divided and seemingly at war. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
The most deadly criticism one could make of modern civilization is that apart from its human-made crises and catastrophes, it is not humanly interesting. This is the primary focus of news, especially local news, which is why so many people are tuning out and their popularity is in decline. In the end, such a civilization can produce only a mass mortal: incapable of choice, incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities: at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost pathetic degree, but increasingly irresponsible as one’s choices become fewer and fewer: finally, a creature governed mainly by one’s conditional reflexes—the ideal type desired, if never quite achieved, by the advertising agency and the sales organizations of modern business, or by the propaganda office and the planning bureaus of totalitarian and quasi-totalitarian governments. Now this mechanical chaos is plainly not self-perpetuating for it affronts and humiliates the human spirit; and the tighter and more efficient it becomes as a mechanical system, the more stubborn will be the human reaction against it. However, we must never abandon the material benefits we have gained from technology and mass production and specialization of tasks. Yet, if we create a class of workers denied the satisfactions of significant work, we shall never achieve the ideals of America. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
We shall not be able to maintain the ideals of the American Dream if we do not apply every tool of government, education, and industry to the improvement of the human abilities of those who are our rulers—the hundreds of millions of ordinary men and women. The part of this task assigned to management is the provision of working conditions which will release the creative instinct of every worker, and which will give play to one’s divine-human ability to think. The picture of an automatized World is clearly insane and yet it only differs somewhat in a degree to the reality of 2019. The result, pretty obviously, will be a series of economic and social changes unprecedented in rapidity and completeness. All existing patterns of human life will be disrupted and new patterns will have to be improvised to conform wit the non-human fact of automatization. If humankind does not fit well, that will be just too bad for humankind. There will have to be some stretching and a bit of amputation—the same sort of stretching and amputation as have been going on ever since applied science really got into its stride, only this time they will be good deal more drastic than in the past. A really efficient totalitarian state is one which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
To make society love their servitude, it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, the fake news media, newspaper editors, and schoolteachers. However, their methods are still and unscientific. However, without economic security, the love of servitude cannot possibly come into existence. Nonetheless, I assume that the all-powerful executive and its managers will succeed in solving the problem of permanent security. To heal society, we need more programs such as assertiveness training. Assertiveness includes many behaviors that formerly were called aggressive: risk-taking, self-affirmation, declaring your own opinion, taking the lead, initiating action, and promoting your own wishes and desires in a respectful and logical way. A new public opinion must be created privately and unobtrusively. The existing one is maintained by the press, by propaganda, by organization, and by financial and other influences which are at its disposal. This unnatural ways of spreading ideas must be opposed by the natural one, which goes from person to person and relies solely on the truth of our thoughts and the hearer’s receptiveness for new truth. Unarmed, and following the human spirit’s primitive and natural fighting method, it must attack the other, which faces it, as Goliath faced David, in the mighty armour of the age. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Will the people of today have strength to carry out what the spirit demands from them? High achievers tend to need immediate feedback. They need some indication of how they are doing so they can modify their actions in order to reach their achievement goals. The goals are usually self-established. While such people are often successful in terms of money or power, their primary needs are to set and reach their own personal—not corporate goals. They see such goals as personal challenges, tests of that they are capable of doing. High achievers are found in the business and commercial World, of course, but just as often they may be found in positions of creative leadership in the military, art, science, and other fields. In the over-organized societies which in a hundred ways have one in their power, one must somehow become once more an independent personality and so exert influence back upon them. They will use every means to keep one in that condition of impersonality which suits them. They fear personality because the spirit of truth, which they would like to muzzle, find in it a means of expressing themselves. And their power, is unfortunately, as great as their fear. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
There is a tragic alliance between society as a whole and its economic conditions. With a grim relentlessness those conditions tend to bring up the mortal of today as a being without freedom, without self-collectedness, without independence, in short as a human being so full of deficiencies that one lacks the qualities of humanity. And they are the last things that we can change. Even if it should be granted us the spirit should begin its work, we shall only slowly and incompletely gain power over those forces. There is, in fact, being demanded from the will that which our conditions of life refuse to allow. And how heavy the task that the spirit has to take in hand! It has to create the power of understanding the truth that is really true where at present nothing is current but propagandist truth. It has to depose ignoble patriotism, and enthrone the noble kind of patriotism which aims at ends that are worthy of the whole humankind, in circles where the hopeless issues of past and present political activities keep nationalist passions a glow even among those who in their hearts would fain be free from them. It has to get the fact that civilization is an interest of all mortals and of humanity as a whole recognized again in places where national civilization is today worshipped as an idol, and the notion of a humanity with a common civilization lies broke to fragments. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The spirit has to maintain our faith in the civilized State, even though our modern States, spiritually and economically ruined by war, have no time to think about the tasks of civilization, and dare not devote their attention to anything but how to use every possible means, even those which undermine the concept of justice, to collect money with which to prolong their own existence. It has to unite us by giving us a single idea of civilized mortals, and this is a World where one nation has robbed its neighbour of all faith in humanity, idealism, righteousness, reasonableness, and truthfulness, and all alike have come under the domination of powers which are plunging us ever deeper into barbarism. It has to get attention concentrated on civilization while the growing difficulty of making a living absorbs the masses more and more in material cares, and makes all other things seem to them to be mere shadows. It has to give us faith in the possibility of progress while the reaction of the economic on the spiritual becomes more pernicious every day and contributes to an ever growing demoralization. High achievers are not necessarily good or bad people, nor are their actions necessarily moral or immoral. They are simply motivated by one dominate need. Of course, high achievers, like others, may utilize means that other consider good or bad, or they may skirt the borders of propriety and legality. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
And for many high achievers the end—their own personal goal—often justifies the means, and the only immorality is not making it. However, the spirit has to provide us with reasons for hope at a time when not only secular and religious institutions and associations, but the mortals, too, who are looked upon as leaders, continually fail us, when artists and mortals of learning show themselves as supporters of barbarism and notabilities who pass for thinkers, and behave outwardly as such, are revealed, when crisis come, as being nothing more than writers and members of academics. We cannot allow advanced technology to become a sin against the Holy Ghost. All these hinderances stand in the path of the will to civilization. A dull despair hovers about us. We are now bewildered by our experience of life. We hear enticing voices which say to us that the one thing which can still make life tolerable is to live for the day. We must, we are told, renounce every wish to think or hope about anything beyond our own fate. We must find rest in resignation. The recognition that civilization is founded on some sort of theory of the Universe, can be restored only through a spiritual awakening, and a will for ethical good in the masses of humankind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
This compels us to make clear to ourselves those difficulties in the way of a rebirth of civilization which ordinary reflection would overlook. However, at the same time it raises us above all considerations of possibility or impossibility. If the ethical spirit provides a sufficient standing ground in the sphere of events for making civilization, if we return to a suitable theory of the Universe and the convictions to which this properly gives birth. Human beings cannot block off any important biological or emotional aspect of experience without developing an equivalent amount of inner anxiety. Where there is an obsession, we can assume some equivalent repression. A behavior pattern continues as long as it proves itself functional, succeeds in meeting certain needs effectively and efficiently. Many people are alarmed by the divorce rates, nearly 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. Many sincere and mature social scientists are wondering of our traditional marriage patterns are not moving toward dysfunctionality. The churches take over the religious teaching that originally was the job of the parent. The society is providing economy security and law enforcement takes care of physical security. Society is beginning to accept the job of caring for the illegitimate child and the older adult, so the family’s legitimizing function is not quite so important any more. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Schools are taking over most of the socialization functions, as are peer groups and some religious groups. What is left for the family to do? Possibly the most important function still remains: to provide a situation in which deep affection and physical desires can be legally and morally expressed. There is really nothing wrong with our present marriage patterns. However, the ways in which we have come to regard human relationships do not fit into the ways in which traditional marriage patterns insist that we view them. Traditionally, two people are supposed to have all their needs met by each other. However, the World is much larger, more crowed today. Both husband and wife travel further from the family hearth than they did even twenty years ago. The social and companionship needs of each are often well met by other people; yet the spouse who is not involved often feels hurt or left out. Even when a couple does not every try occupational, hobby, recreational and companionship needs can be met by a variety of people other than the spouse. No one should expect one person to meet all one’s needs, nor should any one person expect that he or she can or ought to meet all the needs of one’s spouse. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
A healthy marriage, a happy, actualizing married, is one in which two whole persons come together because they have much to share. They desire each other as person, intimately, and as companions. They also know that each of them, being whole and significant, is capable of meeting many of one’s own needs. It is also a happy realization that neither partner expects the other to be all things to him or her. Limitations and strengths are accepted and the two people try to lead realistic lives. Because of their mutual respect and affection, this can bring them into an even closer union. Their love relationship can grow and they can grow because of it. The other people in their lobes—fellow workers, friends, children, relatives—enter into the relationship, but not into the deepest part of it: that is the private shared World of the two people. “For it is by faith that miracles are wrought; and it is by faith that Angels appear and minister unto people; wherefore, if these things have ceased wo be unto the children of mortals, for it is because of their unbelief, and all is vain,” reports Moroni 7.37. A tremendous amount of human misery is caused by a lack of love. Not only do people not love other people; they do not love themselves. Others, having no love for themselves, play love-games with other people. Humankind needs a few more people with healthy self-love, who also love others, who can live—not die. #RandolphhHarris 17 of 17
Randolph Harris II International Institute 