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Great Streets of Silence Led Away to Neighborhoods of Pause
My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take. The phrase essential need is meaningless, because in practice people need what they want. Needs are determined less by the biological requirements of Homo sapiens than by the social environment in which a person lives and especially that in which one has been brought up. The members of a given social group generally come to desire, and consequently develop a need for, whatever is necessary for acceptance in the group. The good life is identified with the satisfaction of these needs, whatever their biological relevance. The difficulties of a love relationship stem largely from too little experience with loving, starting within the family. A growth in the ability to love comes from more experience with loving. When an individual has achieved some freedom, has begun to recognize the self one wants to become, and is able to influence one’s growth toward that self, one also has begun to understand the nature of love better, if only because one’s relationship with one’s self has become warmer and more accepting. One thus is better able to experience love. Owning our uncertainty makes us kinder, more creative, and more alive. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
Love for humanity still carries with it the characteristics and prerequisites of love in general, but its participants and expressions are specialized. A love for humanity occurs between equals, peers, or those who can give and take in somewhat the same way and in about equal shares. The child learns much about living life as one interacts with one’s own siblings. From older brothers, both boys and girls learn much of what it means to be male, just as sisters indirectly teach younger children about femaleness. Because a child may be scaled down more to one’s size or level, one may learn more naturally from a brother or sister than from a parent or teacher. Certainly the skills of communication and play are learned in this kind of interchange. Although the only child is not automatically doomed to a tragic life because one does not have such built-in playmate-teachers, one does seem to have more difficulty acquiring some of the social skills. Many people report that what goes on between or among their children scarcely resembles loving behavior. They see mostly good communication, cheerfulness, encouragement, sharing, understanding, and some uplifting advice. Therefore, there are benefits to have a close family bond. The ordinary play in children and young adults involves the testing and trying out of the self that will enable the self to grow and mature. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
Youth is a good laboratory in which the individual can get some idea of what it is like to be a fully functioning adult, especially a social adult. Even when there is disagreement and on rare occasions some quarreling, it can prepare an individual for some of the hostile and competitive interaction that our particular society seems to prize, or at least need. One of the fortunate by-produce of family living and the love it shares is a sense of kindship, of fellow-feeling. This feeling is one of the important attributes of the self-actualizing person. Developed by experiencing it with the ones around us, kinship gradually becomes a broader, more inclusive experience of identification and empathy with others. The love God speaks of is the kind that enter our hearts when we awake in the morning, stays with us throughout the day, and swells in our hearts as we give voice to our prayers of gratitude at evening’s end. This is the inexpressible love Heavenly Father has for us. It is this endless compassion that allows us to more clearly see others for who they are. Through the lens of pure love, we see immortal beings of infinite potential and worth and beloved sons and daughters of Almighty God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
Not all of our motives are inborn physiological needs, or even physiological/social needs, however. Many of our motives are based on social-personal-situational learning experiences, especially needs for affection and achievement. If there is one characteristic that seems to distinguish humans from other organisms, it is the way in which the human brain is organized. We see that the higher up the evolutionary ladder we go, the less concentration there is on antiquated brain functions (instincts, drives, reflexes—though we cannot live without these!). What augments or replaces these more primitive functions are the functions of the new brain, the cortex: learning, memory, imagination, abstract reasoning, and the other cognitive skills. Therefore, we must find other explanations for why people do what they do. Youth is a time when people need more love and appreciation than ever before, and they may not always seem very lovable. Praise is necessary, though, and so are material rewards—medals, trophies, rings, pins, gold stars, cash bonuses, and so forth. However, more important tan any of these are the approval, support, and encouragement of the people the youth considers important. Some of us are intensely sensitive to the people around us, constantly checking out just how much influence they have on other people and situations. What may appear to be a strong need for dominance, risk-taking, leadership is actually a need to test out the emerging and growing sense of self. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
People who fail to experience enough success and whose self-concept fails to develop may grow into adulthood with gaps in their personality. However, for those who seek, allow, and live for it, the dawn of faith, sometimes gradually will come or can return and overpower deficiency-motivated behavior. Have you ever had opportunity to do something for which you felt unprepared or inadequate but that you were blessed for trying? In healthy people, adulthood is characterized by a variety of new challenges. All tings denote there is a God. There is joy in imagining, learning, doing worthwhile new things. This is especially true as we deepen faith and trust in Heavenly Father and his Son, Jesus Christ. We cannot love ourselves enough to save ourselves. However, the Heavenly Father loves us more and knows us better than we love or know ourselves. We can trust the Lord and lean not unto our own understanding. Self-actualizers tend to be impatient with trivial and nonsensical rules. They will be bound by a rule if it makes sense to them. They seek novelty, stimulation, challenge, rather than safety. In their job, they will not be so much tempted by a larger salary as by a chance to do something wee, to experiment. We rejoice in the invitation to devote our whole souls to seeking higher and holier ways to love God and those around us. It is important not to seek perfection but to discover the joy that comes from integration of both strength and weaknesses—to freely skate between all potentials. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
Triumph May be of Several Kinds as Long as God has Mercy on the Soul
I felt a physical push, as though she had stretched out her two hands and laid them on my chest and tried to move me back from where I stood. Her face was engraved with a hostile beauty. She tossed her hair just slightly, let it stroke her cheeks. We have avoided the concept of faith in our description of the courage to be which is based on mystical union wit the ground of being as well as in our description of the courage to be which is based on the personal encounter with God. This is partly because the concept of faith has lost its genuine meaning and has received the connotation of belief in something unbelievable. However, this is not the only reason for the use of terms other than faith. The decisive reason is that I do not think either mystical union or personal encounter fulfills the idea of faith. Certainly there is faith in the elevation of the soul above the finite to the infinite, leading to its union with the ground of being. However, more than this is included in the concept of faith. And there is faith in the personal encounter with the personal God. However, more than this is included in the concept of faith. Faith is the state of being grasped by the power of being-itself. The courage to be is an expression of faith and what faith means must be understood through the courage to be. We have defined courage as the self-affirmation of being in spite of non-being. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
The power of this self-affirmation is the power of being which is effective in every act of courage. Faith is the experience of this power. However, it is an experience which has a paradoxical character, the character of accepting acceptance. Being-itself transcends every finite being infinitely; God in the divine-human encounter transcends mortals unconditionally. Faith bridges this finite gap by accepting the fact that in spite of it the power of being is present, that one who is separated is accepted. Faith accepts in spite of; and out of the in spite of of faith the inspire of of courage is born. Faith is not a theoretical affirmation of something uncertain, it is the existential acceptance of something transcending ordinary experience. Faith is not an opinion but a state. It is the state of being grasped by the power of being which transcends everything that is and in which everything that is participates. One who is grasped by this power is able to affirm oneself because one knows that one is affirmed by the power of being-itself. In this point mystical experience and personal encounter are identical. In both of them faith is the basis of the courage to be. This decisive for a period in which, as in our own, the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness is dominant. Certainly the anxiety of fate and death is not lacking in our time. The anxiety of fate has increased with the degree to which the schizophrenic split of our World has removed the last remnants of former security. And the anxiety of guilt and condemnation is not lacking either. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
It is surprising how much anxiety of guilt comes to the surface in psychoanalysis and personal counseling. The centuries of puritan and bourgeois repression of vital strivings have produced almost as many guilt feelings as the preaching of hell and purgatory in the Middle Ages. However, in spite of these restricting considerations one must say that the anxiety which determines our period is the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness. One is afraid of having lost or of having to lose the meaning of one’s existence. The expression of this situation is the Existentialism of today. Which courage is able to take nonbeing into itself in the from of doubt and meaninglessness? This is the most important and most disturbing question in the quest for the courage to be. For the anxiety of meaninglessness undermines what is still unshaken in the anxiety of fate and death and of guilt and condemnation. In the anxiety of guilt and condemnation doubt has not yet undermined the certainty of an ultimate responsibility. We are threatened but we are not destroyed. If, however, doubt and meaninglessness prevail one experiences an abyss in which the meaning of life and the truth of ultimate responsibility disappear. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Both the Stoic who conquers the anxiety of fate with the Socratic courage of wisdom and the Christian who conquers the anxiety of guilt with the Protestant courage of accepting forgiveness are in a different situation. Even in the despair of having to die and the despair of self-condemnation meaning is affirmed and certitude preserved. However, in the despair of doubt and meaninglessness bot are swallowed by nonbeing. The question then is this: Is there a courage which can conquer the anxiety of meaninglessness and doubt? Or in other words, can the faith which accepts acceptance resist the power of nonbeing in its most radical form? Can faith resist meaninglessness? Is there a kind of faith which can exist together with doubt and meaninglessness? These questions lead to the last aspect of the problem discussed in these lectures and the one most relevant to our time: How is the courage to be possible if all the ways to create it are barred by the experience of their ultimate insufficiency? If life is as meaningless as death, if guilt is as questionable as perfection, if being is no more meaningful than nonbeing, on what can one base the courage to be? #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
There is an inclination in some Existentialists to answer these questions by a leap from doubt to dogmatic certitude, from meaninglessness to set of symbols in which the meaning of a special ecclesiastical or political group is embodied. This lead can be interpreted in different ways. It may be the expression of a desire for safety; it may be as arbitrary as, according to Existentialist principles, every decision is; it may be the feeling that the Christian message is the answer to the question raised by an analysis of human existence; it may be a genuine conversion, independent of the theoretical situation. In any case it is not a solution of the problem of radical doubt. It gives the courage to be to those who are converted but it does not answer the question as to how such a courage is possible in itself. The answer must accept, as its precondition, the state of meaninglessness. It is not an answer if it demands the removal of this state; for that is just what cannot be done. One who is in the grip of doubt and meaninglessness cannot liberate oneself from this grip; but one asks for an answer which is valid within and not outside the situation of one’s despair. One asks for the ultimate foundation of what we have called the courage of despair. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
There is only one possible answer, if one does not try to escape the question: namely that the acceptance of despair is in itself faith and on the boundary line of courage to be. In this situation the meaning of life is reduced to despair about the meaning of life. However, as long as this despair is an act of life it is beneficial in its negativity. Cynically speaking, one could say that it is true to life to be cynical about it. Religiously speaking, one would say that one accepts oneself as accepted in spite of one’s despair about the meaning of this acceptance. The paradox of every radical negativity, as long as it is an active negativity, is that it must affirm itself in order to be able to negate itself. No actual negation can be without an implicit affirmation. The hidden pleasure produced by despair witnesses to the paradoxical character of self-negation. The negative lives from the benefits it negates. The faith which makes the courage of despair possible is the acceptance of the power of being, even in the grip of nonbeing. Even in the despair about meaning being affirms itself through us. The act of accepting meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act. It is an act of faith. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
We have seen that one who has the courage to affirm one’s being in spite of fate and guilt has not removed them. One remains threatened and hit by them. However, one accepts one’s acceptance by the power of being-itself in which one participates and which gives one the courage to take the anxieties of fate and guilt upon oneself. The same is true of doubt and meaninglessness. The faith which creates the courage to take them into itself has no special content. It is simply faith, undirected, absolute. It is undefinable, since everything defined is dissolved by doubt and meaninglessness. Nevertheless, even absolute faith is not an eruption of subjective emotions or a mood without objective foundation. An analysis of the nature of absolute faith reveals that following elements in it. The first is the experience of the power of being which is present even in face of the most radical manifestation of nonbeing. If one says that in this experience vitality resists despair one must add that vitality in mortals is proportional to intentionality. The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning. The second element in absolute faith is the dependence of the experience of nonbeing on the experience of being and the dependence of the experience of meaninglessness on the experience of meaning. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Even in the state of despair one has enough being to make despair possible. There is a third element in absolute faith, the acceptance of being accepted. Of course, in the state of despair there is nobody and nothing that accepts. However, there is the power of acceptance itself which is experienced. Meaninglessness, as long as it is experienced, includes an experience of the power of acceptance. To accept this power of acceptance consciously is the religious answer of absolute faith, of a faith which has been deprived by doubt of any concrete content, which nevertheless is faith and the source of the most paradoxical manifestation of the courage to be. This faith transcends both the mystical experience and the divine-human encounter. The mystical experience seems to be nearer to absolute faith but it is not. Absolute faith includes an element of skepticism which one cannot find in the mystical experience. Certainly mysticism also transcends all specific contents, but not because it doubts them or has found them meaningless; rather it seems them to be preliminary. Mysticism uses the specific contents as grades, stepping on them after having used them. The experience of meaninglessness, however, denies them (and everything that goes with them) without having used them. The experience of meaninglessness if more radical than mysticism. Therefore it transcends the mystical experience. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Absolute faith also transcends the divine-human encounter. In this encounter the subject-object scheme is valid: a definite subject (mortal) meets a definite object (God). One can reserve this statement and say that a definite subject (God) meets a definite object (mortal). However, in both causes the attack of doubt undercuts the subject-object structure. The theologians who speak so strongly and with such self-certainty about the divine-human encounter should be aware of a situation in which this encounter is prevented by radical doubt and nothing is left but absolute faith. The acceptance of such a situation as religiously valid has, however, the consequences that the concrete contents of ordinary faith must be subjected to criticism and transformation. The courage to be in its radical form is a key to an idea of God which transcends both mysticism and the person-to-person encounter. Dr. Freud has discovered the principle of free association. By giving up the control of your thoughts in the presence of a skilled listener, you can discover your unconscious feelings and thoughts without being asleep, or crazy, or drunk, or hypnotized. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The psychoanalyst reads between your lines, one is capable of understanding you better than you understand yourself because you have freed your thinking from the limitations of conventional thought control. However, free association soon deteriorated, like freedom and happiness. First it deteriorated in the orthodox psychoanalytic procedure itself. Not always, but often. Instead of giving rise to a meaningful expression of imprisoned thoughts, it became meaningless chatter. Other therapeutic schools reduced the role of the analyst to that of a sympathetic listener, who repeats in slightly different version the words of the patient, without trying to interpret or to explain. All this is done with the idea that the patient’s freedom must not be interfered with. The Freudian idea of free association has become the instrument of many psychologists who call themselves counselors, although the only thing they do not do is counsel. These counselors play an increasingly large role as private practitioners and as advisers in industry. What is the effect of the procedure? Obviously not a cure which Dr. Freud ad in mind when he devised free association as a basis for understanding the unconscious. Rather a release of tension which results from talking things out in the presence of a sympathetic listener. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Your thoughts, as long as you keep them within yourself, may disturb you—but something fruitful may come out of this disturbance; you mull them over, you think, you feel, you may arrive at a new thought born out of this travail. However, when you talk right away, when you do not let your thoughts and feelings build up pressure, as it were, they do not become fruitful. It is exactly the same as with unobstructed consumption. You are a system in which things go in and out continuously—and within it is nothing, no tension, no digestion, no self. Dr. Freud’s discovery of free association had the aim of finding out what went on in your underneath the surface, of discovering who you really were; the modern talking to the sympathetic listener has the opposite, although unavowed aim; its function is to make a mortal forget who one is (provided one has still some memory), to lose all tension, and with it all sense of self. Just as one oils machines, one oils people and especially those in the mass organizations of work. One oils them with pleasant slogans, material advantages, and with the sympathetic understanding of the psychologists. The talking and listening to eventually has become the indoor sport of those who cannot afford a professional listener, or prefer the layman for one reason of another. It has become fashionable, sophisticated, to talk things out. There is no inhibition, no sense of shame, no holding back. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
When we are allowed to freely express ourselves, one speaks about the tragic occurrences of one’s life with the same ease as one would talk about another person of no particular interest, or as one would speak about the various troubles one has had with one’s video game. Indeed, psychology and psychiatry are in the process of changing their function fundamentally. From the Delphic Oracle’s “Know thyself!” to Dr. Freud’s psychoanalytic therapy, the function of psychology was to discover the self, to understand the individual, to find the truth that makes you free. Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of mortals. The specialists in this field tell you what the normal person is, and, correspondingly, what is wrong with you; they devise the methods to help you adjust, be happy, be normal. In the Brave New World this conditioning is done from the first month of fertilization (by chemical means), until after puberty. With us, it begins a little later. Constant repetition by newspaper, radio, television, does most of the conditioning. However, the crowning achievement of manipulation is modern psychology. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
What the American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor did for industrial work when he started the Efficiency Movement, the psychologist does for the whole personality—all in the name of understanding freedom. There are many exceptions to this among psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts, but it becomes increasingly clear that these professions are in the process of becoming a serious danger to the development of mortal, that their practitioners are evolving into the priests of the new religion of fun, consumption and selflessness, into the specialists of manipulation, into the spokes person for the alienated personality. One wonders whether everyone has forgotten the fact that eros, according to no less an authority than St. Augustine, is the power which drives men toward God. Eros created life on the Earth, the early Greek mythology tells us. When the World was barren and lifeless, it was Eros who seized his life-giving arrows and pierced the cold heart of the Earth, and immediately the brown surface was covered with luxuriant verdure. This is an appealing symbolic picture of how love is a creative relationship. It is creative in the sense that something new or novel or important comes out of relating. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Eros then breathed into the nostrils of the clay forms of man and woman and gave them the spirit of life. The relationship, not how it is expressed or consummated, is the important thing. A friendship between two people, whether of the opposite sex or the same sex, is a love relationship when certain important qualities are present. Any love relation involves four elements: Knowledge, Care, Respect, Responsibility. Eros is the kind of energy that is a desiring, longing, a forever reaching out, seeking to expand. Eros is defined as ardent desire, yearning, aspiring self-fulfilling love. For eros is the power which attracts us. The essence of eros is that it draws us from ahead. This is revealed in our day-to-day language when I saw a person allures me or entices me, or the possibilities of a new job invite me. Something in me responds to the other person, or the job, and pulls me toward the individual or career. I participate in forms, possibilities, higher levels of meaning, on neurophysiological dimensions but also on aesthetic and ethical dimensions as well. As the Greeks believed, knowledge and even ethical goodness exercise such a pull. Eros is the drive toward union with what we belong to—union with our own possibilities, union with significant other persons in our World in relation to whom we discover our own self-fulfillment. Eros is the yearning in a mortal which leads one to dedicate oneself to seek arete, the noble and good life. #RandolpHarris 14 of 17
To love, to be in a true loving relationship, the involved people must know each other. True love at first sight is possible under the rarest of circumstances and occurs only in the same kinds of ultra-sensitive people who may also be called mind-readers or superb judges of character. The common feeling of falling in love at first sight is a product of one or more things: fascination, fantasy, intimacy, admiration, appreciation, attraction, identification, or just plain good vibes. If one defines love in any of those terms, then for all intents and purposes the individual loves you. However, love, for most people, and we must say in reality, is much more. It is really knowing another individual. To know someone you must experience that person. Not just on dates, and certainly not just by seeing him or her on a two-dimensional movie screen or on social media. In the typical dating experience, even in this modern, enlightened, up-to-date, anti-establishment World, people do unreal, phony and inauthentic things in an attempt to put their best foot forward, basically to impress another person. So many things are artificially hidden—complexion flaws, food preferences, less-than-acceptable traits-that one person may require a great deal of time to penetrate the masks of another or to become acquainted with the games he or she plays. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Mature, deep and satisfying love comes from real, intimate, intensive and extensive knowledge. It comes from wide and profound experiencing of the fullest self possible. Eros makes one want to stay awake and think of the beloved, remembering, savoring, discovering ever-new facets of the prism of what the experience of being around them is like. It is the urge for union with the partner that is the occasion for human tenderness. The source of love is tenderness. Eros is the longing to establish union, full relationship. To know more than intellectual insight. You do not know a girl simply because you know her name is Elle Woods, that she lives on the 4900th Court of Regatta, that her phone number 817-4435, that her measurements are 35-22-36, that her age is 20, that she works at…, that her parents are…,that she has certain color eyes, hair, skin, etc. This is not the kind of knowledge we mean. This is Bureau of the Census information, almanac data. It is impressed on us that intimate, personal knowledge is fundamental and basic part of a close relationship. We must know each other—each of us must understand the other’s special uniqueness—before we consider our relationship one of love. The two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we all are heir as individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not made up of two isolated, individual experiences, but for a genuine union. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
True respect takes place as we come to develop our ability to love our fellow mortals as ourselves. A sharing takes place which is a new being, a new field of magnetic force. This is what is called chemistry of two people in love, and without it, a relationship will not last. Chemistry shakes us, it has within it the great wonder, tremendous and tremulous as it may be, it is when we know the other individual is the mate of our soul and the feeling is mutual. Chemistry is the moment of union of souls and realization that we have won the others. This is a symbolic way of communicating a basic truth of human experience, that eros always drives us to transcend ourselves. It is a truth which obtains our relationships in the objective World. “All these faded pictures I save in the corners of my mind. They call in waves to take me away. I will not be back tonight. And I breathe the sights that we left behind. Wen I dream, those nights will always be mine. I feel as years unfold that we are still connected to those days when we were young and you were my reflect. I still come back to you,” reports Emma Hewitt and Andrew Rayel (My Reflection). Respect is also synonymous with care and concern. We respect those we care about. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Its Past Enlightened to Perceive New Periods of Recollect
Indeed people’s charms should not go to waste, that is my motto, may it never have dire consequences for the mortal World. As I have pointed out before, anonymous authority and automation conformity are largely the results of our mode of production, which requires quick adaptation to the machines, disciplined mass behavior, common taste and obedience without the use of force. Another facet of our economic system, the need for mass consumption, has been instrumental in creating a feature in the social character of modern mortals which constitutes one of the most striking contrasts to the social character twenty first century. I am referring to the principle that every desire must be satisfied immediately, no wish must be frustrated. The most obvious illustration of this principle is to be found in our system of buying on the installment plan. In the nineteenth century you bought what you needed, when you had saved the money for it; today you buy what you need, or do not need, on credit, and the function of advertising is largely to coax you into buying and to whet your appetite for things, so that you can be coaxed. You live in a circle. You buy on the installment plan, and about the time you have finished paying, you sell and you buy again—the latest model. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The principle that desires must be satisfied without much delay has also determined sexual behavior, especially since the end of the First World War. A crude form of misunderstood Freudianism used to furnish the appropriate rationalizations; the idea being that neuroses result from repressed sexual strivings, that frustrations were traumatic, and the less you repressed the healthier you were. Even parents anxious to give their children everything they wanted lest they be frustrated, acquired a complex. Unfortunately, many of these children as well as their parents landed on the analyst’s couch, provided they could afford it. The greed for things and the inability to postpone the satisfaction of wishes as characteristic of modern mortals has been stressed by thoughtful observers, such as Max Scheler and Bergson. It as been given its most poignant expression by Aldous Huxley in the Brave New World. Among the slogans by which the adolescents in the Brave New World are conditioned, one of the most important ones is “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.” It is hammered into them, “two hundred repetitions, twice a week from fourteen to sixteen and a half.” This instant realization of wishes is felt as happiness. “Everybody’s happy nowadays” is another of the Brave New World slogans; people “get what they want and they never want what they can’t get.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
This need for the immediate consumption of commodities and the immediate consummation of sexual desires is coupled in the Brave New World as in our own. It is considered immoral to keep one love partner beyond a relatively short time. Love is short-lived sexual desire, which must be satisfied immediately. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much. There is no such thing as a divided allegiance; you are so conditioned that you cannot help doing what you ought to do. And what you out to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really are not any temptations to resist. This lack of inhibition of desires leads to the same result as the lack of overt authority—the paralysis and eventually the destruction of the self. If I do not postpone the satisfaction of my wish (and am conditioned only to wish for what I can get), I have no conflicts, no doubts; no decision has to be made; I am never alone with myself, because I am always busy—either working, or having fun. I have no need to be aware of myself as myself because I am constantly absorbed having pleasure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
I am—a system of desires and satisfaction; I have to work in order to fulfill my desires—and these very desires are constantly stimulated and directed by the economic machines. Most of these appetites are synthetic; even sexual appetite is by far not as natural as it is made out to be. It is to some extent stimulated artificially. And it needs to be if we want to have people as the contemporary system needs them—people who feel happy, who have no doubts, who have no conflicts, who are guided without the use of force. Having fun consists mainly in the satisfaction of consuming and taking in; commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed. The World is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones—and the eternally disappointed ones. How can we help being disappointed if our birth stops at the breast of the mother, if we are never weaned, if we remain overgrown babes, if we never go beyond the receptive orientation? So people do worry, feel inferior, inadequate, guilty. They sense that they live without living, that life runs through their hands like sand. How do they deal with their troubles, which stem from the passivity of constant taking in? #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
By another form of passivity, a constant spilling out, as it were: by talking. Here, as in the case of authority and consumption, an idea which once was productive has been turned into its opposite. Who we are—what our identities will be—is not a given, not fully decided at birth. Newborn infants are not miniature adults or people seeds, that only require a sprinkling of water to grow to their fullest stature. On the other hand, as unlike the adults they will become that infants are, they are not wholly, either. Just how much of our identities are we born with? How much is nurtured through processes and forces outside of ourselves? Perhaps we can most accurately say that people are born with potentials that develop as they grow into adult human beings. The terms we use to describe the life process—changing, growing, evolving, transforming, unfolding, becoming, realizing, actualizing, blooming, blossoming, flowering—reveal this belief that at birth we both are and are not all that we will become. Many theorists have tried to describe the processes through which people develop. However, these detailed systems cannot explain the study of the human life cycle with certainty to all the questions arise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Too many questions of philosophy and cannot, at least now, be answered by science. They do, though, add important insight and knowledge to our study of the ways in which we grow into being. Most people live in the confidence that out technological developments have largely freed us from the risks of unchosen pregnancy and venereal disease and, therefore, ipso facto, the anxiety people used to feel about sex and love is now banished forever to the museum. The vicissitudes about which the novelists of previous centuries wrote—when a woman gave herself to a man, it meant illegitimate pregnancy and social ostracism, as in The Scarlet Letter; or the tragic break-up of the family structure and the experience of death by suicide, as in Anna Karenina; or venereal disease, as in the market place of social reality—have been outgrown. Now, thank God and science, we tell ourselves, we are rid of all that! The implication is that sex is free and that love is easy and comes in readily procurable packages like what the students call “instant Zen.” And any talk of the deeper conflicts which used to be associated with the tragic and daimonic elements is anachronistic and absurd. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
However, I shall be impolite enough to ask, May there not be a gigantic extensive repression underlying all this? A repression not of sex, but of something underlying body chemistry, some psychic needs more vital, deeper, and more comprehensive than sex. A repression that is socially sanctioned, to be sure—but just for that reason harder to discern and more effective in its results. I am obviously not questioning contemporary medical and psychological advances as such: no one in his or her right mind would fail to be grateful for the development of contraceptives, estrogen, and cures for venereal disease. And I count it good fortune indeed to be born into this age with its freedom of possibilities rather than in the Victorian period with its rigid mores. However, that issue is fallacious and a red herring. Our problem is more profound and starkly real. We pick up the morning paper and read that there are a million illegal abortions in enlightened America each year; that premarital pregnancies are increasing on all sides. One girl out of six who is now thirteen will, according to present statistics, become illegitimately pregnant before she is twenty—two and half times the incidence of ten year ago. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The increase is mainly among the girls of the proletarian classes, but there is enough increase among girls of middle and upper classes to prove that this is not a problem solely of disadvantage groups. Some people believe that we are what we are at birth. Nature, through heredity, determines everything. We look, act, feel, do, and believe what we do because of our genetic makeup. Others believe that regardless of what we are born with, it is the impact of our environment, of the way we are nurtured, that really determines who and what we become. What we learn or acquire through conditioning and experience makes up what we are. Most people now believe that both nature and nurture play important roles in shaping our behavior. We are confronted by the curious situation of the more birth control, the more illegitimate pregnancies. As the reader hastens to cry that what is necessary to change barbaric abortion laws and give more sex education, I would not disagree; but I could, and should raise a caveat. The blanket advising of more sex education can act as a reassurance by means of which we escape having to ask ourselves the more frightening question. May not the real issue be not on the level of conscious, rational intentions at all? May it not be in a deeper realm of what I shall later call intentionality? #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Some women use their sex to gain personal affirmation. They are desired, and that is almost enough…a child is a symbol that she is a woman, and she may gain from having something on her own. This struggle to prove one’s identity and personal worth may be more outspoken with less affluent young women, but it is just as present in middle-class young ladies who can cover it up better by socially skillful behavior. Let us take as an example a female patient from an upper middle-class background with whom I whom I worked. Her father had been a banker in a small city, and her mother a proper lady who has always assumed a Christian attitude toward everyone but who seemed, from the data which came up in therapy, to be usually rigid and had actually resented having this girl when she was born. My patient was well educated, already in her early thirties a successful editor in a large publishing house, and obviously was not the slightest deficient in knowledge of sex or contraception. Yet she had two illegitimate pregnancies in her mid-twenties several years before she began treatment with me. Both of these pregnancies gave her painful feelings of guilt and conflict, yet she went from one directly into another. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
She had been married for two years in her early twenties to a man who, an intellectual like herself, was emotionally detached, and each had tried by various kinds of aggressive-dependency nagging to get the other to infuse some meaning and vitality into an empty marriage. After her divorce, while she lived alone, she volunteered to do some evening reading to those who were visually impaired. She became pregnant by the young visually impaired man to whom she read. Though this, and its subsequent abortion, upset her greatly, she became pregnant again shortly after her first abortion. Now it is absurd to think that we can understand this behavior on the basis of sexual needs. Indeed, the fact tat she did not feel sexual desire was actually more influential in leading her into the sexual relations which caused the pregnancies. We must look to her image of herself and her ways of trying to find a meaningful place for herself in her World id we are to have any hope of discovering the dynamics of the pregnancies. She was, diagnostically speaking, what is called a typically contemporary schizoid personality: intelligent, articulate, efficient, successful in work, but detached in personal intercourse and afraid of intimate relationships. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
She had always thought of herself as an empty person who never could feel much on her own or experience anything lasting even when she took psychedelics—the kind of person who cries out to the World to give her some passion, some vitality. Attractive, she ad a number of men friends but the relationships with them also had a dried up quality and lacked the zest for which she fervently longed. She described sleeping with the one with which she was most intimate at the time as if they were two animals clinging together for warmth, her feeling being a generalized despair. She had a dream early in therapy which recurred in varying form, of herself in one room and her parents in the next room separated by a wall which went not quite up to the ceiling; and no matter how hard she knocked on the wall or cried out to them in the dream, she could not get them to hear her. She arrived for her therapy hour one day having just come from an art exhibit, to tell me she had discovered the symbol most accurately describing her feelings about herself: the lonely figures of Edward Hopper, in his paintings in which there is only one figure—a solitary girl usherette in a brightly lighted and plush but entirely empty theater; a woman sitting alone by an upper window in a Victorian house at the shore in the deserted off-season; a lone person in a rocking chair on a porch not unlike the house in the small city in which my patient grew up. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Edward Hopper’s paintings, indeed, give a poignant meaning to the quiet despair, the emptiness of human feeling and longing which is referred to by that cliché alienation. It is touching that her first pregnancy came in a relation with a human being who was visually impaired. We are impressed here by her elemental generosity in wanting to give him something and to prove something also to herself, but most of all we are struck by the aura of blindness surrounding the whole event of getting pregnant. She was one of the many person in our World of affluence and technological power who moved, humanly speaking, in a World of the blind, where nobody can see another and were our touching is at best a sightless fumbling, moving our fingers over the body of another trying to recognize him or her, but unable in our own self-enclosing darkness to do so. We could conclude that she became pregnant to establish her own self-esteem by proving somebody wants her—as her husband did not; to compensate for her feelings of emotional poverty—which pregnancy does quite literally by filling up the womb if we take the womb (hysteria) as a symbol of vacuum of emotions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Furthermore, the young lady may have wanted to get pregnant to expression her aggression against her mother and father and their suffocating and hypocritical middle-class background. All of the which goes without saying. However, what the deeper defiance required by, and indeed built into, the self-contradiction in her and in our society which belie our rational, well-meaning intentions? It is absurd to think that this girl, or any girl, gets pregnant simply because she does not know better. This woman lives in an age where, for upper-class and middle-class girls like her, contraceptives and sex knowledge were never more available, and her society proclaims on all sides that anxiety about sex is archaic and encourages her to be free of all conflict about love. What of the anxiety which comes precisely from this new born freedom? Anxiety which places a burden on individual consciousness and capacity for personal choice which, if not insoluble, is great indeed; anxiety which in our sophisticated and enlightened day cannot be acted out like the hysterical women of Victorian times (for everyone nowadays ought to be free and uninhibited) and therefore turns inward and results in inhibiting feelings, suffocating passion in place of the inhibition of actions of the nineteenth-century woman. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The girls and women in this predicament are partial victims of a gigantic repression in themselves and in our society—the repression of eros and passion and the over availability of sex as a technique for repression. A corollary is that our dogmatic enlightenment contains elements within it which rob us of the very means of meeting this new and inner anxiety. We are experiencing a return of the repressed, a return of an eros which will not be denied no mater how much it is bribed on all sides by sex: a returned of the repressed in a primitive way precisely designed to mock our withdrawal of feelings. The same is found in out work with men. A young psychiatrist, in his training analysis, was preoccupied mainly with the fear that he was homosexual. Now in his middle twenties, he had never had sexual relations with a woman, and though he had not been a practicing homosexual, he had been approached by enough men to make him think that he emanated that “aura.” During his therapy, he became acquainted with a woman and in due course they begin having sexual relations. At least half the time they did not use contraceptives. Several times I brought to his attention the fact that the was fairly sure to get pregnant; he—knowing all about this from his medical training—would agree and thank me. #RandolpHarris 14 of 19
However, when he still had intercourse without contraception and once was very anxious when the woman missed her menstrual cycle, I found myself vaguely anxious, too, and irritated at how stupid her seemed to be. I caught myself up with the realization that, in my naivete, I was missing the whole point of what was going on. So I broke in, “It seems you want to make this woman pregnant.” He at first emphatically contradicted me, but then he paused to ponder the truth of my statement. All talk of methods and what they ought to do was of course irrelevant. In this man, who had never been able to feel himself masculine, some vital need was pushing him not just to prove himself a man—of which impregnating a woman is much more decisive than merely the capacity to have intercourse—but to get some hold on nature, experience a fundamental procreative process, give himself over to some primitive and powerful biological process, partake of some deeper pulsations in the cosmos. We shall not understand these problems except when we see that our patients have been robbed of precisely these deeper sources of human experience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
We observe in many of these illegitimate pregnancies—or their equivalent—a defiance of the very socially-ordered system which takes away affect, where technology is felt to be a substitute for feelings, a society which calls persons forth to an arid and meaningless existence and gives them, particularly the younger generation, an experience of personalization which is more painful than illegal abortion. No one who has worked with patients for a long period of time can fail to learn that the psychological and spiritual agony of depersonalization is harder to bear than physical pain. And, indeed, they often clutch at physical pain (or social ostracism or violence or delinquency) as a welcome relief. Have we become so civilized that we have forgotten that a girl can yearn to procreate, and can do so not just for psychobiological reasons but to break up the arid desert of feelingless existence, to destroy for one if not for all the repetitive pattern of fucking-to-avoid-the-emptiness-of-despair (“What shall we do tomorrow?” as T.S. Eliot has a rich courtesan cry, “What shall we ever do?”). Or that she can yearn to become pregnant because tee art is never fully converted to a passionlessness, and she is driven to an expression of that which is denied her and which she herself consciously denies in our age of the cool millennium. At least being pregnant is something real, and it proves to the girl and to the man that they are real. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Alienation is felt as a loss of the capacity to be intimately personal. As I hear these people, they are crying, “We yearn to talk but our dried voices are birds feet over broken glass. We go to bed because we cannot hear each other; we go to bed because we are too shy to look in each other’s eyes, and in bed one can turn away one’s head.” It should not be surprising that a revolt is occurring against the mores which people think cause alienation; a defiance of social norms which promise virtue without trying, sex without risk wisdom without struggle, luxury without effort—all provided that they agree to settle for love without passion, and soon even sex without feeling. The denial of the daimonic means only that the Earth Spirits will come back to haunt us in a new guise; Gaea will be heard, and when the darkness returns the black Madonna will be present if there is no white. The error into which we have fallen obviously consists not of our scientific advances and enlightenment as such, but the using of these for a blanket allaying of all anxiety about sex and love. Marcuse holds that in a nonrepressive society, as sex develops it tends to merge with eros. It is clear that our society has done just the opposite: we separated sex from eros and then tried to repress eros. The passion which is one element of the denied eros then comes back from its repression to upset the person’s whole existence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The significant self is one who has come through the ravages of an insignificance-producing technology, has learned to accept and know oneself, has come to appreciate one’s place in the scheme of things (nature and other people), and as learned how to integrate the various sides of oneself in an authentic and honest fashion. The person who is struggling to be oneself and know oneself and enjoy being alive ever comes back, full circle, to the beginning, to that vaguest of all concepts: Love. Love, more than being a mere feeling, idea, ideal, or notion, is the most complex experience in all human life. It is the cause of more joy and also more misery than anything else we can know. What do we mean by love? Do any two people mean the same thing by it? Look at the confusion engendered by the simple expression of “I love you”: Sometimes it means: I desire you or I want you sexually. It may mean: I hope you love me or I hope that I will be able to love you. Often it means: It may be that a love relationship can develop between us or even I hate you. Often it is a wish for emotional exchange: I want your admiration in exchange for mine or I give my love in exchange for some passion or I want to feel cozy and at home wit you or I admire some of your qualities. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
A declaration of love is mostly a request: I desire you or I want you to gratify me or I want your protection or I want to be intimate with you or I want to exploit your loveliness. Sometimes it is the need for security and tenderness, for parental treatment. It may mean: My self-love goes out to you. However, it may also express submissiveness: Please take me as I am or I feel guilty about you. I want through you to correct the mistakes I have made in human relations. It may be self-sacrifice and a masochistic wish for dependency. Saying I love you to someone may also be a way of saying good-bye to a person you have wronged, someone you have set up, when you know something is about to happen to them. However, it also may be a full affirmation of the other, taking responsibility for mutual exchange of feelings. It may be a weak feeling of friendliness, it may be the scarcely even whispered expression of ecstasy. “I love you,” wish, desire, submission, conquest: it is never the word itself that tells the real meaning here. “Wherefore, hear my voice and follow me, and you shall be a free people, and ye shall have no laws but my laws when I come, for I am your lawgiver, and what can stay my hand?” reports Doctrines and Covenants 38.22. It would be nice for people to recognize who one is and what one does, to recognize the individual as a person, and enjoy what we are sharing with them. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Enlightened to a Larger Pain by the Contrast with the love–Was there Ever a Society where this Miracle Happened?
I went down to meet him. The evening was all aglow and full of the scent of the kitchens of the Quarter. I motioned for the guards to let him come back. He was in a frantic state. He was wearing the same three-piece white suit as yesterday, short now open, tie gone, and he was all rumpled and smudged with dirt and his hair was mussed. Drastic changes in industrial technique, economy, and social structures have occurred in Capitalism between the nineteenth and twenty first centuries. The changes in the character of mortals are no less drastic and fundamental. Capitalism in the United States of America is not only more powerful and more advanced than in Europe, it is also the model toward which European Capitalism is developing. It is such a model not because Europe is trying to imitate it, but because it is the most progressive form of Capitalism, freed from feudal remnants and shackles. The feudal heritage has, aside from its obvious negative qualities, many human traits which, compared with the attitude produced by pure Capitalism, are exceedingly attractive. European criticism of the United States of America is based essentially on the older human values of feudalism, inasmuch as they are alive in Europe. It is a criticism of the present in the name of a past which is rapidly disappearing in Europe itself. The difference between Europe and the United States of America in this respect is only the difference between an older and a newer phase of Capitalism, between Capitalism stilled blended with feudal remnants and a pure form of it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The most obvious change from the nineteenth to the twenty first century is the increased use of steam engine, of the combustion motor, of electricity, the use of atomic energy, ethanol, and solar power. The development is characterized by the increasing replacement of manual work by machine work, and beyond that, of human intelligence by machine intelligence. While in 1850 mortals supplied 15 percent of the energy for work, animals 79 percent, and machines 6 percent, the ratio in 2019 is 3 percent, 1 percent and 96 percent respectively. In the twenty first century we find an increasing tendency to employ automatically regulated machines which have their own brains, and which bring about a fundamental change in the whole process of production. The technical change in the mode of production is caused by, and in its turn necessitates, an increasing concentration of capital. The decrease in number and importance of smaller firms is in direct proportion to the increase of big economic colossi. Currently, of the 2,400 independent American corporations covering most stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange, 30 companies control 47 percent of the assets of all the companies represented. Many of the largest nonbanking corporations control a vast majority of all the nonbanking corporate wealth. For instance, respectively 200 companies could control 300,000 smaller companies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
It must further be remembered that the influence of one of these huge companies extends far beyond the assets under its direct control. Smaller companies which sell to or buy from the larger companies are likely to be influenced by them to a vastly greater extent than by other smaller companies with which they might deal. In many cases the continued prosperity of the smaller company depends on the favor of the larger and almost inevitably the interests of the latter become the interests of the former. The influence of the larger company on prices is often greatly increased by its mere size, even though it does not begin to approach a monopoly. Its political influence may be tremendous. Therefore, if roughly half of the corporations and smaller companies it is fair to assume that very much more than half of industry is dominated by these great units. This concentration is made even more significant when it is recalled that a result of it, approximately 3,250 individuals out of a population of three hundred and twenty-five million are in a position to control and direct most of the American wealth and industry. This concentration of power has been growing since 1933, and has yet to stop. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The number of self-employed entrepreneurs has decreased considerably. While in the beginning of the nineteenth century approximately 80 percent of the occupied population were self-employed entrepreneurs, around 42 percent are now incorporated in this category. The eleven largest companies in America employ 20.18 million people. As these figure already indicate, with the concentration of enterprises goes an enormous increase of employees in these big enterprises. Altogether, nearly 50 percent of the United States of America’s population is middle class, 25 percent of American household are considered low income. With the increase in the importance of the giant enterprises, another development of utmost importance has occurred: the increasing separation of management from ownership. Another fundamental change from the nineteenth-century to contemporary Capitalism is the increase in significance of the domestic market. Our whole economic machines rests upon the principle of mass production and mass consumption. While in the nineteenth century the general tendency was to save, and not to indulge in expenses which could not be paid for immediately, the contemporary system is exactly the opposite. Everybody is coaxed into buying as much as one can, and before one has saved enough to pay for one’s purchases. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
The need for more consumption is strongly stimulated by advertising and all other methods of psychological pressure. This development does hand in hand with the rise of the economic and social status of the working class. Especially in the United States of America, but all over Europe, the working class has participated in the increased production of the whole economic system. The salary of the worker, and one’s social benefits, permit one a level of consumption which would have seemed fantastic one hundred and fifty-six years ago. One’s social and economic power has increased to the same degree and this not only with regard to salary and social benefits, but also to one’s human and social role in the factory. The disappearance of feudal factors means the disappearance of irrational authority. Nobody is supposed to be higher than one’s neighbor by birth, God’s will, natural law. Everybody is equal and free. Nobody may be exploited or commanded by virtue of a natural right. If one person is commanded by another, it is because the commanding one bought the labor or the services of the commanded one, on the labor market; one commands because they are both free and equal and thus could enter into a contractual relationship. However, with irrational authority—rational authority became obsolete, too. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
If the market and the contract regulates relationships, there is no need to know what is right and what is wrong and good and evil. All that is necessary is to known that things are fair—that the exchange is fair, and that things work—that they function. Another decisive fact which the twenty first century mortal experiences is the miracle of production. One commands forces thousands of times stronger than the ones nature ad given them before; steam, oil, electricity, have become their servants and beasts of burden. One crosses the oceans, the continents—first in weeks, then in days, now in hours and even minutes. One seemingly overcomes the law of gravity, and files through the air one converts deserts into fertile land, makes rain instead of praying for it. The miracle of production leads to the miracle of consumption. No more traditional barriers keep anyone from buying anything one takes a fancy to. One only needs to have the money. However, more and more people have the money—not for genuine pearls perhaps, but for the synthetic ones; there are even ethically sourced diamonds created in laboratories; people buy Fords that look like Cadillacs, for the affordable dress which look like the expensive ones, for cigarettes which are the same for millionaires and for the working person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Everything is within reach, can be bought, can be consumed. Where was there ever a society where this miracle happened? Mortals work together. Millions stream into the industrial plants and the offices—they come in cars, airplanes, helicopters, in subways, in buses, in trains—they work together, according to a rhythm measured by the experts, with methods worked out by the experts, not too fast, not too slow, but together; each a part of the whole. The evening stream flows back: they read the same newspaper, they listen to the radio, they see the movies, the same for those on the top and for those at the bottom of the ladder, for the intelligent and the less advances, for the educated and those still learning. Produce, consume, enjoy together, in step, without asking questions. That is the rhythm of their lives. What kind of mortal, then does our society need? Wat is the social character suited to twenty-first-century Capitalism? It needs mortals who co-operate smoothly in large groups; who want to consume more and more, and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs mortals who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority, or principle, or conscience—yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected, to fit into the social machine without friction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
How can mortals be guided without force, led without leaders, be prompted without any aim—expect the one to be on the move, to function, to go ahead? Let us approach this from the point of what we do when we live our lives. Each of us is born to certain situations or statuses in one’s life. Attached to each of these, whether we are born to them or whether we acquire them as we grow, is a set of behaviors that go with the statuses. People expect certain things, say, from a teacher, a carpenter, a doctor, a welder. Those things we expect from them makes up the roles of social interaction. Among the many things we do, then, is to perform certain expected behaviors. The authentic, fully functioning, self-actualizing person is one who plays those roles to the best of one’s ability and gets personal satisfaction from doing it. One tires to concentrate on playing only the roles that are consistent with who one is. That is, the healthy person is one who is able to sort out the various roles one may play, select for concentrating on those that are personally meaningful to one and expressive of one’s selfhood, and act out the role behavior well and satisfyingly. However, what about those roles this healthy person gets stuck with? What happens, for example, when such a guy—call him Justin—discovers that he has gotten this girl—Jill—pregnant? What about the situation if they decide to marry? #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Already there are two new positions being forced on them, spouse and parent, and the roles will be forced on them, too. Our answers may seem callous, but let us explore this situation. Justin and Jill are human beings. As such, they have certain potential and actual skills. Thinking, reasoning, logic, and prediction are some of these skills, as well as loving, kissing and passion of physical intimacy. In many cases spontaneous pregnancies are more conscious than either party is willing to admit. Psychologists know, for instance, that many times young ladies will forget to take their birth patrol pills or other precautions before the physical intimacy. Some are unconsciously motivated to force a married or to get back at parents. Some are indulging in self-defeating behavior. However, mature, self-actualizing people like Justin and Jill are aware of the outcomes of their behavior and able to involve themselves with these outcomes to follow through pretty healthily with their involvements. Sometimes there is an understandable amount of disappointment or self-criticism, but the decision to accept the role they now find facing them is usually taken with a healthy degree of good humor. The decision the couple makes may be not to marry or to seek some other solution. However, the important thing is the decisions involve the fullest, most authentic engagement of the persons and their experiences. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Another way of saying this is that self-actualizing people enjoy the novelty and challenge of different situations. Even critical situations like surprises bundles of joy can be opportunities for growth and chances to display fullest selfhood. After all, life is much more than play-acting. It involves a constant round of choice-making experiences. The self-actualizing person tries to live an authentic, fully aware life, by dealing realistically and honestly with oneself, others, and the decisions one makes. How can this be done? How can a person be authentic, real and unpretentious when for much of one’s childhood one is taught to be otherwise? In the absence of a wholesale change of social attitudes to encourage authenticity, the only hope at present apparently is possessed n the freedom of the person to become more fully what one is. Suppose a person does not know he or she is free? Most of us do not. We get caught up in the bag of thinking of ourselves as determined by something—biology, destiny, God, culture—and one of the most difficult things to do is to convince someone that one is a free, moral agent, that one can live one’s life in one’s own terms, that one has choices which may be hidden but which are nonetheless freely his or hers. If a person will conscientiously study one’s own life, one’s choices, one’s preferences, one will find, we believe, that a startling amount of what one has done is one’s own thing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Most of one’s preferences, one will find, are products of one’s value systems; thus preferences are automatic choices as unique to an individual as one’s value system are. To believe otherwise is to deny the richness and variability of life and to limit one’s freedom to make choices based on one’s individual character. The trick is, of course, to enable a person to develop and operate on the basis of one’s own value system. The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. Existential in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one’s existence. This includes temporal, spatial, historical, psychological, sociological, biological conditions. And it includes the finite freedom which reacts to these conditions and changes them. An existential knowledge is a knowledge in which these elements, and therefore the whole existence of one who knows, participate. This seems to contradict the necessary objectivity of the cognitive act and the demand for detachment. However, knowledge depends on its object. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
There are realms of reality or—more exactly—of abstraction from reality in which the most complete detachment is the adequate cognitive approach. Everything which can be expressed in terms of quantitative measurement has this character. However, it is most inadequate to apply the same approach to reality in its infinite concreteness. A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing. You must participate in a self in order to know what it is. However, by participating you change it. In all existential knowledge both subject and object are transformed by the very act of knowing existential knowledge is based on an encounter in which a new meaning is created and recognized. The knowledge of another person, the knowledge of history, the knowledge of a spiritual creation, religious knowledge—all have existential character. This does not exclude theoretical objectivity on the basis of detachment. However, it restricts detachment to one element within the embracing act of cognitive participation. You may have a precise detached knowledge of another person, one’s psychological type and one’s calculable reactions, but in knowing this you do not know the person, one’s centered self, one’s knowledge of oneself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Only in participating in oneself, in performing an existential break-through into the center of one’s being, will you know one in the situation of your break-through to one. This is the first meaning of existential, namely existential as the attitude of participating with one’s own existence in some other existence. The other meaning of existential designates a content and not an attitude. It points to a special form of philosophy: to Existentialism. We have to deal with it because it is the expression of the most radical form of the courage to be as oneself. However, before going into it we must show why both an attitude and a content are described with words which are derived from the same word, “existence.” The existential attitude and the Existentialist content have in common an interpretation of the human situation which conflicts with a nonexistential interpretation. The latter assets that mortals are able to transcend, in knowledge and life, the finitude, the estrangement, and the ambiguities of human existence. The right thing to do with Godly habits is to immerse them in the life of the Lord until they become such a spontaneous expression of our lives that we are no longer aware of them. Love means that there are no visible habits—that your habits are so immersed in the Lord that you practice them without realizing it. “You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God,” reports 2 Corinthians 9.11. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
An existential attitude instigates a philosophy of existence. The knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern, in an existential attitude. At the same time there is a doctrine of mortals which describes the estrangement of mortals from their essential nature in terms of anxiety and despair. Mortals in the existential situation of finitude and estrangement can reach truth only in an existential attitude. Mortals have no place of pure objectivity above finitude and estrangement. One’s cognitive function is as existentially conditioned as one’s whole being. This is the connection of the two meanings of existential. Sometimes it is also important for us to understand that dream figures are like Angels. They look human, but their World is the realm of imagination, where the natural and moral laws of actual life are suspended. “Now if a mortal desired to serve God, it is one’s privilege; or rather, if one believes in God it is one’s privilege to serve him; but if one does not believe in God there was no law to punish one,” reports Alma 30.7. However, God will lead you directly through every barrier and right into the chamber of the knowledge of himself. The proof that our relationship is right with God is that we do our best whether we feel inspired or not. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
No matter how difficult something you or a loved one faces, is should not take over your life and be the center of all your interest. Challenges are growth experiences, temporary scenes to be played out on the background of a pleasant life. Do not become so absorbed in a single event that you cannot think of anything else or care for yourself or for those who depend on your. Remember, much like the mending of the body, the healing of some spiritual and emotional challenges takes time. The Lord wants us to be patient in afflictions, for we shall have many; but endure them for he is with us until the end. As we are patient, we will come to understand what the statement, “I am with thee” thee means. God’s love brings joy and peace. “Cannot take a step, then take my hand. If you love me, you will wait. Something up ahead, just do not be scared. If you love me, stay with me. More than a life of this panic. If you love me, you will wait for me. Our dream will not surely be forgotten. If you love me, just stay with me. If you need another love song just tell me, I can write it. If you need another spaceship, just tell me, I can find it,” reports Steve Brain (Wait for Me). It is love that finds the body and in human relationship a route toward eternity. May every blessing find you. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Not with a Club the Heart is Broken, Nor with a Stone—I think that Earth Seems so to those in Heaven!
Oh, and it is the same old beat with you, Erich, you Devil, you want to do it, you want to, you want to see it, you greedy little beast, you cannot give her over to the Angels and you know they are waiting! You know the God who can sanctify her suffering has purified her an will forgive her last cries. Mental health is to be determined objectively and society has both a furthering and a distorting influence on mortals, contradicts not only the relativistic view, discussed in the past, but two other views which I want to discuss now. One, decidedly the most popular one today, wants to make us believe that contemporary Western society and more especially, the American way of life corresponds to the deepest needs of human nature and that adjustments to this way of life means mental health and maturity. Social psychology, instead of being a tool for the criticism of society, thus becomes the apologist for the status quo. The concept of maturity and mental health in this view, corresponds to the desirable attitude of a worker or employee in industry or business. Maturity is the ability to stick to a job, the capacity to give more on any job than is asked for, reliability, persistence to carry out a plan regardless of the difficulties, the ability to work with other people under organization and authority, the ability to make decisions, a will to life, flexibility, independence, and tolerance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
Maturity is the virtues of a good worker, employee or soldier in the big social organizations of our time; they are the qualities which are usually mentioned in advertisements for a junior executive. To one, and many others who think like one, maturity is the same as adjustment to our society, without ever raising the question whether this adjustment is to a healthy or a pathological way of conducting one’s life. “And now my beloved beings, I had said these things unto you that I might awaken you to a sense of your duty to God, that ye may walk blameless before him, that ye may walk after the holy order of God, after which you have been received,” reports Alma 7.22. If you remain true, you will get the sign that God is with you. When you come to your wits’ end and feel inclined to panic—do not! Stand true to God, and he will bring out his truth in a way that will make your life an expression of worship. Put into practice what you have learned. Make a determination to trust in God. “The house of the LORD God is to be here,” reports 1 Chronicles 22.1. If you have always prided yourself on your sensitivity to the needs of others, you may find resistance when you adopt toughness. Sometimes when people look at it, it is like someone turned on the Christmas lights, it makes them giddy and full of joy. Will you be accepted? #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Maturity is the same as adjustment to our society, without ever raising the question whether this adjustment is to a healthy or a pathological way of conducting one’s life. However, in contrast to this view is the one which runs from Dr. Freud, and which assumes a basic and unalterable contradiction between human nature and society, a contradiction between human nature and society, a contradiction which follows from the alleged asocial nature of mortals. For Dr. Freud, mortals are driven by two biologically rooted impulses: the craving for sexual pleasure, and for destruction. The aim of one’s sexual desire is complete sexual freedom, that is, unlimited access to all women and men one might find desirable. Some mortals discovered by experience that sexual (genital) love affords them their greatest gratification, so that it becomes in affect the prototype of all happiness to him or her. These types of people must have been impelled to seek their happiness further along the path of sexual relations, to make genital erotism the central point of one’s life. Primitive humans have yet to cope with no, or exceedingly few restrictions to the satisfaction of those basic desires. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
Primitive mortals can give vent to their aggression, and there are few limitations to the satisfaction of one’s sexual impulses. In actual fact, most primitive mortals knew nothing of any restrictions on their instincts, some do not even “feel” that they have instincts. Civilized humans have exchanged some part of their changes of happiness for a measure of security. The happy savage’s aggressiveness has two sources: one, the innate striving for destruction (death instinct) and the other the frustration of one’s instinctual desires, imposed upon him or her by society. While mortals may channel part of one’s aggression against oneself, through the Super-Ego, and while a minority can sublimate their sexual desire into love of humanity, aggressiveness remains ineradicable. Mortals will always compete with, and attack each other, if not for material things, then for the prerogatives in sexual relationships, which must arouse the strongest rancor and most violent enmity among men and women who are otherwise equal. Let us suppose this were also to be removed by instituting complete liberty in sexual life, so that the family, the germ-cell of culture, ceased to exist; one could not, it is true, foresee the new paths on which cultural development might then proceed, but one thing one would be bound to expect and that the ineffable feature of human nature would follow wherever it led. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Since for Dr. Freud love is in its essence sexual desire, he is compelled to assume a contradiction between love and social cohesion. Love, according to him, is by its very nature egotistical and antisocial, and the sense of solidarity and humanly love are not primary feelings rooted in mortal’s nature, but aim-inhibited sexual desires. One the basis of his concept of mortals, that of their inherent wish for unlimited sexual satisfaction, and of his destructiveness, Dr. Freud must arrive at a picture of the necessary conflict between civilization and mental health and happiness. Primitive mortals are healthy and happy because one is not frustrated in one’s basic instincts, but one lacks the blessings of culture. Civilized humans are more secure, enjoy art and science, but they are bound to be neurotic because of the continued frustration of one’s instincts, enforced by civilization. For Dr. Freud, social life and civilization are essentially in contrast to the needs of human nature as he sees it, and mortals are confronted with the tragic alternative between happiness based on the unrestricted satisfaction of one’s instincts, and security and cultural achievements based on instinctual frustration, hence conducive to neurosis and all other forms of mental sickness. Civilization, to Dr. Freud, is the product of instinctual frustration and thus the cause of mental illness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Dr. Freud’s concept of human nature as being essentially competitive (and asocial) is the same as we find it in most authors who believe that the characteristics. Dr. Freud’s theory of the competitive struggles for survival. It can also be translated into the sphere of economy. There are basically two types of people, the homo sexual is and the homo economicus. One is after sex, the other is after money. Both the economic mortal and the sexual mortal are convenient fabrications whose alleged nature—isolated, asocial, greedy and competitive—makes Capitalism appear as the system which corresponds perfectly to human nature, and places it beyond the reach of criticism. The necessary conflict between human nature and society, imply the defense of contemporary society and they both are one-sided distortions. Furthermore, most ignore the fact that society is only in conflict with the asocial aspects of mortals, partly produced by itself, but often also with one’s most valuable human qualities, which is suppresses rather than furthers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
An objective examination of the relation between society and human nature must consider both the furthering and the inhibiting impact of society on humans, taking into account the nature of mortals and the needs stemming from it. The neglected pathogenic function of modern society needs to be highlighted. Many of the self-defeating behaviors are motivated by conscious needs. For instance, there appear to be people all around us who have a strong dislike for themselves. In each of us there may be a tinge of dislike for some aspect of our self: freckles, hair, teeth, vocabulary, color, accent. However,most of us manage to combine our dislike of parts of ourselves with very good feelings about the rest of the package. A few people, though, manage to reach a point where they entertain active hatred for their entire beings. They manage to pull off some of the greatest self-defeating stunts since the six hundred marched into the Valley of Death in the Crimean War! Some of these people do it with alcohol, using it precisely because they know it will put them into a state in which they will commit self-defeating or losing behavior. They drink to get courage or strength enough to hurt themselves. There are many who do the same with drugs of various kinds. Again, this is not to dispute the physiological factors of addiction or habituation. It is simply to emphasize that even before the physiological hook gets into some people, they hook themselves onto a drug or habit that will inevitably bring them down. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
An example of the conscious needs that motivate self-defeating behavior is dependency. Some people refuse to take their medicine because they like or need to be dependent on their doctors or they need their family’s concerns. Others get themselves in trouble with authorities because they need to keep themselves tied to their parents or spouses; they build a bond of trouble-rescue-restriction-release-trouble, a cycle that repeats itself week after month after year in some cases. Why? It is a bit too simple to say that the needs are always entirely conscious or even always entirely unconscious.Just as our physiques are three-dimensional, our complexities encompass behaviors that have horizontal, vertical, and depth dimensions as well. Add to this the dimensions that we call time and space and you have a model of human behavior that cannot be sketched on a flat piece of paper. Therefore, we must keep in mind the person, who will play more roles in one’s life, but—like an actor—the mortal is one person and all one’s roles are the individual, too. This multi-dimensioned person is each of us. Mixed in with all the motivations we have described as being universal are the ones that are unique to each of us. There is, therefore, no one answer to the “why?” of the behavior, whether it is the behavior of one or many. It may be instructive, but only instructive, to see what may cause actions in particular cases. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
If a mortal has a strong need to enter into complicated situations from which one cannot extricate oneself, we may uncover some of the reasons why, but only some of them. If you do something, even after an authority figure has told you to stop, changes are that among your individually unique needs is the need to engage in whatever destructive behavior you have been warned to stop, apparently this need is stronger than your need to stay out of danger. Some people engage in bad behavior because they feel a strong need to be punished. They feel that they can only be satisfied or happy when they are being pushed out or put into a situation where they are in some sort of danger of losing out. When these types of people win or achieve something, they feel and empty, hollow sort of triumph. Only when these individuals have guilt so ingrained in their being are punishing themselves or being punished can they admit to feelings of satisfaction. It is hard for guilt given people to admit this to friends. Not even their wives or husbands have ever heard them say these things, but their spouses notice over the years that they only seem completely happy and at ease when they are being pressured, when they are driving themselves to take on unnecessary extra work. It seemed to one woman that her husband was “trying to kill himself,” with his overly emotional and wild criminal behaviors. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
Dr. Freud thought we each have an instinctive death wish. We do not find the evidence for this to be either conclusive or impressive. However, we know that many people learn to deal with their guilt feelings or their negative self-concepts by punishing themselves or by being punished. Without using the term as a diagnosis, this behavior is often called masochism. A person who is still doing something dangerous, even after being warned not to, is a symbol of all the things one does that one has been told one should not do. One is almost totally absorbed by and concerned with guilt. The diagnosis of potential death and danger us almost like a priestly issue of penance: this is what one must undergo to purge oneself of one’s guilt. Some people are begging to be punished because they want to get their just desserts, which could even be death, for being the bad person they are. “No, I insist on paying the full price. I will not take for the LORD what is yours, or sacrifice a burnt offering that costs me nothing,” reports 1 Chronicles 21.24. This long example, we repeat, deals only with one person. It is not meant to explain all people who engage in risky behaviors or careers, all compulsive people, or to condemn all teachings about guilt. It is, however, instructive. Guilt, as experienced by most of us, is the feeling we have when we have let ourselves down, when we have not lived up to our own expectations. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
As such, it is a good motivator: guilt enables us to shift our gears and try a different speed or direction in our behavior. We should feel guilt for committing certain social indiscretions or violations of necessary and expected behaviors. If I step on the foot a woman by accident, both my love for people and my social responsibility will produce guilt feelings. Hopefully, I will be a more careful walker in the future. However, if I tore up my feet, sold my shoes, and swore never to go near people again, I would probably be labeled neurotic—given to extreme guilt reactions. When anxiety and other strong emotions produce fears or self-defeating responses in us, we are experiencing a form of neurosis. This particular problem in living is quite common in the lives of most of us. Each of us at times, precisely because we view our many facets as separate, lets this imagined separateness become virtually real. As the gaps in our thinking about our selves grow, so the gaps and distortions really grow in our everyday behavior. It we imagine that we have a good self and a bad self, any attempt to emphasize the one we want or need to emphasize exaggerates our behaviors in that direction, almost as if we were to say: “See? That other part of me does not even exist!” #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Of course it exists, It is just as real and as important apart of your total self as any other part. However, it is only a part. However,it is only a part. It is so interwoven and inextricably tied in with all the other facets that often you do not know which one is which. That in itself is not bad, either. Rather than trying to single out which part is which, one would be much better off simply accepting and living with the entire package. However, this is so simple to say and so difficult to do. We are encouraged by our society’s values, by its mores, by so many things, to live only partially. Some of the negative consequences of such splitting up are separateness, marginality, and alienation. “There is a God, and he created all things, both the Heavens and the Earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon,” reports 2 Nephi 2.14. As children of our Heavenly Father, we have been blessed with the gift of moral agency, the capacity and power of independent action. Endowed with agency, we are agents, and we primarily are to act and not merely be acted upon—especially as we seek learning by study and also by faith. As gospel learners, we should be doers of the word, and not just hearers only. Our hearts are open to the influence of the Holy Ghost as we properly exercise agency and act in accordance with correct principles—and we thereby invite God’s teachings and testifying power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Stars Amid Profound Galaxies–Those Who Read the Revelations Must Not Criticize
We are all American by virtue of our location of birth, but our parents and language and food and lifestyle may differ. We want the right to life as full human beings, which means we will not be separated from our past and present. We can acknowledge only a fractional part of the time in which Black Americas have actually been shown any kind of equality of rights and opportunity. Many Black Americans are discovering a sense of appreciation for their heritage and they are attempting to identify with their American citizenship. There are many African Americans who are living fully in American society, and who are middle-class and upper-middle class and wealthy. There is an increasing tendency in the Black community to display cultural pluralism, which means to be as American as possible, but to identify and retain pride in the heritage of being African American. Many Blacks see their own identity is far more important than either accepting or rejecting somebody’s stereotyped identity. So, they are taking pride in their heritage, finding some satisfaction in greater acceptance of things labelled soul. Black is Beautiful means to honor your features and accept who you are as a person so that you can see how beautiful you are, and it does not mean that any other culture or race is less attractive. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
Black is beautiful also means of many: I am a human being, real and alive, and only recently aware of myself as a person with unlimited potential. I like who and what I am. I can be real now. I am a human being and my identity is something I can develop and feel good about. Self-acceptance and self-appreciation are definitely part of what self-actualization as a process is all about. Knowing your part inhumanity is a vital concept in self-actualization. This may mean coming to a fuller, deeper, more holistic appreciation of all that you are: body, color, heritage, intellect, and certainly emotions. This is also a current definition of together. Much like other Americans, Black want full acceptance of their status as human beings who happen to have a special ancestry and heritage. The drastic change or destruction of stereotypes upsets or upends our comfortable ways of handling our environment. We are challenged to react in ways in which we have little or no experience. However, it is an important transition stage for any person undergoing the emergence of one’s fullest identity. It is our hope that enough Americans can learn to accept and like and experience their own self-identities that they can also enjoy and appreciate this in people who may differ in pigmentation and heritage. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
Anxiety and courage have a psychosomatic character. They are biological as well as psychological. From the biological point of view one would say that fear and anxiety are the guardians, indicating the threat of nonbeing to a living being and producing movements of protection and resistance to this threat. Fear and anxiety must be considered as expressions of what one could call self-affirmation on its guard. Without the anticipating fear and the compelling anxiety no finite being would be able to exist. Courage, in this view, is the readiness to take upon oneself negatives, anticipated by fear, for the sake of a fuller positivity. Biological self-affirmation implies the acceptance of want, toil, insecurity, pain, possible destruction. Without this self-affirmation life could not be preserved or increased. The more vital strength a being has the more it is able to affirm itself in spite of the dangers announced by fear and anxiety. However, it would contradict their biological function if courage disregarded their warnings and prompted actions a directly self-destructive character. There is a right mean between cowardice and temerity.# RandolphHarris 3 of 11
Biological self-affirmation needs a balance between courage and fear. Such a balance is present in all living beings which are able to preserve and increase their being. If the warnings of fear no longer have an effect or if the dynamics of courage have lost their power, life vanishes. The drive for security, perfection, and certitude to which we have referred is biologically necessary. However, it becomes biologically destructive if the risk of insecurity, imperfection, and uncertainty is avoided. Conversely, a risk which has a realistic foundation in our self and our World is biologically demanded,while it is self-destructive without such a foundation. Life, in consequence, includes both fear and courage as elements of a life process in a changing but essentially established balance. As long as life has such a balance it is able to resist nonbeing. Unbalanced fear and unbalanced courage to destroy the life whose preservation and increase are the function of the balance of fear and courage. Humans are thrown into this World without their knowledge, consent, or will. Or they simply do not remember these things after soul amnesia. In respect, humans are not different from the animals, from the plants, or from inorganic matter. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
However, mortals are endowed with reason and imagination,and cannot be content with the passive role of a creature, with the role of dice cast out of cup. Mortals are driven by the urge to transcend the role ofthe creature, the accidentalness and passivity of their existence. Mortals can create life. This is the miraculous quality which they indeed share with all living beings, but with difference the one alone is aware of being created and of being a creator. Mortals can create life, or rather, women can create life, by giving birth to a child, and by caring for the child until it is sufficiently grown to take care of his or her own needs. Man—man and woman—can create by planting seeds, by producing material objects, by creating art, by creating ideas, by loving one another. In the act of creation mortals transcend themselves as a creature, raises oneself beyond the passivity and accidentalness of their existence into the realm of purposefulness and freedom. In human’s need for transcendence is possessed one of the foundations for love, as well as for art, religion and material production. “And they were also distinguished for their zeal towards God, and also towards mortals; for they were perfectly honest and upright in all things; and they were firm in the faith of Christ,” reports Alma 27.27. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
To create presupposes activity and care. It presupposes love for that which one creates. How then do mortals solve the problem of transcending oneself, if one is not capable of creating, if one cannot love? There is another answer to this need for transcendence: if I cannot create life, I can destroy it. To destroy life makes me also transcend it. Large sections of mortal’s civilization serve the purpose of giving one safety against the attack of fate and death. One realizes that life demands again and again the courage to surrender some or even all security for the sake of self-affirmation. Nevertheless, mortals try to reduce the power of fate and the threat of death as much as possible. Pathological anxiety about fate and death impels toward a security which is comparable to the security of a prison. One who lives in this prison is unable to leave the security given to one by one’s self-imposed limitations. However, these limitations are not based on a full awareness of reality. Therefore the security of the neurotic is unrealistic. The individual fears what is not to be feared and one feels to be safe what is not safe. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
Indeed, that mortals can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that mortals can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, mortals set themselves above life; they transcend oneself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for mortals, inasmuch as one is driven to transcend oneself is to create or destroy, to love or to hate. The anxiety which humans are not able to take upon themselves produces images of having no basis in reality, but it recedes in the face of things which should be feared. That is, one avoids particular dangers, although they are hardly real, and suppresses the awareness of having to die although this is an ever-present reality. Misplaced fear is a consequence of the pathological form of the anxiety of fate and death. The same structure can be observed in the pathological forms of the anxiety of guilt drives the person towards attempts to avoid this anxiety (usually called the uneasy conscience) by avoiding guilt. Moral self-discipline and habits will produce moral perfection although one remains aware that one cannot remove the imperfection which is implied in human’s existential situation, one’s estrangement from one’s true being. Neurotic anxiety does the same thing but in a limited, fixed, and unrealistic way. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
To say that mortals are capable of developing their primary potentiality for love and reason does not imply naïve belief in mortal’s goodness. Destructiveness is secondary potentiality, rooted in the very existence of mortals, and having the same intensity and power as any passion can have. However—and this is the essential point of my argument—it is only the alternative to creativeness. Creation and destruction, love and hate, are not two instincts which exist independently. They are both answers to the same need for transcendence, and the will to destroy must rise when the will to create cannot be satisfied. However, the satisfaction of the need to create leads to happiness; destructiveness to suffering, most of all, for the destroyer him or herself. The anxiety of becoming guilty, the horror of feeling condemned, are so strong that they make responsible decision and any kind of moral action almost impossible. However, since decision and actions cannot be avoided they are reduced to a minimum which, however, is considered absolutely perfect; and the sphere were they take place is defended against any provocation to transcend it. Here also the separation from reality has the consequence that the consciousness of guilt is misplaced. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
The moralistic self-defense of the neurotic makes one see guilt where there is no guilt or where one is guilty only in a very indirect way. Yet the awareness of real guilt and the self-condemnation which is identical with mortal’s existential self-estrangement are repressed, because the courage which could take them into itself is lacking. The pathological forms of the anxiety of the emptiness and meaninglessness show similar characteristics.Existential anxiety of doubt drives the person toward the creation of certitude in systems of meaning, which are supported by tradition and authority. In spite of the element of doubt which is implied in mortal’s finite spirituality, and in spite of the threat of meaninglessness implied in a mortal’s estrangement,anxiety is reduced by these ways of producing and preserving certitude.Neurotic anxiety builds a narrow castle of certitude which can be defended and is defended with the utmost tenacity. Mortal’s power of asking is prevented from becoming actual in this sphere, and if there is a danger of its becoming actualized by questions asked from the outside one reacts with fanatical rejection. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
However, the castle of undoubted certitude is not built on the rock of reality. The inability of the neurotic to have a full encounter with reality makes one’s doubts as well as one certitude unrealistic. One puts both in the wrong place. One doubts what is practically about doubt and one is certain where doubt is adequate. Above all, one does not admit the question of meaning in its universal and radical sense. The question is in the individual, as it is in every person as mortal under the conditions of existential estrangement. However, one cannot admit it because one is without the courage to take the anxiety of emptiness or doubt and meaninglessness upon oneself. Existential anxiety has an ontological character and cannot be removed but must be taken into the courage to be. Pathological anxiety is the consequence of the failure to take the anxiety upon itself. Pathological anxiety leads to self-affirmation on a limited, fixed, and unrealistic basis and to a compulsory defense of this basis. Pathological anxiety, in relation to the anxiety of fate and death, produces an unrealistic security; in relation to the anxiety of guilt and condemnation, an unrealistic perfection; in relation to the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness, an unrealistic certitude. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
Pathological anxiety, once established, is an object of medical healing. Existential anxiety is an object of priestly help. Neither the medical nor the priestly function is bound to its vocational representatives: the minister may be a healer and the psychotherapist a priest, and each human being may be both in relation to the neighbor. However, the function should not be confused and the representatives should not try to replace each other. The goal of both of them is helping mortal to reach full-self affirmation, to attain the courage to be. We want to realize and appreciate the position we occupy before God and the great blessings and privileges that are within our reach. We have just commenced, as it were, it the great work. We do not always comprehend these things, and hence we labor under difficulties pertaining to this matter, because we do not see, we do not comprehend the position and relationship that subsists between us and our God. God is our Father; we are his children. God has brought us into his covenant, and it is our privilege to go on from wisdom to wisdom, from intelligence to intelligence, from understanding of one principle to that of another, to go forward and progress in the development of truth until we can completely comprehend God. “Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven,” reports Matthew 6.9-10. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
A Precious Mouldering Pleasure it is to for the Soul to Select its Own Society
If they take you into their trust, tell you things that even most people do not know, there will be a bond, and maybe a bond that can somehow save us all. Many of us do not wish to settle for knowing just a little bit of other people, especially those we care about. So, we must find ways of opening up avenues of approach. By experimenting, we can invite these people to come out into the Sunlight and experience as much of life as possible. Why should we? If a person is happy being a Bluffer or an Expert or a Life of the Party, is it our business to take on the role of disturbing that individual? A fair question. First of all, it is not for anybody to say whether a person is truly happy or not. However, it is a peculiar and interesting fact that a self-actualizing person often attracts people who are only living partially. They may see the individual as a happy, effective, comfortable human being and come to that individual, associate with the person, in an effort to discover one’s secrets. Without ever admitting they want to be more than they are, they may show it or hint at it through their valuing or seeking after associations with certain people. Complementary and supplementary relationships are as common as male-female liaisons. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Often the more fully functioning partner blazes the trail.They shy and fumbling English person was often invited by the confident Zorbato jump in and play, or dance, or go after the woman: “Boss,” he said, “this is where I count on you. Now, don’t dishonor the male species! The god-devil sends you this choice morsel [a beautiful widow]. You’ve got teeth. All right, get ‘em into it. Stretch out your arm and take her! What did the Creator give us hands for?” “I don’t want any trouble!” I replied angrily. It is clear to see that the actualizer suggests, not to taunt or torment but to dare the other person to become more fully what he or she is. Often the half-person will come out and ask about oneself. Then the actualizer has some decisions to make. Will what he or she says make the person feel better or worse? If what must be said is hurtful, can the person take it? Will this interchange drastically affect the kind of relationship they have? Does one really want reality of is one asking for reassurance that one is likeable? If a person with insights into happier more effective living can communicate, the other person may be able to get the factual information one needs to begin working on oneself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, some people may not want to hear the truth about themselves, especially if it is painful. Anybody who has ever been asked to judge a friend’s work knows well the implication of that statement: If friendship or business relations are important to you, do not be negative. It is the rare individual who can objectively take criticism without some twinge of self-righteousness or resentment. Even well-meant, constructive criticism will wound creative people, who live with it and often because of it all their productive lives. A self-actualizing person generally has the peculiar knack of presenting criticism indirectly and one’s suggestions take on the nature of gifts, which tot he partially functioning individual they are. Some people like their coworkers,in the work place, to loosen up and play around sometimes to show that they are fully human. Yet, there are people who want to go to work, excel at their jobs and keep their person lives and business to themselves. It can make people uncomfortable when one of their employees or coworkers seems like a well adjusted superhuman. “I am not shrink, but I get the feeling you are embarrassed to let people see the…oh, the human side of you. Everybody sees Bud Jones, the super-efficient worker. No mistakes, no sloppiness, no margin for error.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Some people keep their human side to themselves because they have been taught people knowing too much about you and your family life can get you into trouble. “Bud, you are a guy who only let us see the perfect side. We are all human, Bud. It would make some of the newer people feel better about their chances if they could see that you really are flesh and blood. You are a nice and friendly guy, but it does not always show in public. More important than what it did for them, it would do them a lot of good. You do not always need to be person. Nobody expects as much as you do out of yourself. I would like to have you find out that being a human being can be enjoyable, too!” Some self-actualizing people have a trait called the older brother attitude. That is a healthy personality, which includes a high social interest. The older brother type cares about other people and want them to be fully human and to enjoy living rather than merely existing. Self-actualizing people are not running about with signs proclaiming their “Care for Sale,” but they are usually concerned about people and situations. They have enough good will in their beings to let it spill over and help people who really need it. And there are a lot more people living blindly, ignoring human needs, than there are those who care and can share that concern meaningfully and helpfully. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Though it is idealistic, one of the goals we have is the people,though discovering their own person significance, may want to help others discover theirs. Should this happen, a chain-reaction of fuller and more effective humanness might happen, too. If people got more out of living and took an interest in seeing to it that others got a chance to live more fully as well, we cannot help but feel that things might be a lot easier. The forward-going life instinct is stronger and increases in relative strength the more it grows. As it stands, human’s life is determined by the inescapable alternative between regression and progression, between return to a primal existence and arrival at human existence. Any attempt to return is painful, it inevitably leads to suffering and mental sickness, to death either physiologically or mentally (insanity). Every step forward is frightening and painful too, until a certain point has been reaches where fear and doubt have only minor proportions. Aside from the physiological nourished cravings (hunger, thirst, intimacy), all essential human cravings are determined by this polarity of the forward-going and the retrogressive impulse, which do not have the same biological strength. Humans have to solve a problem, one can never rest in the given situation of a passive adaption to nature. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Even the most complete satisfaction of all one’s instinctive needs does not solve one’s human problem; one’s most intensive passions and needs are not those rooted in one’s body, but those rooted in the very peculiarity of one’s existence. There lies also the key to humanistic psychoanalysis. As it turns out, the basic force which motivates human passions and desires are not the libido. As powerful as the sexual drive and all its derivations are, they are by no means the most powerful forces within humans and their frustration is not the cause of mental disturbance. The most powerful forces motivating human’s behavior stem from the condition of one’s existence, the human situation. Human cannot like statically because of their inner contradictions drive them to seek for an equilibrium, for a new harmony instead of the lost soul harmony with nature. After one has satisfied their basic needs, one is drive by the human needs. Human behavior is governed by a large number of types of motives, some that are physiological, but many more that are acquired and learned through social interaction, personal experience, and growth experiences. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
While our bodies tell humans what to eat and what to avoid—one conscious ought to tell one which needs to cultivate and satisfy, and which needs to let wither and starve out. However, hunger and appetite are functions of the body with which people are born—conscience, while potentially present,requires the guidance of people and principles which develop only during the growth of culture. All passions and strivings of humans are attempts to find an answer to one’s existence or, as we may also say, they are an attempt to avoid insanity. (It may be said in passing that the real problem of mental life is not why some people become insane, but rather why most avoid insanity.) Both the mentally healthy and the neurotic are driven by the need to find an answer, the only difference being that one answer corresponds more to the total needs of humans, and hence is more conducive to the unfolding of one’s powers and to one’s happiness than the other. All cultures provide for a patterned system in which certain solutions are predominant, hence certain strivings and satisfactions. Whether we deal with primitive religions, with theistic or non-theistic religions, they are all attempts to give an answer to human’s existential problem. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
The finest, as well as the most barbaric cultures have the same function and that is to answer the human existential problem—the difference is only whether the answer given is better or worse. The deviate from the cultural pattern is just as much in search of an answer as one’s more well-adjusted brother. One’s answer may be better or worse than the one given by one’s culture—it is always another answer to the same fundamental question raised by human existence. In this sense all cultures are religious and every neurosis is a private form of religion, provided we mean religion an attempt to answer the problem of human existence. Indeed, the tremendous energy in the forces producing mental illness, as well as those behind art and religion, could never be understood as an outcome of frustrated or sublimated physiological needs; they are attempts to solve the problem of being born human. All people are idealist and cannot help being idealists, provided we mean by idealism the striving for the satisfaction of needs which are specifically human and transcend the physiological needs of the organism. The difference is only that one idealism is a good and adequate solution, the other a bad and destructive one. The decision as to what is good and bad has to be made on the basis of our knowledge of human’s nature and the laws which govern its growth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
The distinction of the three types of anxiety is supported by the history of Western civilization. We find that at the end of ancient civilization ontic anxiety is predominant, at the end of the Middle Ages moral anxiety, and at the end of the modern period spiritual anxiety. However, in spite of the predominance of one type the others are also present and effective. Enough has been said about the end of the ancient period and its anxiety of fate and death in connection with an analysis of Stoic courage. As Stoics, we learn to focus on what is in our power. We ask ourselves what can we do to create a good life,no matter the circumstances we find ourselves in and what is required of us as human beings and what prevents us from living out to our full potential? Consistent stoic practice increasing our resilience, contentment, joy, and gives us the boldness necessary to tackle the tasks presented to us in life. We believe that we all have the ability to live artfully, and that requires effort. Living naturally means to take actions that we allow us to flourish. We are looking for our best possible selves. Humans are rational, social being. Therefore, there nature is to use their rational mind for the benefit of oneself and their society. Virtuous life is fully sufficient for happiness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The sociological background is well known: the conflict of the imperial powers, Alexander’s conquest of the East, the war between his follower, the conquest of West and East by republic Rome, the transformation of republican into imperial Rome through Caesar and Augusts, the tyranny of the post-Augustan emperors, the destruction of the independent city and nation states,the eradication of the former bearers of the aristocratic-democratic structure of society, the individual’s feeling of being in the hands of powers, natural as well as political, which are completely beyond his control and calculation—all this produced a tremendous anxiety and the quest for courage to meet the threat of fate and death. At the same time the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness made it impossible for many people, especially of the educated classes, to find a basis for such courage. Ancient Skepticism from its very beginning in the Sophists united scholarly and existential elements. Skepticism in its late ancient form was despair about the possibility of right acting as well as right thinking. It drove people into the desert where the necessity for decisions, theoretical and practical, is reduced to a minimum. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
However, most of those who experienced the anxiety of emptiness and the despair of meaninglessness tried to meet them with a cynical contempt of spiritual self-affirmation. Yet they could not hide the anxiety under skeptical arrogance. The anxiety of guilt and condemnation was effective in the groups who gathered in the mystery of cult with their rites of expiation and purification. Sociologically these circles of the initiated were rather indefinite. In most of them even slaves were admitted.In them, however, as in the whole non-Jewish ancient World more the tragic than the personal guilt was experiences. Guilt is the pollution of the soul by the material realm or by demonic powers. Therefore the anxiety of emptiness, within the dominating anxiety of fate and death. Only the impact of the Jewish-Christian message changed this situation, and so radically that toward the end of the Middle Ages the anxiety of guilt and condemnation was decisive.If one period deserves the name of the age of anxiety it is the pre-Reformation and Reformation. The anxiety of condemnation symbolized as the wrath of God and intensified by the imagery of hell and purgatory drove people of the late Middle Ages to try various means of assuaging their anxiety. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
To escape anxiety, people took pilgrimages to holy places,of possible to Rome; ascetic exercises, sometimes of an extreme character; devotion to relics, often brought together in mass collections; acceptance of ecclesiastical punishments and the desire for indulgences; exaggerated participation in masses and penance, increase in prayers and alms. In short they asked ceaselessly: How can I appease the wrath of God, how can I attain divine mercy, the forgives of sin? This predominant form of anxiety embraces the other two forms. The personified figure of death appeared in painting, poetry, and preaching. However, it was death and guilt together. Death and the devil were allied in the anxious imagination of the period. The anxiety of fate returned with the invasion of late antiquity. Fortuna became a preferred symbol in the art of the Renaissance, and even the Reformers were not free from astrological beliefs and fears. And the anxiety of fate was intensified by fear of demonic powers acting directly or through other human beings to cause illness, death, and all kinds of destruction. At the same time, fate was extended beyond death into the pre-ultimate state of purgatory and the ultimate state of Hell of Heaven. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The darkness of destiny could not be removed; not even the Reformers were able to remove it, as their doctrine of predestination shows. In all these expressions the anxiety of fate appears as an element within the all-embracing anxiety of guilt and in the permanent awareness of the threat of condemnation. The late Middle Ages was not a period of doubt; and the anxiety of emptiness and loss of meaning appeared only twice, both remarkable occasions,however, and important for the future. One was the Renaissance, when theoretical skepticism was renewed and the question of meaning haunted some of the most sensitive minds. In Michelangelo’s prophets and sibyls and in Shakespeare’s Hamlet there are indications of a potential anxiety of meaninglessness. The other was in the demonic assaults that Martin Luther experienced, which were neither temptations in the moral sense nor moments of despair about threatening condemnation, but moments when belief in his work and message disappeared and no meaning remained. Similar experiences of the desert or the night of the soul are frequent among mystics. It must be emphasized however that in all these cases the anxiety of guilt remained predominant, and that only after the victory of humanism and Enlightenment as the religious foundation of Western society could anxiety about spiritual nonbeing become dominant. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The sociological cause of the anxiety of guilt and condemnation that arose at the end of the Middle Ages is not difficult to identify. In general one can say it was the dissolution of the protective unit of the religiously guided medieval culture. More specifically there must be emphasized the rise of an educated middle class in the larger cities, people who tried to have as their own experience what had been merely an objective, hierarchically controlled system of doctrines and sacraments. In this attempt, however, they were driven to hidden or open conflict with the Church, whose authority they still acknowledged. There must be emphasized the concentration of political power in the princes and their bureaucratic-military administration, which eliminated the independence of those lower in the feudal system. There must be emphasized the state absolutism which transformed the masses in city and country into subjects whose only duty was to work and obey, without any power to resist the arbitrariness of the absolute rulers. There must be emphasized the economic catastrophes connected with early capitalism, such as the importation of gold from the New World, expropriation of the less affluent and so on. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
In all these often described changes it is the conflict between the appearance of independent tendencies in all groups of society, on the one and,and the rise of an absolutist concentration of power on the other that is largely responsible for the predominance of the anxiety of guilt. Their rational, commanding, absolute God of nominalism and the Reformation is partly shaped by the social, political, and spiritual absolutism of the period;and the anxiety created in turn by one’s image is partly an expression of the anxiety produced by the basic social conflict of the disintegrating Middle Ages. The breakdown of absolutism, the development of liberalism and democracy, the rise of a technical civilization with its victory over all enemies and its own beginning disintegration—these are the sociological presupposition for the third main period of anxiety. In this anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness is dominant. We are under the threat of spiritual nonbeing. The threats of moral and ontic nonbeing are, of course, present, but they are not independent and not controlling. This situation is so fundamental to the question raised in this book that it requires fuller analysis than the two earlier periods, and the analysis must be correlated with the constructive solution. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
It is significant that the three main periods of anxiety appear at the end of an era. The anxiety which, in its different forms, is potentially present in every individual becomes general if the accustomed structures of meaning, power, belief, and order disintegrate. These structures, as long as they are in force, keep anxiety bound within a protective system of courage by participation. The individual who participates in the institutions and ways of life of such a system is not liberated from one’s personal anxieties but one has means of overcoming them with well known methods no longer work. Conflict between the old, which tries to maintain itself, often with new means, and the new, which deprives the old, which tries to maintain itself, often with new means, and the new, which deprives the old of its intrinsic power, produce anxiety in all directions. Nonbeing, in such a situation, has a double face, resembling two types of nightmare (which are perhaps, expressions of an awareness of these two faces). The one type is the anxiety of annihilating narrowness, of the impossibility of escape and the horror of being trapped. The other is the anxiety of annihilating openness, of infinite, formless space into which one falls without a place to fall upon. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Social situation like those described have the character both of a trap without exist and of an empty, dark, and unknown void. Both faces of the same reality arouse the latent anxiety of every individual who looks at them. Today most of us do not look at them. “And they all cried with one voice, saying: Yea, we believe all the words which thou hast spoken unto us; and also, we know of their surety and truth, because of the Spirit of the Lord Omnipotent, which has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually. And we, ourselves, also, though the infinite goodness of God, and the manifestations of his Spirit, have great views of that which is to come; and were it expedient, we could prophesy of all things. And it is the faith which we have had on the things which our king has spoken unto us that has brought us to this great knowledge, whereby we do rejoice with such exceedingly great joy,” Mosiah 5.2-4. Keep your eyes on God, not on people. “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you,” reports Acts 1.7. Spiritual programs are filled with concerns for individual progress, acceptance by authorities, and the wish for sainthood or some other high position. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
The Time was Scarce Profaned by Speech—Let Me Not Mar that Perfect Dream!
Play that song again. You keep playing it and you keep singing it. If her spirit’s wandering, she will hear it and it will comfort her. The problem of human’s existence is unique in the whole of nature; humans have fallen out of nature, as it were, and are still in it; they are partly divine, partly terrestrial; partly infinite, partly finite. The necessity to find ever-new solutions for the contradictions in one’s existence, to find ever-new solutions for the contradictions in one’s existence, to find ever-higher forms of unity with nature, one’s fellow humans and oneself, is the source of all psychic forces which motivates humans, of all one’s passions, affects and anxieties. Humans are not content if only their physiological needs—their hunger, thirst, and intimacy—are satisfied. These instinctual needs are not sufficient to make a person happy; they are not even sufficient to make a person sane. The archimedic point of the specifically human dynamism lies in this uniqueness of the human situation; the understanding of human’s psyche must be based on the analysis of human’s needs stemming from the conditions of one’s existence. The problem,then, which the human race as well as each individual has to solve is that of being born. We are the offspring of God, and God in these last days has seen fit to place of in communication with himself. “Establish peace throughout the land, that there should be no wars, not contentions, no stealing, nor plundering, nor murdering, nor any manner of iniquity,” reports Mosiah 29. 14. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
Physical birth if we think of the individual, is by no means as decisive and singular as it appears to be. It is, indeed, an important change from intrauterine into extra uterine life; but in many respects the infant after birth is not different from the infant before birth; it cannot perceive things outside, cannot feed itself; it is completely dependent on the mother, and would perish without her help. Actually, the process of birth continues. The child begins to recognize outside objects, to react affectively, to grasp things and to coordinate one’s movements, to walk. However, birth continues.The child learns to speak, it learns to know the use and functions of things,it learns to relate itself to others, to avoid punishment and gain praise and liking. Slowly, the growing person learns to love, to develop reason, to look at the World objectively. One begins to develop one’s powers; to acquire a sense of identity, to overcome the seduction of one’s senses for the sake of an integrated life. Birth then, in the conventional meaning of the word, is only the beginning of birth in the broader sense. The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to oneself; indeed, we should be fully born, when we die—although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born. When we consider the visions of eternity, and contemplate God and our own destiny in the economy of Heaven the Angles rejoice in blooming hope and immortal glory. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
From all we know about the evolution of the human race, the birth of a human is to be understood in the same sense as the birth of the individual. When a person has transcended a certain threshold of minimum instinctive adaption, one has become elevated; but when one was as helpless and unequipped for human existence as the individual infant is at birth. The birth of human beings began with the first members of the species homo sapiens, and human history is noting but the whole process of this birth. It has taken human beings hundred of thousands of years to take the first steps into human life; humans went through a narcissistic phase of magic omnipotent orientation, through totemism, nature worship, until human beings arrived at the beginnings of the formation of conscience, objectively humanly love. In the last four thousand years of human’s history, one has developed visions of the fully born and fully awakened human, visions expressed in not too different ways by the great teachers of human in Egypt, China, India, Palestine, Greece and Mexico. True position before God, Angels, and people allow humans to soar above all things of time and sense and burst the cords that bind humans to Earthly objects. “The Lord work with his power in all cases among the children of humans, extending the arm of mercy towards them that put their trust in him,” reports Mosiah 29.20. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
The fact that human’s birth is primarily a negative act, that of being thrown out of the origin aloneness with nature, that one cannot return to where one came from, implies that the process of birth is by no means an easy one. Each step into one’s new human existence is frightening. It always means to give up a secure state,which was relatively known, for one which is new, which one has not yet mastered. Undoubtedly, if the infant could think at the moment of the severance of the umbilical cord, one would experience the fear of dying. A loving fate protects us from this panic. However, at any new step, at any new stage of our birth, we are afraid again. We are never free from two conflicting tendencies: one to emerge from the womb, from the lower form of existence into a more human existence, from bondage to freedom; another return to the womb, to nature, to certainty and security. In the history of the individual, and of the race, the progressive tendency has proven to be stronger, yet the phenomena of mental illness and the regression of the human race to positions apparently relinquished generation ago, show the intense struggle which accompanies each new act of birth. In one point of view, humans appear very poor, weak, and imbecile, and very insignificant: in another point of view, humans appear wise, intelligent, strong, honorable,and exalted. It is just in the way that one looks at humanity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
The three types of anxiety are interwoven in such a way that one of them gives the predominant color but all of them participate in the coloring of the state of anxiety. All of them and their underlying unity are existential, i.e. they are implied in the existence of humans as human, one’s finitude, and one’s estrangement. They are fulfilled in the situation of despair to which all of them contribute. Despair is an ultimate or boundary-line situation. One cannot go beyond it. Its nature is indicated in the etymology of the word despair: without hope. No way out into the future appears. Nonbeing is felt as absolutely victorious. However, there is a limit to its victory; nonbeing isfelt as victorious, and feeling presupposed being. Enough being is left to feel the irresistible power of nonbeing, and this is the despair within the despair.The pain of despair is that a being is aware of itself as unable to affirm itself because of the power of nonbeing. Consequently it wants to surrender this awareness and its presupposition, the being which is aware. It wants to get rid of itself—and it cannot. Despair appears in the form of reduplication,as the desperate attempt to escape despair. If anxiety were only the anxiety of fate and death, voluntary death would be the way out. The courage demanded would be the courage not to be. The final form of ontic self-affirmation would be the act of ontic self-negation. People are changeable in their opinions, thoughts, reflections and actions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
However, the despair is also the despair about guilt and condemnation. An there is no way of escaping it, even by ontic self-negation. Death by suicide can liberate one from the anxiety of fate and death—as some know. However, it cannot liberate from the anxiety of guilt and condemnations, as the Christians know. This is a highly paradoxical statement, as paradoxical as the relation of the moral sphere to ontic existence generally. However, it is a true statement, verified by those who have experienced fully the despair of condemnation. It is impossible to express the inescapable character of condemnation in ontic terms, that is in terms of imaginings about the immortality of the soul. For every ontic statement must use the categories of finitude, and immortality of the soul would be the endless prolongation of finitude and of the despair of condemnation (a self-contradictory concept, for this finis means end). The experience, therefore, that death by suicide is noway of escaping guilt must be understood in terms of the qualitative character of the moral demand, and of the qualitative character of its rejection. Guilt and condemnation are qualitatively, not quantitatively, infinite. They have an infinite weight and cannot be removed by a finite act of ontic self-negation.This makes despair desperate, that is, inescapable. There is “No Exit” from it #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
The anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness participates in both the ontic and the moral element in despair. Insofar as it is an expression of finitude it can be removed by ontic self-negation: This drives radical skepticism to death by suicide. Insofar as it is a consequence of moral disintegration it produces the same paradox as the moral element in despair:there is no ontic exit from it. This frustrates the suicidal trends in emptiness and meaninglessness. One is aware of their futility. In view of this character of despair it is understandable that all human life can be interpreted as a continuous attempt to avoid despair. And this attempt is mostly successful. Extreme situations are not reached frequently and perhaps they are never reached by some people. The purpose of an analysis of such a situation is not to record ordinary human experiences but to show extreme possibilities in the light of which the ordinary situations must be understood. We are not always aware of our having to die, but in the light of the experience of our having to die our whole life is experienced differently. In the same way the anxiety which is despair is not always present. However, the rare occasions in which it is present determine the interpretation of existence as a whole. As children of God, we did not originate from chaotic mass of matter, moving or inert, but came forth possessing, in an embryonic state, all the faculties and powers of God. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
Humans stand proudly erect as the head of all creation and the representative of God on Earth. However, we still possess only the powers that belong to humans. This may be why some people avoid human interaction by acing inferior. There is a large number of people who passively allow the power people to succeed, if only because they have chosen to wear the mask of weakness. The motives, as before, as mixed. Some do this as a defensive maneuver. Take the following example: Elizabeth is 35 years of age, and a mother of two. She has a good mind, many talents, but seems tremendously inferior in social situations. It is hard to know if she is inferior, feels inferior, or just plays inferior. Her husband, George, is a competent, someway domineering, middle-class businessman. He has a great need to be right most of the time, and Sarah lets him be right as often as he needs to be. She will make mistakes, fumble, proclaim her inabilities, and general act as if she were the weakest, most ineffective, most helpless person in the World. George seems to enjoy being needed, being competent, being right. Elizabeth is an example of the person who portrays The Weakling. George needs to be strong and competent, and Elizabeth is going to see to it that he comes off as just that. What is Elizabeth’s motivation? In her childhood, she found that boys liked girls who acted weak and helpless. This became a necessary role for her to play, she thought. Even when she found boys who liked girls to be competent and themselves, she felt more comfortable with The Weakling role. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
Others know that the person who portrays a weak and innocuous role will not be attacked. It is a very effective defense. Very few people will attack someone who is lying down, looking totally defenseless. And think of all the sky, non aggressive people who are allowed to go their own way because nobody perceives them as threatening, if they are perceived at all! The Weakling is often a manipulative and very aggressive person in hiding. You may recall the character of Uriah Heep in Dickens’ David Copperfield. Heep, wringing his hands and proclaiming his ‘umbleness managed to get into powerful situation, without others knowing much about it .Usually we find that a person plays The Weakling as a ploy to put aggressors off guard. When an aggressor lets down his guard in the face of a no contest plea, The Weakling walks off with some advantages. It is an effective technique for manipulating people, but it is also a sneaky and limited way of living one’s life. There is also Sweet Georgia Brown—this woman who never utters a discouraging word. She is always smiling, always cordial, always has a kind and friendly word. She has millions of sweet, wonderful friends, but none of then know her any deeper than her sweet face and smile. She is able of letting people see her mask and no more. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
Underneath, she is full of anger and bitterness. She resents being a woman, not because of anything intrinsically wrong with womanhood, but because she has to be the kind of woman people expect. She wears a mask of sweetness because it fits the stereotype of docile, affectionate, good woman she had been expected to grow into. She has resented her brother being able to live their own lives, go where they pleased, when and with whom they pleased. She had had to help her mother. When she did grumble, she was spanked and told she was not being ladylike. A lady, she was informed, accepted with good grace what life had to offer her. Enough spankings and enough rejections had accompanied her few exhibitions of assertiveness that she soon learned to tuck that part of her away and be just what her mother and aunts expected her to be. Since there were enough people outside her family who also responded optimistically to this role, it became easier and easier to play. Soon, it was the only self she could really portray well. Many people, male and female alike, play this nice guy or sweet Georgia role. It is easier to be liked and loved than to struggle to be significant or respect. Incidentally, many common stereotypes are perpetuated by the people who are best descried by them simply because they will not or cannot take the trouble to declare themselves as full human beings. Passivity, sweetness or compliance are easier than asserting individuality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
There are also people who avoid human interaction by acting aggressive. There is a group of people, also partial actualizers, who exhibit hostile or sour faces toward everything and everyone. They often act like bullies, some actually hurting people, and others act more like bulldogs; they just look mean. The effect is the same. Distance. Nobody will risk crossing them or trying for any closer relationship. A few of these people are deeply warm and human on the inside, but they hide their vulnerability behind a rough exterior. No doubt they have learned the hard way that exposed sensitivity, like Achilles’ heel, is a natural target for the arrows of exploiters. On the Supernatural TV Series, Dean Winchester, while actually a humanitarian, wore a mask that said, “Do not get too close,and do not try to get to know me. I will play a professional role, but the man inside is private property.” As readers and viewers well know, the warmth often showed through in private moments. Many others who specialize in this rough-hewn exterior, in and out of fiction, are usually much kinder than their bark would indicate. Occasionally, as in bullying types, there is little or no kindness lying dormant. The bluff for these hurt or rejected people serves to protect others as well as themselves from their underlying fear and hostility. “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked,” reports Luke 12.48. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
Happy Thanksgiving!
I Years Had Been from Home and Now Before the Door I Dared Not Open—Lest a Face I Never Saw Before!
The gentlemen had risen to see me off. I murmured my superficial farewells, and only then did the secret grip release me. Nonebeingis dependent on the being it negates. Dependent means two things. It points first of all to the ontological priority of being over nonbeing. The term nonbeing itself indicates this, and it is logically necessary. There could be no negation if there were no preceding affirmation to be negated. Certainly one can describe being in terms of non-nonbeing; and one can justify such a description by pointing to the astonishing prerational fact that there is something and not nothing. One could say that being is the negation of the primordial night of nothingness. However, in doing so one must realize that such an aboriginal nothing would be neither nothing nor something, that it becomes nothing only in contrast to something; in other words, that the ontological status of nonbeing as nonbeing is dependent on being. Secondly, nonbeing is dependent on the special qualities of being. In itself nonbeing has no quality and no difference of qualities. However, it gets them in relation to being. The character of the negation of being is determined by that in being which is negated. This makes it possible to speak of qualities of nonbeing and, consequently,of types of anxiety. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
Up to now we have used the term nonbeing without differentiation, while in the discussion of courage several forms of self-affirmation were mentioned. They correspond to different forms of anxiety and are understandable only in correlation with them. I suggest that we distinguish three types of anxiety according to the three directions in which nonbeing threatens being. Nonbeing threatens human’s moral self-affirmation, relatively in terms of fate, absolutely in terms of death. It threatens human’s spiritual self-affirmation, relatively in terms of guilt, absolutely in terms of condemnation. The awareness of this threefold threat is anxiety appearing in three forms, that of fate and death (briefly, the anxiety of death), that of emptiness and loss of meaning (briefly, the anxiety of meaninglessness), that of guilt and condemnation (briefly, the anxiety of condemnation). In all three forms anxiety is existential in the sense that it belongs to existence as such and not to an abnormal state of mind as in neurotic (and psychotic) anxiety. The nature of neurotic anxiety and its relation to existential anxiety will be discussed in another chapter. We shall deal now with the three forms of existential anxiety, first their reality in the life of the individual, then with their social manifestations in special periods of Western history. However, it must be stated that the differences of types does not mean mutual exclusion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
We have seen for instance that the courage to be as it appears in the ancient times conquers not only the fear of death but also the threat of meaninglessness. Sometimes we find that in spite of the predominance of threat of meaninglessness, the anxiety of death and condemnation is passionately challenged. In all representatives of classical Christianity death and sin are seen as the allied adversaries against which the courage of faith has to fight. The three forms of anxiety (and of courage) are immanent in each other but normally under the dominance of one of them. However, nothing is more common than the idea that we, the people living in the Western World of the twenty first century,are eminently sane. Even the fact that a great number of individuals in our midst suffer from more or less severe forms of mental illness produces little doubt with respect to the general standard of our mental health. We are sure that by introducing better methods of mental hygiene we shall improve still further the state of mental health, and as far as individual mental disturbances are concerned, we look at them as strictly individual incidents,perhaps with some amazement that so many of these incidents should occur in a culture which is supposedly so sane. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
Can we be so sure that we are not deceiving ourselves? Many an inmate of an insane asylum is convinced that everybody else is crazy, except oneself. Many a severe neurotic believes that one’s compulsive rituals or hysterical outbursts are normal reaction to somewhat abnormal circumstances. What about ourselves? Let us, in good psychiatric fashion, look at the facts. In the last one hundred and sixty-three years, in the Western World, have created a greater material wealth than any other society in the history of the human race. Everyone is looking with a mixture of confidence and apprehension to the World leaders of the various people, ready to heap all praise on them if the succeed in avoiding a war, and ignoring the fact that it is only these very World leaders who ever cause a war, usually not even through their bad intentions, but their unreasonable mismanagement of the affairs entrusted to them. In the last 3,000 years of history, no less than about eight thousand peace treaties were signed,each one supposed to secure permanent peace, and each one lasting on an average two years. Our direction of economic affairs is scarcely more encouraging. We live in an economic system in which a particularly good crop is often an economic disaster, and we restrict some of our agricultural productivity in order to stabilize the market, although there are millions of people who do not have the very things we restrict, and who need them badly. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
Right now our economic system is function very well, because, among other reasons, we spend billions of dollars per year to produce armaments. Economists look with some apprehension to the time when we stop producing armaments, and the idea that the state should produce houses and other useful and needed things instead of weapons, easily provokes accusations of endangering freedom and individual initiative. We have a literacy above 90 percent of the population. We have radio, television, movies, a newspaper a day for everybody. However, instead of giving us the best of past and present literature and music, these media of communication, supplemented by advertising, fill the minds of people with the cheapest trash, lacking in any sense of reality, with sadistic phantasies which a halfway cultured person would be embarrassed to entertain even once in while. However, the mind of everybody, young and old, is thus poisoned, we go on blissfully to see to it that no immortality occurs on the screen. Any suggestion that the government should finance the production of movies and radio programs which would enlighten and improve the minds of our people would be met again with indignation and accusations in the name of freedom and idealism. “And now my children, see that ye take care of these sacred things, yea see that ye look to God and live. Go unto this people and declare the word, and be sober. My children, farewell,” reports Alma 37.44. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
The Brain within its Groove Runs Evenly and True
Curiosity is one of the components of optimal function and links challenge and novelty with the opportunity to grow. For example, searching for meaning of things could guide a sense of direction and purpose in life. We are part of many social groupings. We know that many of the emotions we have can motivate us in many directions and with varying amounts of intensity. Writings from earliest times, including the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament and the Code of Hamurabi, indicate that human beings have always perceived the need to order and restrain certain human emotions and motivations for the greater good of society. Anger, sexual passion, and covetousness are among those emotions whose expressions are universally structured. The emotions themselves are no more important or powerful than any others, but the fullest expression of them have consequences for more than one individual. Anger, for instance, when carried to an extreme, can lead to such violent expressions are murder, assault, destructiveness. Sexual passions can in their extremes lead to sex by physical force or threat, adultery, and similar offenses against others. Covetousness carried to extremes leads to aggression against the property of another person. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
When human’s social life began, leaders found it necessary to form an unwritten social contract, whereby in return for the benefits of group-living, the individual had to agree to abide by certain laws and restrictions. Some people are instinctively aggressive, and there is the necessity for inhibiting aggressiveness through ritualized actions. The phrase “nature red in tooth and claw” was originally intended to refer to the brutal prey-killing activities of the carnivores, but it has been applied incorrectly in general terms to the whole subject of animal fighting. Nothing could be further from the truth. If a species is to survive, it simply cannot afford to go around slaughtering its own kind. Intra-specific aggression has to be inhibited and controlled, and the more powerful and savage the prey-killing weapons of a particular species are, the stronger must be the inhibitions about using them to settle dispute with rivals. This is the “law of the jungle” where territorial and hierarchy disagreements are concerned. Those species that failed to obey this law have long since become extinct. Some people believe that in nature there is a pitiless fight for survival, an eternal conflict. The strong always overcome the weak, and this makes development possible. The forces keeping population under control are disasters, such as war, famine, and disease. Basically, in order for some people to live, it is necessary for others to die, which makes existence a permanent war. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
The struggle for existence goes on everywhere from long continuous observations of animals and plants, and under these circumstances favorable variations will tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones will be destroyed. The result of this will be the formation of a new species. People consider humans animals because of their continuity with nature, because they share with all other organism similarities in ways of existing: eating, utilizing oxygen, drinking, reproducing, etc. Man, and Woman’s humanness consists of ways in which one has transcended one’s physical nature and its one-to-one dependence on the physical environment. Humans can profit from experience. And, having experienced the benefits to be derived from their social living, one can move in ways that enhance the group so blithely give up one’s own existence. However, human beings do not quite so blithely give up their instinctive selfishness and follow the rules of other people. We have evidence that from the beginning of human’s intellectual life there was as much survival-value for one in cooperation and social living as there may have been in individualistic action and self-seeking behavior. Some people believe that humans are primarily beasts, innately aggressive and instinctively territorial animals, others have been struggling to show us the evidence for the opposite view. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
Physical anthropologists have been arguing for several years that both human nature and nurture are much more inclined toward cooperative behavior than toward either competitive or hostile actions: The evidence as we are able to judge it, on the basis of field observations among living primates, indicates the deep-seated nature of the cooperative drives which bind the members of primate societies together and preserve them. Among early humans these cooperative drives were undoubtedly intensified for the very reason that every member of early human society was in an even more interdependent relation to one’s fellows than the member of any other primate group had ever been. The critical state of immaturity in which the human infant is born, and the long period of dependency which is characteristic of a person, have from the first intensified and reinforced the cooperative organization of the responses from others upon which the human child is dependent for one’s survival and one’s development as a human being. However, people do seem to have territorial or property attitudes, and they seem to justify attack and self-defense and even armed aggression in the name of those attitude. How do we explain this? #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
Our earliest ancestors were wanderers, but not entirely nomadic. They wandered about in search of food and, of course, to escape from the dangers of their physical environment. When they found an area that contained sufficient foods and access to water, they, like many primates observed today, settled for a while. One of the main reasons for the settling was the need of women for a stable situation in which to give birth and rear their children. If there was sufficient food and water and the place was safe (or could be made safe) from animals that might attack them, the women probably preferred to settle. The settling usually involved some kind of laying out or defining of the boundaries (President Trump’s boarder all is not so unheard of). And, if attack came, where from other humans or wilder animals, the defense usually took the form of rituals, rather than warfare. The rituals, observed in many wild animals and to some degree in modern primates, including ourselves, involved shows of strength, bluffing, dancing, loud cries and shouting. Armed fighting was a last resort. Within the small family or band other kinds of rituals would evolve, elaborate patterns of social regulations which were agreed upon by all, for each person could understand one’s own desire to possess and keep that which is his or hers. Those pre-human and human ancestors who selected cooperative and nonaggressive patterns of social interaction were the ones who survived. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
There is more than just guesswork involved here. If the relations within families and tribes had been aggressive and hostile, or even begrudgingly tolerant, mating and the development of family life could hardly have taken place. Moreover, we have fossil and other physical evidence that cooperation and group living were the dominant social patterns for early humans just as several universal patterns of cooperation and group living have been found in every society that has ever been studied: a family form, kinship relations, incest taboos, naming, birth and death rituals, and many others. In the opening half of the nineteenth century, throughout Europe, members of the ruling class gathered to discuss the newly discovered “Population problem” and to devise ways to increase the mortality rate of the poor: Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, they encouraged contrary habits. In towns, they made the streets narrower, crowded more people into the houses, and courted the return of plagues. In the country, they built their villages near stagnant pools, and encouraged settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations and so forth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
As a result of the cruel policy, the strong would defeat the weak in the struggle for survival, and this is probably why not much is being done about the violence in Chicago, it is a form of population control. Much like in the 19th century, the idea is to crush the poor. People ask why cannot people enjoy how beautiful our World is and why is there so much violence and crime and the answer is because the cost of living is so high and there are so many people in competition for money, sex, food, land, and other resources. It is a result of the struggle for survival. With the struggle in nature also being accepted as being in human nature, conflicts in the name of racism, Fascism, Communism, and imperialism, and the efforts of strong peoples to crush peoples they perceived as weaker are by now clothed in a scientific façade. It is now impossible to reproach or obstruct those who carried out barbarous massacres, treated human beings like animals, turned peoples against each other, who despised others on account of their race, who closed down small businesses in the name of competition, and who refused to extend the hand of help to the poor. Because they are doing this in accordance with scientific natural law. This is known as Social Darwinism. Subsequent arguments for slavery, colonialism, racial differences, class struggles, and gender roles go forth primarily under the banner of science. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
One point requires careful attention here. All periods of human history have seen wars, atrocities, ruthlessness, racism, and conflict. However, there is at all times a Divine religion teaching people that what they are doing is wrong and calling them to peace, justice, and clam. Because human beings knew this Divine religion, they at least had a measure of understanding tat what they are doing is wrong when they engaged in violence. However, Darwinism has become an excuse for the struggle for profit and injustice, it has become an element of scientific justification to the people, and they believe this is all part of human nature, that people carry savage and aggressive tendencies left over from their ancestors, and in that same way as the strongest and most aggressive animal survived, the same laws apply to human beings. Under the influence of this thinking, wars, sufferings, and massacres began to affect a very large part of the World. Darwinism supported and encouraged all those movements which brought pain, blood, and oppression to the World, showed them to be reasonable and justified, and backed all their practical applications. As a result of this so-called scientific backing all these dangerous ideologies continue to grow increasingly stronger, and have stamped the name of the age of suffering on the 21st century. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
And the questions a child asks, the observations a child shares, and the discussions that occur provide crucial spiritual early warning signals. Importantly, parents can help to discern what their children are learning, thinking, and feeling about the truths contained in the sacred scripture, as well as the difficulties they may be facing. “The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whole the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I had said unto you. Peace I leave you with, my peace I give unto you: not as the World gives, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid,” reports John 14.26-27. The knowledge and spiritual conviction we receive from the Holy Ghost are the result of revelation. Seeking for and obtaining these blessings require a sincere heart, real intent, and faith in Christ. “If you shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost,” reports Moroni 10.4. A personal testimony also brings responsibility and accountability. “Neither take what you shall say; but treasure up in your mind continually the words of life, and it shall be given you in that hour that portion that shall be meted unto every person,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 84.85. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
Randolph Harris II International Institute 