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After Dinner Light for Flowers and Dukes for Setting Sun
It was unspeakable to need someone in this way. I closed my eyes and listened to the night. Ravenous, repulsive creatures singing magnificently. If the workers and employees of an enterprise were exclusively concerned with their enterprise, the alienation between mortals and their social forces would remain unchanged. The narcissistic, alienated attitude would only have been extended from one individual to the team. It is therefore not an incidental but an essential part of workers’ participation that they looked beyond their own enterprise, that they be interested in and connected with consumers as well as with other workers in the same industry, and with the working population as a whole. The development of a kind of local patriotism for the firm, of an esprit de corps similar to that of college and university students, as recommended by British social psychologists, would only reinforce the asocial and egotistical attitude which is the essence of alienation. All such suggestions in favor of team enthusiasm ignore the fact that there is only one truly social orientation, namely the one of solidarity with humankind. Social cohesion within the group, combined with antagonism to the outsider, is not social feeling but extended egotism. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
All suggestions in the direction of the humanization of work do not have the aim of increasing economic output nor is their goal a greater satisfaction with work per se. They make sense only in a totally different social structure, in which economic activity is a part—and a subordinate part—of social life. One cannot separate work activity from political activity, from the use of leisure time and from personal life. If work were to become human, no real change would occur. In fact, it could not become interesting. It is the very evil of present-day culture that it separates and compartmentalizes the various spheres of living. The way to sanity is possessed in overcoming this split and in arriving at anew unification and integration within society and within the individual human being. The hostility in industry should give way to a feeling of participation in a joint endeavour. How is this to be achieved? The most direct and easily exploitable line of advance is in the direction of joint consultation. Much fruitful work has been done in this sphere, and it is now clear that something more is needed than joint production committees on the present model—some more radical effort to give the worker a sense of participation in the making of decisions. A few progressive firms have already made bold advances, and the results are encouraging. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
It could be advantageous to alter the legal structure of company ownership as to substitute for shareholders’ sole control a constitution which explicitly defines the responsibilities of the firm to worker, consumer and community; workers would become members of the company, and have their representatives on the board of directors. Ownership enterprises, when it passes from wealthy individuals, should go, not to the state, but to less remote public bodies, and should permit greater diffusion of power and encourage people of all sorts to play a more active part in the work and control of pubic and voluntary organizations. Consultation is less successful the further it recedes from face-to-face discussion on the job; and the size and structure of industrial units and the degree to which they can exercise independent initiative and therefore seen as matters of supreme importance. What is finally required for policy decisions and for an executive authority willingly accepted by all the members of an industry. There must be some exit process by which all those employed in an industry are enabled to participate in policy decisions; either through directly elected representative on the board or through a hierarchical system of joint consultation wit considerable powers. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
In either case there must also be an increasing participation in the process of interpreting policy and of making decisions at subordinate levels. The creation of a feeling of common purpose in the activities of industry still remains, therefore, one of the outstanding objectives of Capitalism. After all, what is the matter with joint stock company is the irresponsible dictatorship exercised over it, nominally by its shareholders, actually in many cases by one or two self-appointing and self-perpetuating directors. Make public companies directly responsible both to the community and to the whole body of those engaged in their activities, and they would become institutions of a very different kind. Also, it has been noted throughout history, in France and Germany, after the war that transferring of property rights from the private capitalist to society of the state has, in itself, only a negligible effect on the situation of the worker, and the central problem of why people cannot afford to rent and buy in the cities they live lies in the change of the work situation. Our whole industry is built upon the existence of an ever-widening inner market. Each enterprise wants to sell more and more in order to conquer an ever-widening share of the market. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The result of this economic situation is that industry uses all means within its power to whet the buying appetite of the population, to create and reinforce the receptive orientation which is so detrimental too mental sanity. As we have seen, this means that there is a craving for new but unnecessary things, a constant wish to buy more, even though the standpoint of human, unalienated use, there is no need for the new product. (The automobile industry, for instance, spent some billion dollars on the changes for the new 2019 models, BMW alone some hundred million dollars to compete with Mercedes-Benz. Without doubt, the older BMW was an excellent car, and the fight between BMW and Mercedes-Bens has not primarily the effect of giving the public a better car, but of making them buy a new car when the old one would have done for another generation or so). Another aspect of the same phenomenon is the tendency to waste, which is furthered by the economic need for increasing mass production. Aside from the economic loss implied in this waste, it has also an important psychological effect: it makes the consumer lose respect for work and human effort; it makes the makes one forget the needs of the people within one’s own and in less affluent lands, for whom the product one wastes could be a most valuable possession; in short, our habits of waste show an immature disregard for the realities of human life, for the economic struggle for existence which nobody can evade. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
It is quite obvious that in the long run no amount of spiritual influence can be successful if our economic system is organized in such a way that a crisis threatens when people do not want to buy more and more newer and better things. Hence if our aim is to change alienated into human consumption, changes are necessary in those economic processes which produce alienated consumption. It is the task of economists to devise such measures. Generally speaking, it means to direct production into fields where existing real needs have not yet been satisfied, rather than where needs must be created artificially. This can be done by means of credits through state-owned banks, by the socialization of certain enterprises, and by drastic laws which accomplish a transformation of advertising. Closely related to this problem is that of economic help from the industrialized societies to the economically less developed part of the World. It is quite clear that the time of colonial exploitation is over, that the various parts of the World have been brought together as closely as one continent was a hundred years ago, and that peace for the wealthier part of the World is dependent on the economic advancement of the less affluent part. Peace and liberty in the Western World cannot, in the long run, coexist with hunger and sickness in African and China. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Reduction of unnecessary consumption in the industrialized counties is a must if they want to help the nonindustrailized countries, and they must want to help them, if they want peace. A World development program covering fifty years would increase agricultural production to the point where all persons would receive adequate nutrition and would lead to an industrialization of the now undeveloped areas similar to the prewar level of Japan. The yearly outlay for the Untied States for such a program would be between four and five billion dollars each for the first thirty years, and afterward les. When we compare this to our national income, to our present federal budget, to the funds required for armament, and to the cost of waging war, the amount required does not appear to be excessive. When we compare it to the potential gains that can result from a successful program, it appears even smaller. And when we compare the cost with that of inaction and to the consequences of maintaining the status quo, it is indeed insignificant. The foregoing problems is only part of the more general problem as to what extent the interest of profitable capital investment may be permitted to manipulate the public needs in a detrimental and unhealthy way. The most obvious examples are our movie industry, the comic-book industry and the crime pages of our newspaper. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
In order to make the highest profit, the lowest instincts are artificially stimulated and the mind of the public is poisoned. The Food and Drug Act has regulated the unrestricted production and advertising of harmful food and drugs; the same can be done with regard to all other vital necessities. If such laws should prove to be ineffective, certain industries, such as the film industry, must be socialized, or at least competing industries must be created, financed with public funds. In a society in which the only aim is the development of mortals, and in which material needs are subordinated to spiritual needs, it will not be difficult to find legal and economic means to insure the necessary changes. As far as the economic situation of the individual citizen is concerned, the idea of equality of income has been the aim that the capitalistic society has tried to reach. What Americans need is an income which will be the basis for a dignified human existence. As far as inequalities of income are concerned, it seems that they must not transcend the point where differences in income lead to differences in the experience of life. The mortal without an income of millions, who can satisfy any whim without even thinking about it, experiences life in a different way from the mortal who to satisfy one costly wish has to sacrifice another. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The mortal who can never travel beyond his town, who can never afford any luxury (that is to say, something that is not necessary), again has a different life experience from one’s neighbor who can do so. However, even within certain differences of income the basic experience of life can remain the same, provided the income differences does not exceed a certain margin. What matters is not so much the greater or lesser incomes as such, but the point where quantitative differences of income are transformed into a qualitative difference of life experience. Needless to say, the system of social security, as it exists now in Great Britain and the United States of America for instance, must be retained. However, this is not enough. The existing social-security system must be extended to a universal subsistence guarantee. Each individual can act as a free and responsible agent only if one of the main reasons for present-day un-freedom is abolished: the economic threat of starvation which forces people to accept working conditions which they would otherwise not accept. We are no longer at the point where we can live off the land. Therefore, the owners of capital can enforce their will on the mortal who owns only one’s life, because without capital, we have no work except what the capitalist offers us. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
One hundred and fifty years ago, it was a widely accepted belief that no one had the responsibility for one’s neighbor. It was assumed—and scientifically proved by economists—that the laws of society made it necessary to have a vast army of less affluent and jobless people in order to keep the economy going. Today, hardly anybody would dare to voice this principle any longer. It is generally accepted that nobody should be excluded from the wealth of the nation, either by laws of nature, or by those of society. The rationalizations which were current a hundred years ago, that the less affluent owed their condition to their ignorance, lack of responsibility—briefly, to their sins—are outdated. In all Western industrialized countries a system of insurance has been introduced which guarantees everyone a minimum for subsistence in case of unemployment, sickness and old age. It is only one step further to postulate that, even if these conditions are not present, everyone has a right to receive the means to subsist. Practically speaking, that would mean that every citizen can claim a sum, enough for the minimum of subsistence even though one is not unemployed, sick or aged. One can demand this sum if one has quit one’s job voluntarily, if one wants to prepare oneself for another type of work, or for any personal reason which prevents one from earning money, without falling under one of the categories of the existing insurance benefits; shortly, one can claim this subsistence minimum without having to have any reason. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Some say it should be limited to two years, so as to avoid the fostering of a neurotic attitude which refuses any kind of social obligation. This may sound like a fantastic proposal, but so would our insurance system have sounded to people one hundred and fifty years ago. The main objection to such a scheme would be that if each person were entitled to receive minimum support, people would not work. This assumption rests upon the fallacy of the inherent laziness in human nature; actually, aside from neurotically lazy people, there would be very few who would not want to earn more than the minimum, and who would prefer to do nothing rather than work. However, the suspicious against a system of guaranteed subsistence minimum are not unfounded from the standpoint of those who want to use ownership of capital for the purpose of forcing others to accept the work conditions they offer. If nobody were forced any more to accept work in order not to starve, work would have to be sufficiently interesting and attractive to induce one to accept it. Freedom of contract is possibly only if both parties are free to accept and reject it; in the present capitalist system this is not the case. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
However, such a system would be not only the beginning of real freedom of contract between employers and employees; it would also enhance tremendously the sphere of freedom in interpersonal relationships between person and person in daily life. Let us look at some examples. A person who is employed today, and dislikes one’s job, is often forced to continue in it because one does not have the means to risk unemployment even for one or two months, and naturally if one quits the job, one has no right to unemployment benefits. However, actually the psychological effects of this situation go much deeper; the very fact that one cannot risk being fired, tends to make one afraid of one’s boss or whomever one is dependent on. One will be inhibited in answering back; one will try to please and to submit, because of the constantly present fear that the boss could fire one if one asserted oneself. Or let us take the mortal who at the age of forty decides the he or she wants an entirely different kind of job, for which it will take one or two years to prepare oneself. Since under the conditions of a guaranteed existence minimum this decision would imply having to live with a minimum of comfort, it would require great enthusiasm for and interest in one’s newly chosen field, and thus only those who were gifted and really interested would make the choice. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Or let us take a woman living in an unhappy marriage, whose only reason for not leaving her husband is the inability to support herself for the time necessary to be trained for a job. Or let us think of an adolescent living in severe conflicts with a neurotic or destructive father, whose mental healthy would be saved if he were free to leave his family. Briefly, the most fundamental coercion on economic grounds in business and private relations would be removed and the freedom to act would be restored to everybody. What about costs? Since we already have adopted the principle for the unemployed, the sick and aged, there would only be a marginal group of additional people who would make use of this privilege, the ones who are particularly gifted, those who find themselves in a temporary conflict, and the neurotic ones who have no sense of responsibility, or interest in work. Considering all factors involved, it would seem that the number of people using this privilege would not be extraordinarily high, and by careful research an approximate estimate could even be made today. However, it must be emphasized that this proposal is to be taken together with the other social changes suggested here, and that in a society in which the individual citizen actively participates in one’s work, the number of people not interested in work would only be a fraction of what it is under present-day conditions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Whatever their number, it seems that the cost for such a scheme would hardly be more tan what big states have spent for the maintenance of armies in the last decades, not taking into consideration the cost of armaments. It should also not be forgotten that in a system which restores interest in life and in work to everybody, the productivity of the individual worker would be far above that reported today as a result of even a few favorable changes in the work situation; in addition, our expenses due to criminality, neurotic or psychosomatic illness would be considerably less. Less dramatic illustrations of the loss of the sense of power of the self are present all around us in contemporary society, and, indeed, are so common that we generally take them for granted. For example, there is the curious remark made regularly nowadays at the end of radio programs, “Thanks for listening.” When you come to think of it, this remark is quite amazing. Why should the person who is doing the entertaining, who is giving something ostensibly of value, thank the recipient for taking it? To acknowledge applause is one thing, but thanking the recipient for deigning to listen and be amused is a quite different thing. It betokens that the action is given its value, or lack of value, by the whim of the consumer, the receiver—in the case of our illustration the consumer being their majesties, the public. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Imagine Kreisler, after playing a concerto, thanking the audience for listening! The parallel suggested by the radio announcer’s remark is the court jester, who not only had to perform but at the same time to beg the majesties who watched to deign to be amused—and proverbially the court jester was in as humiliating a position as a human being could occupy. Obviously we are not criticizing radio announcers as such. This remark merely illustrates an attitude which runs through our society: so many people judge the value of their actions not on the basis of the action itself, but on the basis of how the action is accepted. It is as though one has always to postpone one’s judgment until one looked at one’s audience. The person who is passive, to whom or for whom the act is done, as the power to make the act effective or ineffective, rather than the one who is doing it. Thus we tend to be performers in life rather than persons who live and act as selves. The alternative of having versus being does not appeal to common sense. To have, so it would seem, is a normal function of our life: in order to live we must have things. Moreover, we must have things in order to enjoy them. In a culture in which the supreme goal is to have—and to have more and more—and in which one can speak of someone as being worth a million dollars, how can there be any alternative between having and being? #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
One the contrary, it would seem that the very essence of being is having; that if one has nothing, one is nothing. Yet the great Masters of Living have made the alternative between having and being a central issues of their respective systems. In order to arrive at the highest state of human development, we must not crave possession. “For whosoever will save one’s life shall lose it; but whosoever will lose one’s life for my sake, the same shall save it. For what is a mortal advantaged, if one gains the whole World, and loses oneself, or be cast away?” reports Luke 9.24-25. To have nothing and make oneself open and empty, not letting one’s selfishness get in one’s way, is the condition for achieving spiritual wealth and strength. Luxury can be as much as a nice as poverty, depending on what one does to obtain it. Having and being are two fundamental modes of experience, the respective strengths of which determine the differences between the character of individuals and various types of social character. The force of life is stronger than the force of mere intellectual curiosity. The difference between being and having is not essentially that between East and West. The difference is rather between a society centered around persons and one centered around things. The having orientation is characteristic of Western industrial society, in which greed for money, fame, and power has become the dominant theme of life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Many modern people cannot understand the spirit of a society that is not centered in property and prosperity. Love becomes a goddess, an idol into which the mortal projects one’s loving; in this process of alienation one ceases to experience love, but is in touch only with one’s capacity to love by one’s submission to the goddess of Love. One has ceased to be an active person who feels; instead one has become an alienated worshiper of an idol, and one is lost wen out of touch with one’s idol. I have transformed my feeling into something I possess: the problem. However, problem is an abstract expression for all kinds of difficulties. I cannot have a problem, because it is not a thing that can be owned; it, however, can have me. That is to say, I have transformed myself into a problem and am now owned by my creation. This way of speaking betrays a hidden, unconscious alienation. To say I have a great love for you is meaningless. Love is not a thing that one can have, but a process, an inner activity that one is the subject of. I can love, I can be in love, but in loving, I have nothing. In fact, the less I have, the more I can love. To have is a deceptively simple expression. Every human being has something: a body, clothes, shelter—on up to the modern man or woman who has a car, a television set, a washing machine, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Living without having something is virtually impossible. Why, then, should having be a problem? Yet the linguistic history of having indicates that the word is indeed a problem. To those who believe that to have is a most natural category of human existence it may come as a surprise to learn that many languages have no word for to have. It is clear that some people do not understand the word for to have as it developed in connection with the development of private property, while it is absent in societies with predominately functional property, that is, possession for the use. And that is why Eastern philosophies are hard to understand or may lead people in Western society astray. Traditionally, the way mortals have overcomes the daimonic is by naming it. In this way, the human being forms personal meaning out of what was previously a merely threatening impersonal chaos. We need only recall the crucial importance historically knowing the particular name of the demon in order to expell him. In the New Testament, Jesus calls out “Beelzebub!” or “Legion!” or some other presumably accurate name, and the devils or devils leave the possessed unfortunate immediately. The priests who were successful at casting out devils in the Middle Ages were those who could divine the name of the demon, the pronouncing of which was sufficient to conjure the evil spirit out and away. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
God Keep You from the Knowledge of Who You Are–How Much Self-Knowledge Can a Human Being Bear?
She was absolutely ablaze with an inner concentration power. Liberty, equality, fraternity—it should be acknowledged that, very often, those three words bring nothing to our mind except the picture on currency or the inscription on the front doors of public buildings. However, human beings are really free under three conditions: Economic freedom, intellectual freedom, and moral freedom. Economic freedom declares that mortals have an inalienable right to work. One has to have absolute right to the fruit of one’s work from which one should not part except freely. Work should also be understood as everything of value that one brings to society. Intellectual freedom dictates that a mortal cannot be really free if one has an ideal and philosophical attitude which makes it possible for one to have a coherent activity in life. One cannot, under pretext of hastening one’s economic or intellectual liberation, use means contrary to the ethics of the community. Last, moral freedom does not mean license. It would be easy to demonstrate that moral freedom is to be found only within strict observance of the group ethics freely accepted. Fraternity can blossom only in society. Selfishness is a dangerous and non-lasting way of helping oneself. Mortals cannot separate their true interest from those of society. One can help only by helping society. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
We should become conscious that our own inclinations make us find an increase of joy with others. Solidarity is not only a task, it is a satisfaction and the best guarantee of security. Fraternity leads to mutual tolerance and to the determination never to separate. This makes it possible to take all decisions unanimously on a common minimum. Equality-we condemn those who declare demagogically that all people are equal. We can see that people are not equal in their life situations, and sometimes under other circumstances. People are not even viewed as equal under the law. Some people are given more clot than others and preferential treatment. For us equality of rights means to put at the disposal of everyone the means to fulfill oneself completely. It is important to devise a scheme in which active participation of everyone does not contradict a sufficiently centralized leadership; irrational authority has to be replaced by rational authority. There is an emphasis on the practice of life as against ideological differences. This emphasis enables people of the most varied and contradictory convictions to live together in humanity and tolerance without any danger of having to follow the right opinion proclaimed by the community. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Inasmuch as the work is not attractive technically, it is meaningful and attractive in its social aspect. Activity in the arts and science is an integral part of the total situation. Even during the Renaissance, the concept of imitations, or mimesis, involved the creation of representations that transcended mere appearance, that implied the sacred or spiritual essence of things. Various media develops a response to artists’ desire to imitate reality and express themselves more and more fluently. Some artists are interested in the ominous underside of contemporary culture that lurks as an ever present possibility in our lives. The goal is to portray psychological states that everyone experiences. Sometimes, like in Jane Dickson’s, Stairwell, 1984 one can almost feel the acid biting into the plate, as if the process itself is a metaphor for the pain and isolation of the figure learning forlornly over the bannister. Although it is printed in three colors, the roughness of the method’s surface serves to underscore the emotional turmoil and psychological isolation embodied in her subject matter. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The situation of alienation is overcome, work has become a meaningful expression of human energy, human solidarity is established without restriction of freedom—or danger of conformity. While many of the arrangements and principles of the communities can be questioned and argued about, it seems nevertheless that we have here one of the most convincing empirical examples of a productive life, and of possibilities which are generally looked upon as fantastic from the standpoint of our present-day life in Capitalism. The communities descried so far are, of course, not the only examples for the possibility of Capitalistic lifestyles with a humanitarian focus. They do, however, contribute to our knowledge of the possibilities of a new style of life. They also show that most of these communities are executed by people with a shrewd intelligence, and immensely practical sense. Undoubtedly, there have been many shortcomings in the principles and practice of these experiments, which must be recognized in order to be avoided. Many times people fail and it is in several cases essentially a symptom of the laziness of the mind and the inherent conviction that what has not been cannot be and will not be. The aim is to create a work situation which gives one a lifetime and energy to something which has meaning for the individual, in which one knows what one is doing, has an influence on what is being done, and feel untied with, rather than separated from, one’s fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worthy and dignity of the human being. When the individual is being swallowed up in the herd, and one is living by slave morality, it will de-humanize people and they will literally lose their identity as persons. However, this lose of the sense of self did not occur overnight. Many can recall the growing tendency to think of the self in superficial and oversimplified terms. Self-expression was supposed to be simply doing whatever popped into one’s head, as though the self were synonymous with any random impulse, and as though one’s decisions were to be made on the basis of a whom which might be a product of indigestion from a hurried lunch just as often as of one’s philosophy of life. To be yourself was then an excuse for relaxing into the lowest common denominator of inclination. To know one’s self was not thought to be especially difficult, and the problems of personality could be solved relatively easily by better adjustment. We were then congratulating ourselves that the child could be conditioned out of fear, superstition and other problem by techniques not essentially different from the way the dog’s saliva is conditioned to flow every time the dinner gong rings. These superficial views of the human situation were also furthered by the belief in automatic economic progress—we would all get richer and richer without too much struggles or suffering. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Practically everyone who gets their information for the media alone, without doing further research, shares the same oversimplified view of the human being and society. Science is advancing so rapidly that soon we will give people whatever temperament one desires, choleric or timid, strong or weakly gendered, merely by chemical injections into the body. However true this kind of push-button psychology is becoming a reality, it was the basis for the satire which Aldous Huxley have it in his Brave New World. People have become too confident in techniques and gadgets, not in the human being. The oversimplified, mechanical view of the self really betokens an underlying lack of belief in the dignity, complexity and freedom of the person. It is clear that the disbelief in the power and dignity of the person is becoming more openly accepted, for there appears a good deal of concrete evidence that the individual self is insignificant and that one’s personal choices do not matter. In the face of totalitarian democratic movements and controlled economic earthquakes like the housing shortage, we tend to feel smaller and smaller as persons. The individual self is dwarfed into as ineffectual a position as the proverbial grain of sand pushed around by ocean breakers. We move on as the wheel wills; one revolution registers all things, the rise and fall in pay and prices. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Most people now, therefore, are able to find good external reason for their belief that as selves they are insignificant and powerless. For how can one act, they well ask, in the face of the giant economic, political and social movements of the time? Authoritarianism in religion and science, let alone politics, is becoming increasingly accepted, not particularly because so many people explicitly believe in it but because they feel themselves individually powerless and anxious. So what else can one do, goes the reasoning, except follow the mass political leader (as happened in Europe) or follow the authority of customs, public opinion, and social expectations as is the tendency in this country? What is forgotten in such reasoning, is, of course, the fact that the loss of belief in the worth of the person is partly the cause of these mass social and political movements. Or, to put it more accurately, the loss of the self and the rise of collectivist movements, as we have pointed out, are both the result of the same underlying historical changes in our society. We need, therefore, to fight on both flanks—to oppose democratic totalitarianism and the other tendencies toward dehumanization of the person on one flank, and to recover our experience and belief in the worth and dignity of the person on the others. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
A startling picture of the loss of the sense of self in our society is given in a short novel, The Stranger, by the contemporary French author Albert Camus. It is the story of a Frenchman who is extraordinary in no respect—indeed, he might well be called an average modern man. He experiences the death of his mother, goes to work and about the ordinary things of life, has an affair and experiences pleasures of the flesh, all without any clear decision or awareness on his part. He later shoots a man, and it is vague even in his own mind whether he shot by accident or in self-defense. He goes through a murder trial and is executed, all with a horrible sense of unreality, as though everything happened to him: he never acted himself. The book is pervaded by a vagueness and haze which is frustrating and shocking, like the similar haze which is frustrating and shocking, like the similar haze of indecisiveness in Kafka’s stories. Everything seems to take place in a dream, with the man never really related to the World or anything he does or to himself. He is a man without courage or despair, despite the outwardly tragic events, because he has no awareness of himself. At the end when he is awaiting execution he almost gets a glimmer of the realization, as expressed, say in the words of George Herbert, “A sick toss’d vessel, dashing on each thing…My God, I mean myself.” Almost, but not quite; there is not enough sense of himself for even that to break through. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The novel is haunting and subtly terrifying picture of the modern mortal who is truly a stranger to himself. Thus far the argument here has been that the character traits engendered by our socioeconomic system, for example, by our way of living, are pathogenic and eventually produce a sick person and, thus, a sick society. There is, however, a second argument from an entirely different viewpoint in favor of profound psychological changes in mortal as an alternative to economic and ecological catastrophe. It is raised in two reports that deal with the technological, economic, and population trends on a World scale. The only drastic economic and technological changes on a global level, according to a master plan, can avoid major and ultimately global catastrophe. Economic changes are possible only if fundamental changes in the values and attitude of mortals occur (in human character orientations), such as a new ethic and a new attitude toward nature. New society is possible only if, in the process of developing it, a new human being also develops, or in more modest terms, if a fundamental change occurs in contemporary mortal’s character structure. Our present social order makes us sick, and we are headed for an economic catastrophe unless we radically change our social system. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The need for profound human changes emerges not only as an ethical or religious demand, not only as a psychological demand arising from the pathogenic nature of our present social character, but also as a condition for the sheer survival of the human race. Right living is not longer only the fulfillment of an ethical or religious demand. For the first time in history the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of human heart. However, a change of the human heart is possible only to the extent that drastic economic and social changes occur that give the human heart the change for change and the courage and the vision to achieve it. The almost unbelievable fact is that besides what President Trump is doing, no serious effort is made to avert what looks like a final decree of fate. While in our private life nobody except a mad person would remain passive in view of a threat to our total existence, those who are in charge of public affairs do practically nothing, and those who have entrusted their fate to them let them continue to do nothing. How is it possible that the strongest of all instincts, that for survival, seems to have ceased to motivate us? One of the most obvious explanations is that the leaders undertake any actions that make it possible for them to pretend they are doing something effective to avoid a catastrophe: endless conferences, resolutions, disarmament talks, all give the impression that the problems are recognized and something is being done to resolve them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Yet, while the appearance the people are listening, understanding and planning to take action to protect the citizens and their land, nothing of real importance happens; but both the leaders and the led anesthetize their consciences and their wish for survival by giving the appearance of knowing the road and marching in the right direction. Another explanation is that the selfishness the system generates makes leaders value personal success more highly than social responsibility. It is no longer shocking when political leaders and business executives make decisions that seem to be to their personal advantage, but at the same time are harmful and dangerous to the community. Indeed, if selfishness is one of the pillars of contemporary practical ethical, why should they act otherwise? They do not seem to know that greed (like submission) makes people stupid as far as the pursuit of even their own real interests is concerned, such as their interest in their own lives and the lives of their spouses and their children. At the same time, the general public is also selfishly concerned with their private affairs that they pay little attention to all that transcends the personal realm. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Yet another explanation for the deadening of our survival instincts is that the changes in living that would be required are so drastic that people prefer the future catastrophe to the sacrifice they would have to make now. Arthur Koestler’s description of an experience he had during the Spanish Civil War is a telling example of this widespread attitude: Arthur Koestler sat in the comfortable villa of a friend while the advance of Franco’s troops was reported; there was no doubt that they would arrive during the night, and very likely he would be shot; he could save his life by feeling, but the night was cold and rainy, the house, warm and cozy; so he stayed, was taken prisoner, and only by almost a miracle was his life saved many weeks later by the efforts of friendly journalists. This is also the kind of behavior that occurs in people who will risk dying rather than undergo an examination that could lead to the diagnosis of a grave illness requiring major surgery. And many of us have been there, we will wait months and sometimes even years before we find out what is going on with us because will think it will heal on its own, and it actually ends up getting worse. Aside from these explanations for fatal human passivity in matters of life and death, there is another. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Knowledge is another expression of the soul. The aura of mystical emanation which, in most people’s minds, surrounds the physicists or the psychiatrist or psychologist, is composed of both veneration and suspicion. It is a contemporary form of an age-old phenomenon believed in not only by primitive people but by all people down through history; that acquiring knowledge gives one a soul weapon over other people. If I have some special knowledge of you or your World which you do not know, I have power over you. This may be as simple as the fact that I know how something works and you do not; but basically, it is much more complex: it always skates on the edge of participation in the primitive belief that this knowledge gives me a special magical power. Some of the animosity against psychiatrists and psychologist and, specifically, against psychoanalysts (who have to challenge the demons, and it would be a wonder if they dd get off unscathed) arises from this deep-seated fear. Mortals in these professions, it is felt by many people, have a knowledge of life and death which others do not. Thus, there is a tendency to cling to them as gods one day and fight them as hated devils the next. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Knowledge is also our source of freedom and security. The truth shall set you free. However, in our emphasis on the gaining of knowledge, we have assumed that it was a one-way street—the more knowledge, the better; and we have forgotten this ambivalent, double character of knowledge, that it is also dangerous. We hear so much these days about knowledge bringing power, security, financial success, and so on, that we overlook the fact that the very word which refers to the acquiring of knowledge, “apprehend,” is also the word which means dread, “apprehension.” Looking in Webster’s, we find the definitions of apprehend: to perceive, to recognize the meaning of, to lay hold of with understanding; and the very next meaning is to anticipate with anxiety, dread of fear. And the same with “apprehension”: the first meaning, a grasp of the mind, is followed by the second, a distrust of fear of future evil. It cannot be an accident that woven into the very fabric of our language is the relationship between knowledge and the soul. “How dangerous it is to know,” we can say with Oedipus, “But I must know, no less.” It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
It is the psychoanalyst who can afford to forget this least of all. Patients come for treatment ostensibly with open arms for revelations about themselves. However, woe to the therapist who takes this at face value! The whole meaning of resistance and repression testifies to the anxiety and pain accompanying these disclosures about one’s self. That is one reason why it is good that the patient pay for one’s sessions; is one will not take too much when one pays for it, one will take scarcely a thing given one gratis! This gives us a new approach to the concept of resistance and repression—they reveal in person an inescapable need to hide from the truth about oneself. It is perpetually a moot question: How much self-knowledge can a human being bear? Oedipus is the prototype of the person who gains knowledge about oneself and pays the ultimate price for it. He is well aware of the threatening quality of knowledge: “Oh, I am in dread to hear,” he cries, “but I must hear no less.” Tiresias tries to persuade him not to search: “How terrible it is to know when no good comes from knowing.” The issue in the drama is, Shall Oedipus know what he has done? Shall Oedipus know who he is and what his origins are? Everyone commits these acts, in fantasy if not in reality—and in reality by the vicarious means of war and organized violence which one’s nation gives one. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
In actual fact, the only difference between Oedipus and the rest of humankind is that Oedipus faced and admitted what he had done despite all attempted persuasions to the contrary. Even Oedipus’ wife, Jocasta, joins in the general consensus that it is best that he remain in darkness; to show that she means this as a general principle of life, she attacks all the soothsayers and those who deal in myths or take the mysteries of the soul seriously: “Have no part of this craft,” she adjures her husband; dreams are not to be taken seriously and it is best to “live unthinking as a man may.” When the truth finally dawns on her (and it is important to keep in mind that she did not know this when she advised Oedipus not to seek his origins), she cries out desperately to her husband, “God keep you from the know of who you are!” However, Oedipus is a hero precisely because he will not let Tiresias or his wife or God or anyone else stand in the way of his knowledge about himself. He is the hero because he is man facing his own reality. Not that he does not cry out with the pain of it—he does, time and again. However, he repeats, “I will not stop till I have known the whole.” He also knows there are no false heroics “Curse on the man who took the cruel bonds from off my legs, as I lay in the field.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Though he curses the childhood which brought him this fate, he confronts it directly, and destroys himself in the process: a relatively happy and successful king transformed into a blind, bad-tempered, old man exiled to Colonus. However, he knows. And this courage to know, be it noted, with all its destructive possibilities, is found in the same person who can answer the riddle of the sphinx, the one who knows what man is. Down through the ages, mortals have tried through their myths to tell each other of this connection between knowledge and the soul. In Goethe’s Faust, the hero has such an all-encompassing drive to possess knowledge that the sells his soul to Mephistopheles and counts the price light—which was Goethe’s, and the myth’s way of saying that to give in to such an infinite passion for knowledge is already to have become one of the devil’s World. Adam and Eve are thrown out of Eden because they, having eaten of the tree of good and evil, now have knowledge; and this makes them like the gods, immortal. The legend portrays the birth of human consciousness and states that consciousness carries the soul with it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The myth of Prometheus has a parallel meaning: the god’s disclosing of the cultural arts to mortals—central in which is language—amounts to the setting of oneself against the other gods and incurring everlasting torment. Therefore, the more the soul is recognized, the more we shall be able to use the knowledge we acquire or our benefit and humankind’s. “O how great the plan of our God! For on the other hand, the paradise of God must deliver up the spirits of the righteous, and the grave deliver up the body of the righteous; and the spirit and the body is restored to itself again, and all mortals become incorruptible, and immortal, and they are living souls, having a perfect knowledge like unto us in the flesh, save it be that our knowledge shall be perfect,” reports 2 Nephi 9.13. The difficulty of understanding faith either as a matter of the intellect or as a matter of will, or of both in mutual support, has led to the interpretation of faith as emotion. This solution was, and partly is, supported from both the religious and the secular side. For the defenders of religion it was a retreat to a seemingly safe position after the battle about faith as a matter of knowledge or will had been lost. Religion is the feeling of unconditional dependence. Of course, feeling so defined does not mean in religion what it means in popular psychology. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Religion is not vague and changing, but as a definite content: unconditional dependence, a phrase related to what we have called ultimate concern. Nevertheless, the word feeling as induced many people to believe that faith is a matter of merely subjective emotions, without a content to be known and a demand to be obeyed. This interpretation of faith was readily accepted by representatives of science and ethics, because they took it as the best way to get rid of the interference from the side of religion in the process of scientific research and technical organization. If religion is mere feeling it is innocuous. The old conflicts between religion and culture are finished. Culture goes its way, directed by scientific knowledge, and religion is the private affair of every individual and a mere mirror of one’s emotional life. No claims for truth can be made by it. No competition wit science, history, psychology, politics is possible. Religion, put safely into the corner of subjective feelings, has lost its danger for mortal’s cultural activities. Neither of the two sides, the religious and the cultural, could keep this well-defined covenant of peace. Faith the state of ultimate concern claims the whole mortal and cannot be restricted to the subjectivity of mere feeling. It claims truth for its concern and commitment to it. It does not accept the situation in the corner of mere feeling. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
If the whole mortal is grasped, all one’s functions are grasped. If this claim of religion is denied, religion itself is denied. It was not only religion which could not accept the restriction of faith to feeling. It was also not accepted by those who were especially interested in pushing religion into the emotional corner. Scientists, artist, moralists showed clearly that they also were ultimately concerned. Their concern expressed itself even in those creations in which they wanted most radically to deny religion. A keen analysis of most philosophical, scientific and ethical systems shows how much ultimate concern in present in them, even if they are leading in the fight against what they call religion. This show the limits of the emotionalist definition of faith. Certainly faith as an act of the whole personality has strong emotional elements within it. Emotion always expresses the involvement of the whole personality in an act of life or spirit. However, emotion is not the source of faith. Faith is definite in its direction and concrete in its content. Therefore, it claims truth and commitment. It is directed toward the unconditional, and appears in a concrete reality that demands and justifies such commitment. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
But I Was the Best Liked—I Have a Good Dream and I Have to Come Out to be Number One!
Walking. I spun around. He was there. Technicolor ghost, black tailcoat, walking as I had been, through the grass, tossing aside the champagne glass, coming on. Our absolute description of what faith is implies the rejection of interpretations that dangerously distort the meaning of faith. It is necessary to make these implicit rejections explicit, because the distortions exercise a tremendous power over popular thinking and have been largely responsible for alienating many from religion since the beginning of the scientific age. It is not only the popular mind which distorts all the meaning of faith. Behind it lie philosophical and theological thoughts which is a more refined way also miss the meaning of faith. The different distorted interpretations of the meaning of faith can be traced to one source. Faith as being ultimately concerned is a centered act of the whole personality. If one of the functions which constitute the totality of the personality is partly or completely identified with faith, the meaning of faith is distorted. Such interpretations are not altogether wrong because every function of the human mind participates in the act of faith. However, the element of truth in them is embedded in a whole of error. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
The most ordinary misinterpretation of faith is to consider it an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence. Something more or less probable or improbably is affirmed in spite of the insufficiency of its theoretical substantiation. This situation is very usual in daily life. If this is meant, one is speaking of belief rather than of faith. One believes that one’s information is correct. One believes that records of past events are useful for the reconstruction of facts. One believes that a scientific theory is adequate for the understanding of a series of facts. One believes that a person will act in a specific way or that a political situation will change in a certain direction. In all these cases the belief is based on evidence sufficient to make the event probable. Sometimes, however, one believes something which has low probability or is strictly improbable, though not impossible. The causes for all these theoretical and practical beliefs are rather varied. Some tings are believed because we have good though not complete evidence about them; many more things are believed because they are stated by good authorities. This is the case whenever we accept the evidence which others accepted as sufficient for belief, even if we cannot approach the evidence directly (for example, all events of the past). #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
Here a new element comes into the picture, namely, the trust in the authority which makes a statement probable for us. Without such trust we could not believe anything expect the objects of our immediate experience. The consequence would be that our World would be infinitely smaller than it actually is. It is rational to trust in authorities which enlarge our consciousness without forcing us into submission. If we use the word faith for this kind of trust we can say that most of our knowledge is based on faith. However, it is not appropriate to do so. We believe the authorities, we trust their judgment, though never unconditionally, but we do not have faith in them. Faith is more than trust in authorities, although trust is an element of faith. This distinction is important in view of the fact that some earlier theologians tried to prove the unconditional authority of the Biblical writers by showing their trustworthiness as witnesses. The Christian may believe the Biblical writers, but not unconditionally. One does not have faith in them. One should not even have faith in the Bible. For faith is more than trust in even the most sacred authority. It is participation in the subject of one’s ultimate concern with one’s whole being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
Therefore, the term “faith” should not be used in connection with theoretical knowledge, whether it is a knowledge on the basis of immediate, prescientific or scientific evidence, or whether it is on the basis of trust in authorities who themselves are dependent on direct or indirect evidence. The terminological inquiry has led us into the material problem itself. Faith does not affirm or deny what belongs to the prescientific or scientific knowledge of our World, whether we know it by direct experience or though the experience of others. The knowledge of our World (including ourselves as a part of the World) is a matter of inquiry by ourselves or by those in whom we trust. It is not a matter of faith. The dimension of faith is not the dimension of science, history or psychology. The acceptance of a probably hypothesis in these realms is not faith, but preliminary belief, to be tested by scholarly methods and to be changed by every new discover. Almost all the struggles between faith and knowledge are rooted in the wrong understanding of faith as a type of knowledge which has a low degree of evidence but is supported by religious authority. It is, however, not only confusion of faith with knowledge that is responsible for the World historical conflicts between them; it is also the fact that matters of faith in the sense of ultimate concern lie hidden behind an assumedly scientific method. Whenever this happens, faith stands against faith and not against knowledge. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
The difference between faith and knowledge is also visible in the kind of certitude each gives. There are two types of knowledge which are based on complete evidence and give complete certitude. The one is the immediate evidence and give complete certitude. The one is the immediate evidence of sense perception. One who sees a green color sees a green color and is certain about it. One cannot be certain whether the thing which seems to one green is really green. One may be under a deception. However, one cannot doubt that one sees green. The other complete evidence is that of the logical and mathematical rules which are presupposed even if their formulation admits different and sometimes conflicting methods. One cannot discuss logic without presupposing those implicit rules which make the discussion meaningful. Here we have absolute certitude; but we have no reality, just as in the case of mere sense perception. Nevertheless, this certitude is not without value. No truth is possible without the material given by sense perception and without the form given by the logical and mathematical rules which express the structure in which all reality stands. One of the worst errors of theology and popular religion is to make statements which intentionally or unintentionally contradict the structure of reality. Such an attitude is an expression not of faith but of the confusion of faith with belief. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
Knowledge of reality has never the certitude of complete evidence. The process of knowing is infinite. It never comes to an end expect in a state of knowledge of the whole. However, such knowledge transcends infinitely every finite mind and can be ascribed only to God. Every knowledge of reality by the human mind has the character of higher or lower probability. The certitude about a physical law, a historical fact, or a psychological structure can be so high that, for all practical purposes, it is certain. However, theoretically the incomplete certitude of belief remains and can be undercut at any moment by criticism and new experience. The certitude of faith has not this character. Neither has it the character of formal evidence. The certitude of faith is existential, meaning that the whole existence of mortals is involved. It has, as we indicated before, two elements: the one, which is not a risk but a certainty about one’s own being, namely, on being related to something ultimate of unconditional; the other, which is a risk and involves doubt and courage, namely, the surrender to a concern which is not really ultimate and may be destructive if taken as ultimate. This is not theoretical problem of the kind of higher or lower evidence, of probability or improbability, but it is an existential problem of to be or not to be. It belongs to a dimension other than any theoretical judgment. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Faith is not belief and it is not knowledge with a low degree of probability. Its certitude is not uncertain certitude of a theoretical judgment. “Yea, and how is it that ye have forgotten that the Lord is able to do all things according to his will for the children of mortals, if it so be that they exercise faith in him? Wherefore, let us be faithful to him. And if it so be that we are faithful to him, we shall obtain the land of promise; and ye shall know at some future period that the word of the Lord shall be fulfilled,” reports 1 Nephi12-13. The individual’s striving for one’s own gain, in fine, without an equal emphasis on social welfare, no longer automatically brings good to the community. Furthermore, this type of individual competitiveness—in which for you to fail in a deal is as good as for me to succeed, since it pushes me ahead in the scramble up the ladder—raises many psychological problems. It makes every mortal the potential enemy of one’s neighbor, it generates much interpersonal hostility and resentment, and increases greatly our anxiety and isolation from each other. As this hostility has come closer to the surface in recent decades, we have tried to cover it up by various device—by becoming joiners of all sorts of service organizations, from Rotary to Optimist Clubs, by being good fellows, well liked by all, and so on. However, the conflict sober or later burst forth into the open. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
This is pictured beautifully and tragically in Willie Loman, the chief character in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Willie had been taught, and in turn taught his sons, that to get ahead of the next fellow and to get rich were the goals, and this requires initiative. When the boys steal balls and lumber, though he pays lip-service to the idea that he should rebuke them, is pleased that they are fearless characters and remarks that the coach will probably congratulate them on their initiative. His friend reminds him that the jails are full of fearless characters, but Willie rejoins, “the stock exchange is too.” Willie tries to cover up this competitiveness, like most men of four or five decades ago, by being well liked. When as an old man he is cast into the ask can by virtue of the changing policies of his company, Willie is caught in great bewilderment, and keeps repeating to himself, “But I was the best-liked.” His confusion in this conflict of values—why does what he was taught not work?—mounts up until it culminates in his experiencing death by suicide. At the grave one son continues to insist, “He had a good dream, to come number one.” However, the other son accurately sees the contradictions which such an upheaval of values leads to, “He never knew who he was.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
The second central belief in our modern age has been the faith in individual reason. This belief, ushered in at the Renaissance like the belief in the value of individual competitiveness which we have just been discussing, was magnificently fruitful for the philosophical quests of the enlightenment in the seventeenth century, and served as a noble character for the advances in science and for movements toward universal education. In thee first centuries of our period, individual reason also meant universal reason; it was a challenge to each intelligent person to discover the universal principles by which all mortals might live happily. Psychologically, reason become separated from emotion and will. The splitting up of the personality means that reason was supposed to give then answer to any problem, will power was supposed to put it into effect, and emotions—well, they generally got in the way, and could best be repressed. Lo and behold, we find reason (now transformed into intellectualistic rationalization) used in the service of compartmentalizing the personality, with the resulting repressions and conflict between instinct and id. Reason is supposed to be an attitude toward life in which the mind unites the emotions with ethical goals and other aspects of the whole more. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
When most people use the term reason, they almost always imply a splitting personality. They ask in one form or another: “Should I follow reason or give way to sensual passions and needs or be faithful to my ethical duty?” In our bourgeois, industrialized society, a mortal’s most effective way of evading the soul is by losing oneself in the herd. This is the particular reaction to the soul which disperses it. We look at the same programs of programs of unethical population control and deviance on television at the same time millions and billions of people all around the World do; or we join the army and defend our nation not for ourselves but for our homeland and for freedom. This conformism and anonymity relieve us of the burden of the responsibility for our soul urges while insuring their satisfaction. However, they also insure that the soul will remain impersonal. It makes the soul forces unavailable for individual integration; the price the person pays is the forfeiting of one’s chance to develop one’s own capacities in one’s own unique way. The dispersion of the soul by means of impersonality has serious and destructive effects. In New York City, it is not regarded as strange that the anonymous human beings secluded in single room occupancies are so often connected with violent crime and drug addiction. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
Not that the anonymous individual in New York is alone: one sees thousands of other people every day, and one knows all the famous personalities as they come, via TV, into one’s single room. One knows their names, their smiles, their idiosyncrasies; they bandy about in a “we are-all-friends-together” mood on the screen which invites one to join them and subtly assumes that one does join them. One knows them all. However, one oneself is never known. The individual’s smile is unseen; one’s idiosyncrasies are important to nobody; one’s name is unknown. One remains a foreigner pushed on and off the subway by tens of thousands of other anonymous foreigners. There is a deeply depersonalizing tragedy involved in this. The most severe punishment God could inflict on his people was to blot of their name. “Their names,” God proclaims, “shall be wiped out of the book of the living.” This anonymous mortal’s never being known, this aloneness, is transformed into loneliness, which may then become demonic possession. For one’s self-doubts—“I do not really exist since I cannot affect anyone” –eat away at one’s innards; one lives and breathes and walks in a loneliness which is subtle and insidious. It is not surprising that one gets a gun and trains it on some passer-by—also anonymous to him or her. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
And it is not surprising that the young people in the streets, who are only anonymous digits in their society, should gang together in violent attacks to make sure their assertion is felt (this is actually a tactic “reporters” from the fake news media use and get away with for disallowing certain stories to air). Loneliness and its stepchild, alienation, can become forms of demon possession. Surrendering ourselves to the impersonal soul pushes us into an anonymity which cause us to become grim soulless mortals; we serve nature’s gross purposes on the lowest common denominator, which means with violence. “I perceive that ye are weak, that ye cannot understand all my words which I am commanded of the Father to speak unto you at this time. Therefore, go ye unto your homes, and ponder upon the things which I have said, and ask of the Father, in my name, that ye may understand, and prepare your minds for the morrow, and I come unto you again,” reports 3 Nephi 17.2-3. The failure of the Great Promise, aside from industrialism’s essential economic contradictions, was built into the industrial system by its two man psychological premises: that the aim of life is happiness, that is, maximum pleasure, defined as the satisfaction of any desire or subjective need a person may feel (radical hedonism); and that the id, selfishness, and greed, as the system needs to generate then in order to function, lead to harmony and peace. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
It is well known that people are practicing radical hedonism, which is evident when the city of Sacramento builds a nearly $700 billion sports complex with mostly taxpayer’s money, without allowing the tax payers to vote on it. Subsequently, rents increase drastically and the homeless population increases by 50 percent, while 43 percent of home are experiencing food insecurity. The city leaders are acting like they are of unlimited means, such as the elite of Rome, of Italian cities of the Renaissance, and of England and France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as they try to find a meaning to life in unlimited pleasure. However, while maximum pleasure in the sense of radical hedonism is the practice of certain groups at certain times, it has never been the theory of well-being expressed by the great Masters of Living in China, Africa, India, Japan, the Neat East, and Europe. It is not about how much you make, but what you have left over after all the bills are paid. Pleasure as satisfaction of a desire cannot be the aim of life, because such pleasure is necessarily followed by unpleasure and thus keeps humanity away from its real goal of absence of pain. Factual existence of a desire constitutes an ethical norm. We are concerned with humankind’s optimal well-being (vivere bene). #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
The essential element in our thinking is the distinction between those needs (desire) that are only subjectively felt and whose satisfaction leads to momentary pleasure, and those needs that are rooted in human nature and whose realization is conducive to human growth and produces eudaimonia, well-being. In other words, we are concerned with the distinction between purely subjectively felt needs and objectively valid needs—part of the former being harmful to human growth and the latter being in accordance with the requirements of human nature. The theory that the aim of life is the fulfillment of every human desire was clearly voided when profit ceased to mean profit for the soul (as it does in the Bible). It was never meant to mean material, monetary profit, in the period when the middle class and the President is throwing away not only its political shackles, in exchange for bonds of love and solidarity and believing that we are being for more than just ourselves. Happiness is not the continuous process from one greed to another, nor should people use drugs or medications to give the illusion of happiness. For that kind of satisfaction is of cruel impulses and is illegitimate, precisely because they exist and crave satisfaction. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Turning now to studies in the field of industrial psychology, we find a good deal of evidence for the significance of the differentiation between the technical and social aspects of the work situation, and furthermore for the enlivening and stimulating effect of the active and responsible participation of the worker in one’s job. One of the most striking examples of the fact that technically monotonous work can be interesting, if the work situation as a whole permits of interest and active participation has been evaluated. The operation selected was that of assembling telephone coils, work which ranks as a repetitive performance. A standard assembly bench with the appropriate equipment, and with places for give workers was put into a room, which was separated by a partition from the main assembly room; altogether six operatives worked in this room, five working at the bench, and one distributing parts to those engaged in the assembly. All of the people were experienced workers. Two of them dropped out within the first year, and their places were taken by two other workers of equal skill. Altogether, the experiment lasted for five years, and was divided into various experimental periods, in which certain changes were made in the conditions of work. Without going into the details of these changes, it suffices to state that rest pauses were adopted in the morning and afternoon, refreshments offered during these rest pauses, and the hours of work cut by half an hour. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Throughout these changes in making the work environment more pleasant, providing refreshments, give more breaks, and letting the employees go home earlier, the output of each worker rose considerably. So far, so good; noting was more plausible then the assumption that increased rest periods and some attempt to make the worker feel better were the causes for an increased efficiency. Then get this, a new arrangement with the workers took place and disappointed this expectation and showed rather dramatic results: by arrangement with the workers, the group returned to the conditions of work as they had existed in the beginning of the experiment. Rest periods, special refreshments, and other improvements were all abolished for approximately three months. To everybody’s amazement this did not result in a decrease of output but, on the contrary, the daily and weekly output rose to a higher point than at any time before. In the next period, the old concessions were introduced again, with the only exception that the people provided their own food, while the company continued to supply gourmet coffee for the morning lunch. The output still continued to rise. And not only the output. What is equally important is the fact that the rate of infirmary among the workers in this experiment fell by 80 percent in comparison with the general rate, and that a new social friendly intercourse developed among the working people. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
How can we explain the surprising result that the steady increase seemed to ignore the experimental changes in its upward development? If it was not the rest pauses, the tea and coffee, the shortened working time, what was it that made the workers produce more, be more healthy and more friendly among themselves? The answer is obvious: while the technical aspect of monotonous, uninteresting work remained the same, and while even certain improvements like rest pauses were not decisive, the social aspect of the total work situation had changed, and caused a change in the attitude of the workers. They were informed of the experiment, and of the several steps in it; their suggestions were listened to and often followed, and what is perhaps the most important point, they were aware of participating in a meaningful and interest experiment, which was important not only to themselves, but to the workers of the whole factory. While they were at first shy and uneasy, and silent and perhaps somewhat suspicious of the company’s intentions, later their attitude was marked by confidence and candour. The group developed a sense of participation in the work, because they knew what they were doing, they had an aim and purpose, and they could influence the whole procedure by their suggestions. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
God’s ways are not our ways. They are better than our ways. There will be times when we miss out on an opportunity and cannot understand why. We may be experiencing that right now. Here is the question: Will you stay in faith while you wait to see what God is up to? The startling results of the experiment show that sickness, fatigue and a resulting low output are not caused primarily by the monotonous technical aspect of the work, but by alienation of the worker from the total work situation in it social aspect. As soon as this alienation was decreased to a certain extent by having the worker participate in something that was meaningful to him or her, and in which one has a voice, one’s whole psychological reaction to the work changed, although technically he or she was still doing the same kind of work. Research proves that the social aspect of the work situation has a decisive influence on the attitude of the worker, even though the work process in its technical aspect remains the same. Also, here are some clues as to other characteristics of the work situation which will affect the will to work. A variation in the rate of work in different individuals is dependent upon the prevailing group or social atmosphere, on a collective influence which forms an intangible background and determines the general nature of the reactions to the condition of work. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
It is to the same point that in smaller-sized working groups, subjective satisfaction and output are higher than in larger working groups, although in the factories compared, the nature of the work process was almost identical, and physical conditions and welfare amenities were of a higher order and much alike. The relationship between group size and morale has also been noted. The nonsickness absence rate was found to be significantly greater among workers in large-sized rooms than among those in smaller rooms accommodating fewer employees. The psychological climate often develops among people working together, personal bonds and interest develop among the working team, and the work situation in its total aspect is much less monotonous than it would appear to the outsider wo takes into account only the technical aspect. However, telling each other off leads to discussions and a waste of time on the job. So it is best to unanimously set apart a time every week for an informal meetings to iron out differences and conflicts. However, the objective is not just better economic setup but a new way of living together, and discussion are bound to lead to the disclosure of basic attitudes. Very soon people will see the necessity of a common basis, or what we call, from then on, our common ethics. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
Unless there is a common ethical basis, there is no point to start from together and therefore no possibility of building anything. To find a common ethical basis is not easy, because the two dozen workers now engaged are all different: Catholics, Protestants, materialists, Humanists, atheists, Capitalists, and so on. They all examined their own individual ethics, that is, not what they had been taught by rote, or what was conventionally accepted, but what they, our of their own experiences and thoughts, found necessary. They discovered that their individual ethics has certain points in common. They took those point and made them the common minimum on which they agreed unanimously. It was not a theoretical, vague declaration. In their foreword they declared: “There is no danger that our common ethical minimum should be an arbitrary convention, for, in order to determine the points, we rely on life experiences. All our moral principles have been tried in real life, everyday life, everybody’s life.” What they had rediscovered was essentially part of the ten commandments: love thy neighbor, do not kill, do not steal anyone’s good, do not lie, be faithful to thy promise, earn what you desire by working for it, respect others and their property and their liberty, respect thyself. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
Thou shalt fight first against thyself, all vices which debase mortal, all the passions which hold mortals in slavery and are detrimental to social life: narcissism, avarice, lust, covetousness, gluttony, anger, laziness. Thou shalt also hold that there are goods higher than life itself: liberty, human dignity, truth, justice. It is best for people to pledge themselves to do their best to practice these common ethical minimums in their everyday life. Those who had more exacting private ethics pledged themselves to try to live what they believed, but recognized that they had absolutely no right to infringe on the liberties of others. In fact, they all agreed to respect fully the others’ convictions or absence of conviction to the extent of never laughing at them or making jokes about it. The second discovery the group made was that they craved to educate themselves. They figure out that the time they saved on production could be used for education. Within three months, the productivity of their work grew so much, that they could save nine hours on a forty-eight-how week. What did they do? They used these nine hours for education and were paid for it as for regular work hours. First they wanted to sing well together, then polish their French grammar, then to learn how to read business accounts. From there, other courses developed, all given at the factory by the best instructors they could find. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
The instructors were paid the regular rates. There were courses in engineering, physics, literature, Marxism, Christianity, dancing, singing, golf and basketball. Their principle is: “We do not start from the plant, from the technical activity of mortals, but from the mortal oneself. In a Community of Work accent is not an acquiring together, but on working together for a collective and personal fulfillment.” The aim is not increased productivity, or higher wages, but a new style of life which far from relinquishing the advantages of the economic revolution of the year 2020 and beyond. In order to live we have to enjoy the products of our labor. One has to be able to educate oneself. One has to pursue a common endeavor within a professional group proportioned to the stature of mortals. One has to be actively related to the whole World. When these requisites are examined one discovers that they amount to a shifting of the center of the problem of living—from making and acquiring things, to discovering, and fostering and developing human relationships. For a civilization of objects to a civilization of persons; better even a civilization of movement between persons. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
That is the symbol of something special—a free life, a lot of privileges, power, attractiveness. We thus imitate the behavior of others because we want to be like them, to take on their characteristics, and because we are rewarded for out imitation: it pleases us and it pleases them. It is important to remember, however, that a person must be at the right maturational level for a particular behavior if imitation—or any other learning strategy—is to work. It is also important to remember that children do in fact receive and record what goes on around them, and they learn. They learn by doing over and over again—by repetition—and this doing is often initiated by imitation. They also learn by identification with a parent or relative. They learn by experimenting and testing, that is, by doing and then observing parental response to their actions. Of course, this all applies to emotions and how the parents emote and respond to the child’s feelings, especially the feeling—and expression of anger. Children are extremely perceptive and absorb what goes on around them long before they can talk or even comprehend language. They are like finely tuned receivers that pick up much more than is merely said. They are receptive and attuned to every mood, feeling, and change that goes on in people around them. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
Children are particularly affected by the way their parents, sisters and brothers feel and act. You may go through some difficulties. You may have been praying, believing for your situation to change for a long time, but you do not see anything happening. God is working behind the scenes right now arranging things in your favor. The answer is already on the way. What is it that you need to keep believing God for? If you will just get your mind going in the right direction and believe you can rise higher, God will restore your family and allow you to do something greater and make your mark on this generation. “I have this faith, that I have shaven. Caught us on my mind, they calling waves to take me away, I will not be back tonight. When I breathe, goes sails we have left behind. My dream will always be mine. Now I feel as years haven not folded. Oh and we are still connected t those days when we were young. Oh, and you are my reflection,” reports Emma Hewitt and Andrew Rayel (My Reflection). Let this take root in your spirit. Because you are a believer, all will be well with you. The surpassing greatness of God’s power is at work in your life. All will be well in your health, career. Get ready because God’s promises are about to come to pass in your life. Keep believing. It your success will get bigger, better, and greater than you ever imagined. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
Our Common Concern is the Very Destiny of the Human Race and the Unshaken Heart of Well-Rounded Truth
Our senses do not always play fair, or so it often seems. Sometimes the strangest phenomena occur which cause us to doubt our sanity or the effectiveness of our sensory apparatus. When we consider how intricate our nervous system is and how complex our sensory equipment, it is small wonder that there is not a lot more confusion than there actually is. We have you in our World now, and I must say you have a divine house here, and I so admire the paintings which have only just come from Paris, you and your friends are so very cleaver, and the furniture, there is so much of it, yes, it seems you have delicately places things in every nook and cranny, yet who could have asked for anything finer? Incoherence is the result of the present disintegrative processes in education. Thus, we must recognize that natural and humanmade ecological systems require as much study as isolated particles and elementary reactions. For there is a basic correlation of elements in nature as in mortals which cannot be separated, which compose each other and alter each other mutually. Thus we hope to widen appropriately our conceptual framework of reference. For our epistemological problem consists in finding the proper balance between our lack of an all-embracing principle relevant to our way of evaluating life and in our power to express ourselves in a logically consistent manner. All of this is sharply expressed in the relation of faith and doubt. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
If faith is understood as belief that something is true, doubt is incompatible with the act of faith. If faith is understood as being ultimately concerned, doubt is a necessary element in it. It is a consequence of the risk of faith. Our experience challenges us to recognize a totality richer and far more complex than the average observer could have suspected—a totality which compels one to think in ways which the logical dichotomies denies. We are summoned to revise fundamentally our ordinary ways of conceiving experience, and thus, by expanding our vision and by accepting these forms of thought which also include nonexclusive categories, then mind is then able to grasp what it was incapable of grasping or accepting before. The doubt which is implicit in faith is not a doubt about fact or conclusions. It is not the same doubt which is the lifeblood of scientific research. Even the most orthodox theologian does not deny the right methodological doubt in matter of empirical inquiry or logical deduction. A scientist who would say that a scientific theory is beyond doubt would at that moment cease to be scientific. One may believe that the theory can be trusted for all practical purposes. Without such belief no technical application of a theory would be possible. One could attribute to this a kind of belief pragmatic certainty sufficient for action. Doubt in this case points to the preliminary character of the underlying theory. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
We initially experience the soul as a blind push, driving us toward the assertion of ourselves. This blind push is original in two senses: first, it is the original way the infant experiences the soul, but it is also the way the soul instantaneously strikes each of us regardless of how old we are. Nature operates out of necessity; there is no alternative in nature, no will, no freedom, no choice as there is for mortals. Mortals must have convictions and values to live for, and this also is recognized and accepted by those scientists who are at the same time philosophers. For they then realize that duty and devotion to our task, be it a task of acting or of understanding, will become weaker and rarer unless guidance is sought in a metaphysics that transcends our historical and scientific views in a religion that transcends and yet pervades the work we are carrying on in the light of day. Our blind urges become more and more sieved through the context of what gets us what we wish; we begin the long process of learning the gradual acculturation of soul urges. We are born into a social group, and would not survive more than a few hours without this community—no longer than Oedipus would have lasted out on the hillside if he had not been found by the shepherd. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The skeptical doubt is an attitude toward all the beliefs of mortals, from sense experiences to religious creeds. It is more an attitude than an assertion. For as an assertion it would conflict with itself. Even the assertion that there is no possible truth for mortals would be judged by the skeptical principle and could not stand as an assertion. Genuine skeptical doubt does not use the form of an assertion. It is an attitude of actually rejecting any certainty. Therefore, it cannot be refuted logically. It does not transform its attitude into a proposition. Such an attitude necessarily leads either to despair or cynicism, or both alternately. And often, if this alternative becomes intolerable, it leads to indifference and the attempt to develop an attitude of complete unconcern. However, since mortals are those beings who are essentially concerned about their being, such an escape finally breaks down. This is the dynamics of skeptical doubt. It has an awakening and liberating function, but it also can prevent the development of a centered personality. For personality is not possible without faith. The despair about truth by the skeptic shows that truth is still one’s infinite passion. The cynical superiority over every concrete truth shows that truth is still taken seriously and that the impact of the question of an ultimate concern is strongly felt. The skeptic, so long as one is a serious skeptic, is not without faith, even thought it has no concrete content. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
For the nature of knowledge, whether scientific or ontological, consists in reconciling meaning and being. And being signifies nothing other than the actualization of potentiality, self-realization which keeps in tune wit the transformation. This leads to experience in terms of the individual; and to organization and patterning in terms of the Universe. Thus organism and World actualize themselves simultaneously. And so we may understand that organism is being enduring in time, in fact in eternal time, nor with birth, nor does it end with death. Energy and matter in whatever form they may manifest themselves are transtemporal and transspatial and are therefore metaphysical. Mortals as mortal is summoned to know what is right and what is wrong, for emptied of such knowledge one is unable to decide what is better or what is worse. The doubt which is implicit in every act of faith is neither the methodological nor the skeptical doubt. It is the doubt which accompanies every risk. It is not the permanent doubt of the scientists, and it is not the transitory doubt of the skeptic, but it is the doubt of one who is ultimately concerned about a concrete content. One could call it the existential doubt, in contrast to the methodological and the skeptical doubt. It does not question whether a special proposition is true or false. It does not reject every concrete truth, but it is aware of the element of insecurity in every existential truth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
At the same time, the doubt which is implied in faith accepts this insecurity and takes it into itself in an act of courage. Faith includes courage. Therefore, it can include the doubt about itself. Certainly faith and courage are not identical. Faith has other elements besides courage and courage has other function beyond affirming faith. This dynamic concept of faith seems to give no place to that restful affirmative confidence which we find in the documents of all great religions, including Christianity. However, this is not the case. The self-motivated perception of faith is the result of a conceptual analysis, both of the subjective and of the objective side of faith. It is by no means the description of an always actualized state of mind. An analysis of structure is not the description of a state of things. The confusion of these two is a source of many misunderstandings and errors in all realm of life. An example, taken from the current discussion of anxiety, is typical of confusion. The description of anxiety as the awareness of one’s finitude is sometimes criticized as untrue from the of view of the ordinary state of the mind. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Anxiety, one says, appears under special conditions but it not an ever-present implication of mortal’s finitude. Certainly anxiety as an acute experience appears under definite conditions. However, the underlying structure of finite life is the universal condition which makes the appearance of anxiety under special conditions possible. In the same way doubt is not a permanent experience within the act of faith. However, it I always present as an element in the structure of faith. This is the difference between fait and immediate evidence either of perceptual or of logical character. There is no faith without an intrinsic “in spite of” and the courageous affirmation of oneself in the state of ultimate concern. This intrinsic element of doubt breaks into the open under special individual and social conditions. If doubt appears, it should not be considered as the negation of faith, but as an element which was always and will always be present in the act of faith. Existential doubt and faith are poles of the same reality, the state of ultimate concern. The insight into this structure of faith and doubt is of tremendous practical importance. Many Christians, as well as members of other religious groups, feel anxiety, guilt and despair about what they call loss of faith. However serious doubt is confirmation of faith, it indicates the seriousness of the concern its unconditional character. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
This also refers to those who as future or present ministers of a church experience not only scientific doubt about doctrinal statements—that is as necessary and perpetual as theology is a perpetual need—but also existential doubt about the message of their church, for instance, that Jesus can be called the Christ. The criterion according to which they should judge themselves is the seriousness and ultimacy of their concern about the content of both their fait and their doubt. So, it seems all people question their faith from time to time, and that is nature, and even people who do not have or are just establishing their faith have an inclination to believe in God and Christ, but the bottom line is that they know they should be good people, even if they do not recognize God. A belief in God or not believing in God is not a key to sin and think it is all good because you can see something much greater than humans created this World and at sometime, we are going to have to answer for the things we have done. Thus, mortals have discovered their own nature, and with this self-knowledge one has left the state of nonage and entered adulthood. For one is the only being who is able to say “no” to life but “yes” and to make for oneself a life that is human. In this decision lie our burden and our greatness. For the power of life or death lies not only in the tongue but in mortal’s recently acquired ability to destroy or to create life itself, and therefore one is faced with unlimited and unprecedented choices for good and evil that dominate out time. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Our common concern is the very destiny of the human race. For mortals have now intervened in the process of evolution, a power not given to the pre-Socratics, nor to Aristotle, nor to the Prophets in the East or the West, nor to Copernicus, not to Luther, Descartes, or Machiavelli. Judgments of value must henceforth direct technological change, for without such values mortals are divested of one’s humanity and of one’s need to collaborate with the very fabric of the Universe in order to bestow meaning, purpose, and dignity upon one’s existence. No time must be lost since the wavelength of chance is now shorter than the life-span of mortals. In spite of the infinite obligation of mortals and in spite of their finite power, in spire of the intransigence of nationalisms, and in spite of the homelessness of moral passions rendered ineffectual by the technological outlook, beneath the apparent turmoil and upheaval of the present, and out of the transformations of this dynamic period with the unfolding of a World-consciousness, the purpose of humanity is to help quicken the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth and interpret the significant elements of the World Age now taking shape out of the core of that undimmed continuity of the creative process which restores mortals to humankind while deepening and enhancing one’s communion and one’s symbiotic relationship with the Universe. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Regardless of how loud we protest, we need our communities around us. The soul occurs within the context of this social group. To what extent will it be used against them, to attack the, or force them to bend to our needs and desires; and to what extent and wen will it be used as a cooperative assertion? Adults retain the propensity to experience the soul as a blind push, as sheer self-assertion. In all sorts of demonstrations, it is necessary to stir the mob spirit before the act can be done. We experience security in the mob, a comfortable feeling of being completely protected. We surrender our individual consciousness to the group mind; we feel as thought we were in the ecstatic state of trance under hypnosis. No matter how civilized an individual may pride oneself on being, or how much one may deplore violence on the part of others, one must still admit that one is capable of this—or, if one is not, something important in one’s character has been suffocated. The attractiveness of giving one’s self over to the mob lies in the excitement without individual consciousness—no more alienation, no sense of isolation, and none of that fatiguing burden of personal responsibility. All of this is taken over by the group mind, a fictitious phrase which stands for the lowest common denominator. This is what constitutes the attraction—indeed, at times the horrendous joy—of war and of mass demonstrations. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
They assume from us in our individual personal responsibility for the soul; and the fact that my sentence begins with “they” indicates how much we must assign the action to anonymous figures. In society like our, which represses the soul, these states are welcomed for the primitive security they give. Prejudice is a result of disrespect for our fellow beings. We cannot participate in attitudes of prejudice without distancing ourselves from others. True respect, then, comes as we develop our ability to love our brothers and sisters as ourselves. Gossip, another everyday form of disrespect, is incompatible with love. What we say about people in their absence should be what we would say to them, with love, if they were present. Feeling empathy for others is a symptom of respectful behavior, while feeling unsympathetic is a symptom of disrespectful acts. Respect is also synonymous with care and concern. We respect those we care about. Sometimes we excuse our disrespect, even for people we care about, by holding against them their lack of caring or concern for us. “And ye will not have a mind to injure one another, but to live peaceably, and to render to every person according to that which one is due,” reports Mosiah 4.13. While there are many examples of disrespect in the media, there are so good example, like the teach who helped buy one of her students brand new car and get him a paid internship because he was working three job. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Teach your children to respect their neighbors, church leaders, and teachers. The act of faith, like every act in a mortal’s spiritual life, is dependent on language and therefore on community. For only in the community of spiritual beings is language alive. Without language there is no act of faith, no religious experience! This refers to language generally and to the special language in every function of mortal’s spiritual life. The religious language, the language of symbol and myth, is created in the community of the believers and cannot be fully understood outside this community. However, within it, the religious language enables the act of faith to have a concrete content. Faith needs its language, as does every act of the personality; without language it would be blind, not directed toward a content, not conscious of itself. This is the reason for the predominant significance of the community of faith. Only as a member of such a community (even if in isolation or expulsion) can mortals have a content for one’s ultimate concern. Only in a community of language can mortals actualize their faith. If there is no faith without community of faith, is it not necessary that the community formulate the content of its faith in a definite way as a creedal statement and demand that every member of the community accept it? Certainly this is the way in which the creeds came into existence, and is the reason for the doctrines and legal fixation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
However, we cannot force every member of the community to accept out beliefs. This would not explain the tremendous power of these expressions of the communal faith over groups and individual generation to generation. Nor does it explain the fanaticism with which doubts and deviations were suppressed, not only by external power but even more by the mechanism of inner suppression. These mechanisms had been planted into the individual mind and were most effective even without pressure from the outside. In order to understand these facts we must remember that faith as the state of ultimate concern includes total surrender to the content of this concern in a centered act of the personality. This means that the existence of the personality in the ultimate sense is at stake. Idolatrous concern and devotion may destroy the center of the personality. If, as in the Christian Church, in centuries of strife the content of the communal faith has been defended against such intrusions, it is understandable that every deviation from these formulations is considered destructive for the soul of the Christian. One is thought to have fallen under demonic influences. Ecclesiastical punishments are attempts to save one from demonic self-destruction. In these measures the concern which is the content of faith is take absolutely seriously. It is a matter of eternal life and death. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
However, it is not only the individual for who subjection to the established creed is of decisive importance. It is also the community of faith as such which must be protected against the distorting influences of individuals. The Church excludes from its community those who are though to have denied the foundations of the Church. This is the meaning of the concept of heresy. The heretic is not one who has erroneous beliefs (tis is a possible implication of heresy, but not its essence), but the heretic is one who has turned away from the true to a false, idolatrous concern. Therefore, one may influence others in the same direction, destroy them, and undermine the community. If the civil authorities consider the Church as the basis of the conformity and cultural substance without which a society cannot live, they persecute the heretic as a civil criminal and use means of indoctrination and external pressure by which they try to keep the unity of the religio-political realm. However, if this point is reached, the reaction of mortal’s spiritual autonomy begins to work and, if victorious, removes not only the political enforcement of a creedal system but the creedal system itself—and beyond this, often faith itself. However, this proves to be impossible. It can be and has always been done only through the power of another ultimate concern. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Faith stands against faith in the World historical struggles between the Church and its liberal critics. Even the faith of the liberal needs expression and some communal formulations, and it needs to be defended against authoritarian attacks. Even more: the ultimate concern of the liberal needs concrete contents, as does every ultimate concern. One also lives in institutions of a definite historical character. One, too, has a special language and uses special symbols. One’s faith in freedom as an element in the concreteness of a total situation. If one undercuts this concreteness in the name of freedom, one produces a vacuum into which antiliberal forces easily enter. Only creative faith can resist the onslaught of destructive faith. Only the concern with what is truly ultimate can stand against idolatrous concerns. How is a community of faith possible without suppression of the autonomy of mortal’s spiritual life? That is based on the relation of the civil authorities to the communities of faith. Even if a society is practically identical with a community of faith and the actual life of the group is determined by the spiritual substance of a church, the civil authorities should as such remain neutral and risk the rise of dissident forms of faith. If they try to enforce spiritual conformity, and are successful, they have removed the risk of courage which belongs to the act of faith. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
They have transformed faith into a behavior pattern which does not admit alternatives, and which loses its character of ultimacy even if the fulfillment of the religious duties is done with supreme concern. However, such a situation has become rare in our period. In most societies the evil authorities have to deal with different communities of faith, unable to enforce the one or the other in all members of the society. In this case the spiritual substance of the social group is determined by the common denominator of the different groups and their common tradition. This denominator may be more secular or more religious. In any case it is an outgrowth of faith, and its expression—as in the American Constitution—is affirmed in an attitude which sometimes has the unconditional character of an ultimate concern, but more often the conditional character of a preliminary concern of highest degree. Just for this reason the civil authorities should not try to prohibit the expression of doubt about such a basic law, although they must enforce the legal consequences of it. People may have to struggle within themselves about their subjection; but after they have made the decision, no doubt can be admitted by them about the infallible statements of the authorities. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
This faith has become static, a nonquestioning surrender not only to the ultimate, which is affirmed in the act of faith, but also to its concrete elements as formulated by the religious authorities. In this way something preliminary and conditional—the human interpretation of the content of faith from the Biblical writers to the present—receives ultimacy and is elevated above the risk of doubt. The fight against the idolatrous implications of this kind of static faith was waged first by Protestantism and then, when Protestantism itself became static, by Enlightenment. This protect, however insufficient its expression, aimed originally at a dynamic faith and not at the negation of faith, not even at the negation of creedal formulations. So we stand again before the question: How can a faith which has doubt as an element within itself be untied with creedal statements of the community of faith? Creedal expressions of the ultimate concern of the community must include their own criticism. It must become obvious in all of them—by they liturgical, doctrinal or ethical expressions of the faith of the community—that they are not ultimate. Rather, their function is to point to the ultimate which is being all of them. This is what I call the “Protestant principle,” the critical element in the expression of the community of faith and consequently the element of doubt in the fact of faith. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Neither the doubt nor the critical element is always actual, but both most always be possible within the circle of faith. From the Christian point of view, one would say that the Church with all its doctrines and institutions and authorities stands under the Cross, if the Cross is understood as the divine judgment over mortal’s religious life, and even over Christianity, though it has accepted the sign of the Cross. In this way the dynamic faith which we first have described in personal terms is applied to the community of faith. Certainly, the life of a community of faith is a continuous risk, if faith itself is understood as a risk. However, this is the character of dynamic faith, and the consequences of the Protestant principle. Faith is a principle of action and power. Whenever we work toward a worthy goal, we exercise faith. We show our hope for something that we cannot see. We can exercise faith in Christ when we have an assurance that he exists, a correct idea of the Lord’s character, and a knowledge that we are striving to live according to his will. Having faith in Jesus Christ means relying completely on him—trusting his infinite power, intelligence, and love. It includes believing his teaching. It means believing that even though we do not understand all things. Because the Lord has experienced all our pains, afflictions, and infirmaries, he knows how to help us rise above all our daily difficulties. Faith is much more than passive belief. We express our faith through action—by the way we live. Our faith an lead us to good works. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
He Waited with an Empathetic Face with Patient Celibate Alertness—Parting is All We Know of Heaven
Who missed the deep silence of so many past centuries? Who missed the deep darkness of the long ago pre-electric nights? Not me. We can no longer postpone the challenging question: How does one know that among that bedlam of voices which beset us all, one is really hearing one’s soul? Inner voices—experienced as actual or metaphorical ones—are notoriously untrustworthy; they can tell one anything. Many people hear voices, but there are few Joans Arc. The most important criterion which saves the soul from anarchy is dialogue. Almost every contemporary psychotherapist gains in importance and comes much more than a mere technique for dialogue implies that mortals exist in relationship. The fact that dialogue is possible at all—that it is possible, in favorable circumstances, for us to understand each other, stand where the other is standing—is, in itself, a remarkable point. Communication presupposes community which, in turn, means a communion between the consciousness of the persons in the community. This is a meaningful interchange which is not dependent upon the individual’s mere whim but is a built-in aspect of the structure of human intercourse. Human life is life in dialogue; we can know the self only in dialogue. As we move into times of accelerating change and deepening uncertainty, we need to get smart about how to talk to one another. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
We need to be able to overcome differences, find common ground, build meaning and purpose, be able to think together as groups, as teams, as committees, as communities and as citizens. Consensual validation shows the enteral importance of dialogue, and has the merit of emphasizing the experiential side rather than mere discourse. The word logos (meaningful structure of reality) is the anchor of this term, dia-logos. If we can talk about the soul meaningfully, we already are in the process of integrating it into the structure of our lives. We find through dialogue the structure of experience and then each mortal is not cast adrift on one’s own. Ideas and reminiscence has to only be awakened and brought out. Understanding is possible, specially by the structure of language, and more generally by the structure of human relationships. Truth exists in the individual as well as in universal structures, for we ourselves participate in these structures. Logos speaks not only in objective laws but subjectively, through the individual person. The integrated soul pushes the person toward some universal structure of meaning, as shown in dialogue. To be guided by your own soul requires a fundamental humility. Your own convictions will always have an element of blindness and self-distortion; the one ultimate illusion is to operate under the conceit that you are free from illusion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Indeed, some scholars believe the original Greek phrase “know thyself” means “Know that thou art only a mortal.” This implies that what as to be surrendered or worked through, as we say psychoanalytically, is the tendency arising in human infancy to play god and the omnipresent demand to be treated as through we were god. Dr. Freud’s concepts of resistance and repression are descriptions of the profound difficulty of knowing thyself. The concept of bad faith and good faith is also an illustration—the dilemma of honesty with one’s self lying in the fact that there is always some element of self-distortion in our acts and beliefs. The mortal who thinks one is in good faith is at that point in bad faith, and the only way to be in good faith is to know that you are in bad faith, for instance, to know that there is some element of distortion and illusion in your perception. The moral problem is not simply a matter of believing in one’s convictions and acting on them, for people’s convictions can be as dominating and destructive, if not more so, than mere pragmatic positions. The moral problem is the relentless endeavor to find one’s own convictions and at the same time to admit that there will always ben in them an element of self-aggrandizement and distortion. Here is where the principle of humility is essential, for psychotherapists and for any moral citizen. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
The shift from independents (people who own their own businesses) to employees is in itself conducive to decreasing work satisfaction for the reason. The employed person, more than the independent one, works in an alienated position. Whether one is paid a lower or a higher salary, one is an accessory to the organization rather than a human being doing something for one’s self. There is one factor, however, which could mitigate the alienation of work, and that is the skill required in its performance. However, here too, development moves in the direction of decreasing skill requirements, and hence increasing alienation. While the managerial or professional groups have at least considerable interest in achieving something more or less personal, the vast majority sell their physical, or an exceedingly small part their intellectual capacity to an employer to be used for purposes of profit in which they have no share, for things in which they have no interest, with the only purpose of making a living, and for some chance to satisfy their consumer’s greed. Dissatisfaction, apathy, boredom, lack of joy and happiness, a sense of futility and a vague feeling that life is meaningless, are the unavoidable results of this situation. This socially patterned syndrome of pathology may not be in the awareness of people; it may be covered by a frantic flight into escape activities, or by a craving for more money, power, prestige. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
However, the weight of the latter motivations is so great only because the alienated person cannot help seeking for such compensation for one’s inner vacuity, not because these desires are the natural or most important incentives for work. Is there any empirical evidence that most people today are not satisfied with their work? It is evident from psychoanalytic experience that the sense of unhappiness and dissatisfaction can be deeply repressed; a person may consciously feel satisfied and only one’s dreams, psychosomatic illness, insomnia, and many other symptoms may be expressive of the underlying happiness. The tendency to repress dissatisfaction and unhappiness is strongly supported by the widespread feeling that not to be satisfied means to be a failure, unsuccessful, etcetera. (Thus, for instance, the number of people who consciously think they are happily married, and express this belief sincerely in answer to a questionnaire is by far greater than the number of those who are really happy in their marriage.) However, even the data on conscious job satisfaction are rather telling. In a study about job satisfaction on a national scale, satisfaction with and employment of their job was expressed by 85 percent of the professionals and executives, by 64 percent of the white-collar people, by 41 percent of the factory workers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
In another study, we find a similar picture: 86 percent of the professionals, 74 percent of the managerial, 42 percent of the commercial employees, 56 percent of the skilled, and 48 percent of the semi-skilled workers expressed satisfaction. We find in these figures a significant discrepancy between professionals and executives on the one hand, workers and clerks on the other. Among the former only a minority is dissatisfied—among the latter, more than half. Regarding the total population, this means, roughly, that over half of the total employed population is consciously dissatisfied with their work, and do not enjoy it. If we consider the unconscious dissatisfaction, the percentage would be considerably higher. Taking the 85 percent of satisfied professionals and executives, we would have to examine how many of them suffer from psychologically determined high blood pressure, ulcers, insomnia, nervous tension and fatigue. Although there are no exact data on this, there can be no doubt that, considering these symptoms, the number of really satisfied people who enjoy their work would be much smaller than the above figures indicate. As far as factory workers and office clerks are concerned, even the percentage of consciously dissatisfied people is remarkably high. Undoubtedly the number of unconsciously dissatisfied workers and clerks is much higher. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
This is indicated by several studies which show that neurosis and psychogenic illness are the main reasons for absenteeism (the estimates for the presence of neurotic symptoms among factory workers go up to about 50 percent). Fatigue and high labor turnover are other symptoms of dissatisfaction and resentment. The most important symptom from the economic standpoint, hence the best studied one, is the wide speared tendency of factory workers, not to give their best to the work, or work restriction as it is often called. In a recent poll conducted, 49 percent of all the manual workers questioned answered that when a person takes a job in a factory he or she should turn out as much as one can, but 41 percent answered that one should not do one’s best, but only turn out the average among. We see that there is a great deal of conscious, and even more unconscious dissatisfaction with the kind of work which our industrial society offers most of its members. One tries to counteract their dissatisfaction by a mixture of monetary and prestige incentives, and undoubtedly these incentives produce considerable eagerness to work, especially in the middle and higher echelons of the business hierarchy. However, it is one thing that these incentives make people work, and it is quite another thing whether the mode of this work is conducive to mental health and happiness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
The discussion on motivation of work usually considers only the first problem, namely whether this or that incentive increases the economic productivity of the worker, but not the second, that of one’s human productivity. One ignores the fact that there are many incentives which can make a person do something, but which at the same time are detrimental to one’s personality. A person can work hard out of fear, or out of an inner sense of guilt; psychopathology gives us many examples of neurotic motives leading to overactivity as well as to inactivity. Most of us assume that the kind of work current in our society, namely, alienated work, is the only kind there is, hence that aversion to work is natural, hence that money and prestige and power are the only incentives for work. If we would use our imagination just a little bit, we could collect a good deal of evidence from our own lives, from observing children, from a number of situations which we can hardly fail to encounter, to convince us that we long to spend our energy on something meaningful, that we feel refreshed if we can do so, and that we are quite willing to accept rational authority if what we are doing makes sense. However, even if this is true, most people object, what help is truth to us? #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Industrial, mechanized work cannot, by its very nature, be meaningful; it cannot give any pleasure of satisfaction—there are no ways of changing these facts, unless we want to give up out technical achievements. Does the proposed way of acting make for the integration of the individual as a totality? Does it—at least potentially—make for the expansion of interpersonal meaning in one’s life? And in the lives of those persons significant to the individual? Would this way of acting, if adopted by other people (in principle, all of humankind), make for the increase of interpersonal meaning? It may help to see what happens when the soul is not experienced in dialogue. Examples of this can be seen in every nation at war. Unfaced within one’s self and one’s group, the soul is projected on the enemy. It is no longer seen as a nation which has its own security and power needs, but as the Evil One, the personification of the devil; one’s own soul tendencies are placed on it. The enemy becomes the carrier of the elements we repress in ourselves. We fight our adversaries little realizing that we are fighting our own selves, denied though it be. This projection requires assertion of self-righteousness on the part of the in group, which is what makes it almost impossible to negotiate: to negotiate with the devil is to admit him as an equal; you have, in principle then, already given in to him. This is exactly why the democrats do not want to negotiate with president Trump, but a nation divided amongst itself will fall. #RandolphHaris 9 of 17
The next step in war psychology is that imagination and vision are blocked. There comes out of the capital—of whatever nation—cliché after cliché, each one thinner than its predecessor, which people do not believe on one level but join together in a conspiracy to believe one another. They become rigid in their soul obsession. It is impossible for them even to conceive of any solutions. This process makes the soul impersonal again. It removes the whole area from our having control over it; the soul regresses to what it originally was—a blind, unconscious push unintegrated with consciousness. We now become not only nature’s tools but her blind tools. This is abetted by the vicious-circle mechanism, presented in nations as well as neurotics. We do not learn from experience; we make decision patently against our own interest, and wen they do not work we self-destructively make them all over again. Shrunken in vision and sensitivity, we move monolithically, straight ahead, like the ancient dinosaur who could not learn, blond even to out own dinosaurian movements. Indeed, anxiety may take all forms and intensities, for it is the human being’s basic reaction to a danger to his or her existence, or to some value one identifies with one’s existence. Fear is a threat to one side of the self—if a child is in a fight, one may get hurt, but that hurt would not be a threat to one’s existence; or the university student may be somewhat scared by a midterm, but one knows that the sky will not fall in if one does not pass it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
However, as soon as the threat becomes great enough to involve the total self, one then has the experience of anxiety. Anxiety strikes us at the very core of ourselves: it is what we feel when our existence as selves is threatened. It is the quality of an experience which makes it anxiety rather than the quantity. One may feel only a slight gnawing away in one’s stomach when a supposed friend passes one on the street and does not speak, but though the threat is not intense, the fact that the gnawing continues, and that one is confused and searches around for an explanation of why the friend snubbed one, shows the threat is to something basic in us. In its full-blown intensity, anxiety is the most painful emotion to which the human being is heir. Present dangers are less than future imaginings, and people have been known to leap out of a lifeboat and drown rather than face the greater agony of continual doubt and uncertainty, never knowing whether they will be rescued or not. The threat of death is the most common symbol for anxiety, but most of us in our civilized era do not find ourselves looking into the barrel of a crazed stalker’s gun nor in other ways specifically threatened with death very often. The great bulk of our anxiety comes when some value we hold essential to our existence as selves is threatened. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Tom, the man who will go down in scientific history because he had a hole in his stomach through which the doctors at New York Hospital could observe his psychosomatic reactions in times of anxiety, fear and other stress, gave a beautiful illustration of this. In a period when Tom was anxious about whether he could keep his job at the hospital or would have to go one relief, he exclaimed, “If I could not support my family, I would as soon jump off the dock.” That is, if the value of being a self-respecting wage-earner were threatened, Tom, like the salesman Willie Loman and countless other people in our society, would feel one no longer existed as a self, and might as well be dead. However, when God put a dream in your heart, he also set a date for completion, so never give up. Nonetheless, this illustrates what is true in one way or another for practically all human beings. Certain values, be they success or the love of someone, or freedom to speak the truth, one’s inner voice is believed in as the core of the person’s reason for living, and if such a value is destroyed, the person feels one’s existence as a self might as well be destroyed likewise. “Give me liberty or give me death,” is not just rhetoric nor is it pathological. Since the dominant values for most people in our society are being liked, accepted and approved of, much anxiety in our day comes from the threat of not being liked, being isolated, lonely or cast off. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Most examples of anxiety given above are normal anxiety, that is, anxiety which is proportionate to the real threat of the danger situation. In a fire, battle, or crucial examination in the university, for example, anyone would feel more or less anxiety—it would be unrealistic not to. Every human being experiences normal anxiety in many different ways as one develops and confronts the various crises of life. The more one is able to face and move through these normal crises—the weaning from mother, going off to school, independence from dad’s credit card, and sooner or later taking responsibility for his or her own vocation and marriage decisions—the less neurotic anxiety one will develop. Normal anxiety cannot be avoided; it should be frankly admitted to one’s self. However, most neurotic anxiety comes from such unconscious psychological conflicts. The person feels threatened, but it is as though by a ghost; one does not know where the enemy is, or ow to fight it or flee from it. These unconscious conflicts usually get started in some previous situation of threat which the person did not feel strong enough to face, such as a child’s having to deal with a dominating and possessive partner or having to face the fact that one’s family does not love him or her. The real problem is then repressed, and it returns later as an inner conflict bringing with it neurotic anxiety. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The way to deal with neurotic anxiety is to bring out the original real experience one was afraid of, and ten to work the apprehension through as normal anxiety or fear. In dealing with any severe neurotic anxiety, the mature and wise step is to get professional psychotherapeutic help. However, our main concern is to understand how to use normal anxiety constructively. And to do that we need to make clearer one very important point, the relation between a person’s anxiety and one’s self-awareness. After a terrifying experience such as a battle or fire, people often remark, “I felt as though I were possessed.” This is because anxiety knocks out the props, so to speak, from our awareness of ourselves. Anxiety, like a torpedo, strikes underneath at the deepest level, or core, of ourselves, and it is on this level that we experience ourselves as persons, as subjects who can act in a World of objects. Thus anxiety in greater or lesser degree tends to destroy our consciousness of ourselves. When we are in a state of anxiety, or panic we become disoriented, and our clear knowledge of who we are and what is going on is temporarily wiped out, and it blurs our view of reality around us. This betwixting—this confusion as to who we are and what we should do—is the most painful thing about anxiety. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
However, the beneficial and hopeful side is that just as anxiety destroys our self-awareness, so awareness of ourselves can destroy anxiety. That is to say, the stronger our consciousness of ourselves, the more we can take a stand against and overcome anxiety. Anxiety, like fever, is a sign that an inner struggle is in progress. As fever is a symptom that the body is mobilizing its physical powers and giving battle to the infection, let us say the tuberculosis bacilli in the lungs, so anxiety is evidence that a psychological or spiritual battle is going on. We have noted above that neurotic anxiety is the sign of an unresolved conflict within us, and so long as the conflict is present, there is an open possibility that we can become aware of the causes of the conflict, and find a solution on a higher level of health. Neurotic anxiety is nature’s way, as it were, of indicating to us that we need to solve a problem. The same is true of normal anxiety—it is a signal for us to call up our reserves and do battle against a threat. As the fever in our example is a symptom of the battle between the bodily powers and the infecting germs, so anxiety is evidence of a battle between our strength as a self on one side and a danger which threatens to wipe out or existence as a self on the other. The more the threat wins, the more then our awareness of ourselves is surrendered, curtailed, hemmed in. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
However, the greater our self-strength—that is, the greater our capacity to preserve our awareness of ourselves and the objective World around us—the less we will be overcome by the threat. There is still hope for a tuberculous patient so long as he has a fever; but in the final stages of the infirmary, when the body has given up as it were, the fever leaves and soon the patient dies. However, they deserve the opportunity to pass naturally, because in the last few moments there could be a miracle and the patient could recover. Just so, the only thing which would signify the loss of hope for getting through our present difficulties as individuals and as a nation, would be a resigning into apathy, and a failure to feel and face our anxiety constructively. Our task, then, is to strengthen our consciousness of ourselves, to find centers of strength within ourselves which will enable us to stand despite the confusion and bewilderment around us. We must be committed to the recognition that all great changes are preceded by a vigorous intellectual reevaluation and reorganization. The sin of hubris may be avoided by showing that the creative process itself is not a free activity if by free we mean arbitrary, or unrelated to cosmic law. For the creative process in the human mind, the developmental process in organic nature and the basic laws of the inorganic realm may be but varied expressions of a universal formative process. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
The present period is one of exceptional tensions, but there is also at work an exceptional movement toward a compensating unity which refuses to violate the ultimate moral power at work in the Universe, that very power upon which all human effort must at last depend. In this way we may come to understand that there exists an inherent interdependence of spiritual and mental growth which, though conditioned by circumstances, is never determined by circumstances. In this way the great plethora of human knowledge may be correlated wit an insight into the nature of human nature by being attuned to the wide and deep range of human thought and human experience. It can be troublesome when we cannot filter out unwanted sensations. It is annoying to have static on your car radio or to walk into a building that smells like smoke or garlic. These sensations and perception can work against each other. Not only do we have competing sensations to wade through and sort out, we may also have to compete with our own expectations, assumptions, prejudices, or personal needs. “I am mindful of you always in my prayers, continually praying unto God the Father in the name of his Holy Child, Jesus, that he, through his infinite goodness and grace, will keep you through the endurance of faith on his name to the end,” reports Moroni 8.3. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
For Each Beloved Hour Heaven Had Come so Near and Wisdom is More Becoming Viewed at Distance than at Hand
I think on the contrary that I am now responsible for the supreme human obligation: to investigate the highest use of my powers. All ideas to make work interesting and meaningful again are really romantic dreams—the dreams of home ownership, buying your dream car, saving money, having a family, buying new clothes and book, the latest electronics and food you like are just a few of the many things that motivate people to work. In contrast, daydreaming is a symptom of lacking relatedness to reality. People daydream because they are not yet able to achieve their goals and want a distraction, an idea of what like will be like sometime in the future, or what life could have been like, only if they had made different decisions. Daydreaming is not refreshing or relaxing—it is essentially an escape with all the negative result that go with escape. On the other hand, laziness, far from being normal, is a symptom of mental pathology. In fact, one of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one’s life. Even if mortals have no monetary, or any other reward, one would be eager to spend one’s energy in some meaningful way because one could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces. Let us look at children: they are never lazy; given the slightest encouragement, or even without it, they are busy playing, asking questions, inventing stories, without any incentive expect the pleasure in the activity itself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
In the field of psychopathology we find that the person who has no interest in doing anything is seriously sick and is far from exhibiting the normal state of human nature. There is plenty of material about workers during periods of unemployment, who suffer as much, or more, from the enforced rest, as from material deprivations. There is just as much material to show that for many people over the sixty-five the necessity to stop working leads to profound unhappiness, and in many instances to physical deterioration and illness. Nevertheless, pain is important to our survival. It is a signal that we are being hurt and that we should do something to protect ourselves. Research indicates that there may be specific free nerve endings all over the body that convey the message of pain to the brain. If any of these receptors are stimulated to at least a certain degree of intensity, we feel pain. Some people are able to stand much more pain than others. They have a high pain threshold. More stimulation is needed to cause them pain. Some people can raise their pain threshold through hypnosis, medication, or some other training. Pain is also thought to be a great motivator because it pushes people to find an escape, to get more creative about their work, to finally produce something that will make them a success so they can escape the pain. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Some people would rather experience pain than boredom, as boredom could lead to dangerous and destructive behaviors. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for the widespread belief in mortal’s innate laziness. The main reason lies in the fact that alienated work is boring and unsatisfactory; that a great deal of tension and hostility is engendered, which leads to an aversion against the work one is doing and everything connected with it. As a result, we find a longing for laziness and for doing noting to be the ideal of many people. Thus, people feel that their laziness is the natural state of mind, rather than the symptom of a pathological condition of life, the result of meaningless and alienated work. Examining the current views on work motivation, it becomes evident that they are based on the concept of alienated work and hence that their conclusions do not apply to nonalienated, attractive work. Yet, not all nonalienated attractive work pays well, and still renders pain, but people keep going because they believe that one day their hard work will somehow pay off. Everyone has a story to tell and is just looking for the right person to tell it to. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, not everyone is looking to get famous off of their story and share it with the World. Some people just want to share their story with the right party, who can take the appropriate actions. When we are not able to express what we are going through and immediately take action, do not get frustrated and keep your faith in God. Know that God sees everything, and he loves you. God did not bring you this far to let you fall in despair. The conventional and most common theory is that money is the main incentive for work. This answer can have two different meanings: first, that the fear of starvation is the main incentive for work; in this case the argument is undoubtedly true. Many types of work would never be accepted on the basis of wages or other work conditions were the worker not confronted with the alternative of accepting these conditions or of starvation. The unpleasant, undesirable work in our society is done not voluntarily, but because the need to make a living forces so many people to do it. More often the concept of money incentive refers to the wish to earn more money as the motivation to greater effort in working. If mortals were not lured by the hope of greater monetary reward, this argument says, one would not work at all, or at least, would work without interest. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
This conviction still exists among the majority of industrialists, as well as among many union leaders. Thus, for instance, fifty manufacturing executives replied to the question as to what is of importance in increasing worker’s productivity: 44 percent responded that money alone is the answers, 28 percent declared money is by far the chief thing but some importance is to be attached to less tangible things, and another 28 percent said that money is important but beyond a certain point it will not produce results. Actually, employers throughout the World are in favor of wage-incentive plans as the only means which lead to higher productivity of the individual worker, to higher earnings for the workers and employers and thus, indirectly, to reduced absenteeism, easier supervision, and so on. Reports and surveys from industry and government bureaus generally attest to the effectiveness of wage-incentive plans in increasing productivity and achieving other objectives. It seems that workers also believe that incentive pay gets the most output per mortal. In fact, 65 percent of employees said that incentive pay makes for higher production. However, as to the question of which method of pay they prefer, 65 percent said that incentive pay increases output and 29 percent stated that incentive pay. (The ratio pf preference for hourly pay was 74 to 20 in the case of hourly workers, but even in the case of workers already on incentive pay, 59 percent were in favor of hourly pat as against 36 percent in favor of incentive pay.) #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The latter findings show that as useful as incentive pay is in raising output, it does not in itself solve the problem of obtaining workers’ cooperation. In some circumstances it may intensify that problem. This opinion is shared increasingly by industrial psychologists and even some industrialists. However, the discussion about money incentives would be incomplete if we did not consider the fact that the same wish for more money is constantly fostered by the same industry which relies on money as the main incentive for work. By advertising, installment plan systems, and many other devices, the individual’s greed to buy more and newer things is stimulated to the point that one can rarely have enough money to satisfy these needs. Thus, being artificially stimulated by industry, the monetary incentive plays a greater role than it otherwise would. Furthermore, it goes without saying that the monetary incentive must play a paramount role as long as it is the only incentive because the work process itself is unsatisfactory and boring. There are many examples of cases in which people choose work with less monetary reward if the work itself is more interesting. Aside from money, prestige, status and the power that goes with it are assumed to be the main incentives for work. There is no need to prove that the craving for prestige and power constitutes the most powerful incentive for work today among the middle and upper classes; in fact, the importance of money is largely that of representing prestige, at least as much as security and comfort. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
However, while economic independence and skill were important satisfactions for the independent businessperson, artisan, and highly skilled worker, these motivations are now rapidly decreasing. Discoveries are starting great waves of change in human culture, and in such a manner that these discoveries may deepen not erode the sense of universal human community. The differences in the disciplines, their epistemological exclusiveness, the variety of historical experiences, the differences of traditions, of cultures, of languages, of the arts, should be protected and preserved. However, the interrelationship and unity of the whole should at the same time be accepted. The ultimate awareness to the hopes and fears which pervade modern society rest on the moral fibre of mortals, and on the wisdom and responsibility of those who promote the course of its development. However, moral decisions cannot dispense with an insight into the interplay of the objective elements which offer and limit the choices made. Therefore, an understanding of what the issues are, though not a sufficient condition, is necessary prerequisite for directing action toward constructive solutions. Other vital questions explored relate to problems of international understanding as well as to problems dealing with prejudice and the resultant tensions and antagonisms. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The growing perception and responsibility of our World Age point to the new reality that the individual person and the collective person supplement and integrate each other; that the thrall of totalitarianism of bot left and right has been shaken in the universal desire to recapture the authority of truth and human totality. Humankind can finally place its trust not in a proletarian authoritarianism, not in a secularized humanism, both of which have betrayed the spiritual property right of history, but in a sacramental fellowship and unity of knowledge. This new consciousness has created a widening of human horizons beyond every parochialism, and a revolution in human thought comparable to the basic assumption, among the ancient Greek, of the sovereignty of reason; corresponding to the great effulgence of the moral conscience articulated by the Hebrew prophets; analogous to the fundamental assertions of Christianity; or to the beginning of the new scientific era, the era of the science of dynamics, the experimental foundations of which were laid by Galileo in the Renaissance. An important effort to re-examine the contradictory meanings and applications which are given today to such terms as democracy, freedom, justice, love, peace, fellowship and God. The purpose of such inquires is to clear the way for the foundation of a genuine World history not in terms of nation or race or culture but in terms of mortals in relation to God, to oneself, one’s fellow humans and the Universe, that reach beyond immediate self-interest. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
For the meaning of the World Age consists in respecting one’s hopes and dreams which lead to a deeper understanding of the basic values of all peoples. World Perspectives is planned to gain insight into the meaning of mortals, who not only are determined by history but who also determines history. History is to be understood as concerned not only with the life of mortals on this planet but as including also such cosmic influences as interpenetrate our human World. This generation is discovering that history does not conform to the social optimism of modern civilization and that the organization of human communities and the establishment of freedom and peace are not only intellectual achievements but spiritual and moral achievements as well, demanding a cherishing of the wholeness of feeling and thought, and constituting a never-ending challenge to mortals, emerging from the abyss of meaninglessness and suffering, to be renewed and replenished in the totality of one’s life. Justice itself, which has been in a state of pilgrimage and crucifixion and now is being slowly liberated from the grip of social and political demonologies in the East as well as in the West, begins to question its own premises. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The modern revolutionary movements which have challenged the sacred institutions of society by protecting injustice in the name of social justice are here examined and re-revaluated. In the light of this, we have no choice but to admit that the unfreedom against which freedom is measured must be retained with it, namely, that the aspect of truth out of which the night view appears to emerge, the darkness of our time, is as little abandonable as is mortal’s subjective advance. Thus the two sources of mortal’s consciousness are inseparable, not as dead but as living and complementary, an aspect of that principle of complementarity through which Niels Bohr has sought to unite the quantum and the wave, both of which constitute the very fabric of life’s radiant energy. There is in humankind today a counter force to the sterility and danger of a quantitative, anonymous mass culture; a new, if sometimes imperceptible, spiritual sense of convergence toward human and World unity on the basis of the sacredness of each human person and respect for the plurality of cultures. There is a growing awareness that equality may not be evaluated in mere numerical terms but is proportionate and analogical in its reality. For when equality is equated with interchangeability, individuality is negated and the human person transmuted into a faceless mask. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
We stand at the brink of an age of a World in which human life presses forward to actualize new forms. The false separation of mortals and nature, of time and pace, of freedom and security, is acknowledged, and we are faced with a new vision of mortals in one’s organic unity and of history offering a richness and diversity of equality and majesty of scope hitherto unprecedented. In relating the accumulated wisdom of mortal’s spirit to the new reality of the World age, in articulating its thought and belief, we seek to encourage a renaissance of hope in society and of pride in mortal’s decision as to what one’s destiny will be. Mortals have certainly contrived to change the environment, but subject to the new process involved in this change, the same process of selection continues to operate. The environment has changed partly in a physical and geographical sense, but more particularly from the knowledge owe now possess. The Biblical story of Adam and Eve contains a deep lesson, which a casual reading hardly reveals. Once the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge has been eaten, the World is changed. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The new World is dictated by the knowledge itself, not of course by an edict of God. The Biblical story has further interest in that the new World is said to be much worse than the former idyllic state of ignorance. Today we are beginning to wonder whether this might also be true. Yet we are uneasy, apprehensive, and our fears lead to the collapse of civilizations. Thus we turn to the truth that knowledge and life are indivisible, even as life and death are inseparable. We are what we know and think and feel; we are linked with history, with World, with the Universe, and faith in Life creates its own verification. All this is sharply expressed in the relation of faith and doubt. If faith is understood as belief that something is true, doubt is incompatible with the act of faith. If faith is understood as being ultimately concerned, doubt is a necessary element in it. It is a consequence of the risk of faith. The doubt which is implicit in faith is not a doubt about facts or conclusions. It is not the same doubt which is the lifeblood of scientific research. Even the most orthodox theologian does not deny the right of methodological doubt in matters of empirical inquiry or logical deduction. A scientist who would say that a scientific theory is beyond doubt would at that moment cease to be scientific. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
One may believe that the theory can be trusted for all practical purposes. Without such a belief no technical application of a theory would be possible. One could attribute to this kind of belief pragmatic certainty sufficient for action. Doubt in this case point to the preliminary character of the underlying theory. It is the very badness of the act that gives it then its vertiginous fascination. Remove the prohibition, and the attraction stops. How shall we define anxiety, and how is it related to fear?In my university days a student threw himself from an upper entry window of one of the college buildings and was nearly killed. Another student, a friend of mine, has to pass the window daily in coming and going from his room, and experienced a dreadful temptation to imitate the deed. Being a Catholic, he told hid director, who said, “All right! if you must, you must,” and added, “go ahead and do it,” thereby instantly quenching his desires. This director knew how to minister to a mind diseased. (However, this example is not recommended, the results could dangerous.) In one patient attacks of acute loneliness, developing into panic were not infrequent. He could not orient himself in the panics, could not hang on to his sense of time, became, as long as the bout of loneliness lasted, numb in his reactions to the World. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
The ghostlike character of his loneliness was shown in the fact that it could vanish instantaneously with a ring on the phone or his hearing the step of someone coming down the hall. He tired desperately to fight off these attacks—as we all do, which is not surprising since acute loneliness seems to be the most painful kind of anxiety which a human being can suffer. Patients often tell us that the pain is a physical gnawing in their chests, or feels like the cutting of a razor in their heart region, as well as a mental state of feeling like an infant abandoned in a World where nobody exists. This patient would try, when the loneliness began, to wrench his mind away to thoughts about something else, to get busy doing work or go out to a movie—but no matter what escape he tried, there remained the haunting, satanic menace hovering being him like a hated presence waiting to plunge a rapier into his lungs. If here were working, he could practically hear the Mephistophelean laugh behind him mocking him with the reminder that his stratagem would not succeed; sooner or later he would have to stop, more fatigued than ever—and immediately would come the rapier. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Or, if he were in the movies, the awareness could not be suppressed every time the scene changed that his gnawing ache would come back again as soon as he stepped out on the street. However, one day, he came in reporting that he had made a surprising discovery. When an acute attack of loneliness was beginning, it occurred to him not to try to fight it off—running had never helped anyway. Why not accept it, breathe with it, turn toward it and not away? Amazingly, the loneliness did not overwhelm him when he confronted it directly. Then it seemed even to diminish. Emboldened, he began to invite it by imagining situations in the past when he was acutely lonely, the memories of which had, up to now, always been sure to cue off the panic. However strangely enough, the loneliness had lost its power. He could not feel the panic even when he tried. The more he turned on it and welcomed it, the more impossible it was even to imagine how he had ever been lonely in that unbearably painful way before. The patient had discovered—and was teaching me that day—that he felt the acute loneliness only as he ran; when he turned on the devil, it vanished, to use metaphorical language. However, it is not metaphorical to state that the very running is a response which assures the soul uses it power. It is surely true that the anxiety (or loneliness) has the upper hand as long as we continue to run. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
In fear we know what threatens us, we are energized by the situation, our perceptions are sharper, and we take steps to run or in the other appropriate ways to overcome the danger. In anxiety, however, we are threatened without knowing what steps to take to meet the danger. Anxiety is the feeling of being caught, overwhelmed; and instead of becoming sharper, our perceptions generally become blurred or vague. Anxiety may occur in slight or great intensity. It may be a mild tension before meeting some important person; or it may be apprehension before an examination when one’s future is at stake and one is uncertain whether one is prepared to pass the exam. Or it may be the stark terror, when beads of sweat appear on one’s forehead, in waiting to hear whether a loved one is lost in a plane wreck, or whether one’s child is drowned or gets back safely after the storm on the lake. People experience anxiety in al sorts of ways: a gnawing within, a construction of the chest, a general bewilderment; of they may describe it as feeling as though all the World around were dark gray or black, or as though a heavy weight were upon them, or a feeling like the terror which a small child experiences when he realizes he is lost. Anxiety (loneliness or abandonment anxiety being its most painful form) overcomes the person to the extent tat one loses orientation in the objective World. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
To lose the World is to lose one’s self, and vice versa; self and World are correlates. The function of anxiety is to destroy the self-World relationship, for instance, to disorient the victim in space and time and, so long as this disorientation lasts, the person remains in a state of anxiety. Anxiety overwhelms the person precisely because of the preservation of this disorientation. Now if the person can reorient oneself, as happens, one hopes in psychotherapy—and again relate oneself to the World directly, experientially, with one’s senses alive, one overcomes the anxiety. It is often helpful for a person to see oneself struggling against an adversary. For then, instead of waiting forever for the therapy to analyze away the anxiety, one can help in one’s own treatment by taking practical steps when one experiences anxiety such as stopping and asking just what it was that occurred in reality or in one’s fantasies that preceded the disorientation which cued off the anxiety. One is not only opening the doors of one’s closet where the ghosts hide, but one often can also then take steps to reorient oneself in one’s practical life by making new human relationships and finding new work which interests the individual. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Still looking at my patient who had been obsessed with loneliness, let us ask: What was the constructive side of this soul which presumably had gone awry? Being a sensitive, gifted person, he had achieved notable success in practically all realms of human experience except personal intimacy. His gifts included a capacity for interpersonal empathy and a good deal of tenderness—most of which had been absorbed in his self-preoccupation. He had failed to use his capacities for relationship; he had been unable to open himself up to others, to reach out to them, to share feelings and other aspects of personal experience, to identify with and affirm them in the ways necessary to build durable relationship. In short, what he had lacked, and now needed, was the exercise of his capacities to love in an active, outgoing concern for the other’s welfare, for the sharing of pleasure and delight as an “I” with “Thou,” for a communion of consciousness with his fellows. The soul, in the constructive scene in this case and put in the simplest terms, was his potentiality for active loving. Nature, is after all, but one manifestation of spiritual reality, which reveals itself more directly in thought and art. In future stages of evolution, spirit, without loss of self-consciousness, must ascend again through knowledge of its cosmic relations to its universality and transcendence over matter. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
For Heaven is a Different Thing–I Now Find Myself Approaching God on a Totally Undefined Path
You hopeless, egregious Boy! You are patently unworthy of all the philosophical considerations I have lavished upon you! Political liberty by itself is, in fact, always illusory. A mortal who lies in economic subjection six days, if not seven, a week, does not become free merely by making a cross on a ballot-paper once in five years. If freedom is to mean anything to the average mortal it must include industrial freedom. Until mortals at their work can know themselves members of a self-governing community of workers, they will remain essentially servile, whatever the political system under which they live. It is not enough to sweep away the degrading relation in which the wage-slave stands to an individual employer. When workers are left in bondage to a tyranny that is galling because it is impersonal, work is not as active, responsible, attractive, partial, and meaningful as it could be. Mortals are in chains everywhere because the disease of civilization is not so much material poverty of many as the decay of the spirit of freedom and self-confidence. The revolt that will change the World will spring, not from the benevolence that breeds reform, but from the will to be free. Mortals will act together in the full consciousness of their mutual dependence; but they will act for themselves. Their liberty will not be given them from above; they will take it on their own behalf. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Just voting for someone because they the first of their kind to make it in a field may not be freedom, it could be another form of bondage. What matters most is an individual’s mind set. We must put our appeal to the public not in the questions, “Is it not unpleasant to be poor, and will you not help to raise the poor?” but in this form: “Poverty is but a sign of mortal’s enslavement: to cure it you must cease to labour for others and must believe in yourself.” Wage-slavery will exit as long as there is a mortal or an institution that is the master of mortals: it will be ended when the works learn to set freedom before comfort. The average person will become one who seeks freedom not in order to secure a minimum standard of civilized life, but because they feel ashamed of the slavery that blinds them and their fellows, and because one is resolved to end the practices that make them slaves. We must find our soul and figure out what it wants to express and do things that we love to provide for ourselves and our families. And we must become the accredited agents of the community in the economic sphere. Recently, at 31 years of age, Andy Murray announced that he was in pain. His hip has been causing him profound physical discomfort for some time and it is no secret. He has been in a lot of pain for about two years, and has done everything he can do to feel better. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Andy Murray is a very successful tennis player, and he has many great achievements such as winning the Grand Slam singles tournament at the 2012 US Open. On 7 July 2013, Andy Murray won the 2013 Wimbledon Championships. Andy Murray was also the only man in history to win an Olympic Gold and US Open in the same calendar year, as well as the third man to hold the Gold Medal and two majors on different surfaces. He is also the very first tennis player and only man in its history to have won two Olympics Gold Medals in the singles category and on two different surfaces (grass in 2012, and hard in 2016), making a consecutive Olympics singles Gold Medal final in Rio 2016 and defending his title by defeating Juan Martin del Potro in the Gold Medal singles final. Subsequent to his success at the Olympic and Wimbledon in 2013, Andy Murray was voted the 2013 BBC Sports Personality of the Year. In summary, he is a very successfully young man, loves what he does for a living and is highly decorated. However, Andy Murray has played through the pain much of his 14-year career. It is hard for him to remember a time when playing tennis had been pain free. He was born with bipartite patella, a split kneecap, that was first diagnosed at the age of 16. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Andy Murray certainly pushed his body to the limit, as he had recurring problems whit his ankles and back. He tried various treatments, from strengthening the muscles around the joint to daily sessions with a portable ultrasound, but it was always containment not cure. The pain was part of his life. And trying so hard to thrive and continue doing what he loves, Andy Murray cried when he announced 11 January 2019 that he has to retire because he is in too much pain. However, it a great that Andy had a chance to live his dreams, make money, and get endorsements before he retires, so he has something to live off of. There are some people who get injured before they start their careers, and cannot work, but keep doing what they can, in hopes that someday they will find something they can do, make money and retired. Working everyday in extreme pain is not a good thing. This is why it is important for us to have faith. Faith is an act of human personality, as its centered and total act. An act of faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by and turned to the infinite. It is a specific act with all the limitations of a mortal act, and it is an act in which the infinite participates beyond the limitations of calculable constrains. Faith is certain in so far as it is an experience of the holy. However, faith is uncertain in so far as the infinite to which it is related is received by a mortal. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
This element of uncertainty in faith cannot be removed, it must be accepted. And the element in faith which accepts this is courage. Faith includes an element of immediate awareness which gives certainty and an element of uncertainty. To accept this is courage. In the courageous standing of uncertainty, faith shows must visibly its dynamic character. We have to interpret present and past events impinging on human life in our growing World Age and World consciousness and envisage what mortals may yet attain when summoned by an unbending inner necessity to the quest of what is most exalted in one. The purpose of faith is to offer new vistas in terms of World and human development while refusing to betray the intimate correlation between universality and individuality, dynamics and form, freedom and destiny. We come to understand that spirit and nature are not separate and apart; intuition and reason must regain their convergence as the means of perceiving and fusing inner being with outer reality. Anxiety, the other characteristic of modern mortals, is even more basic than emptiness and loneliness. For being hollow and lonely would not bother us except that it makes us prey to that peculiar psychological pain and turmoil called anxiety. No one who reads the morning newspaper needs to be persuaded that we live in an age of anxiety. We have had two World wars in modern history, economic upheavals and depressions, and it shows that the foundations of our World are shaken. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
We have become so injured to living in a state of quasi-anxiety that our real danger is the temptation to hide our eyes in ostrich fashion. However, it is by imagination and understanding that we can face these upheavals openly, and see if, by courage and insight, we can use this anxiety constructively. It is a mistake to believe that the contemporary wars and depressions and government shutdowns and political threats are the total cause of our anxiety, for our anxiety also cases these catastrophes. The anxiety prevalent in our day and the succession of economic and political catastrophes our World has been going through are both symptoms of the same underlying cause, namely traumatic changes occurring in Western society. Fascist and Nazi totalitarianism, for example, do not occur because a Hitler or Mussolini decides to seize power. When a nation, rather, is prey to insupportable and economic want and is psychologically and spiritually empty, totalitarianism comes in to fill the vacuum: and the people sell their freedom as a necessity for getting rid of the anxiety which is too great for them to bear any longer. The confusion and bewilderment in our nation show this anxiety on a broad scale. In this period of wars and threats of wars, we know what we are against, namely, totalitarian encroachment of mortal’s freedom and dignity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
We are confident enough of our military strength, but we fight defensively, but other nations believe we are not sure if we waiting for things to go wrong or looking for solutions. We are confused about constructive goals—what are we working for? America seems to have become betwixted about the gestures of new agendas which give magnificent promise for a New World. When an individual suffers anxiety continuously over a period of time, one lays one’s body open to psychosomatic illness. When a group suffers continuous anxiety, with no agreed-on constructive steps to take, its members sooner or later turn against each other. Just so, when our nation is in confusion and bewilderment, we lay ourselves open to such poison as witch hunts, and the ubiquitous pressures to make every person suspicious of one’s neighbor. Turning our glance from the society to the individual, we see the most obvious expressions of anxiety in the prevalence of neurosis and other emotional disturbances—which, as practically every from Dr. Freud onward has agreed, have their root cause in anxiety and guilt about the past. People feel guilty because of the ways that they have treated others, so they bend the rules and break laws for certain protected classes of people to amend for their sins, even though it may not be the most rational thing to do and could put innocent lives in danger. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Anxiety likewise, is paranoia about the future, and the World might view others when they are perceived as being unjust for not allowing certain people to break the law in the name of humanity, but there is also a level of propaganda about why so many people are becoming so welcoming and humanistic all of the sudden. For some, it is about staying in power and totalitarianism. Some people think there is no point to negotiating, others think we need to hurry up and reach a resolution. Nevertheless, the impasse results in Anxiety. Anxiety is the common denominator psychologically of the psychosomatic disturbances—such as ulcers, many of the form of the great white plague—the greatest destroyer of human health and well-being. When we look below the surface of our individual anxiety, we find that it also comes from something more profound than the threat of war and economic uncertainty. We are anxious because we do not know what roles to pursue, what principles for action to believe in. Our individual anxiety, somewhat like that of the nation, is a basic confusion and bewilderment about where we are going. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Shall a mortal strive competitively to become economically successful and wealthy, as we used to be taught, or a good fellow who is liked by everyone? One cannot be both. Shall one follow the supposed teaching of the society with regard to pleasures of the flesh and be monogamous, or should one follow the average of what is done. Some people in typical communities are caught in a chaos of conflicting patterns, none of them wholly condemned, but no one of them clearly approved and free from confusion. That confusion has now gone deeper to the levels of feelings and desires. In such a bewilderment many persons experience the inward gnawing apprehension of the young man in Auden’s poem, The Age of Anxiety: “It is getting late. Shall we ever be asked for? Are we simply not wanted at all?” If anyone believes there are simple answers to these questions, one has neither understood the questions nor the times in which we live. This is a time when a whole generation is caught between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequences that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence. However, it is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible. Indeed, our present upsets are as much a proof of new possibilities for the future. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
What is necessary for the constructive use of anxiety is, first of all, that we frankly admit and face our perilous state, individually and socially. Both men and women need a self-assertion to bridge their separateness and to achieve union with each other and the World. Otherwise, the way we have amputated significant aspects of reality in overcultivation of power and control, we run the risk of losing exactly what we set out to gain. A curious thing which never fails to surprise persons in therapy is that after admitting their anger, animosity, and even hatred for society and berating people during the hour, they end up with feelings of love toward their peers and their community. A patient may have come in smoldering with negative feelings but resolved, partly unconsciously, to keep these, as a good gentleman or lady does, to oneself; but one finds that one represses the love for humanity at the same time as one suppresses their aggression. This is called the inclusion of the negative—which is essential if the beneficial is likewise to come out. What is occurring here is more than the fact that human consciousness works in polarity: the beneficial cannot come out until the negative does also. This is why in analysis, the negative is analyzed, with the hope—which becomes true often enough to justify the rule—that the beneficial will then able to come into its own. This is the constructive use value in facing and admitting of the World soul. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
We recall that within our soul, we have the ability not simply to love, but also to hate. It has to do with an energizing, a shocking of our normal existence—it is a gadfly that keeps us forever awake; the soul is the breathless peace. Hate and love are not polar opposites; they go together, particularly in transitional ages like ours. We often see the drama on the streets of people who are communicating and it is clear, even if they are peaceful, they are uncomfortable and it is obvious in their nervous laughter or their hesitancy; not-knowing-whether-to-laugh; but that they are deeply affected by communication with community members is more obvious. This power comes from the soul wishes, thoughts, and feelings which go on in every person but are almost always denied in our bourgeois society. What bewitches us is that people often do not truly express how they feel because they are worried about impression management. Most human beings have some level of love for each other beneath the emotional savagery, but they are afraid of it and afraid of their own tenderness. To be able to experience and live out capacities for tender love requires the confronting of the soul. It is our goal to will something with each other. We can will because in the process of the struggles we all face, we learn to end our illusions, and that really strikes a chord with people in civilized societies. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
It is clear that our soul lives in the subconscious and unconscious. One of the reasons that we have been able to rise to our unsurpassed height as a civilization is our courage and openness in facing the desires and dreams of our soul. We are glorified in passion and love. We have been able to achieve our belief that the essence of virtue for a mortal is that we responsibly choose our passions rather than being chosen by them. World perspectives endeavors to show that the conception of wholeness, unity, organism is a higher and more concrete conception that that of matter and energy. Thus an enlarged meaning of life, of biology, not as it is revealed in the test tube of a laboratory but as it is experienced within the organism of life itself, presents courage as an element of faith. This faith is the daring self-affirmation of one’s own being in spite of the powers of nonbeing which are the heritage of everything finite. Where there is daring and courage there is the possibility of failure. And in every act of faith this possibility is present. The risk must be taken. Whoever makes one’s nation one’s ultimate concern needs courage in order to maintain this concern. Only certain is the ultimacy as ultimacy, the infinite passion as infinite passion. This is a reality given to the self with one’s own nature. It is as immediate and as much beyond doubt as the self is to the self. It is the self in its self-transcending quality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
The principle of life consists in the tension which connects spirit with the realm of matter, symbiotically joined. The element of life is dominant in the very texture of nature, thus rendering life, biology, a transempirical science. The laws of life have their origin beyond their mere physical manifestations and compel us to consider their spiritual source. In fact, the widening of the conceptual framework has not only served to restore order within the respective branches of knowledge, but has also disclosed analogies in mortal’s position regarding the analysis and synthesis of experience in apparently separated domains of knowledge, suggesting the possibility of an ever more embracing objective description of the meaning of life. The risk to faith in one’s ultimate concern is indeed the greatest risk mortals can run. For if it proves to be a failure, the meaning of one’s life breaks down; one surrenders oneself, including truth and justice, to something which is not worth it. And that is why young people cry when they are forced to retire early from injuries, or why people get upset when they are striving to be a success and working through tremendous pain and never seem to make it. One has given away one’s person center without having a chance to regain it. The reaction of despair in people who have experienced the breakdown of their national claims is irrefutable proof of the idolatrous character of their national concern. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
In the long run this is the inescapable result of an ultimate concern, the subject matter of which is not ultimate. And this is the risk faith must take; this is the risk which is unavoidable if a finite being affirms itself. However, it is risk and demands courage if it affirms a concrete concern. And every faith has a concrete element in itself. It is concerned about something or somebody. However, this something or this somebody may prove to be not ultimate at all. Then faith is a failure in its concrete expression, although it is not a failure in the experience of the unconditional itself. A god disappears; divinity remains. Faith risks the vanishing of the concrete god in whom it believes. It may well be that with the vanishing of the god the believer breaks down without being able to re-establish one centered self by a new content of one’s ultimate concern. This risk cannot be taken away from any act of faith. There is only one point which is a matter not of risk but of immediate certainty and herein lies the greatness and the pain of being human; namely, one’s standing between one’s finitude and one’s potential infinity. Knowledge no longer consist in a manipulation of mortals and nature as opposite forces, not in the reduction of data to mere statistical order, but is a means of liberating humankind from the destructive power of fear, pointing the way toward the goal of the rehabilitation of the human will and the rebirth of faith and confidence in the human person. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The cry for patterns, systems and authorities is growing less insistent as the desire grows stronger in both East and West for the recovery of a dignity, integrity and self-realization which are the inalienable rights of mortals who may now guide change by means of conscious propose in the light of rational experience. May a loving Father in Heaven bless us tomorrow to remember how we felt today, and bless us to strive with patience and persistence toward the ideals we have heard proclaimed about his knowing and divine love and unfailing help to be with us even when we struggle—no, especially when we struggle. Ultimately, we know that every physical ailment, malady, or imperfection will be healed in the Resurrection. However, Jesus Christ can heal more than just our physical bodies. He can heal our spirits as well. Throughout scripture we learn how Christ helped those whose spirits were weak and made them whole. As we ponder these experiences, our hope and faith in the Savior’s power to bless our lives increase. Jesus Christ can change our hearts, heal us from the effects of injustice or abuse we may experience, and strengthen our capacity to bear loss and heartaches, bringing us peace to help us endure the trials of our lives, healing us emotionally. “And again I say unto you, is there one among you that doth make a mock of one’s brother, or that heaps upon one persecutions? Wo unto such an one, for one is not prepared, and the time is at hand that one must repent or one cannot be saved,” reports Alma 5.30-31. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Possessed by Genius–The Gift of Life is the Most Precious Chance One Has
I have plastered it, painted it, run its new wires, sanded its floors, and laid the gloss. I learned those skills out west, and all that time I lived out there I never forgot this house, used to pass it as a little boy, never forgot it, and never dreamed of course that one day I would be the master of it (chuckle), that is, if any mortal can be the master of this house, what this house has is a mistress, or even two, and for a time, for a long time. Come, let me show you the library. Though many philosophers, such as Owen and Proudhon, Tolstoy and Bakunin, Durkheim and Marx, Einstein and Schweitzer talk about it as they express different concepts, they all find that mortals have lost their central place, that they have been made an instrument for the purposes of economic aims, that one has been estranged from, and has lost the concrete relatedness to one’s fellow mortals and to nature, that one has ceased to have a meaningful life. I have tried to express the same idea by elaborating on the concept of alienation and by sowing psychologically what the psychological results of alienation are; that mortals regress to a receptive and marketing orientation and ceases to be productive; that they lose their sense of self, become dependent on approval, hence tending to conform and spend most of their energy in the attempt to compensate for or just cover up their anxiety. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Human intelligence is excellent, their reason deteriorates and in view of their technical powers they are seriously endangering the existence of civilization, and even of the human race. If we turn to view about the causes for this development, we find less agreement than in the diagnosis of the illness itself. While many are still prone to see the causes of all evil in the lack of political freedom, and especially of universal suffrage, others still stress the significance of economic factors. They believed that the alienation of mortals resulted from their role as an object of exploitation and use. Still spiritual and moral impoverishment is also a precipitating cause of Western mortal’s decay; in addition to repression of one’s instinctual drives and the resulting manifestations. However, what hold true for the causes of society’s infirmary, of course, is true for the remedies by which modern mortal’s defect can be cured. If I believe that the cause of the illness is economic, or spiritual, or psychological, I necessarily believe that remedying the cause leads to sanity. On the other hand, if I see how the various aspects are interrelated, I shall arrive at the conclusion that sanity and mental health can be attained only by simultaneous changes in the sphere of industrial and political organization, of spiritual and philosophical orientation, of character structure, and of cultural activities. The concentration of effort in any of these spheres, to the exclusion or neglect of others, is destructive of all change. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
In fact, here seems to lie one f the most important obstacles to the progress of humankind. Christianity has preached spiritual renewal, neglecting the changes in the social order without which spiritual renewal must remain ineffective for the majority of the people. The age of enlightenment has postulated as the highest norms independent judgment and reason; it preached political equality without seeing that political equality could not lead to the realization of the fraternity of mortals if it was not accompanied by a fundamental change in the socioeconomic organization. While people stress the necessity for social and economic changes, they neglect the necessity of the inner change in human beings, without which economic change can never lead to the good society. Each of these great reform movements of the last two thousand years has emphasized one sector of life to the exclusion of the others; their proposals for reform and renewal were radical—but their results were almost complete failure. The preaching of the Gospel led to the establishment of the Catholic Church; the teachings of rationalists. The result could hardly be different. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Mortals are a unit; their thinking, feeling, and their practice of life are inseparably connected. One cannot be free in one’s thought when one is not free emotionally; and one cannot be free emotionally if one is dependent and unfree in one’s practice of life, in one’s economic and social relations. Trying to advance radically in one sector to the exclusion of others must be necessarily lead to the results to which it did lead, namely, that the radical demands in one sphere are fulfilled only by a few individuals, while for the majority they become formulae and rituals, serving to cover up the fact that in other spheres nothing has changed. Undoubtedly one step of integrated progress in all sphere of life will have more far-reaching and more lasting results for the progress of the human race than a hundred steps preached—and even for a short while lived—in only one isolated sphere. Several thousands of years of failure in isolated progress should be a rather convincing lesson. Closely related to this problem is that of radicalism and reform, which seems to form such a dividing line between various political solutions. Yet, a closer analysis can show that this differentiation as it is usually conceived of is deceptive. There is reform and reform; reform can be radical, that is, going to the roots, or it can be superficial, trying to patch up the symptoms without touching the cases. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Reform which is not radical, in this sense, never accomplishes its ends and eventually ends up in the opposite direction. So-called radicalism on the other hand, which believes that we can solve problems by force, when observation, patience and continuous activity is required, is as unrealistic and fictious as reform. The revolution of the Bolsheviks led to Stalinism, the reform of the right wing Social Democrats in Germany, led to Hitler. The true criterion of reform is not its tempo but its realism, its true racialism; it is the question whether it goes to the roots and attempts to change causes—or whether it remains on the surface and attempts to deal only with symptoms. We are discussing the roads to sanity, that is, methods of cure, and we had better pause here for a moment and ask ourselves what we know about the nature of cure in cases of individual mental diseases. The cure of social pathology must follow the same principle, since it is the pathology of so many human beings, and not of an entity beyond or apart from individuals. The conditions for the cure of individual pathology are mainly the following: A development must have occurred which is contrary to the proper functioning of the psyche. In frame of reference of humanistic psychoanalysis, the cause of pathology lie in the failure to develop a productive orientation, a failure which results in the development of irrational passions, especially of incestuous, destructive and exploitative strivings. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The fact of suffering, whether it is conscious or unconscious, resulting from the failure of normal development, produces a dynamic striving to overcome the suffering, that is, for change in the direction of health. This striving for healthy in our physical as well as in our mental organism is the basis for any cure of sickness, and it is absent only in the most severe pathology. The first step necessary to permit this tendency for health to operate is the awareness of the suffering and of that which is shut out and disassociated from our conscious personality. In this frame of reference, it refers to the repressed irrational passions, to the repressed feeing of aloneness and futility, and to the longing for love and productivity, which is also repressed. Increasing self-awareness can become fully effective only if a next step is taken, that on changing a practice of life which was built on the basis of the neurotic structure, and which reproduces it constantly. A patient, for instance, whose neurotic character makes one want to submit to parental authorities has usually constructed a life where one has chosen dominating or sadistic father images as bosses, teachers, and so on. One will be cured only if one changes one’s realistic life situation in such a way that it does not constantly reproduce the submissive tendencies one wants to give up. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Furthermore, one must change one’s system of values, norms and ideals, so that they further rather than block one’s striving for health and maturity. The same condition—conflict with the requirements of human nature and resulting suffering, awareness of what is shut out, and change of the realistic situation and of values and norms—are also necessary for a cure of social pathology. To show the conflict between human needs and our social structure, and to further the awareness of our conflicts and of that which is dissociated, was the purpose of the previous discussion. However, we still need to further discuss the various possibilities of practical changes in our economic, political and cultural organization. Yet, before we start discussing the practical questions, let us consider once more what constitutes mental sanity, and what type of culture could be assumed to be conductive to mental health. The mentally healthy person is the productive and unalienated person; the person who relates oneself to the World lovingly, and who uses one’s reason to grasp reality objectively; who experiences oneself as a unique individual entity, and at the same time feels one with one’s follow mortals; who is not subject to irrational authority, and accepts willingly the rational authority of conscience and reason; who is in the process of being born as long as one is alive, and considers the gift of life the most precious chance one has. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Let us also remember that these goals of mental health are not ideals which have to be forced upon the person, or which mortals can attain only if one has overcome one’s nature, and sacrifices for one’s innate selfishness. On the contrary, the striving for mental health, for happiness, harmony, love, productiveness, is inherent in every human being who is not born as a mental or moral idiot. Given a chance, these strivings assert themselves forecefully, as can be seen in countless situations. In takes powerful constellations and circumstances to pervert and stifle this innate striving for sanity; and indeed, throughout the greater part of known history, the use of mortal by mortal has produced such perversion. To believe tat this perversion is inherent in mortals is like throwing seeds in the soil of the desert and claiming they were not meant to grow. What society corresponds to this aim of mental health, and what would be the structure of a sane society? First of all, a society in which no mortal is a means toward another’s end, but always and without exception an end in oneself; hence, where nobody is used, nor uses oneself, for purposes which are not those of the unfolding of one’s own human powers; where mortals are the center, and where all economic and political activities are subordinated to the aim of one’s growth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
A sane society is one in which qualities like greed, exploitativeness, possessiveness, narcissism, have no chance to be used for greater material gain or for the enhancement of one’s personal prestige. Where acting according to one’s conscience is looked upon a as fundamental and necessary quality and where opportunism and lack of principles is deemed to be asocial; where the individual is concerned with social matters so that they become personal matters, where one’s relation to one’s fellow mortals is not separated from one’s relationship in the private sphere. A sane society, furthermore, is one which permits mortals to operate within manageable and observable dimensions, and to be an active and responsible participant in the life of society, as well as the master of one’s own life. It is one which furthers human solidarity and not only permits, but stimulates, its members to relate themselves to each other lovingly; a sane society furthers the productive activity of everybody in one’s work, stimulates the unfolding of reason and enables mortals to give expression to one’s inner needs in collective art and rituals. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Another characteristic of modern people is loneliness. They describe this feeling as one being on the outside, isolated, or, if they are sophisticated, they say that they feel alienated. They emphasize how crucial it is for them to be invited to this part or that dinner, not because they especially want to go (though they generally do go) nor because they will get enjoyment, companionship, sharing of experience and human warmth in gathering (very often they do not, but are simply bored). Rather, being invited is crucial because it is a proof that they are not alone. Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the beneficial values of solitude, and even at times are very frightened at the prospect of being alone. Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they do not find themselves at all. The feeling of emptiness and loneliness go together. When persons, for example, are telling of a break-up in a love relationship, they will often not say they feel sorrow or humiliation over a lost conquest; but rather that they feel emptied. The loss of the other leaves an inner yawning void. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
The reasons for the close relationship between loneliness and emptiness are not difficult to discover. For when a person does not know with any inner conviction what one wants or what one feels; when, in a period of traumatic change, one comes aware of the fact that the conventional desires and goals one has been taught to follow no longer bring one any security or give one any sense of direction, when, that is, one feels an inner void while one stands amid the outer confusion of upheaval in one’s society, one senses danger; and one’s natural reaction is to look around for other people. They, one hopes, will give one some sense of direction, or at least some comfort in the knowledge that one is not alone in one’s fright. Emptiness and loneliness are thus two phases of the same basic experience of anxiety. Some people feel like we might be the last generation to walk this Earth—but do not know in which direction to turn. And because of their, their reaction is, strangely enough, a sudden, deep, loneliness. All of mortal’s history is an endeavor to shatter one’s seclusion. Feelings of isolation occur when one feels empty and afraid not simply because one wants to be protected by the crowd. Nor is the longing for others simply an endeavor to fill the void within one’s self—though this certainly is one side of the need for human companionship when one feels empty or anxious. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The more basic reason is that the human being gets one’s original experience of being a self out of one’s relatedness to other persons, and when one is alone, without other persons, one is afraid one will lose this experience of being a self. Mortals, the biosocial mammal, not only is dependent on other human beings such as one’s father and mother for one’s security during a long childhood; one like wise receives one’s consciousness of oneself, which is the basis of one’s capacity to orient oneself in life, from these early relationships. Therefore, it is clear to see that mortals need relationships with other people in order to orient themselves. Angels boring? Yes—until they fall! Then the Angel takes on fascination and interest. The dichotomy between devils and Angles was carried on through the Middle Ages, and the word for the diammonic is now clearly demon. The medieval citizens were enthralled by their demons. The medieval citizens were enthralled by their demons, even in the act of condemning them; why else all these gargoyles, beasts laughing and looking sinister, animals of every sort, scampering and climbing up the sides of their cathedrals and Victorian houses, carved in stone by artisans who must have known the daimonic at first hand? However, this did not stand in the way of their using this handy method of condemnation of their enemies as the devil’s party in their wars of religion and particularly in the Albigensian uprising. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
It seems that it is always mortal’s proclivity to define the outsider, the stranger, the one who differs from one, as the evil one and oneself as on the side of the angel. However, one who enters the sphere of faith enters the sanctuary of life. Where there is faith there is an awareness of holiness. One now becomes gifted with some supernatural power: one has had genius, or even one oneself is a genius. One’s acts do not conform to the norms of accepted behavior, but also one’s work has a superhuman quality that makes it incomparable with the work of other mortals. Therefore the usual categories of good and evil, of useful and useless, do not apply to the genius. What one does and what one suffers is one’s fate. One is not a genius because one is an extraordinary artist, but conversely, one is an artist become one is possessed by genius. Fate guides one to significant meetings and it produces great mortals. To see the experiential justification for this point we have only to recall that greatness consists of being in the right place at the right time; it is an encounter between a mortal of particular qualities and the particular needs of an age. Mortals with talent are seized by the historical situation and hurled to greatness. What concerns one ultimately becomes holy. The awareness of the holy is awareness of the presence of the divine, namely of the content of our supreme concern. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Faith’s presence remains mysterious in spite of its appearance. It is discovered in Nature, animate and inanimate, with soul and without soul, something which was only manifested in contradiction, and therefore cannot be grasped under one conception, still less under one word. Only in the impossible did it seem to find pleasure, and the possible it seemed to thrust from itself with contempt. The ancients become aware of something similar. Faith can manifest itself in the most remarkable way even in some animals, it primarily is connected with mortals. It represents a power which is, if not opposed to the moral order of the World, yet at cross-purposes to it; such that one could compare the one to the warp, and the other to the woof. In the most awesome form faith appears when it manifests itself in some human beings. They are not always mortals of superior mind or talents, seldom do they recommend themselves by the goodness of their heart. Yet a tremendous power emanates from them, they possess an incredible force over all other creatures and even over the elements; nobody can say how far their influence will reach. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The reason for these effects of the holy is obvious if we see the relation of the experience of the holy to the experience of the ultimate concern. The human hearts seeks the infinite because that is where the finite wants to rest. In the infinite it sees its own fulfillment. This is the reason for the ecstatic attraction and fascination of everything in which ultimacy is manifest. On the other hand, if ultimacy is manifest and exercises its fascinating attraction, one realizes at the same time the infinite distance of the finite from the infinite and, consequently, the negative judgment over any finite attempts to reach the infinite. The feeling of being consumed in the presence of the divine is a profound expression of mortal’s relation to the holy. It is implied in every genuine act of faith, in every state of ultimate concern. Entering the sanctuary means encountering the holy. Here the infinitely removed makes itself near and present, without losing its remoteness. For this reason, the holy has been called the entirely other, namely, other than the ordinary course of things or other than the World which is determined by the cleavage of subject and object. The holy transcends this realm; this is its mystery and its unapproachable character. There is no conditional way of reaching the unconditional; there is no finite way of reaching the infinite. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
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One Can Move Ahead Slightly and the Timing Must be Exquisite
We respected their choice to be together. We did not think they would simply disappear. We could not imagine it. We were afraid of hearing from them. We had no idea how they could multiply or survive in the modern World. Some people seek not to be outstanding but to fit in; they live as though they are directed by a radar set fastened to their head perpetually telling them what other people expect of them. This radar type gets one’s motives and directions for others; like a mortal who describes oneself as a set of mirrors, such an individual is able to respond but not to choose; one has no effective center of motivation of one’s own. Such people gain their strength by internalizing external rules, by compartmentalizing will power and intellect and by repressing their feelings. This type is well suited for business success, for, like 21st century technology tycoons and the captains of Wall Street, they can manipulate people in the same way as electric cars of gas prices. The gyroscope is an excellent symbol for the since it stands for a completely mechanical center of stability. William Randolph Hearst was an example of this type: he amassed great power and wealth, but he was so anxious underneath this appearance of strength. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The gyroscope mortals often have a strong influence over their kids and are very rigid. This is how certain attitudes in a society tend to crystallize rigidly. If we take out the gyroscope, there will be an emptiness in society, which might follow a breakdown because it would be hollow. Our society has not yet found something to take the place of the gyroscope person’s rigid rules. If this is truly the Age of Anxiety, it may be because we have entered an era when things happen so rapidly, on such a large scale, that we are overwhelmed by them. For example, we know something of the threats to human survival on our planet. Our uncertainty as to how and when such things might happen or about what to do might be called anxiety. Anxiety, like fear, has come beneficial aspects. It is not always wise to rid ourselves of anxieties, because we can learn from them. Though anxiety is an uncomfortable feeling, rather than popping a tranquilizer we might be better off trying to discover its cause and work through it. The outer-directed people in our tie generally are characterized by attitudes of passivity and apathy. Many people of today have by and large given up the driving ambition to excel, to be at the top; or if they do have such ambition, they regard it as a fault and are often apologetic for such a hangover from their fathers’ mores. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
So many people want to be accepted by their peers even to the extent of being inconspicuous and absorbed in the group. This sociological picture is very similar in its broad lines to the picture we get in psychological work with individuals. A decade or two ago, the emptiness which was beginning to be experienced on a fairly broad scale by the middle classes could be laughed at as the sickness of the suburbs. The clearest picture of the empty life is the suburban man, who gets up at the same hoe every weekday morning, takes the same train to work in the city, performs that same task in the office, lunches at the same place, leaves the same tip for the waitress each day, comes home on the same train each night, has 2.3 children, cultivates a little garden, spends a two-week vacation at the shore every Summer which he does not enjoy, goes to church every Christmas and Easter, and moves through a routine, mechanical existence year after year until he finally has enough move saved at the age of sixty-five to last at least twenty years, and then returns to Heaven. (To some people, that life sounds like a dream come true.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, there are indications in the present decade that emptiness and boredom have become much more serious states for many people. Not long ago, a very curious incident was reported in the New York papers. A bus driver in the Bronx, New York simply drove away in his empty bus one day and was picked up by the police several days later in the state of Florida, which is about 946 miles away. He explained that, having gotten tired of driving the same route every day, he had decided to go away on a trip. While he was being brought back it was clear from the papers that the bus company was having a hard time deciding whether or how he should be punished. By the time he arrived in the Bronx, he was a cause celebre, and a crowd of people who apparently had never personally known the errant bus driver were on hand to welcome him. When it was announced that the company had decided not to turn him over for legal punishment but to give him his job back again if he would promise to make no more jaunts, there was literal as well as figurative cheering in the Bronx. Why should these solid citizens of the Bronx, living in a metropolitan section which is almost synonymous with middle-class urban conventionality, make a hero out of a man who according to their standards was an auto thief, and worse yet, failed to appear at his regular time for work? #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
On a small scale, the story of the bus driver and the reaction from the people in the Bronx reminds us of the fact that the upper middle classes in bourgeois France several decades ago were able to endure the stultifying and mechanical routine of their commercial and industrial activities only by virtue of the presence of centers of Bohemianism at their elbows. People who live as hollow mortals can endure the monotony only by an occasional blowoff—or at least by identifying with someone else’s blowoff. In some circles emptiness is even made a goal to be sought after, under the guise of being adaptable. Nowhere is this illustrated more arrestingly than in an article in Life Magazine entitled “The Wife Problem.” Summarizing a series of researches which first appeared in Fortune about the role of the wives of corporations executives, this article points out that whether or not the husband is promoted depends a great deal on whether his wife fits the pattern. Time was when only the minister’s wife was looked over by the trustees of the church before her husband was hired; now the wife of the corporation executive is screened, covertly or overly, by most companies like the steel or wool or any other commodity the company uses. She must be highly gregarious, not intellectual or conspicuous, and she must have a very sensitive antennae (again that radar set!) so that she can be forever adapting. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The good wife is good by not doing things—by not complaining when her husband works late, by not fussing when a transfer is coming up; by not engaging in any controversial activity. Thus her success depends not on how she actively uses her powers, but on her knowing when and how to be passive. However, the rule that transcends all others is to not be too good. Keeping up with the Joneses is still important. However, where in pushier and more primitive times it implied going substantially ahead of the Joneses, today keeping up means just that: keeping up. One can move ahead, yes—but slightly, and the timing must be exquisite. In the end the company conditions almost everything the wife does—from the companions she is permitted to have down to the car she drives and what and how much she drinks and reads. To be sure, in return for this indenture the modern corporation takes care of its members in the form of giving them added security, insurance, planned vacations, and so on. The Company had become like Big Brother—the symbol for the dictator—in Orwell’s novel, 1984. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Of course, the results of such control is a little frightening. Conformity, it would appear, is being elevated into something akin to a religion. Perhaps Americans will arrive at an ant society, not through fiat of a dictator, but through unbridled desire to get along with one another. While one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of some people, the emptiness has for many now moved from the state of boredom to a state of futility and despair which holds promise of dangers. The minor addiction to unprescribed medication among a small number of adolescents is partially due to the media they consume on the television, but also because of some state laws. Youth need to be reminded that it is important to stay sober because they really need their education to make it in society today. Education will help them move past the condition of emptiness. If youth are not growing toward something, one does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into deviant activities. What is the psychological origin of this experience of emptiness? The feeling of emptiness or vacuity which we have observed sociologically and individually should not be take to mean that people are empty, or without emotional potentiality. A human being is not empty in a static sense, as though one were a storage battery which needs charging. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The experience of emptiness, rather, generally comes from the people’s feeling that they are powerless to do anything effective about their lives or the World they live in. Inner vacuousness is the long-term, accumulated result of a person’s particular conviction toward oneself, namely one’s conviction that one cannot act as an entity in directing one’s own life, or change other people’s attitudes toward one, or effectually influence the World around one. Thus one gets the deep sense of despair and futility which so many people in our day have. And soon, since what one wants and what one feels can make no real difference, one gives up wanting and feeling. Apathy and lack of feeling are also defenses against anxiety. When a person continually faces dangers one is powerless to overcome, one’s final line of defense is at last to avoid even feeling the dangers. Sensitive students of our time have seen these developments coming. People today no longer live under the authority of the church or moral laws, but under anonymous authorities like public opinion and those of the TV news media. However, what you do not understand is that 90 percent of the TV news media is control by six corporations, so what you are getting is a view they want manifested in society, to direct politics, business and economics and it may not be fair or accurate. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The authority of public opinion is the public itself, but this public is merely a collection of many individuals each with one’s radar set adjusted to finding out what others expect of them. Many corporate executives are successful not only because of their education and experience, but also because the husband and wife are able to be successful in adjusting to public opinion. The public is thus made up of all the Elons, Britneys, Drakes, Toms, Marys, Dicks and Harrys who are the slaves to the authority of public opinion! The public is therefore afraid of a ghost, a bogeyman, a chimera. It is an anonymous authority with a capital “A” when the authority is a composite of ourselves, but ourselves without any individual centers. We are in the long run afraid of our own collective emptiness. And we have good reason to be frightened by this situation of conformity and individual emptiness. We need only remind ourselves that the ethical and emotional emptiness in European society three to five decades ago was an open invitation to fascist dictatorships to step in and fill the vacuum. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The great danger of this situation of vacuity and powerlessness is that it leads sooner or later to painful anxiety and despair, and ultimately, if not corrected, to futility and the blocking off of the most precious qualities of the human being. Its end results are the dwarfing and impoverishment of persons psychologically, or else surrender to some destructive authoritarianism. There is a correlation between economy and culture. Human nature itself needs and laws are in constant interaction with the economic conditions which shape historical development; and while mortals are sharped by the form of social and economic organization, they in turn also mold it. The passions and strivings which are rooted in mortal’s nature, and in the conditions of their existence, are the most powerful driving force for human development. Much like how many people love celebrity culture, so they try to design their homes like houses of the stars, buy fancy cars, buy clothes like those of their favor celebrities and even style their hair like theirs, and that is how cultural factors influence economic basis of society. Observation of the human reality proves that the economic structure of Capitalism constitutes a definite progress over all other socialist theories from a scientific viewpoint. Automatically, when the economic changes have been achieved, a better society can be brought into life by the people who have undergone a moral change within themselves. For instance, people are trying to preserve the economy, so are creating “repair cafes” to make to repair electronics. This is being called the “Repair Revolution.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
This is the age-old dilemma of our own personal responsibility even though we are moved by fate. In society, among workers and intellectuals, there is an expression of hope for the liberation of mortals, for the establishment of new moral values, for the realization of human solidarity. It reflects a condition of life to which we all are heir. It is the ultimate statement that truth and reality can be psychologized only to a limited extent. We must have a transpersonal belief in fate and moral responsibility at the same time. God has given every mortal a soul and that is our bond with the divine. To live in accord with one’s soul is difficult but profoundly rewarding. It is natural drive in its starkest form but a drive which mortals, being conscious of, can to some extent assimilate and direct. Our soul opens us up to the creative possibilities we did not know we possessed. And although we experience trials, tribulations, and crises, the struggle gives us a never-failing source of forms and potentialities to awe and to delight. Satan, Lucifer, and other figures who were all at one time archangels, are psychologically necessary. They have to be invented, had to be created, in order to make human action and freedom possible. Otherwise, there would be no consciousness. For every thought destroys as it creates: to think this thing, I have to cut out something else; to say “yes” to this is to say “no” to that and to have a “no” in the very ambivalence of the “yes.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
For consciousness works by way of either/or: it is destructive as well as constructive. Without rebellion, no consciousness. Thus, the hope that Satan or other adversaries can be gotten rid of by gradual progress toward perfection is possible. Faith is a total and centered act of the personal self, the act of unconditional, infinite and ultimate concern. The question now arises: what is the source of this all-embracing and all-transcending concern? The word concern points to two sides of a relationship, the relation between the one who is concerned and one’s concern. In both respects we have to imagine mortal’s situation in itself and in one’s World. The reality of mortal’s ultimate concern reveals something about one’s being, namely, that one is able to transcend the flux of relative and transitory experiences of one’s ordinary life. Mortal’s experiences, feelings, thoughts are conditioned and finite. They not only come and go, but their content is of finite and conditional concern—unless they are elevated to unconditional validity. However, this presupposed the general possibility of doing so; it presupposes the element of infinite in mortals. Mortals are able to understand in an immediate personal and central act the meaning of the ultimate, the unconditional, the absolute, the infinite. This alone makes faith a human potentiality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Human potentialities are powers that drive toward actualization. Mortals are driven toward faith by one’s awareness of the infinite to which one belongs, but which one does not own like a possession. This is in abstract terms what concretely appears as the restlessness of the hearts within the flux of life. The unconditional concern which is faith is the concern about the unconditional. The infinite passion, as faith as been described, is the passion for the infinite. Or, the ultimate concern is apprehension about what is experienced as definitive. In this way we have turned from the subjective meaning of faith as a centered act of the personality to its objective meaning, to what is meant in the act of faith. It would not help at this point of our analysis to call that which is meant in the act of faith God or a god. For at this step we ask: What in the idea of God constitutes divinity? The answer is: It is the element of the unconditional and of ultimacy. This carries the quality of divinity. If this is seen, one can understand why almost every thing in Heaven and on Earth has received ultimacy in the history of religion. However, we also can understand that a critical principle was and is at work in mortal’s religious consciousness, namely, that which is really ultimate over against what claims to be supreme but it only preliminary, transitory, finite. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
The term ultimate concern united the subjective and the objective side of the act of faith—the fides qua creditur (the faith through which is believes) and the fides quae crediture (the faith which is believed). The first is the classical term for the centered act of the personality, the ultimate concern. The second is the classical term for that toward which this act is directed, the ultimate itself, expressed in symbols of the divine. This distinction is very important, but not ultimately so, for the one side cannot be without the other. There is no faith without a content toward which it is directed. There is always something meant in the act of faith. And there is no way of having the content of faith expect in the act of faith. All speaking about divine matters which is not done in the state of ultimate concern is meaningless. Because that which is meant in the act of faith cannot be approached in any other way than through an act of faith. In terms like ultimate, unconditional, infinite, absolute, the difference between subjectivity and objectivity is overcome. The ultimate of the act of faith and the ultimate that is meant in the act of faith are one and the same. This is symbolically expressed by the mystics when they say that their knowledge of God has of himself; and is expressed by Paul when he says (1 Corinthians 13) that he will know as he is known, namely by God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
God never can be object without being at the same time subject. Even a successful prayer, is according to Paul (Romans 8), not possible without God as Spirit praying within us. The same experience expressed in abstract language is the disappearance of the ordinary subject-object scheme in the experiences of the ultimate, the unconditional. In the act of faith that which is the source of this act is present beyond the cleavage of the subject and object. It is present as both and beyond both. This character of faith gives an additional criterion for distinguishing true and false ultimacy. The finite which claims infinity without having it (as, for example, a nation or success) is not able to transcend the subject-object scheme. It remains an object which the believer looks at as a subject. One can approach it with ordinary knowledge and subject it to ordinary handling. There are, of course, many degrees in the endless realm of false ultimacies. The nation is nearer to true ultimacy than is success. Nationalistic ecstasy can produce a state in which the subject is almost swallowed by the object. However, after a periods the subject emerges again, disappointed radically and totally, and by looking at the nation in a skeptical and calculating way does injustice even to its justified claims. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The more idolatrous a faith the less it is able to overcome the cleavage between subject and object. For that is the difference between true and idolatrous faith. In true faith the ultimate concern is a concern about the truly supreme; while in idolatrous faith is existential disappointment, a disappointment which penetrates into the very existence of mortals! This is the dynamics of idolatrous faith: that it is faith, and as such, the centered act of a personality; that the centering point is something which is more or less the periphery: and that, therefore, the act of faith leads to a loss of the center and to the disruption of the personality. The ecstatic character of even an idolatrous faith can hide this consequence only for a certain time. However, finally it breaks into the open. Perception—our interpretation of the data our senses supply—finally determines what our experience of the World is. Our perceptions can be distorted, however, and our senses fooled. In addition, there may be a whole range of senses receiving input that we do not yet really understand. These are the so-called extra senses, those we associate with extra sensory perception (ESP). “Fear not, for behold, it is God that has shown unto you this marvelous thing, in the which is shown unto you that ye cannot lay your hands on us to slay us,” reports Helaman 5.26. The Lord is with us, mindful of us, and blessing us in way only he can do. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Our desire is to always have God’s Spirit with us to push fear aside for a more eternal view of our mortal lives. Stand in holy places—be not troubled—and promises shall be fulfilled. We will find answers to our questions that trouble us or the peace to simply set them aside. That is the Spirit in action. This Earth is a sacred place in the kingdom of God, and this Earth calls for our reverence, our respect for others, our best selves in living the gospel, and our hopes to lay aside our fears and seek the healing power of Jesus Christ through his Atonement. People say this Earth is not our home, but we do live here. Much like a house rent, it may not be your permanent home, but it is your home because you are legally occupying the dwelling. There is no room for fear in these holy places of God or in the hearts of his children. Why? Because of love. God loves us—always—and we love him. Our love of God counters all fears, and his love abounds in holy places. Think about it. Wen we are tentative in our commitments to the Lord, when we stray from his path leading to life eternal, when we question or doubt our significance in his divine design, when we allow fear to open the door to all its companions—discouragement, anger, frustration, disappointment—the Spirit leave us, and we are without the Lord. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
We must learn to receive revelation. We experience the World through our sense. To receive personal revelation, we must place priority on living the gospel and encouraging faithfulness and spirituality in others as well as ourselves. However, we do not experience the same things. Our perceptions of the World differ. When we stand in holy placed, we can feel God’s love and perfect love casts out all fear. Sensation and perception are intimately linked together. It is through them that we both see the World. If we actively trust in the Lord and is ways, if we are engaged in his work, we will not fear the trends of the World or be troubled by them. I plead with you to set aside Worldly influences and pressures and seek spirituality in your daily life. Love what the Lord loves—which includes his commandments, his holy houses, our sacred covenants with him, the sacrament each Sabbath day, our communication through prayer—and you will not be troubled. We must trust the Lord and his promises and they will be fulfilled. We are wise and have received the truth, and have taken the Holy Spirit for our guide. “Peace, peace be unto you, because your faith in my Well Beloved, who was from the foundation of the World,” Helaman 5.47. The way to love other people is to express what we feel—anger and love—without aiming to hurt feelings. Open but reverent communication is how to make love in our lives. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
I am Just a Collection of Mirrors Reflecting What Everyone Else Expects of Me
You do right by me, now. Or I will shout you down. Truth is I cannot recollect what happened. One can understand such a reaction only if one appreciates the degree to which words can assume a magical function, and if one takes into account the decrease in reasonable thought, that is to say, in objectivity, which is so characteristic of our age. While mortals are born with certain character traits, their character is definitely determined only by the circumstances under why they live. If the social conditions of life are satisfactory, mortal’s character will develop its inherent virtues. Many people were trained in all previous history only to defend themselves or to destroy others. A new social order must be created, in which mortals are trained in principles that would permit them to act in union, and to create real and genuine bonds between individuals. Nothing living can prosper without freedom. It is out task to loosen the hardening of hearts so that what lies buried may rise to the surface: so that what truly lives yet now seems dead may emerge and grow light. We must go to the root, and the root—is mortals themselves. The history of the World is nothing but the creation of human, is the history of the birth of mortals. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
However, all history is also the history of mortal’s alienation from oneself, from one’s own human powers; the consolidation of our own product to an objective force above us, outgrowing our control, defeating our expectations, annihilating our calculations is one of the main factors in al previous historical development. Mortals have been the object of circumstances, they must become the subject, so that mortals become the highest being for mortals. Freedom is not only freedom from political oppressors, but the freedom from the domination of mortals by things and circumstances. The free person is the rich person, but not the person rich in an economic sense, but rich in human sense. The wealthy mortal is the mortal who is much, and not the one who has much. The analysis of society and of the historical process must begin with mortals, not with an abstraction, but with the real, concrete mortal, in one’s physiological and psychological qualities. It must begin with a concept of the essence of mortals, and the study of economics and of society serves only the purpose of understanding how circumstances have crippled mortals, how one has become alienated from oneself and one’s powers. The nature of humans cannot be deduced from the specific manifestation of human nature as it is engendered by the capitalist system. Our aim must be to know what is good for humans. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The aim of development of mortals is a new harmony between people and people, and between people and nature, a development in which mortal’s relatedness to one’s fellow mortals will correspond to one’s most important human need. How can this emancipation of mortals be attained? Mortal’s physical energy has become a commodity, hence mortals have become a thing. We are the nice people and, like the cultivated citizens of Athens in Socrates’ time, we do not like to be publicly reminded, whether we secretly admit it to ourselves or not, that we are motivated even in our love by lust for power, anger, and revenge. What is necessary for the cure is that we confront and come to terms with our souls. The principle this implies is identify with that which haunts you, not in order to fight it off, but to take it into yourself; for it must represent some rejected element in you. The community gives a humanly trustworthy, interpersonal World in which one can struggle against the negative forces. Sometimes we can be the source of hostility and aggression, but when we can, through consciousness, integrate it into our self-system, it becomes the course of energy and spirit which enlivens us. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
It is important that we learn to possess the fragments of our soul. By frankly confronting these fragments, coming to terms with them, integrating them into the self-system—this process yields several benefits. It strengthens the self because it integrates what had been left out. It overcomes the split, the paralyzing ambivalence in the self. And it renders the person more human by breaking down the self-righteousness and aloof detachment which are the usual defenses of the human being who denies the soul. In such therapy we notice that there is a freeing of the patient from morbid bonds to the past. Love and will are reciprocally related: to help one is to strengthen the other. Anger and love and the feeling of both do not operate in separate compartments or in separate people. We cannot reject one and hope to experience the other. Our aim is to discover ways in which we can stand against the insecurity of our time, to find a center of strength within ourselves, and as far as we can, to point the way toward achieving values and goals which can be depended upon in a day when very little is secure. Many people do not know what they want; they often do not have any clear idea of what they feel. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
When people talk about lack of autonomy, or lament their inability to make decisions—difficulties which are present in all decades—it soon becomes evident that their underlying problem is that they have no definite experience of their wants or desires. Thus they feel swayed this way and that, with painful feelings of powerlessness, because they feel vacuous, empty. The complaint which leads them to come for help may be, for example, that their love relationships always break up or that they cannot go through with marriage plans or are dissatisfied with the marriage partner. However, they do not talk long before they make it clear that they expect the marriage partner, real or hoped-for, to fill some lack, some vacancy within themselves; and they are anxious and angry because he or she does not talk. They generally can talk fluently about what they should want—to complete their college degrees successfully, to get a job, to fall in love and marry and raise a family—but it is soon evident, even to them, that they are describing what others, parents, professors, employers, expect of them rather than what they themselves want. Soon people realize that they are just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone expects of me. We have to help people clear up the repressions, bring the desire into consciousness, and eventually help them become able to gratify their desire in accord with reality. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Very often people are more sensitive and gifted members of the society; they need to get help, broadly speaking, because they are less successful at rationalizing than the well-adjusted citizen who is able for the time being to over up one’s underlying conflicts. This is why we need to have faith. Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned: the dynamics of faith are the dynamics of mortal’s ultimate concern. Mortals, like every living being, is concerned about many things, above all about those which condition one’s very existence, such as food and shelter. However, mortals, in contrast to other living beings, as spiritual concerns—cognitive, aesthetic, social, political. Some of them are urgent, often extremely urgent, and each of them as well as the vital concerns can claim ultimacy for a human life or the life of a social group. It is claims ultimacy it demands the total surrender of one who accepts this claim, and it promises total fulfillment even if all other claims have to be subjected to it or rejected in its name. If a national group makes the life and growth of the nation its ultimate concern, it demands that all other concerns, economic well-being, health and life, family, aesthetic and cognitive truth, justice and humanity, be sacrificed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
The extreme nationalisms of our century are laboratories for the study of what ultimate concern means in all aspects of human existence including the smallest concerns of one’s daily life. Everything is centered in the only god, the nation—a god who certainly proves to be a demon, but who shows clearly the unconditional character of an ultimate concern. However, it is not only the unconditional demand made that which is one’s ultimate concern, it is also the promise of ultimate fulfillment which is accepted in the act of faith. The content of this promise is not necessarily defined. It can be expressed in indefinite symbols or in concrete symbols which cannot be taken literally, like the greatness of one’s nation in which one participates even if one has died for it, or the conquest of humankind by the saving race, and so forth. In each of these cases it is ultimate fulfillment that is promised, and it is exclusion from such fulfillment which is threatened if the unconditional demand is not obeyed. An example—and more than an example—is the faith manifest in the religion of the Old Testament. It also has the character of ultimate concern in demand, threat and promise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The content of this concern is not the nation—although some nationalist groups have sometimes tried to distort that—but the content is the God of justice, who, because he represents justice for everybody and every nation, is called the Universal God, the God of the Universe. He is the ultimate concern of every pious being, and therefore in his name the great commandment is given: “You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart, and with all your soul, and with al your might,” reports Deuteronomy 6.5. This is what ultimate concern means and from these words the term ultimate concern is derived. They state unambiguously the character of genuine faith, the demand of total surrender to the subject of ultimate concern. The Old Testament is full of commands which make the nature of this surrender concrete, and it is full of promises and threats in relation to it. Here is also the promises of symbolic indefiniteness, although they center around fulfillment of the national and individual life, and the threat is the exclusion from such fulfillment through national extinction and individual catastrophe. Faith, for the people of the Old Testament, is the state of being ultimately and unconditionally concerned about God and about what he represents in demands, threat, and promise. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Another example—almost a counter-example, yet nevertheless equally revealing—is the ultimate concern with success and wit social standing and economic power. It is the god of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it does what every ultimate concern must do: it demands unconditional surrender to its laws even if the price is the sacrifice of genuine human relations, personal conviction, and creative eros. Its threat is social and economic defeat, and its promise—indefinite as all such promises—the fulfillment of one’s being. It is the breakdown of this kind of faith which characterizes and makes religiously important most contemporary literature. Not false calculations but a misplaced faith is revealed in novels like Point of No Return. When fulfilled, the promise of this faith proves to be empty. Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The content matters infinitely for the life of the believer, but it does not matter for the formal definition of faith. And this is the step we have to make in order to understand the dynamics of faith. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Only the adversary, the enemy of us all, would try to convince us that the ideals outlined in the general conference are depressing and unrealistic, that people do not really improve, that no one really progresses. And why does Lucifer give that speech? Because he knows he cannot improve, he cannot progress, that Worlds without end he will never have a bright tomorrow. He is a miserable man bound by eternal limitations, and he wants you to be miserable too. Well, do not fall for that. With the gift of the Atonement of Jesus Christ and the strength of Heaven to help us, we can improve, and the great thing about the gospel is we get credit for trying, even if we do not always succeed. When there was a controversy in the early Church regarding who was entitled to Heaven’s blessings and who was not, the Lord declared to the Prophet Joseph Smith, “Verily I say unto you, [the gifts of God] are given for the benefit of those who love me and keep my commandments, and [for them] that seeketh so to do.” Are we not all thankful for that added provision? That has to be a lifesaver because sometimes that is all we can offer! We take some solace in the fact that if God were to reward only the perfectly faithful, he would not have much of a distribution list. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Please remember tomorrow, and all the days after that, that the Lord blesses those who want to improve, who accept the need for commandments and try to keep them, who cherish Christlike virtues and strive to the best of their ability to acquire them. If you stumble in that pursuit, so does everyone; the Savior is there to help you keep going. If you fall, summon his strength. Call out, “Oh, Jesus, have mercy on me.” He will help you get back up. He will help you repent, repair, fix whatever you have to fix, and keep going. Soon enough you will have the success you seek. We are going to be blessed for our desire to do good, even as we actually strive to be so. And to qualify for those blessings, we must make certain we do not deny them to others; we are to deal justly, never unjustly, never unfairly; we are to walk humbly never arrogantly, never pridefully; we are to judge righteously, never self-righteously, never unrighteously. The first great commandment of all eternity is to love God with all of our heart, might, mind, and strength—that is the first great commandment. However, the first great truth of all eternity is that God loves us with all of his heart, might, mind, and strength. That love is the foundation stone of all eternity, and it should be the foundation stone of our daily life. Indeed, it is only with that reassurance burning in our soul that we can have the confidence to keep trying to improve, keep seeking forgiveness for our sins, and keep extending that grace to our neighbor. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. It is not a movement of a special section or a special function of mortal’s total being. They all are untied in the act of faith. However, faith is not the sum total of their impacts. It transcends every special impact as well as the totality of them and it has itself a decisive impact on each of them. Since faith is an act of the personality as a whole, it participates in the dynamics of personal life. These dynamics have been described in many ways, especially in the recent developments of analytic psychology. Thinking in polarities, their tensions and their possible conflicts, is a common characteristic of most of them. This makes the psychology of personality highly dynamic and requires a dynamic theory of faith as the most personal acts. The first and decisive polarity in analytic psychology is that between the so-called unconscious and the conscious. Faith as an act of the total personality is not imaginable without the participation of the unconscious elements in the personality structure. They are always present and decide largely about the content of faith. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
However, on the other hand, faith is a conscious act and the unconscious elements participate in the creation of faith only if they are taken into the personal center which transcends each of them. If this does not happen, if unconscious forces determine the mental status without a centered act, faith does not occur, and compulsions take its place. For faith is a matter of freedom. Freedom is nothing more than the possibility of centered personal acts. The frequent discussion in which faith and freedom are contrasted could be helped by the insight that faith is a free, namely, centered act of the personality. In this respect freedom and faith are identical. Also important to understand is that real faith, even if it uses the father image for its expression, transforms this image into a principle of truth and justice to be defended even against the father. Faith and culture can be affirmed only if we stay grounded in reality, but keep a focus on our eternal lives. This leads to the question of how faith as a personal, centered act is related to the rational structure of mortal’s personality which is manifest in one’s meaningful language, in one’s ability to know the true and to do the good, in one’s sense of beauty and justice. All this, and not only one’s possibility to analyze, to calculate and to argue, makes one a rational being. However, in spite of this larger concept of reason we must deny that mortal’s essential nature is identical with the rational character of one’s mind. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Mortals are able to decide for or against reason. This power is the power of one’s self, the center of self-relatedness in which all elements of one’s being are untied. Faith is not an act of any of one’s rational functions, as it is not an act of the unconscious, but it is an act in which both the rational and the nonrational elements of one’s being are transcended. Faith as the embracing and centered act of the personality is ecstatic. It transcends both the drives of the nonrational unconscious and the structures of the rational conscious. It transcends them, but it does not destroy them. The ecstatic character of faith does not exclude its rational character although it is not identical with it, and it includes nonrational strivings without being identical with them. In the ecstasy of faith there is an awareness of truth and of ethical value; there are also past loves and hates, conflicts and reunions, individual and collective influences. Ecstasy means standing outside of oneself—without ceasing to be oneself—with all the elements which are united in the personal center. “And as many as had devils cast out from them, and were healed of their sicknesses and their infirmities, did truly manifest unto the people that they had been wrought upon by the Spirit of God, and has been healed; and they did show forth signs also and did do some miracles among the people,” 3 Nephi 7.22. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
A further polarity in these elements, relevant for the understanding of faith, is the tension between the cognitive function of mortal’s personal life, on the one hand, and emotion and will, on the other hand. We must sharply and insistently understand that every act of faith is cognitive affirmation, not as the result of an independent process of inquiry but as an inseparable element in a total act of acceptance and surrender. This also excludes the idea that faith is the result of an independent act of will to believe. There is certainly affirmation by the will of what concerns one ultimately, but faith is not a creation of will. In the ecstasy of faith the will to accept and to surrender is an element, but not the cause. And this is true also of feeling. Faith is not an emotional outburst: tis is not the meaning of ecstasy. Certainly, emotion is in it, as in every act of man’s spiritual life. However, emotion does not produce faith. Faith has a cognitive content and is an act of the will. It is the unity of every element in the centered self. Of course, the unity of all elements in the act of fait does not prevent one or the other element from dominating in a special faith. It dominates the character of faith but it does not create the act of faith. “When you shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that you should read them, that you would remember how merciful the Lord has been unto the children of mortals, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that you shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts,” reports Moroni 10.3. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This also answers the question of a possible psychological of faith. Everything that happens in a mortal’s personal being can become an object of psychology. And it is rather important for bot the philosopher of religion and the practical minister to know how the act of faith is embedded in the totality of psychological processes. However, in contrast to this justified and desirable form of a psychology of faith there is another one which tries to derive faith from something that is not faith but is most frequently fear. The presupposition of this method is that fear or something else from which faith is derived is more original and basic than faith. However, this presupposition cannot be proved. One the contrary, one can prove that in the scientific method which leads to such consequences faith is already effective. Faith precedes all attempt to derive it from something else, because these attempts are themselves based on faith. No matter how serious the trial, how deep the distress, how great the affliction, God will never desert us. He never has, and he never will. He cannot do it. It is not God’s character to quit us. God will always stand by us. God, our Heavenly Father, wants us to be. He wants to bless us. A rewarding, abundant, and eternal life is the very object of God’s merciful plan for his children. It is a plan predicated on the truth that all things work together for good to them that love God. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Randolph Harris II International Institute 