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Love’s Depth is Often Tested in Crisis: Such Creativity is as Close as Mortals Ever Get to becoming Immortal
I know you have survived centuries. You have even survived yourself. You went into a desert place like Christ. You did not die because your blood is too strong. You are afraid you cannot die. Everything you have believed in has been shattered You tell yourself you have no illusions, but that is not true. Mutuality, the giving-taking circle, replenishes and nourishes and assists the growth of each person in any relationship. What becomes of reason, conscience and religion in an alienated World? Superficially seen, they prosper. There is hardly any illiteracy to speak of in the Western countries; more and more people go to college in the United States; everybody reads the newspaper and talks reasonably about World affairs. As to conscience, most people act quite decently in their narrow personal sphere, in fact surprisingly so, considering their general confusion. As far as religion is concerned, it is well known that church affiliation is higher than ever, and the vast majority of Americans believe in God—or so they say in public-opinion polls. However, one does not need to dig too deeply to arrive at less pleasant findings. If we talk about reason, we must decide what human capacity we are referring to. As I have suggested before, we must differentiate between intelligence and reason. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
By intelligence I mean the ability to manipulate concepts for the purpose of achieving some practical end. The chimpanzee—who puts the two sticks together in order to get to do the job—uses intelligence. So do we all when we go about our business, figuring out how to do things. Intelligence, in this sense, is taking things for granted as they are, making combinations which have the purpose of facilitating their manipulations: intelligence is thought in the service of biological survival. Reason, one the other and, aims at understanding; it tries to find out what is behind the surface, to recognize the kernel, the essence of the reality which surrounds us. Reason is not without a function, but its function is not to further physical as much as mental and spiritual existence. However, often in individual and social life, reason is required in order to predict (considering that prediction often depends on recognition of forces which operate underneath the surface), and prediction sometimes is necessary even for physical survival. “Therefore, go to your homes, and ponder upon the things which I has said, and ask the Father, in my name that you may understand, and prepare your minds for the morrow, and I come unto you again, reports 3 Nephi 17.3. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Reason requires relatedness and a sense of self. If I am only the passive receptor of impressions, thoughts, opinions, I can compare them, manipulate them—but I cannot penetrate them. I deduce the existence of myself as an individual from the fact that I think. I doubt, so hence I think; I think, hence I am. The reverse is true, too. Only if I am I, if I have not lost my individuality in the It, can I think, that is, can I make use of my reason. It might be maintained that the reasoning necessary for the knowledge of God is, as a matter of fact, too difficult for frail and mortal human beings to manage. Closely related to this the lacking sense of reality which is characteristic of the alienated personality. To speak of the lacking sense of reality in modern mortals is contrary to the widely held idea that we are distinguished from most periods of history by our greater realism. However, to speak of our realism is almost like a paranoid distortion. What realists, who are playing wit weapons which may lead to the destruction of all modern civilization, if not of our Earth itself! If an individual were found doing that, he or she would be locked up immediately, and if one prided oneself on one’s realism, the psychiatrists would consider this an additional and rather serious symptom of a diseased mind. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
However, quite aside from this—the fact is that modern humans exhibit an amazing lack of realism for all that matters. For the meaning of life and death, for happiness and suffering, for feeling and serious thought. One has covered up the whole reality of human existence and replaced it with one’s artificial, prettified picture of a pseudo-reality, not too different from the savages who lost their land and freedom for glittering glass beads and paper. Indeed, one is so far away from human reality, that one can say with the inhabitants of the Brave Knew World: “When the individual feels, the community reels.” Another factor in contemporary society already mentioned is destructive to reason. Since nobody ever does the whole job, but only a fraction of it, since the dimension of things and of the organization of people is too vast to be understood as a whole, nothing can be seen in its totality. Hence the laws underlying the phenomena cannot be observed. Intelligence is sufficient to manipulate properly one sector of a larger unit, whether it is a machine or a state. However, reason can develop only if it is geared to the whole, if it deals with observable and manageable entities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Just as our eyes and ears function only within certain quantitative limits of wave length, our reason too is bound by what is observable as a whole and in its functioning. To put it differently, beyond a certain order of bigness, concreteness is necessarily lost and abstractification takes place; with it, the sense for reality fades out. The first one to see this problem was Aristotle, who thought that a city which transcended in number what we would call today a small town was not livable. In observing the quality of thinking in alienated mortals, it is striking to see how one’s intelligence has developed and how one’s reason has deteriorated. Mortals take their reality for granted; they want to eat it, consumer it, touch it, manipulate it. Mortals do not even ask what is behind it, why things are as they are, and where they are going. One cannot eat the meaning, one cannot consume the sense, and as far as the future is concered—apres nous le deluge! Even from the nineteenth century to our day, there seems to have occurred an observable increase in stupidity, if by this we mean the opposite to reason, rather than to intelligence. In spite of the fact that everybody reads the daily paper religiously, there is an absence of understanding of the meaning of political events which is truly frightening, because our intelligence helps us to produce weapons which our reason is not capable of controlling. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Indeed, we have the know-how, but we do not have the know-why, nor the know-what-for of what we are creating. We have many persons with good and high intelligence quotients, but our intelligence tests measure the ability to memorize, to manipulate thoughts quickly—but not to reason. All this is true notwithstanding the fact that there are mortals of outstanding reason in our midst, whose thinking is as profound and vigorous as ever existed in the history of the human race. However, they think apart from the general herd thought, and they are looked upon with suspicion—even if they are needed for their extraordinary achievements in the natural sciences. The new automatic brains are indeed a good illustration of what is meant here by intelligence. They manipulate data which are fed into them; they compare, select, and eventually come out with results more quickly or more error-proof than human intelligence could. However, the condition of all this is that the basic data are fed into them beforehand. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
What the electric brain cannot do is think creatively, even with its algorithms and predictions, the computer cannot arrive at an insight into the essence of the observed fact, to go beyond state with which it is fed. It cannot feel and ask questions for further understanding. It does not have emotions. It does not care. It cannot put itself in one’s situation and consider some circumstanced may cause some people to work ten times harder than the average person their age, or that recalling certain things can be painful. The computer does not care. The machine can duplicate or even improve on intelligence, but it cannot simulate reason, and it can be hacked and manipulated and cause great harm and bodily damage to many without being held responsible because it is not a unique biological unit. Therefore, the machine can repeat the same mistake over and over without people demanding it to be dismantled, or greater control placed over it because statistically, it proves well and is better than a human. Ethics, at least in the meaning of the Greco-Judaeo-Christian tradition, is inseparable from reason. Ethical behavior is based on the faculty of making value judgments on the basis of reason; it means deciding between good and evil, and to act upon decision. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Use of reason presupposes the presence of self; so does ethical judgment and action. Furthermore, ethics, whether it is that of monotheistic religion or that of secular humanism, is based on the principle that no institution and no thing is higher than any human individual; that the aim of life is to unfold mortal’s love and reason and that every other human activity has to be subordinated to this aim. How then can ethics be a significant part of a life in which the individual becomes an automaton, in which one serves the big It? Furthermore, how can conscience develop when the principle of life is conformity? Conscience by its very nature is nonconforming; it must be able to say this “no” it must be certain in the rightness of the judgment on which the no is based. To the degree to which a person conforms one cannot hear the voice of one’s conscience, must less act upon it. Conscience exists only when mortals experience themselves, as mortal, not as a thing, as a commodity. So calling a person by their title kind of robs them of their humanity and turns them into an object, and that can lead to condescendence, depending on what the individual does for a living and how society views their career or lifestyle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Concerning things which are exchanged on the market there exists another quasi ethical code, that of fairness. The question is, whether they are exchanged at a fair price, no tricks and no force interfering with the fairness of the bargain; this fairness, not good and evil, is the ethical principle of the market and it is the ethical principle governing the life of the marketing personality. The principle of fairness, no doubt, makes for a certain type of ethical behavior. You do not lie, cheat nor use force—you even give the other person a chance—if you act according to the code of fairness. However, to love your neighbor, to feel one with him, or her, or them, to devote your life to the aim of developing your spiritual powers, is not part of the fairness ethics. We live in a paradoxical situation: We practice fairness ethics, and profess Christian ethics. Must we not stumble over this obvious contradiction? Obviously, we do not stumble. What is the reason? Partly, it is to be found in the fact that the heritage of four thousand years of the development of conscience is by no means completely lost. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
On the contrary, in many way the liberation of mortals from the powers of the feudal state and Church, made is possible for this heritage to be brought to fruition and in the period between the eighteenth century and the twenty-first century it blossomed as perhaps never before. We still are part of this process—but given our own twenty-first century condition of life, it seems that there is no new bun which will blossom when this flower has wilted. Another reason why we do not stumble over the contradiction between humanistic ethics and fairness ethics is based in the fact that we reinterpret religious and humanistic ethics in the light of fairness ethics. A good illustration of this interpretation is the Golden Rule. In its original Jewish and Christian meaning, it was a popular phrasing of the Bible maxim to love thy neighbor as thyself. In the system of fairness ethics, it means simply when you exchange, be fair. Give what you expect to get. Do not cheat! No wonder the Golden Rule is the most popular religious phrase of today. It combines two opposite system of ethics and helps us to forget the contradiction. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
While we still live from the Christian-humanistic heritage it is not surprising that the younger generation exhibits less and less of the traditional ethics and that we come across a moral barbarism among our youth which is in complete contrast to the economic and educational level society has reached. Today, while revising this manuscript, I read two items. One in The New York Times, regarding the fact of the murder of a man, cruelly trampled to death by four teenagers of average middle-class families. The other in Time magazine, a description of the new Guatemalan chief of police, who as former chief of police under the Ubico dictatorship had perfected a head-shrinking steel skull cap to pry loose secrets and crush improper political thoughts. His picture is published with the caption “For improper thought, a crusher.” Could anything be more insanely insensitive to extremes of sadism than this flippant line? It is surprising when in a culture in which the most popular news magazine can write this, some teenagers have no scruples about beating a man to death? Is the fact that we show brutality and cruelty in comic books and movies, because money is made with these commodities, not enough of an explanation for the growing barbarism and vandalism in our youth? #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Our movie censors watch that no sexual scenes are shown, since this could suggest illicit sexual desires. How innocent would this result be in comparison with the dehumanizing effect of what the censors permit and the churches seem to object to less than to the traditional sins. Yes, we still have an ethical heritage, but it will soon be spent and will be replaced by the ethics of the Brave New World, or 1984, or New Jack City or Minority Report unless it ceases to be a heritage and is re-created in our whole mode of life. At the moment, it seems that ethical behavior is still to be found in the concrete situation of many individuals, while society is marching toward barbarism. Much of what has been said about ethics is to be said about religion. Of course, speaking of the role of religion among alienated mortals, everything depends on what we call religion. If we are referring to religion in its widest sense, as a system of orientation and an object of devotion, then, indeed, every human being is religious, since nobody can live without such a system and remain sane. Then, our culture is as religious as any. Our gods are the machine, and the idea of efficiency; the meaning of our life is to move, to forge ahead, to arrive as near to the top of the pyramid as possible. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
However, if religion we mean monotheism, then, indeed, our religions is not more than one of the commodities in our show windows. Monotheism is incompatible with alienation and with our ethics of fairness. It makes mortal’s unfolding, one’s salvation, the supreme aim of life, an aim which never can be subordinated to any other. Inasmuch as God is unrecognizable, indefinable, and indefinable—which means he is not and can never be considered a thing. The fight between monotheism and idolatry is exactly the fight between the productive and the alienated way of life. Our culture is perhaps the first completely secularized culture in human history. We have shoved away awareness of and concern with the fundamental problems of human existence. We are not concerned with the meaning of life, with the solution to it; we start out with the conviction that there is no purpose except to invest life successfully and to get it over with without major mishaps. That is why people try to live right and obey God’s commandments. The majority of us believe in God, take it for granted the God exists. The rest, who do not believe, take it for granted that God does not exist. Either way, God is taken for granted. Neither belief nor disbelief cause any sleepless nights, nor any serious concern. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
In fact, whether a mortal in our culture believes in God or not makes hardly any difference either from a psychological or from a truly religious standpoint. In both instances one does not care—either about God or about the answer to the problem of one’s own existence. Just as humanly love has been replaced by impersonal fairness, God has been transformed into a remote General Director of Universe, Inc.; you know that God is there, God runs the show (although it probably would run without God too), you never see God, but you acknowledge God’s leadership while you are doing your part and paying your fair share or what seems to be more than fair. The religious renaissance which we witness in these days is perhaps the worst blow monotheism has yet received. Is there any greater sacrilege than to speak of the Man upstairs, to teach to pray in order to make God your partners in business, to sell religions with the method and appeals of a new BMW or Buick? In view of the fact that the alienation of modern mortals is incompatible with monotheism, one might expect that ministers, priests and rabbis would form the spearhead of criticism of modern Capitalism. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
While it is true that from high Catholic quarters and from a number of less highly placed ministers and rabbis such criticism has been voiced, all churches belong essentially to the conservative forces in modern society and use religion to keep mortals going and satisfied with a profoundly irreligious system. The majority of them do not seem to recognize that this type of religion will eventually degenerate into overt idolatry, unless they begin to define and then to fight against modern idolatry, rather than to make prenouncements about God and thus to use God’s name in vain—in more than one sense. The courage to be in all its forms has, by itself, revelatory character. It shows the nature of being, it shows that the self-affirmation of being is an affirmation that overcome negation. In a metaphorical statement (and every assertion about being-itself is either metaphorical or symbolic) one could say that being include nonbeing but nonbeing does not prevail against it. Including is a spatial metaphor which indicates that being embraces itself and that which is opposed to it, nonbeing. Nonbeing belongs to being, it cannot be separated from it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
We could not thing being without a double negation: being must be thought as the negation of the negation of being. This is why we describe being best by the metaphor power of being. Power is the possibility a being has to actualize itself against the resistance of other beings. If we speak of the power of being-itself we indicate the being affirms itself against nonbeing. In our discussion of courage and life we have mentioned the dynamic self-affirmation of being—itself wherever it spoke dialectically, notably in Neoplatonism, Hegel, and the philosophers of life and process. Theology has done the same whenever it took the idea of the living God seriously, most obviously in the trinitarian symbolization of the inner life of God. In spite of the static definition of substance (the name for the ultimate power of being), it unites philosophical and mystical tendencies when we speak of the love and knowledge with which God loves and know himself through the love and knowledge for finite beings. Nonbeing (that in God which makes his self-affirmation dynamic) opens up the divine self-seclusion and reveals him as power of love. Nonbeing makes God a living God. Without the No he as to overcome in himself and in his creature, the divine Yes to himself would be lifeless. There would be no revelation of the ground of being, there would be no life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
However, where there is nonbeing there is finitude and anxiety. If we say that nonbeing belongs to being-itself, we say that finitude and anxiety belong to being-itself. Wherever philosophers or theologians have spoke of the divine blessedness they have implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) spoken of the anxiety of finitude which is eternally taken into the blessedness of the divine infinity. The infinite embraces itself and the finite, the Yes includes itself and the No which it takes into itself, blessedness comprises itself and the anxiety of which it is the conquest. All this is implied if one says that being includes nonbeing and that through nonbeing it reveals itself. It is a highly symbolic language which mist be used at this point. However, its symbolic character does not diminish its truth; on the contrary, it is a condition of its truth. To speak unsymbolically about being-itself is untrue. The divine self-affirmation is the power that makes the self-affirmation of the finite being, the courage to be, possible. Only because being-itself has the character of self-affirmation inspite of nonbeing is courage possible. Courage participates in the power of being which prevails against nonbeing. One who receives this power in an act of mystical or personal or absolute faith is aware of the source of one’s courage to be. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Mortals are not necessarily aware of this source. In situations of cynicism and indifference one is not aware of it. However, it works in one as long as one maintains the courage to take one’s anxiety upon oneself. In the act of the courage to be the power of being is effective in us, whether we recognize it or not. Every act of courage is a manifestation of the ground of being, however questionable the content of the act may be. The content may hide or distort true being, the courage in it reveals true being. Not arugments but the courage in it reveals true being. Not arguments but the courage to be reveals the true nature of being-itself. By affirming our being we participate in the self-affirmation of being-itself. There are no valid arguments for the existence of God, but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being, whether we know it or not. If we know it, we accept acceptance consciously. If we do not know it, we nevertheless accept it and participate in it. And in our acceptance of that which we do not know the power of being is manifest to us. Courage has revealing power, the courage to be is the key to being itself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Love’s depth is often tested in crisis. In addition to courage, there must be caring for us to manifest our true divine heritage. We must care, be concerned, about other people’s well-being, their growth, their health, their ups and downs. A deeply felt and often expressed statement, verbal or not, that we convey to each other when we love is “I care about you, how you are, what happens to you, about protecting you, about seeing your grow and become everything you can be.” And it goes a bit further: “I hurt when you hurt: I feel your joy, your sorrow, your ecstasy, your loss, your fear, and your confidence.” The caring aspect of love is seen most vividly in the love expressed by a mother for her child. You birth the baby, carrying him or her on your hip like the child is apart of you and watch the being grow. The child is not yet a full partner in the love relationship; he or she is a recipient of the mother’s affection, concern and tenderness. What satisfies the mother, though, is response. The child can smile when filled or comfortable. One can gurgle and good and wave his or her arms when he or she see her coming. These simple expressions are sufficient for most of us. However, in a mature and authentic love relationship, if one person is inadequate or poorly equipped in responding, the other person may find that one cannot continue giving. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
When it comes to romance, there is good basis in mortal’s ancient wisdom for the urge we all feel in eros to unite with the beloved, to prolong the delight, to deepen the meaning and treasure it. This holds in our relationships not only with persons but with objects, like a machine we are making or a house we are building or a vocation to which we are devoted. Love is neither mortal nor immortal, but a mean between the two…He is a great spirit (daimon) and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal. He is the mediator who spans the chasm which divines mortals and gods, and therefore in him all is bound together. Eros is not a god in the sense of being above mortals, but the power that binds all things and all mortal together, the power informing all things. It means to give inward from, to seek out by the devotion of love the unique form of the beloved person or object and to unite one’s self with that form. Eros also incites mortals in the yearning for knowledge and drives one passionately to seek union with truth. Through eros, we not only become poets and inventors, but also achieve ethical goodness. Love, in the form of eros, is the power which generates, and this generation is a kind of eternity and immortality—which is to say that such creativity is as close as mortals ever get to becoming immortal. #RandolpHarris 20 of 20
Its Past Enlightened to Perceive New Periods of Recollect
Indeed people’s charms should not go to waste, that is my motto, may it never have dire consequences for the mortal World. As I have pointed out before, anonymous authority and automation conformity are largely the results of our mode of production, which requires quick adaptation to the machines, disciplined mass behavior, common taste and obedience without the use of force. Another facet of our economic system, the need for mass consumption, has been instrumental in creating a feature in the social character of modern mortals which constitutes one of the most striking contrasts to the social character twenty first century. I am referring to the principle that every desire must be satisfied immediately, no wish must be frustrated. The most obvious illustration of this principle is to be found in our system of buying on the installment plan. In the nineteenth century you bought what you needed, when you had saved the money for it; today you buy what you need, or do not need, on credit, and the function of advertising is largely to coax you into buying and to whet your appetite for things, so that you can be coaxed. You live in a circle. You buy on the installment plan, and about the time you have finished paying, you sell and you buy again—the latest model. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The principle that desires must be satisfied without much delay has also determined sexual behavior, especially since the end of the First World War. A crude form of misunderstood Freudianism used to furnish the appropriate rationalizations; the idea being that neuroses result from repressed sexual strivings, that frustrations were traumatic, and the less you repressed the healthier you were. Even parents anxious to give their children everything they wanted lest they be frustrated, acquired a complex. Unfortunately, many of these children as well as their parents landed on the analyst’s couch, provided they could afford it. The greed for things and the inability to postpone the satisfaction of wishes as characteristic of modern mortals has been stressed by thoughtful observers, such as Max Scheler and Bergson. It as been given its most poignant expression by Aldous Huxley in the Brave New World. Among the slogans by which the adolescents in the Brave New World are conditioned, one of the most important ones is “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.” It is hammered into them, “two hundred repetitions, twice a week from fourteen to sixteen and a half.” This instant realization of wishes is felt as happiness. “Everybody’s happy nowadays” is another of the Brave New World slogans; people “get what they want and they never want what they can’t get.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
This need for the immediate consumption of commodities and the immediate consummation of sexual desires is coupled in the Brave New World as in our own. It is considered immoral to keep one love partner beyond a relatively short time. Love is short-lived sexual desire, which must be satisfied immediately. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much. There is no such thing as a divided allegiance; you are so conditioned that you cannot help doing what you ought to do. And what you out to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really are not any temptations to resist. This lack of inhibition of desires leads to the same result as the lack of overt authority—the paralysis and eventually the destruction of the self. If I do not postpone the satisfaction of my wish (and am conditioned only to wish for what I can get), I have no conflicts, no doubts; no decision has to be made; I am never alone with myself, because I am always busy—either working, or having fun. I have no need to be aware of myself as myself because I am constantly absorbed having pleasure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
I am—a system of desires and satisfaction; I have to work in order to fulfill my desires—and these very desires are constantly stimulated and directed by the economic machines. Most of these appetites are synthetic; even sexual appetite is by far not as natural as it is made out to be. It is to some extent stimulated artificially. And it needs to be if we want to have people as the contemporary system needs them—people who feel happy, who have no doubts, who have no conflicts, who are guided without the use of force. Having fun consists mainly in the satisfaction of consuming and taking in; commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed. The World is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones—and the eternally disappointed ones. How can we help being disappointed if our birth stops at the breast of the mother, if we are never weaned, if we remain overgrown babes, if we never go beyond the receptive orientation? So people do worry, feel inferior, inadequate, guilty. They sense that they live without living, that life runs through their hands like sand. How do they deal with their troubles, which stem from the passivity of constant taking in? #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
By another form of passivity, a constant spilling out, as it were: by talking. Here, as in the case of authority and consumption, an idea which once was productive has been turned into its opposite. Who we are—what our identities will be—is not a given, not fully decided at birth. Newborn infants are not miniature adults or people seeds, that only require a sprinkling of water to grow to their fullest stature. On the other hand, as unlike the adults they will become that infants are, they are not wholly, either. Just how much of our identities are we born with? How much is nurtured through processes and forces outside of ourselves? Perhaps we can most accurately say that people are born with potentials that develop as they grow into adult human beings. The terms we use to describe the life process—changing, growing, evolving, transforming, unfolding, becoming, realizing, actualizing, blooming, blossoming, flowering—reveal this belief that at birth we both are and are not all that we will become. Many theorists have tried to describe the processes through which people develop. However, these detailed systems cannot explain the study of the human life cycle with certainty to all the questions arise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Too many questions of philosophy and cannot, at least now, be answered by science. They do, though, add important insight and knowledge to our study of the ways in which we grow into being. Most people live in the confidence that out technological developments have largely freed us from the risks of unchosen pregnancy and venereal disease and, therefore, ipso facto, the anxiety people used to feel about sex and love is now banished forever to the museum. The vicissitudes about which the novelists of previous centuries wrote—when a woman gave herself to a man, it meant illegitimate pregnancy and social ostracism, as in The Scarlet Letter; or the tragic break-up of the family structure and the experience of death by suicide, as in Anna Karenina; or venereal disease, as in the market place of social reality—have been outgrown. Now, thank God and science, we tell ourselves, we are rid of all that! The implication is that sex is free and that love is easy and comes in readily procurable packages like what the students call “instant Zen.” And any talk of the deeper conflicts which used to be associated with the tragic and daimonic elements is anachronistic and absurd. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
However, I shall be impolite enough to ask, May there not be a gigantic extensive repression underlying all this? A repression not of sex, but of something underlying body chemistry, some psychic needs more vital, deeper, and more comprehensive than sex. A repression that is socially sanctioned, to be sure—but just for that reason harder to discern and more effective in its results. I am obviously not questioning contemporary medical and psychological advances as such: no one in his or her right mind would fail to be grateful for the development of contraceptives, estrogen, and cures for venereal disease. And I count it good fortune indeed to be born into this age with its freedom of possibilities rather than in the Victorian period with its rigid mores. However, that issue is fallacious and a red herring. Our problem is more profound and starkly real. We pick up the morning paper and read that there are a million illegal abortions in enlightened America each year; that premarital pregnancies are increasing on all sides. One girl out of six who is now thirteen will, according to present statistics, become illegitimately pregnant before she is twenty—two and half times the incidence of ten year ago. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The increase is mainly among the girls of the proletarian classes, but there is enough increase among girls of middle and upper classes to prove that this is not a problem solely of disadvantage groups. Some people believe that we are what we are at birth. Nature, through heredity, determines everything. We look, act, feel, do, and believe what we do because of our genetic makeup. Others believe that regardless of what we are born with, it is the impact of our environment, of the way we are nurtured, that really determines who and what we become. What we learn or acquire through conditioning and experience makes up what we are. Most people now believe that both nature and nurture play important roles in shaping our behavior. We are confronted by the curious situation of the more birth control, the more illegitimate pregnancies. As the reader hastens to cry that what is necessary to change barbaric abortion laws and give more sex education, I would not disagree; but I could, and should raise a caveat. The blanket advising of more sex education can act as a reassurance by means of which we escape having to ask ourselves the more frightening question. May not the real issue be not on the level of conscious, rational intentions at all? May it not be in a deeper realm of what I shall later call intentionality? #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Some women use their sex to gain personal affirmation. They are desired, and that is almost enough…a child is a symbol that she is a woman, and she may gain from having something on her own. This struggle to prove one’s identity and personal worth may be more outspoken with less affluent young women, but it is just as present in middle-class young ladies who can cover it up better by socially skillful behavior. Let us take as an example a female patient from an upper middle-class background with whom I whom I worked. Her father had been a banker in a small city, and her mother a proper lady who has always assumed a Christian attitude toward everyone but who seemed, from the data which came up in therapy, to be usually rigid and had actually resented having this girl when she was born. My patient was well educated, already in her early thirties a successful editor in a large publishing house, and obviously was not the slightest deficient in knowledge of sex or contraception. Yet she had two illegitimate pregnancies in her mid-twenties several years before she began treatment with me. Both of these pregnancies gave her painful feelings of guilt and conflict, yet she went from one directly into another. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
She had been married for two years in her early twenties to a man who, an intellectual like herself, was emotionally detached, and each had tried by various kinds of aggressive-dependency nagging to get the other to infuse some meaning and vitality into an empty marriage. After her divorce, while she lived alone, she volunteered to do some evening reading to those who were visually impaired. She became pregnant by the young visually impaired man to whom she read. Though this, and its subsequent abortion, upset her greatly, she became pregnant again shortly after her first abortion. Now it is absurd to think that we can understand this behavior on the basis of sexual needs. Indeed, the fact tat she did not feel sexual desire was actually more influential in leading her into the sexual relations which caused the pregnancies. We must look to her image of herself and her ways of trying to find a meaningful place for herself in her World id we are to have any hope of discovering the dynamics of the pregnancies. She was, diagnostically speaking, what is called a typically contemporary schizoid personality: intelligent, articulate, efficient, successful in work, but detached in personal intercourse and afraid of intimate relationships. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
She had always thought of herself as an empty person who never could feel much on her own or experience anything lasting even when she took psychedelics—the kind of person who cries out to the World to give her some passion, some vitality. Attractive, she ad a number of men friends but the relationships with them also had a dried up quality and lacked the zest for which she fervently longed. She described sleeping with the one with which she was most intimate at the time as if they were two animals clinging together for warmth, her feeling being a generalized despair. She had a dream early in therapy which recurred in varying form, of herself in one room and her parents in the next room separated by a wall which went not quite up to the ceiling; and no matter how hard she knocked on the wall or cried out to them in the dream, she could not get them to hear her. She arrived for her therapy hour one day having just come from an art exhibit, to tell me she had discovered the symbol most accurately describing her feelings about herself: the lonely figures of Edward Hopper, in his paintings in which there is only one figure—a solitary girl usherette in a brightly lighted and plush but entirely empty theater; a woman sitting alone by an upper window in a Victorian house at the shore in the deserted off-season; a lone person in a rocking chair on a porch not unlike the house in the small city in which my patient grew up. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Edward Hopper’s paintings, indeed, give a poignant meaning to the quiet despair, the emptiness of human feeling and longing which is referred to by that cliché alienation. It is touching that her first pregnancy came in a relation with a human being who was visually impaired. We are impressed here by her elemental generosity in wanting to give him something and to prove something also to herself, but most of all we are struck by the aura of blindness surrounding the whole event of getting pregnant. She was one of the many person in our World of affluence and technological power who moved, humanly speaking, in a World of the blind, where nobody can see another and were our touching is at best a sightless fumbling, moving our fingers over the body of another trying to recognize him or her, but unable in our own self-enclosing darkness to do so. We could conclude that she became pregnant to establish her own self-esteem by proving somebody wants her—as her husband did not; to compensate for her feelings of emotional poverty—which pregnancy does quite literally by filling up the womb if we take the womb (hysteria) as a symbol of vacuum of emotions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Furthermore, the young lady may have wanted to get pregnant to expression her aggression against her mother and father and their suffocating and hypocritical middle-class background. All of the which goes without saying. However, what the deeper defiance required by, and indeed built into, the self-contradiction in her and in our society which belie our rational, well-meaning intentions? It is absurd to think that this girl, or any girl, gets pregnant simply because she does not know better. This woman lives in an age where, for upper-class and middle-class girls like her, contraceptives and sex knowledge were never more available, and her society proclaims on all sides that anxiety about sex is archaic and encourages her to be free of all conflict about love. What of the anxiety which comes precisely from this new born freedom? Anxiety which places a burden on individual consciousness and capacity for personal choice which, if not insoluble, is great indeed; anxiety which in our sophisticated and enlightened day cannot be acted out like the hysterical women of Victorian times (for everyone nowadays ought to be free and uninhibited) and therefore turns inward and results in inhibiting feelings, suffocating passion in place of the inhibition of actions of the nineteenth-century woman. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The girls and women in this predicament are partial victims of a gigantic repression in themselves and in our society—the repression of eros and passion and the over availability of sex as a technique for repression. A corollary is that our dogmatic enlightenment contains elements within it which rob us of the very means of meeting this new and inner anxiety. We are experiencing a return of the repressed, a return of an eros which will not be denied no mater how much it is bribed on all sides by sex: a returned of the repressed in a primitive way precisely designed to mock our withdrawal of feelings. The same is found in out work with men. A young psychiatrist, in his training analysis, was preoccupied mainly with the fear that he was homosexual. Now in his middle twenties, he had never had sexual relations with a woman, and though he had not been a practicing homosexual, he had been approached by enough men to make him think that he emanated that “aura.” During his therapy, he became acquainted with a woman and in due course they begin having sexual relations. At least half the time they did not use contraceptives. Several times I brought to his attention the fact that the was fairly sure to get pregnant; he—knowing all about this from his medical training—would agree and thank me. #RandolpHarris 14 of 19
However, when he still had intercourse without contraception and once was very anxious when the woman missed her menstrual cycle, I found myself vaguely anxious, too, and irritated at how stupid her seemed to be. I caught myself up with the realization that, in my naivete, I was missing the whole point of what was going on. So I broke in, “It seems you want to make this woman pregnant.” He at first emphatically contradicted me, but then he paused to ponder the truth of my statement. All talk of methods and what they ought to do was of course irrelevant. In this man, who had never been able to feel himself masculine, some vital need was pushing him not just to prove himself a man—of which impregnating a woman is much more decisive than merely the capacity to have intercourse—but to get some hold on nature, experience a fundamental procreative process, give himself over to some primitive and powerful biological process, partake of some deeper pulsations in the cosmos. We shall not understand these problems except when we see that our patients have been robbed of precisely these deeper sources of human experience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
We observe in many of these illegitimate pregnancies—or their equivalent—a defiance of the very socially-ordered system which takes away affect, where technology is felt to be a substitute for feelings, a society which calls persons forth to an arid and meaningless existence and gives them, particularly the younger generation, an experience of personalization which is more painful than illegal abortion. No one who has worked with patients for a long period of time can fail to learn that the psychological and spiritual agony of depersonalization is harder to bear than physical pain. And, indeed, they often clutch at physical pain (or social ostracism or violence or delinquency) as a welcome relief. Have we become so civilized that we have forgotten that a girl can yearn to procreate, and can do so not just for psychobiological reasons but to break up the arid desert of feelingless existence, to destroy for one if not for all the repetitive pattern of fucking-to-avoid-the-emptiness-of-despair (“What shall we do tomorrow?” as T.S. Eliot has a rich courtesan cry, “What shall we ever do?”). Or that she can yearn to become pregnant because tee art is never fully converted to a passionlessness, and she is driven to an expression of that which is denied her and which she herself consciously denies in our age of the cool millennium. At least being pregnant is something real, and it proves to the girl and to the man that they are real. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Alienation is felt as a loss of the capacity to be intimately personal. As I hear these people, they are crying, “We yearn to talk but our dried voices are birds feet over broken glass. We go to bed because we cannot hear each other; we go to bed because we are too shy to look in each other’s eyes, and in bed one can turn away one’s head.” It should not be surprising that a revolt is occurring against the mores which people think cause alienation; a defiance of social norms which promise virtue without trying, sex without risk wisdom without struggle, luxury without effort—all provided that they agree to settle for love without passion, and soon even sex without feeling. The denial of the daimonic means only that the Earth Spirits will come back to haunt us in a new guise; Gaea will be heard, and when the darkness returns the black Madonna will be present if there is no white. The error into which we have fallen obviously consists not of our scientific advances and enlightenment as such, but the using of these for a blanket allaying of all anxiety about sex and love. Marcuse holds that in a nonrepressive society, as sex develops it tends to merge with eros. It is clear that our society has done just the opposite: we separated sex from eros and then tried to repress eros. The passion which is one element of the denied eros then comes back from its repression to upset the person’s whole existence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The significant self is one who has come through the ravages of an insignificance-producing technology, has learned to accept and know oneself, has come to appreciate one’s place in the scheme of things (nature and other people), and as learned how to integrate the various sides of oneself in an authentic and honest fashion. The person who is struggling to be oneself and know oneself and enjoy being alive ever comes back, full circle, to the beginning, to that vaguest of all concepts: Love. Love, more than being a mere feeling, idea, ideal, or notion, is the most complex experience in all human life. It is the cause of more joy and also more misery than anything else we can know. What do we mean by love? Do any two people mean the same thing by it? Look at the confusion engendered by the simple expression of “I love you”: Sometimes it means: I desire you or I want you sexually. It may mean: I hope you love me or I hope that I will be able to love you. Often it means: It may be that a love relationship can develop between us or even I hate you. Often it is a wish for emotional exchange: I want your admiration in exchange for mine or I give my love in exchange for some passion or I want to feel cozy and at home wit you or I admire some of your qualities. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
A declaration of love is mostly a request: I desire you or I want you to gratify me or I want your protection or I want to be intimate with you or I want to exploit your loveliness. Sometimes it is the need for security and tenderness, for parental treatment. It may mean: My self-love goes out to you. However, it may also express submissiveness: Please take me as I am or I feel guilty about you. I want through you to correct the mistakes I have made in human relations. It may be self-sacrifice and a masochistic wish for dependency. Saying I love you to someone may also be a way of saying good-bye to a person you have wronged, someone you have set up, when you know something is about to happen to them. However, it also may be a full affirmation of the other, taking responsibility for mutual exchange of feelings. It may be a weak feeling of friendliness, it may be the scarcely even whispered expression of ecstasy. “I love you,” wish, desire, submission, conquest: it is never the word itself that tells the real meaning here. “Wherefore, hear my voice and follow me, and you shall be a free people, and ye shall have no laws but my laws when I come, for I am your lawgiver, and what can stay my hand?” reports Doctrines and Covenants 38.22. It would be nice for people to recognize who one is and what one does, to recognize the individual as a person, and enjoy what we are sharing with them. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
You Are the Great Unknown, Sweetheart–To Love Someone is to Bid One to Live and Invite One to Grow
Enough about the Garden of Eden. You tell yourself you have no illusions, but that is not true. Rock Music scene is a cultic activity. This one is not properly a cult, for rock music, country rock, folk rock, and soul music are real and important trends in American and European music. They began, of course, in Afro-Cuban rhythms, African jazz and blues, and country and Western ballads. More than a fad, rock music has made an indelible mark on the American musical tradition. The cult that has grown up around performers and styles represents still another attempt to transcend certain ordinary experiences and reach out for something else, something beyond. The first real stars in the young rock movement were B.B, King, Bill Haley, and Chuck Berry. Elvis Presley brought rock to the mass media and made it a fantastically profitable occupation and art form. The Beatles gave full credit to these early stars for their original inspiration, but they added some dimensions of their own which enabled the rough and wild rock “child” to grow up into a musical form of sophistication and wide appeal. Bob Dylan introduced social comment into his music, at least in the first big commercial sense. Most folk songs had some kind of message, but Dylan’s commentary told the Establishment that the younger generation was very serious about remaking and challenging the established patterns. Pacifism and brotherhood became themes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Rock music is a form of transcendent behavior for many people. The Flower Children soon came to recognize the impact of electronically amplified music and some of their most significant messages were promoted by performers like Donovan, The Beatles, the Iron Butterfly, Mothers of Invention, and others. Joan Baez and Judy Collins made branding-iron-hot comments about life in the technological age with their soft and plaintive folk-rock sounds. So did Peter, Paul and Mary and many others. The young people began to recognize many things about themselves with their cultic involvement in Rock Music. They found, for example, that they were a force to be reckoned with. Their sounds and their themes were picked up and imitated by older, more established performers. They found that they had economic power: they could make or break a performer by either buying or not buying his or her record, tape, CD or steaming their music. The young generation found that they were also style-setters, and that older youth and even grown-ups were eager to follow in their footsteps. Out of all this, the young have found that they actually do have some significance. As a group, they represent youth, enthusiasm, economic power, political pressure, and above all, a separate and discrete identity that does not easily shade into those of groups on either side of them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Now, our question runs, can the individual love child or rock cultist emerge from this group identity into a phase of knowing oneself to be fully and truly significant, apart from one’s identification and involvement with a cult or group? We do not mean isolation, alienation, or repudiation; we mean, a person must by truly a significant and actualized. One is both a solitary and social being, neither one alone, but capable of being either. Too many people are only identity. Others have only a solitary or isolated identity. Real self-actualization, and this means mental health, is to know yourself, fully and really, both alone and in interaction with others. There are so many other activities that are cultic or similar to cults. Nudism, sexual cults, political action cults, organic food cults—each is important to many people. The cult is a situation that enables the person to experience oneself in safety or to transcend oneself at times. Since self-transcendence is a universal need of all people, we have tried to describe some of these cultic activities and religion solely as means by which individuals rise above their ordinary experiences, not with the intention of promoting or demeaning any one of them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
If we spend too much of our time and energy in actualizing ourselves, we lose sight of our relations to the larger reality, the realm of Meaning. We must not make actualization of the self our end-goal. Rather, one must seek to align oneself with the Meaning in life, seek purpose and intention, primarily through work or causes. Then self-actualization comes, not as a goal to be sought, but as a by-product of the search for Meaning. Hunting for peak experiences does not usually work. They usually just happen. We are surprised by joy. So, mortals are a pleasure-seeking or peak-experiencing being, not so much by intent as by accident. Oh, yes, we can seek pleasure, even more pleasure than Dr. Freud spoke of. We all do. However, the pleasures we seek are more momentary, more superficial: a white chocolate Twix, a warm drink of eggnog on a cold night, a hug, the sense of intimacy. Not all pleasures are quite in the same league, though. There is a hierarchy of pleasures: The cessation of pain, the moratorium of drunkenness, the relief of urination, the pleasure of a hot bath, the contentment of having done a job well, the satisfaction of success, on up through the happiness of being with loved friends, the rapture of being in love, the ecstasy of the perfect love act, on up to the final pleasure-beyond-pleasure of the mystical fusion with the Universe. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
We all have some needs to go beyond our own existences, beyond and above our own experiences. We are not simply ordinariness-bound. The sense of significance is more than feeling that comes from knowing who you are, knowing that who you are is OK, knowing that others know you and appreciate you. It comes from some more grand experiences as well. A significant human being is one who can identify one’s own humanness with that of all other people. More than this, one identifies with Humanity, the same Humanity that ties all people together. And, one does even more than that. Once he or she experiences one’s identification with Humanity, one finds how much this means identification with all nature and, finally, with all of life. The search for personal significance is a search that involves growing as you go: the more you find, the more there is to find. The search begins at the small end of a cornucopia—the horn of plenty. We enter it small, because that is how must of us feel: the small opening fits our self-concept at the time. However, as we go through the cornucopia-shared search, we find that the horn is increasingly larger—and that is a good thing, for we are getting larger right along with it. At the end are the fruits of the search, the plenty which comes of knowing ourselves fully and being full selves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
There are many paths, many cornucopias: religion, a variety of cultic activities, medications and play, physical intimacy and work, prayer and practice: the styles and activities are infinite in number. To live life fully and most significantly means to experience as many things as possible. It means continually enlarging our scope of self-awareness by enlarging our perspective. “All you need is love” declares the Beatles, and though it is oversimplified, it is a great all-encompassing idea. Many of the goals and aspirations sought for by people in the religious and cultic activities mentioned are attained through the full experience of love. It should be repeated and impressed upon you that love is an experience that enables a person to transcend oneself without really losing oneself. Loving another is perhaps the only way both to find oneself and rise above oneself to experience the Larger realities of life. We do have myths. We had a goddess. However, not is not the time for all those things. You need not believe all I have seen. What I do have to give you is a vision. I think a vision is stronger than an illusion. And the vision is that we can exist as powerful beings without hurting anyone who is good and kind. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Love is not only a many-splendored thing; it is a confusing and frustrating human experience as well. First of all, love is not merely an emotion, although many emotions are involved in the love experience. Love is a happening, something that is often not planned or expected or even intended. It involves levels of consciousness, self-development, emotional freedom, personal and social responsibility, tolerance, physical awareness and acceptance, knowledge, and much, much caring. To care of another person, in the most significant sense, is to help the individual grow and actualize oneself. Caring for someone means that you desire to see that person and expand and become all that he or she is capable of becoming. In order to do this, one must first of all care for oneself. One must be on the road to actualization of one’s own potential before one can be fully capable of interest in the needs, goals, or well-being of another person. Just as one cannot give what one has not got, neither can one take someone to a place one has not yet been. The idea that self-love must precede love of others is important to an understanding of what it means to love. Self-love does not mean selfish narcissism. Self and narcissism are not the same things. The ego is the center of the consciousness; the self is the center of the entire being. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
If you can realistically and wholly love your self (including your ego, but not merely in a narcissistic way), you then have enough self-regard to reach out, to experiment, to risk getting involved with others and caring about them. Narcissism is a superficial feeling of liking for the ego or for the roles we play or for a particular aspect of the ego, such as a skill, your appearance, or possessions. Narcissism, like masturbation, is an important part of self-development, but it can become a problem, for you and others, if you do not move beyond it. Narcissism shows itself as conceit, boastfulness, possessiveness, or emphasis on one or two parts of your selfhood, on materialism, or on success or achievement. It can help you firm up your ego identity, but then it should be left behind. The values and pressures of American society often make it difficult for many individuals to move beyond narcissism. Our societal priorities, such as getting ahead at any cost and paying excessive attention to how you look, how you come across socially, or being a winner, encourage narcissism. However, if you are aware of the other aspect of self-love—love of self, not ego—and its importance in the achievement of mature love, you can overcome these pressures. Characteristics that make up mature love are true, caring, knowledge, respect, and responsibility. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
If we place a little more patience in the process and a greater amount of faith in the Lord, our challenges will find their way toward successful conclusions. Trust is the foundation upon which love must be built: no trust = no love. To trust means to believe. Trust has the same meaning as the theological concept of faith. It is derived from a Greek word meaning literally to put yourself in the hands of the object of your faith. To allow someone to get close to you, you must have faith in that person’s motives and in your own. You must trust that neither of your will try to hurt the other, that you will both be working toward a mutually beneficial relationship. Trusting others requires that you first must trust in yourself. You must believe in your own potential. You must be confident enough in your own identity that you can risk sharing yourself with another person. “If thou art sorrowful, call on the Lord thy God with supplication, that your souls may be joyful,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 136.29. Trust is always a risky business. Almost everyone ha trusted the wrong person and been hurt. Some people have been so badly hurt that they believer they can never trust again. Other, however, keeping the risk of pain in mind, know that most trust is warranted. We have to trust someone or else live in alienation and fear. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Let us rejoice in the blessings of peace, hope, and direction, blessings that so many of our Father’s children do not enjoy. Trusting in the Lord with all our hearts will allow us not to lean unto our own understanding. In all our ways, we must acknowledge God, and he shall direct our paths. God lives and loves each of us. I know our Father in Heaven has a perfect plan for us. As we follow this plan and the example of our Savior, we can find peace in this developing World, our hearts can be filled with hope, and we will receive the direction we need. Caring is the next building block of mature love. Caring is an active concern for the life and growth of those whom we love. This means we cannot simply talk about how much we care for something or someone, but we must also act upon it. Caring for others begins with self-caring. Somehow the World is hungry for goodness and recognizes it when it sees it. There is something in all of us that hungers after the good and true. Goodness is the attribute most needed and longed for not only in our individual lives but also in families, communities, states, and nations. If we are to effectively foster and utilize the great goodness of the people around us, we must strengthen both our families and our communities. The family is without question the God-given primary vehicle for the development and expression of personal goodness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, we also live in communities. People are by nature social beings whose lives and feelings are eternally connected and intertwined with those of others. Almost invariably, individuals reach their fully potential only in association and in community with others. Intimate knowledge of another persona is another factor necessary for love. Knowledge as it is meant here is much more than just familiarity with facts about a person. True knowledge of another person is very much like intuition. It is an emotional as much as mental experience. Regardless of the amount of time we spend with another person, picking that person’s brains and observing every facet of that person’s behavior, we may still have little true knowledge of that person. Why is this so? First of all, to know another person we must first know ourselves. When we have a deep, honest awareness of our own identity, we can begin to understand what goes in others. In addition, knowing another requires an openness and a willingness to be known ourselves. This requires trust. It means removing some of the defensive barriers we erect around us. It means taking off the false faces and masks that we wear as we play our many roles in life. This calls for authenticity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Honestly expressing ourselves to others is exceedingly risky, but if we sense they are a good person, the risk-talking may pay off in the closeness we feel as we gain true knowledge of another. Respect is another building block of love. Respect is a word that has been used and misused so often, it is a wonder it has any real meaning left to it. The root of the word comes from the Latin respicere—re- means back again, and spicere means to look. There is in the word, then, the connotation of taking another look, of seeing a person as if for the first time. As a child, some people think their fathers are the dumbest men alive. When they grow up, they are amazed at how much their fathers have learned! Obviously, this is talking about that fact that one’s own maturation has given one a new perspective on their father. One may suddenly see their father anew—whether the older man actually had learned anything new or not. When we respect people, we appreciate their uniqueness and hold them and all that they are in high regard. This does not mean that we like everything that they do, but that we accept them in their entirety, apart from riles, prejudices, circumstances, and relationships. We esteem their integrity, their wholeness, as human beings. To respect others, we must first have self-respect. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Responsibility is the final element necessary for love, and it should actually be spelled “response-ability,” to emphasize the meaning, the ability to responds. To have response-ability for another means to trust, care for, know, and respect someone so fully that we are aware of the person’s needs. Being aware, we try to meet as many of those needs as we responsibly can, without robbing that person of his or her own self-respect and responsibility. We are responsible to people, ore than we are responsible for them. Self-responsibility must precede responsibility for others. This means using one’s own resources to meet one’s own needs. It is not always easy to be responsible, but unless you are, real loving of yourself and other cannot take place. “With their wicked words they will try to hold you down. No this is not our fate, the lives in which they are bound and there is something more we know, it had to be found. I know the World will not wait, the tide is turning around, and there is not enough time. In the fallout of the wasted, in the half light I stand before you in the last dance of an old life. Now the cool wind’s blowing and we cannot stay, but it is alright. When the night is gone, I will still be here,” reports Emma Hewitt (Not Enough Time). #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Sweet Hours have Perished here and Somehow in Heaven Our Journey had Advanced Eternity by Term
They will recollect how cold I looked, and how I just said “please.” Then they will hasten to the doctor. Keep your minds open to each other. Of course you will depend on words, no matter how much you read each other’s thoughts, but do not exchange souls. Too much, and you will lose the mutual telepathy. Of course we know there may be no link between what is taking place at the card table and what is taking place in the economy. However, if card games played by millions of people shift the role of deception, would not we be naïve simply to assume that such shifts do not also occur in the World of commerce? The marketing orientation is closely related to the fact that the need to exchange has become a paramount drive in modern mortals. By 1941, the end of the Great Depression, the Association of American Playing Card Manufacturers revealed that contract bridge had become the most popular card game in the country, and that 44 percent of the household in the United States of America played it. Contract bridge is a game played by partners, who must cooperate—asocial game that from the beginning was frequently recommended as a way to make friends or even find a beau. It was recommended as a means of learning social skills (though the game occasionally ended friendships or caused divorces). Contract bridge has only rarely been played for money. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
It is, of course, true that even in a primitive economy based on a rudimentary form of division of labor, mortals exchange goods with each other within the tribe or among neighboring tribes. The mortal who produces cloth exchanges it for grain which one’s neighbor may have produced, or for sickles or knives made by the blacksmith. With increasing division of labor, there is increasing exchange of goods, but normally the exchange of goods is nothing but a means to an economic end. In capitalistic society exchanging has become and end in itself. None other than Adam Smith saw the fundamental role of the need to exchange, and explained it as a basic drive in mortals. This division of labor from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. Whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human nature, of which no further account can be given; or whether, as seems more probable, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to enquire. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
It is common to all mortals, and to be found in no other race of beings, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contracts. Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. The principle of exchange on an ever-increasing scale on the national and World market is indeed one of the fundamental economic principles on which the capitalistic system rests, but Adam Smith foresaw here that this principle was also to become one of the deepest psychic needs of the modern, alienated personality. Exchange has lost its rational function as a mere means for economic purposes, and has become an end in itself, extended to the noneconomic realms. Quite unwittingly, Adam Smith himself indicates the irrational nature of this need to exchange in one’s example of the exchange between the two dogs. There could be no possible realistic purpose in this exchange; either the two bones are alike, and then there is no reason to exchange them, or the one is better than the other, and then the dog who has the better one would not voluntarily exchange it. The example makes sense only if we assume that to exchange is a need in itself, even if it does not serve any practical purpose—and this is indeed what Adam Smith does assume. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
As I have already mentioned in another context, the love of exchange has replaced the love of possession. One buys a car, or a house, intending to sell it at first opportunity. However, more important is the fact that the drive for exchange operates in the realm of interpersonal relations. Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market. Each person is a package in which several aspects of one’s exchange value is blended into one: one’s personality, by which is meant those qualities which make one a good sale person of oneself; one’s looks, education, income, and change for success—each person strives to exchange this package for the best value obtainable. Even the function of going to a party, and of social intercourse in general, is to a large extent that of exchange. One is eager to meet the slightly higher-priced packages, in order to make contact and possibly a profitable exchange. One wishes to exchange one’s social position, and that is one’s own self, for a higher one, and in this process one exchanges one’s old set of friends, set of habits and feelings for the new ones, just as one exchanged a Mercedes-Benz for a BMW or a Ford for a Buick. While Adam Smith Believed this need for exchange to be an inherent part of human nature, it is actually a symptom of the abstractification and alienation inherent in the social character of modern mortals. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The whole process of living is experienced analogously to the profitable investment of capital, my life and my person being the capital which is invested. If a mortal buys a cake of soap or a pound of meat, one has the legitimate expectation that the money one pays corresponds to the value of the soap or a pound of meat one buys. One is concerned that the equation “so much soap = so much money” makes sense in terms of the existing price structure. However, this expectation has become extended to all other forms of activity. If a mortal goes to an Emma Hewitt concert or to the theater to see Legally Blond 3, one asks oneself more or less explicitly whether the show is “worth the money” one paid (and of course you know it is). While this question makes some marginal sense, fundamentally the question does not make any sense, because two incommensurable things are brought together in the equation; the pleasure of listening to an Emma Hewitt concert cannot possibly be expressed in terms of money; the concert is not a commodity, nor is the experience of listening to it. The same holds true when a mortal makes a pleasure trip, goes to a lecture, gives a party, or any of the many activities which involve the expenditure of money. The acidity in itself is a productive act of living, and incommensurable with the amount of money spent for it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The need to measure living acts in terms of something quantifiable appears also in the tendency to ask whether something was worth the time. A young man’s evening with a young lady, a visit with friends, and the many other action in which expenditure of money may or may not be involved, raise the question of whether the activity was worth the money or the tie. In each case one needs to justify the acidity in terms of an equation which shows that it was a profitable investment of energy. Even hygiene and health have to serve for the same purpose; a mortal taking a walk every morning tends to look on it as a good investment for one’s health, rather than a pleasurable activity which does not need any justification. This attitude found its closest and most drastic expression in Bentham’s concept of pleasure and pain. Starting on the assumption that the aim of life was to have pleasure, Bentham suggested a kind of bookkeeping which would show for each action whether the pleasure was greater than the pain, and if the pleasure was greater, the action was worth while doing. This the whole of life to him was something analogous to a business in which at any given point the favorable balance would show that it was profitable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
While Bentham’s views are not very much in the minds of people any more, the attitude which they express has become ever more firmly established. In Dr. Freud’s concept of the pleasure principle and in his pessimistic views concerning the prevalence of suffering over pleasure in civilized society, one can detect the influence of Benthamian calculation. A new question has arisen in modern mortal’s mind, the question, namely, whether life is worth living, and correspondingly, the feeling that one’s life is a failure, or is a success. This idea is based on the concept of life as an enterprise which should show a profit. The failure is like the bankruptcy of a business in which the losses are greater than the gains. This concept is nonsensical. We may be happy or unhappy, achieve some aims, and not achieve others; yet there is no sensible balance which could show whether life if worth while living. Maybe from the standpoint of a balance life is never worth while living. It ends necessarily with death; many of our hopes are disappointed; it involves suffering and effort; from a standpoint of the balance, it would seem to make more sense not to have been born at all. One the other hand, who will tell whether one happy moment of love, or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies? #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Life is a unique gift and challenge, not to be measured in terms of anything else, and no sensible answer can be given to the question whether it is worth while living, because the question does not make any sense. “it is hard to say what I want my legacy to be, what I want people to say when I am long gone. At this point, right now, I am going to say I want people to see me as an entertainer. Someone who can do it all. I have to honestly say, everything is worth it. The times when you are tired. The times you are a bit sad. The—the good moments when you are on stage performing in front of thousands of people. In the end it is all worth it because it really makes me happy, and I would not trade it for anything else in the World. I honestly would not. There is nothing better than loving what you do. I have good friends, I have beautiful family, and I have a career; a career that is blooming, and still growing, and I am truly blessed. And I thank God for his blessings every single change I get,” reports Aaliayh. We have so much freedom, so many opportunities to develop our unique personalities and talents, our memories, and our personalized contributions. Tears of gratitude formed this wonderous World in which we live. God’s teachings give brilliance and hope and love to everyone single soul, being, creature and life form that exists, has ever existed, and that ever will exist. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The interpretation of life as an enterprise seems to be the basis for a typical modern phenomenon, about which a great deal of speculation exists: the increase of experiencing death by suicide in modern Western society. Between 2010 and 2016 experiencing death by suicide increased 140 percent in Prussia, 355 percent in France. England had 110 cases of suicide per million inhabitants. Sweden 66, as against 150 respectively. Death by suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. On average, there are 129 people who experience death by suicide in America. In 2017, there were 1.3 million attempted suicides, 47,173 of those people died. Sucide and self-injury cost the Untied States of American $69 billion annually. How can we explain this increase in suicide, accompanying the increasing prosperity in the twenty-first century? No doubt that the experiencing death by suicide are highly complex, and that there is not a single motivation which we can assume to be the cause. We find revenge suicide as a pattern in China; we find experiencing death by suicide by melancholia all over the World; but neither of those motivations play much a role in the increase of rates of experiencing death by suicide in the twenty-first century. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Some people think it is possible that there is an increase in death by suicide because of a phenomenon called anomie, which is the destruction of all the traditional social bonds, to the fact that all truly collective organization has become secondary to the state, and all genuine social life has been annihilated. Some people living in the modern political state are a disorganized dust of individuals. It is also believed that the boredom and monotony of life which is engendered by the alienated way of living is an additional factor for why people experience death by suicide. However, Easter cultures believe that it is possible dark spirits, dark energy, or demons follow people and cause some to experience death by suicide and it is not something the victim actually intended to do. The suicide figures for the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland and the United States, together with the figures on alcoholism and the opioid crises seem to support this hypothesis. However, there is another reason which has been ignored about experiencing death by suicide. It has to do with the whole balance concept of life as an enterprise which can fail. Problems or trials in our lives need to be viewed in the perspective of scriptural doctrine. Otherwise they can easily overtake our vision, absorb our energy, and deprive us of the joy and beauty the Lord intends us to receive here on Earth. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Many cases of suicide are caused by feeling that life has been a failure, that it is not worth whole living any more; one experiences death by suicide just as a business person declares one’s bankruptcy when losses exceed gains, and when there is no more hope of recuperating the losses. Do you take time each day to realize how beautiful life can be? You are on Earth for a divine purpose. The tempering effect of patience is required. Some blessings will be delivered in this life, other will come from beyond the veil. Religion begins at the point where philosophy moves into personal commitment and action. A religion is more than a mere belief or an understanding of something; it implies the reaction of a mortal’s whole being to that on which one feels dependent. It is life lived in the conviction that what is highest in spirit is deepest in nature. Religion deals with an indwelling spirit in mortals or some animistic spirit in a rock, tree, car, or animal. For many, God is an Ultimate concern; however, mortals have many definitions of God, and the total number represents the infinite variety of experiences that people have. God is love—he is behind and inclusive of whatever love we may have known. God is a Truth that is beyond individual truths. Therefore, there is always more than two sides to every story. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The concept of God has found very little coverage in books about psychology, mostly because the usual methods of the science’s study do not work well in trying to define, identify, quantify or describe God. The best that scientists have been able to do is to study the effect of a belief or disbelief in God on people’s behavior. Nonetheless, the subject of religion is one of enormous importance. It is the feelings, acts, and experience of individual mortals in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine. Devout religionists point to the fact the for preliterate societies, rocks and Earth contained spirits which had to be appeased, appealed to, and worshipped in some manner or other as evidence of a universal need for worship and religious experience in all mortals. Religion helps account for the origin and development of the society, which most religions do; it helps to organize the power structure; it helps to sanction many of the personal behaviors of the people in society—like marriage, sex, family practices; it helps to provide some common symbols and bonds—such as the concept of the chosen people; it helps to designate certain roles—chief, priest, worshippers, acolytes, shaman, or witch doctor, and so on. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Religion is also used as a means of keeping the people in a particular state—building a gap between those who are keepers of the flame and those who worship, keeping the masses contented or in a state of puzzled uncertainty, keeping the masses happy. Many people let their religious beliefs help them to accept burdens or hardships (the cross I must bear) or to think of the better life Beyond (in that city foursquare). So it is possible that one function of some sort of religious belief or activity is to enable a person or a group of people to endure difficulties or otherwise to find help. However, is this all? Is it not possible that religion has the hard-to-describe function of enabling mortals to see their relatedness to the Universe and to other people? When a religion permits a mortal to transcend one’s solitariness and give one a picture of the larger reality, it may enable because the experience might be similar to standing on a quiet hillside at night and viewing the panorama of constellations and comets in the skies above. Some people become suddenly aware of the immensity of the Universe and raise serious doubts about their part in it all. Knowing the approximate distance to the nearest star, and that the star is actually a Sun to the planets that may circle about it, and that there may be some form of intelligence on those planets can make one feel tremendously insignificant! #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
How, with this experience, can one possibly add to one’s own feeling of significance? Some people cannot. However, others get that feeling called the Oceanic Experience and realize that their tiny and infinitesimal self is part of it all, that they and the Universe, as object, are no longer separate. Another point: Religion seems to be the only institution that gives (or has given) mortals a way of dealing with the anxiety that comes from knowing our physical bodies are not yet immortal, and that this may be the only certainty. Primitive mortals had few alternatives to explain life and death—no science or philosophy, just religious rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death. These gave mortals some assurance of continuity. As mortal have discovered more alternatives, there have been more changes in their religious views. For some people, losing themselves in such an experience means literally to lose themselves. However, for other people, this losing of self means to find and gain a larder, more comprehensive sense of self. If this can happen, we say the self-transcendence is beautiful. The pole of individualization expresses itself in the religious experience as a personal encounter with God. And the courage derived from it is the courage of confidence in the personal reality which is manifest in religious experience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
In contradistinction to the mystical union one can call this relation a personal communion with the source of courage. Although the two types are in contrast they do not excluded each other. For they are united by the polar interdependence of individualization and participation. The courage of confidence has often, especially in Protestantism, been identified with the courage of faith. However this is not adequate, because confidence is only one element in faith. Faith embraces both mystical participation and personal confidence. Most parts of the Bible describe the religious encounter in strongly personalist terms. Biblicism, notably that of the Reformers, follows this emphasis. Martin Luther directed his attack against the objective, quantitative, and impersonal elements in the Roman system. He fought for an immediate person-to-person relationship between God and mortals. In him the courage of confidence reached its highest point in the history of Christian thought. Every work of Martin Luther (not to be confused with Martin Luther King Jr.), especially in his earlier years, is filled with such courage. Again and again he uses the word trotz, “in spite of.” In spite of all the negativities which he had experienced, in spite of the anxiety which dominated that period, one derived the power of self-affirmation from one’s unshakable confidence in God and from the person encounter with him. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
According to the expressions of anxiety in his period, the negativity of Martin Luther’s courage had to conquer were symbolized in the figures of death and the Devil. It has rightly been declared that Albrechet Durer’s engraving, “Knight, Death, and the Devil,” is a classic expression of the spirit of the Lutheran Reformation and—it might be added—of Luther’s courage of confidence, of his form of the courage to be. A knight in full armor is riding through a valley, accompanied by the figure of death on one side, the Devil on the other. Fearlessly, concentrated, confident he looks ahead. He is alone but he is not lonely. In his solitude he participates in the power which gives him the courage to affirm himself in spite of the presence of the negatives of existence. His courage is certainly not the courage to be as a part. The Reformation broke away from the semicollectivism of the Middle Ages. Luther’s courage of confidence is personal confidence, derived from person-to-person encounter with God. Neither popes nor councils could give him this confidence. Therefore, he had to reject them just because they relied on a doctrine which blocked off the courage of confidence. They sanctioned a system in which the anxiety of death and guilt never was completely conquered. There were many assurances but no certainty, many supports for the courage of confidence but no unquestionable foundation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The collective offered different ways of resisting anxiety but no way in which the individual could take his anxiety upon himself. Martin Luther never was certain; he never could affirm his being with unconditional directly with his total being, in an immediate personal relation. There was, except in mysticism, always mediation through the Church, in indirect and partial meeting between God and the soul. When the Reformation removed the mediation and opened up a direct, total, and person approach to God, a new nonmystical courage to be was possible. It is manifest in the heroic representatives of fighting Protestantism, in the Calvinist as well as the Lutheran Reformation, and in Calvinism even more conspicuously. It is not the heroism of risking martyrdom, of resisting the authorities, of transforming the structure of Church and society, but it is the courage of confidence which makes these people heroic and which is the basis of the other expression of their courage. One could say—and liberal Protestantism often has said—that the courage of the Reformers is the beginning of the individualistic type of the courage to be as oneself. However, such an interpretation confuses a possible historical effect with the matter itself. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
In the courage of the Reformers the courage to be as oneself is both affirmed and transcended. In comparison with the mystical form of courageous self-affirmation the Protestant courage of confidence affirms the individual self as an individual self in its encounter with God as person. This radically distinguishes the personalism of the Reformation from all the later forms of individualism and Existentialism. The courage of the Reformers is not the courage to be oneself—as it is not the courage to be as a part. It transcends and unites both of them. For the courage of confidence is not rooted in confidence about oneself. The Reformation pronouns the opposite: one can become confident about one’s existence only after ceasing to base one’s confidence on oneself. One the other hand the courage of confidence is in no way based on anything finite besides oneself, not even on the Church. It is based on God and solely on God, who is experiences in a unique and personal encounter. The courage of the Reformation transcends both the courage to be as a part and the courage to be as oneself. It is threatened neither by the loss of oneself nor by the loss of one’s World. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Freud himself had a very limited sexual life. His own sexual expression began late, around thirty, and subsided early, around forty. At forty-one Freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess complaining of his depressed mood, and added, “Also sexual excitation is of no more use to a person like me.” Another incident points to the fact that around this age his sexual life had more or less ended. Freud reports in The Interpretation of Dreams that at one time, in his forties, he felt physically attacked to a young woman and reached out half-voluntarily and touched her. He comments on how surprised he was that he was still able to find the possibility for such attraction in him. Freud believed in the control and channeling of sexuality, and was convinced that this had specific value both for cultural development and for one’s own character. In 1883, during his prolonged engagement to Martha Bernays, the young Freud wrote to his future wife: it neither pleasant nor edifying to watch the masses amusing themselves; we at least do not have much taste for it. I remember something that occurred to me while watching a performance of Carmen: the mob gives vent to its appetites, and we deprive ourselves. We deprive ourselves in order to maintain our integrity, we economize in our health, our capacity for enjoyment, our emotions; we save ourselves for something, not knowing what. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
And this constant suppression of natural instincts gives us the quality of refinement. And the extreme cases of people like ourselves who chain themselves together for life and death, who deprive themselves and pine for years so as to remain faithful, who probably would not survive a catastrophe that robbed them of their beloved. From that declaration, one may comprehend that Freud’s doctrine of sublimation lies in this belief that libido exists in a certain quantity in the individual, that you can deprive yourself, economize emotionally in one way to increase your enjoyment in another, and that if you spend your libido in direct sexuality you will not have it for utilization, for example, in artistic creation. This concept of sublimation is Freud’ most puritanical belief. The original Puritan movement, in its best representatives and before its general deterioration into the moralistic compartment of Victorianism at the end of the twenty-first century, was characterized by admirable qualities of dedication to integrity and truth. The progress of modern science owes a great deal to it and, indeed, would probably not have been possible without these virtues in their scientific laboratories. It is also possible to make contact with other people in the realm of ideas, of beliefs, of words and thoughts. This is called cognitive (thought) intimacy. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Two people may know each other’s minds, have access to the inner most arenas of each other’s mental processes. To establish such closeness means a constant and opening sharing of ideas. When intellectual changes occur, people can assist one another’s understanding by batting the ideas around—by debating them, arguing them, or simply talking them out. The special quality of cognitive intimacy is that it often consists of unspoken and unexpressed sharing. This quality makes it very difficult to describe. However, those who know it feel it to be one of the more exciting and challenging aspects of intimate experience. “Always I have known that you were there. I only had to find out where we have our own ways, our own signs to follow, with different roads that lead us home. And I feel you close. I am alive again. And it seems like home. This is where the rainbow ends. Footsteps I follow to your door, we do not need to talk anymore, we have the same heart, the same mine, the same souls. The distant lights will lead us on,” reports Emma Hewitt (Alive Again). Shared feeling is emotional intimacy, a mutual accessibility, naturalness, nonpossessiveness, and is a process that required constant attention. It is an important aspect of human closeness. It is this dimension of intimacy, perhaps, that brings us closet to a workable definite of loving. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
You Love No One but Still You Lost My Heart Like the Petals from a Rose—My Soul is at Liberty and Became so Wondrous Dear!
To return to the inescapable question of Salvation, yes, I do remain rooted in a relativistic Universe, no matter how spectacularly defined I have become as to form and function, and I find myself within the same dimension. The German word for resolve is Entschossenheit, and it points to the symbol of unlocking what anxiety, subjection to conformity, and self-seclusion have locked. Once it is unlocked, one can act, but not accord to norms given by anybody or anything. Nobody can give directions for the actions of the resolute individual—no God, no conventions, no laws of reason, no norms or principles. We must be ourselves, we must decide where to go. Our conscience is the call to ourselves. It does not tell anything concrete, it is neither the voice of God nor the awareness of eternal principles. It calls us to ourselves out of the behavior of the average mortal, out of daily talk, the daily routine, out of the adjustment which is the main principle of the conformist courage to be as a part. However, if we follow this call we become inescapably guilty, not through moral weakness but through our existential situation. Having the courage to be as ourselves we become guilty, and we are asked to take this existential guilt upon ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Meaninglessness in all its aspects can be faced only by those who resolutely take the anxiety of finitude and guilt upon themselves. There is no norm, no criterion for what is right and wrong. Resoluteness makes right what shall be right. The essence of mortals is their existence. That idea can be the most despairing and the most courageous idea in all of Existentialism. What it says is that there is no essential nature of mortals, expect in the point that one can make of oneself what one wants. Humans create what they are. Nothing is given to them to determine their creativity. The essence of one’s being—the should-be, the ought-to-be, –is not something which one finds; one makes it. Mortals are what they make of themselves. And the courage to be as oneself is the courage to make of oneself what one wants to be. We are surrounded by things of whose nature and origin we know nothing. The telephone, radio, phonograph, and all other complicated machines are almost as mysterious to us as they would be to a mortal from a primitive culture; we know how to use them, that is, we know which button to turn, but we do not know on what principle they function, expect in the vaguest terms of something we once learned at school. And things which do not rest upon difficult scientific principles are almost equally alien to us. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
We do not know how bread is made, how cloth is woven, how a table is manufactured, how a glass is made. We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them. Our way of consumption necessarily results in the fact that we are never satisfied, since it is not our real concrete person which consumes a real or concrete thing. We this develop an ever-increasing need for more things, for more consumption. It is true that as long as the living standard of the population is below a dignified level of subsistence, there is a natural need for more consumption. It is also true tat here is a legitimate need for more consumption as mortals develop culturally and has more refined needs for better food, objects of artistic pleasure, books, etc. However, our craving for consumption has lost all connection with the real needs of mortals. Originally, the idea of consuming more and better things was meant to give mortals a happier, more satisfied life. Consumption was a means to an end, that of happiness. It now has become an aim in itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The constant increase of needs forces us to an ever-increasing effort, it makes us dependent on these needs and on the people and institutions by whose help we attain them. Each person speculates to create a new need in the other person, in order to force one into a new dependency, to a new form of pleasure, hence to one’s economic ruin. Wit a multitude of commodities grows the realm of alien things which enslave mortals. Mortals today are fascinated by the possibility of buying more, better, and especially, new things. One’s is consumption-hungry. The act of buying and consuming has become a compulsive, irrational aim, because it is an end in itself, with little relation to the use of, or pleasure in the things bought and consumed. To buy the latest gadget, the latest model of anything that is on the market, is the dream of everybody, in comparison to which the real pleasure in use is quite secondary. Modern mortals, if one dared to be articulate about one’s concept of Heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the World, showing new things and gadgets, and oneself having plenty of money with which to buy them. One would wander around open-mouthed with dreamy eyes in this Heaven of gadgets and commodities, provided only that there were every more and newer things to buy, and perhaps that one’s neighbors were just a little less privileged than he or she. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Significantly enough, one of the older traits of middle-class society, the attachment to possessions and property, has undergone a profound change. In the older attitudes, a certain sense of loving a possession existed between a mortal and their property. It grew on the individual. One was proud of it. One took good care of it, and it was painful when eventually one has to part from it because one could not use it anymore. There is very little left of this sense of property today. One loves the newness of the things bought, and is ready to betray it when something newer has appeared. There is this receptive orientation, in which the aim is to receive, to drink in, to have something new all the time, to live with a continuously open mouth, as it were. This receptive orientation is blended with the marketing orientation, while in the nineteenth century the hoarding was blended with the exploitative orientation. The alienated attitude toward consumption not only exists in our acquisition and consumption of commodities, but it determines far beyond this employment of leisure time. What are we to expect? If a mortal works without genuine relatedness to what one is doing, if one buys and consumes commodities in an abstractified and alienated way, how can one make use of one’s leisure time in an active and meaningful way? One always remains the passive an alienated consumer. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
People consume ball games, moving pictures, newspapers and magazines, books, lectures, natural scenery, social gatherings, in the same alienated and abstractified way in which one consumes the commodities one has bought. One does not participate actively, one wants to take in all there is to be had, and to have as much as possible of pleasure, culture and what not. Actually, one is not free to enjoy one’s leisure; one’s leisure-time consumption is determined by industry, as are the commodities one buys; one’s taste is manipulated, one wants to see and hear what one is conditioned to want to see and to hear; entertainment is an industry like any other, the customer is made to buy fun as one is made to buy dresses and shoes. The value of the fun is determined by its success on the market, not by anything which could be measured in human terms. In any productivity and spontaneous activity, something happens within myself while I am reading, looking at scenery, talking to friends, etcetera. I am not the same after the experience as I was before. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
In the alienated form of pleasure something happens within myself, and all that is left are memories of what I have done. One of the most striking examples for this kind of pleasure consumption is the taking of snapshots, which has become one of the most significant leisure activities. The Kodak slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest,” which since 1889 has helped so much to popularize photography all over the World, is symbolic. It is one of the earliest appears to the push-button power-feeling; you do nothing, you do not have to know anything, everything is done for you; all you have to do is press the button. Indeed, the taking of snapshots has become one of the most significant expressions of alienated visual perception, of sheer consumption. The tourist with one’s camera is an outstanding symbol of an alienated relationship to the World. Being constantly occupied with taking pictures, actually one does not see anything at all, except through the intermediary of the camera. The camera sees for the individual, and the outcome of one’s pleasures trip is a collection of snapshots, which are the substitute for an experience which one could have had, but did not have. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Our actual helplessness before the forces which govern us appears more drastically in those social catastrophes which, even though they have denounced as regrettable accidents each time, so far have never failed to happen: economic depressions and wars. These social phenomena appear as if they were natural catastrophes, rather than what they really are, occurrences made by mortals, but without intention and awareness. The anonymity of the social forces is inherent in the structure of the capitalist mode of production. In contrast to most other societies in which social laws are explicit and fixed on the basis of political power or tradition—Capitalism does not have such explicit laws. It is based on the principles that is only everybody strives for oneself on the market, the common good will come out of it, order not anarchy will result. There are, of course, economic laws which govern the market, but these laws operate behind the back of the acting individual, who is concerned only with one’s private interests. You can try to guess these laws of the market as a Calvinist in Geneva tried to guess whether God had predestined him for salvation or not. However, the law of the market, like God’s will are beyond the reach of your will and influence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Science cannot explain why the World makes scientific sense. It cannot explain why we are here, or, now that we are here, what we should do about it. For a moment, let us imagine what thinking must have been like for the firs people who were aware that they were aware. They had no words to describe the World they were experiencing. Because we think in symbols, it is difficult for us to imagine what those early people, who had no symbols, thought, but we can try. The first people began to collect information about the World. They saw a large, bright object move across the sky. It had a profound effect upon their bodies. While it was there, they felt warm, and they could see. In its absence, the World became dark and cold. As time passed, those first human beings saw the trees drop their leaves and die. Then, magically, the trees came back to life in brilliant colors and alluring smells. Finally, those trees produced an object that was good to eat. Then the trees appeared to die, only to return to give birth again and again. Try to imagine how awed early people must have been by these simple events. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The first humans were becoming aware. However, they had no word-symbols to express that awareness in thought or speech. Then perhaps one day two human beings both made a similar sound while grabbing for the same fruit. They walked on apart, but perhaps one of these people heard yet another person make the same sound, and, magically, the picture of the fruit appeared in the mind of this early human being. It was probably through random events such as this that people began the process of naming objects and understanding their World. The limits of our language mean the limits of our World. A new World is the beginning of a new language. A new language is the seed of a new World. The relationship the artist and the neurotic, often considered mysterious, is entirely understandable from the viewpoint presented here. Both artist and neurotic speak and live from the subconscious and unconscious depths of their society. The artist does this absolutely, communicating what one experiences to one’s fellow people. The neurotic does this negatively. Experiencing the same underlying meanings and contradictions of one’s culture, one is unable to form one’s experiences into communicable meaning for oneself and one’s fellows. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Art and neurosis both have a predictive function. Since art is communication springing from unconscious levels, it presents to us an image of a person which is as yet present only in those members of the society who, by virtue of their own sensitized consciousness, live on the frontier of their society—live, as it were, with one foot in the future. The artist anticipates the later scientific and intellectual experience of the race. The water reeds and ibis legs painted in triangular designs on Neolithic vases in ancient Egypt were the prediction of the later development of geometry and mathematics by which the Egyptian read the stars and measured the Nile. In the magnificent Greek sense of proportion of the Parthenon, in the powerful dome of Roman architecture, and in the medieval cathedral, one can trace how, in a given period of history, art expresses the meanings and trends which are as yet unconscious, but which will later be formulated by the philosophers, religious leaders, and scientists of the society. The arts anticipate the future social and technological development by a generation when the change is more superficial, or by centuries when the change, as the discovery of mathematics, is profound. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
By the same token, we find the artists expressing the conflict in the society before these conflicts emerge consciously in the society as a whole. The artist—who is the antennae of the race—is living out, in forms that only one can create, the depths of consciousness which one experiences in one’s own being as one struggles with and molds one’s World. Here we are plunged immediately into the center of the issues for the World presented by our contemporary painters and dramatists and other artists is a schizoid World. They have presented the condition of our World which makes the tasks of living and willing peculiarly difficult. It is a World in which, amid all the vastly developed means of communication that bombard us on all sides, actual personal communication is exceedingly difficult and rare. The most significant dramatists of our time are those who take as their subject matter precisely this loss of communication between persons is all but destroyed. We live out our lives talking to tape recorder; our existence become more lonely as the digital assistants, radios and TV’s and computers and mobile phones and telephone extensions in our house become more numerous. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Ionesco has a scene in his play, The Bald Soprano, in which a man and a woman happen to meet and engage in polite, if mannered, conversation. As they talk they discover that they both came down to New York on the ten o’clock train that morning from New Haven, and, surprisingly, the address of both is the same building on Fifth Avenue. Lo and behold, they also live in the same apartment and both have a daughter seven years old. They finally discover to their astonishment that they are man and wife. We find the same situation among the painters. Cezanne, the acknowledged father of the modern art movement, a man who in his own life was as undramatic and bourgeois as only a middle-class Frenchman can be, paints this schizoid World of spaces and stones and trees and faces. He speaks to us out of the Old World of mechanics but forces us to live in the new World of free-floating spaces. Here we are beyond causes and effects, both come together in the simultaneity of an eternal Cezanne who is at the same time the formula of what he wanted to be and what he wanted to do. There is a rapport between Cezanne’s schizoid temperament and his work because the work reveals a metaphysical sense of the infirmary. In this sense to be schizoid and to be Cezanne come to the same thing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Only a schizoid man could paint a schizoid World; which is to say, only a man sensitive enough to penetrate to the underlying psychic conflicts could present out World as it is in its deeper forms. However, in the very grasping of our World by art there is also our protection from the dehumanizing effects of technology. The schizoid character lies in both the confronting of the depersonalizing World and the refusing to be depersonalized by it. For the artist finds deeper planes of consciousness where we can participate in human experience and nature below superficial appearances. The case may be clearer in Van Gogh, whose psychosis was not unconnected with his volcanic struggle to paint what he perceived. Or in Picasso, flamboyant as he may seem to be, whose insight into the schizoid character of our modern World is seen in the fragmented bulls and torn villagers in Guernica, or in the distorted portraits with mislocated eyes and ears—paintings not named but numbered. This is the first age in which the artist does not have a community; one must now, like all of us, make one’s own. The artist presents the broken image of mortals but transcends it in the very act of transmuting it into art. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
It is one’s creative act which gives meaning to the nihilism, alienation, and other elements of modern mortal’s condition. Thus the illness ceases to be an absurd fact and a fate, and becomes a general possibility of human existence. The neurotic and the artist—since both lived out the unconscious of the race—reveal to us what is gong to emerge endemically in the society later on. The neurotic feels that same conflicts arising from one’s experience of nihilism, alienation, and so on, but one is unable to give them meaningful form; one is caught between one’s incapacity to mold these conflicts into creative works on one hand and one’s inability to deny them on the other. The neurotic is the artiste manqué, the artist who cannot transmute one’s conflicts into art. To admit this as a reality not only gives us our liberty as creative persons but also the basis of our freedom as human beings. By the same token, confronting at the outset the fact of the schizoid state of our World may give us a basis for discovering love and will for our own age. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Yet, people use different kinds of ploys to avoid intimate confrontation and interaction with other people. Some of these actions are Rituals we all use casually: “Hi; nice weather; right?” “Think it will rain?” “Wonderful party; we sure enjoyed ourselves,” “How are things with you?” These are familiar sayings; we all use them. They are Rituals when we do not much care about the answers or when we use these words to fill in awkward gaps in out time- and space-structuring. After Rituals come the Pastimes, activities used to full up time or space: Homework, TV Viewing, Dating, Fixing the Car, Solitaire, Eating Dinner. In other words, any activity in which we engage for the express purpose, conscious or otherwise, of avoiding intimate encounter is simply a Pastime. When we view TV in order to not talk to our family or spouse, we are indulging in an action that is less than authentic or sincere. Finally, the Games themselves. These are complex maneuvers, usually motivated by unconsciousness, designed to being about some kind of Payoff. The Payoff may be a put-down of someone else, or even of yourself. The Payoff may be a breaking off of a relationship that is too threatening or anxiety-producing. The Payoff may be getting somebody else hurt or wounded. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
It is also time we all recognize that psychotherapists are human beings, nothing more. Sometimes therapists, out of their Child’s need for extra credit, or their Parent’s need to be authoritative, will encourage games in the process of therapy, without realizing that they are playing them. Any therapist who has excessive needs for respect or worship is falling into a manipulative trap and may be exploiting his or her clients for one’s own self-enhancement. This is hardly self-actualizing behavior. Of course, sometimes clients put their therapists in a god-like role, either because they need an authority-father-figure to relate to, or as a way of conning the therapist. Sometimes a client can build the therapist up by flattering him or her (“You are Uncommonly Perceptive, Doctor”) as a way of keeping the focus on him or her, or so the therapist, out of some distorted sense of obligation, will not dig any deeper into one’s life. Therapy is a situation that is liable to the same pitfalls as any other interpersonal relationship. We still should be impressed with the need for human beings to develop the ability to be intimate with each other. Self-Disclosure is important for optimum mental health, or psychological wholeness, comes about when a person is able to disclose important feelings, ideas, fears, wishes, or memories to at least one significant person. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Self-disclosure should be at the level of intimacy, that is, real authentic, un-defensive, and part of the very person being of the individual. This is important in order that we experience the feeling of closeness of being personal with one other human being. The surprising truth is that our weaknesses can be a blessing when they humble us and turn us to Christ. Discontent becomes divine when we humbly approach Jesus Christ with our want, rather than hold back in self-pity. In fact, Jesus’s miracles often begin with a recognition of want, need, failure, or inadequacy. The truth is that each of us is one generation away from Deity—each is a child of God. And just as God has done with both prophets and ordinary men and women through the ages, so Heavenly Father intends to transform us. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what he is doing. God is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
However, then you see God is building quite a different house from the one you thought of. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but God is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. Because of our Savior’s atoning sacrifice, we can be made equal to the tasks that lie ahead. Divine discontent can move us to act in faith, follow the Savior’s invitations to do good, and give our lives humbly to him. “Behold, thou shalt not suffer these things which ye have seen and heard to go forth in the World, until the time cometh that I shall glorify my name in the flesh; wherefore, ye shall treasure up the things which ye have seen and heard, and show it to no mortal,” reports Ether 3.21. Modern cynics are not ready to follow anybody. They have no belief in reason, no criterion of truth, no set of values, no answer to the question of meaning. They try to undermine every norm put before them. Their courage is expressed not creatively but in their form of life. They courageously reject any solution which would deprive them of their freedom of rejecting whatever they want to reject. The cynics are lonely although they need company in order to show their loneliness. They are empty of both preliminary meanings and an ultimate meaning, and therefore easy victims of neurotic anxiety. Much compulsive self-affirmation and much fanatical self-surrender are expressions of the noncreative courage to be as oneself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
However, in the crucible of Earthly trials, patiently move forward, and the Savior’s healing power will bring you light, understanding, peace, and hope. “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each person should give what one has decided in one’s heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. A it is written: He has scattered abroad his gifts to the poor; his righteousness endures forever,” reports 2 Corinthians 9.6-9. We search for happiness. We long for peace. We hope for love. And the Lord showers us with amazing abundance of blessings. However, intermingled with the joy and happiness, one thing is certain: there will be moments, hours, days, sometimes years when our souls will be wounded. “Let you in, into my World. I gave you things you said you deserved, but you took all I had and through it back in my face. Through the hardest time was possible place. I know that I was not to blame. So go ahead and take everything. When it is over, I will still be standing because I was here from the start. You love no one, but still you lost my heart. With all my plans, you followed me. You crossed you heart and said you believed,” reports Gareth Emery and Emma Hewitt – Take Everything. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
It was a Boundless Place to Me as if I Breathed Superior Air–I Think that Earth Seems so to those in Heaven Now
Remember, this is an exposition of souls, a bartering of extraordinary revelations. Oh, let me get it straight. I triumph over death, and we gather here to listen to the personal memories. Many conflicts people see psychotherapists for generally are based upon some aspect of love or will gone wrong. Because of this, every therapist is, or ought to be, engaged in research all the time—research, as the word itself states, as a “search” for the sources. With experimental psychology, the data that is uncovered is impossible to formulate mathematically and it sometimes comes from people who represent psychological misfits of the culture. At the same time, philosophers insist that no model of mortal can be based centrally on data from neuroses or character disorders. And a rational person might agree to these cautions. However, neither these psychologist in their laboratories nor those philosophers in their studies can ignore the fact that we do get tremendously significant and often unique data from persons in therapy—data which are revealed only when the human being can break down the customary pretenses, hypocrisies, and defenses behind which we all hide normal social discourse. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
It is only in the critical situation of emotional and spiritual suffering—which is the situation that leads them to see therapeutic help—that people will endure the pain and anxiety of uncovering the profound roots of their problems. There is also the curious situation that unless we are oriented toward helping the person, one will not, indeed in some ways cannot, reveal the significant data. Unless the interviews are designed to help the person, you will get artifacts, not real data. True, the information we get from our patients may be hard or even impossible to codify more than superficially. However, this information speaks so directly out of the human being’s immediate conflicts and one’s living experience that its richness of meaning more than makes up for its difficult in interpretation. It is one thing to discuss the hypothesis of aggression as resulting from frustration, but quite another to see the tenses of a patient, one’s eyes flashing in anger or hatred, one’s posture clenched into paralysis, and to hear one’s half-stifled gaps of pain from reliving the time a score of years ago when one’s father whipped him, because through no fault of his own, his car was stolen—an event giving rise to a strong sense of displeasure which for that moment encompasses every parental figure in one’s whole World, including me in the room with him. Such data are empirical in the deepest meaning of the term. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
With respect to the question of basing a theory of mortals on data form misfits I would, in turn, challenge my colleagues: Does not every human conflict reveal universal characteristics of mortals as well as the idiosyncratic problems of the individual? Sophocles was not writing merely about one individual’s pathology when he showed us, step by step, through the drama of King Oedipus, the agonizing struggle of a mortal to find out “who I am and where I came from.” Psychotherapy seeks the most specific characteristics and events of the given individual’s life—and any therapy will become weakened in vapid, existential, cloudy generalities which forgets this. However, psychotherapy also seeks the elements of the human conflict of this individua which are basic to the perdurable, persistent qualities of every mortal’s experience as a human—and any therapy will tend to shrink the patient’s consciousness and make life more banal for one if it forgets that. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Psychotherapy reveals both the immediate situation of the individual’s disturbance and the archetypal qualities and characteristics which constitute the human being as human. It is the latter characteristics which have gone awry in specific ways in a given patient and have resulted in the former, one’s psychological problems. The interpretations of a patient’s problems in psychotherapy is also a partial revelation of mortal’s self-interpretation of oneself through history in the archetypal forms in literature. Aeschylus’ Orestes and Goethe’s Faust, to take two diverse examples, are not simply portrayals of two given characters, one back in Greece in the fifth-century B.C. and the other in eighteenth-century Germany, but presentations of the struggles we all, of whatever century or race, go through in growing up, trying to find identity as individual beings, striving to affirm our being with whatever power we have, trying to love and create, and doing our best to meet all the other events of life up to and including our own death. One of the values of living in a transitional age—an age of therapy—is that it forces upon us this opportunity, even as we try to resolve our individual problems, to uncover new meaning in perennial mortals and to see more deeply into those qualities which constitute that human being as human. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Our patients are the ones who express and live out the subconscious and unconscious tendencies in the culture. The neurotic, or person suffering from what we now call character disorder, is characterized by the fact that the usual defenses of the culture do not work for one—a generally painful situation of which one is more or less aware. The neurotic or the person suffering from character disorders is one whose problems are so severe that one cannot solve them by living them out in the normal agencies of the culture, such as work, education, and religion. Our patient cannot or will not adjust to the society. This, in turn, may be due to one or both of the two following interrelated elements. First, certain traumatic or unfortunate experiences have occurred in one’s life which make one more sensitive than the average person and less able to live with and manage one’s anxiety. Second, one may posses a greater than ordinary amount of originality and potential which push for expression and, when blocked off, make one ill. Life can sometimes be full of images of meaninglessness and despair. In some areas that is all people witness; in other regions the negativity is less unconditional. However, it seldom becomes beneficial: even comparatively optimistic solutions are undermined by doubt and by awareness of the ambiguity of all solutions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It is astonishing that we can have so much widespread dysfunction in a country whose prevailing courage is the courage to be as a part in a system of political conformity. What does this mean for the situation of American and with it of humankind as a whole? One can easily play down the importance of the phenomenon. One can point to the unquestionable fact that even the largest crowds of people are an infinitely small percentage of the American population. One can dismiss the significance of the attraction unity that many have been calling an imported fashion, doomed to disappear very soon. This is possibly, but not necessarily entirely true. It may be that the comparatively few (few even if one adds to them all the cynics and despairing ones in our institutions of higher learning) are a vanguard which precedes a great change in the spiritual and social-psychological situation. It may be that the limits of the courage to be as a part have become visible to more people than the increasing conformity shows. If this is the meaning of appeal that Existentialism has on the stage, one should observe it carefully and prevent it from becoming the forerunner of a collectivist forms of the courage to be as a part—a threat which history has abundantly proved to exist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
The combination of the experience of meaninglessness and the courage to be as oneself is the key to the development of spiritual life. Reality can be disrupted when the categories which constitute ordinary experience have lost their power. The category of substance is lost: souls are twisted like ropes; the casual interdependence of things is disregarded: things appear in a complete contingency; temporal sequences are without significance, it does not matter whether an event has happened before or after another event; the spatial dimensions are reduced or dissolved into a horrifying infinity. The organic structures of life are cut into pieces which are arbitrarily recomposed: limbs are dispersed, colors are separated from their natural carriers. The psychological process is reversed: one lives from the future to the past, and this without rhythm of any kind of meaningful organization. The World of anxiety is a World in which the categories, the structures of reality, have lost their validity. Everybody would be dizzy if causality suddenly ceased to be valid. Spirituality has been attacked as a forerunner of totalitarian systems. The answer that all totalitarian systems have started their careers by attacking religion is insufficient, for one could say that the totalitarian systems fought spirituality just because they tried to resist meaninglessness they thought it expressed. The real answer lies deeper. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Spirituality is not propaganda but revelation. We should welcome feelings of divine discontent that call us to a higher way, while recognizing and avoiding Satan’s counterfeit—paralyzing discouragement. This is a precious space into which Satan is all too eager to jump. We can choose to talk the higher path that leads us to seek for God and his peace and grace, or we can listen to Satan who bombards us with messages that we will never be enough; rich enough, smart enough, beautiful enough anything enough. Our discontent can become divine—or destructive. One way to tell divine discontent from Satan’s counterfeit is that divine discontent is not an invitation to stay in our conform zone, nor will it lead us to despair. I have learned that when I wallow in thoughts of everything I am not, I do not progress and I find it much more difficult to feel and follow the Spirit. It shows that the reality of our existence is as it is. It does not cover up the reality in which we are living. The question therefore is this? Is the revelation of a situation propaganda for it? If this were the case all religion would have to become dishonest beautification. The situation propagated by totalitarianism is dishonest beautification. It is an idealized naturalism which is preferred by some because in their minds, it removes the evil and sins they have committed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
People who are truly loving and have the spirit of God are able to see the meaninglessness of our existence, but at the same time they have the courage to face it and to express it in their souls and hearts. They have the courage to be themselves. “If anyone you lack wisdom, let one ask of God, that gives to all mortals liberally, and upbraided not; and it shall be given to one,” reports James 1.5. Confidence is not just the emotional state of an individual. It is a view of other people’s confidence, and of other people’s perceptions of other people’s confidence. It is also a view of the World—a popular model of current events, a public understanding of the mechanism of economic change as informed by the news media and popular discussions. High confidence tends to be associated with inspirational stories, stories about new business initiatives, tales of how others are getting rich. New era stories have tended to accompany the major booms in stock markets around the World. The economic confidence of times past cannot be understood without reference to the details of these stories. As years go by we forget these stories of the past, and thus we tend to be mystified by the causes of past stock market moves and macroeconomic fluctuations. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The complexity of the different new era stories through time suggests that differences in confidence have had many effects on the economy beyond an impact on consumption and investment. Changes in these stories, like the young people making fortunes are a contemporary reenactment of the nineteenth-century Gold rush, will affect the expectations for personal success in business, for the success of entrepreneurial ventures, and for payoffs to human capital investments. The process of consumption is as alienated as the process of production. In the first place, we acquire things with money; we are accustomed to this and take it for granted. However, actually, this is a most peculiar way of acquiring things. Money represents labor and effort in an abstract form; not necessarily my labor and effort, since I can have acquired it by inheritance, by unknown means, by luck, or any number of ways. However, even if I have acquired it by my effort (forgetting for the moment that my effort might have brought me the money were it not for that fact that I employed mortals), I may have acquired it in a specific way, by a specific way, by a specific kind of effort, corresponding to my skills and capacities, while, in spending, the money is transformed into an abstract form of labor and can be exchanged against anything else. Provided I am in the possession of money, no effort or interest of mine is necessary to acquire something. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
If I have the money, I can acquire an exquisite painting, even though I may not have any appreciation for art; I can buy the best phonograph, even through I have no musical taste; I can buy a library, although I use it only for the purpose of ostentation. I can buy an education, even though I have no use for it except as an additional social asset. I can even give away the painting or the books I bought, and aside from a loss of money, I suffer no damage. Mere possession of money gives me the right to acquire and to do with my acquisition whatever I like. The human way of acquiring would be to make an effort qualitatively commensurate with what I acquire. The acquisition of bread and clothing would depend on no other premise than that of being alive; the acquisition of books and paintings, on my effort to understand them and my ability to use them. How this principle could be applied practically is not the point to be discussed here. What matters is that the way we acquire things is separated from the way in which we use them. The alienating function of money in the process of acquisition and consumption is beautifully described: Money transforms the real human and natural powers into merely abstract ideas, and natural powers into merely abstract ideas, and hence imperfections, and on the other hand it transforms the real imperfection and imaginings, the powers which only exist in the imagination of the individual into real powers. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Money transforms loyalty into vice, vices into virtue, the slave into the master, the master into the slave, ignorance into reason, and reason into ignorance. One who can buy as a mortal, and one’s relation to the World as a human one, and you can exchange love only for love, confidence for confidence, etc. If you wish to enjoy art, you must be an artistically trained person; if you wish to have influence on other people, you must be a person who had a really stimulating and furthering influence on other people. Every one of your relationships to mortals and to nature must be a definite expression of your real, individual life corresponding to the object of your will. If you love without calling forth love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means of an expression of life as a loving person you do not make of yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent, a misfortune. However, beyond the method of acquisition, how do we use things, once we have acquired them? With regard to many things, there is not even a pretense of use. We acquire them to have them. We are satisfied with useless possession. The expensive dining set manufactured by David Michael or the Baccarat Crystal Medicis Bronze Vase which we never use for fear they might break, the mansion with many unused rooms, the fleet of new and rare BMWs and Mercedes-Benz and the servants, like the ugly brick-a-brac of the lower-middle-class family, are so many examples of pleasure in use. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
However, this satisfaction is possessing per se was more prominent in the nineteenth century; today most of the satisfaction is derived from possession of things-to-be-used rather than of things-to-be-kept. This does not alter the fact, however, that even in the pleasure of things-to-be-used the satisfaction of prestige is a paramount factor. The car, the refrigerator, the television set are for real, but also for conspicuous use. They confer status of the owner. How do we use the things we acquire? Let us begin with food and drink. We eat bread made from 23-carat gold and champagne because it appeals to our phantasy of wealth and distinction—being so unique and luxurious. Actually, we eat a phantasy and have lost contact with the real thing we eat. Our palate, our body, are excluded from an act of consumption which primarily concerns them. We drink labels. We drink labels. With a bottle of Royal DeMaria Chardonnay Icewine 2000 we drink the picture of the pretty boy and girl who drink it in the advertisement, we drink the slogan of the pause the refreshes, we drink the great Canadian habit; least of all do we drink with our palate. All this is even worse when it comes to consumption of things whose whole reality is mainly the fiction the advertising campaign has created, like healthy soap or dental past. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The act of consumption should be a concrete human act, in which or sense, bodily needs, out aesthetic taste—that is to say, in which we as concrete, sensing, feeling, judging human beings—are involved; the act of consumption should be meaningful, human, productive experience. In our culture, there is little of that. Consuming is essentially the satisfaction of artificially stimulated phantasies, s phantasy performance alienated from our concrete, real selves. Most people have parents who encourage these kinds of behaviors. More importantly, their parents encouraged self-reliance, strong social conscience, autonomy, and self-respect. The parents, for the most part, liked their children. This appreciation and affection communicated itself to the children, and they grew up feeling secure and confident. The balance between autonomy and social responsibility was achieved in the interaction process of the growing up, of playing, of schooling, and of working. This was not so much a matter of parents causing or determining actualizing behavior; they simply created the kind of climate in which self-fulfillment blossomed. Since many of us have not had such a childhood, is it too late for us? #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Too often, those of us who had bad breaks in childhood grow up bitter, cynical, or resentful, or we manipulate with the excuses theses negative experiences provide. We cop an ideological plea, which says: “What do you expect of me? I have had a rough life. I am not capable of honesty, openness, a good feeling about my fellow mortals.” We claim exemption from authentic and responsible living on the grounds that we are crippled or disadvantaged. Do you recall the song in the play and film West Side Story “Gee, Officer Krupke”? In this song members of a New York street gang tell a police officer that they cannot help being bad, because they were raised in slums, in broken homes, “my father was a junkie, my mother was a tramp.” Cute as the song is, it represents what a lot of manipulators do today: disavow any responsibility for being full-functioning, creative, and effective members of the human society with the excuse that they had a rough time of it in their childhood. Truly, a negative traumatic childhood may interfere or slow down the process of self-fulfillment. However, what of the mature, responsible person lying dormant beneath the excuses? The time for extolling and reinforcing excuses is past: the need of the times is for responsible, reality-oriented people. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Every now and then, we will recognize that we have been the instruments in the hands of God and we will be grateful to know that the Holy Ghost working through us is a manifestation of God’s approval. Divine discontent leads to humility, not to self-pity or the discouragement that comes from making comparisons in which we always come up short. Covenant-keeping people come in all sizes and shapes; their families, their life experiences, and their circumstances vary. “The Lord will be merciful unto them; yea, he will lengthen out their days and increase their seed,” reports Helaman 7.24. With Christ’s help, we can do all things. The scriptures promise that we will find grace to help in time of need. “And there is something we leave behind to join the ride. I could not wait but did not realize I would never come back. And the calling is taking over and it lasts more than awhile. This is another reason I will not be around to say good night, so do not write me I will call you. For all of my life I have been lost satellite. It is all a waste of time with me before I get it right. And I miss you paradise, although you are over, and I miss you paradise. I know you are over. I lie awake and I count the hours passing by. Too many questions that will not be answered here tonight, and they rise in waves before you and the force opens your eyes,” reports Emma Hewitt (Miss You Paradise). #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Therefore, as One Returned, I Feel Odd Secrets of the Line to Tell Before the Seal Unscrutinized by Eye
He looked at me for a long moment, as though he was seeing me with new eyes, but it was only his weariness. He was seeing what he wanted to see it me, and he thanked me again. This was truly one of the most baffling mortals I had ever met. And to think, he was her husband, and I had though him the perfect husband for her when we had first met. He reached out and took my hand before I could stop him. Could he not feel how hard it was? Only the thinnest layer of flesh was permeable. I was a monster. Yet he peered into my eyes as though plumbing for something separate from the Deadly Sins that prevailed with in me. We can speak of idolatry or alienation not only in relationship to other people, but also in relationship to oneself, when the person is subject to irrational passions. The person who is mainly motivated by one’s lust for power, does not experience oneself any more in the richness and limitlessness of a human beings, but one becomes a slave to one partial striving in oneself, which is projected into external aims, by which one is possessed. The person who is given to the exclusive pursuit of one’s passion for money is possessed by one’s striving for it; money is the idol which one worships as the projection of one isolated power of oneself, one’s greed for it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Many twenty first- century mortals have lost a meaningful World and a self which lives in meanings out of a spiritual center. The mortal-created World of objects has drawn into itself one who created it and who now lose their subjectivity in it. One has sacrificed oneself to one’s own productions. However, mortals are still aware of what he or she has lost or is continuously losing. Yet, they are still mortal enough to experience one’s dehumanization as despair. At this level, power is a sensational exaggeration made for the sake of profit and fame; it is a morbid play with negativities. In this sense, the neurotic person is an alienated person. One’s actions are not one’s own; while an individual is under the illusion of doing what he or she wants, one is actually driven by forces which are separated from oneself, which work behind the individual’s back; one is a stranger to oneself, just as one’s fellow mortals are a stranger to the individual who is consumed by greed, lust, and power. These type of people experiences the other and oneself not as what the really are, but distorted by the unconscious forces which operate in them. The insane person is the absolutely alienated person; one has completely lost oneself as the center of one’s own experience; one has lost the sense of self. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
What is common to all these phenomena—the worship of idols, the idolatrous worship of God, the idolatrous love for a person, the worship of a political leader or the state, and the idolatrous worship of the externalization of irrational passions—is the process of alienation. It is the fact that mortals do not experience themselves as the active bearer of one’s own powers and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside of oneself, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. As the reference to idolatry indicates, alienation is by no means a modern phenomenon. Suffice it to say that it seems alienation differs from culture to culture, both in the specific spheres which are alienated, and in the thoroughness and completeness of the process. Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total; it pervades the relationship of mortals to their work, to things they consume, to the state, to one’s fellow mortals, and to oneself. Mortals have created a World of human-made things as it never existed before. They have constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine they built. Yet this whole creation of theirs stands over and above them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
One does not feel oneself as a creator and center, but as the servant of a Golem, which one’s hands have built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which one unleashes, the more powerless one feels oneself as a human being. Mortals confront themselves with one’s own forces embodied in things one has crated, alienated from oneself. They are owned by their own creation, and have lost ownership of oneself. They have lost ownership of themselves. Many individuals have built a golden calf, and says, “these are your gods who have brought you out of Egypt.” What happens to the worker? As the neurotic state progresses, they are unable to understand what is happening in our period. They are unable to distinguish the genuine from the neurotic anxiety. People begin to attack as a morbid longing for negativity what in reality is courageous acceptance of the negative. They decay what is actually the creative expression of decay. They reject as meaninglessness the meaningful attempt to reveal the meaninglessness of our situation. In industry the person becomes an economic atom that dances to the tune of atomistic management. Your place is just here, you will sit in this fashion, your arms will move x inches in a course of y radius and the time of movement will be .000 minutes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Work is becoming more repetitive and thoughtless as the planners, the micromotionists, and the scientific managers further strip the workers of their rights to think and move freely. Life is being denied; need to control, creativeness, curiosity, and independent thought are being baulked, and the result, the inevitable result, is flight or fight on the part of the worker, apathy or destructiveness, psychic regression. The role of the manager is also one of alienation. It is true, one manages the whole and a part, but one too is alienated from one’s product as something concrete and useful. One’s aim is to employ profitably the capital invested by others, although in comparison with the older type of owner-manager, modern management is much less interested in the amount of profit to be paid out as dividend to the stockholder than it is in the efficient operation and expansion of the enterprise. Characteristically, within management those in charge of labor relations and of sales—that is, of human manipulation—gain, relatively speaking, an increasing importance in comparison with those in charge of the technical aspects of production. The manager, like the worker, like everybody, deal with impersonal giants: with the giant competitive enterprise; with the giant national market; with the giant consumer, who has to be coaxed and manipulated; with the giant unions, and the giant government. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
All these giants have their own lives, as it were. They determine the activity of the manager and they direct the activity of the worker and clerk. The problem of the manager opens up one of the most significant phenomena in an alienated culture, that of bureaucratization. Both big business and government administrations are conducted by bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are specialists in the administration of things and of mortals. Due to the bigness of the apparatus to be administered, and the resulting abstractification, the bureaucrats’ relationship to the people is usually one of complete alienation. They, the people to be administered, are objects whom the bureaucrats consider neither with love nor hate, but completely impersonally; the manager-bureaucrat must not feel, as far as one’s professional activity is concerned; one must manipulate people as though they were figures, or things. Since the vastness of the organization and the extreme division of labor prevents any single individual from seeing the whole, since there is no organic, spontaneous co-operation between the various individuals or groups within the industry, the managing bureaucrats are necessary; without them the enterprise would collapse in a short time, since nobody would know the secret which makes it function. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Bureaucrats are as indispensable as the tons of paper gigabytes and terabytes consumed under their leadership. Just because everybody senses, with a feeling of powerlessness, the vital role of bureaucrats, they are given an almost godlike respect. If it were not for the bureaucrats, people believe, everything would go to pieces, and we would starve. Whereas, in the medieval World, the leaders were considered representatives of god-intended order, in modern Capitalism the role of the bureaucrat is hardly less sacred—since he or she is necessary for the survival of the whole. Karl Marx gave a profound definition of the bureaucrat saying: “The bureaucrat relates oneself to the World as a mere object of one’s activity.” It is interesting to note that the spirit of bureaucracy has entered not only business and government administration, but also trade unions and the great political socialist parities in England, Germany, and France. In Russia and America, too, the bureaucratic managers and their alienated spirit have conquered these countries, Russia and America could perhaps exist without terror—if certain conditions were given—but it could not exist without the system of total bureaucratization. However, somehow, many people feel that this is not a true safety; one has to suppress inclinations to accept the visions of bureaucrats as revelations, and some feel seriously threatened by it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
However, one does not feel spiritually threatened by something which is not an element of oneself. And since it is a symptom of the neurotic character to resist nonbeing by reducing being, one can turn to God for traditional safety. There should be no question of what Christian theology has to do in this situation. It should decide for truth against safety, even if the safety is consecrated and supported by the churches. Certainly there is a Christian conformism, from the beginning of the Church on, and there is a Christian collectivism—or at least semicollectivism, in several periods of Church history. However, this should not induce Christian theologians to identify Christian courage with the courage to be as a part. They should realize that the courage to be as a part—even if they rightly assume that neither of these forms of the courage to be gives the final solution. It is the endless compassion of God that allows us to see others for who they are. Through the lens of pure love, we see immortal beings of infinite potential and worth and beloved sons and daughters of Almighty God. Once we see through that lens, we cannot discount, disregard, or discriminate against anyone. In the Savior’s work, it is often by small and simple means that great things are brought to pass. We know that it requires repetitive practice to become good at anything. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Because of your unique talents, abilities, and personality, you will help others become better and happier. Yes, life can be hard at times. Certainly we all have our times of despair and discouragement. However, regardless of our differences, we seek to embrace one another as sons and daughters of our beloved Heavenly Father. God loves his children enough to give them a blueprint for the architecture to happiness and meaning in this life and a way to experience eternal joy in the halls of glory in the life to come. Being truly self-actualized is considered the exception rather than the rule since most people are working to meet more pressing needs. A peak experience involves feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one every was before, the feeling of ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placement in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that subject was to some extent transformed and strengthened even in one’s daily life by such experiences. These are moments of transcendence in which a person emerges feeling changed and transformed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
We have long believed that love and will are interdependent and belong together. Both are conjunctive processes of being—a reaching out to influence others, molding, forming, creating the consciousness of the other. However, this is only possible, in an inner sense, if one opens oneself at the same time to the influence of the other. The self-actualizer can appreciate the irony and the absurd in life, and especially in the behaviors of mortals in general, but one has no patience with ethnic jokes, sick jokes, cruelty jokes or those situations in which a particular person is made the butt of a joke. This sense of humor enables one to transcend unimportant concerns, and of course, enables one to laugh at oneself when one becomes foolish or ridiculous. Will without love becomes manipulation. Love without will in our own day becomes sentimental and experimental. Therefore, we must display more than average creativeness, originality, and inventiveness. We are not always artistic or mechanically oriented people, nor always involved in problem solving occupations. Even though work tends to be fairly ordinary, one displays innovative skills, more creativity, and a joy from strong encouragement to follow one’s own lead. There is a feeling of the everlasting going and coming, the eternal return, the growing and mating and dying and growing again, which is part of the spiritual process. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Human beings are part of this eternal going and returning, part of its sadness as well as its song. However, mortals, the seeker, is called by one’s consciousness to transcend the eternal return. Our own convictions are to seek the inner reality, with the belief that the fruits of future values will be able to grow only after they are sown by the values of our history. When the full results of our bankruptcy of inner values is brought home to us, it is especially important that we seek the source of love and will. Although we may not be well adjusted in the naïve sense of being always approved of or totally identified with our culture, we can still be well adjusted personally—that is, congruent and authentic in and to ourselves—even if we reject the ideals of social adjustment. So, it is not concerning that some may see others as eccentric or even somewhat odd when compared with the run-of-the-mill, conforming, look-alike people around us. Our value system results automatically from acceptance of ourselves and others. Most self-actualizers are not petty moralizers. What most people are offended by, what most people consider moral problems, are usually of no concern to self-actualizing people. Belief in the flexibility and potentiality of the human being is so strong that one assumes that, unless interfered with, people will usually be just fine. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Many people cannot identify with the theory of self-actualization because it seems to point to a state of excellence. Nonsense! No one’s life is flawless. We all have our own Hells we are trying to work ourselves out of, not day by day, but inch by inch. Self-actualizers are far from faultless. They are human. As a consequence of their kinship, deep feeling, sensitivity, and awareness, they suffer more of the pains of being alive. They also experience more of the joys! Because they find so much pleasure in being alive and being authentic, they often expect too much of the same kind of behavior from people who are less able to live the same way. This makes them frequently impatient, even somewhat resentful, concerning those they care about. The striking thing about love and will in or day is that, whereas in the past we were always held up to as the answer to life’s predicaments, we now have ourselves become the problem. It is always true that love and will become more difficult in a transitional age; and ours is an era of radical age; and ours is an era of radical transition. The old myths and symbols by which we oriented ourselves are gone, anxiety is rampant; we cling to each other and try to persuade ourselves that what we feel is love; we do not will because we are afraid that if we choose one thing or one person we will lose the other, and we are too insecure to take that chance. #Randolphharris 12 of 14
The bottom then drops out of the conjunctive emotions and processes—of which love and will are the two foremost examples. The individual is forced to turn inward; one becomes obsessed with the new form of the problem of identity, namely, Even-if-I-know-who-I-am, I-have-no-significance. I am unable to influence others. The next step can be apathy. And the following step may be violence. For no human being can stand the perpetually numbing experience of one’s own powerlessness. So great is the emphasis on love as the resolution to life’s predicament that people’s self-esteem ascended or feel depending on whether or not they had achieved it. Those who believed they had found it indulged in self-righteousness, confident in their visible proof of salvation as the Calvinist’s wealth used to be tangible evidence of one’s being numbered among the elect. Those who failed to find it felt not simply bereft to a greater or lesser extent, but, on a deeper and more damaging inner level, their self-esteem was undermined. They felt marked as a new species of pariah, and would confess in psychotherapy that they awoke in the small hours of the morning not necessarily especially lonely or unhappy but plagued with the gnawing conviction that thy had somehow missed the great success of life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
And all the while, with the rising divorce rates, the increasing banalization of love in literature and art, and the fact that physical intimacy for many people has become more meaningless as it is more available, this love has seemed tremendously elusive if not an outright illusion. Some members of the community came to the conclusion that love is destroyed by the very nature of our bourgeious society, and the reforms they proposed had the specific purpose of making a World in which love is more possible. “You and me could be enough. We will ride the storm. When the skies get rough, I will stay though cold and dark. I will take your hand and I will pick you up. And I will give you love until the Worlds run dry and I will give you love. Never question why. No hesitation. I will be on your side and I will give you love. It is you and I. We have no need for the light of day, while the World is asleep, we will be miles away. To innocence, through right or wrong, you take my hand and you lead me on,” reports Emma Hewitt (Give You Love). In such a contradictory situation, the sexual form of live—lowest common denominator on the ladder of salvation—understandably became preoccupation; for sex, as rooted in mortal’s inescapable biology, seems always dependable to give at least a facsimile of love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
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This World is Not Conclusion because a Sequel Stands Beyond Invisible as Music
Let your eyes drink me in. You are seeing colors you never saw before. You are realizing sensation you never even dreamt about. The foregoing discussion of the process of abstractification leads to the central issue of the effects of Capitalism on personality: the phenomenon of alienation. By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences oneself as an alien. One does not experience oneself as the center of one’s World, as the creator of one’s own acts—but one’s acts and their consequences have become one’s masters, whom one obeys, or whom one may even worship. “Yea, wo unto those that worship idols, for the devil of all devils delight in them. And, in fine, wo unto those who die in their sins; for they shall return to God, and behold his face, and remain in their sins,” reports 2 Nephi 9.37-38. Therefore, we should rediscover characteristics of the human soul and of mortal’s existential predicament which has been covered by the Essentialist tendency of modern thought. The material conditions of human existence allows one to derive religious faith from the desire of mortals to overcome finitude in a transcendent World. However, the alienated person is out of touch with oneself as one is out of touch with any other person. The courage to be as oneself is expressed in terms of a practical solipsism (the view of theory that the self is all that can be known to exist) that destroys any communication between mortal and mortal. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
This form of alienation creates Nihilism. Nihilism presents the picture of a World in which human existence has fallen into utter meaninglessness. The split between subject and object from something which precedes both of them—life—and to interpret the objectified World as a self-negation of the creative life. This is the tragic self-destruction of life once technical reason has come into control. People become experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the World outside productively. The older meaning in which alienation was used was to denote an insane person; aliene in French, alienado in Spanish are older words for the psychotic, the thoroughly and absolutely alienated person. (“Alienist,” in English, is still used for the doctor who cares for the insane.) In the last century and a half the word “alienation” was used by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegal and Karl Marx, referring not to a state of insanity, but to a less drastic form of self-estrangement, which permits the person to act reasonably in practical matters, yet which constitutes one of the most severe socially pattern defects. In Marx’s system alienation is called that condition of mortal where one’s own act becomes to one an alien power, standing over and against one, instead of being ruled by the individual. This theater is full of discoveries in the deserts and jungles of the human soul. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
However, while the use of the word alienation in this general sense is a recent one, the concept is a much older one; it is the same to which the profits of the Old Testament in the Christian Bible referred as idolatry. It will help us to a better understanding of alienation if we begin by considering the meaning of idolatry. The prophets of monotheism did not denounce heathen religions as idolatrous primarily because they worshiped several gods instead of one. (However, we still should not judge other cultures because we do not understand them.) The essential difference between monotheism and polytheism is not one of the number of gods, but lies in the fact of self-alienation. Mortals spend their energy, their artistic capacities on building an idol, and then they worship this idol, which is nothing but the result of one’s own human effort. One’s life forces have flown into a thing and this thing, having become an idol, is not experienced as a result of one’s own productive effort, but as something apart from oneself, over and against the individual, which one worships and to which one submits. “Assur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses; neither will we say any more to the work of our hands, you are our gods; for in thee the fatherless find love,” reports Hosea XIV.8. Idolatrous mortals bows down to the work of one’s own hands. The idol represents one’s own life forces in an alienated form. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
The principle of monotheism, in contrast, is that mortals are infinite, that there is no partial quality in them which can be hypostatized into the whole. God, in the monotheistic concept, is unrecognizable and indefinable; God is not a thing. If mortals are created in the likeness of God, they are created as the bearer of infinite qualities. In idolatry mortals bows down and submits to the projection of one partial quality in oneself. One does not experience oneself as the center from which living acts of love and reason radiate. One becomes a thing, one’s neighbor becomes a thing, just as his gods are things. “The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the work of mortal’s hands. They have mouths but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears but they hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths. They that make them are like them; so is everyone that trusts in them,” reports Psalm 135.15-18. The individual self becomes an empty space and the bearer of something which is not oneself, something strange by which the self is estranged from itself. Monotheistic religions themselves, to a large extent, regressed into idolatry. Mortals projects their power of love and of reason unto God; one does not feel them any more as one’s own powers, and then one prays to God to give them back some of what one, mortals, has projected unto God. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
In early Protestantism and Calvinism, the required religious attitude is that mortals should feel oneself empty and impoverished, and put their trust in the grace of God, that is, into the hope that God may return to one part of one’s own qualities, which one has put into God. This form of idealism and naturalism are alike in their attitude to the existing person; both of them eliminate one’s infinite significance and makes one a space through which something else passes. Both philosophies are expressions of a society which was devised for the liberations of humanity, but which fell under the bondage of objects it itself had created. The safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanism for the technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person, by the rapidly increasing organizational control of society—this safety is bought at a high price: mortals, for whom all this was invented as a means, becomes a means oneself in the service of means. Every act of submissive worship is an act of alienation and idolatry in this sense. What is frequently called love is often nothing but this idolatrous phenomenon of alienation; only that not God or an idol, but another person is worshiped in this way. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
The loving person in this type pf submissive relationship, projects all his or her love, strength, thought, into the other person, and experiences the loved person as a superior being, finding satisfaction in complete submission and worship. This does not only mean that one fails to experience the loved person as a human being in his or her reality, but the one does not experience oneself in one’s full reality, as the bearer of productive human powers. Just as in the case of religious idolatry, one has projected all one’s richness into the other person, and experiences this richness not any more as something which is unique to the individual, but as something alien from oneself, deposited in somebody else, deposited in somebody else, with which one can get in touch only by submission to, or submergence in the other person. The same phenomenon exists in the worshiping submission to a political leader, or to the state. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
The leader and the state actually are what they are by the consent of the governed. However, they become idols when the individual projects all one’s powers into them and worships them, hoping to regain some of one’s powers by submission and worship. Yet, people should fight against economic dehumanization, and struggle for creativity, instead of allowing humanity to slip into the spatial realm of dead objects. In the Rousseau’s theory of the state, as in contemporary totalitarianism, the individual is supposed to abdicate one’s own rights to protect them unto the state as the only arbiter. In Fascism and Stalinism, the absolutely alienated individual worships at the altar of an idol, and it makes little difference by what names this idol is known: state, class, collective, or what else. “Nevertheless, notwithstanding the great goodness of the Lord, in showing me his great marvelous works, my heart exclaimeth: O wretched person that I am! Yea, my heart sorroweth because of my flesh; my soul grieveth because of mine iniquities,” reports 2 Nephi 4.17. We must save life from the destructive power of self-objectivation. Philosophers generally struggle for the preservation of the person, for the self-affirmation of the self, in a situation in which the self is more and more lost in this World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
Philosophers wanted to indicate a way for the courage to be as oneself under conditions which annihilate the self and replace it by a thing. Therefore, it is important to have a continuing freshness of appreciation. Self-actualizers are seldom bored, stale, mediocre and people find that impressive. They constantly find novelty, wonder, beauty, and delight in the World. Even repeated experiences are new and delightful. Passionate, intimate love, for example, is never just a routine’ each coming together is a refreshing, re-vivifying experience quite unlike the experience of Deficiency-Motivated or self-alienated person who says mist experiences, sexual or otherwise, “Thank God that is over!” The self-actualizer is mature, capable of innocent delight in and appreciation of simple things: flowers, art, butterflies, people, a good cup of coffee. They experience more Peak or Oceanic feelings than the ordinary person. The self-actualizing people is overwhelmed wit a feeling of joy at being alive. One feels totally; all systems are involved—intellect, emotion, physical sense. One person described it thus: “I was a drop of water in the gigantic ocean, infinitesimal and insignificant, but totally aware that the gigantic ocean, infinitesimal and insignificant, but totally aware that the gigantic ocean is made up of simple drops of water.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
Experience is a paradoxical sensation: being at once tiny and all-encompassing, being nothing and being everything, being helpless and being all-powerful, being weak and being super-strong. It is not a religious or supernatural experience, though it resembles the mystical experiences described by St. Francis, William Blake, Sarah Winchester, and others. It also resembles the transcending experiences reported by some people who are experiencing an elevated state of consciousness, though self-actualizing people generally have no use for stimulants. It seems to be a feeling experience; yet, during the few seconds the person is involved in it, centuries of time may seem to pass. Moreover, self-actualizing people report that it is a growing experience. They feel that they have come more real, more authentic, more of what they were before. We achieve the abundant life by becoming true disciple of Jesus Christ—by following in his ways and engaging in his work. The healing hands of Jesus Christ reach out to all who seek him. Believing and loving God and striving to follow Christ can change our hearts, soften our pain, and fill our souls with exceedingly great joy. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
Believing God leads to faith in him and developing trust in his word. Faith causes our hearts to grow in our love for God and others. As that love grow, we are inspired to emulate the Savior as we continue our own great journey on the path of discipleship. They have a strong kinship feeling for other people. Healthy, authentic people feel engaged with and related to other people. They seldom become hermits. They are part of the human race and value the association. This allows the feelings of kinship to humankind as a whole and to individual persons in particular. Feelings of pleasure come from the company of others. Other people are drawn toward these people, too. The benefit derived from these kinship associations is not exploitive, at least not from the self-actualizer’s side of it. Their interpersonal relationships are profound. Because they trust more, empathize and associate more with other people than the typical person, they seem to develop greater love, and are able to break down the barriers that we all build up. Their love is warm and comfortable, seldom clinging and possessive. It is possible to have many acquaintances and casual contacts, but usually a small, select circle of deep friendships. So seeking friends who exhibit similar traits is a priority. It is the love of God that rescues, restores, and revives. God knows you. You are his child. He loves you. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
Even when you think that you are not lovable, God reaches out to you. This very day—every day—God reaches out to you, desiring to heal you, to life you up, and to replace the emptiness in your heart with an abiding joy. God desires to sweep away any darkness that clouds your life and fill it with the sacred and brilliant light of his unending glory. Differences in class, color, creed, or personality are accepted by these people as part of the rich variety of humankind. There is a surprising lack of racist or ethnocentric prejudice among them. The scriptures teach us that without faith it is impossible to please God: for one the comes to God must believe that he is. In my experience, these people value individuals as individuals and tend to emphasize the common bonds existing among human beings rather than the superficial differences. Their only prejudice seems to be in the direction of preferring other Being-Motivated people. Although they respect other people and their opinions, they tend to draw them out and try to enable them to become more of what they can become. Their relationships with others have a therapeutic quality about them; they do other people good by being with them. The love of God enters their hearts, when awaking in the morning, and stays throughout the day. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Therefore, it is important to voice prayers of gratitude at evening’s end. This is the inexpressible love Heavenly Father has for us. Separate means from the ends. The means is as enjoyable as the end. The doing is as satisfying as the accomplishing. Getting there is half the fun, is a good cliché to describe the outlook God wants us to have. This again shows the impulsive rather than the compulsive quality of self-actualizing people. Being self-actualizing allows people the ability to take off for a weekend drive and enjoy wherever they go; whereas other people set a goal and if they do not attain it, feel that nothing was done or enjoyable. “I took a ride, fallen in the state that I am in, away from the lights, an ending before so we can begin now. And it is all I see, this scene is burnt out so meet me tonight and we will leave behind all that we have been. Do not let it slide further away with our eyes closed, in circles again when I am waiting and hoping for you to say that we will go. And then we will ride out, a silent escape that I am craving. I figured out, for all our mistakes we could win. It is all I see…these dreams call out. It is all I need and I need this now,” reports Emma Hewitt (State that I am In). #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Perhaps the Kingdom of Heaven has Changed when the Summer Folded Her Miracle?
There are a number of ways in which a person can be helped to cultivate a set of values that represent the fullest expression of who one is and which are fairly workable within the limits of the society in which one lives. There are motives that are universal to each member of the species of Homo Sapiens. At the core level are the physiological motives, those tensions created by tissue needs—hunger, thirst, elimination, air, and so on. Few humans and animals ignore them. After these are put into proper perspective, into a relatively regulated process, humans are motivated by needs for safety, for love and belongingness, for esteem and ego-identity, and for self-actualization. The self-actualizing person, our model of mental and emotion health, is a person who recognizes first of all one’s terrestrial nature as well as one’s divine nature. One is a person whose value system is based on this recognition of one’s many-sided nature. An individual appreciates one’s natures, one tries to gear one’s life to the optimum meeting of all his or her needs, the individual recognizes these needs in others and one tries to create a World in which he or she and all others can meet their needs. The contemporary social character seems to touch upon the deepest level of the modern personality; it is the most appropriate if one is concerned with the interaction between the contemporary socioeconomic structure of the average individual. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
There is also a level of alienation, which is one of the fundamental economic features of Capitalism, the process of quantification and abstraction. The modern business person not only deals with millions of dollars, but also with millions of customers, thousands of stockholders, and thousands of workers and employees; all these people become so many pieces in a gigantic machine which must be controlled, whose effects must be calculated; each mortal eventually can be expressed as an abstract entity, as a figure, and on this basis economic occurrences are calculated, trends are predicted, decisions are made. Today, when only about 40 percent of our working population is self-employed, the rest for somebody else, and a mortal’s life is dependent on someone who pays one a wage or a salary. However, we should say something, instead of someone, because a worker is hired and fired by an institution, the managers of which are impersonal parts of the enterprise, rather than people in personal contact with the mortals they employ. Let us not forget another fact: in pre-capitalistic society, exchange was to a large extent one of the goods and services; today, all work is rewarded with money. The close fabric of economic relations is regulated by money, the abstract expression of work—that is to say, we receive different quantities of the same for different qualities; and we give money for what we receive—again exchanging only different qualities. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Practically nobody, with the exception of the farm population, could live for even a few days without receiving and spending money, which stands for the abstract quality of concrete work. In the modern industrial enterprise, when it comes to the division of labor, the worker is not in touch with the is not in touch with the whole product at any point, unlike in the past when there was more vertical integration. Now days, the worker is engaged in the performance of one specialized function, and while he or she might shift in the course of time from one function to another, one is still not related to the concrete product as a whole. The worker develops a specialized function, and the tendency is such, that the function of the modern industrial worker can be defined as working in a machine like fashion in activities for which machine work has not yet been devised or which would be costlier than human work. The only person who is in touch with the whole product is the manager, but to he or she the product is an abstraction, whose essence is exchange value, while the worker, for whom it is concrete, never works on it as a whole. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Undoubtedly without quantification and abstraction modern mass production would be unthinkable. However, in a society in which economic activities have become the main preoccupation of mortals, this process of quantification and abstractification has transcended the realm of economic production, and spread to the attitude of mortals to things, to people, and to oneself. We are starting to relate to ourselves as objects: one can relate to oneself to it in its full concreteness, then the object appears with all its specific qualities, and there is no other object which is identical with it. And one can relate oneself to the object in abstract ways, that is, emphasizing only those qualities which it has in common with all other objects of the same genus, and this accentuating some and ignoring other qualities. The full and productive relatedness to an object comprises this polarity of perceiving it in its uniqueness, and at the same time in its generality; in its concreteness, and at the same time in its abstractness. In Western culture this polarity has given way to an almost exclusive reference to the abstract qualities of things and people, and to a neglect of relating oneself to their concreteness and uniqueness. We are supposed to have an efficient perception of reality and a comfortable relationship with it so we can detect what is real and authentic and gravitate toward it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
However, many people are now dividing reality and unreality into mutually exclusive compartments. They no longer know and appreciate the facts of existence because they are minimizing the importance of imagination, fantasy, dreaming, and fiction. Instead of forming abstract concepts where it is necessary and useful, everything, including ourselves, is being abstractified; the concrete reality of people and things to which we can relate with the reality of our own person, is replaced by abstractions, by ghosts that embody different quantities, but not different qualities. It is quite customary to talk about a three-million-dollar house, a hundred-thousand-dollar car, a fifteen-thousand-dollar watch, and this not only from the standpoint of the manufacturer or the consumer in the process of buying it, but as the essential point in the description. When one speaks of the three-million-dollar house, one is not primarily concerned with its usefulness or beauty, that is, with its concrete qualities, but one speaks of it as a commodity, the main quality of which is its exchange value, expressed in a quantity, that of money. This does not mean, of course, that one is not concerned also with the usefulness or beauty of the house, but it does mean that its concrete (use) value is secondary to its abstract (exchange) value in the way the object is experiences. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The famous line by Gertrude Stein “a rose is a rose is a rose,” is a protest against this abstract form of experience; for most people a rose is just not a rose, but a flower in a certain price range, to be bought on certain social occasions; even the most beautiful flower, provided it is a wild one, costing nothing, is not experienced in its beauty, compared to that of the rose, because it has no exchange value. In other words, things are experienced as commodities, as embodiments of exchange value, not only while we are buying or selling, but in our attitude toward them when the economic transaction is finished. A thing, even after it has been bought, never quite loses its quality as a commodity in this sense; it is expendable, always retaining its exchange value quality. A good illustration of this attitude is to be found in the behavior displayed by a homeowner, Justin. During one of the first days after they had moved into a new house they just had built for them, he got a call from a real estate agent, saying that some people were interested in buying that particular house and wanted to look at it. Although he knew that it was most unlikely that the family would want to sell their new home a few days after they had moved in, he could not resist the temptation to know whether the value of the house had risen since they had bought it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Justin spent one or two valuable hours showing the real estate agent around the house. He writes: “Very interested in fact we can get an offer for more than we have invested into this house. Nice coincidence that offer comes before we moved all our furniture in. All agree it will be good for our family’s morale to learn that the house will sell for a good deal more than we spent to have it built. Let us see what happens.” In spite of all the pride and pleasure in the new house, it had still retained its quality as a commodity, as something exchangeable, and to which no full sense of possession or use had been attached yet because it had not been lived in. The same attitude is obvious in the relationship of people to the cars they buy; the car never becomes fully a thing to which one is attached, for many people, but retains its quality as a commodity to be exchanged in a successful bargain; thus, cars are sold after a year or two, long before their use value is exhausted or even considerably diminished. This abstraction takes place even with regard to phenomena which are not commodities sold on the market, like a flood disaster; the newspaper will headline a flood, speaking of a “million-dollar catastrophe,” emphasizing the abstract quantitative element rather than the concrete aspects of human suffering. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
However, the abstactifying and quantifying attitude goes far beyond the realm of things. People are also experienced as the embodiment of a quantitative exchange of value. To speak of a man as being “worth one hundred and fifty million dollars,” is to speak of him not any more as a concrete human person, but as an abstraction, whose essence can be expressed in a figure. It is an expression of the same attitude when a newspaper headlines an obituary with the words “Rifle Heiress Dies.” Actually a woman has died, a woman with certain human qualities, with hopes and frustrations, wit a husband and children. It is true that she manufactures guns, or rather, that she owned and managed a corporation in which workers served machines manufacturing guns; but if it is said that a “Rifle Heiress Dies,” the richness and concreteness of a human life is expressed in the abstract formula of economic function. The same abstractifying approach can be seen in expressions like “Mr. Ford produced so many automobiles,” or this or that general “conquered a fortress”; or if a person has a house built for oneself, he or she says, “I built a house.” Concretely speaking, Mr. Ford did not manufacture the automobiles; he directed automobile production which was executed by thousands of workers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The general never conquered the fortress; he was sitting in his headquarters, issuing orders, and his soldiers did the conquering. The man did not build the house; he paid the money to an architect who made the plans and to contractors who did the building. All this is not said to minimize the significance of the managing and directing operations, but in order to indicate that in this way of experiencing things, sight of what goes on concretely is lost, and an abstract view is taken in which one function, that of making plans, giving orders, or financing an activity, is identified with the whole concrete process of production, or of fighting, or of building, as the case may be. The same process of abstractification takes place in all other spheres. A Newspaper recently printed a news item under the heading: “B.Sc. + PhD. = $3 million.” The information under this somewhat baffling heading was that statistical data showed that a student of engineering who had acquired his Doctor’s degree will earn, in a lifetime, $3 million more than a person who has only the degree of Bachelor of Sciences. As far as this is a fact it is an interesting socioeconomic datum, worth reporting. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The economic equation is mentioned because the way of expressing the fact as an equation between a scientific degree and a certain amount of dollars is indicative of the abstractifying and quantifying thinking in which knowledge is experienced as the embodiment of a certain exchange value on the personality market. It is to the same point when a political report in a news magazine states that the President Trump administration feels it has so much “capital of confidence” that it can risk some unpopular measures, because it can afford to lose some of the confidence capital. Here again, a human quality like confidence is expressed in its abstract form, as if it were a money investment to be dealt with in terms of a market speculation. How drastically commercial categories have entered even religious thinking is show in the following passage by Bishop Sheen, in an article on the birth of Christ. “Our reason tells us that if anyone of the claimants (for the role of God’s son) came from God, the least that God could do to support His Representative’s claim would be to preannounce His coming. Automobile manufacturers tell us when to expect a new model,” so writes the author. Or even more drastically, Billy Graham, the evangelists declared, “I am selling the greatest product in the World; why should not it be promoted as well as soap?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The process of abstractification, however, has still deeper roots and manifestations than the ones described so far, roots which go back to the very beginning of the modern era; to the dissolution of any concrete frame of reference in the process of life. In a primitive society, the World is identical with the tribe. The tribe is in the center of the Universe, as it were; everything outside is shadowy and has no independent existence. In the medieval World, the Universe was much wider; it was seen with the Earth as the center and mortals as the purpose of Creation. Everything had its fixed place, just as everybody had one’s fixed position in feudal society. With the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, new vistas opened up. The Earth lost its central place, and became one of the satellites of the Sun; new continents were found, new sea lanes discovered; the static social system was more and more loosened up; everything and everybody was moving. Yet, until the end of the nineteenth century, nature and society had not lost their concreteness and definiteness. Mortal’s natural and social World was still manageable, still has definite contours. However, with the progress in scientific thought, technical discoveries and the dissolution of all traditional bonds, this definiteness and concreteness is in the process of being lost. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Whether we think of our new cosmological picture, or of theoretical physics, or of atonal music, or abstract art—the concreteness and definiteness of our frame of reference is disappearing. We are not any more the center of the Universe, we are not any more the purpose of Creation, we are not any more the masters of a manageable and recognizable World—we are a speck of dust, we are a nothing, somewhere in space—without any kind of concrete relatedness to anything. We speak of millions of people being killed, of one third or more of our population being wiped out if a third World War should occur; we speak of trillions of dollars piling up as a national debt, of thousands of lights years as interplanetary distances, of interspace travel, of artificial satellites. Tens of thousands work in one enterprise, hundreds of thousands live in hundreds of cities. The dimension with which we deal are figures and abstractions; they are far beyond the boundaries which would permit of any kind of concrete experience. There is no frame of reference left in which is manageable, observable, which is adapted to human dimensions. While our eyes and ears receive impressions only in humanly manageable proportions, our concept of the World has lost just that quality; it does not any longer correspond to our human dimensions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
This is especially significant in connection with the development of modern means of destruction. In modern war, one individual can cause the destruction of hundreds of thousands of men, women, children, and animals. One could do so by pushing a button; one may not feel the emotional impact of what one is doing, since one does not know how they people whom one kills; it is almost as if one act of pushing the button or pulling the plug and their death had no real connection. The same person would probably be incapable of even cursing, not to speak of killing, a helpless person. In the latter case, the concrete situation arouses in one a conscience reaction common to all normal people; in the former, there is no such reactions, because the act and one’s object are alienated from the doer, one’s action is not that individual’s any more, but has, so to speak, a life and a responsibility of its own. Science, business, politics, have lost all foundations and proportions which make sense humanly. We live in figures and abstractions; since nothing is concrete, nothing is real. Everything is possible, factually and morally. Science fiction is not different from science fact, nightmares and dreams from the events of next year. Mortals have been thrown out from any definite place whence one can overlook and manage one’s life and the life of society. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Mortals are driven faster and faster by the forces which originally were created by them. In this wild whirl mortals thinks, figures, busy with abstractions, ore and more remote from concrete life. People used to have the ability to accept themselves, other people, and nature as they are. They did not experience extended morbid psychological guilt, anxiety, shame, anger, or chagrin. The emotions were there as they were in most people, but extreme degrees and prolongation are becoming more common. Many people are replacing their humanity with idolatry of money. Some of these people no longer enjoy eating, they think a shake, pill, or tea can adequality nourish them. Virtual intimate encounters are replacing passionate relationships. Pills and coffee and other substance are meant to replace sleep. Machines, computers, and robots are replacing workers. Physical activity is being replaced by virtual reality and medical procedures for weight loss are increasingly common. Many people are also more defensive than they should be. They are particularly disgusted by bodily functions, as they do not see them as normal and natural. They are car more about what other people might say about them and no longer seem to behave spontaneously and naturally. #RandolpHarris 14 of 19
The Existentialist point of view is being lost. Existentialism is a philosophical movement stressing individual existence and holding that mortals are totally free and responsible for their acts. The existence of mortals in their World is being put into brackets. Mortals become pure consciousness, a naked epistemological subject; the World (including mortal’s psychosomatic being) becomes an object of scientific inquiry and technical management. Mortals in their existential predicament disappear. It is, therefore, quite adequate that behind the sum lies the problem of the nature of this sum which is more than consciousness—namely existence in time and space and under the conditions of finitude and estrangement. The Existentialist point of view deals with confrontation of human sin and divine forgiveness. However, much like during the Middle Ages, some people, in this technological era are so removed from spirituality that they believe in the doctrines of justification and predestination. As children of God, we are supposed to stress the unconditional character of the divine judgment and the free character of God’s forgiveness. We are also supposed to be suspicious of any analysis of human existence, that weaken the divine-human relationship. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Reasonable management of oneself and one’s World are part of what is required in the industrial and technological era. Existence is resolved into essence. The World is reasonable as it is. Existence is a necessary expression of essence. History is the manifestation of essential being under the conditions of existence. Its course can be understood and justified. A courage which conquers the negativities of the individual life is possible for those who participate in the universal process in which the absolute mind actualizes itself. The anxieties of fate, guilt, and doubt are overcome by means of an elevation through the different degrees of meanings toward the highest, the philosophical intuition of the universal process itself. We must unite the courage to be as a part (especially of a nation) wit the courage to be as oneself (especially as a thinker) in a courage which transcends both and has a mystical background. History is not a place where the individual can reach happiness. Either the individual must elevate oneself above the universal process to the situation of the intuiting philosopher or the existential problem of the individual is not solved. Self-actualizing, authentic people often act on impulse, on the basis of wanting to. Doing something because it feels good is not quite the same as infantile gratification-seeking or compulsive behavior. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Self-actualizers experience each moment as precious and valuable, as something to be enjoyed merely because it exists. They don the cloak of conformity voluntarily and with good grace because certain conforming behaviors may be important to people who are important to and loved by these self-actualizing people, not because they care whether people will talk if they do not. Their ethics tend to be humanistic; that is, they value human life, human experience, and they define good and evil in terms of what benefits and what detracts from human happiness. “Make room for us in your hearts. We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have exploited no one. I do not say this to condemn you; I have said before that you have such a place in our hearts that we would live or die with you. I have great confidence in you; I take great pride in you. I am greatly encouraged; in all our troubles my joy knows no bounds,” reports 2 Corinthians 7.2. It is important to remain problem-centered rather than self-centered. Self-actualizing people focus their energies and attention on things outside themselves, although the opposite may seem to be the case. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
We are not mean to be seen as God’s perfect, bright-shining examples, but to been seen as the everyday essence of ordinary life exhibiting the miracle of God’s grace. People who are driven by their id are usually so hung-up on holding together a slipping sense of self-worth that one has not the time or energy for anybody else’s problems expect insofar as other people and their problems can help define one’s sense of self. Self-actualizing people have such a healthy self-appreciation and self-respect that they have time and energy to deal sincerely and genuinely with matters outside themselves. They are usually engaged in the larger issues of human experience, appear to have a goal or mission in life, and work on large-scale problems like poverty, bigotry, hostility, warfare, ecology, and so on. These individuals are Being-Motivated (or Growth-Motivated), as opposed to being Deficiency-Motivated. They express their fullness rather than attempt to fill voids. They have a sense of detachment. Self-actualizers like their own company and often enjoy privacy. Solicitude does not disturb or panic them. They can easily transcend the petty demands of environment, yet remain completely part of the World and its people. They are autonomous. B-Motivation enables these individuals to strike out on their own and to live their own lives. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
D-Motivators are busy making up for deficiencies, compensating, or engaging in futile competition. Self-actualizing people need other people, but retain the right to make important decisions autonomously. When they seek out others for company, companionship, or advice, they tend to gravitate toward others with similar motivations. Your faith in Jesus Christ gives life enduring meaning. Remember, we are on a journey to exaltation. Sometimes we have experiences that yield more happiness than others, but it all has purpose with the Lord. We are a covenant people. If there is a distinguishing feature about self-actualizers it is that we make covenants. We need to be known as a covenant-keeping people as well. Making promises is easy, but to follow through and do what we have promised is another matter. We can remain true to our word by staying to the course, being constant and consistent. We are able to keep the faith and be faithful to the end despite success or failure, doubt or discouragement. The ability to draw near the Lord is another characteristic as it fulfills our hearts. We do whatever we promise to do with all out might—even when we might not feel like it. “And charity suffers long, and is kind, and does not envy, and is not puffed up, seeks not one’s own, is not easily provoked, thinks no evil, and rejoices not in iniquity, but rejoices in truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.” reports Moroni 7.45 #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Enlightened to a Larger Pain by the Contrast with the love–Was there Ever a Society where this Miracle Happened?
I went down to meet him. The evening was all aglow and full of the scent of the kitchens of the Quarter. I motioned for the guards to let him come back. He was in a frantic state. He was wearing the same three-piece white suit as yesterday, short now open, tie gone, and he was all rumpled and smudged with dirt and his hair was mussed. Drastic changes in industrial technique, economy, and social structures have occurred in Capitalism between the nineteenth and twenty first centuries. The changes in the character of mortals are no less drastic and fundamental. Capitalism in the United States of America is not only more powerful and more advanced than in Europe, it is also the model toward which European Capitalism is developing. It is such a model not because Europe is trying to imitate it, but because it is the most progressive form of Capitalism, freed from feudal remnants and shackles. The feudal heritage has, aside from its obvious negative qualities, many human traits which, compared with the attitude produced by pure Capitalism, are exceedingly attractive. European criticism of the United States of America is based essentially on the older human values of feudalism, inasmuch as they are alive in Europe. It is a criticism of the present in the name of a past which is rapidly disappearing in Europe itself. The difference between Europe and the United States of America in this respect is only the difference between an older and a newer phase of Capitalism, between Capitalism stilled blended with feudal remnants and a pure form of it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The most obvious change from the nineteenth to the twenty first century is the increased use of steam engine, of the combustion motor, of electricity, the use of atomic energy, ethanol, and solar power. The development is characterized by the increasing replacement of manual work by machine work, and beyond that, of human intelligence by machine intelligence. While in 1850 mortals supplied 15 percent of the energy for work, animals 79 percent, and machines 6 percent, the ratio in 2019 is 3 percent, 1 percent and 96 percent respectively. In the twenty first century we find an increasing tendency to employ automatically regulated machines which have their own brains, and which bring about a fundamental change in the whole process of production. The technical change in the mode of production is caused by, and in its turn necessitates, an increasing concentration of capital. The decrease in number and importance of smaller firms is in direct proportion to the increase of big economic colossi. Currently, of the 2,400 independent American corporations covering most stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange, 30 companies control 47 percent of the assets of all the companies represented. Many of the largest nonbanking corporations control a vast majority of all the nonbanking corporate wealth. For instance, respectively 200 companies could control 300,000 smaller companies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
It must further be remembered that the influence of one of these huge companies extends far beyond the assets under its direct control. Smaller companies which sell to or buy from the larger companies are likely to be influenced by them to a vastly greater extent than by other smaller companies with which they might deal. In many cases the continued prosperity of the smaller company depends on the favor of the larger and almost inevitably the interests of the latter become the interests of the former. The influence of the larger company on prices is often greatly increased by its mere size, even though it does not begin to approach a monopoly. Its political influence may be tremendous. Therefore, if roughly half of the corporations and smaller companies it is fair to assume that very much more than half of industry is dominated by these great units. This concentration is made even more significant when it is recalled that a result of it, approximately 3,250 individuals out of a population of three hundred and twenty-five million are in a position to control and direct most of the American wealth and industry. This concentration of power has been growing since 1933, and has yet to stop. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The number of self-employed entrepreneurs has decreased considerably. While in the beginning of the nineteenth century approximately 80 percent of the occupied population were self-employed entrepreneurs, around 42 percent are now incorporated in this category. The eleven largest companies in America employ 20.18 million people. As these figure already indicate, with the concentration of enterprises goes an enormous increase of employees in these big enterprises. Altogether, nearly 50 percent of the United States of America’s population is middle class, 25 percent of American household are considered low income. With the increase in the importance of the giant enterprises, another development of utmost importance has occurred: the increasing separation of management from ownership. Another fundamental change from the nineteenth-century to contemporary Capitalism is the increase in significance of the domestic market. Our whole economic machines rests upon the principle of mass production and mass consumption. While in the nineteenth century the general tendency was to save, and not to indulge in expenses which could not be paid for immediately, the contemporary system is exactly the opposite. Everybody is coaxed into buying as much as one can, and before one has saved enough to pay for one’s purchases. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
The need for more consumption is strongly stimulated by advertising and all other methods of psychological pressure. This development does hand in hand with the rise of the economic and social status of the working class. Especially in the United States of America, but all over Europe, the working class has participated in the increased production of the whole economic system. The salary of the worker, and one’s social benefits, permit one a level of consumption which would have seemed fantastic one hundred and fifty-six years ago. One’s social and economic power has increased to the same degree and this not only with regard to salary and social benefits, but also to one’s human and social role in the factory. The disappearance of feudal factors means the disappearance of irrational authority. Nobody is supposed to be higher than one’s neighbor by birth, God’s will, natural law. Everybody is equal and free. Nobody may be exploited or commanded by virtue of a natural right. If one person is commanded by another, it is because the commanding one bought the labor or the services of the commanded one, on the labor market; one commands because they are both free and equal and thus could enter into a contractual relationship. However, with irrational authority—rational authority became obsolete, too. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
If the market and the contract regulates relationships, there is no need to know what is right and what is wrong and good and evil. All that is necessary is to known that things are fair—that the exchange is fair, and that things work—that they function. Another decisive fact which the twenty first century mortal experiences is the miracle of production. One commands forces thousands of times stronger than the ones nature ad given them before; steam, oil, electricity, have become their servants and beasts of burden. One crosses the oceans, the continents—first in weeks, then in days, now in hours and even minutes. One seemingly overcomes the law of gravity, and files through the air one converts deserts into fertile land, makes rain instead of praying for it. The miracle of production leads to the miracle of consumption. No more traditional barriers keep anyone from buying anything one takes a fancy to. One only needs to have the money. However, more and more people have the money—not for genuine pearls perhaps, but for the synthetic ones; there are even ethically sourced diamonds created in laboratories; people buy Fords that look like Cadillacs, for the affordable dress which look like the expensive ones, for cigarettes which are the same for millionaires and for the working person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Everything is within reach, can be bought, can be consumed. Where was there ever a society where this miracle happened? Mortals work together. Millions stream into the industrial plants and the offices—they come in cars, airplanes, helicopters, in subways, in buses, in trains—they work together, according to a rhythm measured by the experts, with methods worked out by the experts, not too fast, not too slow, but together; each a part of the whole. The evening stream flows back: they read the same newspaper, they listen to the radio, they see the movies, the same for those on the top and for those at the bottom of the ladder, for the intelligent and the less advances, for the educated and those still learning. Produce, consume, enjoy together, in step, without asking questions. That is the rhythm of their lives. What kind of mortal, then does our society need? Wat is the social character suited to twenty-first-century Capitalism? It needs mortals who co-operate smoothly in large groups; who want to consume more and more, and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs mortals who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority, or principle, or conscience—yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected, to fit into the social machine without friction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
How can mortals be guided without force, led without leaders, be prompted without any aim—expect the one to be on the move, to function, to go ahead? Let us approach this from the point of what we do when we live our lives. Each of us is born to certain situations or statuses in one’s life. Attached to each of these, whether we are born to them or whether we acquire them as we grow, is a set of behaviors that go with the statuses. People expect certain things, say, from a teacher, a carpenter, a doctor, a welder. Those things we expect from them makes up the roles of social interaction. Among the many things we do, then, is to perform certain expected behaviors. The authentic, fully functioning, self-actualizing person is one who plays those roles to the best of one’s ability and gets personal satisfaction from doing it. One tires to concentrate on playing only the roles that are consistent with who one is. That is, the healthy person is one who is able to sort out the various roles one may play, select for concentrating on those that are personally meaningful to one and expressive of one’s selfhood, and act out the role behavior well and satisfyingly. However, what about those roles this healthy person gets stuck with? What happens, for example, when such a guy—call him Justin—discovers that he has gotten this girl—Jill—pregnant? What about the situation if they decide to marry? #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Already there are two new positions being forced on them, spouse and parent, and the roles will be forced on them, too. Our answers may seem callous, but let us explore this situation. Justin and Jill are human beings. As such, they have certain potential and actual skills. Thinking, reasoning, logic, and prediction are some of these skills, as well as loving, kissing and passion of physical intimacy. In many cases spontaneous pregnancies are more conscious than either party is willing to admit. Psychologists know, for instance, that many times young ladies will forget to take their birth patrol pills or other precautions before the physical intimacy. Some are unconsciously motivated to force a married or to get back at parents. Some are indulging in self-defeating behavior. However, mature, self-actualizing people like Justin and Jill are aware of the outcomes of their behavior and able to involve themselves with these outcomes to follow through pretty healthily with their involvements. Sometimes there is an understandable amount of disappointment or self-criticism, but the decision to accept the role they now find facing them is usually taken with a healthy degree of good humor. The decision the couple makes may be not to marry or to seek some other solution. However, the important thing is the decisions involve the fullest, most authentic engagement of the persons and their experiences. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Another way of saying this is that self-actualizing people enjoy the novelty and challenge of different situations. Even critical situations like surprises bundles of joy can be opportunities for growth and chances to display fullest selfhood. After all, life is much more than play-acting. It involves a constant round of choice-making experiences. The self-actualizing person tries to live an authentic, fully aware life, by dealing realistically and honestly with oneself, others, and the decisions one makes. How can this be done? How can a person be authentic, real and unpretentious when for much of one’s childhood one is taught to be otherwise? In the absence of a wholesale change of social attitudes to encourage authenticity, the only hope at present apparently is possessed n the freedom of the person to become more fully what one is. Suppose a person does not know he or she is free? Most of us do not. We get caught up in the bag of thinking of ourselves as determined by something—biology, destiny, God, culture—and one of the most difficult things to do is to convince someone that one is a free, moral agent, that one can live one’s life in one’s own terms, that one has choices which may be hidden but which are nonetheless freely his or hers. If a person will conscientiously study one’s own life, one’s choices, one’s preferences, one will find, we believe, that a startling amount of what one has done is one’s own thing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Most of one’s preferences, one will find, are products of one’s value systems; thus preferences are automatic choices as unique to an individual as one’s value system are. To believe otherwise is to deny the richness and variability of life and to limit one’s freedom to make choices based on one’s individual character. The trick is, of course, to enable a person to develop and operate on the basis of one’s own value system. The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. Existential in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one’s existence. This includes temporal, spatial, historical, psychological, sociological, biological conditions. And it includes the finite freedom which reacts to these conditions and changes them. An existential knowledge is a knowledge in which these elements, and therefore the whole existence of one who knows, participate. This seems to contradict the necessary objectivity of the cognitive act and the demand for detachment. However, knowledge depends on its object. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
There are realms of reality or—more exactly—of abstraction from reality in which the most complete detachment is the adequate cognitive approach. Everything which can be expressed in terms of quantitative measurement has this character. However, it is most inadequate to apply the same approach to reality in its infinite concreteness. A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing. You must participate in a self in order to know what it is. However, by participating you change it. In all existential knowledge both subject and object are transformed by the very act of knowing existential knowledge is based on an encounter in which a new meaning is created and recognized. The knowledge of another person, the knowledge of history, the knowledge of a spiritual creation, religious knowledge—all have existential character. This does not exclude theoretical objectivity on the basis of detachment. However, it restricts detachment to one element within the embracing act of cognitive participation. You may have a precise detached knowledge of another person, one’s psychological type and one’s calculable reactions, but in knowing this you do not know the person, one’s centered self, one’s knowledge of oneself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Only in participating in oneself, in performing an existential break-through into the center of one’s being, will you know one in the situation of your break-through to one. This is the first meaning of existential, namely existential as the attitude of participating with one’s own existence in some other existence. The other meaning of existential designates a content and not an attitude. It points to a special form of philosophy: to Existentialism. We have to deal with it because it is the expression of the most radical form of the courage to be as oneself. However, before going into it we must show why both an attitude and a content are described with words which are derived from the same word, “existence.” The existential attitude and the Existentialist content have in common an interpretation of the human situation which conflicts with a nonexistential interpretation. The latter assets that mortals are able to transcend, in knowledge and life, the finitude, the estrangement, and the ambiguities of human existence. The right thing to do with Godly habits is to immerse them in the life of the Lord until they become such a spontaneous expression of our lives that we are no longer aware of them. Love means that there are no visible habits—that your habits are so immersed in the Lord that you practice them without realizing it. “You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God,” reports 2 Corinthians 9.11. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
An existential attitude instigates a philosophy of existence. The knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern, in an existential attitude. At the same time there is a doctrine of mortals which describes the estrangement of mortals from their essential nature in terms of anxiety and despair. Mortals in the existential situation of finitude and estrangement can reach truth only in an existential attitude. Mortals have no place of pure objectivity above finitude and estrangement. One’s cognitive function is as existentially conditioned as one’s whole being. This is the connection of the two meanings of existential. Sometimes it is also important for us to understand that dream figures are like Angels. They look human, but their World is the realm of imagination, where the natural and moral laws of actual life are suspended. “Now if a mortal desired to serve God, it is one’s privilege; or rather, if one believes in God it is one’s privilege to serve him; but if one does not believe in God there was no law to punish one,” reports Alma 30.7. However, God will lead you directly through every barrier and right into the chamber of the knowledge of himself. The proof that our relationship is right with God is that we do our best whether we feel inspired or not. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
No matter how difficult something you or a loved one faces, is should not take over your life and be the center of all your interest. Challenges are growth experiences, temporary scenes to be played out on the background of a pleasant life. Do not become so absorbed in a single event that you cannot think of anything else or care for yourself or for those who depend on your. Remember, much like the mending of the body, the healing of some spiritual and emotional challenges takes time. The Lord wants us to be patient in afflictions, for we shall have many; but endure them for he is with us until the end. As we are patient, we will come to understand what the statement, “I am with thee” thee means. God’s love brings joy and peace. “Cannot take a step, then take my hand. If you love me, you will wait. Something up ahead, just do not be scared. If you love me, stay with me. More than a life of this panic. If you love me, you will wait for me. Our dream will not surely be forgotten. If you love me, just stay with me. If you need another love song just tell me, I can write it. If you need another spaceship, just tell me, I can find it,” reports Steve Brain (Wait for Me). It is love that finds the body and in human relationship a route toward eternity. May every blessing find you. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Randolph Harris II International Institute 