And so down the long centuries it comes down to this. Was it you, you traitor to everything the believed? It had to be, did it not? You petty deserter. May God forgive you that you made peace with your enemy. Did you lead them here by the hand yourself? You made are people as hard as ice, that is what you did. Frozen solid. If there is a soul left in them, I cannot feel it. But what do I know? Humans really should be called the valuator. No people could live without first valuing; if a people will maintain itself, however, it must not value as its neighbor valueth. The existence of a very general attitude toward experience, of a sort that disposes toward complexity of outlook, independence of judgment, and originality, has been suggested by the result of the studies. Valuing is created; hear it, ye creating ones! Valuation itself is the treasure and jewel of the valued things. Through valuation only is there value; and without valuation the soul of existence would be hollow. Hear it, ye creating ones! Individuals who refuse to yield to strong pressure from their peers to concur in a false group opinion described themselves, on an adjective check-list, as original and artistic much more frequently than do subjects who yielded to such group pressure. In addition, the independent (nonyielding) subjects show a definite preference for complex and asymmetrical line drawings, as opposed to simple and symmetrical drawings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

 This preference for the complex and asymmetrical has been show previously to be highly correlated both with the choice of art as a vocation and with rated artistic ability among art students. Furthermore, in a sample of Ph.D. candidates in the sciences, preferences for the complex and asymmetrical figures proved to be significantly related to rated originality in graduate work. This relationship was found among graduating medical school seniors who were rated for originality be the medical school faculty. Other evidence indicated that the opposed preferences, for complexity or for simplicity, were related to a generalized experiential disposition: the preference for complexity is associated with a perceptual attitude that seeks to allow into the perceptual system the greatest possible richness of experience, even though discord and disorder result, while the preference for simplicity is associated with a perceptual attitude that allows into the system only as much as can be integrated without great discomfort and disorder, even though this means excluding some aspects of reality. From all these considerations, certain hypotheses as to the characteristics of original persons were derived and put to the test in the present study. Hypothesis one is that original persons prefer complexity and some degree of apparent imbalance in phenomena. The second hypothesis is that original persons are more complex psychodynamically and have greater personal scope.  #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The third hypothesis is that original persons are more independent in their judgments, and the fourth hypothesis is that original persons are more self-assertive and dominant. The fifth hypothesis is that original persons reject suppression as a mechanism for the control of impulse. This would imply that they forbid themselves fewer thoughts, that they dislike to police themselves or others, that they are disposed to entertain impulses and ideas that are commonly taboo, and in general that they express in their person the sort of indiscipline that psychoanalytic theory would ascribe to a libidinal organization in which derivatives of the early anal rather than of the late anal stage in which psychosexual development predominate. What is common to both rational and irrational authority is that it is overt authority. You know who orders and forbids; the father, the teacher, the boss, the king, the officer, the priest, God, the law, the moral conscience. The demands or prohibitions may be reasonable or not, strict or lenient, I may obey or rebel; I always know that there is an authority, who it is, what it wants, and what results from my compliance or my rebellion. Thus the ability to respond in an unusual or original manner will be greatest when freedom is great. Now freedom is related in a very special manner to degree and kind of organization. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

In general, organization in company with complexity generates freedom; the more complex the level of integration, the greater is the repertoire of adaptive responses. However, the tendency toward organization may operate in such a fashion as to maintain a maladaptive simplicity. We are familiar in the political sphere with totalitarian stats which depend upon suppression to achieve unity; such states are psychodynamically similar to the neurotic individual who suppresses one’s own impulses and emotions in order to maintain a semblance of stability. There are at hand enough case histories of both such organizations, political and private, to make it clear that the sort of unity and balance that depends upon total suppression of the claims of minority affects opinions is maladaptive in the long run. Suppression is a common way of achieving unity, however, because in the short run it often seems to work. Increasing complexity puts a strain upon an organism’s ability to integrate phenomena. One solution of the difficulty is to inhibit development of the greater level of complexity and thus to avoid the temporary disintegration that would otherwise have resulted. Originality, then flourishes where suppression is at a minimum and where some measure of disintegration is tolerable in the interests of a higher level of integration which may yet be reached. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

If we consider the case of a human being who develops strongly the disposition toward originality, we must posit certain personal characteristics and personal history which facilitated the development of such a disposition. In our hypotheses, the term dominance was used to describe one trait of the regularly original individual. Dominance may be translated as a strong need for personal mastery, not merely over other persons, but over all experience. It initially involves self-centeredness (which in its socialized form may come to be known as self-realization). One aspect of it is the insistence on a high degree of self-regulation, and a rejection of regulation by others. For such a person, the most crucial development crisis in relation to control of impulse comes, if we accept the psychoanalytic formulation of stages of psychosexual development, at the anal stage of socialization. At this level one learns independence is important and necessary, as well as toilet training and to keep one’s clothes clean. What our hypotheses have suggested is that there is a beneficial rebellion against the prohibition of unregulated anal production, and a carrying of the derivatives of anal indiscipline into adult life. The original person, in adulthood, thus often likes things messy, at least at first. The tendency is toward a final order, but the necessary preliminary is as bis a mess as possible. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Viewed developmentally, the rejection of externally imposed control at the anal stage is later generalized to all external control of impulse, with the tendency toward socially unlicensed phallic activity, or phallic exhibitionism in its more derivative forms, being simply another expression of the general rejection of regulation of impulse by others, in favor of regulation of impulse by oneself. The disposition toward originality may thus be seen as a highly organized mode of responding to experience, including other persons, society, and oneself. The socially disrated traits that may go along with it include rebelliousness, disorderliness, and exhibitionism, while the socially valued traits which accompany it include independence of judgment, freedom of expression, and novelty of construction and insight. Every act has an infinite number of deterministic elements in it, to be sure, but at the moment of personal decision something occurs which is not just the product of these conditioning forces. A man, for example, is confronted with a picket line as he arrives to board a steamer for a trip to fill a speaking engagement. The strike, say, is one which the issue of justice is far from simple, as in the recent disputes in the New York harbor between two stevedore unions. The man is confronted with what for him, let us assume, is a strong ethical issue—shall he cross the picket line? #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The man may endeavor by countless means to determine the justice of the strike, to weigh his own needs to take the trip, or alternate means of transportation. However, the point of decision to board the ship or not, he draws himself together and assumes the risk in his decision. This risk will be present no matter which way he decides. The action, like a dive into water, is done by the person as a whole or not at all. To be sure we are speaking in somewhat ideal terms; many persons would tend to act by a rule—I never cross picket lines,” or “The hell with strikers”—and to rationalize out of the responsibility this way or that. However, to the extent that the person is able to fulfill his human capacities in any action—that is, to choose in self-awareness—he makes the decision as a relative unity. This element of unity does not arise merely out of the integration of his personality—though the more mature he is, the more will he be able to act in this way. Rather, it arises from the fact that any action chosen in self-awareness is a placing of oneself on the line as it were; it involves a commitment, to a greater or lesser extent a leap. It is as though one were saying, “To the best of my lights at the moment this is what I choose to do, even thought I may know more and choose differently tomorrow.” The person’s act of choosing itself throws a new element into the picture. The configuration is changed, if ever so slightly; someone has thrown his weight on one side or the others. This is the creative and the dynamic element in decision. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

As everyone knows, a person is influenced in a multitude of ways by unconscious forces. However, it is often overlooked that conscious decisions, if they are soundly and not precipitately or defiantly made, can change the direction in which unconscious forces push. This is illustrated most fascinatingly in drams in therapeutic sessions when a person as been struggling for months to make the decision, let us say, to leave home and get a job on one’s own. During these months one’s dreams have been roughly equally on the pro and con side of the issue, some dreams warning one to stay home, others saying it is better to go. One finally makes the decision to leave and one’s dreams suddenly become strongly on the optimistic side, as if the conscious decision releases some unconscious power likewise. It seems that there are potentialities within us for healthy which are not released until we make a conscious decision. Allegorically, the individual’s decision is like that of the Israelites in their battle against the army of Sisera: “the stars in their courses fought Sisera,” but not until the Israelites decided to fight, too. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

An ethical act, then, must be an action chosen and affirmed by the person doing it, and act which is an expression of one’s inward motives and attitudes. It is honest and genuine in that it would be affirmed in one’s dreams as well as one’s waking thoughts. Thus an ethical mortal does not act on the conscious levels as though one loves someone when on unconscious levels one hates the individual. To be sure, no integrity is perfect; all human actions have some ambivalence, and no motives are entirely pure. An ethical action does not mean one must act as a completely unified person—with no doubts at all—or one would never act. One will always have struggle, doubt, conflict. It means only that one has endeavored to act as nearly as possible from the center of oneself, that one admits and is aware of the fact that one’s motives are not completely clear and assumes responsibility for making them clearer as one learns in the future. In this emphasis on inner motives in ethical acts, the findings of modern psychotherapy and the ethical teachings of Jesus have their clearest parallel. For the essential point in Jesus’ ethics was his shifting the emphasis from the external rules of the Ten Commandments to inward motives. Out of the heart are the issues of life. The ethical issues of life, he held, are not simply “thou shalt not kill,” but rather are inward attitudes toward other persons—anger, resentment, exploitative lust in the heart, railings, jealousies, and so on. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

The wholeness of the mortal whose external actions are at one with one’s inner motives is what is meant by the expression in beatitudes, the pure in heart. Purify your hearts, ye double-minded! Some persons will be frightened by the freedom in such an ethics of inwardness, and made anxious by the responsibility which this places on each mortal’s decisions. They may yearn for the rules, the absolutes, the rigid ancient law, which relieves us of this fearful burden of free choice. And in the longing for a rule, one might protest, your ethics of inward motives and personal decision lead to anarchy—everyone can then act as one wishes! However, freedom cannot be avoided by such an argument. For what is honest and true for a given person is not totally dissimilar from what is true for others. Dr. Tillich has stated that “the principles which constitute the Universe must be sought in mortals,” and the converse is true, that what is found in mortal’s experience is to some extent a reflection of what is true in the Universe. This can be clearly illustrated in art. A picture is never beautiful if it is not honest, and to the extent that it is honest, that is, represents the immediate, deep and original perceptions and experience of the artist, it will have at least the beginnings of beauty. This is why the art work of children, when it is an expression of their simple and honest feelings, is almost always beautiful: any line one make as a free, spontaneous person will have it in the beginning of grace and rhythm. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

The harmony, balance and rhythm which are principles of the Universe, present in the movement of stars as well as atoms, and underlying our concepts of beauty, are likewise present in the harmony of rhythm and balance of the body as well as other aspects of the self. However, at the moment the child begins to copy, or to draw to get praise from adults, or to draw by rules, the lines become rigid, constricted, and the grace vanishes. The truth in the inner light tradition in religious history is that one must always begin with oneself. No one has known God who has not known oneself—fly to the soul, the secret place of the Most High. Relating this truth, each individual is one’s own center, and the entire World centers in one, because one’s self-knowledge is a knowledge of God. This is not the whole story of ethics and the good life, but certainly if we do not start there we will get no place. The religious and philosophical development after the end of the Middle Ages is too complex to be treated within the present volume. It can be characterized by the struggle between two principles: the Christian, spiritual tradition in theological or philosophical forms and the pagan tradition of idolatry and inhumanity that assumed many forms in the development of what might be called the religious of industrialism and the cybernetic era. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Following the tradition of the Late Middle Ages, the humanism of the Renaissance was the first great flowering of the religious spirit after the end of the Middle Ages. The ideas of human dignity, of the unity found in it an unencumbered expression. The seventeenth—and eighteenth-century Enlightenment expressed another great flowering of humanism. If we examine the foundation of this faith, we find that at every turn the Philosophers betrayed their debt to medieval thought without being aware of it. The French Revolution, to which Enlightenment philosophy had given birth, was more than a political revolution. It was a political revolution which functioned in the manner and which took on in some sense the aspect of a religious revolution. Like Islamism and the Protestant revolt it overflowed the frontiers of countries and nations and was extended by preaching and propaganda. Radical humanism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is descried later on, in my discussion of the humanist protest against the paganism of the industrial age. However, to provide a base for that discussion we must now look at the new paganism that has developed side by side with humanism, threatening at the present moment of history to destroy us. The change that prepared the first basis for the development of the industrial religion was the elimination, by Martin Luther, of the motherly element in the church. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Although it may appear an unnecessary detour, I must dwell on this problem for a while, because it is important to our understanding of the development of the new religion and the new social character. Societies have been organized according to two principles: patricentric (or patriarchal) and matricentric (or matriarchal). The matricentric principle is centered in the figure of the loving mother. The motherly principle is that of unconditional love; the mother loves her children not because they please her, but because they are her (or another woman’s) children. For this reason the mother’s love cannot be acquired by good behavior, nor can it be lost by sinning. Motherly love is mercy and compassion (in Hebrew rachamim, the root of which is rechem, the womb”). Fatherly love, on the contrary, is conditional; it depends on the achievements and good behavior of the child; father loves that child most who is like him, for instance, whom he wishes to inherit his property. Father’s love can be lost, but it can also be regained by repentance and renewed submission. Father’s love is justice. The two principles, the feminine-motherly and the masculine-fatherly, correspond not only to the presence of a masculine and feminine side in any human being but specifically to the need for mercy and justice in every man and woman. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their antagonism and, instead, color each other. While such a synthesis cannot be fully reached in a patriarchal society, it existed to some extent in the Roman Church. The Virgin, the church as the all-loving mother, the pope and the priest as motherly figures represented motherly, unconditional, all-forgiving love, side by side with the fatherly elements of a strict, patriarchal bureaucracy with the pope at the top ruling by power. Corresponding to these motherly elements in the religious system was the relationship toward nature in the process of production: the work of the peasant as well as of the artesian was not a hostile exploitative attack against nature. It was cooperation with nature: not destructive but transforming nature according to its own laws. Martin Luther established a purely patriarchal form of Christianity in Northern European that was based on the urban middle class and the secular princes. The essence of this new social character is submission under patriarchal authority, with work as the only way to obtain love and approval. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Behind the Christian façade arose a new secret religion, industrial religion, that is rooted in the character structure of modern society, but is not recognized as religion. The industrial religion is completely incompatible with genuine Christianity. It reduces people to servants of the economy and of the machinery that their own hands build. The industrial religion had its basis in a new social character. Its center was fear of and submission to powerful male authorities, cultivation of the sense of guilt for disobedience, dissolution of the bonds of human solidarity by the supremacy of self-interest and mutual antagonism. The sacred in industrial religion was work, property, profit, power, even though it furthered individualism and freedom within the limits of its general principles. By transforming Christianity into a strictly patriarchal religion it was still possible to express the industrial religion in Christian terminology. How do we learn to mistrust our anger and pass this mistrust on from one generation to another? After all, the idea that anger has a legitimate and inevitable place in life has been stated many times before. Yet the suppression of anger remains an actual, though sometimes disavowed, ideal for most of us. Our mistrust of our anger is learned, of course. And we learn it because it is taught to us. And the teaching begins early. Even small babies are frequently punished for angry behavior and rewarded for behavior that is more pleasing to the parents. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

As the child grows older, the training becomes more specific and explicit. The child is told not to express anger toward parents, or brothers and sisters, or others. He is taught that anger is bad and that it is bad because it is the opposite of love. Most parents are too sophisticated these days to say, “If you get angry with me, it means you do not love me.” Or: “If you get mad at me, I will not love you any more.” Or: “If you do something, and I get angry with you, it means I do not love you.” However, despite our intellectual sophistication about these matters, we still give them because we are not so sure that they are not true. This is probably the most important way in which the ideal of the suppression of anger is maintained in our culture. A perpetual cycle is set up. We, as parents, having been subtly indoctrinated as children, cannot accept within ourselves the anger that we all experience. Our inclination is to avoid admitting our anger and dealing directly with our guilt about it. It is much easier for us to recognize and condemn the anger we see in our children. So when our children express anger toward us, we react quickly to their talking back or smarting off. The anger we express under these circumstances is, of course, justified because we are doing it for the good of the child and to teach one a lesson. In other words, we have been righteously indignant. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

Our children, then, through many of these experiences, come to feel guilty about their anger when they feel it and more so when they express it. In order to please us and society they may try to suppress entirely this evil side of their nature. Unless the continuing cycle is interrupted, they, too, will eventually become parents well prepared to teach their children to mistrust their feelings of anger. Another reason we learn to mistrust our anger is that we often have little opportunity to learn as children that we can be very angry without being dangerous. Often the only message the child hears is that if he or she becomes angry the outcome is likely to be disastrous. He is apt, for example, to understand that if one becomes angry with the boy next door one is liable to be in danger of being harmed. Under these circumstances one has little opportunity to learn that one can express anger directly and openly without the necessity of resorting to harmful violence. One frightening reality is that there is indeed danger when a person has been encouraged to view oneself along these extreme lines, so that one says of oneself, “If I do not keep my anger suppressed, I am likely to hurt someone.” When the emotional overload of anger eventually piles up beyond the point where is can be suppressed, such a person is not prepared to act any way but violently, with the flood of backed-up emotion suddenly released. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Children also learn to mistrust their feelings of anger because their parents make it apparent that they are afraid of their own anger. Some parents go to great lengths to avoid letting the children see them fight. They feel so frightened and guilty about their anger that they assume it would be very frightening and emotionally damaging to their children for them to witness their parents in a heated argument. What the children often witness are sullen silences between their parents that are probably frightening to the child because one has no idea what they are about and yet sense the anger. The child often interprets these silences as much more serious breaches between the parents than they actually are. And when the child does happen to overhear a fight between the parents (perhaps without their knowledge), it may seem as though the family is disintegrating, since one has been taught by word and implication that anger is a cataclysmic and catastrophic occurrence in human relationships. However, even if the parents were successful in hiding all their disagreements, the results would probably still be harmful; for the child would be likely to feel even more guilty and frightened about one’s own anger when one has no opportunity to observe similar feelings in one’s parents’ dealings with each other. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

On the other hand, when parents make little or no attempt to hide their anger from their children, but have not learned to fight creatively, it is certain to be frightening to the children. Such fights lead nowhere. Perhaps when the argument begins, dad stomps out of the hose or mother withdraws behind a bitter wall of silence. Or perhaps the fighting degenerates into an incessant bickering back and forth that fails to clarify the real issues. The fears that keep the parents from dealing creatively with their anger are almost certain to infect the child under such circumstances. For the child has been denied the opportunity to see those one loves dealing openly and realistically with anger. One as not been able to witness one’s parents in a natural ebb and flow of anger openly and directly expressed, resulting in relief of tension, clearing of the air, and the good feeling of having been oneself, followed by the reassertion of their deep affection also being expressed openly and directly. “But behold, my limbs did receive their strength again, and I stood upon my feet, and did manifest unto the people that I had been born of God,” reports Alma 36.23. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

It was an engine of great and continuous healing. However, what drew her through the World were project yet unrevealed for which she had the wealth, the knowledge, the laserlike vision, the nerve and the personal energy. Some people tend characteristically to isolate affect and avoid psychological self-examination; they tend to be strangers in their own life. This, indeed, has implications for social communities as well as individuals, inasmuch as it suggests that the organization that fosters prejudice might well be forfeiting the kind of emotional flexibility that is necessary if time of crisis it is to cure its own ills. Everyone alive has troubles and problems, and as we learned from our studies of sound individuals, the most important consideration in determining personal effectiveness is not the amount of trouble or misfortune (within limits) a person encounters, but how one responds to the vicissitudes and challenges of life. This capacity to meet problems without being dismayed or overwhelmed, to endure suffering and face great loss without foundering, is an aspect of psychological strength and vitality that deserves special study. Believe it or not there are people who envy the mental salubrity of psychoneurotic patients who are about to improve. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

That is because the greater vividness of psychopathology often tends to obscure the egosynthetric or constructive forces in the behavior of a psychologically disturbed individual, so that a prognostic evaluation is generally more difficult to make than a diagnostic evaluation. From time to time, people give in to madness as if it were strong drink, drawing in memories of guilt, all judgment and sense of proportion last, murmuring confessions of unworthiness and half-explored plots of escape that would seal them off from all expectations. Nevertheless, in spite of the saliency of psychopathology in the clinical picture, it may be presumed that the patient has certain latent strengths which will gradually show themselves, particularly as the psychological crisis that brings one to therapy subsides. What the item content of the prediction generally ascribed to a well-functioning ego, ad that latent egostrength is the most important determinant (within the patient) of response to brief psychotherapy. At precious moments people regard their sanity as their State of Grace, and the therapist is the Demon who has brought them back to it. Another tendency which is nourished by religious dependency is that of getting one’s feeling of worth, prestige and power through identifying with someone else. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

This usually takes form of identifying with an idealized figure of minister, priest, rabbi, bishop, or whoever above one in the hierarchy as prestige and power. Again this tendency is not confined to religion; it is present in business, politics and other aspects of community life. It is a regular phenomenon in psychotherapy called transference, and shows itself, among other ways, in the patient’s needing to build the therapist up and to get the prestige from the fact that the therapist is well known. However, in therapy it is regarded as a problem to be eventually worked though so that the individual will come to see one’s therapist as the real person one is, and obtain one’s own feelings of worth and prestige from one’s own activities rather than the therapist’s. This tendency in religion seems to rest on a deeper level than in some other areas of social living. It of course receives reinforcement from deteriorated interpretations of vicarious suffering and atonement. It is as though everyone were trying to live vicariously through someone else, until no one knows where he or she him or herself is. It is amazing how easily the Christian teaching of love can deteriorate into everyone’s agreeing, “If you take responsibility for me, I will for you.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

The neurotic uses of religion have one thing in common: they are devices by which the individual avoids having to face one’s loneliness and anxiety. God is made into a cosmic papa. Religion in this form is a rationalization for covering up the realization—a realization which contains a good deal of terror for those who take it seriously—that the human beings is in the depths of one’s self basically alone, and that there is no recourse from the necessity of making one’s choices ultimately alone. However, if the need to escape terror and loneliness are the main motives for turning to God, one’s religion will not help one toward maturity or strength; and it will not even give one security in the long run. Despair and anxiety can never be worked through until one confronts them in their stark and fully reality. Tis truth is obviously just as valid psychologically. Maturity and eventual overcoming of loneliness are possible only as one courageously accepts one’s aloneness to begin with. It often occurs to me that the reason Dr. Freud was able to work with such courage and unswerving purpose throughout the last forty years of his life was that he won the battle of being able to grow and work alone in the first solitary ten years, when, after he had separated from Dr. Breuer, he pursued his explorations into psychoanalysis with neither colleague nor co-worker. Dr. Freud was so prolific that many believed he was a prophet of the Lord. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

It seems to me, further, that what Dr. Freud went through is the battle the creative ethical figures like Jesus win in the wilderness, that the real meaning of the temptations with which Jesus wrestled was not in the desire for bread or power, but in the temptation, as put in the words of the Devil in the story, to throw himself down from the mountain to prove that God was protecting him: He will give his Angels charge of you; they will bear you on their hands, lest you strike your foot against a stone. When one has been able to say “No” to the need that one be “borne up,” when, in other words, one is able not to demand one be taken care of, when one has the courage to stand alone, one can then speak as one with authority. And did not Spinoza’s refusing to flee from excommunication by his church and community mean his winning the same inner battle of integrity, the same struggle for the power not to be afraid of aloneness, without which the noble Ethics, certainly one of the great works of all tie, could not have been written? “So powerful was the Spirit of God; and thus it had wrought upon them” reports 1 Nephi 17.52. The person knows that virtue is happiness, not a claim check for it; the love of God is its own reward, and beauty and truth are to be loved because they are good, and not because they will redound to the credit of the artist or scientist or philosopher who loves them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Spinoza of course does not at all mean to imply the martyr-like, sacrificial, masochistic attitude for which his sentence might be mistake. He rather is stating in its most unequivocal form the basic characteristic of the objective, mature, creative person (in hos words the blessed and joyful person), namely the capacity to love something for its own sake, not for the sake of being taken care of or gaining a counterfeit feeling of prestige and power. Certainly loneliness and anxiety can be constructively met. Though this cannot be done through the deus ex machina of a cosmic papa, it can be achieved through the individual’s conforming directly the various crises of one’s development, moving from dependence to greater freedom and higher integration by developing and utilizing one’s capacities, and relation to one’s fellows through creative work and love. This does not imply that there is no such thing as authority in religion or any other field. It does not imply that the question of authority should first be put the other way around, that is, as the question of personal responsibility. For authoritarianism (the neurotic form of authority) grows in direct proportion to the degree in which the individual is trying to avoid responsibility for meeting one’s problems one’s self. In therapy, for example, it is precisely the times when the patient feels some special or overpowering anxiety that one seeks to make an authority of the therapist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

And the fact that at these times one tends to identify the therapist with God and one’s parent presents another proof for the contention above: that one is searching for someone to whom one can hand one’s self over for care. Fortunately it is not difficult to demonstrate that the therapist is not God—and it is a red-letter day in a patient’s therapy when one discovers this fact and is not frightened. Instead of trying to argue with one’s self or others on the merits of various authorities, therefore, it is better initially to confront one’s self, in self-scrutiny, with the question: “What anxiety makes me now wish to run to the wings of an authority, and what problem of my own am I trying to evade?” The upshot of this discussion is that religion is constructive as it strengthens the person in one’s own dignity and worth, assists one in one’s confidence that one can affirm values in life, and helps one in the use and development of one’s own ethical awareness, freedom and personal responsibility. Thus religious faith or practices like prayer cannot be called good or bad in themselves. The question is, rather, how much one’s freedom, a way of becoming less of a person; or how much it is a way of strengthening one in the exercise of one’s own responsibility and ethical power. The person praised in Jesus’ parable in Matthew was not the one who was afraid and buried one’s talent, but the persons who courageously used their talents; and these, the good and faithful persons, were given more power. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

One of our most deep-rooted ideals is our desire for freedom, both at a personal and a collective level. Words such as those from the New Testament—“You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” (John 8.32)—strike a deeply emotional chord in most of our hearts. Yet, while all of us pay lip service to freedom and our desire for it, we are also very much afraid of it. We talk about personal freedom, but we tend to shy from it. Amanda was married to a man who had always tended to be exceedingly critical of her. He made unreasonable demands of her and attempted to dominate her entire life. She in turn tended to play a weak, helpless role in relationship to him. In general, she did little to oppose his bullying attitudes. When he was around, at least, she was the obedient slave; and he was the ruthless tyrant. Things began to change, however, after Amanda sought help through psychotherapy. Out of a growing sense of her own value as a person she began to stand on her own feet. She started doing things she did not think he would tolerate. She refused to accept unjust criticism. When he falsely accused her, she fought back. To her amazement he did not react with the brutality that she expected. Instead he showed that he felt more respect and warmth toward her than he ever had when she was so compliant. As her self-respect grew, his respect for her also appeared to grow. Gradually, she became aware of the exhilarating fact that she was not enslaved. She was much more free to do as she wished than she ever thought she could be. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

However, at this point Amanda had a very interesting reaction. When she spoke of it, she said, “You know, I have the funniest feeling. Now that I have this freedom to do everything I have ever wanted to do, I do not know what to do with it. I guess I am frightened. It is almost as though I needed him to criticize me, and act like t dictator, and make me feel trapped!” Maybe Amanda was codependent or suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. The conclusion that we are afraid of freedom seems inescapable when we examine the lengths to which we go to enslave ourselves. For example, men and women who see a therapist for help with personal or family problems often spend much time trying to convince their counselor and themselves that they are not free to do what they want to do. Listen to what some of them say, and you will probably recognize some of you own feelings. A mother says, “I can’t do the thing I’d really like to do. I feel it’s my duty to spend my free time with my youngsters.” A husband says, “If I were ever really myself and told my wife how I really feel about her, she would leave me in a minute.” Nearly everyone says, “If I said the things I really want to say to people, no one would like me. Or, “I can’t let people see what I’ like because then they wouldn’t have anything to do with me.” And everyone says, “I have so many things I just have to do, that I’m never free to do the thing I want to do.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

A working wife says, “I’d like to quit my job, but I don’t see how we could get along.” A nonworking wife (an unemployed wife, that is!) says, “I really want to work, but I feel it’s my duty to stay at home.” Perhaps it can be summed up by stating that we all have a tendency to say in one way or another, “Poor me, I’m just a helpless victim of circumstances.” My, how we kid ourselves! For when we are realistic about it, we have to recognize that there are few if any things that we have to do. We do what we do and avoid doing what we do not do because we choose it that way. We always have alternatives. So it is with the trapped feeling in marriage. One man said to his wife, “If it weren’t for you and the kids, I’d go to the beach and become a surfer.” He was considerably shook up when his wife replied, “Well, if that’s what you want, why don’t you want, why don’t you go ahead. Nothing’s really preventing you!” Later, in telling about it, he said, “You know, she was right! If I really wanted to, I could leave her and head for the beach. But when I no longer felt trapped, I realized I don’t really want to be a beach bum. In fact, the whole idea is rather distasteful!” As long as he could maintain the fantasy that he was trapped, this man could ignore the frightening fact that he loves his wife and children and is staying married by choice rather than because he must. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

The old cliché is true. We do not have to do anything but die and pay taxes. (And, of course, we can refuse to do the latter if we are willing to suffer the consequences!) We always have alternative courses of action, but we constantly try to convince ourselves otherwise. We must be terribly frightened of discovering that we are free to do pretty much what we want to do. Our fear of freedom expresses itself in many ways. Our resistance to change is probably one such expression. For example, during the times recorded in the New Testament early Christians apparently found it very difficult to give up the old ceremonial laws that had been traditional with Judaism for centuries. One would think that this would have been easy for Christians to do. They had embraced a young faith that said it was no longer necessary to perform the many daily ritualistic laws that virtually enslaved those who seriously tried to follow them. The reluctance to give up such observances seems hard to understand unless we see that it must have been terribly frightening o people suddenly to have almost unlimited freedom. And no doubt the same sort of thing happens constantly today in both our institutional and our personal lives. In religious, political, educational, economic, and social life, we probably cling to many time-consuming rituals and customs that no longer have any relevance to life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

These irrelevant rituals and customs probably serve mainly to keep our daily lives somewhat predictable and provide the security of a self-limited freedom. Much of the tension between generations likely results from the resistance to change that parents express. Most changes, like the more extensive use of the BMW M5, for example, seem to us parents to be in the direction of granting our children more freedom. We are frightened of freedom for ourselves; we are also afraid of our children having it. Religious impulses contribute the energy necessary to move men and women to accomplish drastic social change, hence, that a new society can be brought about only if a profound change occurs in the human heart—if a new object of devotion takes the place of the present one. The starting point of these reflections is the statement that the character structure of the average individual and the socioeconomic structure of the society of which he or she is a part are interdependent. I call the blending of the individual psychical sphere and the socioeconomic structure social structure. The socioeconomic structures of a society molds the social character of its members so that they wish to do what they have to do. Simultaneously, the social character influences the socioeconomic structure of society, acting either as cement to give further stability to the social structure or, under special circumstances, as dynamite that tends to break up the social structure. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

You will have some promptings of the Spirit that will be unusual for you. The reason that will happen is because all of God’s children are precious to the Lord Jesus Christ. Do not be afraid of the future. Do not let anything that is going on in the World, that is happening now, slow you down from our progress in mortality. Everything may not by lined up like you expect, but fret not. Always remember that God—the Creator of the Universe, the architect of our salvation is in control. We should replace fear with faith—Faith in God and the power of the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. Face the future with optimism. I believe we are standing on the threshold of a new era of growth, prosperity, and abundance. Many of the amazing discoveries made in communication, medicine, energy, transportation, physics, computer technology, and other fields of endeavor were the result of the Spirit whispering insights into and enlightening the mind of truth-seeking individuals and these innovations will continue to happen in the future. With these discoveries and advances will come new employment opportunities and prosperity for those who work hard and especially for those who strive to keep the commandants of God. This has been the case in other significant periods of national and international economic growth. Many of these discoveries will happen on a divine timetable and will quicken the World of God in building his kingdom.  #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

I hope we have given you what you need. As for the files, I will see that they are all copied and delivered to you wherever you like. They will prove our efforts to track down ever lead. Poor prognosis in mental health is generally associated with subclinical psychotic trends, which refer to a more sever ego dysfunction than first clinical impression seems to indicate. Depression and anxiety are salient features of the clinical picture in almost all patients who seek psychotherapy in the outpatient clinic; but the patients who fail to improve are those in whom paranoid and schizoid features underlie the psychoneurotic symptoms. A reasonable guess would be that their personal difficulties are more chronic and characterologically based, in contrast to the more accurate and situation-linked problems of the patients who improve. In one study, the expectation was that above 70 percent of patients would improve. Actually, 75 to 80 patients showed improvement. What was noticed in the relationships is it seems that the patients who are most likely to get well are those who are not very sick in the first place. Another way of putting this is to say that patients who are more integrated to begin with are better able to use the psychotherapeutic relationship to solve whatever problems brought them into therapy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

A corollary is that the potential gains from therapy should increase as therapy progresses, at least up to the point where the critical problem for the patient is to become genuinely independent of the therapist. By that time, of course, the therapeutic process has become internalized, and personality problems have been brought into the ego, to be dealt with rationally and objectively. Another escape hatch from feeling hatred toward one’s self is the attempt to win acceptance from others by pleasing them. It is important to examine this tendency closely because it is subtle and therefore often misunderstood. In the initial stages, at least, the children who are its victims are frequently mistake as healthy, well-adjusted children. When they are caught in the bind of increasing feelings of worthlessness and self-hate, some children will, in their effort to escape, make desperate attempts to win acceptance by attempting to meet what they perceive to be the requirements of their parents. They attempt to please and thereby win their parents’ love. One might tend to assume that such an individual would come out all right. After all, one would think that the child, by attempting to please, would win expressions of love and acceptance and no cycle of rejection would result. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Unfortunately, it usually does not work that way, for parents whose children take this approach to dealing with self-hate have probably created the youth’s feelings of rejection and worthlessness by making unrealistic demands on the individual and by encouraging the youth to feel that their acceptance of him or her is conditional upon one’s performance. It is as though the child feels the parents are saying to the individual, “We will love you if you and when you live up to our standards.” Under these circumstances the youth’s efforts to win acceptance and a feeling of self-worth by attempting to please his or her parents are almost certain to fail for two reasons. First of all, the child’s performance will probably never be quite good enough. It is clear that the parents have considerable doubt about their own adequacy as parents and are afraid of the open expression of love, otherwise they would not have needed to make their love seem to hinge on the child’s (even applies to adult children) behavior. These same qualities will make it difficult for the parents to respond with real enthusiasm even to excellent accomplishments. One woman, Jane, in an effort to gain her mother’s approval, got a job at a law firm. She dressed like them, spoke their jargon, and catered to the partners. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

The young lady was excited to tell her mother that she was an associate at a law firm, and she was fairly successful at this. She could hardly wait until the next weekend to visit with her parents, because she was eager to tell them of her success. She walked into the house bubbling over with the exciting news. Her mother’s only reaction was, “Why couldn’t you have becoming a partner?” Since she was exposed to such attitudes of her parents all of her childhood, it is no wonder that now, fifteen years after that incident, she still tried to prove her worth to the World, her parents, and, most of all, to herself. The second reason why efforts to win acceptance through pleasing are doomed to failure is that the individual’s self-hate is increased, because one feels a loss of freedom to be a genuine individual in one’s own right. When a child grows up with a feeling that one must strive at all times to perform adequately and that love will be given and withdrawn on the basis of one’s performance, one never feels free to be one’s self. One resents others and one’s self because one is not becoming an independent person who is loved and respected because of is rather than because of what one does. Jane is in the predicament a lot of adults are in. Jane was reared in a strict, religious household in which great emphasis was put on her career success. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Jane became so involved in the need to please by being successful in her career at the law firm that she began overworking herself very early in her legal career. Whenever she took on another case, she knew she could not handle with the heavy load she already had, Jane would suffer a great deal of anxiety about the possibility of not having enough times. On several occasions—when she saw no way of successfully handling her case load in the time constraints—she went to the yoga studio and deliberately twisted and twirled in such a way that she became physically ill. It would then be necessary for her to all in sick at work and dump her case load on someone else, thus avoiding the necessity of admitting she took on too much. Jane went through terrifying torments of guilt and self-hate, since she lived in a household where lying and cheating would be considered a great sin. Jane felt that God condemned her. It is no surprise that she also believed no one could possibly love her for herself—and certainly could not love her as she had become—if they really knew her. Yet on the surface Jane managed somehow to appear to live a successful and happy life. She was able to conceal her self-torment from others. She appeared to win a good deal of acceptance, but all the time her self-loathing was being reinforced. It was not until she was in her forties and had a family of her own that she was able through psychotherapy to share these feelings. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Only when Jane was able to finally share her feelings could she experience relief from the feeling of being a fraud and discover that people’s love for her was not based on the image of herself that she had so carefully constructed in order to win acceptance. Jane is an extreme example, to be sure, but there are many people who are caught in some form of the attempt to win acceptance through pleasing. Sometimes it is the quiet one in a classroom who never gives the teacher or anyone else any trouble, but who also never seems to be able to join in the fun in a spontaneous way and who is terribly afraid of making a mistake. Adults who have an obsession with keeping things organized or clean or who demand perfection of themselves in other ways likely developed the pattern trying to please parents. When these people became parents themselves they, too, because of their own fears and feelings of self-hate, may become subtly rejecting, giving the feeling to their children that they must perform at a certain standard if they are to win mother’s or dad’s love. The cycle ensues: Feelings of rejection, become feelings of worthlessness, then self-hate, and there is an escape through attempting to win acceptance, and there is further rejection (he or she never quite measures up to what I expect), and then there are more feelings of worthlessness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

It is appropriate here to speak of the harmful effects that a certain kind of religious training can have on children’s lives. Although they make speak of love as being of first importance in human affairs, churches often become preoccupied with rigid rules of conduct, betraying a deep mistrust of spontaneity in behavior. The church then tends to condemn any failure to measure up to its standards. Under these circumstances the churches create a community where the members do not experience of love for each other but rather in which they feel on guard and constantly in danger of condemnation. These attitudes, of course, extend into the family lives of members of the religious group. The result is that some religious families are among the most psychologically damaging to their children. Perhaps much of the damaging effect comes because of the confusing message that the judgments and the condemnation are a result of the love of the parents for the child. Such parents often say, “We only say these things to you because we love you so much and want you to be happy.” And the fact that the parents are sincere and do not recognize that their need to judge, condemn, and mistrust themselves, and resulting fears only makes the message that much more subtle and more difficult for the child to cope with. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Ashely is a young woman who grew up in this kind of religious family. Her father was an attorney, and he was also a perfectionist and a stanch religionist. Ashley was always made aware that it was very important to him that she succeed in her schooling. In fact she felt that her father’s love was dependent on her achievement. Although she was a very bright girl, Ashley did not respond favorably to these demands. She did not do well in school and dropped out of college, an action of which her father strongly disapproved. Not long thereafter, however, she—on her own initiative—became a skilled legal secretary as a result of her own initiative. She thoroughly enjoyed her work and made a good living for herself. Instead of being delighted about her success, her father continued to express his disappointment and criticize her for not having made full use of her talents by securing a college degree. Whatever she did, it was never quite good enough. It is not surprising that Ashley, having been exposed all her life in her religious home to such demands, has also tended to see God as demanding an impossible kind of perfection from her. She never thinks of God loving her just as she is. God is made into the image of her father. It is not unusual at all in such circumstances that we come to imagine that God embodies the criticism we feel of ourselves and that which we eel from our religious parents. We become paranoid about God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

This feeling is illustrated by another woman who dreamed one night that Jesus was looking at her in a very stern and condemning manner. Gradually, in the dream, the face of Jesus changed into the face of her mother, who did indeed tend to be very critical of her, but subtly so an in the name of religion. In families like this the force of religion and the religious community often feed into and become an important part of the cycle of rejection. The child initially feels rejection from parents who themselves are full of self-hate and fears and therefore are unable to express their love as openly as they might. As the child grown old enough to be impressed with somewhat more sophisticated ideas, religious teaching, formal and informal, may enter in to fortify these feelings of rejection. The subtlety of the teaching varies a great deal according to the orientation and the sophistication of the religious group. However, the child is likely to receive the message that one is evil by nature and that one dare not trust one’s feelings or impulses. One is likely to feel, even though one may be assured that it is not true, that not only one’s parents but also God and the members of one’s religious community will not like the individual if one does not meet prescribed standards of behavior. These are ideal conditions for the flourishing of feelings of worthlessness of self-hate, which are often accompanied by strong feelings of guilt, often of a generalized unspecific nature. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Eventually the child seeks one or more ways of escape from the self-hatred in the form of some actual or fantasied, neurotic or delinquent behavior. However, there is no escape. If one’s feeling or behavior is detected, one feels condemned by parents and the religious community. If one is not found out, one is in the position—which may be even more psychologically dangerous—of feeling. “They’d sure condemn me if they really knew me.” In either case one feels condemned by a critical God who sees all and knows one’s innermost thoughts. And so the cycle is completed as these further feelings of rejection intensify one’s feelings of worthlessness. The cycle goes this way: Feelings of rejection by parents (increased by the feeling that one is evil by nature in God’s sight), giving way to feelings of worthlessness, then self-hate, leading an escape hatch (neurotic or delinquent behavior or fantasies), which become further feelings of rejection (my parents and my religious community condemn me or would if they really knew me. In any case God does know me and condemns me) and this opens to greater feelings of worthlessness. So our personality problems and difficulties with others have their origins in our childhood experiences. Our fear of love arises out of feelings of rejection and the subsequent feelings of worthlessness and self-hate that begin when we are children. #RandolphHarris 10 of  20

Because childhood experiences are recognizes as being crucial importance, the professions that offer psychological help are often accused, and perhaps with some justification, of teaching people to blame their parents for their problems. While there is no doubt that parents play an important role in child development, it is a waste of time to attempt to pin responsibility on them. It is much more helpful to see the problem in terms of the universality of the fear of love. As parents we are afraid of emotional closeness, even with our children. Perhaps this is not so surprising since no one matters more to us and, therefore, no one has greater power to hurt us. Consequently, we resist letting them see our genuine selves—how lonely, frightened, and capable of being hurt we are. Our children experience this withholding of ourselves and our genuine feelings of rejection. In any discussion of religion and personality integration, the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Dr. Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not. Any area in life may be used as a compulsive neurosis: philosophy may be a flight from reality into a harmonious system as a protection from the anxiety and disharmonies of day-to-day life or it may be a courageous endeavor to understand reality better. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Science may be used as a rigid, doctrine of faith by which one escapes emotional insecurity and doubt, or it may be an open minded search for new truth. Indeed, since faith in science has been more acceptable intelligent circles in our society and therefore is less apt to be questioned, it may well be that in our day this faith more frequently plays the role of a compulsive escape from uncertainties than does religion. Dr. Freud, however, was correct technically—as he so often was—in that he asked the right questions with respect to religion: does it increase dependency and keep the individual infantile? Nor are those on the other side correct who say glibly and with comfort to the masses that religion makes for mental health. Some religion certainly does and some decidedly does not. All of these blanket statements would relieve us of the much more difficult question of penetrating to the inner meaning of the religious attitudes, and assessing them not as theoretical beliefs but as functioning aspects of the person’s organic relation to one’s life. For example, a mother and daughter had agreed when the daughter was very young that her life was always to be directed by the will of God. And the will of God, it was further agreed, was to be revealed to the daughter through the mother’s prayers. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

One can well shudder to think how thoroughly this would open the girl to domination in every act and thought by the mother! How then could the girl’s own capacity to choose be anything but stifled—which the girl painfully discovered when, in her late twenties, she was caught in an insoluble dilemma because she could not make an autonomous marriage decision. This example may seem extreme, since the mother and daughter belonged to a conservative evangelical sect and the pattern is not covered over by sophisticated rationalizations. It illustrates that when a person sees one’s self as the mouthpiece or partner of God, as did the mother, there is no limit to the possibilities of arrogating to one’s self power over others. This use of religion comes out frequently and vividly when a person in therapeutic sessions is struggling to establish some freedom from parental control. The parents then often, with various degrees of subtlety, make their central stand on the argument that it is the younger person’s religious obligation to remain under the parents’ direction, that it is in effect God’s will that one continue under the parents’ control. In letters which persons in therapy often receive from parents at such times, the parent of course quotes such Biblical passages as “Honor thy father and thy mother,” rather than the later ethic of Jesus as shown in the New Testament passage we quoted above, “a person’s foes shall be those of one’s own household (Matthew 10.34-39).” #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Most parents would insist verbally, of course, that they wish only to have the child fulfill his or her own potentialities. They are often quite unaware of the unconscious needs to hang on to the younger person. However, the fact that they so often behave as though the son’s or daughter’s fulfillment were to be achieved only by remaining under their control reveals something quite different from their conscious intentions. The son’s or daughter’s becoming free often stirs up some deep anxiety in the parent, an anxiety which shows how difficult it is for parents in our society really to be in the indigenous potentialities of the child (perhaps because it is so hard for them to believe in their own potentialities), and how strong is the tendency of all entrenched authority to keep its power even at the price of breaking the other person into submission. The conflicts are made more complex because the younger person struggling for autonomy has often been inculcated with a deep sense of doom if one does not obey parental percept. And one is already generally fighting considerable anxiety and guilt feelings within one’s self over one’s effort to be free. Often at this stage persons have dreams in which they are guilty yet not guilty—guilty, yet having to go ahead. One such person dreamed that he was being cited as guilty by Senator McCarthy in the Senate, though he knew within himself that he really was not guilty. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

The problem of being prey to someone else’s power is reinforced, of course, by one’s own infantile desires to be taken care of. Thus there are tendencies within one’s self to give one’s self over to the dominating person. About half my own psychotherapeutic work over the past ten years has been with persons from specifically religious backgrounds and in the religious professions, and about half with person of no specific religious background or interest. There are some illuminating psychological effects of religious training in our society. There is an attitude—the strong interest in doing something about one’s problems—it is a function of the person’s confidence in meaning and value in life, is one constructive contribution of a mature religion and, generally has an energizing influence of therapy. However, the attitude of the divine right to be taken care of is quite something else. It is one of the greatest blocks to the development of these persons toward maturity in therapy as well as in life in general. It is generally difficult for such people to see their demand to be taken care of as a problem to be analyzed and overcome, and they often react with hostility and a feeling of being ripped off when their right is not honored. Of course they have been told, “God will take care of you,” from the early says when they sang the song in Saturday or Sunday school to the present vulgarized from of the same idea in many movies. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

However, on a deeper level, the demand to be take care of—particularly since hostility arises so quickly when it is frustrated—is a function of something more profound. I believe it gets its dynamic from the fact that these persons had to give up so much. They have had to relinquish their power and their right to make moral judgments to their parents, and naturally the other half of the unwritten contract is that they then have a right to depend entirely on parental power and judgment, as a slave has a right to depend upon his or her master. So they are being ripped off of the parent—or more likely the parental substitutes such as the therapist of God—does not extend them special care. They have been taught that happiness and success would follow their being good, the latter generally interpreted as being obedient. However, being merely obedient, as we have shown above, undermines the development of an individual’s ethical awareness and inner strength. By being obedient to external requirements over a long period of time, one loses one’s real powers of ethical, responsible choice. Strange as it sounds, then, the powers of these people to achieve goodness and the joy which goes with it are diminished. And since happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, the person who surrenders one’s ethical autonomy has relinquished to the same degree one’s power to attain virtue and happiness. No wonder one feels resentful. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

When we look at how the obedience morality, the emphasis on being good by subordinating one’s self, got its power in modern culture, we can see more concretely what these people have had to give up. It takes its modern form largely from patterns copied from the development of industrialism and capitalism in the last four centuries. Now the subordination of the person to mechanical uniformity, the arranging of one’s life to fit the requirements of work and parsimony, did bring financial and, as a result, social success during the major part of the modern period. One could argue persuasively that salvation follows obedience, for if one was obedient to the demands of work in an industrial society, one tended to accumulate money. Anyone who has read of the business acumen of the Early Quakers and Puritans, for example, knows how well these economic and moral attitudes worked together. The Quaker dollar was a concrete solace for the great resentment engendered in the middle class because of the emotional privations they suffered in this obedience system. However, time change, as we have indicated, and in our day early to bed and early to rise may make a mortal healthy, but there is no guarantee that it will make one wealthy and wise. Ben Franklin’s precepts, tithing and daily fidelity to routine work, no longer ensure success, and this is why some are trying to Make America Great Again so people have an opportunity at the American Dream, which is a product of capitalism and freedom. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

The religious person, furthermore, particularly if one is a minister or otherwise engaged in professional religious work, has had to give up a realistic attitude toward money. One is not supposed to require that one be paid such and such a salary. In many religious circles it is considered undignified to talk about money, as if being paid, like toilet activities, is a necessary part of life but the ideal is to act as though it does not really occur. Labor groups, adapting to the changing economic times of mass industry, have recognized that God does not send the pay check by raven’s mouth as food was sent to Elijah of old, and they have learned though their unions to bring pressure to bear to get adequate wages. However, people in religious professions cannot strike for higher wages. Instead the church is supposed to take care of the minister financially and otherwise; one is given discounts on the railroad and in department stores; tuition in seminaries is lower than in other graduate schools—all of which is not calculated to increase the minister’s self-respect or others’ respect for one in our particular society. The fact that the religious person is not supposed to take active steps to ensure one’s financial security is another evidence of the underlying assumption in our society that material security will somehow come automatically if one is good, an assumption closely connected with the belief that God will take care of you. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Thus it is easy to see why the person in our society who is taught to be good by subordinating oneself, and only discovers sooner or later that one does not even get economic rewards for doing so, let alone happiness, should have so much resentment and anger. It is this buried resentment which gives the dynamic to the demand to be take care of. It is as though the person were silently saying, “I was promised I would be taken care of if I was obedient: look how obedient I have been, so why am I not taken care of? The belief in the divine right to be take care of often brings with it the feeling that one has a right to exercise power over others. That is to say, if one believes that persons should be under the power of others, one will not only submit one’s self to some more powerful persons for the purpose of getting care, but one will feel it is one’s duty to take care of—and to exercise power over—some person subordinate to one on the scale. This tendency is illustrated in its more sadistic form in the statement of one man, when questioned about his practice of controlling the younger man, when questioned about his practice of controlling the younger man with whom he lived even to the extent of taking the latter’s pay check every Saturday and putting him on an allowance, “Am I not my brother’s keeper?” #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

We should not abuse the soul of other individuals. Freedom and light have never been easy to attain or maintain. Since the War in Heaven, the forces of evil have used every means possible to destroy agency and extinguish light. The assault on moral principle and religious freedom have never been stronger. Our primary purpose must be to seek truth and light. My personal experience of living and interacting with people all over the World has caused me to be optimistic. I believe that light and truth will be preserved in our time. In all nations there are large numbers who worship God and feel accountable to God for their conduct. Some people accept the proof that there is no Hell in the hereafter and no demons to burn them or in other ways give them eternal punishment, so they do not fear death, and this is why they abuse the scriptures. Other people are concerned with being good and death because of their own deep human feelings and their own active sympathy for human kind, including themselves. Most people are still also respectful of basic moral values. It is a symbol of them trying to hang on to their loved ones—the most powerful symbol that mortal’s life transcends all the natural explanations. The majority of people, even some who have different beliefs than us, aspire to be good and honorable. The Light of Christ, which is distinct from the Holy Ghost, is vivid proof that the meaning of life is informing our conscious with love and a message of inevitable salvation. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20