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If You Do Not Know Who You are, this is an Expensive Place to Find Out!
Since wealth awaits those who can play this game well, it is not surprising that there is a large body of serious literature devoted to telling you how. The economy is all about hopes, fears, greed, ambition, acts of God—it would be hard to put it more succinctly. The one thing we have, whether or not we ever find true Value, is liquidity—the ability to buy and sell momentarily and relatively effortlessly. Liquidity is the cornerstone of Wall Street. It is what makes it the financial capital of the World, for it is, except for rare, odd moments of panic, a truly liquid market. It is liquid and it is run honestly, and there are few places like that in the World that if you are a rich international person who wants to be able to cash in on any given day and yet wants to make capital gains, you have virtually only one place to go. The dominate note of our time is unreality. In good times it is not hard to make money, but in times of unreality the market is saying, “You do not understand me anymore; do not trust me until you understand me.” When it comes to understanding the market, computers and statistics are important, but even more import is personal intuition. One has to know how to sense patterns of behaviour. A person’s behaviour can tell you from the start if you want to do business with them or not. Do not learn the hard way. Learn to read signs and trust your intuition. If you have problems in business when dealing with people who act goofy, sarcastic and patronizing, then take that as an indication that this will be a bad business deal and do not get burned. Professional money managers often seem to make up their minds in a split second, but what pushes them over the line of decision is usually an incremental bit of information which, added to all the slumbering pieces of information filed their minds, suddenly makes the picture whole. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
What is it the good managers have? It is a kind of locked-in concentration, an intuition, a feeling, nothing that can be schooled. The first thing you have to know is yourself. It sounds simplistic to say the first thing you have to know is yourself, and of course you are not necessarily out to become a professional money manager. However, if you stop to think about it, here is one authority saying there are no formulas which can be automatically applied. If you are not automatically applying a mechanical formula, then you are operating in this area of intuition, and if you are going to operate with intuition—or judgment—then it follows that the first thing you have to know is yourself. You are—fact it—a bunch of emotions, prejudices, knowledge, education, faith, and twitches, and this is all very well as long as you know it. Successful speculators do not necessarily have a complete portrait of themselves, hair and all, in their own minds, but they do have the ability to stop abruptly when their own intuition and what is happening Out There are suddenly out of the kilter. A couple of mistakes crop up, and they say, simply, “This is not my kind of market,” or “I do not know what in the World is going on, do you?” and return to established lines of defense. A series of market decisions does add up, believe it or not, to a kind of personality portrait. It is, in one small way, a method of finding out who you are, but it can be very expensive. That is one of the cryptograms which are my own, and this is the first Irregular Rule: If you do not know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
It may seem a little silly to think that a portfolio of stocks can give you a portrait of the human who picked them, but any turned-in stock-picker will swear to it. I know a private fund where there are four managers, each with one section–$60 million or so—to run. Every three months they switch chairs. You can have no preconceived ideas. There are fundamentals in the marketplace, but the unexplored area is the emotional area. All the charts and breadth indicators and technical palaver are the statistician’s attempts to describe an emotional state. If the emotional area is the unexplored area, and the statistical area is being so thoroughly explored, why not explore the unexplored area? Such a study seems to require a cross of disciplines. Mass psychology and the marketplace are great areas of study. The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with the necessaries and connivences of life which it annually consumes, and which conflict always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations. According, therefore, as this produce, or what is purchased with it, bears a greater or smaller proportion to the number of those who are to consume it, the nation will be better or worse supplied with all the necessaries and conveniences which it has occasion. However, this proportion must in every nation be regulated by two different circumstances; first, by the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labour is generally applied; and, secondly, by the proportion between the number of those who are employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed. Whatever be the soil, climate, or extent of territory of any particular nation, the abundance of scantiness, depend on upon those two circumstances. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The abundance of scantiness of this supply too seems to depend more upon the former of those two circumstances than upon the latter. Among the savage nations of hunters and fishers, every individual who is able to work, is more or less employed in useful labour, and endeavours to provide, as well as one can, the necessaries and conveniences of life, for oneself, or such of one’s family or tribe as either too old, or too young, or too infirm to go a hunting and fishing. Such nations, however, are so miserably poor, that, from mere want, they are frequently reduced, or, at least, think themselves reduced, to the necessity of directly destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people, and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger, or to be devoured by wild beast. Among civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number of people do not labour at all, many of whom consume the produce of times, frequently of a hundred time more labour than the greater part of those of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman or woman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if one is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and convivences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire. The causes of this improvement, in the productive powers of labour, and the order, according to which its produce is naturally distributed among the different ranks and conditions of human in the society are subjects of great importance. Whatever be the actual state of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which labour is applied in any nation, the abundance or scantiness of its annual supply must depend, during the continuance of that state, upon the proportion between the number of those who are annually employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The number of useful and productive labourers, it will hereafter appear, is every where in proportion to the quantity of capital stock which is employed in setting them to work, and to particular way in which it is so employed. The nature of capital stock, of the manner in which it is gradually accumulated, and of the different quantities of labour which it puts into motion, are central focuses and we must understand the different ways in which they are employed. Nations tolerably well advanced as to skill, dexterity, and judgment, in the application of labour, have followed very different plans in the general conduct of direction of it; and those plans have not all been equally favourable to the greatness of its produce. The policy of some nations has given extraordinary encouragement of the industry of the country; that of others to the industry of towns. Scarce any nation has dealt equally and impartially with every fort of industry. Since the downfall of the Roman empire, the policy of Europe has been more favourable to arts, manufactures, and commerce, the industry of towns; than to agriculture, the industry of the country. The circumstances which seem to have introduced and established this policy are crucial. Russia is still a reactionary welfare state; we are still a liberal welfare state. However, it is to be assumed that things in Russian will slowly change. Clearly, the more Russian can satisfy the material need of her population, the less will she need the methods of the police state. The Russian system will shift to the same means that are used in the West: the methods of psychological suggestion and manipulation that give the individual the illusion of having and following one’s own convictions, while “one’s” decisions are in reality made by the elite of “decision makers.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The Russians believe that they represent socialism because they talk in terms of Marxist ideology, and they do not recognize how similar their system is to the most developed form of capitalism. We in the West believe that we represent the system of individualism, private initiative, and humanistic ethics, because we hold on to our ideology, and we do not see that our institutions are, in fact, in many ways becoming more and more similar to the hated system of communism. We believe that the essence of the Russian system is that the individual is subservient to the State, and hence that one has no freedom. However, we do not recognize that in Western society the individual is becoming more and more subservient to the economic machine, to the big corporation, to public opinion. We do not recognize that the individual, confronted with giant enterprises, giant government, giant trade unions, is afraid of freedom, has no faith in one’s own strength, and seeks shelter by identifying with these giants. Our mode of industrial organization needs men and women similar to men and women the Russian system needs: humans who feel that they are the masters of their society (both capitalism and communism make this claim), yet who are willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction and who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim—except the one of making good, of being on the move, of getting ahead. We try to reach this result by means of the ideology of free enterprise, individual initiative, et cetera; the Russians by the ideology of socialism, solidarity, and equality. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The question whether the Soviet system is a socialist system has been answered in the negative. We have concluded that it is a state managerialism, using the most advanced methods of total monopolization, centralization, mass manipulation, and moving slowly from exercising this manipulation by violence to exercising it by mass suggestion. It is, while resembling socialism in certain economic features, its very contradiction in a social and human sense, and is actually converging with the trends of the most advanced capitalistic countries, provided these do not change their present course. It is economically a very successful system, and while unfavourable to development of authentic freedom and individualism, it has many features of planning and social welfare which can be counted as very beneficial achievements. It has often been said tht the treatment of Germany by the victors in 1918 was one of the chief reasons for the rise of Nazism. During this time, there was also an increase in witchcraft accusations as a social problem linked to the past. In fact, witchcraft accusations were the social issues of this era. Witchcraft beliefs and the trials actually still took place in the 1950s. Lawmakers and police also held meetings to discuss popular fears of witches based on evidence provided to them. The fears inspired a search for enemies, and made outsiders out of community members, and the community was encouraged to train a suspicious gaze on these “others,” now regarded as the cause of their various misfortunes. The witchcraft fears bore clear similarities to the scapegoating and persecution of Jewish people in Nazi Germany. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
As a result, and despite attention given to the subject, the public and relevant authorities remained largely impervious to the notion of any underlying social danger in witchcraft fears—they could and did chalk them up, however vaguely, to village intrigues and “age-old” superstition. When we reflect on the Treaty of Versailles, which was a peace treaty signed on 28 June 1919, the majority of Germans felt that the peace treaty was unjust; but while the middle class reacted with intense bitterness, there was much less bitterness at the Versailles Treaty among the working class. They had been opposed to the old regime and the loss of the way for them meant defeat of the regime. They felt that they had fought bravely and that they had no reason to be ashamed of themselves. On the other hand, the victory of the revolution which had only been possible by the defeat of the monarchy had brought them economic, political, and human gains. The resentment against Versailles had its basis in the lower middle class; the nationalistic resentment was a rationalization, projecting social inferiority to national inferiority. This projection is quite apparent in Mr. Hitler’s personal development. He was the typical representative of the lower middle class, a nobody with no chances or future. He felt very intensely the role of being an outcast. He often speaks in Mein Kampf of himself as the “nobody,” the “unknow man” he was in his youth. However, although this was due essentially to his own social position, he could rationalize it in national symbols. Being born outside of the Reich he felt excluded not so much socially as nationally, and the great German Reich to which all her sons could return became for him the symbol of social prestige and security. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The old middle class’s feeling of powerlessness, anxiety, and isolation from the social whole and the destructiveness springing from this situation was not the only psychological source of Nazism. The peasants felt resentful against the urban creditors to whom they were in debt, while the workers felt deeply disappointed and discouraged by the constant political retreat after their first victories in 1918 under a leadership which had lost all strategic initiative. The vast majority of the population was seized with the feeling of individual insignificance and powerlessness which we have described as typical for monopolistic capitalism in general. Those psychological conditions were not the “cause” of Nazism. They constituted its human basis without which it could not have developed, but any analysis of the whole phenomenon of the rise and victory of Nazism must deal with the strictly economic and political, as well as with the psychological, conditions. The representatives of big industry and the half-bankrupt Junkers played a huge role in the establishment of Nazism. Without their support Mr. Hitler could never have won, and their support was rooted in their understanding of their economic interests much more than in psychological factors. This property-owning class was confronted with a parliament in which 40 percent of the deputies were Socialists and Communists representing groups which were dissatisfied with the existing social system, and in which were an increasing number of Nazi deputies who also represented a class that was in bitter opposition to the most powerful representatives of German capitalism. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
A parliament which thus in is majority represented tendencies directed against their economic interest deemed them dangerous. They said democracy did not work. Actually one might say democracy worked too well. The parliament was a rather adequate representation of the respective interests of different classes of the German population, and for this very reason the parliamentary system could not any longer be reconciled with the need to preserve the privileges of big industry and half-feudal landowner. The representatives of these privileged groups expected that Nazism would shift the emotional resentment which threatened them into other channels and at the same time harness the nation into the service of their own economic interests. On the whole they were not disappointed. To be sure, in minor details they were mistaken. Mr. Hitler and his bureaucracy were not tools to be ordered around by the Thyssens and Krupps, who had to share their power with the Nazi bureaucracy and often to submit to them. However, although Nazism proved to be economically detrimental to all other classes, it fostered the interests of the most powerful groups of German industry. The Nazi system is the “streamlined” version of German prewar imperialism and it continued where the monarchy had failed. (The Republic, however, did not really interrupt the development of German monopolistic capitalism but furthered it with the means at her disposal.) There is one question that a reader will have in mind at this point: How can one reconcile the statement that the psychological basis of Nazism was the old middle class with the statement that Nazism functions in the interests of German imperialism? #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
In the postwar period it was the middle class, particularly the lower middle class, that was threatened by monopolistic capitalism. Its anxiety and thereby its hatred were aroused; it moved into a state of panic and was filled with a craving for submission to as well as for domination over those who were powerless. These feelings were used by an entirely different class for a regime which was to work for their own interests. Mr. Hitler proved to be such an efficient tool because he combined the characteristics of a resentful, hating, petty bourgeois, with whom the lower middle class could identify themselves emotionally and socially, with those of an opportunist who was ready to serve the interests of the German industrialists and Junkers. Originally he posed as the Messiah of the old middle class, promised the destruction of department stores, the breaking of the domination of banking capital, and so on. The record is clear enough. These promises were never fulfilled. However, that did not matter. Nazism never had any genuine political or economic principles. It is essential to understand that the very principle of Nazism is its radical opportunism. What mattered was that hundreds of thousands of petty bourgeois, who in the normal course of development had little chance to gain money or power, as members of the Nazi bureaucracy now got a large slice of the wealth and prestige they forced the upper classes to share with them. Others who were not members of the Nazi machine were given the jobs taken away from the Jewish people and political enemies; and as for the rest, although they did not get more bread, they got “circuses.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The emotional satisfaction afforded by these sadistic spectacles and by an ideology which gave them a feeling of superiority over the rest of humankind was able to compensate them—for a time at least—for the fact that their lives had been impoverished, economically and culturally. The lover, the poet, and the mystic find a fuller satisfaction than the seeker after power can ever know, since they can retain the object of their love, whereas the seeker after power must be perpetually engaged in some fresh manipulation if one is not to suffer from a sense of emptiness. When I come to die I shall not feel I have lived in vain. I have seen the Earth turn red at evening, the dew sparking in the morning, and the snow shining under a frosty sun; I have smelt rain after drought, and have heard the stormy Atlantic beat upon the granite shoes of Cornwall. Science may bestow these and other joys among more people than could otherwise enjoy them. If so, its power will be wisely used. However, when it takes out of life the moments to which life owes its values, science will not deserve admiration, however, cleverly and however elaborately it may lead humans along the road to despair. Some feel that intellects exhaust reality, and that there is nothing of significance which cannot be grasped of it. They are skeptical toward everything which cannot be caught in an intellectual formula, but they are naively unskeptical toward their own scientific approach. They are more interested in the results of their thoughts than in the process of enlightenment which occurs in the inquiring person. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Pragmatism appeals to the temper of mind which finds on the surface of this planet the whole of its imaginative material; which feels confident of progress, and unaware of nonhuman limitations to human power; which loves battle, with all the attendant risks, because it has no real doubt that it will achieve victory; which desires religion, as it desires railways and electric light, as a comfort and a help in the affairs of this World, not as providing nonhuman objects to satisfy the hunger for perfection and for something to be worshipped without reserve. In contrast to the pragmatist, rational thought is not the quest for certainty, but an adventure, an act of self-liberation and of courage, which changes the thinker by making one more awake and more alive. One must have faith in the power of reason, faith in the human capacity to create one’s own paradise through one’s own efforts. Humans have existed only for a very short period—1,00,000 years at the most. What they have achieved, especially during the last 6,000 years, is something utterly new in the history of the Cosmos, so far at least as we are acquainted with it. For countless ages the sun rose and set, the moon waxed and waned, the stars shone in the night, but it was only with the coming of Man that these things were understood. In the great World of astronomy and in the little World of the atom, Man has unveiled secrets which might have been thought undiscoverable. In art and literature and religion, some humans have shown a sublimity of feeling which makes the species worth preserving? Is this to end in trivial horror because so few are able to think of Man rather than of this or that group of men? #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Is our race so destitute of wisdom, so incapable of impartial love, so blind even to the simplest dictates of self-preservation, that the last proof of its stilly cleverness is to be the extermination of all life on our planet?—for it will be not only men who will perish, but also the animals and plants, who no one can accuse of communism or anticommunism. I cannot believe that this is to be the end. I would have humans forget their quarrels for a moment and reflect that, if they will allow themselves to survive, there is every reason to expect the triumphs of the future to exceed immeasurably the triumphs of the past. There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal, as a human being to human beings: remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a ne Paradise; if you cannot, nothing lies before you but universal death. This faith is rooted in a quality without which neither philosophy nor fight against war could be understood: one’s love for life. To many people this may not mean much; they believe that everybody loves life. Does one not cling to it when it is threatened, does one not have a great deal of fun in life and plenty of thrilling excitement? Only in the most rugged mountain wasteland can one get a chilling sense of the feeling of solitude that pervaded the recluse of the Ephesian temple of Artemis. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
No overwhelming feeling of sympathetic excitement, no caving, no desire to help or to save emanates from him—he is like a shining planet without an atmosphere. His eye, fiery, and turned inward, looks lifeless and cold from without, as if just for the sake of appearance. All around him, waves of delusion and distortion crash onto the fortress of his pride; he turns away in disgust. Yet even people with tender hearts shun such a tragic mask; in some remote sanctuary, amid the images of gods, in cold, magnificent architecture, such a figure might seem more intelligible. Among humans, as a man, Heraclitus was an enigma; and when he was seen watching the games of shouting children, he was pondering what no mortal ever pondered on such an occasion: the game of the great cosmic child, Zeus, and the eternal sport of World destruction and World creation. He had no need of men, not even for his knowledge; he cared not at all for what one could learn from them, nor what other sages before him were at pains to discover. “I searched out myself,” he said, using a word that refers to the fathoming of an oracle: as if he and no one else were the true embodiment and achievement of the Delphic Maxim “Know yourself.” What he heard in this oracle, however, he took to be immortal wisdom, eternally worthy of interpretation, in the same sense in which the prophetic utterances of the sibyl are immortal. It is sufficient for the most distant generations; may they interpret it simply as the saying of an oracle, just as he himself, like a Delphic god, “neither speaks nor conceals.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Although he pronounces it “without laughter, without ornament, and scented ointments” but rather “fronting at the mouth,” it must resound thousands of years into the future. For the World always needs truth, and so will always need Heraclitus, though he does not need it. What is fame to him! “Fame among constantly fleeting mortals!” as he scornfully exclaims. That is something for singers and poets, and for those before him who were known as “wise” men—let them gulp down the most delicious morsels of their self-love; the stuff is too common for him. His fame matters to men, not to him; his self-love is the love of truth—and this very truth tells him that the immortality of man needs him, not that he needs the immortality of the man Heraclitus. Truth! Rapturous delusion of a god! What does truth matter to human beings! And what was the Heraclitean “truth”! And where has it gone? A vanished dream, wiped from the faces of humans, along with other dreams!—It was not the first! Of all that we with such proud metaphours call “World history” and “truth” and “fame,” a heatless demon might have nothing to say but this: “In some remote corner of the sprawling Universe, twinkling among the countless solar systems, there was once a stare on which some clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant, most mendacious minute in World history, but it was only a minute. After nature caught its breath a little, the star froze, and the clever animals had to die. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
“And it was time, too: for although they boasted of how much they had come to know, in the end they realized they had gotten it all wrong. They died and in dying cursed truth. Such was the species of doubting animal that had invented knowledge.” This would me man’ fate were he nothing more than a thinking animal; truth would drive him to despair and annihilation, truth eternally damned to be untruth. All that is proper to man, however, is faith in the attainable truth, in the ever approaching, confidence-inspiring illusion. Does he not in fact live by constant deception? Does not nature conceal virtually everything from him, even what is nearest, for example, his own body, of which he has only a spurious “consciousness”? He is locked up in this consciousness, and nature has thrown away the key. O fateful curiosity of the philosopher, who longs to peer out just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness—perhaps then one gains an intimation that humans rest in the indifference of their ignorance on the greedy, the insatiable, the disgusting, the merciless, the murderous, suspended in dreams on the back of a tiger. “Let him hang,” cries art. “Wake him up,” cries the philosopher, in the pathos of truth. Yet, even as he believes himself to be shaking the sleeper, he himself sinks into a still deeper magical slumber—perhaps then he dreams of “ideas” or of immortality. Art is mightier than knowledge, for it wants life, and knowledge attains as its ultimate end only—annihilation. The great need of the Church is to know and understand the laws of the spirit, so as to co-work with the Spirit of God in fulfilling the purpose of God through His people. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
However, the lack of knowledge of the spirit life has given the deceiving spirits of the ultimate negative the opportunity for the deceptions of which we have spoken of in the past. There is a need for concrete embodiment of the Spiritual Presence. The twofold experience of the holy as being and as demand gives rise to two types of religion: the sacramental, priestly type founded upon the ontological presence of the holy, and the eschatological, prophetic type stemming from its moral insistence. Both components are actually present in both types, but one of them will predominate. It is consider domical to attribute holiness to finite beings, nevertheless the solid doctrines of the church according to which “the moral perfection of the community does not bring about the holiness of the church, but rather the holiness of the church sanctifies the community by preaching the forgiveness of sins and by leading it to the New Being upon which the church rest. Neither the prophetic type of Christianity can survive without the priestly type, nor can the eschatological, without the sacramental. The World can honestly respect one another by a mutual recognition of the Spiritual Presence that animates them all. In practical terms, the ecumenical movement is a limited, short-range success and long-range failure: In practical terms it is able to heal divisions which have become historically obsolete, to replace confessional fanaticism by interconfessional co-operation, to conquer denominational provincialism, and to produce a new vision of the unity of all churches in their foundation. However, neither the ecumenical nor any other future movement can conquer the ambiguity of unity and division in the churches’ historical existence. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Even if it were able to produce the United Churches of the World, and even if all latent churches were converted to this unity, new divisions would appear. The dynamics of life, the tendency to preserve the holy even when it has become obsolete, the ambiguities implied in the sociological existence of the churches, and above all, the prophetic criticism and demand for reformation would being about new and, in many cases, Spiritually justified divisions. The unity of the churches, similar to their holiness, has a paradoxical character. It is the divided church which is the united church. All your children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all God’s holy mountain, for the Earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. The work of righteousness shall be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and confidence forever. Then shall they sit every man under his vine. And under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid, for the Lord Himself hath spoken it. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All. All Americans are brothers and sisters, responsible for one another. If there be among you a needy man, do not harden your heart. Shut not your hand to your needy brother, but surely open your hand unto him. The Sacramento Fire Department has proudly been serving the community since 1851, please consider donating to their organization so they can have the resources to continue doing an exemplary job. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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The Most Delicious Morsel of Our Self Love?
Colleges such a University of Southern California—Los Angeles, Cornell, Duke and Chapman are now offering courses on how to be a social media influencer as part of their business and communications department. A social media is someone who has a platform on the Internet and vast amounts of fans. Some of these influencers have hundreds of thousands to millions of fans. A lot of them are even more popular than well-known celebrities. When these influencers get popular enough and gain the attention of a brand, the brand will usually sponsor them to market their goods and/or services for a profit. The goal is for the brand to gain more popularity and increase their revenue. Some popular social media influencers are people like Taylor Swift, who by just advocating voting or mentioning that she is attending a football game, can get millions of fans to vote and attend football games. There are of course other social media influencers who may or may not be major celebrities, but became famous by marketing their talents on the Internet and/or other forms of media. A great example is Jillian Harris, who starred on Love it or List it, Too, which is a HGTV program, which comes on television and focuses on renovating and decorating homes. Now Jillian Harris uses her social media platform to help support charities and market items that her followers love. She has over 1 million fans on social media. Austin Harris Mahone, who sang Justin Bieber songs, is also a social media influence. He was discovered and currently an American singer. Micro-influencers with 10,000 to 50,000 fans may earn anywhere between $40,000 and $100,000 per year. However, Cristiano Ronaldo, with over 570 million fans on social media charges around $2.4 million for a social media post. People are now seeing becoming a social media influencer as the great equalizer that education once used to be. With the desire of so many to become famous, it leaves many wondering if fame really just the most delicious morsel of our self-love? #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Fame has, after all, attached itself to the most uncommon men and women, as an ambition, and in turn to their most uncommon moments. These are moments of sudden illumination in which a human stretches out a commanding arm, as if creating a World, light shining forth and spreading out around one. One is then filled with the deeply gratifying certainty that what enraptured and exalted one into the farthest regions, the height of this one sensation, can never be denied to posterity; in the eternal necessity of this rare illumination for all those to come humans see the necessity of their fame. Far into the future, human kind need man, and just as that moment of illumination is the embodiment and epitome of his innermost essence, so, too, he believes himself, as the man of this moment, to be immortal, dismissing all others as dross, rot, vanity, brutishness, or pleonasm, leaving them to perish. We view all disappearance and demise with discontent, often with astonishment, as if we experienced in it something at bottom impossible. We are disturbed when a Victorian mansion is torn down, and a crumbling tower aggrieves us. Every New Year’s Eve, we feel the mystery of the contradiction of being and becoming. What offends moral man above all, though, is that an instant of supreme universal perfection should vanish without a trace, like the Mansion of the Gilded Age, leaving nothing to posterity. Humans’ imperative reads instead: whatever once served more beautifully to propagate the concept “man” must continue to exist forever. That all the great moments form a chain; that, like mountain peaks, they unite humankind across the millennia; that the greatest things from a bygone age are also great for me; and that the prescient faith of the lust for fame will be fulfilled—that is the idea at the very foundation of culture. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The terrible struggle of culture is ignited by the demand that what is great should be eternal; for everything else that continues to live cries out, No! The customary, the small, the common fills every nook and cranny of the World like an oppressive atmosphere we are all condemned to breathe, smoldering around what is great; hindering, choking, suffocating, deadening, smothering, dimming, deluding, it throws itself onto the road the great must travel on the way to immortality. The road goes through human brains! Through the brains of pitiful, short-lived creatures who, given over to their cramped needs, rise again and again to the same afflictions and, with great effort, manage to fend off ruin for a short time. They want to live, to live a bit—at any price. Who would discern among them that arduous torch race that only the great survive? And yet time and again some awaken who, seeing what is great, feel inspired, as if human life were a glorious thing, and as if the most beautiful fruit of this bitter plant were the assurance that someone once walked proudly and stoically through this existence, another with deep thoughts, a third with mercy, but all of them leaving behind a single lesson: that one who lives life most beautifully is one who does not hold it in great esteem. However, while the common man regards this bit of existence with such morbid seriousness, those on their journey to immortality knew how to respond to it with an Olympian laugh, or at least with sublime disdain; often they went to their graves with irony—for what did they have to bury? #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The boldest knights among those addicted to glory, those who believe they will find their coat of arms hanging on a constellation, must be sought among the philosophers. They address their efforts not to a “public,” to the agitation of the masses and the cheering applause of their contemporaries; it is in their nature to travel the road alone. Their talent is the rarest, and in a certain respect, the most unnatural in nature, shutting itself off from and hostile even to kindred talents. The wall of their self-sufficiency must be hard as diamond not to be shattered and destroyed, for everything is on the move against them, humans and nature. Their journey to immortality is more arduous and impeded than any other, and yet no one can be as sure as the philosopher about reaching one’s goal, since one knows not where to stand, if not on the wings of all ages; for a disregard of the present and the momentary is of the nature of philosophical contemplation. One has the truth; let the wheel of time roll where it will, it can never escape the truth. It is important to realize that such humans did indeed once live. One could never imagine as a mere idle possibility the pride of the wise Heraclitus, who may serve as our example. For all striving for knowledge seems in itself unsatisfied and unsatisfying, which is why, without having learned it from history, one could hardly believe in such regal self-esteem, such boundless confidence in being the one lucky suitor of truth. Such humans live in their own solar system; that is where one must look for them. Even a Pythagoras, an Empedocles treated himself with a superhuman esteem, indeed with an almost religious awe, though the bond of compassion, together with grand faith in the transmigration of souls and the unity of all living things, led them back again to other humans, and to their salvation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The World is not the way they tell you it is. Unconsciously we know this because we have al been immunized by growing up in the United States of America. The little girl watching television asks will she really get the part in the spring play if she uses Listerine, and her good mother says no, darling, that is just the commercial. It is not long before the moppets figure out that parents have commercials of their own—commercials to keep one quiet, commercials to get one to eat, and so on. However, parents—indeed all of us—are in turn being given a whole variety of commercials that do not seem to be commercials. Silver is in short supply, and the Treasury is running out and begins to fear a run. So the Treasury tells the New York Times that, what with one thing and another, there is enough silver for twenty years. Those who listened to the commercial sat quietly, expecting to get the part in the spring play, and the cynics went and ran all the silver out of the Treasury and the price went through the roof. Image and reality an identity and anxiety and money are all major concerns to us. If that does not scare you, nothing will. It is not really that serious and there is a message in here from Lord Keynes to that effect. You already know about image and reality, and you probably already know all about identity and anxiety, and everybody knows about money, so all we are doing is stirring them up together. Many are wondering, as Mr. Adam Smith did, the famous economist and moral philosopher, “To what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this World?” What is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power, and preheminence?” he asked in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
We are taught—at least those of us who grew up without a great deal of it—that money is A Very Serious Business, that the stewardship of capital is holy, and that the handler of money must conduct oneself as a Prudent Human. It is all part of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of Capitalism and I suppose it all helped to make this country what it is. Penny saved, penny earned, waste not, want not, Summer Sale Save 10 Percent, and so on. The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and overexacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst one who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate told. Drs. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern developed, some years ago, a Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. This game theory has had a tremendous impact on our national life; it influences how our defense decisions are made and how the marketing strategies of great corporations are worked out. What is the game theory? You could say it is an attempt to quantify and work through the actions of players in a game, to measure their options continuously. Or, to be more formal, game theory is a branch of mathematics that aims to analyze problems of conflict by abstracting common strategic features for study in theoretical models. By stressing strategic aspects, id est, those controlled by the participants, it goes beyond the classic theory of probability, in which the treatment of games is limited to pure chance. Drs. Von Neumann and Morgenstern worked through systems that incorporated conflicting interests, incomplete information, and the interplay of free rational decisions and choice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
They started with dual games, zero sum two-person games, id est, those in which one player wins what the other loses. At the other end you have something like the stock market, an infinite, n-person game. (N is one of the letters economists use when they do not know something.) The stock market is probably temporarily too complex even for the Game Theoreticians, but I suppose some day even it will become a serious candidate for quantification and equations. The market is both a game and a Game, id est, both sport, frolic, fun, and play, and a subject for continuously measurable options. If it is a game, then we can relieve ourselves of some of the heavy and possibly crippling emotions that individuals carry into investing, because in a game the winning of the stake is clearly defined. Anything else becomes irrelevant. Is this so startling? “Eighty percent of investors are not really out to make money,” says one leading Wall Streeter. Investors not out to make money? It seems almost like a contradiction in terms. What are they doing then? That can be a subject for a whole discussion, and will be, a bit later. Let us go back to the illumine, that the investment game is intolerably boring save to those with a gambling instinct, while those with the instinct must pay to it “the appropriate toll.” This really does say it all. Active investors do not pursue bonds (except convertibles) and preferreds (except convertibles). It is not that one cannot make money with these instruments, it is that they lack romance enough to be part of the game; they are boring. It is very hard to get excited over a bond basis book, where your index finger traces along a column until it gets to the proper degree of safety and yield. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Sometime illusions are more comfortable than reality, but there is no reason to be discomfited by facing the gambling instinct that saves the stock market from being a bore. Once it is acknowledged, rather than buried, we can “pay to this propensity the appropriate toll” and proceed with reality. There is really no more than recognizing an instinct. Dr. Thomas Schelling, a Harvard economist and the author of a number of works on miliary strategy, foes a lot further. Writing on “Economics and Criminal Enterprise,” Dr. Schelling says: “The greatest gambling enterprise in the United States has not been significantly touched by organized crime. That is the stock market…The reason is that the market works too well, Federal control over the stock market, designed mainly to keep it honest and informative…makes it a hard market to tamper with.” Sentences like the first one in that excerpt must make the public-relations people at the New York Stock Exchange wake up screaming. For years the New York Stock Exchange and the securities industry have campaigned to correct the idea that buying stocks was gambling, and while there may be some dark corners of this country that persist in a Populist suspicion of Wall Street, by and large they have succeeded. Dr. Schelling’s phrasing has to be counted as unfortunate, and in no sense is the stock market a great gambling enterprise like a lottery. However, it is an exercise in mass psychology, in trying to guess better than the crowd how the masses will behave. Sometimes the literature which was produced in order to dispel the pre-1929 suspicions can get in the way of seeing things the way they are. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
If you are a player in the Game, or are thinking of becoming one, there is one irony of which you should be aware. The object of the game is to make money, hopefully a lot of it. All the players in the Game are getting rapidly more professional; the amount of sheer information poured out on what is going on has become almost too much to absorb. The true professionals in the Game—the professional portfolio managers—grow more skilled all the time. They are human and they make mistakes, but if you have your money managed by a truly alert mutual fund or even by one of the better banks, you will have a better job done for you than probably at any time in the past. However, if you have your money managed for you, then you are not really interested, or at least the Game element—with that propensity to be paid for—does not attract you. There are a lot of investors who came to the market to make money, and they told themselves that what they wanted was the money: security, a trip around the World, a new sloop, a country estate, an art collection, a Caribbean house for cold winters. And they succeeded. So they sat on the dock of the Caribbean home, chatting with their art dealers and gazing fondly at the new sloop, and after a while it was a bit flat. Something was missing. If you are a successful Game player, it can be a fascinating, consuming, totally absorbing experience, in fact it has to be. If it is not totally absorbing, you are not likely to be among the most successful, because you are competing with those who do find it so absorbing. The lads with the Caribbean houses and the new sloops did not, upon the discovery that something was missing, sell those trophies and acquire sackcloth and ashes. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The sloops and the houses and the art are still there, but the players have gone back to the Game, and they do not have a great deal of time for their toys. The Game is more fun. It probably does not make you a better person, and I am not sure it does any good for humanity; the best you can say is what Samuel Johnson said, that no man is so harmlessly occupied when he is making money. The irony is that this is a money game and money is the way we keep score. However, the real object of the Game is not money, it is the playing of the Game itself. For the true players, you could take all the trophies away and substitute plastic beads or whale’s teeth; as long as there is a way to keep score, they will play. There are cases of a predatory government just as they are in cases of firms and agencies of a benevolent government. Modeling of dynamics seems essential for a more satisfactory treatment of the distinction between roving and stationary bandits than the simple ad hoc procedures. Hierarchical agencies are important in practice because a government has to use middle-level administrators to implement its policies, and these can have their own objectives and information advantages. Thus a top-level government may be more or less benevolent while its middle-level agents are predatory, or both may be predatory and the middle-level agents may be trying to keep some of the extorted sums for themselves. Agricultural reforms in China in the late 1970s eventually won the approval of the top-level government, overcoming initial resistance by local bureaucrats. There are especially harmful consequences when a citizen needs permission from several officials of a predatory government to conduct one’s productive activities, and each of them demand a bribe. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
If we continue in our present direction, the Soviet Union serves as a warning to Western industrialism of where we will arrive. In the West we have developed a managerial industrialism, with the concomitant “organization man”; Russia, having jumped over the intermediate stage in which we in the West still find ourselves, has carried this development to its logical end—under the names of Marxism and socialism. Nationalization (the abolition of private property in the means of production) is not an essential distinction between “socialism” and “capitalism.” It is merely a technical device for more efficient production and planning. The Soviet system is an efficient, completely centralized system, ruled by an industrial, political and military bureaucracy; it is the completed “managerial revolution,” rather than a socialist revolution. The Soviet system is not the opposite of the capitalist system, but rather the image into which capitalism will develop unless we return to the principles of the Western tradition of humanism and individualism. If concentrated ownership of property, bureaucratic management of the process of production, and manipulated consumption are essential elements of twenty-first century capitalism, the difference from Soviet communism seems to be one of degree rather than of quality. If capitalism, as Mr. Keynes said, can survive only with a considerable degree of socialization, it may be said with equal justification that Soviet communism has survived by incorporating a considerable amount of capitalism. In fact, the Soviet system and the Western system are both confronted with the same problems of industrialization and economic growth in a highly developed, centralized managerial society. They both use the methods of a managerial, bureaucratically ruled mass society characterized by an increasing degree of human alienation, adaptation to the group, and a prevalence of material over spiritual interests; they both produce the organization man who is ruled by the bureaucracies and the machines and yet believes himself to be following the lofty aim of humanistic ideals. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The similarities between the Soviet system and “capitalism” were strikingly demonstrated in the presentation of the class stratification and the educational goals of the Soviet Union, a comparison which shows that in many respects the Soviet system resembles the capitalist system of the nineteenth century while in some other it is more modern and “advanced” than that of the West. These similarities become even clearer if we consider one factors that, In Western opinion, is the cornerstone of capitalism: monetary incentives. What are the facts about incentives in Soviet Russia? As far as the workers in Russian are concerned the incentive is cash. The cash incentive operates in two ways. First, is the fact that wages are for the most part based on the piece-work principle. Wages “are fixed for the required output planned for the specific job. As the worker exceeds one’s quota, the incentive system sets up a rising scale to compensate one for increased production. For the labourer who raises one’s output from 1 to 10 percent, the commensurate increases in the piece rate is 100 percent.” If one consistently doubles one’s quota, one’s monthly pay will be almost double one’s regular wage. The second cash incentive for the worker is bonuses, which are paid out of the profit of the enterprise. “In many cases the bonus will make up the larger amount of a Russian worker’s annual wages.” As far as Soviet managers are concerned, the chief incentives is that of the bonus paid for the overfulfillment of targets. “The amount of income earned in the form of bonuses is substantial. The managerial personnel of the iron and steel industry earned bonuses averaging 51.4 percent of their basic income. In the food industry at the low end, the percentage was 21 percent. Since these are averages, many individual managers earned considerably more than this. Bonuses of this magnitude must be a potent incentive indeed.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Also the status symbol and the expense account have become, according to Javits, an important incentive for the Soviet manager. Summing up, Berliner states that “private gain has for the last 25 years been the keystone of the management incentive system” and “we are safe in saying that for the next several decades at least, private gain will be the central economic incentive in both [the America and the Russian] systems.” For the peasants too, cash is one of the main economic incentives. There is one incentive that is paradoxical insofar as it shows a relaxation of state incentive on the one had by the Soviet, and a continued experimentation on the other hand by the United States of America. It refers to the highly publicized incentive to agriculture offered by the United States of America at its expense for the private gain of the farmer. In the Soviet Union…after having sold the required crop to the government, the members of the collectives are permitted to market the excess to the public on a supply-and-demand basis. This area of Soviet economy is about the only one in which a free marker can be found. In the period before the German Revolution of 1918, the authority of the monarchy was undisputed, and by leaning on it and identifying with it the member of the lower middle class acquired a feeling of security and narcissistic pride. Also, the authority of religion and traditional morality was still firmly rooted. The family was still unshaken and a safe refuge in a hostile World. The individual felt that one belonged to a stable social and cultural system in which one had one’s definite place. One’s submission and loyalty to existing authorities were a satisfactory solution of one’s masochistic strivings; yet one did not go to the extreme of self-surrender and one retained a sense of the importance of one’s own personality. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
What one was lacking in security and aggressiveness as an individual, one was compensated for by the strength of the authorities to whom one submitted oneself. In brief one’s economic position was still solid enough to give one a feeling of self-pride and of relative security, and the authorities on whom one learned were strong enough to give one the additional security which one’s own individual position could not provide. The postwar period changed this situation considerably. In the first place, the economic decline of the old middle class went at a faster pace; this decline was accelerated by the inflation, culminating in 1923, which wiped out almost completely the savings of many years’ work. While the years between 1924 and 1928 brought economic improvement and new hopes to the lower middle class, squeezed in between the workers and the upper classes, was the most defenseless group and therefore the hardest hit. However, besides these economic factors there were psychological considerations that aggravated the situation. The defeat in the war and the downfall of the monarchy was one. While the monarchy and the state had been the solid rock on which, psychologically speaking, the petty bourgeois had built his existence, their failure and defeat shattered the basis of one’s own life. If the Kaiser could be publicly ridiculed, if officers could be attacked, if the state had to change its form and to accept “red agitators” as cabinet ministers and saddle-maker as president, what could the little human put one’s trust in? One had identified oneself in one’s subaltern manner with all these institutions; now, since they had gone, where was one to go? The inflation, too, played both an economic and a psychological role. It was a deadly blow against the principle of thrift as well as against the authority of the state. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
If the savings of many years, for which one had sacrificed so many little pleasures, could be lost through no fault of one’s own, what was the point in saving anyway? If the state could break its promises printed on its bank noted and loans, whose promises could one trust any longer? It was not only the economic position of the lower middle class that declined more rapidly after the war, but its social prestige as well. Before the war one could feel oneself as something better than a worker. After the revolution the social prestige of the working class rose considerably and in consequence the prestige of the lower middle class fell in relative terms. There was nobody to look down upon any more, a privilege that had always been one of the strongest assets in the life of small shopkeepers and their like. In addition to these factors the last stronghold of middle-class security had been shattered too: the family. The postwar development, in Germany perhaps more than in other countries, had shaken the authority of the father and the old middle-class morality. The younger generation acted as they pleased and cared no longer whether their actions were approved by their parents or not. The decline of the old social symbols of authority like monarchy and state affected the role of the individual authorities, the parents. If these authorities, which the younger generation has been taught by the parents to respect, proved to be weak, then the parents lost prestige and authority too. Another factor was that, under the changed conditions, especially the inflation, the older generation was bewildered and puzzled and much less adapted to the new conditions than the smarter, younger generation. Thus the younger generation felt superior to their elders and could not take them, and their teachings, quite seriously any more. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Furthermore, the economic decline of the middle class deprived the parents of their economic roles as backers of the economic future of their children. The older generation of the lower middle class grew more bitter and resentful, but in a passive way; the younger generation was driving for action. Children, after being limbs of Satan in traditional theology and mystically illuminated angels in the minds of educational reformers, have reverted to being little devils—not theological demons inspired by the Evil One, but scientific Freudian abominations inspired by the Unconscious. They are, it must be said, far more wicked than they were in the diatribes of the monks; they displayed, an ingenuity and persistence in sinful imaginings to which in the past there was nothing comparable except St. Anthony. Is all this the objective truth at least? Or is it merely an adult imaginative compensation for being no longer allowed to wallop the little pests? Germany’s economic position was aggravated by the fact that the basis for an independent economic existence, such as their parents had had, was lost; the professional market was saturated, and the chances of making a living as a physician or lawyer were slight. Those who had fought in the war felt that they had a claim for a better deal than they were actually getting. Especially the many young officers, who for years had been accustomed to command and exercise power quite naturally, could not reconcile themselves to becoming clerks or traveling salesmen. The increasing social frustration led to a projection which became an important source for National Socialism: instead of being aware of the economic and social fate of the old middle class, its members consciously thought of their fate in term of the nation. The nation defeat and the Treaty of Versailles became the symbols to which the actual frustration—the social one—was shifted. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Instead of denying or seeking to minimize the effects of social investigation on the behaviour of the people investigated, it is probable that social science has much to gain by making them the focus of greater attention. For if the reflexive consequences of social inquiry can be isolated and studied, it is possible that the precise condition under which they occur can be predicted, and ultimately utilized. This outcome is far form certain; it may be that with every cycle of self-examination new conditions are generated, so that prediction is always one move behind self-knowledge, and the concrete outcomes will always remain indeterminate. Abstractly, on the other hand, each increment of self-knowledge is likely to produce at least an enhanced sense of self-determination. If in all social research, furthermore, the subjects were systematically made party to the research, as well as to the findings—as the subjects’ curiosity and co-operation have always seemed in fairness to warrant—the result promises new techniques of self-expression and social planning. Suppose that a survey of all parents in a certain community reveals that 75 percent of those parents beat their children for defying commands and 25 percent do not. The mere interviewing of parents to find this out may have caused large numbers of them to reflect upon beating as a debatable practice, and to discuss it with other. Suppose that the figure found are then published for the information of the whole community. Some parent who beat their children may be encouraged by realizing how many other do likewise; other may be influenced by the fat that many parents et along without beating. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Some parents who do not go in for beating may be encouraged to learn that there are many others who do not; others may be discouraged to realize they are in a minority. However, since many parents do not fall neatly into one category or the other, and may resort to beating only under extreme circumstances, it is likely that the interviewing process will force them to clarify their conception of themselves as beaters or nonbeaters. Also, when the results are published, knowledge of how many endorse or condemn each practice is likely to send further waverers in one direction or the other. Human beings quickly lose patience with being studied—unless they are studying themselves. As people become more aware of what is taking place in their community, discussion will occur and opinion form. Instead of the findings remaining mere factual records objectively gathered by disinterested observers, they become indices of progress and achievement; the community commences to measure itself against itself, to accentuate a direction of change guided by a preferred self-characterization; goals of the “Let’s do better next year!” type are informally or formally set up for each period. The adoption of these goals releases the energy for their achievements; new values and motives are created. Human beings change their behaviour as a consequence of studying it. Planning becomes not a procedure for reducing freedom but for increasing the scope of self-determination. Social science becomes not a technique for manipulation but a means for everyone to explore new possibilities of self-development. Family life becomes a lifelong series of experiments in personality reorganization conducted by the persons involved, and family agencies become their sources of leadership. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
If the goal of family research and family agencies is to be the development of competent personalities, then this implies a good deal more than the acquisition and application of matter-of-fact knowledge. It requires above all the will to carry out these theoretical and practical programs. Not the least of the threats confronting western communities is a dangerous paralysis of the general will. There is compelling evidence in the volume of sales of religious books and self-help books for the existence of an almost universal desire for greater competence. As humans achieve a competence with respect to the social World comparable to their mastery over the material World, some old values may make way for new, but other are realized in higher degree. As some means become an ends in themselves, so some formers ends are reduced to the function of means. Perhaps the substitution of the pursuit of competence for the pursuit of wealth will be such instance. In the contemporary world, a parent is far better advised to endow one’s child with competence in the new sense than to leave one with “a competence” in the old sense. Democracies do not know what kind of citizen the want to create. It is likely, however, that a later generation will look back and observe that we were not trying to create a fixed type of person, as other ages and place have done. Instead, we were groping toward the creation of a person who, not conforming to a predetermine image, is unprecedently capable of determining oneself. The members of a family change and develop, and it is other family members who are the principal determinants of such development. If this is assumed to be true, then the reflexivity quotient of any participant experiment is maximized, the more the behaviour of the subjects resembles that of the members of the family. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The more each means to the others, and they do one, the greater the consequence of their interactions. Conversely, the influence of others upon the self sharply declines as they move outside one’s constellation of significant others. Family patterns are normally transferred to interpersonal relations in other institutions. It is the possibility of progressively reconstituting the family through experimentally establishing its preferred relations in the quasi-families which offers hope of raising the quality of family life and of making accessible to experimental research a subject previously almost inviolate to observation. It is clear that incompetence in marriage and parenthood are very common, and its consequences are difficult for millions to bear. The usual references to rates of divorce only crudely suggests how far families fall short of hopes they inspire when formed, since even families that last often fail to achieve the optimal development of their members, so much so that many writers incline to assume that marital and parental misfeasance are the normal human condition. A basic finding is that changes in certain components of competence can be produced through series of meetings of quasi-family groups of young adults, who role-play and discuss problematic family life situations. By over performance a member learns to exhibit greater competence within the sheltered forum of a small group of comparable others, before whom one is willing to expose oneself in challenging tasks of learning. They carry-over to actual life—in one’s real family and interpersonal relations—is a problem not only of competence but of identity-change. It can be accomplished by a process of identification and progressive involvement in one’s practice group from week to week. How stable such gains are is yet to be determine, but as other investigators have frequently found, the only permanent change is structural change. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Thus it is assumed that only as increments in competence are stabilized through changed conceptions of identity, and fortified through the actual growth of friendship, commitment, and obligation to other members of the practice group, is there reasonable chance of achieving the substantial results envisaged. And if the family as the cellular component of society can be reconstituted through participant experimentation—if the gap from quasi-family to real life situations can be steadily bridged through wider development of interpersonal competence in the next generation—then the family itself will gain in value and public honour. Because of the domination of the physical pat of the human, and the emphasis placed upon the supernatural experiences in the body, the body is made to do the work of the spirit and is forced into a prominence which hides the true spirit life. It feels the pressure, feels the conflict, and thus becomes the locus of the sense instead of it being the spirit. These believers do not perceive where they feel. If they are question as to where they “feel,” they cannot answer. They should learn to discriminate, and know how to discern the feelings of the spirit, which are neither emotional (soulish) nor physical. The spirit may be likened to an electric light. If the humans’ spirit is in contact with the Spirit of God, it is full of light; apart from Him it is in darkness. Indwelt by Him, “the spirit of the human is a lamp of the Lord,” reports Proverbs 20.27. The possibilities and potentialities of the human spirit are only known when the spirit is joined to Christ and, united to Him, is made strong to stand against the powers of darkness. The Lord will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the land; He will make the people lie down in safety. Violence shall no more be heard in your land, neither desolation nor destruction within your borders. I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for All. The Sacramento Fire Department has been serving the community since 1851, they are not receiving all their resources, please make donations to them. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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The New World Under Construction
Nazism is an economic and political issue, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds. The psychological aspect of Nazism, its human basis suggests two problems: the character structure of those people to whom it appealed, and the psychological characteristics of the ideology that made it such an effective instrument with regard to those people. In considering the psychological basis for the success of Nazism this differentiation has to be made at the outset: one part of the population bowed to the Nazi regime without any strong resistance, but also without becoming admirers of the Nazi ideology and political practice. Another part was deeply attracted to the new ideology and fanatically attached to the new ideology and fanatically attached to those who proclaimed it. The first group consisted mainly of the working class and the liberal and Catholic bourgeoisie. In spite of an excellent organization, especially among the working class, these groups, although continuously hostile to Nazism from its beginning up to 1933, did not show the inner resistance one might have expected as the outcome of their political convictions. Their will to resist collapsed quickly and since then they have caused little difficulty for the regime (excepting, of course, the small minority which has fought heroically against Nazism during all these years). Being a member of the SS in a society like Nazi Germany was a matter of considerable significance. In the Soviet Union, another revolutionary society, people who rose into the elite were called “new people.” They were people of the future, liberated from old norms, and distinct from the nobility of the old regime, who had attained their rank and privileges through birth or wealth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The SS were the new people of Nazi Germany. However, their distinction was based less on class (as in the USSR) than on the perception that they had especially good blood. This was their entrée into the elite of the new World under construction. Early in the war, Otto Meckelburg serves as an adjutant in the Death’s Head regiment, which oversaw the administration of Germany’s concentration camps. No “task was ever too much” for Mr. Mechelburg, his boss wrote in 1940; he was always “fresh and eager to work.” Mr. Meckelburg participated in the Germans’ early campaigns in Poland and the west, and later at the Eastern Front and in Yugoslavia. He was decorated a number of times during the war and moved up the ranks. In September 1942, he was made company commander in the notorious Prince Eugen Division, whose counterinsurgency operations involved numerous war crimes, many against civilians. Whatever the precise nature of his wartime deeds, Mr. Meckelburg would be repeatedly lauded by his superiors for “particularly successful leadership” and promoted. The officer urging his promotion to Sturmbannfuhrer in 1943 described him as “open, direct, and straight-as-an-arrow,” with an “impeccably SS attitude.” He had, another assessor observed in 1944, an “instinct for the possibilities of a given situation.” Psychologically, this readiness to submit to the Nazi regime seems to be due mainly to a state of inner tiredness and resignation, which, is characteristic of the individual in the present era even in democratic countries. In Germany one additional condition was present as far as the working class was concerned: the defeat it suffered after the first victories in the revolution of 1918. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The working class had entered the postwar period with strong hopes for the realization of socialism or last least for a definite rise in its political, economic, and social position; but, whatever the reasons, it had witnessed an unbroken succession of defeats, which brought about the complete disappointments of all its hopes. By the beginning of 1930 the fruits of its initial victories were almost completely destroyed and the result was a deep feeling of resignation, of disbelief in their leaders, of doubt about the value of any kind of political organization and political activity. They still remained members of their respective parties and, consciously, continued to believe in their political doctrines; but deep within themselves many had given up any hope in the effectiveness of political actions. An additional incentive for the loyalty of the majority of the population to the Nazi government because effect after Mr. Hitler came into power. For millions of people Mr. Hitler’s government then became identical with “Germany.” Once he held the power of the government, fighting him implied shutting oneself out of the community of Germans; when other political parties were abolished and the Nazi party “was” Germany, opposition to it meant opposition to Germany. It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group. However much a German citizen may be opposed to the principles of Nazim, if he has to choose between being alone and feeling that he belongs to Germany, most persons will choose the latter. It can be observed in many instances that persons who are not Nazis nevertheless defend Nazism against criticism of foreigners because they feel that an attack on Nazis is an attack on Germany. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The fear of isolation and the relative weakness of moral principles help any party to win the loyalty of a large sector of the population once that part has captured the power of the state. This consideration results in an axiom which is important for the problems of political propaganda: any attack on Germany as such, any defamatory propaganda concerning “the Germans” (such as the “Hun” symbol of the last war), only increases the loyalty to those who are not wholly identified with the Nazi system. This problem, however, cannot be solved basically by skillful propaganda but only by the victory in all countries of one fundamental truth: that ethical principles stand above the existence of the nation and that by adhering to these principles an individual belongs to the community of all those who share, who have shared, and who will share this belief. In contrast to the negative or resigned attitude of the working class and of the liberal and Catholic bourgeoisie, the Nazi ideology was ardently greeted by the lower strata of the middle class, composed of small shopkeepers, artisans, and white-collar workers. In fact, 90 percents of doctors were connected to the Nazi Party. Members of the older generation among this class formed the more passive mass basis; their sons and daughters were the more active fighters. For them the Nazi ideology—its spirit of blind obedience to a leader and of hatred against racial and political minorities, its craving for conquest and domination, its exaltation of the German people and the “Nordic Race”—had a tremendous emotional appeal, and it was this appeal which won them over and made them into ardent believers in and fighters for the Nazi cause. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The answer to the question why the Nazi ideology was so appealing to the lower middle class has to be sought for in the social character of the lower middle class. Their social character was markedly different from that of the working class, of the higher strata of the middle class, and of the nobility and the upper classes. As a matter of fact, certain features were characteristic for this part of the middle class throughout its history: their love of the strong, hatred of the weak, their pettiness, hostility, thriftiness with feelings as well as with money, and essentially their asceticism. Their outlook on life was narrow, they suspected and hated the stranger, and they were curious and envious of their acquaintances, rationalizing their envy as moral indignation; their whole life was based on the principle of scarcity—economically as well as psychologically. To say that the social character of the lower middle class differed from that of the working class does not imply that this character structure was not present in the working class also. However, it was typical for the lower middle class, while only a minority of the working class exhibited the same character structure in a similarly clear-cut fashion; the one or the other trait, however, in a less intense form, like enhanced respect of authority or thrift, was to be found in most members of the working class too. On the other hand it seems that a great part of the white-collar workers—probably the majority—more closely resembled the character structure of the manual workers (especially those in big factories) than that of the “old middle class,” which did not participate in the rise of monopolistic capitalism but was essentially threatened by it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Although it is true that the social character of the lower middle class had been the same long before the war of 1914, it is also true that the events after the war intensified the very traits to which the Nazi ideology had its strong appeal: its craving for submission and its lust for power. There were, after all, times of spiritual malaise, of mistrust and heightened suspicion. In an atmosphere of determined, willful refusal to acknowledge basic facts, who could be blamed for imagining that evil was lurking about. It is precisely because reason is universal and transcends all nation borders, that the philosopher who follows reason is a citizen of the World; humans are their objects—not this or that person, or this or that nation. The World is one’s country, not the place where one was born. Humans fear thought more than they fear anything else on Earth—more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees a human being, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the Universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the World, and the chief glory of humans. However, if thought is to become the possession of many, not the privilege of few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds humans back—fear lest their cherished beliefs should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by which they live should prove harmful, fear least they themselves should prove less worthy of respect than they have supposed themselves to be. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
“Should the working human think freely about property? Then what will become of us, the rich? Should young men and women think freely about sex? Then what will become of morality? Should soldiers think freely about war? Then what will become of military discipline? Away with thought! Back into the shades of prejudice, lest property, morals, and war should be endangered! Better men should be stupid, slothful, and oppressive than that their thoughts should be free. For if their thoughts were free, they might not think as we do. And at all costs this disaster must be averted.” So the opponents of thought argue in the unconscious depths of their souls. And so they act in their churches, their schools, and their universities. For some philosophers, the capacity to disobey is rooted, not in some abstract principle, but in the most real experience there is—in the love of life. This love of life shines through their writings as well as through the persons. It is a rare quality today, and especially rare in the very countries where humans live in the midst of plenty. Many confuse thrill with joy, excitement with interest, consuming with being. The necrophilous slogan “Long live death,” while consciously used only by the fascists, fills the heats of many people living in the lands of plenty, although they are not aware of it in themselves. It seems that in this fact lies of one the reasons in which explain why the majority of people are resigned to accept nuclear war and the ensuing destruction of civilization and to take so few steps to prevent this catastrophe. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Some philosophers, on the contrary, fight against the threatening slaughter, not because they are pacifist or because some abstract principle is involved, but precisely because they are humans who love live. For the very same reason many have no use for those voices which love to harp on the evilness of humanity, in fact thus saying more about themselves and their only gloomy moods than about humans. While these steadfast individuals may not be sentimental romantics, they tend to be hard-headed, critical, caustic realist; they are aware of the depth of evil and stupidity to be found in the heart of humans, but they do not confuse this fact with an alleged innate corruption which serves to rationalize the outlook of those who are too gloomy to believe in man’s gift to create a World in those which they can feel themselves to be at home. Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned hopes. The Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. However, out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim’s heart. However, those who feel that life on this planet would be a life in prison if it were not for the windows onto a greater World beyond; for those to whom a belief in human’s omnipotence seems arrogant, who desire rather the Stoic freedom that comes of mastery over the passions than the Napoleonic domination that sees the kingdoms of this World at its feet—in a word, to humans who do not find Man an adequate object of their worship, the pragmatist’s World will seem narrow and petty, robbing life of all that gives it value, and making Man himself smaller by depriving the Universe which he contemplates of all its splendour. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
With the increasing development of capitalism, not only economically but psychologically, the spiritual, humanistic aims of socialism were replaced by those of the victorious capitalist system—the aims of maximal economic efficiency, maximal production and consumption. This misinterpretation of socialism as a purely economic movement, along with an acceptance of the nationalization of the means of production as an aim in itself, occurred both in the right and left wings of the socialist movement. The primary aim of the reformist leaders of the socialist movement in Europe was the elevation of the economic status of the worker within the capitalist system. Their most radical measure in this effort was the nationalization of certain big industries. Only recently has it been realized that the nationalization of an enterprise is in itself not the realization of socialism, and that to be managed by a publicly appointed bureaucracy. The leaders of the Soviet Union evaluated socialism also by the standards of capitalism and their principal claim for the Soviet system is that “socialism” can produce more effectively and abundantly than “capitalism.” Both wings of socialism forget that Mr. Marx aimed at a humanly different society, not only at a more prosperous one. His concept of socialism, despite changes in the development of his own thinking, was principally that of an unalienated society in which every citizen would be an active and responsible member of the community, participating in the control of all social and economic arrangements and not, as the Soviet practice, a “number,” fed with ideologies and controlled by a small bureaucratic minority. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
For Mr. Marx, socialism was the control of society from below, by its members; not from above, by a bureaucracy. The Soviet Union may be called state capitalism, or anything else; one claim this managerial, bureaucratic system can not make is that of being “socialism” in Marx’s sense. No better answer can be given to this claim than Mr. Schumpeter’s statement that there is “between the true meaning of Marx’s message and Bolshevist practice and ideology at least as great a gulf as there was between the religion of humble Gallileans and the practice and ideology of the princes of the Church or the warlords of the Middle Ages.” While the Soviet system has borrowed the concept of the nationalization of the means of production and of over-all planning from Marxist socialism, it nonetheless shares many features with contemporary capitalism. The development of twentieth-century capitalism has led to an ever-growing centralization in industrial production. The big corporations are becoming increasingly the center of production in the steel, automobile, and chemical industries, in oil, food, banking, movies, and television. Only in certain branches of production, like the clothing industry, do we still find the nineteenth-century picture of a great number of small and highly competitive enterprises. Today’s big enterprises are directed by vast and hierarchically structured bureaucracies, which administer the enterprise according to the principles of profit maximization, yet are relatively independent of the millions of stockholders who are the legal owners. The same centralization has taken place in government, in the armed forces, and even in scientific research. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
While “private enterprises” decries ideologically all socialist tendencies, it is eager to accept large direct and indirect grants by the state. The same development has led to important changes with regard to free competition and free market. The free market and free competition in the nineteenth-century sense are phenomena of the past. Even though the Western system retain some measure of competition, overt and hidden price agreements between the big corporations, state grants, et cetera, have (in spite of anti-monopoly laws in the United States of America) greatly restricted competition and the function of the free market. Assuming, for a moment, that the tendency toward centralization develops further, and that there will eventually be only one big corporation producing, respectively, automobiles, steel, films, et cetera, the picture of “capitalist” economy would not be so drastically different from the Russian socialist economy. There is of course an increasing element in state planning in Western capitalism, not only through massive state intervention, but also in the sense that the Atomic Energy Commission is the largest industrial enterprise in the United States of America, and that the armament industry, although in private hands, produces a great mass of weapons according to plans made by the state. This, however, does not imply that there is over-all planning in the United States of America beyond arms production, or even a plan for the transition from an armament to a peace economy. The mode of production in contemporary capitalism is that of large conglomerations of workers and clerks who work under the orders of the managerial bureaucracies. They are part of a vast production machine which, in order to run at all, must run smoothly, without friction, without interruption. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The individual worker or clerk becomes a cog in this machine; one’s functions and activities are determined by the whole structure of the organization in which one works. In the large enterprises, legal ownership of the means of production has become separated from its management, and has lost importance. The managers do not have the qualities of the old owners—individual initiative, daring, risk-taking—but the qualities of the bureaucrat—lack of individuality and imagination, impersonality, caution. They administer things and persons, and relate to persons as to things. The giant corporations, which control the economic—and to a large degree the political—destiny of the country, constitute the very opposite of the democratic process; they represent power without control by those whom they rule. Aside from the industrial bureaucracy, the bast majority of the population is administered by still other bureaucracies. First, there is the governmental bureaucracy, (including that of the armed forces) which influences and direct the lives of many millions in one form or another. More and more, the industrial, military and governmental bureaucracies are becoming intertwined, both in their activities and, increasingly, in their personnel. With the development of ever greater enterprises, unions also have developed into big bureaucratic machines in which the individual member has very little to say. Many union chiefs are managerial bureaucrats, just as the industrial chiefs are. All these bureaucracies have little authentic vision; and, due to the very nature of bureaucratic administration, this has to be so. They function rather like electronic computers, into which all the data have been fed and which—according to certain principles—make the “decisions.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
When humans are transformed into things and managed like things, their managers themselves become things; and things have no will, no vision, no plan. With the bureaucratic management of people, the democratic process becomes transformed into a ritual. Whether it is a stockholders meeting, or a political election, or a union meeting, the individual has lost almost all power to participate actively in the making of decision. Especially in the political sphere, elections become more and more reduced to plebiscites in which the voter can express preference for one of two slates of professional politicians. The best that can be said for that is that he is governed with his consent. However, the means used to bring about this consent are those of suggestion and manipulation and, with all that, the most fundamental decisions—those of foreign policy which involve peace and war—are made by small groups, which the average citizen hardly even knows of. Not only is the individual managed and manipulated in the sphere of production, but also in the sphere of consumption, which allegedly is the one in which one can express one’s free choice. Whether it is the consumption of food, clothing, liquor, cigarettes, or of films and television programs, a powerful suggestion apparatus is employed for two purposes: first, to increase constantly the appetite for new commodities, and second, to direct these appetites into the channels most profitable for industry. The very size of the capital investment in the consumer goods industry and the competition between a few giant enterprises makes it necessary not to leave consumption to chance, nor to leave the consumer a free choice of whether one want to be more and what one wants to buy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
One’s appetites have to be constantly whetted; one’s tastes have to be manipulated, managed, and made predictable. Humans are transformed into the “consumer,” the eternal suckling whose one wish is to consumer more and “better” things. To maximize its own take, the kleptocratic government would ideally to drive everyone down to the subsistence or quiescence utility level. However, such a government, provided it is rational, will recognize the need to give the higher-skilled people sufficient marginal incentives to reveal their skills, because this increases its net extraction from the economy. Therefore, it will keep only the least-skilled person at the lowest utility level, and allow the successively higher-skilled people to enjoy successively higher utility levels. Casual observation confirms that predatory governments do indeed treat the poor harshly. (A benevolent government will also have to tolerate some inequality in the interests of revelation of high skills, but it will keep even the worst-off person above the subsistence level. In fact a government with an extremely egalitarian—so-called Rawlsian—objective function wants to maximize the utility of the least-well-off person, to the extent permitted by the information and resource constraints.) Lowering the marginal tax rate on any one person reduces the revenue that the government can get from all those with higher skills. This is costly to the government: directly so for the kleptocratic government, and indirectly for the benevolent government because that tightens its revenue constraint and makes it harder to deliver utilities to citizens. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The calculation of the optimal tax schedule balances, at each skill level, the incentive effect of lowering the marginal tax rate for people at that skill level and the revenue loss from the people with skill levels higher than that. However, the trade-off disappears at the highest skill level that exists in the population, because then there is no higher skill level and therefore no revenue loss. Therefore the incentive effect dominates at the top skill level, and the optimal marginal tax rate is zero there. Benevolent governments usually have regard for equality and fairness. Therefore they are reluctant to lower the marginal tax rates on the most well-off people. They will let the marginal rate go to zero only at the very end, or may even choose to disregard this aspect of optimality in the interests of fairness. However, a kleptocratic government does not care about equality or fairness. Therefore we should expect such a government to treat the richest people in society especially well. They will have to contribute to the government’s coffers, to be sure, but at the margin they will be allowed to earn more income and keep it. Again causal observation supports the result that predatory dictators are often best buddies with their richest citizens. In view of the fact that all human beings organize their experience and actions through the medium of verbal categories, and that social science concepts are usually as accessible to the ordinary citizen as to the social scientist, it probably should be expected that descriptive and analytical concepts would lead to revisions of self-conception and social distinction among the human beings to whom applied. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Account must be taken of the common implication of citizens and scientists alike, not only in the methods, findings, and concepts of social science, but also in the interests which motivate social studies. It is not as if a special class of beings called scientists withdrew from the rest of humanity, and became mere spectators of life, knowledge of which they gathered and stored for its own sake. Moreover, the extent of resources made available for social science in general tends to vary with importance accorded to social science in a community, as against the alternative uses to which the same resources might be put. The economics of research and teaching quite clearly reveal the relative values placed upon particular problems. The sociologists of knowledge have for some time been exploring the interests which have animated the work of certain scholars in various periods, places, and settings. Thus far, however, they have only begun to explore the implications which general adoption by their own community of a scientific interest toward itself would have for their own specialty. To recognize that social facts are the creation of the persons observed, that neither persons nor institutions are permanently given but are in constant process of reconstruction, and that the verbal categories by which self and others are construed are the materials of which social organization is constructed, leads to a conception of human nature and the social order which is less a substantive description than a methodology. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
This is the ultimate outcome of the interactional approach of social psychology, which was first developed in studies of personality in the family. The evolution of social science is not in the direction of permanently definitive statements about human nature and society, but toward the specification of the methods whereby human nature and society come to be what they are. Social theory thus becomes only suspended social action. The famous mot of Poincare, that natural scientists talk about their results while social scientists talk about their methods, is rendered pointless when it becomes evident that the methods of social science are, in this sense, its most valuable findings. Psychopathological offenders seek to create a counterfeit of the truth. If the self-actualized Christian is ignorant of the tactics of the enemy in this way, one lets go the true spirit-action (or allows it to sink into disuse) and follows the counterfeit spiritual feelings, thinking one is walking after the spirit of God all the time. When this true spirit-action ceases, the psychopathological offenders suggest that God now guides through the “renewed mind,” which is an attempt to hide their workings and the human’s disuse of one’s spirit. Upon the cessation of the spirit’s cooperation with the Holy Spirit, with counterfeit “spirit” feelings taking place in the body, what follows is counterfeit light to the mind, reasoning, judging, et cetera—the human thus walking after mind and body, and not after the spirit, with the true illumination of the mind which comes from the full operation of the Holy Spirit. To further interfere with the true spirit of life, the deceiving spirits seek to counterfeit the action of the spirit in burden and aguish. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The start is by giving a fictitious “divine love” to the person, the faculty receiving it being the affections. When these affections are grasped fully by the deceivers, the sense of love passes away, and the human thinks that one has lost God and all communion with God. Then follow feelings of constraint and restraint, which will develop into acute suffering—which the believer thinks is in the spirit, and of God. Now one goes by these feelings, calling them “anguish in the spirit,” “groaning in the spirit,” et cetera, while the deceiving spirits, through these sufferings given by them in the affections, compel the human to do their will. The sacramental element in Protestantism is important. For this element is the one essential element of every religion, namely, the presence of the divine before our acting and striving, in a “structure of grace” and in the symbols expressing it. The experience of the holy must be mediated in a concrete and, therefore, sacramental fashion, for the sacramental is nothing else than some reality becoming the bearer of the holy in a special way and under special circumstances. The largest sense of the term “sacramental” denotes everything in which the Spiritual Presence has been experience; in a narrower sense, it denotes particular objects and acts in which a Spiritual community experiences the Spiritual Presence; and in the narrowest sense, it merely refers to some “great” sacraments in the performance of which the Spiritual Community actualizes itself. Two factors are discernible in every sacrament: a relationship to nature, and a participation in salvation history. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Although, in principle, anything from the World of nature may covey the Spiritual Presence, certain elements are specially qualified to act as sacramental symbols. Symbols must participate in that which they symbolize, not merely by an arbitrary connection, but by their very nature. For instance, water has a special power which peculiarly fits it to become a sacramental material. Water, in one hand, is a symbol for the origin of life in the womb of the mother, which is a symbol for the creative source of all things, and on the other hand, it is a symbol of death—the return to the origin of things. Thus, by its very character, water has a necessary relation to baptism. Whatever the explanation of individual elements such as water, the sacramental principle asserts that nature is open to and, in fact, participates in the holy. All physical consciousness of supernatural things, and even undue consciousness of natural things, should be refused, as this diverts the mind from walking after the spirit and sets it upon the bodily sensations. Physical consciousness is also an obstacle to the continuous concentration of the mind, and in a spiritual believer an “attack” of physical “consciousness” made use of by the enemy make break concentration of the mind and bring a cloud upon the spirit. The body should be kept calm, and under full control; excessive laughter should be avoided, and all “rushing” which rouses the physical life to the extent of dominating mind and spirit. Believers who desire to be “spiritual” and “full age” in the life in God should avoid excess, extravagance, and extremes in all things. “Natural sacraments” swiftly fall prey to the demonic, and the only way they can escape demonization is by union with the New Being in Jesus as the Christ. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Nature has no true sacramental power apart from the history of salvation. Hence, sacraments cannot be manufactured; they “originate when the intrinsic power of a natural object becomes for faith the bearer of sacramental power.” Their origin is linked to the source of all faith, to the Spiritual Presence manifest in Jesus the Christ whose Cross offers the only sure guarantee against the forces of demonization. Since the sacramental principle embraces the whole World of nature and since faith is not restricted by time and places, the question arises: Is the Spiritual Presence bound to any definite sacramental media? Every sacramental act must be subject to the criterion of the New Being in Jesus as the Christ, or demonization would result. Furthermore, sacraments must somehow refer to the central historical and doctrinal symbols of Christianity which have emerged within the history of salvation. However, in the sense that the Spiritual Community may adopt new sacramental symbols, for its entirely possible that a symbol may gradually fade and die, that is, lost its sacramental power. It shall come to pass at the end of days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the top of the mountains; it shall be exalted above the hills; all the nations shall flow into it. And many peoples shall go and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.” God will teach us His ways, and we will walk in His paths; God shall judge between the nations; He shall decide for many peoples. And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning forks. Nation shall not life up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. Please be sure to donate to the Sacramento Fire Department. They are not receiving all of their resources and have been proudly serving the community since 1851. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Humans Have an Innate Drive for Progress
The pseudo character which thinking can assume is better known than the same phenomenon in the sphere of willing and feeling. There is a difference between genuine thinking and pseudo thinking. Let u suppose we are on an island where there are fishermen and summer guest from the city. We want to know what kind of weather we are to expect and ask a fisherman and two of the city people, who we know have all listened to the weather forecast on the radio. The fisherman, with his long experience and concern with this problem of weather, will start thinking, assuming that he had not as yet made up his mind before we asked him. Knowing what the direction of the wind, temperature, humidity, and so on mean as a basis for weather forecast, he will weigh the different factors according to their respective significance and come to a more or less definite judgment. He will probably remember the radio forecast and quote it as supporting or contradicting his own opinion; if it is contradictory, he may be particularly careful in weighting the reasons for his opinion; but, and this is the essential point, it is his opinion, the result of his thinking, which he tells us. The first of the two city summer guests is a man who, when we ask him his opinion, knows that he does not understand much about the weather nor does he feel any compulsion to understand anything about it. He merely replies, “I cannot judge. All I know is that the radio forecast is thus and thus.” The other man who we ask is of a different type. He believes that he knows a great deal about the weather, although actually he knows little about it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
This man is the kind of person who feels that he must be able to answer every. He thinks for a minute and then tells us “his” opinion, which in fact is identical with the radio forecast. We ask him for his reasons and he tells us that on account of wind direction, temperature, and so on, he had some to his conclusion. This man’s behaviour as seen from the outside is the same as the fisherman’s. Yet, if we analyze it more closely, it becomes evident that he had heard the radio forecast and has accepted it. Feeling compelled, however, to have his own opinion about it, he forgets that he is simply repeating somebody else’s authoritative opinion, and he believes that this opinion is one that he arrived at through his own thinking. He imagines that the reasons he gives us preceded his opinion, but if we examine these reasons we see that they could not possibly have led him to any conclusion about the weather if her had not formed an opinion beforehand. They are actually only pseudo reasons which have the function of making his opinion appear to be the result of his own thinking. He has the illusion of having arrived at an opinion of his own, but in reality he has merely adopted an authority’s opinion without being aware of this process. It could very well be that he is right about the weather and the fisherman wrong, but in the event it would not be “his” opinion which would be right, although the fisherman would be really mistaken in “his own” opinion. If we study people’s opinions about certain subjects, for instance, politics, the same phenomenon can be observed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
To test this theory, as an average newspaper reader what he or she thinks about a certain political question. One will give you as “his” or “her” opinion a more or less exact account of what one has read, and yet—and this is the essential point—one believes that what he or she is saying is the result of one’s own thinking. If one lives in a small community where political opinions are handed down from father to son, “his own” opinion may be governed far more than he would for a moment believe by the lingering authority of a strict parent. Another reader’s opinion may be the outcome of a moment’s embarrassment, the fear of being thought uniformed, and hence the “thought” is essentially a front and not the result of a natural combination of experience, desire, and knowledge. The same phenomenon is to be found in aesthetic judgment. The average person who goes to a museum and looks at a picture by a famous painter, say Rembrandt, judges it to be a beautiful and impressive picture. If we analyze his or her judgement, we find that one does not have any particular inner response to the picture but thinks it is beautiful because one knows that one is supposed to think it is beautiful. The same phenomenon is evident with regard to the act of perception itself. Many persons looking at a famous bit of scenery actually reproduce the pictures they have seen of it numerous times, say on postal cards, and while believing “they” see the scenery, they have these pictures before their eyes. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Or, in experiencing an accident which occurs in their presence, witnesses see or hear the situation in terms of the newspaper report they anticipate. As a matter of fact, for many people an experience which they have had, an artistic performance or a political meeting they have attended, becomes real to them only after they have read about it in the newspaper. The suppression of critical thinking usually starts early. A five-year-old girl, for instance, may recognize the insincerity of her mother, either by subtly realizing that, while the mother is always talking of love and friendliness, she is actually cold and egotistical, or in a cruder way by noticing that her mother is having an affair with another man while constantly emphasizing her high moral standards. The child feels the discrepancy. Her sense of justice and truth is hurt, and yet, being dependent on the mother who would not allow any kind of criticism and, let us say, having a weak father on whom she cannot rely, the child is forced to suppress her critical insight. Very soon she will no longer notice the mother’s insincerity or unfaithfulness. She will lose the ability to think critically since it seems to be both hopeless and dangerous to keep it alive. On the other hand, the child is impressed by the pattern of having to believe that her mother is sincere and decent and that the marriage of the parents is a happy one, and she will be ready to accept this idea as if it were he own. In all of these illustrations of pseudo thinking, the problem is whether the thought is the result of one’s own thinking, that is, of one’s own activity; the problem is not whether of not the contents of the thought are right. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
As has been already suggested in the case of the fisherman making a weather forecast, “his” thought may even be wrong, and that of the man who only repeats the thought put into him may be right. The pseudo thinking may also be perfectly logical and rational. Its pseudo character does not necessarily appear in illogical elements. This can be studied in rationalizations which tend to explain an action or a feeling on rational and realistic grounds, although it I actually determined by irrational and subjective factors. The rationalization may be in contradiction to facts or to the rules of logical thinking. However, frequently it will be logical and rational in itself; then its irrationality lies only in the fact that it is not the real motive of the action which it pretends to have caused. An example of irrational rationalization is brought forward in a well-known joke. A person who had borrowed a glass jar from a neighbour had broken it, and on being asked to return it, answered, “In the first place, I have already returned it to you; in the second place, I never borrowed it from you; and in the third place, it was already broken when you have it to me.” We have an example of “rational” rationalization when person, A, who finds himself in a situation of economic distress, asks a relative of his, B, to lend him a sum of money. B declines and says that he does so because by lending money he could only support A’s inclinations to be irresponsible and to lean on others for support. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Now this reasoning may be perfectly sound, but it would nevertheless be a rationalization because B had not wanted to let A have the money in any event, and although he believes himself to be motivated by concern for A’s welfare he is actually motivated by his own stinginess. We cannot learn, therefore, whether we are dealing with a rationalization merely by determining the logicality of a person’s statement as such, but we must also take into account the psychological motivations operating in a person. The decisive point is not what is thought but how it is thought. The thought that is the result of active thinking is always new and original; original, not necessarily in the sense that others have not thought it before, but always in the sense that the person who thinks has used thinking as a tool to discover something new in the World outside or inside of himself or herself. Rationalizations are essentially lacking this quality of discovering and uncovering; they only confirm the emotional prejudice existing in oneself. Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempts to harmonize one’s own wishes with existing reality. With feeling as with thinking, one must distinguish between a genuine feeling, which originates in ourselves, and a pseudo feeling, which is really not our own although we believe it to be. Let us choose an example from everyday life which is typical of the pseudo character of our feelings in contact with other. We observe a man who is attending a party. He is gay, he laughs, makes friendly conversation, and all in all seems to be quite happy and contented. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
On taking his leave, he has a friendly smile while saying how much he enjoyed the evening. The door closes behind him—and this is the moment when we watch him carefully. A sudden change is noticed in his face. The smile has disappeared; of course, that is to be expected since he is now alone and has nothing or nobody with him to evoke a smile. However, the change is more than just a disappearance of the smile. There appears on his face an expression of deep sadness, almost of desperation. This expression probably stays only for a few seconds, and then the face assumes the usual masklike expression; the man gets into his car, thinks about the evening, wonders whether or not he made a good impression, and feels that he did. However, was “he” happy and gay during the party? Was the brief expression of sadness and desperation we observed on his face only a momentary of no great significance? It is almost impossible to decide the question without knowing more of this man. There is no incident, however, which may provide the clue for understanding what his gaiety meant. Human beings have many ascertainable ways to find unity. Humans can find unity by trying to regress to the animal stage, by doing away with what is specifically human (reason and love), by being a slave or a slave driver, by transforming oneself into a thing, or else by developing one’s specific human powers to such an extent that one finds a new unity with one’s fellow humans and with nature by becoming a free human—free not only from chains but free to make the development of all one’s existence to one’s own productive effort. #RandolphHarris 7of 20
Humans have an innate “drive for progress,” but one is driven by the need to solve one’s existential contradiction, which arises again at every new level of development. This contradiction—or, in other words, humans’ different and contradictory possibilities—constitutes one’s essence. It can be said without exaggeration that never was the knowledge of the great ideas produced by the human race as widespread in the World as it is today, and never were these ideas less effective than they are today. The ideas of Mr. Plato and Mr. Aristotle, of the prophets of Mr. Christ, of Mr. Spinoza, and Mr. Kant, are known to millions among the educated classes in Europe and America. They are taught at thousands of institutions of higher learning, and some of them are preached in the churches of all denominations everywhere. And all this in a World which follows the principles of unrestricted egotism, which breeds hysterical nationalism, and which is preparing for an insane mass slaughter. How can one explain this discrepancy? Ideas do not influence humans deeply when they are only taught as ideas and thoughts. Usually, when presented in such a way, they change other ideas; new thoughts take the place of old thoughts; new words take the place of old words. However, all that has happened is a change in concepts and words. Why should it be different? It is exceedingly difficult for a human to be moved by ideas, and to gras a truth. In order to do that, one needs to overcome deep-seated resistances of inertia, fear of being wrong, or of straying away from the heard. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Just to become acquainted with other ideas is not enough, even though these ideas is not enough, even though these ideas in themselves are right and potent. However, ideas do have an effect on humans if it is personified by the teacher, if the idea appears in the flesh. If a human expresses the idea of humanity and is humble, then those who listen to one will understand what humility is. They will not only understand, but they will believe that one is talking about a reality, and not just voicing words. The same holds true for all ideas which a human, a philosopher, or a religious teacher may try to convey. Those who announce ideas—and not necessarily new ones—and at the same time live them we may call prophets. The Old Testament prophets did precisely that: they announced the idea that humans had to find an answer to one’s existence, and that this answer was the development of one’s reason, of one’s love; and they taught that humility and justice were inseparably connected with love and reason. They lived what they preached. They did not seek power, but avoided it. Not even the power of being a prophet. They were not impressed by might, and they spoke the truth even if this led them to imprisonment, ostracism or death. They were not humans who set themselves apart and waited to see what would happen. They responded to their fellow human because they felt responsible. What happened to others happened to them. Humanity was not outside, but within them. Precisely because they saw the truth they felt the responsibility to tell it; they did not threaten, but they showed the alternatives with which humans were confronted. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
It is not that a prophet wishes to be a prophet; in fact, only the false ones have the ambition to become prophets. One’s becoming a prophet is simple enough, because the alternatives which one sees are simple enough. The prophet Amos expressed this idea very succinctly: “The lion has roared, who will not be afraid. God has spoken, who will not be a prophet.” The phrase “God has spoken” here means simply that the choice has become unmistakably clear. There can be no more doubt. There can be no more evasion. Hence the human who feels responsible has no choice but to become a prophet, whether one has been herding sheep, tending one’s vineyards, or developing and teaching ideas. It is the function of the prophet to show reality, to show alternatives and to protest; it is one’s function to call loudly, to awake humans from their customary half-slumber. It is the historical situation which makes prophets, not the wish of some humans to be prophets. Any nations have had their prophets. The Buddha lived his teachings; Mr. Christ appeared in the flesh; Mr. Socrates dies according to his ideas; Mr. Spinoza lived them. And they made a deep imprint on the human race precisely because their idea was manifested in the flesh in each one of them. According to the leaders of the Soviet Union, the “Union of Socialist Soviet Republics” is socialist not only in name but in fact. Already in 1936 Mr. Stalin proclaimed “the complete victor of the socialist system in all sphere of the national economy,” and at the present time Russian ideology claims that Russia is realizing communism. (Characterized by Mr. Marx’s famous statement: “From each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs.”) #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The question of the socialist character of Russia can be decided only by making a comparison between Mr. Marx’s vision of socialism and the reality of the Soviet system. What rationale did the Soviet leaders from Mr. Stalin to Mr. Khruschev have for calling their system socialism? They make this claim essentially on the basis of their definition of Marxist socialism, in which two factors are considered decisive for a socialist society: the “socialization of the means of production” and a planned economy. However, Socialism is in the sense of Mr. Marx or, for that matter, in the sense of Mr. Owen, Mr. Hess, Mr. Fourier, Mr. Proudhon, et cetera, can not be defined in this way. What was the essence of Mr. Marx’s thought and of Marxist socialism? It is bewildering how Mr. Marx’s theory is falsified and vilified not only by the ignorant, but also by many who should and could know better. A Robert L. Heilbroner has put it so well: our public newspapers and books “obscure the fact that the literature of socialist protest is one of the most moving and morally searching of all chronicles of human hope and despair. To dismiss the literature unread, to vilify it without the faintest conception of what it represents, is not only shocking but dangerously stupid.” The very beginning of an understanding of Mr. Marx is blocked by one of the most widespread and completely erroneous cliches, that of Mr. Marx’s “materialism.” This materialism is supposed to mean that the main motivation in man is his wish for material gain, as against spiritual, moral or religious values. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
While it is rather paradoxical that those who attack Mr. Marx for this alleged materialism defend capitalism against socialism with the claim that only a monetary incentive can be a sufficiently strong motivation for humans to give their bet, the fact is that Mr. Marx’s theory is precisely the opposite of this alleged materialism. One’s main criticism of capitalism was that it is a system that put a premium on selfish and materialistic motivations, and his concept of socialism was that of a society that favours humans who are much instead of having much. Mr. Marx’s historical materialism never speaks of the economic factor as a psychological motivation, but as a socio-economic condition that leads to a certain practice of life and this shapes the character of humans. His difference with Mr. Hegel’s idealism (idealism and materialism are philosophical terms and have nothing to do with ideal versus materialistic motivation, as any high school student should know), lies in the fact that “…we do not set out from what men imagine, conceive, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of the life process.” Or, as he put it elsewhere: “As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production. Both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Mr. Marx’s discovery was that the practice of life, as it is determined by the economic systems, determines the feeling and thinking of the people involved. According to this view, a certain system may be conducive to the development of materialistic strivings; another system may lead to the preponderance of ascetic tendencies. The word “anarchy” is often used in the sense of complete chaos or disorganization, but M. Hirshleifer argues for a more subtle distinction. He used the word “amorphy” for the chaotic scramble for resources that are not owned or protected by anyone, or in other words, for cases of failure to solve common resource-pool problems. By contrast, anarchy is interference competition; people attempt to sequester resources (assets property rights) and to defend these resources (provide private protection) from others’ attempts at predation or theft. The equilibrium of an anarchic game of aggression and defense can exhibit spontaneous order. For the administrators of an agency, the appraisal of the planning process offers the opportunity for self-conscious accumulation of skill and know-how, of tried and tested techniques of action. If appropriately publicized, annual reports offer one of the most reliable means of communicating information to a clientele and quickening its involvement and support of the agency. Through unflinching reports, an agency can get the confidence of the public. The perspective derived from its annual appraisals gives balance and wisdom to day-by-day decisions on policy and personnel. Periodicity itself is a security-giving organization of work, and reports contribute to periodicity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Like interim reporting, and supplementing it, annual reporting helps a worker in an organization to visualize one’s place in the whole, to assist in co-ordinating one’s work with that of others with less requirement of supervision. It strengthens discipline of members of a group by each other, instead of by supervision, and thereby can accentuate the morale of personnel. By facilitating adoption by working groups of quotas and schedules as personal commitments, annual reporting like interim reporting adds appreciably to the motivation and sense of responsibility among personnel. By causing reflection upon the method employed by an agency in achieving its results, the systematic backward look at how far they have come encourages personnel to ingenuity in devising new methods to economize effort and resources. Since the annual report, unlike interim types of reporting, goes out to the public of the agency, the mere existence of annual reports tends to increase the consciousness by personnel of their responsibilities toward clientele, and invites a sense of identification with clientele. Least these claims for the virtues of annual reporting seem too unrealistic, let note be made of the nuisance and imposition that report-writing becomes to administrators when conceived as mere record-keeping. Interim reporting especially can easily register as a pro forma duty, whose principal function is to interrupt and distract ongoing activity. Interim reporting, however should principally apply intramurally to agency personnel, and be for them not only a report to other but a means of exhibiting to themselves, in a graphic and economical way, jut how they are doing in the execution of their interlocking quotas and schedules. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Annual reporting, on the other hand, suffers more from under- than from overdoing—not so much in the sense of quantity as in the sense of profundity of retrospection. Unless it achieves the degree of detachment, of withdrawal from action, which permits basic and imaginative reconsideration of what the activity is all about, its result is undoubtedly stultification instead of simulation. However, reporting itself, like agency programs, benefits from inclusion within the scope of regular review; if it is working poorly, it deserves improvement, not rejection. With regard to clientele, annual reports, when properly exploited, also function to bring about identification. Thorough reporting provides the factions among the clientele at once with non-hearsay material for criticism and appreciation of an agency’s operation, and for defending it against its opponents. The public is going on to evaluate an agency anyway, but when the clientele feels itself a party to the formulation and revision of agency programs, their judgments are more likely to be responsible, sound, and fair; their own overt participation in execution, more vigorous and effective. The reporting of success enhances the appetite for more success, especially when the reaching of goals is not only matter-of-factly reported but given ceremonial recognition in meetings of personnel and clientele, exempli gratis, awards made to leaders and outstanding performers by the voluntary associations among the clientele. Finally, there is another group for whom annual reports perform an extremely valuable function. That is the planners in similar agencies elsewhere, the professionals and technical specialist who, in fashioning proposals, must draw upon as much relevant prior experiences as possible. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Each instance of planning is in a sense a pilot projector for similar ventures by others confronted with matching problems. And if the experience of planning is to be made available to others, the ideal form for its communication is adequate annual reports. Like the journals of scientific societies, the annual reports of planning agencies, as they come to be prepared by professional standards, develop as the media for the more repaid evolution of planning technology through its sharing. Very much like the duty of the scientist to publish one’s findings, it has become the obligation of planners to make known the assessments of their own experience in return for sharing the findings of others. Planning of the piecemeal, democratic character which we have outlined above is not a dream of the future. It is a fait accompli on the American scene, and our model is already descriptive of the operation of hundreds if not thousands of family agencies. Yet though many agencies perform these phases without explicit formulation of what they are doing, they may find it helpful to unify and clarify their activities as they examine themselves from this point of view. That is, the model of the planning process which we have sketched offers itself as a standard for the evaluation of the practice of any action agency, whether it already conceives of itself as practicing planning or not. And to evaluate is already to commence to plan, for one cannot assign a value to anything, including past experience itself, save by reference to its potential role in future action. It is, however, the task and prerogative of each family agency itself to judge its own proper degree and quality of planning. To attempt to usurp such functions would be futile as well as inconsistent with what has already been said about outside experts. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The notion of planning is comparable to embarking upon an endless journey. Any existing ways can be improved. Development is cumulative, one cycle of change leads to another. Planning therefore implies a sociology, a psychology, a philosophy. It is at once a theory of social organization and of social change, of motivation and personality formation, or valuation and metaphysics. Some of these implications, though not explorable further here, become visible in part as we note how another phase of one cycle of planning merges into the first phase of the next. By considering in a matter-of-fact way each previous cycle, as well as its current situation, a group can voluntarily and advisedly alter its existing procedures. Culture and social organization then become cumulatively the self-conscious product of rational intent. The group is freed from those bounds of necessity which were only necessary because they were thought to be so. This does not mean that the lessons of the past are discarded or ignored. It means that according to circumstances, what is worthy is conserved, and what is not is changed. No church can be founded on a protest, yet Protestantism became a church…The inner dilemma of Protestantism lies in this, that it must protest against every religious or cultural realization which seeks to be intrinsically valid, but that it needs such realization if it is to be able to make its protest in any meaningful way. By the power of what reality does the Protestant principle exercise its criticism? There must be such a reality, since the Protestant principle is not mere negation. The ultimate answer is the New Being manifest in Jesus as the Christ. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The basis of the solution is rooted in the axiom that the negative can live only from the positive, that negation must build upon affirmation. Thus, protest can exist only within a Gestalt to which it belongs, Gestalt being understood as the total structure of living reality, a structure which includes both form and negation of form, a Yes and a No. This union of protest and creation we call “the Gestalt of grace.” Grace as a reality grace as embodied in a structure, goes against the Protestant grain, for it sounds perilously similar to the Roman Catholic teaching which supposedly objectifies grace. And the objectification of grace opens the door to a whole legion of Catholic doctrines such as a sacred hierarchy, an infallible ecclesiastical authority, and the system of automatic sacraments. Many Protestants would consider a Gestalt of grace a betrayal of the essence of Protestantism. However, the jargon of Reformation controversy should not be allowed to obscure the theological facts, that the choice is not simply between the Roman Catholic objectification of grace and a completely structureless Protestant grace. There is a third possibility which is clearly seen in the Protestant notion of faith. Faith is in man, but not from man. Consequently, Protestantism can assert that grace appears through a living Gestalt which remains in itself what it is, while the Protestant protest prohibits the appearance of grace through finite forms from becoming an identification of grace with finite forms. Granted that the Gestalt of grace embraces both the positive and the negative, where is the protest voiced. In the secular World, of course. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
For according to the Protestant principle, grace cannot be tied down to any particular form, not even to a religious form. History shows that nonreligious, even anti-religious, movements can express a religious protest more effectively than religion itself. Consequently, Protestantism stands in a special relationship to secularism, a relationship which by its very nature, demands a secular reality. It demands a concrete protest against the sacred sphere and against ecclesiastical pride, a protest that is incorporated in secularism. Protestant secularism is a necessary element of Protestant realization. The formative power of Protestantism is always tested by its relation to the secular World. If Protestantism surrenders to secularism, it ceases to be a Gestalt of grace. If it retires from secularism, it ceases to be Protestant, namely, a Gestalt that includes within it the protest against itself. As guidance, the believer should understand that when there is no action in one’s spirit, there is no use for the brain at all, but the spirit does not always speak. There are times when it should be left in abeyance. In all guidance the mind decides the course of action—not only from the feeling in the spirit but by the light in the mind. In coming to a decision, the deciding is an act of mind and will, based upon either the mental process of reasoning or the sense of the spirit, or both, id est: Decision by mental process, reasoning, or decision by sense of the spirit, id est, moment impelling; drawing or restraint; spirit as if “dead”—no response; contraction of spirit; openness of spirit; fullness of spirit; compression of spirit; burden on spirit; wrestling in spirit; resisting in spirit. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
God have three ways of communicating His will to humans. By vision to the mind, which is very rare; understanding by the mind; and consciousness to the spirit, that is, by light to the mind and consciousness in spirit. In true guidance, spirit and mind are of one accord, and the intelligence is not in rebellion against the leading in the spirit—as it is so often in counterfeit guidance by evil spirits, when the human is compelled to act in obedience to what one thinks is of God, supernaturally given, and fears to disobey. This all refers to guidance from the subjective standpoint, but it must be emphasized in addition that all true guidance from God is in harmony with the Scriptures. The “understanding” of the will of God by the mind depends upon the mind being saturated with the knowledge of the written Word: and true “consciousness in the spirit” depends upon its union with Mr. Christ through the indwelling Spirit of God. The mind should never be dropped into abeyance. The human spirit can be influences by the mind, therefore the believer should keep one’s mind in purity, and unbiased, as well as having an unbiased will. I pledge allegiance to Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All. Woe until them that call evil “good,” and good “evil,” that turn darkness into light, and light into darkness. Seek justice, relieve the oppressed, protect the fatherless, defend the case of the widow. The Sacramento Fire Department has been proudly serving the community since 1851. Currently, they are not receiving all of their resources, and it would be greatly appreciated if you could donate to the Sacramento Fire Department, so they can help keep the community safe. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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A Model of Human Nature, Which Could be Cripped?
The task of appraisal always to some degree involved the technical problem of modifying and applying indices of progress, and there is no end to the improvements that can be made in this process. The task of index construction, however, is only part of the larger activity of evaluation. Are the indices applied actually valid. To illustrate, an adult education office may report that it has mailed out many thousands of pieces of literature, although these may be quite unreadable and unread. Or a health clinic may publicize how many free physical examinations or inoculations it has given, without disclosing whether it has demonstrated any effect upon morbidity in a community. Often the most accessible quantitative data have the least validity as indices of progress; massive effort is proffered as a substitute for results. Efficiency is the ratio of effect to effort, and indices of effect are the harder to come by. The problem of developing valid indices is frequently a very difficult one. Professional statisticians, incidentally, have been of meager help, since they tend to concentrate on the manipulation of indices, once derived, rather than on their progressive validation. To be sure, they are in part excused by the uniqueness of the goals of each agency, yet it remains puzzling that theoretical contributions to such a basic feature of social statistics as index construction should remain almost primitive. Why should each family agency be left to struggle in an amateurish way with the technical problems of indexing? #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The statistical expert cannot rule with propriety upon questions of policy. However, where objectives are not clear or consistent, or where wishful or defeatist thinking prevails in the evaluation of results, the determined statistician makes a signal contribution to objectivity by insisting upon definitions of aims which one can convert into quantitative expressions. One calls loose talk to account. Also, by the same insistence upon converting goals and ideals into standards for measurement of change in desired directions, one promotes thinking about self-evaluation by comparison of achievement in one planning period with that in another, rather than by reference to implied rivals. By such objective comparisons of self with self, over time, the identity and direction of development of a group (or a person) is confirmed, stimulated, and fortified against external counterinfluences. In addition to descriptions and measures of achievement, annual reports usually include statements of the original objectives and goals of a program, names of leading personnel, jurisdiction, financial accounts, table of organization, and varying amounts of background information (history, maps, illustrations) and propaganda. The precise functions which the report is supposed to perform will regulate the inclusion of exclusion of such minor data. Where the annual report goes beyond the reporting of progress for the previous cycle, and becomes also the bearer of definitions of new problems and proposals for action in ensuing cycles, there is, of course, no ready way of determining in advance what further material will prove relevant. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Limiting ourselves to the annual report which is primarily a record of progress, it is still possible to extract a few general rules or criteria for the evaluation of annual reports themselves. Examination of even a limited sample of annual reports issued by planning agencies (and there are differences in quality) reveals a pressing need for greater standardization in annual reporting. For a start, annual reports ought to be issued annually, and certainly no more than a year after the period which they cover. Second, they ought to be reports, that is, they should record the degree of success or failure an agency has experienced in pursuing its goals. Not until an agency begins to appraise its achievement objectively can there by any possibility of cumulative improvement in the construction and validation of its indices of progress. These are the fundamentals, yet they are not so obvious that their regular observance can be presupposed. For example, the parks and forest department of a certain great state—employing hundreds of personnel, caring for thousands of square miles, and controlling millions in budget and facilities—issued its only annual report in 1934, and that was a campaign pamphlet for the incumbent governor! In judging the planning practice of many an agency, one cannot begin with the niceties of index validation. Perhaps it may seem superfluous to urge that annual reports should be veracious, but the exhortation is too often needed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
One way of getting veracity might be to adopt the same means normally employed to assure honesty in financial accounting, id est, the employment of outside, disinterested, presumably incorruptible auditors. For special purposes of increased assurance, resolution of intra-agency conflicts, fresh viewpoints and special expertness, outside audits of operations are to be recommended. However, such audits ought to be viewed as supplementary only, and the main task of preparing annual reports be kept within the hands of the agency personnel itself. Otherwise much of the utility and regenerative function of annual reports in the planning process is necessarily lost. Sometimes actual preparation of the basic data is delegated to an internal policy-appraisal or progress-reporting unit. However, an agency and its administrative chief ought to feel that the document by which their work is made known periodically is their report. And if the agency grasps the fact that its annual report can become a powerful instrument working for the success of its programs, the strong identification of the personnel with the showing it makes in print can support and augment the veracity of its annual reports. For the declared purpose of the periodic appraisal is to assess the successes and failures of the program, and if the failures are concealed, little or no profit can be derived from them. Incentives to distort facts, to engage in judicious selection and emphasis, to offer tendentious interpretations and gratuitous justifications, will no doubt continue as long as rivalry for position persists, but they can be diluted and countered progressively by strengthening the experimental attitude inherent in planning as science. Professional societies as independent bodies may also eventually assist in raising the standards of program audits. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
If plans are construed as hypotheses, to be confirmed or refuted by experience, there is no reason to review results in the spirit of praise and blame. There will, no doubt, be gratification or disappointment over the outcome of each cycle of planning, but the important consideration is that each round of experience and its meaning for the next round will be evaluated objectively. Unless critical appraisal of success and failure occurs, the agency will go on repeating undiagnosed mistakes or ascribing efficacy to the wrong causes. Instead of progressive reduction of error and reliable achievement of intention, affairs will degenerate into a stabilized routine which evokes little enthusiasm for anyone concerned. The systematic scrutiny of experience can be a provocative stimulus to progress. Unless this is grasped, neither personnel nor clientele realize how much they have been robbed when their agency fails to publish regular, thorough, and veracious annual reports. Some of the less obvious functions of an annual reports when properly utilized are their respective consequences for administrators, rank-and-file personnel, clientele, and similar agencies in other communities. Many instances of the different methods of protection can be observed in reality. Even in modern states with well-functioning governments, private protection supplements or replaces official policing: firms have private security guards, and homeowners have neighbourhood-watch organizations and gated communities with private guards. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
In countries where the rule of law does not run very well, private protection become even more important. Theorists have also studied alternative methods of private protection: the owner spending one’s own time and effort on protection, hiring specialized protector who may be individuals or organizations like the Mafia, and so on. In these games, predator choose their targets knowing the form of protection that prevails in equilibrium, and the guards choose their strategies of pricing, entry, collusion, et cetera. This creates many complex interactions. We have to consider the optimal allocation of a property-owner’s effort between producing output using one’s own property on one hand, and fighting over one’s own or another’s property or the output produced using such property on the other hand. We must consider the interaction of a private mafia and the government in providing enforcement of property rights, but our government is also a profit maximizer, so the basic effect of the mafia is to increase competition in the protection industry. The effect of predation—whether by private bandits or by kleptocratic government and its agents—on the incentives to produce and invest, therefore on overall economic performance, depends crucially on the time-horizon of the predator. This dichotomy can involve “roving bandits” and “stationary bandits.” A roving bandit has a short time-horizon, perhaps because he or she faces strong competition from others who want to take one’s place. Such a bandit will grab as much as one can as fast as one can, destroying all incentives for one’s victims. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
A stationary bandit expects to prey on the same victim for a long time. One will find it in one’s own long-term interests to establish and maintain the reputation that one leaves individuals some of the fruits of their investments or efforts. The resulting incentives will generate more output and growth, and therefore more for the predator to take in the future. One’s optimal strategy will balance at the margin the gains from short-run grabbing and long-run cultivation and harvesting. Can an economy under a station bandit be efficient? It is in the bandit’s own interest to control one’s victim population so as to maximize economic efficiency; this will maximize one’s own take, after one has given the victims just the amount needed to keep them alive and to stop them revolting against one’s rule. We assumed that the bandit can only choose proportional taxation, and it is well known that such a tax inflicts an unavoidable distortion or dead-weight loss on the economy. However, a smarter bandit might try a less-distorting instrument, for example lump-sum taxation or more general nonlinear taxation. The feasibility of such mechanisms depends on the information available to the bandit. The theory of mechanism design under incomplete information is well established in microeconomies. Even though an economy ruled by a stationary bandit may fall considerably short of full efficiency, it will perform much better than that under a roving bandit. Under a regime that has reasonable institutional stability and is not completely dysfunctional, a rapidly increasing level of GDP per capita is possible up to semi-industrialization. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
At their best, these types of regimes, while they tolerate high level of corruption, also demand some performance such that corruption does not become absolutely disorganized. Disorganization becomes likely if a number of bandits compete with each other for the resources available for extraction, because this adds a common-resource-pool problem to the short-horizon problem. Marxists have usually assumed that what works behind humans’ backs and directs them are economic forces and their political representations. Psychoanalytic study shows that this is much too narrow a concept. Society consists of people, and each person is equipped with a potential of passionate strivings, from the most archaic to the most progressive. This human potential as a whole is molded by the ensemble of economic and social forces characteristic of each given society. These forces of the social ensemble produce a certain social unconscious, and certain conflicts between the repressive factors and given human needs which are essential for sane human functioning (like a certain degree of freedom, stimulation, interest in life, happiness). In fact, revolutions occur as expressions of not only new productive forces, but also of the repressed part of human nature, and they are successful only when the two conditions are combined. Repression, whether it is individually or socially conditioned, distort humans, fragments them, deprives them of their whole humanity. Consciousness represents the “social man” determined by a given society; the unconscious represents the universal human in us, the good and the bad, the whole human who justifies Terrence’s saying, “I believe that nothing human is alien to me.” (This was incidentally was Mr. Marx’s favorite motto.) #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Depth psychology also has a contribution to make a problem which plays a central role in Mr. Marx’s theory, even though Mr. Marx never arrived at its satisfactory solution: the problem of the essence and nature of humans. On the other hand Mr. Marx—especially after 1844—did not want to use a metaphysical, unhistorical concept like the “essence of man,” a concept which had been used for thousands of years by many rulers in order to prove that their rules and laws corresponded to what each declared to be the unchangeable “nature of man.” On the other hand, Mr. Marx was opposed to a relativistic view that humans are born a blank piece of paper on which every culture writes its text. If this were true, how could humans ever rebel against the forms of existence into which a given society forces its members? How could Mr. Marx use (in Capital) the concept of the “crippled man” if he did not have a concept of a “model of human nature” which could be crippled? An answer on the basis of psychological analysis lies in the assumption that there is no “essence of man,” in the sense of a substance which remains the same throughout history. The answer, in my opinion, is to be found in the fact that humans’ essence lies in the very contradiction between one’s being in nature, thrown into the World without one’s will and taken away against one’s will, at an accidental place and time, and at the same time transcending nature by one’s lack of instinctual equipment and by the fact of one’s awareness—of oneself, of others, of the past and the present. Humans, a “freak of nature,” would feel unbearably alone unless one could solve their contradiction in human existence forces one to seek a solution of this contradiction, to find an answer to the question which life asks one from the moment of one’s birth. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
There are a number of ascertainable but limited answers to the question of how to find unity. Human beings can find unity by trying to regress to the animal stage, by doing away with what is specifically human (reason and love), by being a slave or a slave driver, by transforming oneself into a thing, or else by developing one’s specific human powers to such an extent that one finds a new unity with one’s fellow humans and with nature by becoming a free human—free not only from chains but free to make the development of all one’s potentialities the very aim of one’s life—a human who owes one’s existence to one’s own productive effort. Humans have no innate “drive for progress,” but they are driven by the need to solve their existential contradiction, which arises again at every new level of development. This contradiction—or, in other words, humans’ different and contradictory possibilities—constitutes their essence. This is a plea to introduce a dialectically and humanistically oriented psychoanalysis as a significant view point into Marist thought. I believe that Marxism needs such a psychological theory and that psychoanalysis needs to incorporate genuine Marxist theory. Such a synthesis will fertilize both fields. Leisure, just as family life, should serve labour training. It should not serve “idle pleasure,” but it should make humans better fitted for their social integration and for better work habits. “With the expansion of free time under socialism, each working person receives greater opportunity to raise one’s cultural level, to perfect one’s knowledge; one can better fulfill one’s social obligations and raise one’s children, better organize one’s rest, participate in sports, and so on. All this is necessary for the all-sided development of a human being. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Simultaneously, free time…serves a powerful factor in raising labour productivity It was in the sense that Mr. Marx called free time the greatest productive force exerting an influence in turn on the productive force of labour. Thus free time and working time are interconnected and interdependent. (It should be noted in passing that this reference to Mr. Marx is cynical falsification; Mr. Marx speaks of free time precisely as the true realm of freedom, which begins when work ends, and in which humans can unfold their own powers as an aim in itself, and not as a means for the end of production.) How far a Soviet leader like Khrushchev has even ideologically moved away from the Marxist concept of socialism becomes very clear from a conversation between President Sukarno and Mr. Khrushchev. Mr. Sukarno stated, in a simple yet essentially correct way, the traditional socialist concept way, the traditional socialist concept: “Indonesian socialism…aims at a good life for all without exploitation.” Mr. Khrushchev: “No, no, no. Socialism should mean that every minute is calculated, a life built on calculation.” Mr. Sukarno: “That is the life of a robot.” He might have added: and your definition of socialism is actually the definition of the capitalist principle. In some respects, as Mr. Marcuse has pointed out, Soviet morality is similar to Calvinist work morale: they both “reflect the need for the incorporation of large masses of ‘backward’ people into a new social system, the need for the creation of a well-trained, disciplined labour force, capable of vesting the perpetual routine of the working day with ethical sanction, producing every more rationally, ever-increasing amounts of goods, while the rational use of these goods for individual’s needs is every more delayed by circumstances.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
At the same time, however, Russia makes use of the most modern technology, machinery and production methods, and hence has to combine the need for intelligent imagination, individual initiative and responsibility, with the needs of an old-fashioned, traditional labour discipline. The Russian system is its organization methods as well as in its psychological aims combines (or “telescopes,” as Mr. Marcuse aptly says) older with the new phases, and it is precisely this telescoping which makes the understanding of it so difficult for the Western observer—not to speak of the added difficulty that this system is expressed in ideological terms of Marxist humanism and eighteenth-century enlightenment philosophy. While Russian ideology pays lip service to Mr. Marx’s ideal of the “all-rounded personality” who is not shackled to one and the same occupation all one’s life, Russian education places all the emphasis on Training—the training of “specialists on the basis of a close co-operation between studies and production” and calls for “strengthening [of] the ties of the country’s scientific establishment with production, with the concrete demands of the national economy.” Russian culture is centered around intellectual development, while it neglects the development of the affective side of humans. This latter fact finds it expression in the standards of Russian literature, painting, architecture and moving pictures. In the name of “socialist realism” a reasonable level of Victorian bourgeois taste is cultivated, and this in a country that, especially in literature and films, was once among the most creative in the World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
While in certain traditional arts like the ballet and the performing of music the Russian people show still the same gifts they had for many generations, the arts that are related to ideology and that influence people’s minds, especially films and literature, show nothing of this creativeness. They breathe the spirit of extreme utilitarianism, are valuable exhortations to work, discipline, patriotism, et cetera. The absence of any authentic human feeling, love, sadness, or doubt, betrays a degree of alienation that is hardly surpassed anywhere else in the World. In these films and novels, men and women have been transformed into things, useful for production, and alienated from themselves and one another. (Of course it remains to be seen whether the change from Stalinism to Khruschchevism had lead to a marked improvement in the artistic standard of Russian culture, and that means in the degree of alienation existing now; such a development seems possible only if very fundamental changes were to take place in the social system of Russia.) These facts seem perhaps to be contradicted by another set of facts, namely the large amount of “good” literature (Dostoevisk, Tolstoi, Balzac, et cetera), which is published and presumably read in Russian. A number of authors who believe that the Khrushchev system might be the basis from which a genuine humanistic socialism will develop have often quoted this aspect of Russian book-publishing as an argument for their hopes. If people are imbued with this kind of literature to the degree that they are in Russia, their human development will be molded by the spirit of this literature. The population is being driven into a state of ever-increasing alienation and is working to produce more genuine human experience, as it is represented in “good” literature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
However, the very fact that the novels by Mr. Dostoevski, Balzac, or Jack London take place in foreign countries or in cultures entirely different from Russian reality makes them serve as high-class escape literature; this literature satisfies the unquenchable thirst for authentic human experience which remains unsatisfied in the contemporary Russian practice, and yet, being completely disconnected from this practice, also does not endanger it. If we want to look for a parallel phenomenon in the Western culture one has only to remember that the Bible is still the most widely sold and presumably most widely read book in the West, and yet that this same book fails to have any marked influence on the real experience of modern humans, either on their feelings or on their actions. The Christian Bible has become escape literature, needed to save the individual from facing the abyss of emptiness that one’s mode of life opens up before one, yet without much effect because no connection is made between the Christian Bible and their real life. The assumption that the “normal” way of overcoming aloneness is to become an automaton contradicts one of the most widespread ideas concerning humans in our culture. The majority of us are supposed to be individuals who are free to think, feel, act as they please. To be sure this is not only the general opinion on the subject of modern individualism, but also each individual sincerely believes that one is “one” and that one’s thoughts, feelings, wishes are “one’s.” Yet, although there are true individuals among us, this belief is an illusion in most cases and a dangerous one for that matter, as it blocks the removal of those conditions that are responsible for this state of affairs. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Ewe are dealing here with one of the most fundamental problems of psychology which can most quickly be opened up by a series of questions. What is the self? What is the nature of those acts that give only the illusion of being the person’s own acts? What is spontaneity? What is an original mental act? Finally, what has all this to do with freedom? Feelings and thoughts can be induced from the outside and yet be subjectively experienced as one’s own, and one’s own feelings and thoughts can be repressed and thus cease to be part of one’s self. When we say “I think,” this seem to be a clean and unambiguous statement. The only question seems to be whether what I think is right or wrong, not whether or not I think it. Yet, one concrete experimental situation shows at once that the answer to this question is not necessarily what we suppose it to be. Let us attend an hypnotic experience. Here is the subject A whom the hypnotist B puts into hypnotic sleep and suggests one will want to read a manuscript which one will believe one has brought with one, that one will seek it and not find it, that one will then believe that another person, C, has stolen it, that one will get very angry at C. One is also told that one will forget that all this was a suggestion given one during the hypnotic sleep. It must be assed that C is a person toward whom the subject has never felt any anger and according to the circumstances has no reason to feel angry; furthermore, that one actually has not brought any manuscript with one. What happened? A awakes and, after a short conversation about some topic, says, “Incidentally, this reminds me of something I have written in my manuscript. I shall read it to you.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
He looks around, does not find it, and then turns to C, suggesting that he may have taken it; getting more and more excited when C repudiates the suggestion, he eventually bursts into open anger and directly accuses C of having stolen the manuscript. He goes even further. He puts forward reasons which should make it plausible that C is the thief. He has heard from others, he says, that C needs the manuscript very badly, that he had a good opportunity to take it, and so on. We hear him not only accusing C, but making up numerous “rationalizations” which should make one’s accusation appear plausible. (None of these, of course, are true and A would never have thought of them before.) Let u assume that another person enters the room at this point. He would not have any doubt that A says what he thinks and feels; the only question in his mind would be whether or not his accusation is right, that is, whether or not the contents of A’s thoughts conform to the real facts. We, however, who have witnessed the whole procedure from the start, do not care to ask whether the accusation is true. We know that this is not the problem, since we are certain that what A feels and thinks now are not his thoughts and feelings but are alien elements put into his head by another person. The conclusion to which the person entering in the middle of the experiment comes might be something like this. “Here is A, who clearly indicates that he has all these thoughts. He is the one to know best what he thinks and there is no better proof than his own statement about what he feels. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
“There are those other persons who say that his thoughts are superimposed upon him and are alien elements which come from without. In all fairness, I cannot decide who is right; any one of them may be mistaken. Perhaps, since there are two against one, the greater chance is that the majority is right.” We, however, who have witnessed the whole experiment would not be doubtful, nor would the newcomer be if he attended other hypnotic experiments. He would then see that this type of experiment can be repeated innumerable times with different persons and different content. The hypnotist can suggest that a raw potato is a delicious pineapple, and the subject will eat the potato with all the gusto associated with eating a pineapple. Or that the subject cannot see anything, and the subject will be blind. Or gain, that he thinks that the World is flat and not round, and the subject will argue heatedly that the World is flat. What does the hypnotic—and especially the post-hypnotic—experiment prove? It proves that we can have thought, feelings, wishes, and even sensual sensations which we subjective feel to be ours, and yet that, although we experience these thoughts and feelings, they have been put into us from the outside, are basically alien, and are not what we think, feel, and so on. What does the specific hypnotic experiment with which we started show? The subject wills something, namely, to read his manuscript, he thinks something, namely, anger against C. We have seen that all three mental acts—his will impulse, his thought, his feeling—are not his own in the sense of being the result of his own mental activity; that they have not originated in him, but are put into him from the outside and are subjectively felt as if they were his own. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
He gives expression to a number of thoughts which have not been put into him during the hypnosis, namely, those “rationalizations” by which he “explains” his assumption that C has stolen the manuscript. However, nevertheless these thoughts are his own only in a formal sense. Although they appear to explain the suspicion, we know that the suspicion is there first and that the rationalizing thoughts are only invented to make the feeling plausible; they are not really explanatory but come post factum. This hypnotic experiment shows in the most unmistakable manner that, although one may be convinced of the spontaneity of one’s mental acts, they actually result from the influence of a person other than oneself under the conditions of a particular situation. The phenomenon, however, is by no means to be found only in the hypnotic situation. The fact that the contents of our thinking, feeling, will, are induced from the outside and are not genuine, exists to an extent that gives the impression that these pseudo acts are the rile, while the genuine or indigenous mental acts are the exceptions. As to “guidance,” the believer should understand that when there is no action in one’s spirit, one should use one’s mind. If in everything there must be there is no use for the brain at all, but the spirit does not always speak. There are times when it should be left in abeyance. In all guidance the mind decides the course of action—not only from the feeling in the spirit but by the light in the mind. I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, One Nation under God, with liberty and justice for all. And please seeing in your heart as a God loving Christian to donate to the Sacramento Fire Department, for they are not receiving all of their resources. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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What Miracles is He Not Capable!
Man is an indolent creature, but light the fire of fear under him, and of what miracles is he not capable! However, not only the forces that determine one’s own life directly but also those that seem to determine life in general are felt as unchangeable fate. It is fate that there are wars and that one part of humankind has to be ruled by another. It is fate that the amount of suffering can never be less than it always has been. Fate may be rationalized philosophically as “natural law” or as “destiny of man,” religiously as the “will of the Lord,” ethically as a higher power outside of the individual, toward which the individual can do nothing but submit. The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation—and creation is always a miracle—is outside of one’s range of emotional experience. Religious experience as experience of absolute dependence is the definition of the masochistic experience in general; a special role in this feeling of dependence is played by sin. The concept of original sin, which weighs upon all future generations, is characteristic of the authoritarian experience. Moral like any other kind of human failure becomes a fate which humans can never escape. Whoever has once sinned is chained eternally to one’s own sin with iron shackles. Human’s own doing becomes the power that rules over one and never lets one free. The consequences of guilt can never be softened by atonement, but atonement can never do away with the guilt. Isaiah’s words, “though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow,” express the very opposite of the authoritarian philosophy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The feature common to all authoritarian thinking is the conviction that life is determined by forced outside of humans’ own self, one’s interest one’s wishes. They only possible happiness lies in the submission to these forces. The powerlessness of humans is the leitmotif of masochistic philosophy. One of the ideological fathers of Nazism, Moeller van der Bruck, expressed this feeling very clearly. He writes: “The conservative believers rather in catastrophe, in the powerlessness of man to avoid it, in its necessity, and in the terrible disappointment of the seduced optimist.” In Mr. Hitler’s writings we shall see more illustrations of the same spirit. The authoritarian character does not lack activity, courage, or belief. However, these qualities for one mean something entirely different from what they mean for the person who does not long for submission. For the authoritarian character activity is rooted in a basic feeling of powerlessness which it tends to overcome. Activity in this sense means to act in the name of something higher than one’s own self. It is possible in the name of God, the past, nature, or duty, but never in the name of the future, of the unborn, of what has no power, or of life as such. The authoritarian character wins one’s strength to act through one’s leaning on superior power. This power is never assailable or changeable. For one lack of power is always an unmistakable sign of guilt and inferiority, and if the authority in which one believes shows signs of weakness, one’s love and respect change into contempt and hatred. One lacks an “offensive potency” which can attack established power without first feeling subservient to another and stronger power. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The courage of the authoritarian character is essentially a courage to suffer what fate or its personal representative or “leader” may have destined one for. To suffer without complaining is one’s highest virtue—not the courage of trying to end suffering or at least to diminish it. Not to change fate, but to submit to it, is the heroism of the authoritarian character. One has belief in authority as long as it is strong and commanding. One’s belief is rooted ultimately in one’s doubts and constitutes an attempt to compensate them. However, if we mean by faith the secure confidence in the realization of what now exists only as a potentiality, one has no faith. Authoritarian philosophy is essentially relativistic and nihilistic, in spite of the fact that it often claims so violently to have conquered relativism and in spite of its show of activity. It is rooted in extreme desperation, in the complete lack of faith, and it leads to nihilism, to the denial of life. Authoritarian leaders come out to speak to crowds. These wild-eyed charismatic people mount stages in the darkness and feed crowds words like manna. As they stand out on the balcony—gazing out over the masses in their own kind of uniform—they may telegraph, at least for some, a specific and undeniable memory: that of Mr. Hitler addressing the Volk. Those memories, those aesthetic elements: they charge the air with emotional fervor, at least, for those inclined to be so enchanted. This is not to discount the religious significance so many attach to the leader’s presence and ability to cure the sick. There is no reason in fact to separate those two things at all. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
For some of the people standing in these fields on an Alpine summer’s night, seeing an authoritarian leader is a little like seeing a friendly ghost. That encounter has enormous, even curative, power. In authoritarian philosophy the concept of equality does not exist. The authoritarian character may sometimes use the word equality either conventionally or become it suits one’s purpose. However, it has no real meaning or weight for one, since it concerns something outside the reach of one’s emotional experiences. For one the World is composed of people with power and those without it, of superior ones and inferior ones. On the basis of one’s sado-masochistic strivings, one experiences only domination or submission, but never solidarity. Differences, whether of gender or race, to one are necessarily signs of superiority or inferiority. A difference which does not have this connotation is unthinkable to one. In Germany, reporters described many people getting suddenly healed at the Trotter Farm, especially of paralysis, and trouble with their ears or eyes. Maria Wurstel told the journalist Heueck how she had suffered since 1938 from near-paralysis of the spine. The slightest movement caused her terrible pain. Her doctor had recommended she see Herr Groning. Heueck saw her run like a child, “partly laughing, partly crying from happiness.” Another woman—she had had polio and had used a wheelchair since the age of three—got up and walked too. A man who said he had suffered brain damage in the war rejoiced, “The buzzing in my ears is gone, my head is free again!” Sometimes people brought photos of their sick relatives—perhaps those too ill to travel—and held them up before the resort’s windows in the hopes of receiving Mr. Groning’s energies. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
As new of these gatherings and cures multiplied, the crowds grew larger. The description of the sado-masochistic strivings and the authoritarian character refers to the more extreme forms of helplessness and the correspondingly more extreme forms of escaping it by the symbiotic relationship to the object of worship or domination. Although these sado-masochistic strivings are common, we can consider only certain individuals and social groups as typically sado-masochistic. There is, however, a milder form of dependency which is so general in our culture that only in exceptional cases does it seem to be lacking. This dependency does not have the dangerous and passionate qualities of sado-masochism, but it is important enough not to be omitted from out discussion here. I am referring to the kind of persons whose whole life is in a subtle way related to some power outside themselves. There is nothing they do, feel, or think which is not somehow related to this power. They expect protection from “him,” wished to be take care of by “him,” make “him” also responsible for whatever may be the outcome of their own actions. Often the fact of his dependence is something the person is not aware of at all. It worried police. “There people cannot understand why anyone would hinder” Mr. Groning’s “practicing,” one reported, and said he feared a riot if anyone tried. In truth, banning Mr. Groning’s healing work, as Herford officials had done, was not much discussed in local papers. Rather, something like the opposite was generally true. A number of local politicians and officials spoke up for him publicly. Munich’s police commissioner, Social Democrat Franz Xaver Pitzer, thanked Mr. Groning personally in the front of the Trotter Farm crowds for helping him over an illness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
A state parliamentary representative, Hans Hagn of Bavaria’s conservative party, the Christian Social Union, exhorted the crowds to “believe in the healing power of Groning and to trust him.” Even the highest officeholder in the Bavarian government, Minister President Hans Ehard, openly expressed support for Mr. Groning. The healer should not be subject to a lot of “red tape” (Paragraphenschwierigkeiten), Mr. Ehard said. Members of the press were as smitten as politicians. One local paper described the public’s trust in Mr. Groning—“a simple, uneducated man…the son of a Danzig bricklayer”—as “limitless.” The very air in Rosenheim, correspondent Hans Bentzinger rhapsodized, was “filled with a special excitement” that “grows from hour to hour, as it becomes known that Her Groning will speak to the waiting crowds.” Mr. Bentzinger described an “unbearable” tension, the atmosphere “so laden with the energy of expectation that one can hear his own heart beating and that of his neighbor at the same time.” Everyone and everything in Germany was waiting for some kind of miracle. Even if there is a dim awareness of some dependency, the person or power on whom one is dependent often remains nebulous. There is no definite image linked up with that power. Its essential quality is to represent a certain function, namely to protect, help, and develop the individual, to be with one and never leave one alone. The “X” which has these qualities may be called the magic helper. Frequently, of course, the “magic helper” is personified: one is conceived of as God, as a principle, or as real persons such as one’s parent, husband, wife, or superior. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
It is important to recognize that when real persons assume the role of the magic helper they are endowed with magic qualities, and the significance they have results from their being the personification of the magic helper. This process of personification of the magic helper is to be observed frequently in what is called “falling in love.” A person with that kind of relatedness to the magic helper seeks to find one in flesh and blood. For some reason or other—often supported by sexual desires—a certain other person assumes for one those magic qualities, and one makes that person into the being to whom and whom one’s whole life becomes related and dependent. The fact that the other person frequently does the same with the first one does not alter the picture. It only helps to strengthen the impression that this relationship is one of “real love.” This need for the magic helper can be studied under experiment-like conditions in the psychoanalytic procedure. Often the person who is analyzed forms a deep attachment to the psychoanalyst and his or her whole life, all actions, thoughts, and feelings are related to the analyst. Consciously or unconsciously the analysand asks oneself: would he (the analyst) be pleased with this, displeased with that, agree to this, scold me for that? In love relationships the fact that one chooses this or that person as a partner serves as a proof that this particular person is loved just because he is “he”; but in the psychoanalytic situation this illusion cannot be upheld. The most different kinds of persons develop the same feelings toward the most different kind of psychoanalysts. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
The relationship looks like love; it is often accompanied by sexual desires; yet magic helper, a role which obviously a psychoanalyst, like certain other persons who have some authority (physicians, ministers, teachers), is able to play satisfactorily for the person who is seeking the personified magic helper. The reasons why a person is bound to a magic helper are, in principle, the same that we have found at the root of the symbiotic drives: an inability to stand alone and to fully express one’s own individual potentialities. In the sado-masochistic strivings this inability leads to a tendency to get rid of one’s individual self through dependency on the magic helper—in the milder form of dependency I am discussing now it only leads to a wish for guidance and protection. The intensity of the relatedness to the magic helper is in reverse proportion to the ability to express spontaneously one’s own intellectual, emotional, and sensuous potentialities. In other words, one hopes to get everything one expects from life, from the magic helper, instead of by one’s own actions. The more this is the case, the more is the center of life shifted from one’s own person to the magic helper and one’s personifications. The question is then no longer how to life oneself, but how to manipulate “him” in order not to lose him and how to make him do what one wants, even to make him responsible for what one is responsible oneself. In the more extreme cases, a person’s whole life consists almost entirely in the attempt to manipulate “him”; people differ in the means which they use; for some obedience, for some “goodness,” for others suffering is the main means of manipulation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
We see, then, that there is no feeling, thought, or emotion that is not at least coloured by the need to manipulate “him”; in other words, that no psychic act is really spontaneous or free. This dependency, springing from and at the same time leading to a blockage of spontaneity, not only gives a certain amount of security but also results in a feeling of weakness and bondage. As far as this is the case, the very person who is dependent on the magic helper also feels, although often unconsciously, enslaved by “him” or “her” and to a greater or lesser degree, rebels against “him” or “her.” The television show Buffy The Vampire Slayer is another example of a magic helper. This rebelliousness against the very person on whom one has put one’s hopes for security and happiness, creates new conflicts. It has to be suppressed is one is not to lose “him” or “her,” but the underlying antagonism constantly threatens the security sought for in the relationship. If the magic helper is personified in an actual person, the disappointment that follows when one falls short of what one is expecting for this person—and since the expectation is an illusory one, any actual person is inevitably disappointing—in addition to the resentment resulting from one’s own enslavement to that person, leads to continuous conflicts. This can be seen in the conflicts between Buffy and her friends, which frequently arise. These sometimes end only with separation, which is usually followed by a choice of another object who is expected to fill all the hopes connected with the magic helper. This is seen many times with Buffy, like when her friends abandon her when she runs for homecoming queen, or when her mother kicks her out of the house, or when Buffy’s friends kick her out of her own house and turn to the leadership of Faith, another slayer. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
If this relationship proves to be a failure too, it may be broken up again or the person involved may decide that this is just “life,” and resign. What one does not recognize is the fact that one’s failure is not essentially the result of one’s not having chosen the right magic person; it is the direct result of having tried to obtain by the manipulation of a magic force that which only the individual can achieve oneself by one’s own spontaneous activity. The phenomenon of life-long dependency on an object outside of oneself has been seen by Dr. Freud. He has interpreted it as the continuation of the early, essentially nurturing bonds with the parents throughout life. As long as the infant is small it is quite naturally dependent on the parents, but this dependence does not necessarily imply a restriction of the child’s own spontaneity. However, when the parents, acting as the agents of society, start to suppress the child’s spontaneity and independence, the growing child feels more and more unable to stand on its own feet; it therefore seeks for the magic helper and often makes the parents the personification of “him” or “her.” Later on, the individual transfers these feelings to somebody else, for instance, to a teacher, a husband, or a psychoanalyst. Again, the need for being related to such a symbol of authority is caused by anxiety. What we can observe at the kernel of every neurosis, as well as of normal development, is the struggle for freedom and independence. For many normal persons this struggle has ended in a complete giving up of their individual selves, so that they are thus well adapted and considered to be normal. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The neurotic person is the one who has not given up fighting against complete submission, but who, at the same time, has remained bound to the figure of the magic helper, whatever form or shape “one” may have assumed. One’s neurosis is always to be understood as an attempt, and essentially an unsuccessful one, to solve the conflict between that basic dependency and the quest for freedom. The concept of social character is not only a theoretical one lending itself to general speculation; it is useful and important for empirical studies which aim at finding out what the incidence of various kinds of social character is in a given society or social class. Assuming that one defines the “peasant character” as individualistic, hoarding, stubborn, with little satisfaction in cooperation, little sense of time and punctuality, this syndrome of traits is by no means a summation of various traits, but a structure, charged with energy. This structure will show intensive resistance by either violence or silent obstructionism if attempts are made to change it; even economic advantages will not easily produce any effects. The syndrome owes its existence to the common mode of production which has been characteristic of peasant life for thousands of years. The same holds true for a declining lower-middle class, whether it is that which brought Mr. Hitler to power, or the poor Whites in the South of the United States of America. The lack of any kind of beneficial cultural stimulation, the resentment against their situation, which is one of being left behind by the forward-moving currents of their society, the hate toward those who destroy the images which once gave them pride, have created a character syndrome which is made up of love and death (necrophilia), intense malignant fixation to blood and soil, and intense group narcissism (the latter expressed in intense nationalism and racism). #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The striking feature of a socialist economy is the fact that there is no private ownership in the fact that there is no private ownership in the means of production, and that all enterprises are administered by a state-appointed managerial bureaucracy. (There is, of course, private ownership of consumer goods, like houses, furniture, automobiles, and personal accumulation of saving such as bank accounts and government bonds, just as in the United States of America. The differences in this respect is only that one cannot own a factory or stock in a corporation, a difference, incidentally, which would be relevant only for a small part of the population of the United States of America.) The Soviet leaders and their peoples, assuming that Marxist socialism is characterized by the ownership and management of enterprises by the state, take this to mean that their system is socialism. Whether this claim is justified or nor will be discussed later, along with the fact that current developments in the Soviet system are in many respects more akin to the trends existing in the twenty-first century capitalism than they are to socialism. Over-all planning, introduced for the first time by Mr. Stalin’s Five-Year Plan in 1928, offers Soviet ideology an additional reason to speak of their system as socialism. The over-all plan (Gosplan) is centrally made in Moscow for the USSR after intensive deliberation over a great amount of data. The planning determines what is to be produced and at what rate, in contrast to the relatively free market in the Western countries. Until 1957 the Moscow ministries for various ranches of industry were the central authorities for the respective industries under their administration. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Mr. Khrushchev abolished this centralized system, which had existed for over twenty years, and inaugurated a process of decentralization by replacing the ministries by regional economic councils (sownarkhoz). In the United States of American 1 percent of all families own 4/5 of all Industrial stocks which can be owned by individuals. There are somewhat over one hundred such councils within the Soviet Union. They appoint the top personnel (or confirm their appointments) in the enterprises under them, determine the production program of “their” industries (although within the framework of the general plan), are active in determining prices and production methods, and the securing of scarce materials and conduct research on the quality of products et cetera. The control of the sownarkhoz over the many industries under its control is exercised through subdivisions, the “chief administrations,” which in turn control the individual enterprises, headed by their managers. Who are the administrators working in the regional councils, the chief administrations, and the individual enterprises? The majority have a college education (in fact, a greater percentage than in the United States of America), with the greater proportion of graduates in engineering and a small proportion in business administration. The vast majority of them are members of the Communist Party. (It is important for the America reader to remember that the Communist Party in Russia is, by intention, not a mass party, but represents the elite of those who want to get to the highest position and who are willing to exert the greatest efforts; actually, only about 4 percent of the total population are party members.) The director of a plant earns from five to ten times (including bonuses) what the worker earns, depending on the size and kind of factory. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
If we compare the American situation, an American plant director would have to earn $232,115.88 a year to attain the same position in relation to the worker. A small scale study of American firms showed that in actual fact the top policy-making executive in firms of under 1,000 employees earned an annual average of $305,933.38 in salary and bonus. These figures are difficult to compare since on the one hand prices for consumer goods are relatively much higher in the Soviet Union than in the United States of America, while on the other hand rents are much lower in the Soviet Union and fringe benefits are higher than in the United States of America. Thus, the income differential between managers and workers is not too different in the Soviet Union from what it is in the United States of America. What is particularly important is the role of bonuses which reach 50 to 100 percent of the manager’s salary and which constitutes the most important incentive for optimal production. (Often this system emphasizes quantity rather than quality—hence leading to the production of inferior consumer goods.) Thus, the managers represent a social group that in income, consumption, and authority, is as different from the workers as in any capitalist country of the West. In fact, judging from many reports, rigidities in class stratification, status-differential, et cetera, are greater than in the United States of America. Something we value in the United States of America is legal property rights. Legal property rights are not absolute. They are to some extent subject to private modification by mutual consent for mutual benefit. More generally, security of property rights depends on: government protection, private protection, and other people’s attempts to capture some of the rights. All these are costly in different ways; therefore rights are generally not complete. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
When transacting is costly, all contract forms are costly, so choice of governance form is at best a constrained optimum. Most assets and commodities have multiple dimensions. It may be optimal to divide the property rights to different attributes of a commodity between different owners. Different dimensions of assets and contracts interact: they may be mutually substitutes or complements. This can be utilized to achieve better outcomes for seemingly incomplete contracts. For example, in a short-term rental contract, the landlord is usually responsible for maintenance and improvement, whereas in the long-term contract, the tenant is. This goes with their natural incentives; therefore it can even be left unspecified. When the rights and responsibilities governing real aspects of behaviour have been efficiently specified, the financial aspects of the contract can adjust to satisfy the participation constraints and division of surplus. Even a given attribute may have shared ownership, of if ownership is not specified or enforced because of incompleteness, it may be placed in the public domain. Actions of individuals in shared ownership can be constrained for their mutual benefit. Income from an asset or attribute may be affected by the actions of others; transaction costs may preclude attainment of the optimum indicated by the Coase Theorem. As transaction technology (information, enforcement, et cetera) changes, the nature and governance mode of property rights also evolves. Disputes arise when some previously unexercised rights become worth exercising, so an owner who had preciously left them in the public domain now wants to reclaim them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Leicap (1989) studies how property rights come to be delineated and enforced in the first place. His general idea is that property rights are needed t reduce or eliminate efficiency losses due to common pool problems. However, the process is political, with distributional conflicts. Bargaining may not lead to an efficient outcome, or may do so only with long delay. The analytical framework argues that efficient adaptation of rights to new circumstances is more difficult if: aggregate gains are small; the number of participants is large; interests are heterogeneous; the sizes of participants’ gains or losses are private information; the efficient regime will involve greater concentration of wealth, so there will be more losers. The outcome of the political conflict between the winners and losers may be determined by who is better able to organize for political action; this is usually the smaller group with more concentrated benefits or costs. When participation in the conduct of programs lags, these programs cease to represent planning, and become something else, for which epithets abound, if analytic concepts do not. Planning, by definition, stands for the guidance of present action by prospective and retrospective reference. It does not stand for mere maintenance of present routine, however well devised, or it does so only to the extent that this may be useful within the context of a more enveloping goal. The vital element, or condition, in maintaining participation by clientele and personal in the programs of agencies is the constant emergence of new goals. Only thus can the sense of creation, of values in process of realization, be maintained. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In part, this is a task of leadership, by leaders who do not sink into mere office-holding, but continually find new and inspiring areas for effort. Viewed thus, leadership may spring from any member of a group; if anything, the reverse may be true. It is the realization of such a relationship which provides the political solution to the problem of maintaining both citizen participation in government and clientele participation in social agencies. One way of maintaining public interests is through competition for office, success in which occurs through appeals to the diverse interests and shifting ideas among the public. The dynamic effect of aspiring leaders setting forth rival promises regarding the future, as a mans of securing office, is to generate new wants, new hopes and aspirations, new goals for concerted effort. It happens, however, that even competition for office may be an insufficient source of renewal of group purpose. The insecurities of office-holding may be so intense that, by various schemes of co-optation, monopoly, quietism, or even more drastic devices, office-holders succeed in cementing themselves into place. Or it may be that imagination lag, and rivals come to be so little different that they make no difference. Or, on the other hand, the strife of competition for office may become so intense that its contribution to unified community action is nullified and reversed. Without depreciating the stimulus of competitive politics, of the part they play as a guarantee against worse events, as incentive to progress they must be assessed as sporadic, inconsistent, and unpredictable. Happily, it is quite possible for new goals to form rationally, continually, and effectively without continual changes of personnel. This can come about through the vigorous and careful implementation of the fifth phase of the planning process, the making of the periodic appraisals of progress. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Walking “after the spirit” and “minding the spirit”—these expressions do not merely mean mind and body are subservient to the spirit, but they denote the humans’ own spirit co-working with the Holy Spirit in one’s daily life, and in all the occasions of life. To do this, the believer needs to know the laws of the spirit—not only the conditions necessary for the Holy Spirit’s working but the laws also governing one’s own spirit, so that it may be kept open to the Spirit of God. When the Holy Spirit takes the spirit of human beings as His sanctuary, psychopathological offenders attack the spirit to get it our of their object being to close the outlet of the Spirit of God dwelling at the center. And yet, when the human is “spiritual” and the mind and body is subservient to the spirit, the spiritual forces of the ultimate negative can come into DIRECT CONTACT with the spirit—and then follows the “wrestling” referred to by Paul (Eph. 6.12). If the human is ignorant of the laws of the spirit, especially the tactics of the ultimate negative, one is liable to yield to an onslaught of deceiving spirits by which they forced one’s spirit into strained ecstasy, or elation, or elation, or else press it down, as it were into a vice. In the former case one has given “visions” and revelations which appear to be divine, but afterwards are proved to have been of the enemy, by their passing away with no results; in the latter, the mortal sinks into darkness and deadness as if one had lost all knowledge of God. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The relationship between the churches and society are within the context of the functions of the churches. Certain functions flow from their very nature. However, a function of the church is not the same as that of an institution. To further highlight this illustration, mediation is a constitutive function of the church, and it frequently is served by the institution of the priesthood. However, mediation may take place without the priesthood, for an institution is only an organizational mechanism for the function. Institutions may come and go, but the function always remains. The function of a church is constitution. By its constitutive function a church receives and mediates the New Being. Expansion is the church function that is behind missionary activity, education, and evangelization of fallen-away members. The constructive function of the churches includes both Theoria (the aesthetic and cognitive functions) and praxis (the personal and communal functions). The aesthetic function struggles to express the meaning of the church through medium of religious art—pictorial, musical, and visual. Theology is the cognitive function which interprets religious symbols and relates them to the categories or rational knowledge. The personal function of the church is the development of saintliness in its members, while the communal function promotes the Holy Community in which justice and holiness flourish together. The problem in all these functions of the church is how to preserve their autonomy of form within the body of the church. Must aesthetic expressiveness, cognitive truth, personal humanity, and communal justice be twisted out of shape in order to fit within the cadre of the church? #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
I feel it is possible to maintain autonomy of form in these functions by the Spiritual Presence; in other words, though theonomy. We come now to the relating function, the function that governs the mutual interaction between the churches and other groups in society. The relating function operates in a threefold way: the way of the silent interpenetration, the way of critical judgment, and the way of political establishment. By silent interpretation the churches radiate the Spirital Presence into the social units which they are contiguous. One could call it the pouring of priestly substance into the social structure of which the churches are a part. The rapid spread of secularism obscures this influence, but if the churches disappeared overnight, society would be impoverished. Interpenetration also means that the current of influence flows from society toward the churches via the cultural forms develop in society. The most obvious of these influences is felt in the continuous transformation of the ways of understanding and expressing experiences in a living culture. To put it another way, the churches’ creative function of Theoria and praxis draws upon society for the forms in which its substance is preserved and conveyed. You shall deal your bread to the hungry, and bring the poor that are cast out to your house. When you see the naked, cover him or her, and hide not yourself from your own flesh. Then shall your light break forth as the morning, and your healing shall spring forth speedily; your righteousness shall go before you, the glory of God shall be your protection. I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all. And please open your hearts and be kind enough to donate to the Sacramento Fire Depart for they are not receiving all of their vital resources. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Why this Symptom? Why Now?
After World War I, psychosomatic practitioners tended to be critical of more mainstream medicine, finding fault with that they perceived as an overly reductionist attitude among fellow physicians, one that failed to treat patients as whole beings, body and soul. Psychosomatic doctors rejected narrowly natural-scientific ideas about illness and disability and sought, along side science, to engage in questions of meaning. They placed patients’ biographies and social environment at the center of their treatment and philosophy. Neurologist Viktor von Weizsacher’s teacher and mentor Ludolf von Krehl believed that healing required knowing a patient’s “entire nature.” Dr. Von Krehl declared himself to be no “mystic,” and “also no occultists or such. But what is spirit is spirit,” he said, “and a human being is a totality, spirit, and body.” Dr. Von Weizsacher was much influenced by these ideas, believing that on had to contemplate seriously not just the appearance of disease or organ dysfunction but also its symbolic aspects. He listened to the stories his patients told for clues about the meanings of their troubles. From their life stories, he wrote “pathosophies”—narratives that analyzed aspects of his patients’ lives to unlock hidden significance about their ailments. Rather than asking his patients “What seems to be the trouble?” Dr. Von Weizacker asked, in a way a psychoanalyst might, “Why this symptom? Why now?” It was believed that if medicine had failed patients, the reason was because they were treating their bodies like failing machines while neglecting their souls. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Medicine’s psychosomatic transformation toward a more holistic approach to treatment that would take people’s inner lives and life experiences into account was deemed to be more beneficial. This would help to restore trust. Why trust had to be restored—the recent history of forced sterilizations and “mercy killings” of those with disabilities. Through experimentation and observation, German doctors believed that a damaged soul could make the body ill. Patients were also asked how they perceived their bodily sensations. Many patients were spiritually disoriented. They saw “no way out,” felt terribly lonely, thought of suicide, and had “no one in whom they could confide.” One patient described his wife as herzkrank—heartsick—after losing their daughter. Another woman described how her daughter had been raped eight times, had been sick ever since, and no longer wanted to ea. For most doctors in 1949, unless there was an “organic basis” for illness, that illness did not exist. When patients complained of pain for which no manifestly physical cause could be located, doctors sought other explanations. Not unlike the problem of chronic pain in our own day, these explanations could cast a shadow on the sufferer’s moral constitution, suggest a family taint, or hint at a lack of personal integrity. Perhaps the patient was a malingerer, angling for a disability check, or lacked the fortitude or individual strength of character to overcome hard times. Perhaps the patient was too sensitive or weak-willed, or there had already been something wrong with him or her. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Doctor’s who practiced psychosomatic medicine believed that these were not phantom ailments: they were manifestly physical maladies with origins in the soul. Individual stories of distress of mass fate; nights under falling bombs, flight and hunger, fallen fathers, fallen sons, assaults and rape. Psychosomatic illness had become the epidemic of war time. They also revealed the history of German suffering. People whose limps suddenly refused to move, or who had stomach ailments, or whose children’s kidneys were failing—these were the products not so much of individual experience but of the nation’s collective fate. They were reactions to the extraordinary burdens that had been the yield of the events of the wars. However, prominent doctors argued that suffering and ill people should not be coddled, but learn to tolerate pain with equanimity. During the war, the remedy prescribed for terrible experiences was not talk, but hard and uncomplaining work. Hard work, that is, and silence. A psychological study conducted in 1944 with people who related their symptoms of illness to experiences in the wartime air raids cautioned that talking about feelings could lead to depression. A culture of silence, in other words, was not only a generalized social imperative born of taboos surrounding Nazism and the war, it was an authoritative medical recommendation because an unseen World of pain and illness, previously confined to the privacy of the home and family, had become increasingly revealed. Every house in Germany was a hospital. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Dr. Freud considered character as the relatively stable manifestation of various kinds of libidinous strivings, that is, of psychic energy directed to certain goals and stemming from certain sources. In his concepts of the oral, anal, and genital characters, Dr. Freud presented a new model of human character which explained behaviour as the outcome of distinct passionate strivings; Dr. Freud assumed that the direction and intensity of these strivings was the result of early childhood experiences in relation to the “erogenous zones” (mouth, anus, genitals), and aside from constitutional elements the behaviour of parents was mainly responsible for the libido development. The concept of social character refers to the matrix of the character structure common to a group. It assumes that the fundamental factor in the formation of the social character is the practice of life as it is constituted by the mode of production and the resulting social stratification. The social character is that particular structure of psychic energy which is molded by any given society so as to be useful for the functioning of that particular society. The average person must want to do what one has to do in order to function in a way that permits society to use one’s energies for its purposes. Humans’ energy appears in the social process only partly as simple physical energy (labourers tilling the soil or building roads) and partly in specific forms of psychic energy. A member of a primitive people, living from assaulting and robbing other tribes, must have the character of a warrior, with a passion for war, killing, and robbing. The members of a peaceful, agricultural tribe must have an inclination for cooperation as against violence #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Only if its members have a striving for submission to authority, and respect and admiration for those who are their superiors, does feudal society function well. Capitalism functions only with men who are eager to work, who are disciplined and punctual, whose main interest is monetary gain, and whose main principle in life is profit as a result of production and exchange. In the nineteenth century capitalism needed men who liked to save; in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it needs men and women who are passionately interested in spending and consuming. The social character is the form in which human energy is molded for its use as a productive force in the social process. The social character is reinforced by all the instruments of influence available to a society—its educational system, its religion, its literature, its songs, its jokes, its customs, and most of all, its parents’ methods of bringing up their children. This last is so important because the character structure of individuals is formed to a considerable extent in the first five or six years of their lives. However, the influence of the parents is not essentially an individual or accidental one, as classic psychoanalysts believe. The parents are primarily the agents of society, both through their own characters and through their educational methods; they differ from each other only to a small degree, and these differences usually do not diminish their influence in creating the socially desirable matrix of the social character. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
A condition for the formulation of the concept of the social character as being molded by the practice of life in any given society was a revision of Dr. Freud’s libido theory, which is the basis for his concept of character. The libido theory is rooted in the mechanistic concept of humans as machines, with the libido (aside from the drive for self-preservation) as the energy source, governed by the “pleasure principle,” the reduction of increased libidinal tension to its normal level. In contrast to this concept, various strivings of man, who is primarily a social being, develop as a result of one’s need for “assimilation” (of things) and “socialization” (with people), and that the forms of assimilation and socialization that constitute their main passions depend on the social structure in which one exists. Humans in this concept are seen as characterized by their passionate strivings toward objects—men, women, and nature—and their need of relating themselves to the World. The concept of the social character answers important questions which were not dealt with adequately in Marxist theory. If their reason tells them that their allegiance to it is harmful to them, why is it that a society succeeds in gaining the allegiance of most of its members, even when they suffer under the system? Why has their real interest as human beings not outweighed their functions interests produced by all kinds of ideological influences and social engineering? Why has consciousness of their class situation and of the advantage of socialism not been as effective as Mr. Marx believed it would be. Because of the phenomenon of the social character. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Once a society has succeeded in molding the character structure of the average person in such a way that one likes to do that which one has to do, one is satisfied with the very condition that society imposes upon one. As one of Ibsen’s characters once said, “He can do anything he wants to do because he wants only what he can do.” Needless to say, a social character which is, for instance, satisfied with submission is a crippled character. However, crippled or not, it serves the purpose of a society requiring submissive men and women for its proper function. The concept of social character also serves to explain the link between the material basis of a society and the “ideological superstructure.” Mr. Marx has often been interpreted as imply that the ideological superstructure was nothing but the reflection of the economic basis. This interpretation is not correct; but the fact is that in Mr. Marx’s theory the nature of the relation between basis and superstructure was not sufficiently explained. A dynamic psychological theory can show that society produces the social character, and that the social character tends to produce and to hold onto ideas and ideologies which fit it and are nourished by it. However, it is not only the economic basis which creates a certain social character which, in turn, creates certain ideas. The ideas, once created, also influence the social character and, indirectly, the socioeconomic structure. The social character is the intermediary between the socioeconomic structure and the ideas and ideals prevalent in a society. It is the intermediary in both directions, from the economic basis to the ideas and from the ideas to the economic basis. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
The concept of social character can explain how human energy, like any other raw material, is used by a society for the needs and purposes of that society. Humans, in fact, are one of the most pliable natural forces; they can be made to serve almost any purpose; they can be made to hate or to cooperate, to submit or to stand up, to enjoy suffering or happiness. While all this is true, it is also true that humans can solve the problem of their existence only by the full unfolding of their human powers. The more crippled a society makes a human, the more sicker one becomes, even though consciously one may be satisfied with one’s lot. However, unconsciously one is dissatisfied; and this very dissatisfaction is the element which clines one eventually to change the social forms that cripple one. If one cannot do this, one’s particular kind of pathogenic society will die out. Social change and revolution are caused not only by new productive forces which conflict with older forms of social organization, but also by the conflict between inhuman social conditions and unalterable human needs. One can do almost anything to humans, yet only almost. The history of man’s fight for freedom is the most telling manifestation of this principle. In recent decades “conscience” has lost much of its significance. It seems as though neither external nor internal authorities play any prominent role in the individual’s life. If only one does not interfere with other people’s legitimate claims, then is everybody is completely “free.” However, what we find is rather that instead of disappearing, authority has made itself invisible. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Instead of overt authority, “anonymous” authority reigns. It is disguised as common sense, science, psychic health, normality, public opinion. It does not demand anything except the self-evident. It seems to use no pressure but only mild persuasion. Whether a mother says to her daughter, “I know you will not like to go out with that boy,” or an advertisement suggest “Drink the brand of premium cranberry juice—you will like its coolness,” it has the same atmosphere of subtle suggestion which actually pervades our whole social life. Anonymous authority is more effective than overt authority, since one never suspects that there is any order which one is expected to follow. In external authority it is clear that there is an order and who gives it; one can fight against the authority, and in this fight personal independence and moral courage can develop. However, whereas internalized authority the common, though an internal one, remains visible, in anonymous authority both command and commander have become invisible. It is like being fired at by an invisible enemy. There is nobody and nothing to fight back against. The most important aspect of the authoritarian character is the attitude towards power. For the authoritarian character there exists, so to speak, two genders: the powerful ones and the powerless ones. One’s love, admiration and readiness for submission are automatically aroused by power, whether of a person or of an institution. Power fascinates one not for any values for which a specific power may stand, but just because it is power. Just as his “love” is automatically aroused by power, so powerless people or institutions automatically arouses one’s contempt. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The very sight of a powerless person makes one want to attack, dominate, humiliate one. Whereas a different kind of character is appalled by the idea of attacking one who is helpless, the authoritarian character feels the more aroused the more helpless one’s object has become. There is one feature of the authoritarian character which has mislead many observers: a tendency to defy authority and to resent any kind of influence from “above.” Sometimes this defiance overshadows the whole picture and the submissive tendencies are in the background. This type of person will constantly rebel against any kind of authority, even one that actually furthers one’s interest and has no elements of suppression. Sometimes the attitude toward authority is divided. Such persons might fight against one set of authorities, especially if they are disappointed by its lack of power, and at the same time or later on submit to another set of authorities which through greater power or greater promises seems to fulfill their masochistic longings. Finally, there is a type in which the rebellious tendencies are completely repressed and come to the surface only when conscious control is weakened; or they can be recognized ex posteriori, in the hatred that arises against an authority when its power is weakened and when it begins to totter. In persons of the first type in whom the rebellious attitude is the center of the picture, one is easily led to believe that their character structure is just the opposite to that of the submissive masochistic type. It appears as if they are persons who oppose every authority on the basis of an extreme degree of independence. They look like persons who, on the basis of their inner strength and integrity, fight those forces that block their freedom and independence. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
However, the authoritarian character’s fight against authority is essentially defiance. It is an attempt to assert oneself and to overcome one’s feeling of powerlessness by fighting authority, although the longing for submission remains present, whether consciously or unconsciously. The authoritarian character is never a “revolutionary”; I should like to call one a “rebel.” There are many individuals and political movements that are puzzling to the superficial observer because of what seems to be an inexplicable change from “radicalism” to extreme authoritarianism. Psychologically, these people are the typical “rebels.” The end of the terror—the most obvious new factor by which Khruschevism is distinguished from Stalinism is the liquidation of the terror. If terror was necessary in a system where the masses had to work hard without getting any corresponding material satisfaction, it could be diminished once the workers could begin to enjoy the fruits of their labour and could hope for increasing enjoyment. Mr. Stalin’s successors were also sufficiently traumatized themselves by the crazy terror which he had exercised during his last years and which daily threatened each one of the top leaders with extinction. A psychological phenomenon, similar to that in France before the fall of Robespierre, probably existed in the Russian top leadership which led, together with the reasons first mentioned, to the decision to liquidate the terror. All reports from Russian confirm that the system of terror has ceased to exist. The slave labour camps which were not only institutions of terror but also a source of inexpensive labor under Mr. Stalin were dissolved. Arbitrary arrests and punishments were abolished. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The Khruschev state might be compared with a reactionary police stat of the nineteenth century as far as political freedom is concerned, perhaps not too different from the Czarist system. Yet this comparison would be misleading; not only because of the obvious differences in the economic structure of the two systems but also because of another and more complex factor. Political freedom comes up as a manifest problem only when there is considerable dissent within the fundamental structure of a given society. In the Czarist system, the majority of the population—peasants, workers, the middle class—were in opposition to the system, and the system took oppressive measures to insure its own existence. On the other hand, there is a reason to assume that the Khruschev system has succeeded in ensuring the allegiance of the majority of the Soviet population. It has done this partly by the real economic satisfactions it provides at present and the reasonable hope for far greater improvements in the future and partly by its success in the ideological manipulation of people’s minds. From all reports it seems fairly clear that the average Russian is convinced that his system worked reasonably well, looked forward to a better future, enjoyed the possibilities for more education and amusement, and was mainly afraid of one thing—war. When one criticized the system one criticized details of its operation, bureaucratic stupidities, and the shoddy quality of consumer goods, but not the Soviet systems as such. One certainly did not think of substituting the capitalist system for it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
No doubt under Mr. Stalin’s terror the situation was quite different. The ruthless arbitrariness of the terror threatened everyone, high or low, with prison or physical extinction, not only as a result of making mistakes, but as a consequence of denunciations, intrigues, et cetera. However, this terror has gone and things are different. The average American misjudges the Russian situation by putting oneself in the role of an anti-Communist within Russia, and considering the degree to which expression of one’s opinion would be discouraged. One forgets that, apart from writers and social scientists who might be prone to criticize the system, the average Russian feels little of such an urge. Hence the problem of political freedom is by far less real for one than it appears from the American perspective. (The average Russian might feel similarly to the average American if, picturing oneself as a Communist, one considered the restrictions and hazards one would face in the United States of America.) All this does not alter the fact that Khruschev’s Russian is a police state with much less freedom to dissent and to criticize the government and majority opinion than there is within the Western democracies. Furthermore, after many years of unrestricted terror, it will take years to dispell the residue of fear and intimidation created by terror. Yet, when all is considered, the net result if that Khrushchevism marks a considerable improvement over the Stalinist era as far as political freedom is concerned. Closely related to the disappearance of the terror system is also a change in the nature of the method of leadership in Russia. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Mr. Stalin’s rule was a one-man rule, without any serious consultation with collaborators and anything that in the broadest sense could be called discussion or majority rule. It is clear that such a one-man regime needed a terror-force by which the dictator could strike at any person who dared to oppose one. With the execution of Beria, the power of the terrorist state police was considerably restricted and none of the Russian leaders since Mr. Stalin’s death has assumed a dictatorial position that could be compared with that of Stalin. It appears that the leader, whoever he is, has to convince the top echelon in the party of the correctness of his views, and that there is something like discussion and majority rule in the ruling committee. All events in the last few years of Mr. Khruschev’s rule had to defend his policy against opponents, that he had to show successes in order to maintain himself on top, and that he was in some ways in a position not too different from that of a statesman in the West, whose continued political failures would lead to his political disappearance. The attitude of the authoritarian character toward life, one’s whole philosophy, is determined by one’s emotional strivings. The authoritarian character loves those conditions that limit human freedom, one loves being submitted to fate. It depends on one’s social position what “fate” means to one. For a solider it may mean the will or whim of one’s superior, to which one gladly submits. For the small businessperson, the economic laws are one’s fate. Crisis and prosperity to one are not social phenomena which might be changed by human activity, but the expression of a higher power to which one has to submit. For those on the top of the pyramid it is basically not different. The difference lies only in the size and generality of the power to which one submits, not in the feeling of dependence as such. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Economic theorists have always recognized the importance of secure property rights in creating the right incentives to produce and to invest. This has been critical to the rise of Western European economies. Students of less-developed countries (LCDs) and transition economies reinforce this lesson. They also show how insecure property rights remain in many countries. The threats to property rights come from two broad classes of predators. Other individual may encroach on one’s property, may extort money by making threats of damaging property, or may steal the property outright; a weak state maybe unable to deter or prevent such actions. Even worse, the state itself or its agents may engage in extortion of private property to further their own objectives, whether they be wasteful public monuments and displays, aggression against other states, or simple person consumption. Faced with such threats, individuals will be deterred from production and investment, but will also attempt to take some countermeasures to preserve their property. Property rights over assets consist of: control—decision about them; entitlement to income produced by them; alienation—selling one or both of the control or income rights, fully or partially, to someone else. All of these are subject to formal or informal constraints. Control rights can be leased or sold under contracts, but where contracts are incomplete, the unspecified or residual rights remain with the owner. Income rights are often shared with other stakeholders under various social norms, terms or covenants in a higher-level contract, general laws, et cetera; some control right may also be similarly shared. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
And sales are also subject to similar constraints, such as covenants restricting what homeowner can and cannot do to the exterior of their homes, to fences and yards, and on. Much academic discussion of the principle of an administration, while admirably giving increasing emphasis to participation by personnel, tends to overlook the probably much more important matter of participation by clientele. Indeed, some of the academic discussion seem to take for granted that participation by the clientele is impossible, that at best the clientele may consume the services of the agency, and these services are related directly to their preconceived wants. By some administrators and writers on administration, however, it is well understood that the benefits of participation by the clientele of an agency overweighs the hazards. The existence of an alert, informed, interested clientele may expose the inept administrator to observation and correction that one would escape if it were more apathetic; on the other hand, a favourable public goes far to assure the success of a program. The attempt to evoke such a favourable response from its clientele often leads agency administrators into unilateral forms of publicity, public relations, and propaganda. A free flow of valid information is rightly to be desired. A system of interim progress reporting, for the clientele as well as the personnel, is indispensable to optimum co-ordination and motivation in democratic planning agencies. Nevertheless, the practice of unilateral public relations is currently probably justly a little suspect. It produces far fewer results than might be supposed from its analogy to commercial advertising. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Though it will be granted by many that public relations will not take the place of participation by an agency’s clientele, some continue to rely upon public relations as a means of obtaining participation. That is, they exhort and cajole their clients to participate, or to feel a sense of participation, as if such a feeling could be induced by will power. Participation to deepen must commence with the definition of the problem, and carry through the debate of proposals and the adoption of policy. It is too late in the process of commence trying to evoke participation after everything is cut and dried. Countless instances can be cited to demonstrate people’s lack of enthusiasm for projects which have been fashioned and thrust on them by others. The best of intentions often go awry because of such methods. Let us suppose, however, that the public has participated fully in the first three phases, in defining the problem, debating the alternative solutions, and, at least through representatives, making the policy decision which launches a program for action. And for the clientele to participate in the conduct of the program. Is it then certain that their involvement will be high, with a resulting flow of effort and ingenuity, or initiative and responsibility? Unfortunately, this cannot be assumed. If participation in the planning process were deemed to go only as far as participation in the conduct of programs and no farther, it would soon dwindle into routine. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
To the extent that participation of the clientele was voluntary, it would cease. The public would in a sense abdicate, becoming content to leave matters in the hands of the paid and delegated personnel of the agency, as long as they did not to greatly transgress routine expectations. This spectacle of public which is satisfied after setting up a program to leave it to be run by a few is familiar in agencies of all kinds. In the beginning of its existence an agency may enjoy a high degree of interests from its clientele; there is hope, energy, idealism, enthusiasm; but once a permanent personnel is established, all this often wanes. A crisis may seem to waken it again, but only ephemerally. The most persistent obstacle to continuing participation is an intangible one. For the baffling opponent is complacency, especially the sort of complacency which seems permitted if not justified by the tolerable success of an agency in meeting some routine minimum of performance. Some of the bitterest struggles of leadership can occur in the minds of leaders, as the same complacency infiltrates and begins to be felt as dull poisoning of their energy. It is then that the question arises, “Why not relax? Why not let things find a level routine? As long as no one is complaining, why is it not sufficient just to let things amble along as they have been?” A swarm of rationalizations can be found to justify such doubts about the desirability of continued progress, and to support the policy of simply mending troubles as they arise. The decline and failure of participation may this occur insidiously, from within, despite good will, as readily as from arbitrariness without. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Many believers are not even aware that they have a spirit. At the other extreme, however, some people imagine that every experience which takes place in the realm of their senses is spirit-based—or perhaps even directly “of the Spirit.” These believers consider everything which takes place in their inner life to be His working. In each of these cases the humans’ own spirit is left out of account. In the first instance, the believer’s religious life is, if we may say so, “spiritually mental,” that is, the mind is illuminated and enjoys spiritual truth, but what “spirit” means one does not clearly know. In the second instance the believer is really “soulish,” although one thinks one is spiritual. And in the case where the believer think that the Holy Spirit’s indwelling means every moment is of Him, one becomes dangerously open to the deception of evil spirits counterfeiting the Holy Spirit, because without discrimination one attributes all inner “movements” or experiences to Him. The conversion of an individual to one of the churches is a gradual process that finally ends in the ecstatic moment of Christian faith. Conversion is the transition from the latent stage of the Spiritual Community to its manifest stage. Thus it is relative, not absolute, conversion, for humans is never completely without faith, without an ultimate concern through which they participate in the Spiritual Community. The missionary and evangelistic efforts of the churches must take this fact into account. The lost sheep are never completely lost; the manifest church builds upon the latent church. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The Spiritual Community is a community of Spiritual personalities, of individuals determined by the Spiritual Presence in a state of faith and love. One is either grasped by the Spirit or one is not; there is no special status within the Spiritual Community. Everyone is a priest. However, for the sake of efficiency and orderly procedure, certain individual experts may be called to a regular and trained performance of priestly activities. Though the convert in one’s actual being is subject to the ambiguities of the churches, in one’s essential being one is a Spiritual personality, a participant in the Spiritual Community. This is situation is called the experience of the New Being. By experience, we mean the awareness of something that happens to somebody, namely, the state of being grasped by the Spiritual Presence. According to the three elements of salvation, the New Being is experienced as creative (Regeneration), as paradox (Justification), and as process (Sanctification). The stranger that sojourns with you, shall be unto you as the native among you, and you shall love one as you love yourself, for you were all strangers in the land of America. One law shall be among you, for the native and the stranger alike. If your fellowman become poor and one’s means fail, you shall uphold one. Harden not your heart to the needy in your midst, nor shut your hand to your needy brother; but open your hand unto one; and lend one sufficient for one’s needs. Behold how good and how pleasant it is when brethren dwell together in unity. Hate not your brother in your heart; love your neighbour as yourself. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, with Liberty and Justice for all. And please donate to the Sacramento Fire Department, as they are not receiving all of their resources. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Comin’ Straight Out of Brooklyn, Crush Your Spine, Corrupt Your Mind!
The era of large-scale witch hunting in Europe ended long ago. The last legal execution that we know of, of a witch in German-speaking Europe took place in Glarus, Switzerland, in 1782. However, that did not end the fear of witches. Perhaps not all witches are bad, but there are renewed concerns in America that people are cohabitating with devilry. The early modern witch hunt has powerfully shaped what we assume witchcraft to be about, and it has also limited what we think it is, and when we think it was. However, in the most basic sense, to accuse someone of being a witch is to accuse that person of conspiring to do covert evil: to inflict harm, misfortune, and sickness. Even if they are unwilling to admit it, some people are using arts of the Devil and in league with demonic forces, which are intended to perplex humanity. Witchcraft, in this regard, is a cultural idiom, a way of understanding and explaining the bad things that befall us. Illness has often been associated with dirt, pollution, and disorder. However, illness is also seen as a form of cosmic judgment, as punishment for improper or irresponsible behaviour. It reflects the order of society and the cosmos write large, and may reveal sins of various orders and magnitude. As such, during Victorian times, it structured the community’s moral economy: those who suffered from heart disease, or had circulatory problems, people believed, had lives wrong. Perhaps they had not worked hard enough, or had recklessly participated in life, creating a social burden for the community. Cancer and ulcers were perceived as punishments, perhaps for youthful sexual indiscretion. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Maintaining health was a sign of one’s self-discipline and accountability within a community where people depended on one another to get the work done that allowed the community to continue and to thrive. However, inhabitants did not perceive all illnesses as moral judgments or as the result of cosmic sanction. Tuberculosis and pneumonia, they felt, could befall anyone; those were simply two of humanity’s burdens. Furthermore, it has been asked whether experiences of betrayal, interpersonal alienation, and power politics might help explain some manifestations of illness or sudden disability. One of the striking examples concerns the air-traffic-controller crisis of the early 1980s. In 1981, air traffic controllers went on strike to protest their working conditions and the intolerable stress associated with their jobs. However, researchers readily conceded that the controllers were under stress, they could find no physical evidence of it, like heightened levels of cortisol or elevated blood pressure. Ultimately, Robert Rose, a prominent psychiatrist on a Federal Aviation Administration team researching the problem, concluded that the cause of the controllers’ suffering was not so much stress as a lack of social support. They felt that no one cared about how hard their work was, or how they fared in their jobs. The stress they experienced, Mr. Rose became convinced, was not just biological or physiological, and it “wasn’t just inside the individual.” Their illness was a product of social experience. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Also, during World War I, some supplicants were described as suffering from war blindness (Kriegsblindheit). While many other ailments continued to be part of the parade of affliction, illness vaguely attributed to war damage and impairments to sufferers’ limbs and sensory organs were especially prominent themes. Applying these ideas to postwar Germany, we might ask how pervasive unease, a sense of collective failure, persistent questions of blame, and fears of betrayal might have influenced the ways people experienced the fragility of their bodies after the war. Did people become suddenly blind or deaf because they could not bear to see or hear what was happening around them—could not bear defeat and its consequences? Did some suddenly lose their ability to walk as a form of unconscious protest against volition, against agency, against responsibility for genocide and war or defense crimes? Did they lose the ability to speak because there were so many things that could not be discussed out loud? The loss of speech can stand for a refusal of co-existence. The human spirit is a distinct organism. Separation of soul and spirit can happen. This is because of the Fall. The spirit which had been in union with God—which once ruled and dominated the soul and body—feel from its predominated position into the vessel of the soul and could no longer rule. In the “new birth,” which the Lord told Nicodemus was necessary for every man, the regeneration of the fallen spirit takes place. “That which is born of the Spirit is spirit,” reports John 3.6; “a new spirit will I put within you,” reports Ezekiel 36.26. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
And through cognizance of the death of the old creation with Christ, as set forth in Romans 6.6, is the new spirit liberated, divided from the soul, and joined to the Risen Lord. “Dead to the law…joined to Another”; “Having died…that we might serve in newness of the spirit,” reports Romans 7.4-6. The believer’s life is therefore to be a walk after the spirit, minding the things of the spirit. However, the believer can only thus walk after the spirit if the Spirit of God dwells in one. The Holy Spirit lifts one’s spirit to the place of rule over soul and body—“flesh,” both ethically and physically—by joining it to the Risen Lord, and making it “one spirit” with Him. That the believer retains volitional control over one’s own spirit is the important point to note, for through ignorance one can withdraw one’s spirit from cooperation with the Holy Spirit, and thus, so to speak, walk after the soul, or after the flesh—unwittingly. A surrendered will to do the will of God I therefore no guarantee that one is doing that will; one must understand what the will of the Lord is, and for doing that will must seek to be filled in spirit to the utmost of one’s capacity. The knowledge that the Spirit of God has come to indwell the shrine of the spirit is not enough to guarantee that the believer will continue to walk in the spirit and not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. If one wishes to truly “live” in the realm of the Spirit and know His power, one must learn how to “walk” with the Spirit. And for this, one must understand how to “combine” and “compare” spiritual things with spiritual, so as to interpret truly the things of the Spirit of God—exercising the spirit faculty by which one is able to examine all things, and so discern the mind of the Lord. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Such a believer should know how to walk after the spirit, so that one does not quench its action, movements or admonitions as it is moved or exercised by the Spirit of God—cultivating its strength by use, so that one becomes strong in spirit, and a truly spiritual human of “full age” in the Church of God. The Spiritual Community is the assembly of God of the Old Testament, the body of Christ of the New Testament, and the church invisible or Spiritual of the Reformers. It is the invisible essence of the religious communities, both non-Christian and Christian alike. However, those religious groups which are consciously founded upon the reception of Jesus as the Christ are the churches. The Christian churches constitute the manifest Spiritual Community. The Spiritual Community does not exist as a separate entity. For the Spiritual Community is the invisible essence, the inner telos, the essential power in every actual church. The spiritual essence of the churches permits them to participate in unambiguous life under the Spiritual Presence. However, they are also groups of human beings under the conditions of existence. They are simultaneously both the actualization and the distortion of the Spiritual Community. Consequently, there are two aspects to the churches which make them a paradox: the theological aspect, which points to their spiritual essence, and the sociological aspect, which reveals their ambiguities. Every church is a sociological reality. As such it is subject to the laws which determine the life of social groups with all their ambiguities. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The sociologists of religion are justified in conducting these inquiries in the same way as the sociologists of law, of the arts, and of the sciences. They rightly point to the social stratification within the churches, to the rise and fall of elites, to power struggles and the destructive weapons used in them, to the conflict between freedom and organization, to aristocratic esotericism in contrast to democratic exotericism, and so forth. Seen in this light, the history of the churches is a secular history with all the disintegrating, destructive, and tragic-demonic elements which make historical life as ambiguous as all other life processes. Despite the sociological trappings which envelop the churches, at their core lies the Spiritual Community. It supplies the “in spite of” element in their paradoxical character, the dynamism which does not eliminate, but conquers the ambiguities of religion at least in principle. The phrase “in principle” means “the power of beginning, which remains the controlling power in a whole process.” In this sense, the Spiritual Presence, the New Being, and the Spiritual Community are principles (archai). Since our primary interest in the mutual relationship between religion and culture, we shall not delay to describe how the Spiritual Presence overcomes the ambiguities of religion within religion itself. Instead, we consider the influence of the churches upon individuals and upon society. As regards the ambiguities of religion, it suffices to note the operative factor, the Protestant principle: The Protestant principle is an expression of the conquest of religion by the Spiritual Presence and consequently an expression of the victory over the ambiguities of religion, its profanization, and its demonization. In this sense, we can speak of the victory of the Spirit over religion. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Marxism is humanism, and its amin is the full unfolding of the human potentialities—not humans as deduced from their ideas or their consciousness, but humans with their physical and psychic properties, the real human who does not live in a vacuum but in a social context, the human who has to produce in order to live. It I precisely the fact that the whole human, as well as one’s consciousness, is the concern of Marxist thought which differentiates Mrs. Marx’s “materialism” from Mr. Hegel’s idealism, as well as from the economistic-mechanistic deformation of Marxism. It was Mr. Marx’s great achievement to liberate the economic and philosophical categories that referred to humans from their abstract and alienated expressions and to apply philosophy and economics ad hominem. Mr. Marx’s concern was humans, and his aim was humans’ liberation from the predomination of material interests, from the prison one’s own arrangements and deeds had built around them. If one does not understand this concern of Mr. Marx, one will never understand either his theory or the falsification of it by many who claim to practice it. Even though Mr. Marx’s main work is entitled Capital (Das Kapital), this work was meant to be only a step in his total research, to be followed by a history of philosophy. For Mr. Marx the study of capital was a critical tool to be used for understanding humans’ crippled state in industrial society. It is one step in the great work which, if he had been able to write it, might have been entitled On Man and Society. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Mr. Marx’s work, that of the “young” Mr. Marx as well as that of the author of Capital, is fully of psychological concepts. He deals with concepts like the “essence of man,” and the “crippled man,” with “alienation,” with “consciousness,” with “passionate strivings,” and with “independence,” to name only some of the most important. Yet, in contrast to Mr. Aristotle and Mr. Spinoza, who based ethics on a systematic psychology, Mr. Marx’s work contains almost no psychological theory. Aside from fragmentary remarks on the distinction between fixed drives (like hunger and sexuality) and flexible drives which are socially produced, there is hardly any relevant psychology to be found in Mr. Marx’s writings or, for that matter, in those of his successors. The reason for this failure does not lie in a lack of interest in or talent for analyzing psychological phenomena (the volumes containing the unabridged correspondence between Mr. Marx and Mr. Engels show a capacity for penetrating analysis of unconscious motivations that would be a credit to any gifted psychoanalyst); it is to be found in the fact that during Mr. Marx’s lifetime there was no dynamic psychology that he could have applied to the problems of human beings. Mr. Marx died in 1883; Dr. Freud began to publish his work more than ten years after Mr. Marx’s death. Even though in need of many revisions, the kind of psychology necessary to supplement Mr. Marx’s analysis was created by Dr. Freud. Psychoanalysis is, first of all, a dynamic psychology. It deals with psychic forces, which motivate human behaviour, action, feelings, ides. These forces cannot always be seen as such; they have to be inferred from the observable phenomena, and to be studied in their contradictions and transformations. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
To be useful for Marxist thinking, a psychology must also be one which sees the evolution of these psychic forces as a process of constant interaction between humans’ need and the social and historical reality in which one participates. It must be a psychology which is from the very beginning social psychology. Eventually, it must be a critical psychology, particularly one critical of humans’ consciousness. Dr. Freud’s psychoanalysis fulfills these main conditions, even though their relevance for Marxist thought was grasped neither by most Freudians nor by Marxists. The reasons for this failure to make contact are apparent on both sides. Marxist continued in the tradition of ignoring psychology; Dr. Freud and his disciples developed their ideas within the framework of mechanistic materialism, which proved restrictive to the development of the great discoveries of Dr. Freud and incompatible with “historical materialism.” In the revival of Marxist humanism, those in the West became aware of the fact that socialism must satisfy humans’ need for a system of orientation and devotion; that it must deal with the questions of who humans are and what the meaning and aim of their lives are. It must be the foundation for ethical norms and spiritual development beyond the empty phrase stating that “good is that which serves the revolution” (the worker’s state, historical evolution, et cetera). On the other hand, the criticism arising in the psychoanalytic camp against the mechanistic materialism underlying Dr. Freud’s thinking has led to a critical reevaluation of psychoanalysis, essentially of the libido theory. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Because of the development in both Marxist and psychoanalytic thinking, the time seems to have come for humanist Marxist to recognize that the use of a dynamic, critical, socially oriented psychology is of crucial importance for the further development of Marxist theory and socialist practice; that a theory centered around man can no longer remain a theory without psychology if it is not to lose touch with human reality. The sado-masochistic person is always characterized by one’s attitude toward authority. One admires authority and tends to submit to it, but at the same time one wants to be an authority oneself and have others submit to one. There is an additional reason for choosing this term. The Fascist systems call themselves authoritarian because of the dominant role of authority in their social and political structure. By the term “authoritarian character,” we imply that it represents the personality structure which is the human basis of Fascism. Authority is not a quality one person “has,” in the sense that one had property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to one. However, there is a fundamental difference between a kind of superiority-inferiority relation which can be called rational authority and one which may be described as inhibiting authority. An example is the relationship between teacher and student and that between slave and owner and slave are both based on the superiority of the one over the other. The interests of teacher and pupil lie in the same direction. If one succeeds in furthering the pupil, the teacher is satisfied; if one has failed to do so, the failure is that of the teacher and the pupil. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The slaver owner, on the other hand, wants to exploit the slave as much as possible; the more one gets out of the slave, the more one is satisfied. At the same time, the slave seeks to defend as best one can one’s claims for a minimum of happiness. These interests are definitely antagonistic, as what is of advantage to the one is detrimental to the other. The superiority has a different function in both cases: in the first, it is the condition for the helping of the person subjected to the authority; in the second, it is the condition for one’s exploitation. The dynamics of authority in these two types are different too: the more the student learns, the less wide is the gap between one and the teacher. One becomes more and more like the teacher oneself. In other words, the authority relationship tends to dissolve itself. However, when the superiority serves as a basis for exploitation, the distance becomes intensified through its long duration. The psychological situation is different in each of these authority situations. In the first, elements of love, admiration, or gratitude are prevalent. The authority is at the same time an example with which one wants to identify one’s self partially or totally. In the second situation, resentment or hostility will arise against the exploiter, subordination to whom is against one’s own interest. However, often, as in the case of a slave, this hatred would only lead to conflicts which would subject the slave to suffering without a chance of winning. Therefore, the tendency will usually be to repress the feeling of hatred and sometimes even to replace it by a feeling of blind admiration. This has two functions: to remove the painful dangerous feeling of hatred, and to soften the feeling of humiliation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
If the person who rules over me is so wonderful or perfect, then I should not be ashamed of obeying one. I cannot be one’s equal because one is so much stronger, wiser, better, and so on, than I am. As a result, in the inhibiting kind of authority, the element either of hatred or of irrational overestimation and admiration of the authority, the element either of hatred or of irrational overestimation and admiration of the authority will tend to increase. In the rational kind of authority, it will tend to decrease in direct proportion to the degree in which the person subjected to the authority becomes stronger and thereby more similar to the authority. The difference between rational and inhibiting authority is only a relative one. Even in the relationship between slave and master there are elements of advantage for the slave. One gets a minimum of food and protection which at least enables one to work for one’s master. (However, with being beat and working in the broiling hot sun and freeze cold could lead to death, as well as the beatings.) On the other hand, it is only in an ideal relationship between teacher and student that we find a complete lack of antagonism of interests. There are many gradations between these two extreme cases, as in the relationship of a factory worker, with one’s boss, or a farmer’s son with his father, of a hausfrau with her husband. Nevertheless, although in reality two types of authority are blended, they are essentially different, and an analysis of a concrete authority situation must always determine the specific weight of each kind of authority. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Authority does not have to be a person or institution which says: you have to do this, or you are not allowed to do that. While this kind of authority may be called external authority, authority can appear as internal authority, under the name of duty, conscience, or superego. As a matter of fact, the development of modern thinking from Protestantism to Mr. Kant’s philosophy, can be characterized as the substitution of internalized authority for an external one. With the political victories of the rising middle class, external authority lost prestige and man’s own conscience assumed the place which external authority once had held. This change appeared to many as the victory of freedom. To submit to orders from the outside (at least in spiritual matters) appeared to be unworthy of a free man; but the conquest of one’s natural inclinations, and the establishment of the domination of one part of the individual, one’s nature, by another, one’s reason, will or conscience, seemed to be the very essence of freedom. Analysis shows that conscience rules with a harshness as great as external authorities, and furthermore that frequently the contents of the orders issues by humans’ conscience are ultimately not governed by demands which have assumed the dignity of ethical norms. The rulership of conscience can be even harsher than that of external authorities, since the individual feels its orders to be one’s own; how can one rebel against oneself? Mr. Stalin, a shrewd, cynical opportunist with an insatiable lust for personal power, drew the consequences of the failure. Given his personality, socialism could never have meant for him the human vision of Mr. Marx or Mr. Engles, and hence he had no scruples in introducing the enforced industrialization of Russian under the name of “socialism in one country.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
This formula was only the transparent cover for the goal to be achieved—the building of a totalitarian state managerialism in Russia, and the rapid capital accumulation (and mobilization of human energy) necessary for this goal. Mr. Stalin liquidated the socialist revolution in the name of “socialism.” He used terror to enforce acceptance of the material deprivations which resulted from the rapid build-up of basic industries at the expense of the production of consumer goods; furthermore, the terror served to create a new work morale by mobilizing the energies of an essentially agrarian population and forcing them to work at the pace necessary for this rapid industrial expansion. He used terror probably far beyond what was necessary for the achievement of his economic program because he was possessed by an extraordinary thirst for power, a paranoid suspicion of rivals, and a pathological pleasure in revenge. If a highly industrialized, centralized Russian state managerialism was Mr. Stalin’s aim, he certainly could not have said so. Terror alone, even the most extreme terror, would not have sufficed to force the masses into co-operation had not Mr. Stalin been able also to influence humans’ minds and thoughts He could, of course, have made a complete about-face, staging an ideological counterrevolution employing a fascist-nationalist ideology. Thus he might have had the ideological means which would have led to similar results. Mr. Stalin did not choose this course, and hence there was nothing left for him to do but to use the only ideology which had any influence on the masses at that time—that of communism and World revolution. Religion had been depreciated by the Communist Party; nationalism had been depreciated; “Marxism-Leninism” was the only prestigious ideology left. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
And no one this, but the figures of Mr. Marx, Mr. Engel, and Mr. Lenin had a charismatic appeal for the Russian people and Mr. Stalin used this appeal by presenting himself as their legitimate successor. In order to perpetrate the great historical fraud, Mr. Stalin had to get rid of Mr. Trotsky and eventually to exterminate almost all the old Bolsheviks to have the way completely free for his transformation of the socialist goal into one of a reactionary state managerialism. He had to rewrite history in order to wipe out even the memory of the old revolutionaries and their ideas. Maybe, unconsciously, he feared and suspected the old revolutionaries in his paranoid fashion, because he felt guilty of having betrayed the ideals of which they were symbols. If not in the whole World, Mr. Stalin succeeded in his goal, which was not World revolution but an industrialized Russia that should become the strongest industrial power in Europe. The economic success of his method of totalitarian state planning later continued with some changes by Mr. Malenkov and Mr. Khrushchev, is no long a matter of dispute. “The Soviet system of centralized direction has proved itself to be more or less the peer of the market economy, as exemplified by the United States of America.” This judgment is borne out by the Russian industrial growth. While the estimates of various American economists vary somewhat, the differences are relatively small. Mr. Bornstein estimates the annual rate of growth of gross national product from 1950 to 1958 in the Soviet Union at 6.5-7.5 percent and for the United States of America in the name period at 2.9 percent. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Kaplan-Moorsteen estimate the Russian industrial rate of growth for the same period as being 9.2 percent. The current GDP in Russia for 2023 is 1.3 percent. If one considers the Russian annual rate of growth since 1913, that is to say for the period including the destruction of the First World War and the Civil War, the figures are, of course, quite different. They are according to Mr. Nutter, for civilian industrial output from 1913 to 1955 only 4.2 percent, while the rate of growth for the last forty years of the Czarist period was 5.3 percent. However, between 1928 and 1940 (that is to say, in a period of peace) the Soviet rate was 8.3 percent and between 1950 and 1955 9.0 percent, more or less twice the United States of America during the same time, and somewhat less than twice that of the Czarist rate. Mr. Nutter estimates that if one looks to the immediate future—“it seems reasonably certain that industrial growth will proceed more rapidly in the Soviet Union than in the United States of America, in the absence of radical institutional changes in either country,” while, “it is more doubtful that industrial growth in the Soviet Union will be faster than in rapidly expanding Western economies, such as Western Germany, France, and Japan.” Mr. Nutter doubts, however, that in the long run the Soviet system will generate a more rapid growth than the private enterprise system. In contrast to industrial production, Russian agricultural production has been lagging far behind the planned figures and still constitutes one of the difficult problems of the Russian system. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
As far as consumption is concerned, the annual growth, taking in account the growth in population, is estimated at about 5 percent, with a recent rise in consumption among peasants. “In terms of food and clothing,” Mr. Turgeon concludes, “the Soviet stands the best chance of overtaking our level of living,” while the United States of America is far ahead in automobiles and other durable consumer goods, and in expenditures for services and travel. Mr. Stalin laid the foundations for a new, industrialized Russia. He transformed, within less than thirty years, the economically most backward of the great European nations into an industrial system that soon would become the economically most advanced and prosperous, second only to the United States of America. He achieved this goal through the ruthless destruction of human lives and happiness, through the cynical falsification of socialist ideas, and through an inhumanity which together with that of Mr. Hitler, corroded the sense of humanity in the rest of the World. Yet apart from the question whether this goal could have been achieved in less inhuman way by using other methods, the fact that he left to his heirs a viable and strong economic and political system. Many of the Stalinist features have remained the same—others have been changed. It is probably not extreme to declare any quote of work externally imposed upon a person is bound to seem coercive to some degree. While the ways in which coercion is exercised are often subtle and difficult to discern, even where no effort is made deliberately to conceal them, the effects of coercion are registered in the attitude of the person to one’s work. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Instead of motivation to approach an ideal of performance, which removes all barriers to the release of energy, there is resistance to the coercion, a setting of limits to effort, and even discontent and sabotage. Instead of guilt over doing less than one’s best, there is often the feeling that integrity and self-respect are best maintained by a refusal to surrender to the coercion. To be sure, it is obvious that employment utterly free of coercion is almost nonexistent; even play can become rapidly adulterated with compulsion as it gets organized by teams and clubs. Nevertheless, there are enormous differences in quality of performance as coercion fluctuates. Conversely, if none of the personnel doe more than their specified and required minimum, no organization can survive long; even in prison, the prisoners must contribute more than is absolutely forced from them. In practice the participation of personnel in setting the goals of their own effort can help to release the energy for attaining them. In determining their respective quotas and schedules, personnel are in effect spelling out of the interim or subgoals within the over-all goals of the agency. Yet, since initiative in evoking responsibility lies almost entirely with the administrator, the burden of achieving the personnel’s genuine participation lies upon one’s shoulders, and failure to achieve it can only spuriously be blamed on the personnel. In other words, as generally recognized, the test of the administrator, although it may be expressed in term of objective results in completing one’s program, is basically a test of one’s ability to minimize coercion and maximize participation. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Where one has the least opportunity for coercion, one’s skill as an organizer and leader of group effort becomes most clearly manifest (such as in campaigns using unpaid volunteers). All other conditions being equal, it seems demonstrable that shared purpose will always release more energy and ingenuity, and produce better results, than coercion. Too often the planning aspect of administration is discussed loosely in terms of controls. Not only has the term a popular connotation of some form or degree of coercion, but this is all too often so in practice. In other words, the various quotas and schedules are set up unilaterally and hierarchically by the administrator and one’s lieutenants, as tasks imposed externally upon subordinates. The best forms of planning break down the broad goals of a program to apply to the various functional units of the executive agency, but much is lost, and the success of the program is jeopardized, if this is done solely for the sake of co-ordination. If quotas and schedules are instead construed not as controls in this limited sense but as interim goals, their other functions in facilitating motivation of personnel and morale of the agency then become feasible Beyond starting these general characteristics of the program phase of our model of the planning process, it is doubtful that much more could be said without getting down to particular cases. There are vast numbers of books about the familiar problems of administration, most of the conceived in terms of human relations. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all. If a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not wrong him or her. And you shall love one as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of America. Please be sure to donate to the Sacramento Fire Depart, as they are not receiving all of their resources. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Do You Believe in Ghosts?
The garden was thickening and closing up in the darkness. There was thunder in the air, and lurking fear, half hidden, rearing up before me. Llanada Villa, with its dark wings, cupolas, towers and façade oddly resembled a colossal dragon, crouched and ready to spring. My estate bore an aspect more than usually sinister as viewed it by night. It was not a wholesome landscape after dark. Even if they were ignorant of the terror that stalked here, I believe anyone would notice its morbidity. The ancient lightning-scarred trees seemed surreal, large, and twisted, and the other vegetation unnaturally thick and feverish. Fear had lurked on the estate for as long as I could remember. The psychic power which had been leading me had now become a reality. The surroundings under the moonlight blended harmoniously with my mood. I felt a shiver run through me. It was with a suddenness that brought me electrified to my feet. For over a century, the curse of the Winchester Fortune had been the subject of stories incredibly wild and monstrously hideous; stories of apparitions that come back from the dead of their own accord. Silent, colossal, creeping death which stalked inside of Llanada Villa where it welled up a consciousness of terror. With whimpering insistence, the people told tales of demons which sized lone servants after dark, either carrying them off or leaving them in a frightful state of gnawed dismemberment; while others whispered of blood-trails toward my mansion. It was also said that Llanada Villa was ghoulishly haunted and it had a voice—its voice was thunder. Thunder that could even creep up on a clear summer’s day. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
Through the haze of exhaustion, it occurred to me that I felt lost and knew only that I was wandering away from the utter unknown. I went for a midnight stroll through the miles of hallways within my home to relieve myself of the terrible events of the past. A strange nervousness had slowly seized me. An impression stole upon me that there was something prowling about. Thin shadows were moving across the rooms and had attracted my gaze. These must be the souls, not of the good, but of the evil, which are compelled to wander about my home in payment of the penalty of their former evil way of life. For a moment, I thought I saw a curious cloud formation racing low and directly above me, a cloud black and impenetrable with two wing-like ends strangely in the shape of a monstrous flying bat. There were no lights lit in the house. And in the unremitting rain outside, there was no moonlight. There was a noise from some remote floor above, a dry chuckle like the scrape of lazy chains. The voice above tightened and broke with a roar. These ghosts were the players of a diabolical game. Serving a playful master. I descended stairs. A corridor followed. The bellowing fury above me faded slightly. However, that was no comfort. The corridor was catacomb-like. I felt more deeply entombed with every step. The pitiful throughs of the ghosts of natives shrieked and whined of the unnamable horror which had descended upon them. Death was indeed there. The disordered corridor was covered with blood and human debris bespeaking too vividly the ravages of demon teeth and talons; yet no visible trail led away from the carnage. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
Haunted by these apocalyptic visions of such cryptic deaths, horribly mangled bodies, chewed, and clawed in the catacombs of my home, it was certainly clearly that something demonic had been unleashed, for I have never heard of any rifle capable of creating carnage in such a hideous fashion. This curse was vastly different than the memory of endless prairies shimmering in the bright sun; of the breath of the evergreen forest in summer; of the crooning of ice-armored pines at the touch of the winds of winter; of cataracts roaring between hoary mountain masses; of all the innumerable sights and sounds of the wilderness; of its immensity and mystery; and of the silence that brood in its still depths. The death that had come had left no trace save destruction itself. However, a phantasmal chaos had suddenly caused my nerves to jump on edge, as I heard hideous shrieks beyond anything in my former experience or imagination. In the shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the veil of the living. Then came the devastating stoke of lightning which shook the whole mansion, lit the darkest corridors, and reverberated throughout my soul. There was something preternaturally about this experience. While the glare from beyond the window caught my eyes, a shadowy figure appeared before me. He had old sunken skin around the eyes and coarsely textured about his complexion. His shoulders were bunched under the black vanity of the silk embroidered robe he wore. His neck was a wattle of flesh. The eyes themselves were only partially focused, as though mostly lost to some wild and sly avenue of speculation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
As I passed by the apparition, his eyes followed me. This man was smugly and completely given over to evil. I had become lost in the forgotten turns of my mansion’s maze. Grief shuddered through me. I felt the grip of comforting fingers on my shoulder. I stared at the stain on the table. I sighed and my breath faltered. From far above, I heard the beast’s cavorting laughter. Tears blurred my eyes. There was blood everywhere. “Marvellous!” said a voice. There were two figures by the parlor. They were attired in evening wear and white silk mufflers and top hats. The glass of a monocle glittered above the spoiled grin of one of them. Even from forty feet distant, they smelled of cigars and brilliantine. And they stank of dead meat, sour wine, and feral rot. The figures began to fade. They had receded from sight almost entirely when one of the apparitions said, “You’ve angered Chief Little Fawn. And Chief Little Fawn will settle with you shortly.” I looked at my own soft, unaccustomed hands. And a voice that caused the skin on my head to crawl icily called down all the way from the top of the stairs to reach me where I stood. “My name is Chief Little Fawn.” There was a pause. “Are you coming up to fight? Or am I coming down for you?” My house was warming with the baleful threat of the thing above. In was becoming harder to breath. Demonic mutterings of thunder, and shadows thwarted me. As I shivered and contemplated my next move, I knew that I had pried out one of Earth’s supreme horrors. A fall of rain was drumming the mansion, and the heavy blanket of clouds glowed with a soft radiance where the moon was trying to break through. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
Then the blue moonlight returned, illuminating the mansion. A large white hound leaped from the wall and ran towards me, before it slinked across the room and disappeared. Startled, I had no idea which direction to turn. A click, and a dazzling white light enveloped the entire floor. For a brief second, I saw a woman outlined there against the wall. “Fool!” she cried hoarsely. “Blundering fool! What have you done?” Her eyes were glaring at me, smouldering with hatred. I gazed at her curiously as she stood erect, head thrown back, body apparently taut as wire, and a slow shudder crept down my spine. Then without warning, she gathered up her dress and floated down the path towards the door to nowhere. A moment later she disappeared somewhere in the shadows. I stood there, staring after her in a daze. Suddenly, there rose a low animal snarl. And before I could move, a huge gray shape came hurtling through the hallway, bounding in great leaps toward me. Its face was contorted in diabolic fury, and its jaws were dripping slaver. Even in that moment of terror as I stood frozen before it, the sight of those black nostrils and those black hyalescent eyes emblazoned itself on my mind, never to be forgotten. Then with a lunge it was upon me. I had only time to run. I could feel those teeth trying to clamp down on my heels. The beast coughed and faded into a black mist and vanished. Endless hours I spent confined to my room suffering the tortures of the damned. When twilight came, I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul. That I am still alive and sane, is a marvel I cannot fathom. I cannot fathom it, for these ghouls were a blasphemous abnormality from hell’s nethermost craters; abominations which no mind could fully grasp. There I lay, alone, in my accursed mansion, shivering, and terrified. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
The Winchester Mystery House seems to be drenched with the powerful emotions of spiritual energy. Of all the anomalous phenomenon which is reported, ghosts and ghostly sightings are by far the most common. One need not venture off to a distant loch, travel deep into a jungle wilderness, spend the night in a graveyard staring at the stars to have an extraordinary, life-changing, mind-blowing encounter. In The Winchester Mystery House, a ghost can appear to anyone, at anytime, for any reason. People from all walks of life have had a ghostly encounter in this beautiful but bizarre mansion. Be it an apparition that appears in a hallway or upon the step, mindless and unaware of your presence; or the giggles of children who once played nearby many, many years ago. Ghost, of course, have walked by our side since time immemorial. Ghosts arrived on stage by the Upper Paleolithic, perhaps around 50,000 BC. The simple conception that something recognizable of a dead person might at some time return to human society is neither fanciful nor surprising. Its roots originate at that developmental horizon where burial with goods became the norm for the first time. Ghost have waited in the winds from the beginning and have fluttered persistently as part of human cultural, religious, or philosophical baggage ever since. Practically speaking, as a result, they are inexpungible. Dying without a grave, accidently or otherwise, was a terrible fate. It was a weapon in warfare and judgement, for no quietus was attainable. Hammurapi of Babylon, in the eighteenth-century BC, threatens that the soldiers of any other king who does not follow his laws should be thrown on the plain in heaps and his troops denied burial. Other laws show that executed criminals were similarly treated. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
Crucially, burial is not compelling of itself in our search for ghosts, for there were always many reasons for rapid burial of the dead; it was understood before thought it self what happened to corpses, diseased or otherwise, and there was the question of say, respect for the dead, or predators. Archaeologically speaking, burial as such carries no implication necessarily different from waste disposal. The gradual establishing of deliberate burial in early ancestor communities, however, must have led to significant consequences. Shared ritual tied with mourning would come to teach that individual life itself was finite. With the development of abstract thought and the sharing of language and experience, the great lesson would come to be explicitly, rather than instinctively, understood: all that lives must die, passing though nature to eternity. For Babylonian men and women, accordingly, ghosts were an unpredictable reality. Everyone knew that ghosts must be unhappy: those responsible could list all the reasons. Omens, spells and rituals were available that could help the experienced diviner or exorcist in assessing his or her case as well as dealing with it. It is easy to imagine that deceased members of extended or extending families who had long inhabited the same place would not only feel close to their descendants but also tied to the rooms and passages where they had spent so much of their lives. Most ghosts, probably, were of the local and family type, but what must have been especially frightening was the idea that a dangerous ghost might be unconnected with anyone at in in one’s personal World—a killer bent on random street murder—or a ghost fastened on his or her victim through mistaken identity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
The ancient Egyptians were so preoccupied with the prospect of an afterlife that their entire civilization was founded on the cult of the dead. Many believe that the pyramids may have been built not only as tombs for their pharaohs, who were venerated as living descendants of the Gods, but also as the means of initiation into the mysteries of life and death. As with the pyramids, the structural shape of The Winchester Mystery House is believed to have both a mystical significance and a practical purpose, focusing the Earth’s magnetic energies to a specific point and to such effect that the initiate would be unable to resist the force drawing their etheric body out of its physical home. According to some sources, a Boston medium consulted by Mrs. Winchester explained that her family and her fortune were being haunted by spirits. Supposedly their untimely deaths of her daughter and husband were caused by these spirits, and it was implied that Mrs. Winchester might be the next victim. However, the medium also claimed that there was an alternative. Mrs. Winchester was instructed to move west and appease the spirits by building a great house for them. As long as construction of the house never ceased, Mrs. Winchester could rest assured that her life was not in danger. Building such a house was even supposed to bring her eternal life. Earth energies are stronger near the water which suggests one explanation of why Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester chose the Santa Clara Valley to build her beautiful estate and vibrant gardens.
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May America Previl?
One of the most important things to do is to live in the moment. This does not mean that you forget where you come from or do not plan for the future, it simply means living righteously and enjoying the present, without focusing on past atrocities. No one can right the past, but we can create a better future. The best way to capture the moment is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake and enjoy the life we are having. However. Lapses in awareness are frequently caused by an eddy of dissatisfaction with what we are seeing our felling in that moment, out of which springs a desire for something to be different, for things to change. Fear is as nonsubstaintal as your shadow, but it is. The shadow also exists—nonsubstantial, negative, but not nonexistential—and sometimes the shadow can have a great impact on you. People are more afraid of fear than of anything else, because the very existence of fear shakes your foundations. The infant still feeling one with mother, cannot yet say “I,” nor has he any need for it. Only after he has conceived of the outer World as being separate and different from himself does he come to the awareness of himself as a distinct being, and one of the last words he learns to use is “I,” in reference to himself. In the development of the human race the degree to which man is aware of himself as a separate self depends on the extent to which he has emerged from the clan and the extent to which the process of individuation has developed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The member of a primitive clan might express his sense of identity in the in the formula “I am we”; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an “individual,” existing apart from his group. It should always be kept in mind that, in addition to sorrow and mourning, part of the psychological response to separation is great anger at the mother-figure for leaving. Thus mourning, along with his attachment and love become subjects of anxiety. In the medieval World, the individual was identified with his social role in the feudal hierarchy. The peasant was not a man who happened to be a peasant, the feudal lord not a man who happened to be a feudal lord. He was a peasant or a lord, and this sense of his unalterable station was an essential part of his sense of identity. When the feudal system broke down, this sense of identity was shaken and the acute questions “Who am I”—or, more precisely, “How do I know what I am?”—arose. This was the question that was raised, in a philosophical form, by Rene Descartes. He answered the quest for identity by saying, “I doubt, hence I think; I think, hence I am.” This answer put all the emphasis on the experience of “I” as the subject of my thinking activity, and failed to see that the “I” is experienced also in the process of feeling and creative action. The development of Western culture went in the direction of creating the basis for the full experience of individuality. By making the individual free politically and economically, by teaching him to think for himself and freeing him from an authoritarian pressure, one hoped to enable him to feel “I” in the sense that he was the center and active subject of his powers and experienced himself as such. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
However, only a minority achieved the new experience of “I.” For the majority, individualism was not much more than a façade behind which was hidden the failure to acquire an individual sense of identity. Many substitutes for a truly individual sense of identity were sought for and found. Nation, religion, class, and occupation serve to furnish a sense of identity. “I am an American.” “I am a Protestant.” “I am a businessman.” These are the formulae that help a man experience a sense of identity after the original clan identity has been acquired. These different identifications are, in contemporary society, usually employed together. If blended with older feudal remnants, they are in a broad sense status identifications, and they are more efficient, as in European countries. In the United States of America, where so little is left of feudal relics and where there is so much social mobility, these status identifications are naturally less efficient, and the sense of identity is shifted more and more to the experience of conformity. Inasmuch as I am not different, inasmuch as I am like the others and recognized by them as “a regular fellow,” I can sense myself as “I.” I am “as you desire me”—as Mr. Pirandello put it in the title of one of his plays. Instead of the preindividualistic clan identity, a new herd identity develops in which the sense of identity rests on the sense of an unquestionable belonging to the crowd. That is uniformity and conformity are often not recognized as such, and are covered by the illusion of individuality, does not alter the facts. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The problem of the sense of identity is not, as it usually understood, merely a philosophical problem, or a problem concerning only our mind and thought. The need to feel a sense of identity stems from the very condition of human existence, and it is the source of the most intense strivings. Since I cannot remain sane without the sense of “I,” I am driven to do almost anything to acquire this sense. Behind the intense passion for status and conformity is this very need, and it is sometimes even stronger than the need for physical survival. What could be more obvious than the fact that people are willing to risk their lives, to give up their love, to surrender their freedom, to sacrifice their own thoughts for the sake of being one of the herd, of conforming, and thus of acquiring a sense of identity, event though it is an illusory one. The fact that man has reason and imagination leads to the necessity not only for having a sense of his own identity but also for orienting himself in the World intellectually. This need can be compared with the process of physical orientation that develops in the first years of life and that is completed when the child can walk by himself, touch and handle things, knowing what they are. However, when the ability to talk and to speak has been acquired, only the first step in the direction of orientation has been taken. Man finds himself surrounded by many puzzling phenomena and, having reason, he has to make sense of them, has to put them in some context which he can understand and which permit him to deal with them in his thoughts. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
The further his reason develops, the more adequate becomes his system of orientation, that is, the more it approximates reality. However, even if man’s frame of orientation is utterly illusory, it satisfies his need for some picture which is meaningful to him. Whether he believes in the power of a totem animal, in a rain god, or in the superiority and destiny of his race, his need for some frame of orientation is satisfied. Quite obviously, the picture of the World that he has depends on the development of his reason and of his knowledge. Although biologically the brain capacity of the human race has remained the same for thousands of generations, it takes a long evolutionary process to arrive at objectivity, that is, to acquire the faculty to see the World, nature, other persons, and oneself as they are and not distorted by desires and fears. The more man develops this objectivity, the more he is in touch with reality, the more he matures, the better can he create a human World in which he is at home. Reason is man’s faculty for grasping the World by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man’s ability to manipulate the World with the help of thought. Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the World more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs also to the animal part of man. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
There is a dialectical sense in which the existence of opinion necessarily presupposes difference of opinion. Without dissent, there would be nothing to discuss. There might be facts to ascertain, or indoctrination to preform upon recruits, but if all concerned are quite contented with current ways, and no one sees a better alternative, there is no problem of what is to be done. Dissent is possible only when the public has come to feel that there is a problem, and that something should be done, and when one or more definite proposals are then put forward. Even discussion over whether there is a problem or something should be done is academic until some plan of action is suggested. Those who are against action must have something to be against, just as those who want action must have at least one notion which they favour. Moreover, dissent over alternative lines of action (inaction being usually a synonym for traditional procedure) must be supposed by clashes of interest least it be merely academic and lead to no resolution. It is only an apparent contradiction to insist that discussion is conditional both on values held in common and on clashes of interest. Because of the values held in common each party can advance his proposal not as a mere assertion of interest but as a right which out to be binding upon the other. It is the justification of interests as rights which makes a discussion. Enemies of government by discussion exaggerate the ideological nature of a group’s moral justification of its position, but the wisest friends of government by discussion do not altogether deny the basis of group interest for each partisan’s view. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
To insist, however, that justifications set forth in advocacy or defense of an action program are derived in some direct way from the interest of a group is to reduce discussion to a mere war of words, which it is not. Moreover, it willfully and knowingly overlooks the variety of justifications which may be asserted for any one group of interest, the often incoherent and contradictory diversity among the interests of a group, and, above all, the unformed, inchoate nature of any group’s interests. Often it assumes that a group’s interest is either an objective fact visible to all, or at least visible to some observers with special access to truth. This is never the case. A group, or even an individual, is often as divided within itself as to what it wants as the community of which it is a part. It may wish to justify its formulation of what it wants as much to itself as to the public. The integration of personality and the integration of the community are aspects of the same unceasing process. Some professed friends of government by discussion, however, presume that there is an objective public interest, usually implicitly represented and defined by themselves. There is no pre-existing public interest, any more than there is a pre-existing group interest. It is the public interest which is to be determined by discussion; the definition of the public interest is the product of discussion; it is the determinant only in the sense of being the end sought. Those who insist that they represent the public good in any sense except in demanding that agreement be reached are like the prophets whom make discussion impossible through dogmatically proclaiming “God says…” #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
When it comes to good and services, one consists of keeping track of any history of individual traders’ deviation and selling this information for a fee. This person (or organization) providing this service is called an information intermediary, or Info for shot. Another service is to deter cheating by the trader with whom a customer is currently matched, by threatening to inflict some dire punishment in response to such behaviour. This person providing this service is called an enforcement intermediary, or Enfo for short. If a customer of Info gets cheated, Info finds this out without incurrent any further cost. This may be because he provides his service by accompanying his customer (physically or metaphorically) to the trade. If a buyer or borrower defaults, credit-rating agencies, too, are likely to be told by their customer firms or lenders. A customer who has been cheated probably actually gets a little satisfaction from complaining, but even if he incurs a small cost by complaining, a contract like that in Milgrom, North, and Weingast will enable Infor to induce the customer to report the other party’s current cheating. In addition, Info can detect at a further cost any occurrences where someone who is not his customer gets cheated. At the start of each period, Info chooses his fee F and invites traders to become his customers. More precisely, the contact that Inform offers to each trader has the following form. Pay me F now. When your match is revealed, I will tell you what I know of that player’s history. If he has a history of cheating, of if he is not my customer, you should play Deviate; this will not count against you in the future. Otherwise you should play Comply. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Each trader decides whether to accept this offer. Then the pairings are revealed. Info tells his customers their partner’s history of behaviour, but Info’s truthfulness is not automatically guaranteed. Each trader can also observe whether his current partner is Info’s customer. Based on this information, each decides whether to play this period’s game; in the case I am considering the answer is yes. Info may double cross a customer by conspiring, for a separate fee, with the person on the other side of the deal and mislead the customer into choosing Comply while the other plays Deviate. And Infor may extort money from a trader with a clean history by threatening to asset that he has cheated in the past. After all the pairwise games for this period are played, Info keeps a record of any cheating of his customers, and decides whether to carry out an extra cost any additional detection activities. Infor merely tells a customer either “I know your match has cheated in the past” or “As far as I know, your match has not cheated in the past.” If Info says the latter and the other trader cheats this time, the customer has no recourse and Info will not inflict any punishment on the cheater. If Info lies about the other party’s history (and extracts an additional fee from the other party for allowing him to cheat in this way, the customer equally has no recourse; we have to find conditions under which the equilibrium is proof against such double crossing by Info. Similarly, we have to check whether Info has any incentive to extract extortion payments by threatening falsely to assert a history of cheating by someone who in reality has a clean record. Since customers’ contracts with Info cannot be externally enforced, Info cannot credibly enter into long-run contracts with large up-front fees to control customers’ cheating. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
The phenomena which we observe in the neurotic person are in principle not different from those we find in the normal. They are only more accentuated, clear-cut, and frequently more accessible to the awareness of the neurotic person than they are in the normal who is not aware of any problem which warrants study. The term normal or health can be defined in two ways. Firstly, if he is able to fulfill the social role he is to take in that given society, from the standpoint of a functioning society, one can call a person normal or healthy. More concretely, this means that he is able to work in the fashion which is required in that particular society, and furthermore that he is able to participate in the reproduction of society, that is, that he can raise a family. Secondly, from the standpoint of the individual, we look upon health or normalcy as the optimum of growth and happiness of the individual. If the structure of a given society were such that it offered the optimum possibility for individual happiness, both viewpoints would coincide. However, this is not the case in most societies we know, including our own. Although they differ in the degree to which they promote the aims of individual growth, there is a discrepancy between the aims of the smooth functioning of society and of the full development of the individual. This fact makes it imperative to differentiate sharply between the two concepts of health. The one is governed by social necessities, the other by values and norms concerning the aim of individual existence. Unfortunately, this differentiation is often neglected. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Most psychiatrist take the structure of their own society so much for granted that to them the person who is not well adapted assumes the stigmas of being less valuable. On the other hand, the well-adapted person is supposed to be the more valuable person in terms of a scale of human values. If we differentiate the two concepts of normal and neurotic, we come to the following conclusion: the person who is normal in terms of being well adapted only at the expense of having given up his self in order to become more or less the person he believes he is expected to be. All genuine individuality and spontaneity may have been lost. On the other hand, the neurotic person can be characterized as somebody who was not ready to surrender completely in the battle for his self. To be sure, his attempt to save his individual self was not successful, and instead of expressing his self productively he sought salvation through neurotic symptoms and by withdrawing into a phantasy life. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of human values, he is less crippled than the kind of normal person who has lost his individuality altogether. Needless to say there are persons who are not neurotic and yet have not drowned their individuality in the process of adaptation. However, if we think of neurotic in terms of social efficiency, the stigma attached to the neurotic person seems to us to be unfounded and justified. As for a whole society, if its members did not function socially, the term neurotic cannot be applied in this latter sense, since a society could not exist. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
From a standpoint of human values, however, a society could be called neurotic in the sense that its members are crippled in the growth of their personality. Since the term neurotic is so often used to denote lack of social functioning, we would prefer not to speak of society in terms of its being neurotic, but rather in terms of its being adverse to human happiness and self-realization. Once the primary bond which gave security to the individual are served, once the individual faces the World outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to “positive freedom”; he can relate himself spontaneously to the World in love and work, in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous, and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course open to him is to fall back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the World. This second course never reunites him with the World in the way he was related to it before he merged as an “individual,” for the fact of his separateness cannot be reversed; if it were prolonged, it is an escape from an unbearable situation which would make life impossible. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
This course of escape, therefore, is characterized by its compulsive character, like every escape from threatless complete surrender of individuality and the integrity of the self. This it is not a solution which leads to happiness and positive freedom; it is, in principle, a solution which is to be found in all neurotic phenomena. It assuages an unbearable anxiety and makes life possible by avoiding panic; yet it does not solve the underlying problem and is paid for by a kind of life that often consists only of automatic or compulsive activities. Some of these mechanisms of escape are of relatively small social import; they are to be found in any marked degree only in individuals with severe mental and emotional disturbances. It may be said that the Holy Spirit dwelling in the regenerate human spirit energizes and works through the faculties of the soul and the members of the body only in and with the active cooperation of the WILL of the believer. In other words, God, though in the spirit of man, does not use the man’s hand apart from the “I will use my hand” of the man himself. Life is a mixture of essence and existence, of actualized potentiality and existential distortions, of being and estrangement. Since the process of actualization is ontological, life is a universal concept applicable to all real beings, organic and inorganic, stars and rocks, animals and men. Life can be considered from the viewpoints of its two constitutive factors, essence and existence. Essentially, life exhibits a unity amid diversity described as the multidimensional unity of life. Existentially, life is ambiguous. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
The metaphor “dimension” should replace “level” in depicting the diversity of life, for levels so divide life into watertight compartments that its essential unity is destroyed. A plurality of dimensions reflects the difference in life, but, because dimensions can meet in a point without excluding one another, they accurately express the essential unity of life. Since life is the gradual actualization of potentialities, some dimensions are called “realms.” In this sense one speaks of the vegetable realm or the animal realm or the historical realm. In all of them, all dimensions are potentially present, and some of them are actualized. However, in man all dimensions, especially the spiritual and historical, are actual; in him is found the fullness of the essential multidimensional unity of life. Life as the actualization of potential being is a process, a movement out and away from a center and then back toward it. Thus, the life-process is made up of three basic functions. The circular movement of self-integration I the actualization of the ontological polarity of individualization and participation. Secondly, the horizontal direction of life is self-creativity, which is the actualization of the dynamics-form polarity. Thirdly, the vertical movement toward the ultimate and infinite is self-transcendence which actualizes the polarity of freedom-destiny. Although these functions of life in themselves are unified and harmonized, they are subject to the disruptions that follow upon existential estrangement. When separation becomes actual, their negative effects come into play, and ambiguity sets in. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
To the degree in which this disruption is real, self-integration is countered by disintegration, self-creation is countered by destruction, self-transcendence is countered by profanization. In the life process these positive and negative elements are inseparably entwined, for life is neither essential nor existential but ambiguous. China, borrowing Communist ideology and economic and social methods from Soviet Russia, has become the first colonial country to make spectacular economic gains, beginning to transform herself into one of the great World powers and trying by example, persuasion, and economic help to become the leader of the colonial revolution in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. While after 1923 the Soviet Union had definitely given up the hope for a workers’ revolution in the West and, in fact, sought to contain all Western revolutionary movements since then, she had hoped for support from the nationalist revolutions in the East. Now, however, having herself become one of the “have” states, she feels threated by the growing onslaught of the underdeveloped countries under China’s leadership, and seeks an understanding with the United States of America, without, however, turning this understanding into an alliance against China. Any description of the basic trends of Western history in the last four hundred and eighty years would be lacking in an essential element unless it took account of a profound spiritual chance. While the influence of Christian theological thinking was waning from the seventeenth century onward, the same spiritual reality which was expressed earlier in the concepts of this theology found now a new expression in philosophical, historical, and political formulations. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The philosophers of the eighteenth century were, as Carl Becker has pointed out, no less men of faith than were the theologian of the thirteenth century. They just expressed their experience in a different conceptual framework. With the explosive growth of wealth and technical capacities in the nineteenth century, there occurred a fundamental change in man’s attitude. Not only, as Mr. Nietzsche put it, “God was dead,” but the humanism that was common to the theologians of the thirteenth, and to the philosophers of the eighteenth centuries, slowly died too; the formulae and ideologies, both of religion and of humanism, continued to be used, but the authentic experience became increasingly thinner, to the point of unreality. It was as if man had become drunk with his own power, and had transformed material production, once a means to the end of a more dignified life, into an end in itself. Large-scale enterprise, state intervention, emphasis on control of—rather than ownership of—property in the means of production, are characteristic of all industrial systems today. The Wester capitalist system, while it has many features of nineteenth-century capitalism, has incorporated enough of the new features to constitute a very different system from the former. The three forms of socialism current today, have broken much more drastically with the continuity of the former economic stage, show the new trends in different degrees and emphasis: a) Khrushchevism, a system of complete centralized planning and state ownership of industry and agriculture. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
B ) Chinese communism, especially since 1958, a system of total mobilization of its most important capital asset, 1.4 billion people, and the complete manipulation of their currency, physical and emotional energy and thoughts without regard to their individuality; c ) humanistic socialism, which aims at the blending of a necessary minimum of centralization, state intervention, and bureaucracy with the possible maximum of decentralization, individualism, and freedom. This third type of socialism is represented by various forms from Scandinavia to Yugoslavia, Burma, and India. It makes sense because without some form of communism, the people hold all the natural resources which they can sell as they please, while the government only takes in tax revenue. However, as LCDs (less developed countries) are now rising, the American government needs to take some control of production of goods and services to ensure it does not lose its role as World power. If the corporations and the people in the United States of America can no longer afford to own farms, make cars, and produce, poultry, dairy, wood, steel, and other raw materials, they will have to important everything, which send wealth out of the United States of America to other nations. Therefore, the government has two choices. They can make laws that allow them to compete with private firms, or subsidize American farms, automakers, and other companies that produce goods and services so they remain affordable and are purchased by Americans as well as other nations. It would also be wise to offer huge tax incentives to people who purchase American cars. If a person, for example, could get a $5,000 tax credit on any American car, they would not only be popular because of style, but also because there is more incentive to purchase one. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Russian under control of President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, is a conservative, state-controlled, industrial managerialism, not a revolutionary system; she is interested in law and order and anxious to defend herself against the onslaught of the revolution of the “have-not” nations. For the reason Mr. Putin seeks an understanding with the United States of America, the ending of USA involvement with Ukraine. He neither needs nor wants another war. Mr. Putin cannot, however, give up his Communist-revolutionary ideology, nor can he turn against China, without undermining his own system. Hence he has to maneuver carefully to preserve his ideological hold on the Russian people and to defend himself against both his opponents within Russian and against China and her potential allies outside. If he fails in his attempt to end the United States of America’s involvement with Ukraine, he (or his successor) will be forced into a close alliance with China and into a policy which would leave little hope for peace. The development of the former colonial peoples will not follow the capitalist development, because for psychological, social, and economic reasons this system is neither feasible nor attractive to them. The question is not whether they will join the communist or the capitalist systems. The real alternative is whether they will accept the Chinese or Russian form of communism, thus becoming closely allied with either of these two countries, or whether they will adopt one of the various forms of democratic, decentralized socialism and become allied with the neutral bloc. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The United States of America is, therefore, confronted with the following alternative: either a continued fight against communism together with the continuation of the arms race—hence the probability of nuclear war—or a political understanding on the basis of the status quo with Russia, and the support of neutral democratic-socialist regimes in the colonial World. It is a fact that two systems represented By Russia-China and by the United States of America—Western Europe are competing with each other in the World today and the race is only heating up and getting more intense. Any attempt of either one to defeat the other system through the use of military power will not only fail, but will lead to the destruction of both—or the World. There is only one way in which the United States of America can compete with communism: that is by demonstrating that it is possible to raise the standard of living in America and influence LCDs to follow this method, without using forces of coercive regimentation. However, many people are not convinced that America is heading in the right direction because their leaders are displaying a lack of competence, a lack of law and order, a loss of family values, and it even seems to some that hardworking Americans, who believe in the capitalist dream, are given less consideration than people who enter America illegally. While there are over 5 million homeless people (many are not counted as homeless because they are subletting, living with family, or not on a rental lease where they are being housed) in America, people entering the country without passing background checks and without documents are put up in hotel rooms and given cash assistance. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
You will hear critics say that there are so many people homeless in America because they are mentally ill and that there is a shortage of houses. However, let us be real, many of you know people who are mentally ill and should have been fired who are gainfully employed. It is so bad that several of their coworkers display the same level of dysfunction. Furthermore, there are currently sixteen million homes currently sitting vacant across the United States of America. In fact, in every state across the country, any homes remain empty while hundreds of thousands of Americans face homelessness. The existence of a multicentered World depends on the acceptance of the present status quo by all powers and on effective universal disarmament. The tension and suspicious of the nuclear arms race do not permit a political understanding; the unsettled political situation does not permit disarmament. If peace is to be preserved, both disarmament and political understanding are necessary. If and when the economy improves and the arms race ends, only then will massive economic assistance—food, capital and technical assistance—to the LCDs be possible. Also, efforts to education LCDs about family planning and birth control should also be a goal. Because when there is food on the table, and people do not have to work for it, they usually continue to have babies. Some babies are even born starving because people have no idea about birth control and family planning nor access to it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Also, in conquering poverty and achieving wealth, the United States of America, like the rest of the West (and Russia), has accepted a spiritual of materialism under which production and consumption have become ends in themselves, rather than means to a more human, creative life. These and other institutional, secondary goals and values have become indistinguishable to most people from the primary aims of life. Quite aside from all dangers from without, our inner emptiness and deep-rooted lack of hope will eventually lead to the fall of Western civilization, unless a genuine renaissance of the Western spirit takes the place of the present complacency, resignation, and confusion. This renaissance must be precisely what the Renaissance of the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries was—an invigorating re-establishment of contact with the humanistic principles and aspirations of Western culture. What we are witnessing today is truly a World revolution in rapid advance, a revolution which began in the West four hundred and eighty years ago. It has led to a new system of production which at first made Europe and America the leaders of the World. It made the working masses in Europe beneficiaries of the system; and hence the revolution of the masses in Europe (with the exception of Russia) and in North America was peaceful. Now a new stage of the World revolution is developing, the revolution of the LCDs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. If the great industrial powers accept the historical trend and take the adequate anticipatory steps, will this revolution occur peacefully? Many think World War III is on the verge of breaking out, and that leaves little hope for peace and the survival of democracy. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
I pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one Nation, under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. The American, even though they are being driven from the land, will never surrender their love for it. The American literally transplanted Heaven into his very consciousness. He imagines that he continues to live in the land of his dreams. He might be living in the cold north or in the sunny south, yet he prays for rain or for dew when it is the season in America. He celebrated Thanksgiving, the blending of two cultures and sharing of food and traditions. He celebrated Columbus Day, the founding of America. He celebrated Christmas, the birth of the Saviour. He celebrated Earth Day, when the trees were beginning to blossom. And he proudly celebrated Independence Day. In whatever clime he lived, he and she were always believed that they were in their ancient home. We must not forget the many sacrifices and contributions that woman have made for America also. Without women, we would not be able to continue the human race. The Americans mourned for their ancient land as they have for the dead, and they believe it will rise again and experience the resurrection of the dead. If I forget thee, O America, let my right hand forget its cunning; let my tongue cleave to my mouth, if I remember thee not, if I set not America above my chiefest joy. Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for unto thee I will give it. And be sure to donate to the Sacramento Fire Department, they are not receiving all of their resources. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
MAGNOLIA STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA | low $600s
Now Selling!
Residence Five is the largest home offered at Magnolia Station. This stunning two-story home is just over 3,700 square feet and includes five bedrooms, three and half bathroom, and a four, yes four car garage! The Flexibility is the best word to summarize this gorgous home.
With the opportunity to add an additional two bedrooms, this home is designed to meet the needs of any family size. The Generations Suite on the first floor allows space for extended family, guests, or even a separated office space.
The expansive kitchen opens up to the great room – ideal for entertaining of any kind. You’ll find the Owners’ Suite and three additional bedrooms upstairs plus a loft suitable for a game lounge, TV room, or homework space.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Home Mini! https://cresleigh.com/magnolia-station/residence-5/
Randolph Harris II International 