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The Line Between Knowing and Loving is Impossible to Draw–Feelings are More Important than Anything Under the Sun!

November 12, 2019 12:27 am

“It is easy for us to make beings like you. We do it all the time. There is nothing to it. We can easily replace you. Understand, all the mental and physical equipment we have given you is for a purpose.” At this point, I knew my first real fear. I was afraid they were going to do away with Derek then and there. I could not bear it. The pain in me was so all-consuming that it took all the strength I possessed to stand by and say nothing. However, I did not feel that there was anything that I could do to prevent whatever the Parents would now do to Derek. What deep-seated fears and needs underly Derek’s delusional system? We were long in finding out, for Derek’s preventions effectively concealed the secret of his autistic behavior. In the meantime we dealt with his peripheral problems one by one. During his first year with us Derek’s most trying problem was toilet behavior. This surprised us, for Derek’s personality was not “anal” in the Freudian sense; his original personality damage had antedated the period of his toilet-training. Rigid and early toilet-training, however, had certainly contributed to his anxieties. It was our effort to help Derek with this problem that led to his first recognition of us as human beings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Going to the toilet, like everything else in Derek’s life, was surrounded y elaborate preventions. We had to accompany him; he had to take off all his clothes; he could only squat, not sit on the toilet seat; he had to touch the wall with one hand, in which he also clutched frantically the vacuum tubes that powered his elimination. He was terrified lest his whole body would be sucked down. To counteract this fear we gave him a metal wastebasket in lieu of the toilet. Eventually, when eliminating into the wastebasket, he no longer needed to take off all his clothes, nor to hold on to the wall. He still needed the tubes and motor which, he believed moved his bowels for him. However, here again the all-important machinery was itself a source of new terrors. In Derek’s World the gadgets had to move their bowels, too. He was terribly concerned that they should, but since they were so much more powerful than men, he was also terrified that if his tubes moved their bowels, their feces would fill all of space and leave him no room to live. He was thus always caught in some fearful contradiction. Our readiness to accept his toilet habits, which obviously entailed some hardship for his counselors, gave Derek the confidence to express his obsession in drawings. Drawing these fantasies was a first step toward letting us in, however distantly, to what concerned him most deeply. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Drawing was the first step in a year-long process of externalizing Derek’s anal preoccupations. As a result he began seeing feces everywhere; the whole World became to hm a mire of excrement. At the same time he began to eliminate freely wherever he happened to be. However, with this release from his infantile imprisonment in compulsive rules, the toilet and the whole process of elimination became less dangerous. Thus far it had been beyond Derek’s comprehension that anybody could possibly move his bowels without mechanical assistance. Now Derek took a further step forward; defecation became the first physiological process he could perform without the help of vacuum tubes. It must not be thought that he was proud of this ability. Taking pride in an achievement presupposes that one accomplishes it of one’s own free will. He still did not feel himself an autonomous person who could do things on his own. To Derek defecation still seemed enslaved to some incomprehensible but utterly binding cosmic law, perhaps the law his parents had imposed on him when he was being toilet trained. It was not simply that his parents had subjected him to rigid, early training. Many children are so trained. However, in most cases the parents have a deep emotional investment in the child’s performance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

As a result of this deep emotional investment, the child’s response in turn makes training an occasion for interaction between them and for the building of genuine relationships. Derek’s parents had no emotional investment in him. His obedience gave them no satisfaction and won him no affection or approval. As a toilet-trained child he saved his mother labor, just as household machines saved her labor. As a machine he was not loved for his performance, nor could he love himself. So it has been with all other aspects of Derek’s existence with his parents. Their reactions to his eating or noneating, sleeping or wakening, urinating or defecating, being dressed or undressed, washed or bathed did not flow from any unitary interest in him, deeply embedded in their personalities. By treating him mechanically his parents made him a machine. The various functions of life—even the parts of his body—bore no integrating relationship to one another or to any sense of self that was acknowledged and confirmed by others. Though he had acquired mastery over some functions, such as toilet-training and speech, he had acquired them separately and kept then isolated from each other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Toilet-training had thus not gained Derek a pleasant feeling of body mastery; speech had not led to communication of thought or feeling. On the contrary, each achievement only steered him away from -self-mastery and integration. Toilet-training had enslaved him. Speech left him talking in neologisms that obstructed his and our ability to relate to each other. In Derek’s development the normal process of growth had been made to run backward. Whatever he had learned put him not at the end of his infantile development toward integration but, on the contrary, farther behind than he was a its beginning. Had we understood this sooner, his first years with us would have been less baffling. In order to explore more fully the relations among the several parts of social front, it will be convenient to consider here a significant characteristic of the information conveyed by front, namely, its abstractness and generality. However specialized and unique a routine is, its social front, with certain exceptions will tend to claim fact that can be equally claimed and asserted of other, somewhat different routines. It is unlikely that Derek’s calamity could befall a child in any time and culture but our own. He suffered no physical deprivation; he starved for human contact. Just to be taken care of is not enough. At the extreme where utter scarcity reigns, the forming of relationships is certainly hampered. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

However, in our society of mechanized plenty often makes for equal difficulties in a child’s learning to relate. Where parents can provide simple creature-comforts for their children only at the cost of significant effort, it is likely that they will feel pleasure, that gives children a sense of personal worth and sets the process of relating in motion. However, if comfort is so readily available that the parents feel no particular pleasure in winning it for their children, then the children cannot develop the feeling of being worthwhile around the satisfaction of their basic needs. Of course parents and children can and do develop relationships around other situations. However, matters are then no longer so simple and direct. If he is to feel loved and worthy of respect and consideration, the child must be on the receiving end of care and concern given with pleasures and without the exaction of return. This feeling gives him the ability to trust; he can entrust his well-being to persons to whom he is so important. Out of such trust the child learns to form close and stable relationships. For Derek relations with his parents were empty of pleasures in comfort-giving as in all other situations. His was an extreme instance of a plight that sends many schizophrenic children to our clinics and hospitals. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Many months passed before he could relate to us; his despair that anybody could like him made contact impossible. When Derek could finally trust us enough to let himself become more infantile, he began to play at being a papoose. There was a corresponding change in his fantasies. He drew endless pictures of himself as an electrical papoose. Totally enclosed, suspended in empty space, he is run by unknown, unseen powers through wireless electricity. As we eventually came to understand, the heart of Derek’s delusional system was the artificial, mechanical womb he had created and into which he had locked himself. In his papoose fantasies lay the wish to be entirely reborn in a womb. His new experience in the school suggested that life, after all, might be worth living. Now he was searching for a way to be reborn in a better way. Since machines were better than men, what was more natural than trying to rebirth through them? This was the deeper meaning of his electrical papoose. As Derek made progress, his pictures of himself became more dominant in his drawings. Though still machine operated, he has grown in self-importance. Now he has acquired hands that do something, and he has had the courage to make a picture of the machine that runs him. Later still the papoose became a person, rather than a robot encased in glass. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Eventually Derek began to create an imaginary family at the school: the “Carr” family. Why the Carr family? In the car he was enclosed as he had been in his papoose, but at least the car was not stationary; it could move. More important, in a car one was not only driven but also could drive. The Carr family was Derek’s way of exploring the possibility of leaving the school, of living with a good family in a safe, protecting car. Derek at last broke through his prison. In this brief account it has not been possible to trace the painfully slow process of his first true relations with other human beings. Suffice it to say that he ceased to be a mechanical boy and became a human child. This newborn child was, however, nearly 12 years old. To recover the lost time is a tremendous task. That work has occupied Derek and us ever since. Sometimes he sets to it with a will; at other times the difficulty of real life makes him regret that he ever came out of his shell. However, he has never wanted to return to his mechanical life. One last detail and this fragment of Derek’s story has been told. When Derek was 12, he made a float for our Veteran’s Day parade. It carried the slogan: “Feeling are more important that anything under the Sun.” Feelings, Derek had learned, are what make for humanity; their absence, for a mechanical existence. With this knowledge Derek entered the human condition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Instead of having to maintain a different pattern of expectation and responsive treatment for each slightly different performer and performance one can place the situation in a broad category around which it is easy for one to mobilize one’s past experience and stereotypical thinking. Observers then need only be familiar with a small and hence manageable vocabulary of fronts, and know how to respond to them in order to orient themselves in a wide variety of situations. There are grounds for believing that the tendency for a large number of different acts to be presented from behind a small number of fronts is a natural development in social organization. In the descriptive kinship system which gives each persona a unique place, it may work for very small communities, but, as the number of persons becomes large, clan segmentation becomes necessary as a means of providing a less complicated system of identifications and treatments. As a compromise, the full range of diversity is cut at a few crucial points, and all those within a given bracket are allowed or obliged to maintain the same social front in certain situations. In addition to the fact that different routines may employ the same front, it is to be noted that a given social front tends to become institutionalized in terms of the abstract stereotyped expectations to which it gives rise, and tends to take on meaning and stability apart from the specific tasks which happen at the time to be performed in its name. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

The front becomes a collective representation and a fact in its own right. When an actor takes on an established social role, usually one finds that a particular front has already been established for it. Whether one’s acquisitions of the role was primarily motivated by a desire to perform the given takes or by a desire to maintain the corresponding front, the factor will find that one must do both. Further, if the individual takes on a task that is not only new to one but also unestablished in the society, of if one attempts to change the light in which one’s task is viewed, one is likely to find that there are already several well-established fronts among which one must choose. Thus, when a task is given a new front we seldom find that the front it is given is itself new. Since fronts tend to be selected, not created, we may expect trouble to arise when those who perform a given task are forced to select a suitable from for themselves from among several quite dissimilar ones. Thus, in military organizations, task are always developing which (it is felt) require too much authority and skill to be carried out behind the front maintained by one grade of personnel and too little authority and skill to be carried out behind the front maintained by the next grade in the hierarchy. Since there are relatively large jumps between grades, the task will come to carry too much rank or to carry too little. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

When Reese remarked to me that a man in her home town would not have committed suicide if one person had known him, what was she saying? I believe she was saying that this man had no person to whom he could open himself up, no one who was interested enough in him to listen, to pay attention to him. Se was saying that he lacked someone who had compassion for him, a compassion which would be the basis of his self-esteem. If he had had such a person, he would have counted himself too valuable to wipe out. She was also saying, although she did not know it, that the line between knowing and loving is impossible to draw. One merges into the other. If I know someone well I will tend to have compassion for one; and as I have compassion for one I will try to know one well. This is why it is next to impossible, when somebody you dislike is talking to listen to one, take in what you hear, and let it form itself into a comprehensible structure in your mind. If not our ears, the tendency is to close off our minds; to block out the person we do not like. The development of power is a prerequisite for compassion just as it is for communication. At the beginning of psychotherapy persons are normally so bereft of power in interpersonal relationships that they have very little compassion to give. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Compassion requires that one have some security, some position of power from which one can give concern to another. Lack of self-esteem and self-affirmation makes it very difficult to have anything left over for others; an individual must have something with which to prime the pump before one can give to others. I cannot agree with some of my colleagues who hold that there are two kinds of people: those who operate by love, and those who operate by power. I believe this is a dichotomy which leaves the way open for the illusion of the past, namely that one can have powerless love and another (generally a person one does not like) loveless power. Do not protest, let love alone rule! Can you prove it true? However resolve: every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary between the love-deeds-Yes and the power-deed-No and pressing forward honor reality. If we are to honor reality, we must be aware that power and love can have a dialectical relationship, each feeding and nourishing the other. We must turn our attention to the interplay between love and power, and the fact that powers needs love if it is not to slide into manipulation. Power without charity ends up in cruelty. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

The destructive kind of power generally comes from persons who have suffered radical deprivation, like when Duke Harry, despairing over the lack of effect his protest had in Washington, fantasied firing all the people in the supermarket. The constructive forms of power, such as nutrient power and integrative power, come only when there has already been built up within the individual some self-esteem and self-affirmation. Having established the relationship between power and love, let me now state that there is an experience in which love does transcend power. This is shown in Goethe’s drama in which Faust has made his compact with Mephistopheles to gain infinite knowledge and infinite sensual experience. Mephistopheles can give him only power, and that he does. Faust has loved Margarete and Helen of Tory and thinks he will leave them easily and casually behind. However, when Faust experiences the moment when his soul should logically be surrendered to the devil, he is saved by Margarete’s love for him. The mothers re-enter the drama, carrying with them the ties that every being has with nature and humankind. This allegory of love conquering power reveals an archetype of human experience that speaks to us all in diverse ways: I do not know what would remain to us were love not transfigured power and power not staying love. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

We are the creatures whose love is continually straying into power, and whose power is occasionally transfigured by love. We all participate in some way or other in the power structure of our society. Compassion is the name of that form of love which is based on our knowing and our understanding each other. Compassion is the awareness that we are all in the same yacht and that we all shall either skin of swim together. Compassion arises from the recognition of community. It realizes that all being, men and women, are bothers and sisters, even though a disciplining of our own instincts is necessary for us even to being to carry out that belief in our actions. Compassion is the tie felt for another not because one fulfills one’s potentialities (as if anyone ever did!). Compassion is felt for another as much because one does not fulfill one’s potentialities—in other words, one is human, like you or me, forever engaged in the struggle between fulfillment and nonfulfillment. We then surrender the demand that we be divine in order to join humankind in its suffering and its destiny. We are all lonely….We have learnt to pity one another for being alone. And we have learnt that nothing remains to be discovered except compassion. Compassion is the acceptance of the conviction that nothing human is foreign to me. I can then understand that if my enemy is killed, humanity is reduced that much. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Even if the sum total of cruelty has not greatly diminished in the last twenty-one centuries—children still suffer for the things which they have not the slightest responsibility—we shall not require a token of success. It is in the confronting of this dilemma—fighting cruelty without regard for tangible success—that beings discover what one is in the dept of one’s personality. An interesting illustration of the dilemma of selecting an appropriate front from several not quite fitting ones may be found today in American medical organization with respect to the task of administering anesthesia. In some hospitals anesthesia is still administered by nurses being the front that nurses are allowed to have in hospitals regardless of the task they perform—a front involving ceremonial subordination to doctors and a relatively low rate of pay. In order to establish anesthesiology as a specialty for graduate medical doctors, interested practitioners have had to advocate strongly the idea that administering anesthesia is a sufficiently complex and vital task to justify giving to those who perform it the ceremonial and financial reward given to doctors. The difference between the front maintained by a nurse and the front maintained by a doctor is great; many things that are acceptable for nurses are infra dignitatem for doctors. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Some medical people have felt that a nurse under-ranked for the task of administering anesthesia and that doctors over-ranked; were there an established status midway between nurse and doctor, an easier solution to the problem could perhaps be found. Similarly, had the Canadian Army had a rank halfway between lieutenant and captain, two and a half pips instead of two or three, then Dental Corps captains, any of them of underrepresented ethnic origin, could have been given a rank that would perhaps have been more suitable in the eyes of the Army than the captaincies they were actually given. I do not mean here to stress the point of view of a formal organization or a society; the individual, as someone who possesses a limited range of sign-equipment, must also make unhappy choices. Thus, in the crofting community studied by the writer, hosts often marked the visit of a friend by offering one a shot of hard liquor, a glass of wine, some home-made brew, or a cup of tea. The higher the rank or temporary ceremonial status of the visitor, the more likely one was to receive an offering near the liquor end of the continuum. Now one problem associated with this range of sign-equipment was that some crofters could not afford to keep a bottle of hard liquor, so that wine tended to be the most indulgent gesture they could employ. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

However, perhaps a more common difficulty was the fact that certain visitors, given their permanent and temporary status at the time, outranked one potable and under-ranked the next one in line. There was often a danger that the visitor would feel just a little affronted or, on the other hand, that the host’s costly and limited sign-equipment would be misused. In our middle classes a similar situation arises when a hostess has to decide whether or not to use the good silver, or which would be the more appropriate to wear, her best afternoon dress or her plainest evening gown. Compassion gives us a basis for arriving at the humanistic position which will include both power and love. Compassion occupies a position opposite to violence; as violence projects hostile images on the opponent, compassion accepts such daimonic impulses in one’s self. It gives us the basis for judging someone without condemning one. Although loving one’s enemies requires grace, compassion for one’s enemies is a human possibility. I have suggested that social front can be divined into traditional parts, such as settings, appearances, and manner, and that (since different routines may be presented from behind the same front) we may not find a perfect fit between the specific character of a performance and the general socialized guise in which it appears to us. #RandolphHarris #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

These two facts, taken together, lead one to appreciate that items in the social front of a particular routine are not only found in the social fronts of a whole range of routines, but also that the whole range of routines in which one items of sign equipment is found will differ from the range of routines in which another item in the same social front will be found. Thus, a lawyer may talk to a client in a social setting that one employs only for this purpose (or for a study), but the suitable clothes one wears on such occasions one will also employ, with equal suitability, at dinner with colleagues and at the theater with is wife. Similarly, the prints that hang on one’s wall and the carpet or hardwood on the floor may be found in domestic social establishments. Of course, in highly ceremonial occasions, settings, manner, and appearance may all be unique and specific, used only for performances of a single type of routine, but such exclusive use of sign equipment is the exception rather than the rule. Will our compassion be ignited by the wars in African and the Middle East? Many of us have no way out of despair at being unable to stop these cruel holocausts, noting effective to do, struggle as we might with the viable alternatives. Almost universally these wars are hated, and is they could, most people would like to forget. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Regardless of all our protests and prayers, it goes on and on, with the steady attrition of our sense of honesty, credulity, and even language. However, even as we continue all efforts to end the wars as soon as is humanly possible, it may be that the Middle East and Africa will be, in the long run, of service—if one may speak that way without blasphemy—to America. With all the evil the wars in Africa and the Middle East, daimonically indeed, represent an occasion in which American could achieve an insight into life that will be essential to its future. This could come about by our gaining a tragic sense, an awareness of our own complicity in evil, our own participation in automatized, dehumanized destructiveness. “All the violence you see amongst the mammals, all of it stems from the drive to live, to survive, and to have offspring to survive and to obtain all the food and drink necessary to survive and procreate. This is the basis of all life on Earth. And self-aware human mammals—intelligent mammals—are the most savage and cruel and vicious of all beings on the planet, or any planet in the ‘Realm of Worlds.’ They are always too deeply enmeshed in pain or pleasure, loneliness or suffocating sense of paralysis, a need for love, or a raging jealousy resulting from love, or a desire for vengeance due to personal defeat or injury. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

“And when they [humans] are physically wounded or experience disease, their suffering is unendurable for them. They are driven by it to terrible extremes. Peace, harmony, joy elude these creatures. (Pages 248-249 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice.) The guilt we feel is surely a normal guilt and may be the beginning of America’s transformation from an adolescent posturing to the maturity of a responsible nation. So far we have kept our innocence, despite all lessons to the contrary. Let us hope that these sad events will constitute a farewell to war. Do not let the repetitiveness of pain and suffering make you callous to the endless torment. “There is hope. You have seen the human mammals of the planet weeping and sobbing and praying. They have hope, hope that the Maker (God) hears them and that when they die their spirits go up and away from Earth.” (Pages 254 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice.) If the so-called powerful and practical persons and the self-confessed materialistic ones only knew how much nearer to realities the sage is than the they, how much more “practical” one is, they would be very much surprised. “Thus we nay see that the Lord is merciful unto al who will, in he sincerity of their hears, call upon his holy name. Yea, thus we see that the gate of Heaven is open unto all, even to those who will believe on the name of Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God,” reports Helaman 3.27-28. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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They Even Carry You to Your Bed Here!

November 11, 2019 1:42 am

There were always stories in those ancient days of wise men and healers who came out of the sea. I spoke to many a teller of tales in this or that city of such legends. And there were tales of a great kingdom that had been swallowed by the ocean in more places than one. These wise men and women were survivors of that great kingdom, or so some thought. I used to put hope in such legends. I used to think I could one day find one of these wise men or women and discover from that person some great and salvific truth. When an individual plays a part one implicitly requests one’s observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes one appears to possess, that the task one performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be. It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role. It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves. In a sense, and in so far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves—the role we are striving to live up to—this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

In the end, our conception of our role becomes second nature and an integral part of our personality. We come into the World as individuals, achieve character, and become persons. Derek, when we began our work with him, was a mechanical boy. He functioned as if by remote control, run by machines of his own powerfully creative fantasy. No only did he himself believe that he was a machine but, more remarkable, he created this impression in others. Even while he performed actions that are intrinsically human, they never appeared to be other than machines-started and executed. On the other hand, when the machine was not working we had to concentrate on recollecting his presence, for he seemed not to exist. The performance is a front which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the routine. Not every child who possesses a fantasy World is possessed by it. Normal children may retreat into realms of imaginary glory or magic powers, but they are easily recalled from these excursions. Disturbed children are not always able to make the return trip; they remain withdrawn, prisoners of the inner World of delusion and fantasy. In many ways Derek presented a classic example of this state of infantile autism. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

At one extreme, one finds that the performer can be fully take in by one’s own act; one can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which one stages is the real reality. When one’s audience is also convinced in this way about the show one puts on—and this seems to be the typical case—then for the moment at least, only the sociologist or the socially disgruntled will have any doubts about the realness of what is presented. At the other extreme, we find that the performer may not be taken in at all by one’s own routine. This possibility is understandable, since no one is in quite as good an observational position to see through the act as the person who puts in on. Coupled with this, the performer may be moved to guide the conviction of one’s audience only as a means to other ends, having no ultimate concern in the conception that they have of one or the situation. When the individual has no belief in one’s own act and no ultimate concern with the beliefs of one’s audience, we may call one cynical, reserving the term “sincere” for individuals who believe in the impression fostered by their own performance. It should be understood that the cynic, with all one’s professional disinvolvement, may obtain unprofessional pleasures from one’s masquerade, experiencing a kind of gleeful spiritual aggression from the fact that one can toy at will with something one’s audience must take seriously. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

Derek’s delusion is no uncommon among schizophrenic children today. He wanted to be rid of his unbearable humanity, to become completely automatic. He so nearly succeeded in attaining this goal that he could almost convince others, as well as himself, of his mechanical character. The descriptions of autistic children in the literature take for their point of departure and comparison the normal or abnormal human being. To do justice to Derek I would have to compare him simultaneously to a most inept infant and a highly complex piece of machinery. Often we had to force ourselves by a conscious act of will to realize that Derek was a child. Again and again his acting-out of his delusions froze our own ability to respond as human beings. During Derek’s first weeks with us we would watch absorbedly as this at once fragile-looking and imperious nine-year-old went about his mechanical existence. Entering the dining room, for example, he would string an imaginary wire from his energy source—an imaginary electric outlet—to the table. There he insulated himself wit paper napkins and finally plugged himself in. Only then could Joey eat, for he firmly believed that the current ran his ingestive apparatus. So skillful was the pantomime that one had to look twice to be sure there was neither wire nor outlet nor plug. Children and members of our staff spontaneously avoided stepping on the “wires” for fear of interrupting what seemed the source of his normal life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

It is not assumed, of course, that all cynical performers are interested in deluding their audiences for purposes of what is called “self-interest” or private gain. A cynical individual may delude one’s audience for what one considers to be their own good, or for the good of the community, and so forth. One may be tactfully attempting to put the superior at ease by simulating the kind of World the superior is thought to take for granted. For long periods of time, when Derek’s “machinery” was idle, he would sit so quietly that he would disappear from the focus of the most conscientious observation. Yet in the next moment he might be “working” and the center of our captivated attention. Many times a day he would turn himself on and shift noisily through a sequence of higher and higher gears until he “exploded,” screaming “Crash, crash!” and hurling itself for his ever present apparatus—radio tubes, light bulbs, even motors or, lacking these, any handy breakable object. (Derek had an astonishing knack for snatching bulbs and tubes unobserved.) as soon as the object thrown had shattered, he would cease his screaming and wild jumping and retire to mute, motionless nonexistence. While we can expect to find natural movement back and forth between cynicism and sincerity, still we must not rule out the kind of transitional point that can be sustained on the strength of a little self-illusion. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

We find that the individual may attempt to induce the audience to judge one and the situation in a particular way, and one may seek this judgment as an ultimate end in itself, and yet one may not completely believe that one deserves the valuation of self which one asks for or that the impression of reality which one fosters is valid. Our maids, inured to difficult child, were exceptionally attentive to Derek; they were apparently moved by his extreme infantile fragility, so strangely coupled with megalomaniacal superiority. Occasionally some of the apparatus he fixed to his bed to “live him” during his sleep would fall down in disarray. This machinery he contrived from masking tape, cardboard, wire and other paraphernalia. Usually the maids would pick up such things and leave them on a table for the children to find, or disregard them entirely. But Derek’s machine they carefully restored: “Derek must have the carburetor so he can breathe.” Similarly they were on the alert to pick up and preserve the motors that ran him during the day and the exhaust pipes through which he exhaled. This expressive equipment, one may take the term “personal front” to refer to other items of expressive equipment, the items that we most intimately identify with the performer himself and that we naturally expect will follow the performer wherever he goes. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

These stimuli also tell us of the individual’s temporary ritual state, that is, whether he is engaging in formational social activity, work, or informal recreation, whether or not he is celebrating a new phase in the season cycle or his life-cycle. “Manner may be taken to refer to those stimuli which function at the time to warn us of the interaction role the performer will expect to play in the oncoming situation. Thus a haughty, aggressive manner may give the impression that the performer expects to be the one who will initiate the verbal interaction and direct its course. A meek, apologetic manner may give the impression that the performer expects to follow the lead of pression that the performer expects to follow the lead of others, or at least that he can be led to do so. How had Derek become a human machine? From intensive interviews with his parents we learned that the process had begun even before birth. Schizophrenia often results from parental rejection, sometimes combined ambivalently with love. Derek, on the other hand, had been completely ignored. “I never knew I was pregnant,” his mother said, meaning that she had already excluded Derek from her consciousness. His birth, she said, “did not make any difference.” Derek’s father, a rootless draftee in the wartime civilian army, was equally unready for parenthood. So, of course, are many young couples. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Fortunately, must such parents lose their indifference upon the baby’s birth. However, not Derek’s parents. “I did not want to see or nurse him,” his mother declared. “I had no feeling of actual dislike—I simple did not want to take care of him.” For the first three months of his life Derek “cried most of the time.” A colicky baby, he was kept on a rigid four-hour feeding schedule, was not touched unless necessary and was never cuddled or played with. The mother, preoccupied with herself, usually left Derek alone in the crib or playpen during the day. The father discharged his frustrations by pushing Derek when the child cried. Soon the father left for overseas duty, and the mother took Derek, now a year and a half old, to live with her at her parents’ home. On his arrival the grandparents noticed that ominous changed had occurred in the child. Strong and healthy at birth, he had become frail and irritable; a responsive baby, he had become remote and inaccessible. When he began to master speech, he talked only to himself. At an early date he become preoccupied with machinery, including an old electric fan which he could take apart and put together again with surprising deftness. Derek’s mother impressed us with a fey quality that expressed her insecurity, her detachment from the World and her low physical vitality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

We were struck especially be her total indifference as she talked about Derek. This seemed much more remarkable than the actual mistakes she made in handling him. Certainly he was left to cry for hours when hungry, because she fed him on a rigid schedule; he was toilet-trained with great rigidity so that he would give no trouble. These things happen to many children. However, Derek’s existence never registered with his mother. In her recollections he was fused at one moment with one event or person; at another, with something or somebody else. When she told us about his birth and infancy, it was as is she were talking about some vague acquaintance and soon her thought would wander off to another person or to herself. When Derek was not yet four, his nursery school suggested that he enter a special school for disturbed children. At the new school his autism was immediately recognized. During his three years there he experienced a slow improvement. Unfortunately a subsequent two years in a parochial school destroyed this progress. He began to develop compulsive defenses, which he called “preventions.” He could not drink, for example, expect through elaborate piping systems built of straws. Liquids had to be “pumped” into him, in his fantasy, or he could not suck. Eventually his behavior become so upsetting that he could not be kept in parochial school. At home thing did not improve. Three months before entering the Orthogenic School he made a serious attempt at suicide. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

To us Derek’s pathological behavior seemed the external expression of an overwhelming effort to remain almost nonexistent as a person. For weeks Derek’s only reply when addressed was “Bam.” Unless he thus neutralized whatever we said, there would be an explosion, for Derek plainly wished to close off every form of contact not mediated by machinery. Even when he was bathed he rocked back and forth with mute, engine-like regularity, flooding the bathroom. If he stopped rocking, he did this like a machine too; suddenly he went completely rigid. Only once, after months of being lifted from his bath and carried to bed, did a small expression of puzzled pleasure appear on his face as he said very softly: “They even carry you to your bed here.” For a long time after he began to talk he would never refer to anyone by name, but only as “that person” or “the little person” or “the big person.” He was unable to designate by its true name anything to which he attached feelings. Nor could he name his anxieties expect through neologisms or word contaminations. For a long time he spoke about “master paintings” and “master painting room” (i.e., masturbating and masturbating room). One of his machines, the “criticizer,” prevented him from “saying words which have unpleasant feelings.” Yet he gave personal names to the tubes and motors in his collection of machinery. Moreover, these dead things had feelings; the tubes bled when hurt and sometimes got sick. He consistently maintained this reversal between animate and inanimate objects. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

Many people wonder, how can we get people to open up about what they are experiencing and want to engage in therapy so there can be a break through. We can begin to change the status of the subject from that of an anonymous object of our study to that status of a person, a fellow seeker, a collaborator in our enterprise. We can let one tell the story of one’s experience in our studies in a variety of idioms. We can let one show what our stimuli have meant to one by one’s manipulations of our gadgetry; by responses to questionnaires; wit drawings; with words. We can invite one to reveal one’s being. We can prepare ourselves so that one will want to produce a multifaceted record of one’s experiencing in our laboratories. We can show one how we have recorded one’s responding and tell one what we have thought one’s responses mean. We can ask one to examine and then authenticate or revise our recorded version of the meaning-for-one of one’s experience. We can let one cross-examine us to get to know and trust us to find out what we are up to and to decide if one wishes to take part. Heaven knows what we might find. We might well emerge with richer images of beings. However, the problem is not everyone is looking to help. Many just simply want to apply their analytical assumptions to a patient and get paid. Those in helping position need to actually help people and not just assertive themselves to a position so they can feel superior. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

In Derek’s machine World everything, on pain of distant destruction, obeyed inhibitory laws much more stringent than those of physics. When we came to know him better, it was plain that in his moments of silent withdrawal, with his machine switched off, Derek was absorbed in pondering the compulsive laws of his private Universe. His preoccupation with machinery made it difficult to establish even practical contacts with him. If he wanted to do something with a counselor, such as play with a toy that had caught his vague attention, he could not do so: “I would like this very much, but first I have to turn off the machine.” But by the time he had fulfilled all the requirements of his preventions, he has lost interest. When a toy was offered to him, he could not touch it because his motors and his tubes did no leave him hand free. Even certain colors were dangerous and had to be strictly avoided in toys and clothing, because “some colors turn off the current, and I cannot touch them because I cannot live without the current.” Derek was convinced that machines were better than people. Once when he bumped into one of the pipes on our jungle gym he kicked it so violently that his teacher had to restrain him to keep him from injuring himself. When she explained that the pipe was much harder than his foots, Derek replied: “That proves it. Machines are better than the body. They do not break; they are much harder and stronger.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

If Derek lost or forgot something, to him, it merely proved that his brain ought to be thrown away and replaced by machinery. If he spilled something, his arm should be broken and twisted off because it did not work properly. When his head or arm failed to work as it should, he tried to punish it by hitting it. Even Derek’s feelings were mechanical. Much later in his therapy, when he had formed a timid attachment to another child and had been rebuffed, Derek cried: “He broke my feelings.” Gradually we began to understand what had seemed to be contradictory in Derek’s behavior—why he held on to the motor and tubes, then suddenly destroyed them in a fury, then set out immediately and urgently to equip oneself with new and larger tubes. Derek had created these machines to run his body and mind because it was too painful to be human. However, again and again, he became dissatisfied with their failure to meet his need and rebellious at the way they frustrated his will. In a recurrent frenzy he “exploded” his light bulbs and tubes, and for a moment became a human being—for one crowning instant he came alive. But as soon as he had asserted his dominance through the self-created explosion, he felt his life ebbing away. To keep on existing he had immediately to restore his machines and replenish the electricity that suppled his life energy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

A being’s philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in one. A completed theoretic philosophy can thus never be anything more than a completed classification of the World’s ingredients; and its results must always be abstract, since the basis of every classification is the abstract essence embedded in the living fact, the rest of the living fact being for the time ignored by the classifier. This means that none of our explanations are complete. Hey subsume things under heads wider or more familiar; but the last heads, whether of things or of their connections, are mere abstract genera, data which we just find in things and write down. A single explanation of a fact only explains it from a single point of view. The entire fact is not accounted for until each and all of its characters have been classed with their likes elsewhere. The most one can say is that them elements of the World are such and such, and that each is identical with itself wherever found; but the question Where is it Found? the practical being is left to answer by one’s own wit. Which, of all the essences, shall here and now be held the essence of this concrete thing, the fundamental philosophy never attempts to decide. We are thus led to the conclusion that the simple classification of things is, on the one hand, the best possible theoretic philosophy, but is, on the other, a most miserable and inadequate substitute for the fulness of truth. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

The Right Way to Teach Beings is to Propose Truth, Not Impose it!

November 10, 2019 6:26 am

I climbed swiftly up the mountain until I was in the thick of the old forest that extended to the very end of my ancestral land, moving effortlessly through the snow that had exhausted me when I was a young boy and a young man. Many of the old trees I recalled were gone, and I was in a dense thicket of spruce and other fire trees when I came to the cement bench I had hauled to this high and deserted place when I had first returned in the twentieth century. It was a common kind of garden bench, curved about the bark of an immense tree, and deep enough for me to sit comfortably with my back against the tree to look down on the distant Chateau with her glorious lighted windows. On, the cold Winters I had spent under that roof, I thought, but only in passing. I was almost used to it now, the splendid palace that the old castle had become, and this sense of ownership, of being the lord of this land, the lord who could walk out to the very boundaries, and gaze on all that one ruled. I shut out the sound of distant music, voices, laughter. I wake slowly and without enthusiasm, spinning out each moment as long as possible. Here, under the bedclothes, is the safety of the primeval cave, the womb warmth of the lord’s lair. All humanity loves the security and comfort of these slow, drowsy moments: to us, they are vital. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

More than sleep itself, they stoke up our energy, making unreal past and future, and all the present except the sweet laziness of muscle and the mind’s soft meanderings. It is, I supposed, about an hour before full consciousness crowds in on me and I can no longer lie in peace. I wish, I really wish, it were possible to prolong that state of trance indefinitely, to hibernate my way into eternity so that the World’s events, great and small, passed unnoticed and unfelt. However, as I have gradually extended my sleeping hours from the normal eight to twelve or more, to fill in the long and empty days, I suppose I cannot complain. For myself, I am content enough alone, although at times the need for emotional contact with another human being becomes hard to bear. I cannot be bothered to cook anything, so I make a pot of tea, have a slice of break, switch on the radio, and attempt to read the day-old paper. Before long it beings to bore and annoy me. I turned my head to the left and started to gaze at the murals on the wall, which had the eerie perfection of a vampire painter, and it made them look both magnificent and contrived at the same time, as if someone had blasted the walls with photographic images and then a team had painted them in. Thus, if a man should die, yet his personality in his home allowed to live on in that his possessions and choice of their settings are left and where they are, his presence will continue to be felt. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

If he has passed his physical body and mental characteristics on to his children, and they continue to live in this home, his presence will be felt more strongly. Furnished rooms, though obviously not completely empty, have this same anonymity, so that the newcomer, feeling lost in the void, is indefinably cheered at the discovery of an bedroom with comforters and pillows already on the bed, or a living room with plush sofas and art on the walls, with their message that the vacant space has been filled in the past and can be so in their own share of its future. To be precise, I have no roots, and, apart from an African wood carving on the mantelpiece and a couple of books on the bedside table, the room is as impersonal as when I first took it. The carving is about all I have left f my childhood and family (from whom, obviously, I had to sever myself) and was collected by my grandfather, who specialized in African primitives. The books, relics of school-day enthusiasm, have remained unopened for months now, giving way to an endless stream of newspapers and periodicals. A part from the extremes of fear and weakness of resolution, no softness of any kind must be shown or shared, for softness has no place in our World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

It is at once shunned and despised when we come across it, because to be soft is to be constantly shamed and hurt, to lose illusions before others can be built up, to invite trickery, to open the door for the profiteer, the violent or the mad, to allow that vital and precious awareness to be dulled. From the time of my own high school days, I have heard judgments and words, sometimes spoken by the people I love, sometimes by those I despise. It can be difficult to ignore the self-defeating invective. It took many years of experience in life, and some invaluable psychoanalytic therapy, for me to overcome such influences on my own attitude. However, even before I had succeeded in rebutting and then rejecting the hostile viewpoints, I had reacted to them. Since them, I have learned through observation that my reaction was not unusual. The need for self-acceptance is buried within many of us, and we can only throw off the influence of those who think us beneath them by always striving, despite the hardship and impediment, to excel even beyond our own capacities. Our ethical standards must be above reproach, our honesty greater than that of others, our loyalty to friends and ideals firmer than that of other people, precisely because—knowingly or not—they think so little of some of us, and precisely in that order that we must think the more of ourselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

At each turn of life and at all moments of the day, it is important for us to convince ourselves that we are as good as the next person; in fact, better. It is necessary for us to believe in ourselves, as it must be for all successful persons. Because humankind can make it so difficult for us to preserve our self-esteem, it may be necessary to hold aloft our own activities, to drive on with our own achievements in order that our faith in self can survive the impact of many crushing blows. And those who have studied the personality adjustments of people in other marginalized groups, whether of the character, will recognize the struggle as following a not uncommon pattern. The stages of the Quest for Truth passes by degrees from the disciplining of the ego to the opening of consciousness to God. For me personally, I was spurred by a belief that if my learning were greater, my thinking deeper, my talents more creative, then the loftier would be the stature which I could assume in my own eyes. On this journey there are stages of ascent, stations of understanding lights of peace, and shadows of despair. If we continue the inner work we will pass through various stages of development. It would be a mistake to believe that one has reached a final attitude or a fixed set of values. Between the beginner and the adept is this difference: that the state of being which the one looks up to with awe-struck wonder seems entirely natural to the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Here is, perhaps, a phase of the laws of compensation. It is a counterpart of the bravado displayed by the cowardly, the overlording shown by the diminutive, the conceit by those who suffer from an inferiority of feeling to utilize scientific foundation for its group attitude as justification for discrimination. In other fields, it is called a defense mechanism, or a Napoleonic complex. However, it is not the origin that matters. We are concerned with the results, whether beneficial or destructive to society and to the individual. A small person is anti-social when one seeks to compensate for one’s defects, in one’s own image, for whatever inferior trait by a display of dictatorial traits in which one uses other people as pawns. One’s behavior stems from a factor beyond his or her control, and may be turned to other directions, and does not make it the more palatable for society. When people are oppressed and discriminated against, however, many of their achievements may stem from the effort of the individual to excel in order to combat the influence of universal condemnation on one’s self-esteem. This is a beneficial consequence, even though it may (or may not) arise from an unfortunate source. People tell us we should tolerate others with differences, but tolerance is one of the ugliest words in our language. No word is more misunderstood. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

We appeal to other beings to be tolerant of others—in other words to be willing to stand them. I do not want to be tolerated, and I cannot see why anyone else should be struggling to be tolerated. If people are no good, they should not be tolerated, and if they are good, they should be accepted. In the intergroup relations people are far from having attained acceptance of peoples other than themselves. Tolerance—in the sense of willingness to put up with the existence of others—is still to be achieved. However, what is it but a miserable compromise? In the name of humanity appeals are made to various groups to tolerate each other, when tolerance is actually hardly more desirable than intolerance. The latter is only slightly more inhumane than the former. People cutting across all racial, religious, national, and caste lines, frequently react to rejection by a deep understanding of all others who have likewise been scorned because of their belonging to a marginalized group. It is not for us to join with those who reject millions or billion of our fellow beings of all types and groups, but to accept all beings, an attitude forced upon us happily by the stigma of being cost out of the fold of society. And today, the deep-rooted prejudices that restrict marriages and friendships according to social strata—family wealth, religion, color, and a myriad of other artifices—are conspicuously absent among the submerged groups that makes up the marginalized members of our society. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The sympathy for all humankind—including groups similarly despised in their own right—that is exhibited by so many people who feel like they are outcasts, can be a most rewarding factor, not only for the individual, but for society. The person learning to accept oneself can—and often does—demonstrate that he or she harbors no bitterness, for one learns, of necessity, the meaning of turning the other cheek. One is forced by circumstances to answer hate with love, abuse with compassion. It is no wonder, then, that one can as a doctor, educator, or pacifist, show a tenderness to others, no matter how tragic their dilemma, that is seldom forthcoming from people who have themselves not deeply suffered. The humiliations of life can distill a mellow reaction, a warmth and understanding, not only for people in like circumstance, but for all the unfortunate, the despised, the oppressed of the Earth. People who are rejected and accept their circumstances are compelled to constantly search for the answers to their problems within themselves. Reminded of the “baseness” and the “ugliness” of one’s acts, one wishes to understand what differentiates one from all other around them. This introspective study pervades the entire personality and all its activities. The great why, the infantile manifestation of curiosity that strives, in the less inhibited mind of the child, to gain the key to the ultimate riddle of a being’s life and its meaning, is typical of those who have been marginalized. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Unable, perhaps, to develop the extrovert qualities which require a receptive World in which to have free play; struggling to find a solution to the mystery of one’s own imperious desires; not suited for unquestioning acceptance of the facts of one’s self without an understanding of these facts—the invert finds much of one’s thought process consumed with inner projection. The flare-up of temper, the critical perception of a work of art, the basis of a broken friendship, the unfinished task at work, the daydream and the nightmare—whence come these facets of life, what are their hidden meanings, how do they tie in with the total personality? These perceptive abilities, sharpened by inner search, can be and frequently are applied to an understanding of all people. On the surface this seems to be confined to the ability to recognize hidden, latent, or well-disguised talent behind the façade of respectability, but it also permits recognition of the concealed meaning of a poem, the delayed break of a handshake, even the condemnatory attitude of a hostile person. This ability is, in a sense, a form of self-protection. Analytical abilities that are developed by introspection, sharpened by the search for a glimpse behind anonymous mask, are extended to the understanding of all phases of human behavior. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Because some individual learns that one’s activities, thoughts, philosophies, aspirations, are understandable in the light of full knowledge of the intricacies of the emotional structure; because one learns that the motives for an action may be camouflaged so thoroughly that it seems to stem from the very opposite of its actual source; because, in short, one is forced to obtain a wealth of knowledge about the personal psychological make-up, one can and frequently does this to the fuller understanding of others. And when to this understanding is added compassion for all individuals and groups, no matter to what tragic pass life has brought them, a rare combination of worthwhile traits is obtained. It is understood that beyond discussion, not based on unthinking faith, blind passion, illogical reasoning, or linger prejudices that are one time or another were part of the ruling mores of society fails to receive its day in court. Not all people have been able to utilize their disadvantageous position for self-improvement in every respect and in all direction. I have pointed out the struggle to excel, but many people are easily defeated. Their resiliency in the face of the burden they carry is insufficient to meet the experiences of life. I have outlined the understanding that is extended to other individuals and groups that struggle, each in its own manner, against exclusion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

However, many people, even those in marginalized groups, are deeply rooted in prejudice. They have been unable to learn the lesson that should be so apparent to them in the face of the World’s bigotry and persecution. I have depicted the individual turned compassionate toward one’s fellow beings, but there are those whose cruelty is lustful and murderous. Self-study and insight are not always present, nor is skepticism of necessity a constructive force. However, it is the very essence of democracy, the antithesis of totalitarianism, that justice and fair play are desirable ends in themselves. Repression and intolerance are to be condemned, no mater what lofty purpose may motivate them or what useful result may unwittingly issue therefrom. The beneficial reaction that turns repression to the finer purpose in life is far from a justification of that of course. In fact, the opposite is true, for it is a demonstration of character, power, and intellect of the invert that gives the lie to the name-calling of one’s enemies and proves all the more one’s worthiness of acceptance by society. The desirable ends which I have outlined must, in fact, be weighed against the needless sufferings, the dejection and humiliation, the extortion and the court trials—all issuing from the same repressive character of modern culture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

The great energy of those who have utilized the contempt of their fellows as an incentive to further creativity must be balanced against the energy expended and wasted in the struggle against this very same contempt. There is a poetic irony in the future of the once marginalized in society, for one will use the high attainments of character to struggle against the very injustices that are so largely responsible for these attainments, and the successful termination of repressive attitudes may erase the very achievements that were used to effect this termination. Nevertheless, I am convinced that there is a permanent place in the scheme of things for the person reaching for self-actualization—a place that transcends the reaction to hostility and that will continue to contribute to social betterment after social acceptance. Power is required for communication. To stand up before an indifferent or hostile group and have one’s say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths which go deep and hurt—these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression. This point is so self-evident that it is generally overlooked. Hence, many are mighty in contradiction. My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple truthful communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one’s deepest thoughts to another. We generally communicate most openly only to those who are our equals in power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Violence itself is a kind of communication. They cannot communicate with language, so they strike out in violence. However, it is still a language, however rudimentary or primitive, appropriate in certain conditions, and necessary in others. Some people are violence because they do not possess the self-esteem necessary for communication. They cannot stand and deliver themselves of their feelings in relation to others; indeed, unable to formulate them, they are unsure of what their feelings really are. The sooner people in power turn their minds away from exploiting taxpayers and the less affluent for financial gain and become concerned with the rights of people as human beings, the sooner the violence will be mitigated. There is something more important that powerful nations need to send to our leaders and children. This is the poets. For the poets (and writers in general) are the ones skilled in communication. They can speak in universal forms which will be understood by people of whatever color or nationality. They speak the language of consciousness, of dignity, regardless of race or color; they can cultivate the integrity of the marginalized and the other characteristics that are essential to being human. For they know that communication makes community, and community is the possibility of human beings living together for their mutual psychological, physical, and spiritual nourishment. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

The kind of communication that overcomes the impulse to violence and that binds persons to each other is a kind of talking that is conciliatory and restorative. In psychotherapy we find that the difficulties experiences by a man and a wife in a relationship can be gauged roughly how much trouble they have in communicating with each other. When there is difficulty understanding what the other is talking (or not talking) about, we can assume an estrangement. Then the person is simply not (or perhaps does not want to be) tuned in on the wave length of the others. Intellectualizing or talking abstractly is a symptom of the same thing—a desire not to communicate one’s real feelings, a blocking-off of one’s total self. As hostility grows, projection increases also; there is apt to be a good deal of allegations and an increase in distance, all of which is indicative of growing hostility. We know that we shall get to the stage of violence ere long. Psychotherapy is reversing that process so that the person can talk on the same wave length. Even if the couple decides to divorce, at least they decide it together, and the process has that much more community in it. Communication recovers the original “we” of the human being on a new level. Authentic communication depends on authentic language. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Authentic talk is organic—the speaker communicates not merely with words but with one’s body also; one’s gestures, one’s movements, one’s expression, one’s tone of voice communicate the same thing as one’s words. One speaks not as a disembodied voice but as one organic totality to another. We would not communicate unless we valued the other, considered one worth talking to, worth the effort to make our ideas clear. This is communicating without talking down, without patronizing. Communication implies the presence of social interest. One has to have an interest in the other to make it worthwhile to hear one. This means one relates to another not as receptacle for the expression one one’s pleasures of the flesh, or as a being to be exploited for the assuaging of one’s own loneliness, or in any other way as an object, but as a human being in the full meaning of that term. Communication leads to community—that is, to understanding, intimacy, and the mutual valuing that was preciously lacking. Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood. These days there is a greater search for community, partly because our human experience of community has largely evaporated and we are lonely. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

The term community gives birth to a rich cluster of words, all of which have powerful connotations. There is commune, a relatively new word with an optimistic ring; and communion, an old word with new meaning that has for many of us a still more beneficial tone. However, when we come then to a cognate which is taken negatively by many people—namely communism. All these words have the same root. Community is destroyed by destructive violence. If I, like Cain, commit a senseless act of ending a life, I must flee into the desert, driven by my guilt at having take the life of my brother Abel; a cleavage now exists between me and other members of my erstwhile community. In this sense I shrink my World and thus kill part of myself. I need my enemy in my community. He or she or they keep me alert, vital. I need one’s criticism. Strange to say, I need him or her or them to posit myself against. If I could learn something from one, I would walk twenty miles to see my worst enemy. However, beyond what we specifically learn from our enemies, we need them emotionally: our psychic economy cannot get along well without them. Persons often remark that curiously to them, they feel a singular emptiness when their enemy dies or is incapacitated. All of which indicates that our enemy is as necessary for us as is our friends. Both together are part of authentic community. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Community is where I can accept my own loneliness, distinguishing between that part of it which can be overcome and that part of it which is inescapable. Community is the group in which I can depend upon my fellows to support me; it is partially the source of my physical courage in that, knowing I can depend on others, I guarantee that they also can depend on me. It is where my moral courage, consisting of standing against members of my own community, is supported even by those I stand against. “And it came to pass that I prayed unto the Lord that he would give unto community grace, that they might have charity,” reports Ether 12.36. O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,–Nature observatory—whence the dell, its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell, may seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ‘mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee, yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, whose words are images of thoughts refin’d, is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be almost the highest bliss of human-kind, when to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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True, Nature Does Have Rhythm in its Day and Night; it Does Have Balance and Harmony, Summer and Winter!

November 8, 2019 2:30 am

Do not tell me you are the People of Purpose when your purpose is to do just what they sent you to do! For the love of your souls, find yourself a finer purpose! Just as I did. In any case, the African Americans came to the Bowery and the sociologists fund them in good shape when they got there, regardless of how he felt about it. When the defense boom came many of the African Americans left but some stayed on, seeing in life on the Bowery what the Irish and the Swedes and Poles saw, seeing in it what the seaman and those without homes saw—an end to fight back, a resting place, a refutation of the old hymn, “There is no hiding place down here.” The Bowery offered a hiding place so secret that the fugitive could not be found even by himself. The Jew is a rarity and a curio on the Bowery. On either side of the street are districts primarily Jewish. Until Puerto Ricans came in to share the East Side tenements with them, this was an area where Jewish life filled the air and flavored the stores and the streets. However, the peddlers, sweatshop workers, teachers, and rabbis looked upon the Bowery as beyond the pale. Some Jews made Bowery history. Monk Eastman and his gang of thus, almost all Jewish, were sponsored by Tim Sullivan who counted on them to deliver votes and loot from their side just as the Irish and Italians did. Jews also appeared in the Bowery theaters as producers, actors, directors, and impresarios. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

They were part of the Bowery’s history but not fully a part of the Bowery until the depression. Then some of them drifted down to the breadlines and the psychologists found them in a bay way. These were the shattered, declassed ones. They cropped up with skills that were unusual on the Bowery. They were bookkeepers, teachers, musicians, tailors, and sales people; but temperamentally they were shot. After the war Jews ran to about two percent of the Bowery population. Dr. Levinson has said that most of them have deteriorated much further than the average non-Jewish Bowery resident. Alcohol itself, said the Doctor, is outside the Jews’ “cultural patter,” and presumably those Jews who take to it suffer a cirrhosis not only of the liver but of the psyche. Perhaps it is only those disturbed Jews who end up on the Bowery or else their fate disturbs them ore than it does the others. In any case, Dr. Levinson says, Jews on the Bowery are more likely to be psychopathic or mentally defective. Even rare than a Jewish Bowery Man is a Chinese. Chinatown abuts the Bowery, and Chinese stores spill out of the tight narrow streets of their quarter onto the Street, but no Chinese panhandler works there. Patrolman Leo O’Hea, who has walked the beat along the Bowery for a quarter of a century, says the blotter is clean of Chinese names. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

There are no Chinese vagrants. The patrolman has no very fancy scientific notions of “why,” but he knows that when a Chinese boy breaks a window all that an officer need do is to tell his brother or his cousin or his uncle and the matter is take care of. The boy is likely to apologize. In time the Chinese may become so Americanized that the family will lose the antique function of mutual responsibility, of collective conscience. Until then, however, there are not likely to be Chinese flophouses. The only times when any police action was needed were the days of the tong wars—a kind of bloody commercial rivalry—and during the period when the exclusion laws were so rigid that no Chinese man could hope to marry a Chinese young lady in New York. In those days, women of the evening from the Bowery would then come down to Chinatown to pay the “house calls” of their profession, and now and then the police would feel obliged to intervene. The Bowery is above all American. More than three quarters of its regular derelict population are a mixture of races and native-born, often tracing a native American lineage far back into their country to stand in front of the Salvation Army Building on an afternoon—cheerfully facing nothingness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Dr. Levinson and his colleagues had these native-born Americans examine the telltale ink blots of the Rorschach test, and from their fancied images they pieced together this view of the personality type (which I have presumed to annotate): “The homeless man has had a very poor psychosexual history, as a result of which he has developed a fear of either accepting or sharing affection,” says Dr. Levison. (There is a musician who used to play with the Philadelphia Symphony. One day he came home and found a stranger in his wife’s bed. He turned around, walked out, and buried his poor psychosexual history on the Bowery.) The Doctor continues: “At some time, the mother figure had brought about a good deal of ambivalence and anxiety. To love meant to be hurt, to be rejected to be deserted.” (A seaman, now permanently beached on the Bowery, says that he never had a home. He grew up in an orphanage. Sure, he had girls, but “you know the kind you meet on a waterfront…Oh a nice girl would be something else again.” So he never got married. He would not make anybody a good husband, he says.) “He now denies to himself his need for affection and tends to respond to the demands of the World of reality by repression. By withdrawing into passivity…Since he replaces activity by passivity, he atones for his guilt.” (“I didn’t commit no crime, see,” says Thomas Finn. “What I did, I did only to myself, right?”) #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

“He is able to accept life and to continue existing on the Bowery because being there is a solution to his problems. His life on the Bowery is an acting out of his conflicts, an ‘undoing’ and assuaging of guilt, and is a replacement of his phallicism by castration.” (An old man says that he finds it hard to stay at the Muni—the Municipal Lodging House—because of the “queens.” Disgusting, he says. The queens are young men who swing their hips and gather courts around them in secluded spots. Courtiers and courtesans vie for the queen’s affections, and the old Bowery hands shrink to the wall in horror.) Dr. Levinson concludes: “It is hypothesized that being homeless has only exacerbated latent personality trends and that living on the Bowery is the solution of the emotional problems of these men and the natural outcome of the dynamics involved.” Psychologist agree that the Bowery Men need a place where an effortless going to hell is the accepted way of life. They need a place where no one requires anything of them, where no one ever says: “You can do better.” The institution the Bowery Men need is one where everyone agrees: “Mac, you can’t do better.” They need the sweet delights of hopelessness, and anyone who seeks to energize them with hope betrays them, for he calls their spirit into action; calls them again to try again to lose; calls them again to compare themselves with other men, to assert their worth—when all that they want is for the World to leave them alone, worthless and careless, beyond redemption or competition. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Where else could these men find such an institution? Where could they find a home in which all the talents and learning of psychologist are bent to give them the certainty they need that they have lost themselves? It is probably as difficult for a social worker or a missionary to let a man despair as it is for a doctor to oblige a patient with euthanasia. For that reason the Bowery Men have made their own community on the street. Sociologists describe this institution—creation by the men themselves, tailor-made for them and for no others—as a subculture. Professor H. Warren Dunham, of Wayne University, gives the psychologist short shrift. It is all very well, he says in effect, to diagnose individuals as suffering from dependency needs (“Inadequate personality” and so on), but the stubborn fact remains that a lot of men not on the Bowery fit that picture just as well. Society, says Dr. Dunham, keeps producing “inadequately socialized types,” and the skid rows are there to receive them. The World, after all, is full of opportunities for failure. A boy can flunk an exam or catch the look of scorn in a girl’s eye. A man can lose a job, or possibly hold a job too long whole his friends rise, perhaps stepping smilingly upon his neck as they go up. A businessman can lose his money and suddenly realize that he has nothing else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

And the World is scornful of failures. People persecute failures even by feeling sorry for them. Even when stretching out a helping hand, successful men make it clear that it is more blessed to give than to receive—though the receiver plainly stands in greater need of blessing. Those who no longer aspire, who do not wish to rise on anybody’s shoulders, who do not wish to sell more, make more, show more, even give more than others—these are among the “inadequately socialized” who have built the modern Bowery. There they need struggle no longer against the critics, the status-seekers and the status-makers who pigeonhole people. The Bowery, it would seem, is a grotesque limbo beyond good and evil, where there is no first or last, no past or future—a death wherein one may have the delights and torments of being a spectator at one’s own funeral. In the quiet attitudes of the men in flops—the old ones often sit for hours with hands crossed in their laps—it is easy to read a prayerful solemnity. In the prim detached way in which pleasures of the flesh is regarded there is something monastic. These men use the usual four-letter words, but this is mere ritual and no more. Such words are expletives and no longer serve to recall the warmth of the fires below. There is an air of finality on the Street. Each man things it is all over. He used to live some other way. There used to be another self. It is all gone now, as if he had taken holy orders, changed his name, and put on his rags as a sign. What they are a sign of is, of course, the crucial difference between the Bowery Man’s retreat and that of a monk. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Learnedly, Dr. Levinson terms it “ego-devaluating, not a religious retreat.” Still it is a retreat, an escape into tranquility. And here one is brought up short by the obvious bond linking the unshaved bum sprawled flat on his face in the street with the businessman, the advertising executive, the cocktail drinking wife, the harried suburbanite—the whole organization, brief-cased, golf-and-bridge, scotch-and-soda set. All understand that the major objective of life is tranquility freedom from tension, and an end to worry. The parents who send their children joyfully off to life adjustment courses do so with the notion that they will have fewer conflicts, fewer tensions. Life will be smoother. However, if life is not smoother and the ideal is still tranquility; if one is not fully adjusted to life and the objective is still to avoid tension; if the tranquilizers are too expensive on in the end fail to secure the all-important inner peace—then it may be a consolation to us all to know that there is a Bowery, a place where life is thoroughly anesthetized. It is our brothers who have pioneered there. It is not a state of dreamy futility but one of intense usefulness. There is some confusion about the kind of life an enlightened being will live. It is popularly believed that one sits in one’s cave or one’s hunt sunk continually in meditation. The idea that one can be active in the World is not often accepted, especially by the masses who have not been properly instructed in these matters and who do not know differences between religion and mysticism and between mysticism and philosophy. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

The truth is that the enlightened being may not practise meditation; but one has no dependence upon it, because one’s enlightenment being fully established will not be increased by further meditation. Whenever one does meditate, it is either for the purpose of withdrawing from the World totally for short periods, at intervals, either for one’s own satisfaction or to recuperate one’s energies, or to benefit others by telepathy. When it is said “for one’s own satisfaction,” what is meant is that meditation in seclusion may have become a way of life in one’s previous incarnation. This generates a karmic tendency which reappears in this life and the satisfaction of this tendency pleases one, but it is not absolutely essential for one. One can dispense with it when needful to do so, whereas the unenlightened being is too often at the mercy of one’s tendencies and propensities. There is no classification into matter and spirit for the Sage. There is only one life for one. If a being can find reality only in trance, if one says that the objective World is unreal, one is not a Sage. The being who becomes immobilized by one’s inheritance of asceticism and escapism will also become indifferent to the sorrows of a humankind whom one regards as materialistic. The seeker of truth is self-disciplined to live in the World with one’s heart and thought molded after one’s own fashion, and will not turn in contempt or helplessness from the so-called materialistic but, on the contrary, will find their ignorance the motive for one’s incessant service of enlightenment to them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The stultified stony apathy of the first is shamed by the courageous acceptance of life as a whole of the second. The saint is satisfied to attain freedom from one’s lower self but the Master does not stop there. One seeks also to carry enlightenment to others, remove their misery, and save them from the illusion in which they are involved. One’s attainments in the mental, ethical, and philosophic spheres must take concrete shape in the disinterested service of humanity, or one is no illuminate. Truth seekers certainly wish that all others might attain to their own inner peace. However, because one has not oneself realized this higher unity (which is all-embracing) one does not feel that one bears any personal responsibility for their uplift. One the contrary while the ascetic, under the illusion that Worldly life is a snare set by Satan, sits smugly in one’s retreat, the illuminate knows that all life is divinely born, never relaxes one’s efforts for the enlightenment of humankind. Imagination is the outreaching of mind. It is the individual’s capacity to accept the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images, and every other sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to dream dreams and see visions, to consider diverse possibilities, and to endure the tension involved in holding these possibilities before one’s attention. Imagination is casting off mooring ropes, taking one’s changes that there will be new mooring posts in the vastness ahead. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

In creative endeavors the imagination operates in juxtaposition with form. When these endeavors are successful, it is because imagination infuses form with its own vitality. The question is: How far can we let our imagination loose? Can we give it rein? Dare to think the unthinkable? Dare to conceive of, and move among, new visions? At such times we face the danger of losing our orientation, the danger of complete isolation. Will we lose our accepted language, which makes communication possible in a shared World? Will we lose the boundaries that enable us to orient ourselves to what we call reality? This, again, is the problem of form or, stated differently, the awareness of limits. Psychologically speaking, this is experienced by many people as psychosis. Hence some psychotics walk close to the wall in hospitals. They keep oriented to the edges, always preserving their location in the external environment. Having no localization inwardly, they find it especially important to retain whatever outward localization is available. As director of a large mental hospital in Germany which received many brain-injured soldiers during the war, Dr. Kurt Goldstein found that these patients suffered radical limitation of their capacities for imagination. He observed that they had to keep their closets in rigid array, shoes always placed in just this position, shirts hung in just that place. Whenever a closet was upset, the patient became panicky. He could not orient himself to the new arrangement, could not imagine a new form that would bring order to the chaos. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The patient was then thrown into what Dr. Goldstein called the “catastrophic situation.” Or when asked to write his name on a sheet of paper, the brain-injured person would write the name in some corner close to the boundaries. He could not tolerate the possibility of becoming lost in the open spaces. His capacities for abstract thought, for transcending the immediate facts in terms of the possible—what I call, in this context, imagination—were severely curtailed. He felt powerless to change the environment to make it adequate to his needs. Such behavior is indicative of what life is when imaginative powers are cut off. The limits have always to be kept clear and visible. Lacking the ability to shift forms, these patients found their World radically truncated. Any limitless existence was experiences by them as being highly dangerous. Not brain-injured, you and I nevertheless can experience a similar anxiety in the reverse situation—that is, in the creative act. The boundaries of our World shift under our feet and we tremble while waiting to see whether any new form will take the place of the lost boundary or whether we can create out of this chaos some new order. As imagination gives vitality to form, form keeps imagination from driving us into psychosis. This is the ultimate necessity of limits. Artists are the ones who have the capacity to see original visions. They typically have powerful imaginations and, at the same time, a sufficiently developed sense of form to avoid being led into the catastrophic situation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The artists are the frontier scouts who go out ahead of the rest of us to explore future. We can surely tolerate their special dependencies and harmless idiosyncrasies. For if we can listen seriously to them, we will be better prepared for them. There is a curiously sharp sense of joy—or perhaps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy—that comes when you find the particular form required by your creation. Let us say you have been puzzling about it for days when suddenly you get the insight that unlocks the door—you see how to write that line, what combination of colors is needed in your picture, how to form that theme you may be writing for a class, or you hit upon the theory to fit your new facts. I have often wondered about this special sense of joy; it so often seems out of proportion to what actually has happened. I may have worked at my desk morning after morning trying to find a way to express some important idea. When my insight suddenly breaks through—which may happen when I am chopping wood in the afternoon—I experience a strange lightness in my step as though a great load were taken off my shoulders, a sense of joy on a deeper level that continues without any relation whatever to the mundane tasks that I may be performing at the time. It cannot be just that the problem at hand has been answered—that generally brings only a sense of relief. What is the course of this curious pleasure? #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

I propose that it is the experience of this-is-the-way-things-are-meant-to-be. If only for that moment, we participate in the myth of creation. Order comes out of disorder, form out of chaos, as it did in the creation of the Universe. The sense of joy comes from our participation, no matter how slight, in being as such. The paradox is that at the moment we also experience more vividly our own limitations. We discover the amor fati that Nietzsche write about—the love of one’s fate. No wonder it gives a sense of ecstasy! Most people are surprises to learn that the rebel operates with built-in restraints. Indeed, that is one’s chief distinction from the revolutionary who, concerned as one is with political change, experiences only outer restraints. However, the rebel, who is concerned with people’s attitudes and motives, has inner limits. One is restrained by the boundaries inherent in the order one proposes. In describing these limits, I shall speak in ideal terms to clarify my point. The first is the universality of the rebel’s vision. One’s ideal of life, which gives birth to one’s rebellion in the first place, applies not just to oneself but to others as well; and these others must include one’s enemies. To pursue the metaphor I employed earlier, if the slave kills the master he or she has no choice but to usurp the master’s throne and be killed oneself; and we have round after round of meaningless bloodshed, like the sultans’ murders in the seraglio. The excitement of the ego trip is secondary to the rebel; one is concerned chiefly with one’s vision. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

In this vision of the World are present the restraints upon one’s actions. Sokrates is restrained from making a secret deal with Sparta not by the Athenians, who condemned him to death, but by the requirements of one’s own personally chosen ethics. Jesus could not take up the sword without betraying his own vision of the World. The rebel scorns as a motive personal revenge (actually the nursing of feelings of rejection, of one’s own hurt pride—authentic enough but not the basis for a genuine rebellion). One does not have the right to demand revenge, and furthermore there is no time to do so. The essential characteristic of the rebel is one’s capacity to transcend one’s own particular hurt pride in identification with one’s people and with one’s universal ideal. Another limit is the rebel’s compassion. As we noted in the case of Daniel Ellsberg, the compassion of the rebel is one of the things that makes one a rebel in the first place. One identifies with people who suffer and feels a passionate desire to do something about this suffering. This arises from one’s sensitivity and empathy for other people which inform one’s vision. True, the revel is sometimes so absorbed in the universal application of one’s ideal that one neglects one’s own family. Well, like us all, one remains a human being of good and bad traits. One’s capacity for empathy makes one more compassionate of peoples—if not always for the members of one’s family—and enables one to form one’s vision. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The limits also come from the fact that the rebel’s mind meets other minds. The others’ views of reality restrain and sharpen one’s; and in encounter between them, they work out something of greater value for both. This is why dialogue is so important for the rebel. Dialogue includes all the tangling of emotions, temperament, and diverse goals which occurs in any real interchange. The authentic rebel knows that the silencing of all one’s adversaries is the last thing on Earth one wishes: their extermination would deprive one and whoever else remains alive from the uniqueness, the originality, and the capacity for insight that these enemies—being human—also have and could share with one. If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of beings. In the losing of the chance for dialogue with out enemies, we are the poorer. We would lose not only our enemies’ good ideas, but the restraints they give us as well. The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the World. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out the mass of meaningless data in the World an order and form. Born as we are out of chaos, why can we never establish contact with it? No sooner do we look at it than order, pattern, shape is born under our eyes. This is not only true of the novelist, but of the painter, the engineer, and the intellectual as well—indeed, true of us all. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The forming of the World begins with the simple act of perception, which arranges things in a Gestalt that has meaning for us. We institute the order. It is a product of the human mind’s continual search for meaning in a World in which meaning does not exist apart from our minds. True, nature does have rhythm it its day and night; it does have balance and harmony, Summer and Winter; without our patterns, the functions are blind and meaninglessly repetitive. However, no sooner does the human mind look at this chaos than order is born. Out of the meeting of the human mind and the chaos of nature some meaning is established by which we can orient ourselves. The rebel is one who can grasp this meaning with a clarity that reaches beyond that of the masses of people. An act of rebellion of [the rebel’s] part seems like a demand clarity and unity. The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration to order. Those who hold political power may not trust the rebel’s vision and may hang on to their power to oppose it. However, in this new vision, this very pattern and order, there are present the restraining factors on the rebel oneself. When one writes a sonnet or any other kind of poetry, the chosen form exercises a restraint upon the poet just as the banks restrain the river. Otherwise creativity flows off absurdly in every direction and the river is lost in the sand. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

There are even limits to such a personal aim as self-actualization. The human potential movement has fallen heir to the form of innocence prevalent in America, namely that we grow toward greater and greater moral perfection. Trying to be good all the time will make one not into an ethical giant but into a prig. We should grow, rather, toward greater sensitivity to both evil and good. The moral life is dialectic between good and evil. Especially in the understanding of violence is it necessary to be aware of the good and evil in each of us. Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of beings, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. However, our task is not to unleash them on the World; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others. Rebellion, the secular will not to surrender is still today at the basis of the struggle. Origin of form, source of real life, it keeps us always erect in the savage formless movement of history. The fact that good and evil are present in all of us prohibits anyone from moral arrogance. No one can insist on one’s own moral supremacy. It is out of this sense of restrain that the possibility of forgiveness arises. “Ask in sincerity of heart that God would forgive you,” reports Moroni 6.8. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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Evil Flows from Poisoned Wells; Good Flows from Pure and Crystal Fountains, Dazzling a Silvery Shower of Love and Beauty!

November 2, 2019 1:40 am

We seek to perfect what we are, not to constantly alter it. We seek to find something that is a true expression of our soul with which is to shape what makes up our form. However, there is no need for you to trouble yourself over these things. If your reasoning is correct, it should throw some light upon the peculiar quality of property delinquency in the delinquent subculture. We have already seen how the rewardingness of a college-boy and middle-class way of life depends, to a great extent, upon general respect for property right. In an urban society, in particular, the possession and display of property are the most ready and public badges of reputable social class status and are, for that reason, extraordinarily ego-involved. That property actually is a reward for middle-class morality and the possession of property. The middle-classes have, then, a strong interest in scrupulous regard for property rights, not only because property is intrinsically valuable but because the full enjoyment of their status requires that status be readily recognizable and therefore that property adhere to those who earn it. The cavalier misappropriation or destruction of property, therefore, is not only a diversion or diminution of wealth; it is an attack on the middle-class where their egos are most vulnerable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Group stealing, institutionalized in the delinquent subculture, is not just a way of getting something. It is a means that is the antithesis of sober and diligent labor in a calling. It expresses contempt for a way of life by making its opposite a criterion of status. Money and other valuables are not, as such, despised by the delinquent. For the delinquent, and the non-delinquent alike, money is a most glamorous and efficient means to a variety of ends and one cannot have too much of it. But, in the delinquent subculture, the stolen dollar has an odor of sanctity that does not attach to the dollar saved or the dollar earned. This delinquent system of values and way of life does its job of problem-solving most effectively when it is adopted as a group solution. We have stressed that the efficacy of a given change in values as a solution and therefore the motivation to such a change depends heavily upon the availability of reference groups within which the deviant values are already institutionalized, or whose members would stand to profit from such a system of deviant values if each were assured of the support and concurrences of the others. So it is with delinquency. We do not suggest that joining in the creation or perpetuation of a delinquent subculture is the only road to delinquency. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

We do believe, however, that for most delinquents delinquency would not be available as a response were it not socially legitimized and given a kind of respectability, albeit by a restricted community of fellow-adventurers. In this respect, the adoption of delinquency is like the adoption of the practice of appearing at the office in open-collar and shirt sleeves. It is much more comfortable, is it more sensible than full regalia? Is it neat? Is it dignified? The arguments in the affirmative will appear much more forceful if the practice is already established in one’s milieu or if one sense that others are prepared to go along if someone makes the first tentative gestures. Indeed, to many of those who sweat and chafe in ties and jackets, the possibility of an alternative may not even occur until they discover that it has been adopted by their colleagues. This way of looking at delinquency suggests an answer to a certain paradox. Countless mothers have protested that their “Simon” was a good boy until he fell in love it a certain bunch. However, the mothers of each of Simon’s companions hold the same view with respect to their own offspring. It is conceivable and even probable that some of these mothers are naïve, that one or more of these youngsters are “rotten apples” who infected the others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

We suggest, however, that all of the mothers may be right, that there is a chemistry in the group situation itself which engenders that which was not there before, that group interaction is a sort of catalyst which releases potentialities not otherwise visible. This is especially true when we are dealing with a problem of status-frustration. Status, by definition, is a grant of respect from others. A new system of norms, which measure status by criteria which one can meet, is of no value unless others are prepared to apply those criteria, and others are not likely to do so unless one is prepared to reciprocate. We have referred to a lingering ambivalence in the delinquent’s own value system, an ambivalence which threatens the adjustment one has achieved and which is met through the mechanism of reaction-formation. The delinquent may have to contend with another ambivalence, in the area of one’s status sources. The delinquent subculture offers him status as against other children of whatever social level, but is offers hum this status in the eyes of one’s fellow delinquents only. To the extent that there remains a desire for recognition from groups whose respect has been forfeited by commitment to a new subculture, one’s satisfaction in one’s solution is imperfect and adulterated. One can perfect one’s solution only by rejecting as status sources those who reject one. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

This too may require a certain measure of reaction-formation, going beyond indifference to active hostility and contempt for all those who do not share one’s subculture. One becomes all the more dependent upon one’s delinquent gang. Outside that gang one’s status position is now weaker than ever. The gang itself tends toward a kind of sectarian solidarity, because the benefits of membership can only be realized in active face-to-face relationships with group members. This interpretation of the delinquent subculture had important implications for the sociology of social problems. People are prone to assume that those things which we define as evil and those which we define as good have their origins in separate and distinct features of our society. Evil flows from poisoned wells; good flows from pure and crystal fountains. The same source cannot feed both. Our view is different. It holds that those values which are at the core of the American way of life, which help to motivate the behavior which we most esteem as typically American, are among the major determinants of that which we stigmatize as pathological. More specifically, it holds that the problems of adjustments to which the delinquent subculture is a response are determined, in part, by those very values which respectable society holds most sacred. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

The same value system, impinging upon children differently equipped to meet it, is instrumental in generating both delinquency and respectability. The rebel insists that one’s identity be respected; one fights to preserve one’s intellectual and spiritual integrity against the suppressive demands of one’s society. One must range oneself against the group which represents to one conformism, adjustment, and the death of one’s own originality and voice. Continuously through human history and through the life-span of each one of us, there goes on this dialectical process between individual and society, person and group, being and community. When either pole of the dialectic is neglected, impoverishment of the personality sets in. Every being has from time to time impulses to shock one’s society, fantasies of outraging one’s neighbors. Paradoxically enough, one’s own continued mental vitality depends on this. Also, paradoxically, the community itself, even though it condemns the outrage, gets its health, vitality and new growth from the outrage. This shows once again that human beings do not grow in one-dimensional fashion toward something better and better, but rather by a dynamic process, a thesis and antithesis; they grow down at the same time as they grow up, deeper while they grow higher. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

The Garden of Eden myth portrays the rebellion as being against God. And, indeed, it is against authority, against the status quo, against whatever clings to the values of the past rather than looks to the future. What is omitted from the rhetoric in this rebellion is that the outcome is not either/or, but a dialectical interplay: we need authority as we rebel against it. We rebel against the culture with the very language and knowledge that we learned from the culture; we revolve against or parents while loving them at the same time. The rebel also needs one’s society. One’s language, one’s concepts, one’s way of relating to others all come from that culture which one now opposes. One rises from the society, criticizes it, and aligns oneself with those who are trying to reform it; and all the while one is a member of the very culture one opposes. If one thinks of civilization as ungrateful in killings its prophets, one also sees the absurdity of the whole question of gratitude or ingratitude in the behavior of the rebel. This is why I call the relationship dialectic. It is a dynamic interrelationship in which each pole exists by virtue of the other pole—as one changes, the other does likewise. Beings therefore have a right to fear that society may unhuman them. Yet no being has made the best of one’s gifts without the setting [up] of a helpful society, such as the Greek or the Italian city states. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Always the animal drive for self, the jungle of nature, waits to disrupt one’s city. And yet that force, anti-social as it is, is not all alien or all bad. The mind that drives it is full of human wishes. The Greeks remembered that every mind, good as well as bad, takes strength from our animal body. It is the nature of society to suppress that individual person. Pointing this out, it is a surprise that people do often talk as through the group ought to behave differently. Society can be spoken of as being bureaucratic, juggernaut, supertechnocratic, all implying that while society has its faults, we are what we are. On one hand, this arises from a utopianism—the expectation that when we develop a society which trains us rightly, we will all be in fine shape. On the other hand, it is like a child wheeling one’s parents because they are not taller or in some other way different from what they are. All of which society cannot be expected to be. For society, on one side, is us. The rebel is a split personality that one realizes one’s society nursed one, met one’s needs, and gave one security to develop one’s potentialities; yet one smarts under its constraints and finds it stifling. The rebel is continually struggling to make the society into a community. People feel they rebel, therefore they exist. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

In our particular day, the rebel fights the mechanizing bureaucratic trends not because these in themselves are evil, but because they are the paramount modern channels for the dehumanizing of beings, the stultifying loss of integrity, and the indignity of beings. One fights affluence for a similar reason, for one thinks that an abundance of wealthy may erode power, and riches are particularly dangerous for the well-being of republics because corruption has a tendency to set in and take precedence over justice, family values and human rights. The rebel also may be found in the colorful, albeit sometimes tattered, clothes of the dropout. The young person rightly sensing the threat to one’s values and to one’s life in the Syrian war, pollution, and the dehumanization which seems to accompany our vast technological progress, drops out of society for a period. One’s action is protest against the rigidity of society, but it is also a time in which one can find oneself. It is similar to the withdrawal of Jesus to the wilderness to find inner integrity before beginning their ministries. It is also similar to that period of wandering taken by the students of the Middle Ages as an integral part of their education. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

True, the dropout can never completely deny one’s culture, never entirely sever one’s umbilical cord. One takes it with one to the mountain or the dessert in one’s language, one’s way of thinking, and even as an object against which to protest. However, in one’s withdrawal one can get new perspective, a new awareness of oneself which may stand one in very good stead later on. I have had the impression in talking with hipsters that for some of them the year or so they dropped out protected them from psychosis. It gave them some breathing time in the burdensome sequence of nursery, elementary school, high school, college, graduate school—during which many of them find themselves in a genuine danger of suffocation. Often the dropping out serves a purpose similar to psychoanalysis. No one would argue that the dropout has not selected a more satisfactory way of working things out, not to say less expensive for all concerned, than a stint in a mental hospital. It is entirely possible that one comes back from one’s seemingly lighthearted wanderings with a new seriousness in one’s relationship to oneself and one’s society. Human beings can be conditioned into any form of Nazilike obedience or antlike organization of colonies. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

However, we must not forget at the same moment that there are individuals who from time to time pull themselves and oppose the group even to the extent of going to prison. Edward Snowden, the Berrigan brothers, and Bonhoeffer come to mind. Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to make the Pentagon Papers available to the people was the one tangible step he felt he could take to shorten the Vietnam war. Some people become rebels because they have empathy for the suffering of people, especially helpless children. Rebellion can be a flamboyant, long struggle for psychological integrity. However, whatever the motives, it is clear that rebels step out because in many cases they are performing acts against law and order. With social media, people are less dependent on the news because they can get their points out using mass communication and modern technology in the service of the rebellion. There is no escape from living through this dialectical conflict of individual and society. The only choice is whether one will live it through constructively and with zest and dignity or waste one’s energy and substance protesting against a Universe which is not organized according to one’s living. No matter how much society is changed—and much of it cries to high Heaven for change—there still will exist the fundamental dialectical situation of individuation against the conformist, leveling tendencies of the society. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Some societies have recognized and made allowance for the destructive, protesting, anarch needs of the citizens. Then you get situations like what is going on in China. Tens of thousands of protesters in Hong Kong are peacefully marching on the 22^nd anniversary of the former colony’s handover from Britain to China, but also a group of protestors took their frustrations out, as hundreds of young protestors broke into the heart of the government of Hong Kong’s legislative council. We need our ways of mocking authority. We have our Halloween and April Fools’ Day. However, we need ways of channeling our secret dreams of outraging our neighbors and scandalizing the town fathers—in short, of symbolically expressing our dreams of revenge on a society that thwarts and confines us. An interesting example of this is the scapegoat king, who accepts the scepter knowing that he will be killed during some riotous saturnalia in which all authority is mocked. And consider the mocking of ultimate religious authority in the crucifixion of God’s son, Jesus. The expression of our disdain and mocking—indeed, of all these so-called negative and destructive emotions—enables us then to see and experience more clearly the beneficial side of religious conviction. We can change the forms of these beneficial and negative sides of human nature, but we cannot change the fact of them without amputating part of human experience and impoverishing ourselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Are not the excesses in American life—one of which is violence—symptoms in part of a lack of sound opportunities to let out the secret dreams of revenge on the society that thwarts and contains the individual. You cannot in fact bottle up these deep feelings of protest in a World as mechanical as ours and think that you will syphon them off casually in lacy thrillers and in little evasins of the forces of order. Anti-social feelings in a hierarchy society like ours are first a power, then a commodity on which some unscrupulous leader can raise to fame, and become the spokes persons for the dream of violence of all the underrepresented. The recognition of the value of the rebel would go a long way in channeling such daimonic forces in constructive directions. For the rebel does what the rest of us would like to do but do not dare. Not that Christ willingly takes on Himself the sins and the scorns of beings; He acts, lives, and dies, vicariously for the rest of us. This is what makes Him a rebel. The rebel and the savior then turn out to be the same figure. Through his rebellion the rebel saves us. We see here another demonstration of my previous thesis—that civilization needs the rebel. The possibilities of the human being are unlimited, and that statement can be de-energizing. If you take it at face value, there is no real problem anymore. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Every problem will sooner or later be overcome by these unlimited possibilities; there remain only temporary difficulties that will go away on their own accord when the time comes. Saying that possibilities are unlimited to a person who has not figured out how to overcome a situation, however, is like putting someone into a canoe and pushing one out into the Atlantic toward England with the cheery comment, “The sky is the limit.” The canoer is only too aware of the fact that an inescapably real limit is also the bottom of the ocean. There is the inescapable physical limitation of death. We can postpone our death slightly, but nevertheless each of us will die and at some future time unknow to and unpredictable by us. Sickness is another limit. When we overwork, we get ill in one form or another. There are obvious neurological limits. If the blood stops flowing to the brain for as little as a couple of minutes, a stroke or some other kind of serious damage occurs. Despite the fact that we can improve our intelligence to some degree, it remains radically limited by our physical and emotional environment. There are also metaphysical limitations which are even more interesting. We can blind ourselves to reality and come to grief. True, we can surpass to some extent the limitations of our family backgrounds or our historical situations, but such transcendence can occurs only to those who accept the fact of their limitation to begin with. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

For seekers of truth, real fruit is only borne when one seeks within, for the indwelling God, who author of our soul. The question of how far one will be prepared to travel in this quest has no geographical reference. It is a metaphorical one and refers only to the time one can give each day to the exercises, studies, and devotions, as well as to the moral ideals one can bring oneself to pursue. One is not asked for more than one feels one can humanly give under one’s present circumstances and responsibilities. We do not need to cross the sea to find God—the Word is nigh thee, is in thy heart. To come to know our true divine power, we must continually become something greater and therefore that which we were must come to an end. Immortality through it sounds good on the surface in an exoteric sense is truly the source of attachment and fear of change. Embracing God is overcoming perfection. Through the depths of your soul you must also come to realize that all systems of enslavement which emanate from this concept of external divinity are equally useless when compared to your potential. Simply reading and understanding it intellectually is not enough. It must be experiences through the work itself so that you have become stronger in faith, so strong that you can rise above stress and anxiety. “They were in captivity, and again the Lord did deliver them out of bondage by the power of his word; and we were brought into this land, and here we began to establish the church of God throughout this land also,” reports Alma 5.5. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

Stop and Consider Life is but a Day—A Lovely Tale of Human Life We Will Read!

October 17, 2019 1:29 am

Not twenty minutes has passed since you left me here in the café, since I said No to your request, that I would never write out for you the story of my mortal life. Now here I am with your notebook open, using one of the sharp pointed eternal ink pens you left me, delighted at the sensuous press of the black ink into the expensive and flawless white paper. Naturally, David, you would leave me something elegant, an inviting page. This notebook bound in dark varnished leather, is it not, tolled with a design of rich roses, thornless, yet leafy, a design that means only Design in the final analysis but bespeaks an authority. What is written beneath this heavy and handsome book cover will count, sayeth this cover. The thick pages are ruled in light blue—you are practical, so thoughtful, and you probably know I almost never put pen to paper to write anything at all. Even the sound of the pen has its allure, the sharp scratch rather like the finest quills in ancient Rome when I would put them to parchment to write my letters to my Father, when I would write in a diary my own laments…ah, that sound. The only think missing here is the smell of the ink, but we have the fine plastic pen which will not run out for volumes, making as fine and deep a black mark as I choose to make. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

I am thinking about your request in writing. You see you will get something from me. I find myself yielding to it. The questions of social isolation and loneliness in senior years will be discussed here. A distinction is made between the two: to be socially isolated is to have few contacts with family and community; to be lonely is to have an unwelcome feeling of lack or loss of companionship. The one is objective, the other subjective and, as we shall see, the two do not coincide. The poorest people, socially as well as financially, were those most isolated from family life. Social isolation needs to be measured by reference to objective criteria. The problem is rather like that of measuring poverty. “Poverty” is essentially a relative rather than an absolute term, and discovering its extent in a population is usually divided into two stages. Most people agree on the first stage, which is to place individuals on a scale according to their income; they often disagree about the second, which involved deciding how far up the scale the poverty “line” should be drawn. They task of measuring isolation can also be divided in this way by placing individuals on a scale according to their degree of isolation and by drawing a line at some point on the scale so that those below the line would, by common consent, be called “isolated.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

There were 20 people who were very isolated. Their ages ranged from 64 to 83. They comprised two married women, two widowers, eight widows, five spinsters and three bachelors. Thirteen of them lived alone; 12 had no children and half of the rest had sons only. It is worth examining their circumstances, taking first those with children. Four of the eight with surviving children had daughters. One was a widow living with her only daughter, unmarried; she had few other relatives and all lived outside London. The second was a widow who had come with her only daughter from Scotland after the war, leaving friends and relatives behind. They were together until the housing authorities of her daughter’s children lived with her but she saw the rest of the family once a week or less. The third was a very infirm widow whose only daughter was married to a naval officer, obliged to live near Portsmouth; she lived in the same house as a widowed and childes sister and saw her every day but infirmity prevented other social contacts. The fourth was a widower of 80 who said his daughter and son living in Bethnal Green visited him twice a week to see he was all right but did not spend much time with him, now his wife was dead; he had a drink with a friend twice a week but infirmity precluded other activities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The other four very isolated people with children had sons only. One was a married woman whose only son had moved into his wife’s home district outside London; she and her husband had only one relative in Bethanl Green, the wife’s unmarried sister, who was seen each week, and they had no friends or outside social activities, largely because the husband could not walk. Another was a widower, living with an unmarried son, who saw two married sons about once a week; he had no other surviving relatives. The two remaining people were both widows living alone. One had three sons living outside London, two of them visited her once a week; she saw a sister and two mature aunts in Bethnal Green every week but she spent much of her time on her own. The other had two illegitimate sons but no other relatives; she saw these sons occasionally. There remained the childless and the unmarried. Most were in a worse position. The 10 most isolated people of the 203 interviewed were all unmarried or childless. The circumstances of two are summarized below. Miss Paley, 67 years of age, lived in a one bedroom flat. It was a large airless room with dismal orange-brown wallpaper peeling off in huge strips. Two or three mats, ingrained with dirt, covered the floor. There was an old iron bedstead propped up in the middle by two bits of wood and on this was a heap of gray and brown blankets. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

An ancient iron mangle stood in a corner and there was a gas stove, a gas mantel for lighting, three or four wooden chairs and a table with a flat-iron propping up one of its legs. Miss. Paley wore a pair of stockings, extensively patched and tied around her knees, and a ramshackle navy-blue skirt and slip. Her skin had the whiteness of someone who rarely went out and she was very shy of her appearance, particularly the open sores on her face. She said she suffered from blood poisoning, but had not seen her doctor since the war. (This was confirmed by the doctor.) She was the only child of parents who had been street traders and who had died when she was young, in the 1880s, “I was with my aunt until I was nearly 40. She was 85 when she died. I had cousins in the street traders and who had died. I had cousins in the street but they were my aunt’s children. In the war they got scattered. They all had families to bring up and I have not met them since the war. I do not know where they are. I do my work in my own way. They would not have the patience with me.” Persistent questioning failed to reveal a singe relative with whom she has any contact. She did not g to the cinema, to a club or to church, and had no radio. She had spent Christmas on her own and had never had a holiday away from home. She sometimes made conversation with her neighbors in the street but because of her appearance did not go into their homes or hers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

She had only one friend, a young woman who “used to live in the street where I lived,” and they visited one another about once a week. Her answer to a question about membership of a club was typical of much she said. “No, I cannot be shut in. I do not go to those clubs. They had been too much excitement for me.” At one point she said she went to bed about 8pm and got up between 10am and 11am the next day. I also found she had an hour or two in bed in the afternoons.” Mr. Fortune, 76 years of age, lived alone in a two-room council flat. There were two wooden chairs, an orange box converted into a cupboard, a gas stove, a table covered with newspaper, a battered old pram with tins and boxes inside, a pair of wooden steps and little else in the sitting-room. There was no fire, although the interview took place on a cold February morning. Mr. Fortune had been a cripple from birth and he was partly deaf. He was unmarried and his give siblings were dead. An older widowed sister-in-law lived about a mile away with an unmarried son and daughter. These three and two married nieces living in another East London borough were seen from once a month to a few times a year. Asked how often he saw his sister-in-law Mr. Fortune said, “Only when I go there. It is a hard job to walk down there in the Winter time and I have not seen her for three of four months.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Asked about a gentleman’s club Mr. Fortune said, “No. I am simply as I am now. I should not like to join. Walking is such a painful job for me. I cannot get any amusement out of it.” He spoke to one or two of the neighbors outside his flat but he had no regular contact with any of them. He had one regular friend, living a few blocks away, who came over to see him on a Sunday about once a month, “more when there is fine weather.” He was not a churchgoer, never went to a cinema, rarely went to a pub because he could not afford a drink, had never had a holiday in his life and spent Christmas on his own. “My nephew came down for an hour. He gave me a little present, a Digital Storm Lynx Gaming PC, and the Canon EOS 6D Digital SLR Camera. No, I did not get any cards.” He received a non-contributory pension and supplementary assistance through the National Assistance Board, which recently arranged for him to have a woman home-help for two hours a week. Her regular call was the main event of the week. “I sit here messing about. Last week I was making an indoor aerial. I made those steps over there. I like listening to the wireless and making all manners of things. My time is taken up, I can tell you, with that and cooking and tidying-up.” The most striking fact about the most isolated people was that they had few surviving relatives, particularly near relatives of their own or of succeeding generations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

This lent special significance to familiar references to fathers having weaker ties with children than mothers, to sons being drawn into their wives’ families, and to distant relatives being lost sight of after the death of “connecting” relatives. The isolated included a comparatively high number of unmarried and childless people, of those possessing sons but not daughters and of those without siblings. Rarely did they have friends, become members of clubs or otherwise participate in outside social activities in compensation. Nearly all of them where retired and most were infirm; some were why of revealing to others how ill or poverty-stricken they were or how they have “let themselves go.” They had little or no means of regular contact with the younger generation, and for one reason or another could not be brought into club activities. One of the most striking results of the whole inquiry was that those living in relative isolation from family and community did not always say they were lonely. Particular importance was attached during the interviews to “loneliness.” The question was not asked until most of an individual’s activities had been discussed and care was taken to ensure as serious and as considered a response as possible. One difficulty had to be overcome. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

A few people liked to let their children think they were lonely so the latter would visit them as much as possible. If children were present, this meant they were not inclined to give an honest answer. In an early interview one married woman, asked whether she ever got lonely, said, “Sometimes I do when they are all at work.” However, she hesitated before answering and looked at two married daughters, who were in the room. When this woman was alone, on a subsequent call, she told me she was “never lonely really, but I like my children to call.” When interviewed, a widow who was along, said she was never lonely. In fascinating contrast to this was a statement of one of her married daughters, who was interviewed independently. “She is not too badly off. The most she complains of is loneliness. She is always wanting us to go up there.” When the senior was alone, care was therefore taken to ask about loneliness so far as possible, and to check any answer which seemed doubtful. Some people living at the center of a large family complained of loneliness and some who were living in extreme isolation repeated several times with vigor that they were never lonely—such as Miss Paley and Mr. Fortune, described above. Despite there being a significant association between isolation and loneliness about a half of the isolated and rather isolated said they were not lonely; over a fifth of the first group said they were. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Spirituality is something that can keep people from being lonely. When it liberates one from the yoke of the commandments to the freedom of the Spirit, the work of the Spiritual Presence in a being reaches its height. This is like a release from the sentence of death to a new life. A tremendous experience lies behind such words, an experience in which we all can share, but one that is rare in its full depth, and is then a revolutionary power that, through beings like Paul and Augustine and Luther, changes the Spiritual World, and, through it, the history of humankind. Can we, you and I, share in such an experience? First, have we not all felt the deadening power of the written code, written not only in the ten commandments and their many interpretations in the Bible and history, but also with the authoritative pen of parents and society into the unconscious depths of our being, recognized by our conscience judging us by what we do and, above all, by what we are? Nobody can flee from the voice of this written code, written internally as well as externally. And if we try to silence it, to close our ears against it, the Spirit itself frustrates these attempts, opening our ears to the cries of our true being of that which we are and ought to be in the sight of eternity. We cannot escape this judgment against us. The Spirit itself, using the written code, makes this impossible. For the Spirit does not give life without having led us through the experience of Hell. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

And certainly, the written code in its threatening majesty has the power to kill. It kills the joy of fulfilling our being by imposing upon us something we feel as hostile. It kills the freedom of answering creatively what we encounter in things and beings by making us look at a table of laws. It kills our ability to listen to the calling of the moment, to the voiceless voice of others, and to the here and now. It kills our courage to act through the scruples of our anxiety-driven conscience. And among those who take it most seriously, it kills faith and hope, and throws them into self-condemnation and despair. There is no way out from the written code. The Spirit itself prevents us from becoming compromisers, half fulfilling, half defying the commandments. The Spirit itself calls us back when we try to escape into indifference, or lawlessness, or (most usually) average self-righteousness. However, when the Spirit calls us back, it does so not in order to hold us within the written code, but in order to give us life. How can we describe the life that the Spirit gives us? I could use many words, well known to everybody, spoken by Paul himself, and after him by the great preachers and teachers of the church. I could say that the work of the Spirit, liberating us from the law, is freedom. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Or I could say that its work is faith, or that its work is grace, and above all, that the Spirit creates love, the love in which all laws are confirmed and fulfilled and at the same time overcome. However, if I used such words, the shadow of the absent God would appear and make you and me aware that we cannot speak like this today. If we did, freedom would be distorted into willfulness, faith into belief in the absurd, hope into unreal expectations, and love—the word I would like most to use for the creation of the Spirit—into sentimental feeling. The Spirit must give us new words, or revitalize old words to express true life. We must wait for them; we must pray for them; we cannot force them. However, we know, in some moments of our lives, what life is. We know that it is great and holy, deep and abundant, ecstatic and sober, limited and distorted by time, fulfilled by eternity. And if the right words fail us in the absence of God, we may look without words at the image one in whom the Spirit and the Life are manifest without limits. One responds to the inner call according to one’s capacity, history, one’s circumstances and perspective. There was a British doctor, George Pickering, who wrote a book called Creative Malady, subtitled “Illness in the Lives and Minds of Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

In this book, the successful people we listened are covered, but the author could have added Mozart, Chopin, and Beethoven—these were all writers and musicians who had a malady, and George Pickering, the author, points out that each one suffered severe illness and met it constructively in creativity and in contribution to our culture. Pickering speaks of his own arthritic hips as “an ally,” and he “put them to bed,” he said, “when they become painful.” In bed he cannot attend committee meetings; cannot see patients or entertain visitors. He adds, “These are the ideal conditions for creative work—freedom from intrusion, freedom from the ordinary chores of life.” Now you have many questions in your mind about what I am saying, and I certainly had, and have, many questions also. Otto Rank, as a matter of fact, wrote a whole book, Art and Artist, on [these ideas]…Overcoming neurosis and creating art are identical things in Rank’s work. What I am doing tonight is challenging our whole view of health in our culture. We keep people living day after day because we think it is simply the number of days you live. We struggle to invent ways to live longer, as though infirmary were the ultimate enemies. Our health is our only priority. If we obey the dying nurse, whose constant care is not to please, but to remind of ours, and Adam’s curse and that to be restored, our we must heal and grow better. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

These are tremendously significant things—if you can take them in. When we think about Adam’s curse, this is referring to the fact that we are all the ultimate children of the myth of Adam—this is called in words that do not sound very nice anymore—this is called original sin, and the whole idea is that life is not a question of how long you live. It is not a question of how many days you can add. Many people would much prefer to go when their work is finished—to die—but what this verse is trying to say is that disease and illness mean something quite different from what most people in our Faustian civilization take then to mean. As alienating as illness is, it can also be a connecting of ourselves with new others on a new and deeper level. We see this in compassion. Creativity is one of the products of the right relationship between nature and infinity within us. We see also another gift which Fromm Reichmann certainly had, which Abe Maslow had, which Harry Stack Sullivan had—the gift of compassion, the ability to feel with other people, the ability to understand their problems—this is the other quality that makes a good psychiatrist. The experience of degeneration and of chaos is, I hope, temporary, but this can often be used as a way of reforming or reorganizing ourselves on a higher level. The Gods return in our charity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

It is fair for each of us to ask ourselves what do we bring to the quest: what equipment, qualities, and virtues to entitle me to ask for the results I seek? When the sublime light of the Ideal shines down upon one and one has the courage to look at one’s own image by it, one will doubtless make some humiliating discoveries about oneself. One will find that one is worse than one believed and not so wise as one thought oneself to be. However, such discoveries are all to the good. For only then can one know what one is called upon to do and set to work following their pointers in self-improvement. However deep one’s commitment to the quest may be, one will have to reckon with one’s own frailties and one’s environmental pressures. The great being knows one has limitations, one knows one’s defects and faults—but one is not afraid of them. Paint me as I am, lips and all. All do not start with equal capacities for the quest. Each is qualified to go only a certain distance upon it. Those who exaggerate their capacities harm themselves by the presumption. Those who underrate them practise a false modesty. It is an error either to deceive oneself about one’s aspirations or to deter oneself unduly. Hope is good for beings: it confers endurance, spurs beneficial attitudes, and urges endeavour upon one. However, if its base is ungrounded fancy and extravagant wishes, one is hurt rather than benefited by it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Begin by admitting that one knows really little or nothing about your deeper mind. That is better than learned tall talk. It is much easier to set oneself a discipline than to keep it. This will engage one’s own creative faculties through application, and will further unite physical and spiritual discipline in order to create a dynamic of synergy which will assist in tearing the veil between physical and spiritual realms. Powerful changes will begin to take place within you and your life experience as you start to integrate and merge with these spiritual forces. When the inner blessings spills from the crown into outer darkness then mold and shape the energy of the spirit as a clear vision of what you want to achieve or accomplish through your process of prayer. The energy of God is then grounded by reversing negativity and moving more spiritual harmony in your being. Our faith feeds and grows in power as our consciousness expands. Every human being is an emanation of the void and unlimited possibility. As out consciousness expands, we unite and the knowledge of all and eternity becomes ours once again. We are simply taking back infernal wisdom which was ours to begin with. “Hear and know the commandments of God, and stir them up in remembrance of the oath which they have made,” reports Mosiah 6.3. However, when a being turns belief in the superior knowledge of the guide into belief in the virtual omniscience of the guide, it is dangerous. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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Thee for Enlivening All the Cheerful Eyes that Glance so Brightly at the New Sun-Rise!

October 13, 2019 12:13 am

All my life I had believed in Heaven and Hell. Did Heaven look down upon this metamorphosis? We have described some of the effects of migration. People’s relatives are no longer neighbors sharing the intimacies of daily life. Their new neighbors are strangers, drawn from every part of the East End, and they are, as we have seen, treated with reserve. In point of services, neighbors do not make up for kin. Our informants were so eager to talk about their neighbors, and generally about their attitude to other residents on the estate, that we feel bound to report them. They frequently complained of the unfriendliness of the place, which they found all the more mysterious because it was so different from Bethnal Green. Why should Greenleigh be considered so unfriendly? The prevailing attitude is expressed by Mr. Morrow. “You cannot get away from it, they are not so friendly down here. It is not ‘Hello, Joe,’ ‘Hello, mate.’ They pass you with a side-glance as though they do not know you.” And by Mr. Adams. “We all come from the slums, not Park Lane, but they do not mix. In Bethnal Green you always used to have a little laugh on the doorstep. There is none of that in Greenleigh. You are English, but you feel like a foreigner here, I do not know why. Up there you had lived for years, and you knew how to deal with the people there. People here are different.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

And by Mr. Prince. “The neighbors round here are very quiet. They all keep themselves to themselves. They all come from the East End but they all seem to chance when they come down here.” Of the 41 couples, 23 considered that other people were unfriendly, eight were undecided one way or another and ten considered them friendly: the recorded opinions are those of the couples because in no interview did husband and wife appear to hold strongly different view. How does this majority who consider their fellow residents unfriendly feel about themselves? Do they also label themselves unfriendly? No one admits it, some indignantly deny it. If they are hostile themselves, they do not acknowledge it, but attribute the feelings to others. Yet they mostly reveal that their own behavior is the same as they resent in others; that (since others are unfriendly) to withdraw will avoid trouble and keep the peace; that coexistence is safer, because more realistic, than cooperation. “The policy here is do not have a lot to do with each other, then there will not be any trouble,” says Mr. Chortle succinctly. Neurotic conflicts may be concerned with the same general problems as perplex the normal person. However, they are so different in kind that the question has been raised whether it is permissible to use the same term for both. I believe it is, but we must be aware of the differences. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

This attitude is supported by reference to the skirmishes and back-biting which have resulted from being “too friendly” in the past. “It is better if you just talk to neighbors and do not get too friendly,” concludes Mr. Sandeman from his past experience. “You stop friends if you do not get to know them well. When you get to know then you are always getting little troubles breaking out. I have had too much of that and so I am not getting too friendly now.” Mr. Young told his wife, “When I walk into these four walls, I always tell her ‘Do not make too many friends. They turn out to be enemies.’” And one experience had turned Mr. Yule into a recluse. “We do not mix very well in this part of the estate. At first I used to lend every Tom, Dick, and Harry all my tools or lawn mower or anything. Then I had $1,000 pinched from my wallet. Now we do not want to know anyone—we keep ourselves to ourselves. There is a good old saying—the Englishman’s home is his castle. It is very true.” Usually the troubles are shadowy affairs which have always happened to people other than oneself. “We are friendly,” says Mr. Oliver in the usual style, “But we do not get too involved, because we have found that causes gossip and trouble. We have seen it happen with other people, so we do not want it to happen to us. Now we keep ourselves to ourselves.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Whatever the justification, the result is the same. People do not treat others either as enemies or friends. They are wary, though polite. They pass the time of day in the road. They have an occasional word over the fence or a chat at the garden gate. They nod to each other in the shops. Neighbors even borrow and lend little things to each other, and when this accommodation is refused, it is a sign that acquaintance has turned into enmity. Mrs. Chortle has broken off trading as well as diplomatic relations with one of her neighbors. “These people are very dirty,” she said, “and I have told the I do not want to borrow or lend.” So has Mrs. Morrow, for the different reason that “Just because they have got a couple of ha’pence more than you they do not want to know you. In Bethnal Green it was different—neighbors were more friendly.” Even where relations have not been served, there is little of the mateyness so characteristic of Bethnal Green. Mr. Stirling summed it up by remarking, “I do not mind saying hello to any of them, or passing the time of say with them, but if they do not want to have anything to do with me, I do not want to have anything to do with them. I am not bothered about them. I am only interested in my little family. My wife and my two children—they are the people that I care about. My life down here is my home.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Women feel the lack of friends, as of kin, more keenly than their menfolk. Those who do not follow their husbands into the society of the workplace—and loneliness is one of the common reasons for doing so—have to spend their day alone, “looking at ourselves all day,” as they say. In one interview the husband was congratulating himself on having a house, a garden, a bathroom and a TV—“the tellie is a bit of a friend down here”—when his wife broke in to say,” It is all right for you. What about the time I have to spend here on my own?” This difference in their life may cause sharp contention, especially in the early years. “When we first came,” said Mrs. Haddon, “I have just had the baby and it was all a misery, not knowing anyone. I sat on the stairs and cried my eyes out. For the first two years we were swaying whether to go back. I wanted to and my husband did not. We used to have terrible arguments about it. I use to say, “It is all right for you. I have to sit here all day. You do get a break.’” Not that all women resent it. A few, like Mrs. Painswick, actually welcome seclusion. She had been more averse to the quarrels amongst the “rowdy, shouty” Bethnal Greeners than appreciative of the mateyness to which quarrels are the counterpart, and finds the less intense life of Greenleigh a pleasant contrast. “In London people had more squabbles. We have not seen neighbors out here having words.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

What, then, are the characteristics of neurotic conflicts? A somewhat simplified example by way of illustration: An engineer working in collaboration with others at mechanical research was frequently afflicted by spells of fatigue and irritability. One of these spells was brought about by the following incident. In a discussion of certain technical matters his opinion were less well received than those of his colleagues. Shortly afterward a decision was made in his absence, and no opportunity was given him subsequently to present his suggestions. Under these circumstances, he could have regarded the procedure as unjust and put up a fight, or he could have accepted the majority decision with good grace. Either reaction would have been consistent. However, he did neither. Though he felt deeply slighted, he did not fight. Consciously he was mere aware of being irritated. The murderous rage within him appeared only in his dreams. This repressed rage—a composite of his fury against the others and of his fury against himself for his own meekness—was mainly responsible for his fatigue. His failure to react consistently was determined by a number of factors. He had built up a grandiose image of himself that required deference from others to support. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

This self-inflated image was, of course, unconscious at the time: he simply acted on the premise that there was nobody as intelligent and competent in his field as he was. Any slight could jeopardize this premise and provoke rage. Furthermore, he had unconscious sadistic impulses to berate and humiliate others—an attitude so objectionable to him that he covered it up by overfriendliness. To this was added an unconscious drive to exploit people, making it imperative for him to keep in their good graces. The dependence on others was aggravated by a compulsive need for approval and affection, combined as it usually is with attitudes of compliance, appeasement, and avoidance of fight. There was thus a conflict between destructive aggression—reactive rage and sadistic impulses—on the one hand, and on the other the need for affection and approval, with a desire to appear fair and rational in his own eyes. The result was inner upheaval that went unnoticed, while the fatigue that was its external manifestation paralyzed all action. Looking at the factors involved in the conflict, we are struck first by their absolute incompatibility. It would be difficult indeed to imagine more extreme opposites than lordly demands for deference and ingratiating submissiveness. Second, the whole conflict remains unconscious. The contradictory tendencies operating in it are not recognize but are deeply repressed. Only slight bubbles of the battle raging within reach the surface. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The emotional factors are rationalized: it is an injustice; it is a slight; my ideas were better. Third, the tendencies in both directions are compulsive. Even if he had some intellectual perception of his excessive demands, or of the existence and the nature of his dependence, he could not change these factors voluntarily. To be able to change them would require considerable analytical work. He was driven on either hand by compelling forces over which he had no control: he could not possibly renounce any of the needs acquired by stringent inner necessity. However, none of them represented what he himself really wanted or sought. He would want neither to exploit nor to be submissive; as a matter of fact he despised these tendencies. Such a state of affairs, however, has a far-reaching significance for the understanding of neurotic conflicts. It means that no decision is feasible. A further illustration presents a similar picture. A free-lance designer was stealing small sums of money from a good friend. The theft was not warranted by the external situation; he needed the money, but the friend would gladly have given it to him as he had on occasion in the past. That he should resort to stealing was particularly striking in that he was a decent fellow who set great store by friendship. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

The following conflict was at the bottom of it. The man had a pronounced neurotic need for affection, especially a longing to be taken care of in all practical matters. Alloyed as this was with an unconscious drive to exploit others, his technique was to attempt both to endear and intimidate. These tendencies by themselves would have made him willing and eager to receive help and support. However, he had also developed an extreme unconscious arrogance which involved a correspondingly vulnerable pride. Others should feel honored to be of service to him: it was humiliating for him to ask for help. His aversion to having to make a request was reinforced by a strong craving for independence and self-sufficiency that made it intolerable for him to admit he needed anything or to place himself under obligation. So he could take, but not receive. The content of this conflict differs from that of the first example but the essential characteristics are the same. And any other example of neurotic conflict would show like incompatibility of conflicting drives and their unconscious and compulsive nature, leading always to the impossibility of deciding between the contradictory issues involved. Allowing for an indistinct line of demarcation, the difference, then, between normal and neurotic conflicts is possessed fundamentally in the fact that the disparity between the conflicting issues is much less great for the normal person than for the neurotic. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

The choices the former has to make are between two modes of action, either of which is feasible within the frame of a fairly integrated personality. Graphically speaking, the conflicting directions diverge only 90 degrees or less, as against the possible 180 degrees confronting the neurotic. In awareness, too, the differences is one of degree. Real life is far too multifarious to be portrayed by merely exhibiting such abstract contrast as that between a despair which is completely unconscious, and one which is completely conscious. We can say this much, however: a normal conflict can be entirely conscious; a neurotic conflict in all its essential elements is always unconscious. Even though a normal person may be unaware of one’s conflict, one can recognize it with comparatively little help, while the essential tendencies producing a neurotic conflict are deeply repressed and can be unearthed only against great resistance. The normal conflict is concerned with an actual choice between two possibilities, both of which the person finds really desirable, or between convictions, both of which one really values. It is therefore possible for one to arrive at a feasible decision even though it may be hard on one and require a renunciation of some kind. The neurotic person engulfed in a conflict is not free to choose. One is driven by equally compelling forces in opposite directions, neither of which one wants to follow. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

One is driven by equally compelling forces in opposite directions, neither of which one wants to follow. Hence a decision in the usual sense in impossible. One is stranded, with no way out. The conflict can only be resolved by working at the neurotic trends involved, and by so changing one’s relations with others and with oneself that one can dispense with the trends altogether. These characteristics account for the poignancy of neurotic conflicts. Not only are they difficult to recognize, not only to they render a person helpless, but they have as well a disruptive force of which one has good reason to be afraid. Unless we know these characteristics and keep them in mind, we shall not understand the desperate attempts at solution which the neurotic enters upon, and which constitute the major part of a neurosis. Murder rarely fits the stereotype of an unsuspecting, helpless, passive victim stalked by a cold, calculating killer. Most homicides are preceded by angry quarrels in which the victim plays an active part in bringing about one’s own death. Can innocence, once it becomes involved in action, escape murder? This troublesome question confronts us with renewed sharpness after the events of the past years, especially after the Orlando nightclub shooting 12 June 2016. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

However, it is a question that has troubled beings ever since the dawn of consciousness and the forming, in our forefathers’ minds, of the legend of the Garden of Eden. When we take an endeavor to resolve the knotty question, we wonder does the victim, for example, have anything to do with making oneself the victim? The question takes us into the very heart of the meaning of innocence. Does the virgin herself, beyond flirting, constitute the challenge to the man to end her virginity? Is not innocence curiously bound up with murder in the ritual of sacrifice in practically all cultures? What is the meaning of the phenomenon to be found in the dim beginnings of human history and coming down to this very hour of sacrificing virgins and youths to the Cretan Minotaur or the Moloch of modern walfare? When we push the question of innocence and murder to the furthest reaches of human consciousness, we may find it to be one of those perdurable problems that we cannot answer satisfactorily via intellect alone but must live the questions now. Perhaps you will then live along some distant day into the answer. However, in our endeavor to think it through, we can expect new light to be thrown on the mainsprings of violence. Most important of all, an analysis of the problem of innocence and murder foreshadows the emergence of new ethics for the coming age. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Innocence is generosity, especially in children, who can still believe and trust since they have yet to experience that betrayal which leads to cynicism. Innocence has to do with the heart in that it is a feeling state, a way of perceiving life rather than a calculation. It is “virgin” in that it is before the awakening to the vast possibilities in life for sensuality, tenderness, exploitation, and betrayal. The lack of experience in pleasures of the flesh has historically been taken for the symbol of innocence, although it should be remembered that it is a symbol and not the content. Innocence is, in addition, a condition of powerlessness. One of our problems, as we discuss innocence, will be to establish the extent to which this powerlessness is capitalized on by the innocent person. The question is: How far is innocence used as a strategy of living? When we reflect on the shooting at Kent State in 1970, we immediately see a demonstration of part of our thesis. This is possessed in the fact that two of the four students killed were not involved in the protest at all. One was dressed in his Reserve Officer raining Corps (ROTC) uniform and was going across that campus to take a test in war tactics, and another was on her way to music class. The moral of this is clear: there are no bystanders anymore. This implies something about the solidarity of human beings—the fact that we are all part of the tragic event. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Without a surrender of one’s own consciousness, no one today can draw one’s own moral skirts about him and claim an immunity from these events. Television, social media, and mass communication are only symptoms of a basic participation in the events of importance to the human race. To breathe is to judge. We can be confident that we shall find that this awareness of our own involvement is not at all the excuse for masochistic breast-beating or quietist withdrawal from the struggles. It can lead us rather to a new sharpening of our own ethical sensitivity and a discovery, though it be only partial, of the basis on which a lasting and effective struggle for racial integration or a relief from the compulsive hold of warfare may be founded. As a representative of these four students and their innocence, I shall choose one of them, Allison Krause, who was reported to have dropped a flower the day before the shooting into the barrel of one of the guardsmen’s rifles saying: “Flowers are better than bullets.” She is pictured in a poem by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, which, despite its tendency toward sentimentality, reveals some important points: Nineteen-year-old Allison Krause, you were killed because you loved flowers. Bullets, pushing out the flower…let all the apple trees of the World, not in white—but in mourning be clothed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

So far we see only the event as it occurred that day: four victims of murder, the whole event summed up in the ironic and cruel trajectory of stray bullets. However, Yevtushenko knows that this simple innocence has only touched the surface. In the succeeding lines we see the complexity of innocence and of evil: “But a Vietnam girl—the same age as Allison—taking in her hand a gun, is an armed flower, the wrath of the people.” I take both the phrase “armed flower” and “thorny flower of protest,” a phrase that appears later on in the poem, as referring to the dimension of experience added to the original purity of innocence. We now have wrath as the basic motivation. Yevtushenko is now talking about a different kind of innocence—an armed flower, no longer the product of a childlike powerlessness but the power of wrath. The Vietnamese girl knows the flower grows on a thorny bush and has to be handled with care. She has an innocence that does not avoid evil and that there is, in the depth of the human soul as well as in human history, no such thing as pure evil or pure good. Yevtushenko’s juxtaposition of flower and armed reminds us of the phrase used by Jesus in the Gospel according to Saint Mark with which He adjured His disciples as He sent them out into the World: “Be ye wise as serpents but harmless as doves.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

This is, again, a curious juxtaposition of innocence and experience, which, it was hoped, would become the foundation for effective social action in the work of the disciples. Now, when I speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do I mean by “trusting”? Is the word to carry with it license to define in detail an invisible World, and to anathematize and excommunicate those whose trust is different? Certainly not! Our faculties of belief were not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they were given us to live by. And to trust our religious demands means first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible World which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature, that beings can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that does without a single strict and rigid doctrine or definition. The bare assurance that this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vison, the external staging of a many-storied Universe, in which spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal,–this bare assurance is to such beings enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural plane. Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and all the light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these persons at a stroke. Often enough the wild-eyed look at life—the suicidal mood—will then set in. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

In the same way the Spirit is always present, a moving power, sometimes in stormy ecstasies of individuals and groups, but mostly quiet, entering our human spirit and keeping it alive; sometimes manifest in great moments of history or a personal life, but mostly working hiddenly through the media of our daily encounters with beings and World; sometimes using its creation, the religious communities and their Spiritual means, and often making itself felt in spheres far removed from what is usually called religious. Like the wind the Spirit blows where it wills! It is not subject to rule or limited by method. Its ways with beings are not dependent on what beings are and do. You cannot force the Spirit upon yourself, upon an individual, upon a group, or even upon a Christian church. Although one who is the foundation of the church was oneself of the Spirit, and although the Spirit as it was present in one is the greatest manifestation of Spiritual Presence, the Spirit is not bound to the Christian church or any one of them. The Spirit is free to work in the spirits of beings in every human situation, and it urges beings to let Him do so; God as Spirit is always present to the spirit of beings. It is through this spirit that more specific powers can be extracted for the sake of communication and personal empowerment. “Yea, say unto them, except they repent to the Lord God will destroy them,” reports Alma 8.16. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

It is Well to Seek Guidance—The Error and Exaggeration Creep in When One Becomes too Concentrated on a Single Source of Guidance!

October 11, 2019 12:03 am

More full of visions than a high romance? Light hoverer around our happy pillows! It was about nine a.m. when I called Stirling, and, unable to contain myself, spilled out all of the story of recent events, as I invited him to dinner to discuss them in greater detail. Perhaps I wanted him to know this was a loaded invitation. I thought it only fair. He surprised me. He insisted that we meet for lunch. He asked if it would not be too inconvenient if we gathered at twelve noon. All population elements are represented in the community, but three families out of five (58 percent) trace their ancestry to “American stock” that came to Graystone Hills before the Civil War. In spite of popular belief, “the Irish element” has contributed less than 9 percent to the ranks of class V. The Poles are found here twice as frequently, and the Germans and Norwegians only one-third as frequently as we may expect if change factors alone are operating. The concentration of “American stock” is overlooked by people in Graystone Hills who commonly use a European ancestral background as a symbolic label. This is understandable in the case of the Poles; they were imported as strikebreakers, and they have not outlived this experience of their ethnic background. Authority and individuality need not contend with one another in a being’s mind. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Many of these “American” families have lived in Graystone Hills as long as its “leading families”; however, length of residence is their only similarity to leading families, for through the generations they have achieved notorious histories. Unfortunately, the unsavory reputation of an ancestor is remembered and often used as an explanation for present delinquency. It is interesting to note that the doctrine of “blood” which explains the rise to eminence of class I is used on the same way to justify the derogation of class V. And, significantly, present behavior of class V gives the people who hold such an explanation is unwarranted, but people in Graystone Hills are not sociologists! Often such remarks as the following are made about these families or some member of them, “Blood will out”; “You cannot expect anything else from such people”; “His great-grandfather was hanged for killing a neighbor in cold blood!” Class V families are excluded from the two leading residential areas. They are found in the others, with large concentrations north of the tracks and below the canal. Below the canal and the Mill Addition are populated mainly by “Americans.” Down by the Mill is “Irish Heaven,” whereas the section north of the tracks is divided into the Norwegian and Poles areas. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

A low, flat, swamp-like sub-area within this section, Bluffs, is almost exclusively Polish. The higher ground north of the tracks, populated mainly by Norwegians with a slight intermingling of Irish and Germans, is known as “Ixnay.” Below the canal is referred to by many names, all symbolic of its undesirability: down by the garbage dump; where the river rats live; behind the tannery; the bush apes’ home; squatters’ paradise; where you will find the God-damned yellow hammers; the tannery flats; and along the tow-path. The dilapidated, box-like homes contain crude pieces of badly abused furniture, usually acquired secondhand. A combination wood and coal stove, or kerosene burner, is used both for cooking and heating. An unpainted table and a few chairs held together with baling wire, together with an ancient sideboard—with shelves above to hold the assorted dishes, and drawers below for pots, pans, and groceries—furnish the combined kitchen and dining room. There may be some well-worn linoleum or strips of roofing on the floor. The “front room” generally serves a dual purpose, living room by say and bedroom by night. Here too the floor is often covered with linoleum or roofing strips, seldom with a woven rug. Two or three overly used chairs in various stages of disrepair share the room with a sagging sofa that leads a double life as he routine of day alternates with that of night. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

If an additional bed is needed, an iron one may stand in a corner or along one wall. A simple mirror that shows signs of age, perhaps abuse, shares the wall with a few cheap prints of pictures cut from magazines that show how undressed a woman may be without being nude. Now and again a colored print of a saint and a motion picture star will be pasted or nailed beside a siren. An improvised wardrobe made by driving a row of nails in the wall generally occupies one corner. A table, a radio, and some means of lighting the room complete its furnishings. Old iron beds that sag in the middle, made with blankets, and comforts in the absence of sheets, a chest of drawers, a chair or two, and a mirror that looks out on the stringy curtains and the bare floor complete the furnishings of tiny bedrooms. Musical instruments, magazines, and newspapers other than The Bugle seldom find their way into these homes. Less than 1 percent have telephones. Privacy in the homes is almost non-existent; parents, children, “in-laws” and their children, and parts of broken family may live in two or three rooms. There is little differentiation in the use of rooms—kitchen, dining room, living room, and bedroom functions may be combined from necessity into a single use area. Bath and toilet facilities are found in approximately one home in seven. City water is piped near or into 77 percent of the homes within the city limits, except those below the canal. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Water for these homes is either carried from the town pump, also located in this area, or from the river. Outside the town, wells, springs, and creeks are used for a water supply. Some 4 percent of the homes were equipped with furnace heat; the rest were heated with wood- or coal-burning stoves. The family residence is rented in four cases out of five (81 percent). The few that are owned have either been inherited or built along the canal and in the tannery flats by their present owners. A few Poles have bought homes in Rolling Hills from the English and Scotch who formerly inhabited this area. Although it is popularly believed that these people buy cars rather than homes, only 57 percent own cars, the great majority (83 percent) being more than 7 years old. The family pattern is unique. The husband-wife relationship is more or les an unstable one, even though the marriage is sanctioned either by law or understandings between the partners. Disagreements leading to quarrels and vicious fights, followed by desertion by either the man or the woman, possibly divorce, are not unusual. The evidence indicates that few compulsive factors, such as neighborhood solidarity, religious teachings, or ethical considerations, operate to maintain a stable material relationship. On the contrary, the class culture has established a family pattern were serial monogamy is the rule. Legal marriages are restricted within narrow limits to class equals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

However, exploitative liaisons of pleasures of the flesh between males from the higher classes frequently occur wit teenage girls, but they are illegal and rarely result in marriage. Marriage occurs in the middle teens for the girls and late teens or early twenties for the boys. Doctors, nurses, and public officials who know these families best estimate that from one-fifth to one-fourth of all births are illegitimate. Irrespective of the degree of error in this estimate, 78 percent of the mothers gave birth to their first child before they were 20 years of age. Another trait that marks the family complex is the large number of children. The mean is 5.6 per mother, the range, 1 to 13. There is little prenatal or postnatal care of either mother or child. The child is generally delivered at home, usually by a local doctor, the county nurse, or a midwife, but in the late 1990’s some expectant mothers entered the local hospital. Hospital deliveries, however, are a recent innovation and not widely diffused. Death, desertion, separation, or divorce has broken more than half the families (56 percent). The burden of child care, as well as support, falls on the mother more often than on the father when the family is broken. The mother-child relation is the strongest and most enduring family tie. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Formal education experience is limited in large part to the elementary school. Two parents out of three (67 percent) quit school before the eighth grade was reached; the third completed it. Seven fathers and six mothers out of 230 have completed a year or more of high school; only one father and four mothers have graduated. None has attended any type of school after leaving the public school system. Psychologically speaking, there are an infinite number of situations in which people live at subhuman levels, and they find that some violence is life-giving. The overly shy person; the suspicious one who cannot let oneself make relationships; the one unable to love deeply or to give to another; the coward who insulates oneself from experiences that would enrich one—the list becomes endless. These are all individuals in whom some admixtures of violence may help to correct a deficiency. However, it requires a burst of effort that goes beyond rationality, a risking of one’s self, a committing of all, to give the person a sense of fulfillment. When a woman who has been docile all her life finally loses her temper and breaks out in a tirade, we find ourselves smiling and silently cheering; at least she is no longer apathetic. A friend of mine told me recently that his two sons had come home from college and had stepped into a situation where there was a lot of tension because of the illness of two relatives. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

After a coupe of days one of the sons had torn up his iPhone 11 Pro Max in rage, and the other son had crashed his Bentley Flying Spur V8 S into a wall. My friend remarked: “It was a good violence.” A bust of anger seems to clear up the psychological relationship, making for greater honesty. Hence most people feel better after having gotten angry. However, I think he was rationalizing because the items were insured and no one physically got hurt. We have sad that violence united the self on a level below the human one. Now it so happens that many people (in fact most people) do live this way—that is without consciousness in any degree and without personal dignity. Many people spend their lives as only partially formed human beings, and millions living on a substandard in affluent countries. For these people, violence may raise the level of psychological and spiritual existence. Just as it unites the self that has attained consciousness on a level below the human one, it may raise undeveloped persons to a human level. This may take the form of political rebellions, which cause groups to break out of their apathy and succeed in wrenching social reforms from the dominant party. There are few, if any, instances where a dominant group has given up its power willingly and freely; power has a way of burrowing in to stay. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

You do not have to be a semibeast to be accepted. One must live their life with dignity, and develop their potential consciousness, and future freedom. There are people who have suffered centuries of exploitation and have endured the apathy this causes; and to become psychologically and spiritually alive, some forgiveness is necessary. Do not allow colonial powers to take an active role in setting natives against each other because, as a result, they are only consolidating their own interests. Violence is not the only way to throw off the yoke of the colonial powers, education is the most important factor, and education will help to elevate the community and produce unity in the family. Although underdeveloped nations, after being exploited for so long, have turned to violence, this is not the path to integrity, self-esteem, nor awareness of their own powers. The most important thing is for us to have human dignity, the birth and growth of consciousness, integrity of relationships. There have been people who have resisted exploitation by going to school during the day and driving taxis at night. The dignity of humanity will spring from their brains and incorporate their total organism and their collective unconscious, which is an expression of their organism. We are climbing toward a new order, toward new forms, and these are part of the new nationality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

The old order and old forms will be destroyed in the process, but no sane person would argue that the forms of colonial society, which exploit people are part of humanity. Justice is a perspective that has been conceived as realistic. We ought to uplift the people; we must develop their brains, fill them will ideas, change them and make them into human beings. The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the coherent, enlightened action of men and women. We ought first to give back their dignity to all people. We should not be sticking needles in dolls or pounding on pillows, but should wipe out the rea evils of social and economic oppression. This concept has helped to clarify many neurotic problems which hitherto were beyond the reach of our understanding and hence of our therapy. It also puts two of the neurotic trends which had preciously resisted integration into their proper setting. The need for perfection now appears as an endeavor to measure up to this idealized image; the craving for admiration can be seen as the patient’s need to have outside affirmation that one really is one’s idealized image. And the farther the image is removed from reality the more insatiable this latter would logically be. Of all the attempts at solution the idealized image is probably the most important by reason of its far-reaching effect on the whole personality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

However, in turn it generates a new inner rift, and hence calls for further patchwork. The next attempt at a solution seeks primarily to do away with this rift, though it helps as well to spirit away all other conflicts. Through what I call externalization, inner processes are experience as going on outside the self. If the idealized image means taking a step away from the actual self, externalization represents a still more radical divorce. It again creates new conflicts, or rather greatly augments the original conflict—that between the self and the outside World. I have called these attempts a solution, partly because they seem to operate regularly in all neuroses—though in varying degree—and partly because they bring about incisive changes in the personality. However, they are by no means the only ones. Others of less general significance include such strategies as arbitrary rightness, whose main function is to quell all inner doubts; rigid self-control, which holds together a torn individual by sheer will power; and cynicism, which, in disparaging all values, eliminates conflicts in regard to ideals. Sometimes being rich is not the answer to your problems, it can actually be a curse. Rich people have all their needs and wants met and it gives them nothing to strive for. This can leave them empty inside, to the point they do not realize how beautiful or talented they are. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

For a wealthy person, if he or she is empty inside a new dress or suit looks like just another pile of rags. They have to develop their spirituality and sometimes it is more difficult for them to do because they have more responsibilities to handle. Being less affluent, you get more joy for just putting food on the table and you see how thankful your kids are, who may have been starving all week. Buying new tires for your car might be a blessing because you know now you can get back and forth to work without hydroplaning with your kids in the back seat. Also, being less affluent allows you to dream more and it may motivate you to think about that house you are trying to purchase so you and your kids can live in a lace curtain suburb where you will no longer be preyed on. Meanwhile the consequences of all these unresolved conflicts have gradually become clearer to me. I see the manifold fears that are generated, the waste of energy, the inevitable impairment of moral integrity, the deep hopelessness that has resulted for the affluent and less affluent from feeling inextricably entangled. It was only after I had grasped the significance of neurotic hopelessness that the meaning of sadistic tends finally came into view. These, I now understand, represent an attempt at restitution through the vicarious living, entered upon by a person who despairs of ever being oneself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

And the all-consuming passion which can so often be observed in sadistic pursuits grew out of such a person’s insatiable need for vindictive triumph. It becomes clear to me then that the need for destructive exploitation is in fact no separate neurotic trend but only a never-failing expression of that more comprehensive whole which for the lack of a better term we call sadism. Thus a theory of neurosis evolves, whose dynamic center is basic conflict between the attitudes of moving toward, moving again, and moving away from people. Because of one’s fear of being split apart on the one hand and the necessity to function as a unity on the other, the neurotic makes desperate attempts at solution. While one can succeed this way in creating a kind of artificial equilibrium, new conflicts are constantly generated and further remedies are continually required to blot them out. Every step in this struggle for unity makes the neurotic more hostile, more helpless, more fearful, more alienated from oneself and others, with the result that the conflicts become more acute and their real resolution less and less attainable. One finally becomes hopeless and may try to find a kind of restitution in sadistic pursuits, which in turn have the effect of increasing one’s hopelessness and creating new conflict. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

This, then, is a fairly dismal picture of neurotic development and its resulting character structure. Why do I nonetheless call my theory a constructive one? In the first place it does away with the unrealistic optimism that maintains we can cure neuroses by absurdly simple means. However, in involves no equally unrealistic pessimism. I call it constructive because it allows us for the first time to tackle and resolve neurotic hopelessness. I call it constructive most of all because in spite of its recognition of the severity of neurotic entanglements, it permits not only a tempering of the underlying conflicts but their actual resolution, and so enables us to work toward a real integration of personality. Neurotic conflicts cannot be resolved by rational decision. The neurotic’s attempts at solution ae not only futile but harmful. However, these conflicts can be resolved by changing the conditions within the personality that brought them into being. Every piece of analytical work well done changes these conditions in that it makes a person less helpless, less fearful, less hostile, and less alienated from oneself and others. Dr. Freud’s pessimism as regards neuroses and their treatment arouse from the depths of his disbelief in human goodness and human growth. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Being, Dr. Freud postulated, are doomed to suffer or to destroy. The instincts which drive one can only be controlled or at best sublimated. My own belief is that beings have the capacity as well as the desire to develop one’s potentialities and become a decent being, and that these deteriorate if one’s relationship to others and hence oneself is, and continues to be, disturbed. I believe that a being can change and g on changing as long as one lives. And this belief has grown with deeper understanding. We cannot allow the media or any other puppet show to direct an attack on our very freedom of thought, forcing all minds to think towards the same objective of enslavement which below the surface drives the collective race of humankind into a state of oppression. After all, who is anyone to tell us what to think? Who is anyone to say what thoughts are good? Thoughts stem from our ability to seek knowledge and live according to that knowledge as wise men and women and children and other living beings. They are expressions of our individual spirit of consciousness which has been torn to pieces. When we choose to develop our thought process by actually thinking instead of accumulating supposed facts we are empowered to create lives which are fulfilled according to how we want to shape them in correlation with our own true divine will and level of self-discipline. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Maybe making money outside of the system of slave labor is your goal. If that is the case, then focus on your talents and contemplate ways of making cash by using those talents to produce prosperity. Your perception of the enslaved will become more apparent and you will essentially stop being able to understand their contentment with such mundane aspirations. Do not fall into the trap of expressing disgust with these people, or exhibiting spite or hatred. They serve as important examples of what not to be. Remember that they are not the target of your spite and hatred. It is the systematic construct of imposed limitation we despise. Not the people who are enslaved by the system. The veil between Worlds will begin to tear from top to bottom and your spiritual and corporal experiences will begin to merge. Your life will become more blessed, and your blessings more grounded. The increasing intensity of your spiritual experiences will make the experiences more malleable through our soul work. This is a major part of this infernal science of becoming. It helps to enforce the process of unifying the dense physical self with the potential of unlimited possibility. Instead of being fearful you should see these visions as opportunities to destroy imposed fate through spirituality. Remember this at all times…the life experience is nothing but a series of opportunities to exercise power. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Absorb and consume any malign energies that may see your destruction as your personal power develops through alchemical transmutation. The oppositional forces then become fuel for ascent. A miracle will awake and when it does, it will mercilessly encroach upon all enemies which seek to interrupt your ascent with malicious intent. These blessings are extensions of self and the collective being conscious of humankind. These numbers of these blessings is infinite and when they are stirred, legions upon legions will begin to attack the enemy. Destruction of tyrants and liberation of the spirit is our goal. Keep this in mind, as then through application of this work our children may live in a better World of love and peace beyond the slavery of those so called gods who seek and worship adoration as if they were entities of greater power. We are isolated emanations of the void and so we are the Gods of Gods. We created them to serve us. Respect this current for what it is. It is a weapon meant to destroy the God of slaves from the inside out as well as the slave drivers who exalt him and/or her. It is meant to destroy the entire system and usher in something else. “They should come forth even unto the land of promise, which was choice above all other lands, which the Lord God had preserved for a righteous people,” reports Ether 2.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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The Real Stands Alone—It is Without Any Kind of Support, and Needs None!

October 7, 2019 1:09 am

Do you not see, I have to do this! I have no choice. If I do not insist that you talk to these psychiatrists, we will stand accused of gross negligence. Think of it. We have to get this of the way and get back to life the way we want it to be. If there is anything that modern beings regard as infinite, it is no longer God; nor is it nature, let alone morality or culture; it is one’s own power. Creatio ex nihilo, which was once the marl of omnipotence, has been supplanted by its opposite, potestas annihilationis or reductio as nihil; and this power to destroy, to reduce to nothingness is possessed in our own hands. The Promethan dream of omnipotence has at long last come true, though in an unexpected form. Since we are in a position to inflict absolute destruction on each other, we have apocalyptic powers. It is we who are the infinite. To say this is easy, but the fact is so tremendous that all historically recorded developments, including epochal changes, seem trifling in comparison: all history is now reduced to prehistory. For we are not merely a new historical generation of beings; indeed, we are no longer what until today humans have been called “human beings.” Although we are unchanged anatomically, our completely changed relation to the cosmos and to ourselves has transformed us into a new species—beings that differ from the previous type of beings no less than Nietzsche’s superman differed from humans. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

In other words—and this is not meant as a mere metaphor—we are Titans, at least as long as we are omnipotent without making definitive use of this omnipotence of ours. In fact, during the short period of our supremacy the gulf separating us Titans from the humans of yesterday has become so wide that the latter are beginning to seem alien to us. This is reflected, to take a salient example, in our attitude toward Lestat, the hero in whom the last generations of our forefathers saw the embodiment of their deepest yearnings. Lestat strives desperately to be a Titan; his torment is caused by his inability to transcend his humanity. We, who are no longer finite, cannot even share this torment in our imagination. The infinite longing for the infinite, which Lestat symbolizes, and which for almost a thousand years was the source of human’s greatest sufferings and greatest achievements, has become so completely a thing of the past that it is difficult for us to visualize it; at bottom we only know that it has once existed. What our parents, the last humans regarded as the most important thing is meaningless to us, their sons, the first Titans; the very concepts by means of which they articulated their history have become obsolete. For instance, the antithesis between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac principle: The former denoted the happy harmony of the finite; the latter, the intoxication found in exploding the boundaries of the finite. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

Since we are no longer finite, since we have the explosion behind us, the antithesis has become unreal. The infinite longing some of us still experience is a nostalgia for finitude, the good old finitude of the past; in other words, some of us long to be rid of our Titanism, and to be humans again, humans like those of the golden age of yesterday. Needless to say this longing is as romantic and utopian as was that of the Luddites; and like all longings of this kind, it weakens those who indulge in it, while it strengthens the self-assurance of those who are sufficiently unimaginative and unscrupulous to put to actual use the omnipotence they possess. However, the starving working people who early in the nineteenth century rose against the machines could hardly have suspected that a day would come when their longing for the past would assume truly mythological dimensions—when beings could be appropriately descried as Titan who strives desperately to recover one’s humanity. Curiously enough, omnipotence has become truly dangerous only after we have got hold of it. Before then, all manifestations of omnipotence has become truly dangerous only after we have got hold it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

Before then, all manifestations of omnipotence, whether regarded as natural or supernatural (this distinction, too, has become unimportant), have been relatively benign: in each instance the threat was partial, only particular things were destroyed—merely people, cities, empires, or cultures—but we were always spared, it “we” denotes humankind. No wonder that no one actually considered the possibility of a total peril, expect for a few scientific philosopher who toyed with the idea of a cosmic catastrophe (such as the extinction of the Sun), and for a minority of Christians who took eschatology seriously and expected the World to end at any moment. With one stroke all this has changed. There is little hope that we, cosmic parvenus, usurpers of the apocalypse, will be as merciful as the forces responsible for the former cataclysms were out of compassion or indifference, or by accident. Rather, there is no hope at all: the actual masters of the infinite are no more imaginatively or emotionally equal to this possession of theirs than their prospective victims, for instance, ourselves; and they are incapable, and indeed must remain incapable, of looking upon their contraption as anything but a means to further finite interest, including the most limited party interests. Because we are the first beings with the power to unleash a World cataclysm, we are also the first to live continually under its threat. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

Because we are the first Titans, we are also the first dwarfs or pygmies, or whatever we may call beings such as ourselves who are mortal not only as individual, but also as a group, and who are granted survival only until further orders. We have just emerged from a period in which for Europeans natural death was an unnatural or at least an exceptional occurrence. A being who died of old age aroused envy: one was looked upon as one who could afford the luxury of a peaceful and individual death, as a kind of slacker who managed to escape from the general fate of extermination, or even as a sort f secret agent in the service of cosmic foreign powers though which one had been able to obtain such a special favor. Occasionally natural death was viewed in a different light—as evidence of being’s freedom and sovereignty, as a twin brother or Stoic suicide—but even the natural death was felt to be unnatural and exceptional. During the war, being killed was thus the most common form of dying: the model for our finitude was Abel, not Adam. In the extermination camps natural death was completely eliminated. There the lethal machines operated wit absolute efficiency, leaving no uneconomical residues of life. There the venerable proposition, All humans are mortal, had already become an understatement. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

The fact that all human are mortal being more serious than we realize—if this proposition had been inscribed on the entrance gates to the gas chambers, instead of the usual misleading, “Shower Baths,” or “Conventional Housing,” it would have aroused jeers; and in this jeering laughter the voices of the victims would have joined an infernal unison with the voices of their guards. For the truth contained in the old proposition was now more adequately expressed in an new proposition—“All men and women are exterminable.” Whatever changes have taken place in the World during the ten years since the end of the war, they have not affected the validity of the new proposition: the truth it expressed is confirmed by the general threat hanging over us. Its implications have even become more sinister: for what is exterminable today is not “merely” all beings, but humankind a whole. This change inaugurates a new historical epoch, if the term “epoch” may be applied to the short time intervals in question. Accordingly, all history can be divided into three chapters, with the following captions: All human beings are mortal, All human beings are exterminable, and Humankind as a whole is exterminable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

Under the present dispensation, human mortality has acquired an entirely new meaning—it is only today that its ultimate horror is brought home to us. To be sure, even previously no one was exempt from mortality; but everyone regarded oneself as mortal within a larger whole, the human World; and while no one ever explicitly ascribed immortality to the latter, the threat of its mortality stared no one in the face either. Only because there was such a “space” within which one died, could there arise that peculiar aspiration to give the lie to one’s mortality through the acquisition of fame. Admittedly the attempt has never been very successful; immortality among mortals has never been a safe metaphysical investment. The famous beings were always like those ship passengers of the Arabian Nights, who enjoyed the highest reputation abroad, but whose reputation enjoyed no reputation, because the very existence of the ship was totally unknow on land. Still, as compared with what we have today, fame was something. For today our fear of death is extended to all of humankind; and if humankind were to perish leaving no memory in any being, engulfing all existence in darkness, no empire will have existed, no idea, no struggle, no love, no pain, no hope, no comfort, no sacrifice—everything will have been in vain, and there would be only what which has been, and nothing else. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Even to us, who are still living in the existing World, the past, that which merely was, seems dead; but the end of humankind would destroy even this death and force it, as it were, to die a second time, so that the past will not even have been the past—for how would that which merely had differ from that which had never been? Nor would the future be spared: it would be dead even before being born. Ecclesiastic’s disconsolate, “There is nothing new under the Sun,” would be succeeded by the even more disconsolate, “Nothing ever was,” which no one would record and which for that reason would never be challenged. Let us assume that the bomb has been exploded. To call this “an action” is inappropriate. The chain of events leading up to the explosion is composed of so many links, the process has involved so many different agencies, so many intermediate steps and partial actions, none of which is the crucial one, that in the end no one can be regarded as the agent. Everyone has a good conscience, because no one conscience was required at any point. Bad conscience has once and for all been transferred to moral machines, electronic oracles: those cybernetic contraptions, which are the quintessence of science, and hence of progress and of morality, have assumed all responsibility, while beings self-righteously washes their hands. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Since all these machines can do is to evaluate profits and losses, they implicitly makes the loss finite, and hence justifiable, although it is precisely this evaluation that destroys us, the evaluated ones, even before we are actually destroyed. Because responsibility has been displaced on to an object, which is regarded as “objective,” it has become a mere response; the Ought is merely the correct chess move, and the Ought Not, the wrong chess move. The cybernetic machines are interested only in determining the means that can be advantageously used in a situation defined by the factors a, b, c….n. Nothing else matters: after all, the continued existence of our World cannot be regarded as one of the factors. The question of the rightness of the goal to be achieved by the mechanically calculated means is forgotten by the operators of the machine or their employers, for instance, by those who bow to its judgment the moment it begins to calculate. To mistrust the solutions provided by the machine, for instance, to question the responses that have taken the place of responsibility, would be to question the very principle of our mechanized existence. No one would venture to create such a precedent. Even where robots are not resorted to, the monstrous undertaking is immensely facilitated by the fact that it is not carried out by individual, but by a complex and vastly ramified organization. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

If the organization of an undertaking is “all right,” and if the machines function smoothly, the performance too seems “all right” and smooth. Each participant, each intermediary, performs or has insight into only the job assigned to one; and certainly each works conscientiously. The specialized worker is not conscious of the fact that conscientious efforts of a number of specialists can add up to the most monstrous lack of conscience; just as in any other industrial enterprise one has no insight into the process as a whole. In so far as conscientia derives from scire, for instance, conscience from knowledge, such a failure to become conscious certainly points to a lack of conscience. However, this does not mean that any of the participants acts against one’s conscience, or has no conscience—such immoral possibilities are still comfortingly human, they still presuppose beings that might have a conscience. Rather, the crucial point here is that such possibilities are excluded in advance. We are here beyond both morality and immortality. To blame the participants for their lack of conscience would be as meaningless as to ascribe courage or cowardice to one’s hand. Just as a mere hand cannot be cowardly, so a mere participant cannot have conscience. The division of labor prevents one so completely from having clear insight into the productive process, that the lack of conscience we must ascribe to one is no longer an individual moral deficiency. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

And yet it may result in the death of all humankind. The action of unleashing the bomb is not merely irresponsible in the ordinary sense of the term: irresponsibility still falls within the realm of the morally discussible, while here we are confronted with something for which no one can even be held accountable. The consequences of this action are so great that the agent cannot possibly grasp them before, during, or after one’s action. Moreover, in this case there can be no goal, no positive value that can even approximately equal the magnitude of the means used to achieve it. This incommensurability of cause of effect or means and end is not in the least likely to prevent the action; on the contrary, it facilitates the action. To murder an individual is far more difficult than to throw a bomb that kills countless individuals; and we would be willing to shake hands with the perpetrator of the second rather than of the first crimes. Offenses that transcend our imagination by virtue of their monstrosity are committed more readily, for the inhibitions normally present when the consequences of a projected action are more or less calculable are no longer operative. The Biblical “They know not what they do” here assumes a new, unexpectedly terrifying meaning: the very monstrousness of the deed makes possible a new, truly infernal innocence. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

The situation is not entirely unfamiliar. The mass extermination under Hilter could be carried our precisely because they were monstrous—because they absolutely transcended the moral imagination of the agents, and because the moral emotions that normally precede, accompany, or follow actions could not arise int his case. However, can one speak here of “agents”? The beings who carry out such actions are always co-agents: they are either half-active and half-passive cogs in a vast mechanism, or they serve merely to touch off an effect that has been prepared in advance to the extent of 99 percent. The categories of coagent and touching off are unknown in traditional ethics. This is not to be interpreted as a justification of the German crimes. The concept of collective guilt was morally indispensable: something had to be done to prevent these crimes from being quickly forgotten. However, the concept proved inadequate because the crime in question transcended the ordinary dimensions of an immoral act; because a situation in which all perpetrators are merely co-perpetrators, and all non-perpetrator are indirectly perpetrators, requires entirely new concepts; and above all because the number of dead was too great for any kind of reaction. Just as being can produce acoustic vibrations unperceivable by the human ear, so they can perform actions that lie outside the realm of moral apperception. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

The saying of Jesus cannot authenticated by anyone as being historically true. However, every illumined being can authenticate them as being mystically true. Those who can understand the mystery of what is called by theologians (not by philosophers) the Incarnation, will understand also that the crucifixion of Jesus did not last a mere sic hours. It lasted for a whole thirty-three years. His sufferings were primarily mental, not physical. They were caused, not by the nails driven into his flesh at the end of his life, but by the evil thoughts and materialistic emotions impinging on his mind from his environment during the whole course of his life. Nonetheless, without either a Long or Short Path previous history of a being may still find oneself in the higher consciousness. This shows that Grace alone is a sufficient cause. Second, aside from the feeling of disgust with the World through failure to pass one’s school examinations, the only preparation which some undergo are falling involuntarily and profoundly into a trance state for three days. Here, these beings are pulled in away from the sense and outer awareness by a strong force. This shows that depth of inner penetration of the mind’s layers and length of period that contact is held with the Overself are the two important governors of the result attained. Go as deep as you can; stay there as long as you can; this seems to be silent message of the experience. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Sokrates was an awakener of beings. He tried to stir their minds by questions, and their conscience by revealing fresh points of view. This being who came among them to tell of a deeper kind of life that would give them unearthly peace, who sought to bless them by removing an ancient curse from their history, was rejected, yet Jesus had to do what he did, to say what he said. Human beings must learn to put the Worldly existences into the proper proportions. As one is also a human being, one should be able to reduce one’s own egoism and tranquillize one’s own desires and recast one’ sense of values until the great peace comes over one and one is enlightened. “Gather together whatsoever force ye can upon your march hither, and we will go speedily against those dissenters, in the strength of our God accord to the faith which is in us,” reports Alma 61. 17. After a certain day when she underwent an experience wherein God seemed to take out her heart and carry it away, Saint Catherine of Siena remained peaceful and contended for the rest of her life. She could not describe that inner experience but said that in it she had tasted a sweetness which made Earthly pleasures seem like mud and even spiritual pleasures seem far inferior. The miracles of Christ were an expression of special power manifested by Him in virtue of His special mission to humanity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

One May Work Toward Enlightenment and Inner Freedom to the Aspiration which Draws One Most!

October 4, 2019 2:00 am

Angels, or those who call themselves Angels, or would have me conclude that they are Angels come to me in the long years. They come to me as I lay in bed. It seems we have established some link with these beings, and I could tell you a tale of them, but now is not the time. I think it is my eyes which give them the claim on me, the ability to reach down to me, in this realm, and take me—it is the vision, stolen in another dominion and then returned on Earth to its rightful entity. You might say that as they looked down from their lofty Heaven, if Heaven is, they could see, through the mists of Earth, these bright shining eyes. My visions give them their compass to find me, their opening, as it were, between the dominions, and down they come to enlist my spirit against my will. How can I accept a World full of injustice, along with their august designs? As worker and consumer beings are increasingly alienated by the power of machines which regulate their daily life, even determining their values. The technology which produces machines, however, is but the offspring of a science which, as it developed the means to transform our planet or destroy it, has become ever more remote from the lives of ordinary citizens and perhaps the ultimate factor in their alienation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

To such citizens science appears magical and mysterious in its capacity for and neutrality toward good or evil. Is this entirely due to faults in education which, separate beings of humanistic learning from beings of science? Undoubtedly, Western education has failed to help rising generations of non-scientists to understand science. However, the fault is possessed in beings of science, too. Scientists have enjoyed acting the mysterious stranger, the powerful voice without emotion, the expert and the god. They have failed to make themselves comfortable in the talk of people in the street; no one taught them the knack, of course, but they were not keen to learn. And now they find the distance which they enjoyed has turned to distrust, and the awe has turned to fear; and people who are by no means fools really believe that we should be better off without science. Science and society are out of step. Can their mutual alienation be overcome? We can answer affirmatively, but with proviso that both sides make the necessary effort. Against the guardedly optimistic view is the more pessimistic outlook of philosophers who see beings as unable to live with and control the extraordinary knowledge and power which fertile brains have devised. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

It is not merely the hydrogen bomb itself which threatens our existence, but a bureaucratization of mass destruction and an incapacity for fear. The first of these factors deprives even the participants in mass destruction of any sense of responsibility for their acts. As for the second, the helplessness with which contemporary humankind reacts—or rather fails to react—to the existence of the superbomb bespeaks a lack of freedom the like of which has never before existed in history. This marks the freezing point of human freedom. We all know the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice; or Frankenstein which Mary Shelley wrote in competition with her husband and Byron; or some other story of the same kind out of the macabre invention of the nineteenth century. In these stores, someone who has special powers over nature conjures or creates a stick or a machine to do his work for him; and then finds that he cannot take back the life he has given it. The mindless monster overwhelms him; and what began as an invention to do the housework ends by destroying the master with the house. These stories have become the epitome of our own fears. We have been inventing machines at a growing pace for about four hundred years. This is a short span even in our recorded history, and it is not a thousandth part of our history as beings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

In that short moment of time we have found a remarkable insight into the workings of nature. We have used it to make ourselves far more flexible in our adaption to the outside World than any other animal has ever been. We can survive in climates which even germs find difficult. We can grow our own food and meat. We can travel overland and we can tunnel and swim and fly, all in one body. More important than any of these, we have come nearest to the dream which Lamarck had, that animals might inherit the skills which their parents learned. We have discovered the means to record our experience so that others may live it again. The history of other animal species shows that the most successful in the struggle for survival have been those which were most adaptable to changes in the World. We have made ourselves by means of our tools beyond all measure more adaptable than any other species, living or extent; and we continue to do so with gathering speed. Yet today we are afraid of our own shadow in the nine o’clock news; and we wonder whether we shall survive so over-specialized a creature as the Pekinese. Everyone likes to blame one’s sense of defeat on someone else; and for some time scientists have been a favorite scapegoat. I want to look at their responsibility, and for that matter at everybody’s, rather more closely. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

They do have special responsibility; do not let us argue that out of existence; but it is a complicated one, and it is not the whole responsibility. For example, science obviously is not responsible for the readiness of people, who do not take their private quarrels beyond the stage of insult, to carry their public quarrels to the point of war. Many animals will fight for their needs, and some for their mere greeds, to the point of death. Bucks fight for females, and birds fight for their territories. The fighting habits of human beings are odd because they display them only in groups. However, they were not supplied by scientists. On the contrary, science has helped to end several kinds of group murder, such as witch hunting and the taboos of the early nineteenth century against disinfecting hospitals. Neither is science responsible for the existence of groups which believe themselves to be in competition: for the existence above all of nations. And the threat of war today is always a national threat. Some bone of contention and competition is identified with a national need: Fiume or the Polis corridor or the dignity of the Austrian Empire; and in the end nations are willing to organize and to invite the death of citizens on both sides in order to reach these collective aims. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Science did not create the nations; on the contrary, it helped to soften those strong national idiosyncrasies which it seems necessary to exploit if war is to be made with enthusiasm. And wars are not made by any traditional groups: they are made by highly organized societies, they are made by nations. If the day was thirsty, most of us have seen Yorkshiremen invade Old Trafford, and a bloody nose or two. However, if her had been told that Lancashire had the atomic bomb, no Yorkshireman would have grown pale. The sense of doom in us today is not a fear of science; it is a fear of war. And the causes of war were not created by science; they do not differ in kind from known causes of the War of Jenkins’ Ear of the Wars of the Roses, which were carried on with the modest scientific assistance. No, science has not invented war; but it has turned it into a very different thing. The people who distrust it are not wrong. The man in the pub who says, “It will wipe out the World,” the woman in the queue who says “It is not natural”—they do not express themselves very well; but what they are trying to say does make sense. Science has enlarged the mechanisms of war, and it has distorted it. It has done this in at least two ways. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

First, science has obviously multiplied the power of the warmakers. The weapons of the moment can kill more people more secretly and more unpleasantly than those of the past. This progress, as for want of another word I must call it—this progress as been going on for some time; and for some time it has been said, of each new weapon, that it is so destructive or so horrible that it will frighten people into their wits, and force the nations to give up war for the lack of cannon fodder. This hope has never been fulfilled, and I know no one who takes refuge in it today. The acts of men and women are not dictated by such simple compulsions; and they themselves do not stand in any simple relation to the decisions of the nations which they compose. Grapeshot and TNT and gas have not helped to outlaw war; and I see no sign that the hydrogen bomb or a whiff of bacteria or fentanyl will be more successful in making beings wise by compulsion. Secondly, science at the same time has given the nations quite new occasions for falling out. I do not mean such simple objectives as someone else’s uranium mine, or a Pacific Island which happens to be knee-deep in organic fertilizer. I do not even mean merely another nation’s factories and her skilled population. These are all parts of the surplus above our simple needs which they themselves help to create and which gives our civilization its character. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

And war in our World battens on this surplus. This is the object of the greed of nations, and this also gives them the leisure to train and the means to arm for war. At bottom, we have remained individually too greedy to distribute our surplus, and collectively too stupid to pile it up in any more useful form than the traditional mountains of arms. Science can claim to have created the surplus in our societies, and we know from the working day and the working diet how greatly it has increased it in the last two hundred years. Science had created the surplus. Now put this year’s budget beside the budget of 1750, anywhere in the World, and you will see what we are doing with it. There are at least five recognizable kinds of violence. There is, first, simple violence. Some people dream of violence, in which they ward off knives and guns, and this is simple violence. This is characteristic of many student rebellions, and carries with it the muscular freedom, the surging up of pent-up energy, and the freedom from the restrictions of individual conscience and responsibility of which we have spoken. It is the general protest against being placed continuously in an impotent situation, and it typically carries highly moral demands. However, very little violence stays at this first level. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

There is, second, calculated violence. Many, if not most, of the student rebellions were surrounded by calculated violence. He rebellion of French students in Paris was taken over by professional revolutionaries on the second or third day, and the leadership, which began with moral demands, changed as the leaders exploited the profound frustration of the students and their energy. The third type I call fomented violence. This is the work of a Himmler or of the rabble-rousers of the extreme right or left in any country. It is a stimulation of the impotence and frustration felt by the people at large for the purposes of the speaker. Modern history is full of illustrations of how treating people like beasts in the process. Fourth, there is absentee violence (or instrumental violence). Obviously all of us who live in society partake to some extent of the violence of that society, although most of us do it from our own vantage point of moral elevation and hide behind zombie-like unawareness of conscience. The war on our boarder with Mexico cannot continue expect that our taxes are paying to shelter unidentified immigrants who are looking for a new place to live; in this sense we all are part of the war on the boarder, whether we are for or against national security. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

There is a fifth category of violence, different from those above, which occurs when the party in power, threatened with encroachment on its power, strikes out with violence to stave off these threats. This we may call violence from above. Its motive is generally to protect or re-establish the status quo. The police are taken out of their rightful roles as apprehenders and are made punishers. Such violence is said to be regularly more destructive than other violence—partly because the police have the clubs and guns, and partly because they have a large reservoir of inner individual resentment on which they can draw in their rage. The age-old assumption, especially in the American dream, is that the government is instituted for the protection of the weak and less affluent against exploitation, as well as for the strong and the rich. The police officer on the corner, who is everyone’s friend and will direct you when you are lost, is the ideal model, as the law-loving sheriff bringing order to the West. However, in this fifth kind of violence, this is all thrown aside and situations like the death of Stephan Clark by the hands of two police officers in Sacramento, California and the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, unfortunately more people are starting to view the police department as the army of Hitler. And the violence becomes the more destructive precisely because it is a perversion of previous protectiveness. Government itself is then reduced to battling on the level of combatants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

However, keep in mind that a few bad incidents do not spoil the entire law enforcement team and turn them into the type of law enforcement we see in the 2009 film Brooklyn’s Finest. There are still wonderful police officers like Jamie Reagan who we see on the hit television series Blue Bloods. And there are wonderful officers like Oliva Benson and Odafin Tutuola who star on Law and Order SVU. And now, in turning to what religion may have to say to the situation, I come to what is the soul of my discourse. Religion has meant many things in human history; but when from now onward I use the word I mean to use it in the supernaturalist sense, as declaring that the so-called order of nature, which constitutes this World’s experience, is only one portion of the total Universe, and that there stretches beyond this visible World and unseen World of which we now know nothing beneficial, but in its relation to which the true significance of our present mundane life consists. A being’s religious faith (whatever more special item of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially one’s faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

In the more developed religions the natural World has always been regarded as the mere scaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more eternal Word, and affirmed to be a sphere of education, trial, or redemption. In these religions, one must in some fashion die to the natural life before one can enter into life eternal. The notion that this physical World of wind and water, where the Sun rises and the Moon set, is absolutely and ultimately the divinely aimed-at and established thing, is one which we find only in the very early religions, such as that of the most primitive Jewish people. It is this natural religion (primitive still, in spite of the fact that poets and beings of science whose good-will exceeds their perspicacity keep publishing it in new editions tuned to our contemporary ears) that has suffered definitive bankruptcy in the opinion of a circle of persons, among whom I must count myself, and who are growing more numerous every day. For such persons the physical order of nature, taken simply as science know it, cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual intent. It is mere weather doing and undoing without end. Now, if I can in the short remainder of this hour, I wish to make you feel that we have a right to believe the physical order; if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living again, that we have a right to supplement in by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

However, such as a trust will seem to some of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say a word or two to weak the veto which you may consider that science opposes to out act. There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually tangible. Of this sort of mind the entity called science is the idol. Fondness for the word scientists is one of the notes by which you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing any opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it unscientific. It must be granted that there is no slight excuse for this. Science has made such glorious leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended our knowledge of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; beings of science, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirable virtues,–that it is no wonder if the worshippers of science lose their head. In this very University, accordingly, I have heard more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have already been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in. However, this slightest reflection on the real conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so crude. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Think how many absolutely new scientific conceptions have arisen in our own generation, how many new problems have been formulated that were never thought of before, and then cast an eye upon the brevity of science’s career. It began with Galileo, not three hundred years ago. For thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, and audience of some five or six score people, if each person in it could speak for one’s own generation, would carry us away to the absolute unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale. Is it credible that such a mushroom knowledge, such a growth overnight as this, can represent more than the minutest glimpse of what the Universe will really prove to be when adequately understood? No! our science is a drop blood and our ignorance a sea of salt water. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain,–that the World of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger World of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no absolute idea. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

It is a mistake to imagine the sage as a weakling. We can be powerful in our public addresses as well as in private capacity. When hostile critics of our own race slander us behind our backs, we must liken ourselves to an elephant treading down worms in its path. “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to claim anything coming from us; our sufficiency is from God, how has qualified us to be ministers of a new covenant, not in a written code but in the Spirit; for the written code kills, but the spirit gives life,” reports 2 Corinthians 3.5-6. Nobody can look into the innermost center of another being, nor fully into one’s own heart. Therefore, nobody can say with certainty that anyone else shares in the new state of things, and one can scarcely say it of oneself. However, even less can one say of another, however distorted the being’s life may be, that one does not participate at all in the new reality, and that one is not qualified to serve its cause. Certainly, nobody can say this of oneself. Perhaps it is more important in our time to emphasize this last—namely, the qualification of ourselves and those around us to serve the new creation, our ability to be priests in mutual help towards achieving it. Not long ago, many people, especially members of the church, felt qualified to judge others and to tell them what to believe and how to act. Today we feel deeply the arrogance of this attitude. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Instead, there is a general awareness of our lack of qualification, especially among the middle-aged and younger generations. We are inclined to disqualify ourselves, and to withdraw from the service of the new creation. We feel that we do not participate in it, and that we cannot bring others into such participation. We decline the honor and the burden of mutual priesthood. Often this is caused by unconcern for our highest human vocation. However, it is equally caused by despair about ourselves, by doubt, guilt and emptiness. We feel infinitely removed from a new state of things, and totally unable to help others towards it. However, then the other words of our text must become effective, that our qualification is from God and not from ourselves, and the all-consoling word that God is greater than our heart. If we look beyond ourselves at that which is greater than we, then we can feel called to help others in just the moment when we ourselves need help most urgently—and, astonishingly, we can help. A power works through us which is not of us. We may remember situations when words rose out of a depth of our being, perhaps in the midst of our own great anxiety, that struck another in the depth of one’s being and one’s great anxiety so strongly that they helped one to a new state of things. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Perhaps we remember other situations when an action of a person, whose life we knew was disrupted, had a priestly, awakening, and healing effect upon us. It did not come from one, but was in one, as it did not come from us, but was in us. Let us not assume the task of being mediators of the new creation to others arrogantly, but it personal or ecclesiastical terms. Yet, let us not reject the task of being priest for each other because of despair about ourselves or unconcern about what should be our highest concern. Against both arrogance and despair stands the word that our qualification does not come from us, nor from any being or any institution, not even from the church, but from God. And if it comes from God it is His Spiritual Presence in our spirit. “Yea, and that same God did establish his church among them; yes, and that same God hath called me by a holy calling, to preach the word unto this people, and hath given me much success, in which joy is full,” reports Alma 29.13. There is no single path to enlightenment. Life itself is the great enlightener. I met a man once who, after the shock of hearing his wife tell hm that she had ceased to love him, that she had for some time had a secret lover, and that she requested a divorce so as to be able to marry him, felt a collapse of all his hitherto confidently held values and beliefs. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

For some days he was so affected the he could not eat. However, his mind by then had become so extraordinarily lucid concerning these matters and himself, that he experiences moments of truth. Through them he came into a great peace and understanding, an inner change. What was the morning Sun which awakened him? He did not pray, entered no churches, was too intent on his Worldly business to read the Bible. This brings me back to the theme: do not submit to the pressure of those who say there is only a single way to salvation (the way they follow or teach), do not let the mind be trammeled or narrowed. The truth is that the ways are many, are spread out in all directions, are individual. From the clues, hints, and indications which search and experience give us, we learn in the end what is the true way to God within us. The quest is too individual a matter to fit everyone in the same way, like a ready-made suit of clothes. Each being has one’s own life-problems to consider and surmount. In trying to do so wisely nobly and honestly one does precisely what the quest calls for from one at the time. Each quest thus has its own character and its own personality. This it shapes by the act of dedicating itself to the incorruptible integrity of the higher life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

Randolph Harris II International Institute

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