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Should I Ever Take Ease Upon a Bed of Leisure, May that Same Moment Mark My End!
It is a lust again of time and for the future, for the mysteries of the natural World. For being the watcher that I became that long-ago night in Paris, when I was forced into it. I lost my illusions. I lost my favorite lies. You might say I revisited that moment and was reborn to darkness of my own free will. The transition to a study of the negative aspects of bureaucracy is afforded by the application of Veblen’s concept of trained incapacity, Dewey’s notion of occupational psychosis, or Warnotte’s view of professional deformation. Trained incapacity refers to that state of affairs in which one’s abilities function as inadequacies or blind spots. Actions based upon training and skills which have been successfully applied in the past may result in inappropriate responses under changed conditions. An inadequate flexibility in the application of skills, will, inchanging milieu, result in more or less serious maladjustments. Thus, to adopt a barnyard illustration used in this connection by Kenneth Burke, chickens may be readily conditioned to interpret the sound of a bell as a signal for trained chickens to their doom as they are assembled to suffer decapitation. In general, one adopts measures in keeping with one’s past training and, under new conditions which are not recognized as significantly different, the very soundness of this training may lead to the adoption of the wrong procedures. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
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It is a State Which Has Been Attained in its Fullness by Only a Few Persons During Each Century but Glimpsed at Least Once in a Lifetime by Many More!
What have the many towers of great Rocklin to do with this endless sprawling World that comes so close to it. Wence came this metropolis of America with its clear blue skies and its vast teeming hillside McMansions? Beauty is beauty where you find it. At night, even these Spanish colonial cottages as they call them—the thousands upon thousands of houses that cover the streets on either side with their beautiful green lawns—are darling, for they have water, landscaping, sewerage, electricity, and they are peaceful and beyond all modern questions healthy and comfortable, and are strung with bright, shining electric lights. Sometimes it seems that light can transform anything! That is an undeniable and irreducible blessing of God’s grace. However, do the people of the suburbs know this? Is it for beauty that they do it? Or do they merely want a comfortable illumination in their beauty Cresleigh Homes? It does not matter. We cannot stop ourselves from making beauty. We cannot stop the World. Of course there is a way to stop the rampant spread of beauty. It has to do with regimentation, conformity, assembly-line aesthetics, and the triumph of the functional over the grandeur and marvelous. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
An Architect Builds a House with the Same Feeling as that with which a Criminal Commits a Crime!
My dear Mrs. Aaliyah Haughton,
My wife and I were overwhelmed by your beauty and your voice during your concert. If you continue to sing with such grace and beauty, you will certainly die young. No one can sing with such perfection and look so beautiful without provoking the jealousy of the gods. I earnestly implore you to sing something badly every night before going to bed…. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Fortune is Mistress and Foreknowledge of Nothing Sure for the God Who Threw You Down Sustain You Now!
She never loved you, you know. Not in the way that I loved you, and the way that I loved us both. I knew this! I understood it! And I believed I would gather you to me and hold you. And time would open to us, and we would be the teachers of one another. All the things that gave you happiness would give me happiness; and I would be the protector of your pain. My power would be your power. My strength the same. However, you are dead inside to me, you are cold and beyond my reach! It is as if I am not here, beside you. And not being here with you, I have the dreadful feeling that I do not exist at all. And you are as cold and distant from me as those strange modern paintings of lines and hard forms that I cannot love or comprehend, as alien as those hard mechanical sculptures of this age which have no human form. When I am near you, I shudder. I look into your eyes and my reflection is not there. A crucial problem is the distinction between experience and what the younger generation calls mere thinking or mere words. This is particularly important for us here since historically experience has also been set in opposition to innocence. A person who buys a BMW is a consumer, whereas an auto science engineer works on cars and is experienced in the mechanical function of them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
God’s Gift to His Sorrowing Creatures is a Joy Worthy of their Destiny for Harmony is Next to Godliness!
Refuse to Cover the Signs of the End in Our Lives and in Our Souls–We Are a Generation of the End and We Should Know What We Are!
Could I have Used My Tongue I Would Not Have Struck Him—I Could Say it Only with a Blow!
Individuals in the mass societies of the twenty first century are to an ever increasing extent involved in public affairs; it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore them. However, ordinary individuals have ever less the feeling that they can understand or influence the very events upon which their life and happiness [are] known to depend. Many public issues are highly complex; to exercise citizenship intelligently, men and women and others must have an inkling of where their interests are possessed. If they find politics incomprehensible, they will be encouraged to depend on experts and leaders and the fake new media (also known as the propaganda department) to interpret and decide for them. However, as a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption. And that is particularly serious now. It is being so quickly corrupted. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear, and this leads to violence. When an age is in the throes of profound transition, the first thing to disintegrate is the language. This leads directly to the upsurge of violence. Billy Budd, at his trial after he had killed the master-at-arms with his fist, exclaims: “Could I have used my tongue I would not have struck him. I could say it only with a blow.” Not being able to find his tongue (because of his severe stuttering), he could only speak by means of the physical expression of his passion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In Humility the Quest is to be Begun: in Even Greater Humility it is to be Fulfilled
If the Mind is to Engage With Success in the Quest for Truth, it Must First be Unfettered and then Unprejudiced
Even his unusual beauty and unfailing charm were something of a secret to him. But I had always wanted many things. What accounted for the duration of the life many of us live? Why do we last so long? I purpose that there are five levels of power present as potentialities in ever human being’s life. The first is the power to be. This power can be seen in the newborn infant—he can cry and violently wave his arms as signs of discomfort within himself, demanding that his hunger or other needs be met. Whether we like it or not, power is central in the development in this infant of what we call personality. Every infant becomes an adult in ways that reflect the vicissitudes of power—that is, how one has been able to find his or her power and use it—indeed, how to be it. It is given in the act of birth, not by the culture as such but by the sheer fact that the infant lives. If the infant is denied the experience that one’s actions can get a response from those around him or her—as show in Rene Spitz’s studies of the pitiable infant orphans in Puerto Rico who were given no attention by nurses or other mother substitutes—the infant withdraws into a corner of his or her bed, does not walk or develop in other ways, and literally wither away physiologically and psychologically. The ultimate in impotence is death. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
The power to be is neither good nor evil; it is prior to them. However, it is not neutral. It must be lived out or neurosis, psychosis, or violence will result. The second phase is self-affirmation. Every being has the need not only to be but to affirm one’s own being. This is especially significant for the human organism, for it is gifted with, or condemned to, self-consciousness. This consciousness is not inborn but begins to develop in the infant after a few weeks, is not fully developed for several years, and, indeed continues developing throughout one’s life. The question of significance then emerges, and the long and crucially important quest for self-esteem or substitutes for it, accompanied by grief with the lack of it. With human beings, mere physical survival is now no longer the main issue, but survival with some esteem. The cry for recognition becomes the central cry in this need for self-affirmation. If significance and recognition are granted as a matter of course in the family, the child simply assumes them and turns one’s attention to other things. However, if—as too often the case in our disrupted day when parents as well as children are radically confused—self-affirmation is blocked, it becomes a compulsive need which drives the person all of one’s life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Or the child’s affirming of oneself may be made difficult in the face of one’s parents’ pattern of “We love you only if you obey us.” The child this get caught in the destructive aspects of competitiveness, the buying and selling of oneself and the World: one’s self-affirmation is taken by others to be a diminishing of them, and one is diminished in turn by theirs. In these or many other ways one’s self-affirmation is distorted or blocked outright. When self-affirmation meets resistance we make greater effort, we give power to our stance, making clear what we are and what we believe; we state it now against opposition. This is self-assertion, the third phase. It is a stronger form of behavior, more overt than self-affirmation. It is potentiality in all of us that we react to attack. We make it unavoidable that the others see us as we cry: “Here I am; I demand that you notice me!” The speech of Willy Loman’s wife in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, is a good example of this: “Attention must be paid…” Even though “Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the papers…he’s a human being…So attention must be paid.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The fact that her assertion was nominally for someone else does not change the fact that she was doing the asserting. When we are doing it for someone else, some of us can assert ourselves more firmly. That is merely another form of self-assertion—often made necessary by canons of politeness or not “blowing one’s own horn.” The fourth phase is aggression. When self-assertion is blocked over a period of time—as it was for the Jewish people for many years, as it is for every underrepresented group of people—this stronger form of reaction tends to develop. When I spent three years in Salonika, I found that the 100, 000 Sephardic Jewish people living there—one third of the population of the city—actually made up the cultured intelligentia of the city. There was a complete absence of anti-Semitic prejudice such as existed in the rest of Europe and America. There was so a complete absence of the aggressiveness associated in this country with Jewish people Indeed, the motto in Salonika was: “It takes two Jews to outwit a Greek, and two Greek to outwit an Armenian.” The Armenians, the group less represented, were the ones in whom aggression and a sharp bargaining sense had developed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
In contrast to self-assertion, which is drawing a line at a certain point and insisting “This is me; this is mine,” aggression is a moving into the positions of power or prestige or the territory of another and taking possession of some of it for one’s self. The motives may be righteous enough—to right an ancient wrong, as with the natives in Africa about whom Frantz Fanon, in his book The Wretched of the Earth, writes; or passion for liberation; or pride; or any one of a thousand other things. Motive does not concern us at the moment; we only emphasize that this is a phase of behavior that in every person exists a potentiality, and in the right situation it can be whipped into action. When aggressive tendencies are completely denied to the individual over a period of time, they take their toll in a zombielike deadening of consciousness, neurosis, psychosis, or violence. Finally, when all the efforts towards aggression are ineffective, there occurs the ultimate explosion known as violence. Violence is largely physical because the other phases, which can involve reasoning or persuasion, have been ipso facto blocked off. In typical cases, the stimulus transmitted from the environment to the individual is translated directly into violent impulse to strike, with the cerebrum being bypassed. This is why when a mortal erupts in a violent temper, one often does not fully realize what one has done until afterward. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It is tragic, indeed, when whole peoples are placed in a situation where significance becomes almost impossible to achieve. The African Americans are, of has met with a lot of opposition. The central crime of the early Americans is that they placed the Africans, during several centuries of slavery and one century of physical freedom but psychological oppression, in situations where self-affirmation was impossible. In physical slavery, and later in psychological slavery, every one of the nonviolent phases was difficult or impossible. They were permitted to affirm themselves only as singer, dancers, and entertainers for the titillation of the majority group, or as tillers of fields owned by others, and later, in the construction of automobiles. That this would lead to widespread apathy and, later on, to radical explosions should no longer surprise anyone. An illustration comes from the remark of an African American man in Harlem: “When the times comes, it is going to be too late. Everything will explode because the people they live under tension now; they going to a point where they can’t stand it no more. When they get to that point…” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
He dangles the end of the sentence, correctly letting us simply imagine what might come, because—as indicated above—before the violent explosion we cannot realize what may happen. For as long a people feel forced to remain in such a semihuman state, there will be aggression and violence. If the other phases of behavior are blocked, then the explosion into violence may be the only way individual or groups can get release from unbearable tension and achieve a sense of significance. We often speak of the tendency toward violence as a building up inside the individual, but it is also a response to the outside conditions. The source of violence must be seen in both its internal and external manifestations, a response to a situation which is felt to block off all other ways to response. However, it seems that people in positions of authority are not always willing to address nor resolve situations where people are being exposed to semihuman conditions because they are part of the problem and do not want to get in legal or civil trouble, so they hope that the person reaching out for help resorts to violence as a way to abdicate themselves of any illegal, unethical, or immoral ties to the situation. Their defense will be the person has a problem and erupted in violence and there was nothing we could do to prevent this from happening. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The five phases above are ontological ones—that is, they are part of the human being as human. It is the endeavor of ontology to describe the characteristics of being as being—in our case the human beings as human. A child of three may erupt in violence that takes the form of a temper tantrum as many a mortal of sixty; and although we may judge the latter more harshly, the action is potentially present in both. The ontological view does not deny development, but takes its inquiry down to a deeper level. It is not to be identified with the nature theory of violence any more than with the nurture theories discussed earlier. Ontological inquiry is directed at the structure in which both nature and nurture are rooted. I believer that the psychotherapeutic approach provides one of the most fruitful avenues for the investigation of violence and aggression. When pondering the condition of Juan Carlos Chapa Jr., Adel Sambrano Ramos, or Dylann Storm Roof, we can see the seeds and roots of the madness and the violence in our nation. I am aware of the dangers of identifying too closely the society with the individual, but to entirely avoid a relationship between the two is just as erroneous. Social problems and psychological problems can no longer be isolated from each other. I believe it is valuable to try to understand modern social aggression and violence in the context, for example, that we can learn from Elliot Rodger and other persons in dire need of power. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Medieval mortals were conscious of themselves only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. The duty of pioneers, if they are to be successful pioneers, it to realize they will need courage to forget outworn ideas and to free themselves from dying traditions so as to cope with the new conditions which are arising. In this connection, if it were practicable, the suggestion that it is also a duty to cooperate with existing spiritual movements would be acceptable; but experience will show that most of these movements are unable to enter that deep union of hearts which alone can guarantee success to any external union. Such a plan would end in failure and it is better for them to pursue their own independent course than waste time and force in attempting what would not succeed and is not really needed. With the Renaissance emerges the individual as we know them. If one’s entrance upon the scene was gradual rather than dramatic, it is indicated nonetheless clearly by important changes in language. In the Middle Ages the word “individual” means “inseparable”; and it was used chiefly in theological arguments about the Holy Trinity or to indicate a member of some group, kinds of species. The complexity of the term is at once apparent in this history, for it is the unit that is being defined, yet defined in terms of its membership of a class. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The separable entity is being defined by a word that has meant inseparable. The crucial history of the modern description is a change in emphasis which enabled us to think of the individual as a kind of absolute, without immediate reference to the group of which one is a member. This change took pace in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; and since then we have come to speak of the individual in one’s own right, whereas previously to describe an individual was to give an example of the group of which one was a member, and so to offer a particular description of that group and of the relationships within it. This semantic change reflected profound changes in the social order after the medieval period, particularly the breakup of the feudal caste system. When mortals found that they could change their status and social mobility increased, the idea grew of being an individual apart from one’s social role. Also important, as we shall see, was mortal’s new detachment from power over nature: when mortal (as subject) divorced one’s self from nature (as object) in order to understand and control it, individualism was given further impetus. It is the historical emergence of the individual as we now know one, of mortal alone, that makes alienation so crucially a modern problem. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
In the past, as we saw, when they lost their status that identified them and offered them some security, mortals particularly felt anxiety or despair. However, when the medieval system collapsed, the likelihood of alienation increased appreciably. Indeed, only with the release of the individual from medieval bonds could alienation become a widespread social problem. The breakdown of the feudal order forced mortals to fall back upon themselves; they had to learn how to cope with countless problems and decision that were once taken care of my Worldly and spiritual hierarchies. However, together with the anxieties generated by this new autonomy mortals sensed a great promise, for in the period of the formation of the national state and the development of a mercantile economy one’s own future seemed to have infinite possibilities. At the end of the curve, in our own century, mortals begin to feel threatened by the encroachment of powerful social forces emanating not only from one’s own corner of the Earth but from every part of a contracting World. If mortals today fear freedom or wish to escape from it, this was not always so—certainly not for the optimistic of the political and scientific enlightenment. However, then alienation is not only an accompaniment of individualism. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Perhaps above all, as we have suggested, alienation is a response to fearful new powers that mortals themselves have created and that threaten their hard-won freedom. Foremost among them are the machine and the social structures which administer it. The freedom to command one’s life in one’s own way can be got only by first getting the fearlessness to disregard the criticism and to ignore the expectations of other people. One who would follow an independent path must, to some extent, be fearless. One must refuse to be intimidated by the power, prestige, claims, or size of established organizations, just as one must refuse to be deluded by the idealizations of themselves which they hold before the public. Few people know what a free existence really is; most people live caged in by fear of, or enslavement to, the opinion of others. Even the rich do not know it for their cages are gilt and comfortable. Even the spiritual do not know it for they mere echo back what these others want them to think about God. Complete freedom is possible only to those who have special character, one that is devoid of tyrannizing ambitions and despotic cravings, and even of unworldly strivings. Such is the strange paradox of the quest that on the one hand one must foster determined self-reliance but on the other yield to a feeling of utter dependence on the power of God. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Those who are self-sufficient and prefer to learn and develop by themselves, are those who especially need to practise this inward listening and waiting. What we mean is that modern mortals have to become more self-reliant, has to throw off the remnants of tribal consciousness which still rule one, has to learn to think for one’s self. However, it one must stand aloof to one’s own way, with one’s own free thoughts, it remains a benevolent, amiable independence. One wishes all beings well while knowing they receive, suffer, or enjoy the results of their own physical, emotional, or mental action. Ones desire to express individual views, character, and personality must be respected so long as one does not try to impose them aggressively or tyrannically on others. This is the only genuine guarantee of continuity. The genuine guarantee of duration is that the pure relation can be filled as the beings become You, as they are elevated to the You, so that the holy basic word sounds through all of them. Thus the time of human life cannot and ought not to overcome the It-relation, it then becomes so permeated by relation that this gains a radiant and penetrating constancy in it. The moments of supreme encounter are no mere flashes of lightning in the dark but like a rising Moon in a clear starry night. And thus the genuine guarantee of spatial constancy consists in this the mortal’s relations to their You, being radii that lead from all I-points to the center, create a circle. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Not the periphery, not the community comes first, but the radii, the common relation to the center. That alone assures the genuine existence of a community. The anchoring of time in relation-oriented life of salvation and the anchoring of space in a community unified by a common center: only when both of these come to be and only as long as both continue to be, a human cosmos (shelter for mortals, a houselike World) comes to be and continues to be around the invisible altar, grasped in the spirit out of the World stuff on the eon. The encounter with God does not come to mortals in order that one may henceforth attend to God but in order that one may prove its meaning in action in the World. All revelation is calling and a mission. However, again and again mortals shun actualization and bends back toward the revealer: one would rather attend to God than to the World. Now that one has bent back, however, one is no longer confronted by a You; one can do nothing but place a divine It in the realm of things, believe that one knows about God as an It, and talk about him. It is not necessary to be surly and irritable in order to be an individualist. One can still be affable, genial, civil, and courteous—even radiant with good will It is a matter of inner equilibrium. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
One must refuse to violate one’s intellectual integrity or sacrifice one’s spiritual independence. Even as the egomaniac does not live anything directly, whether it be a perception or an affection, but reflect on one’s perceiving or affectionate I and thus misses truth of the process, thus the theomaniac (who incidentally, can get along very well with egomaniac in the very same soul) will not let the gift take full effect but reflects instead on that which gives, and misses both. When you are sent forth, God remains presence of you; whoever walks in one’s mission always has God before one: the more faith the fulfillment, the stronger and more constant the nearness. Of course, one cannot attention to God, touching oneself all over with God, but one can converse with God. Bending back, on the other hand, turns God into an object. It appears to be a turning toward the primal ground, but belongs in truth to the World movement of turning away, even as the apparent turning away of those who fulfill their mission belongs in truth to the World movement of turning toward. For the two basic metacosmic movement of the World—its expansion into its own being returning to association [with God]—attain their supreme and conciliation, their mixture and separation, in the history of mortal’s relation to God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
It is in the return that the word is born on Earth; in spreading out it enter the chrysalis of religion; in a new return it is reborn with new wings. Not caprice is at work here, although the movement toward the It may at times go so far that it holds down the movement of going forth again t the You and threatens to suffocate it. The powerful revelations invoked by the religions are essentially the same as the quiet one that occurs everywhere and at all times. The powerful revelations that stand at the beginnings of great communities, at the turning points of human time, are nothing else than the eternal revelation. However, revelation does not pour into the World through its recipient as if one were a funnel: it confers itself upon one, it seizes one’s whole element in all of its suchness and fuses with it. Even the more who is mouth is precisely that and not a mouthpiece—not an instrument but an organ, an autonomous, sounding organ; and to sound means to modify sound. If one is unable to continue in this quest without the association, encouragement, or sympathies of others who are also following it, then one had better not enter it at all, for quite obviously one is not ready for it not sufficiently appreciative of its values. If being different is an honest result of the search for higher truth, it must be acceptable. However, when it is merely a disguised egocentric exhibitionism, it becomes reprehensible. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
And Distance Has Come and Taken You Far Away Again, but I Will See You Soon, My Friend!
I showed my power to understand. Yes, illusions before, I admit it, but the thing I have spoken here are true. Already you despise your son for his love of mortals, his need to be ever near them, his yielding to the violinist. “Lie awake watching you run through my head, I am alone again, but not for long my friend. We face another day and distance has come and taken you far away again, but I will see you soon my friend, and then I will sing you my song. I cannot go home alone again. No I cannot my friend. Until then, eyes, I recognize taking me back familiar to me from some other time or maybe another life. Remember out times, and know who I am. The memory stays, until we can breathe as one again,” Until then by Sully Erna. Power and the sense of significance, I have said, are intertwined. One is the objective form and the other the subjective form of the same experience. While power is typically extrovert, significance may not be extrovert at all but may be shown (and achieved) by prayer or other introvert, subjective methods. It is nevertheless experienced by the person as a sense of power in that it helps one integrate oneself and subsequently makes one more effective in one’s relations with others. Power is always interpersonal; is it is purely personal we call it strength. Power is social and consists of person in groups acting in concert. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
This is why the interpersonal view point, the tap root of the cultural school of psychoanalysis, is so important. If one believes the feeling of power in the sense of having influence in interpersonal relations with significant others is crucial for the maintenance of self-esteem and for the process of maturity, when the sense of significance is lost, the individual shift one’s attention to different, and often perverted or neurotic, forms of power to get some substitute for significance. “Here I am, what a nice place to be. I never thought I would see the skies separate for me and here I am. What a nice surprise. If only I had known what life was like on this side. You always bring me light, and you help me find my way. A gentle kiss goodnight is the innocence I crave. Here I am humbled and amazed. This beautiful little miracle of life was gifted to me, and here I am. I never thought I would say, if I could live my life again, I would live it your way. You always brought me life, and you have helped me find my way. I will never waste you time, I will never cause you pain. I will love you all my life, I will love you everyday. Under the light you shine on me, I promise I will be there for you baby. I would never want to leave you anyway, you have become my light. I cross my heart that is in your hands with hope that you will always be my best friend. I promise I will be there until the end,” My Light by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Our particular problem in America at this point in history is the widespread loss of the sense of individual significance, a loss which is sensed inwardly as impotence. A situation in our day more tragic than the violence about us is that so many people feel they do not and cannot have power, that even self-affirmation is denied them, that they have nothing left to assert, and hence that there is no solution short of a violent explosion. Consider a recurring nightmare from a radical student at Columbia University. In this dream, the student Salvatore, came home from school and rand the bell to his house. He was told by his mother that she did not know him and that he did not belong there. He went to his cousin’s house and they told him the same thing. Finally he walked across the country to his father’s house in California and was told by his father that he did not know him and he did not belong there. The dream ended with him disappearing into the Pacific Ocean. “In separation, we come together. It never ends, change has just begun. Believing as we release the departed to know, what no one else could know. A way, into the unexplained. Redeem my soul into my body. To think my souls have been damned again, and again and again,” The Departed by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Judging from how often this kind of dream—“My parents did not recognize me; they closed the door in my face,” “I do not belong to any place”—comes up in therapy, it seems to be an important clue to understanding our times. The student who had that dream was a member of the revolutionary movement not by accident. Violence, or acts close to it, gives one a sense of counting, of mattering, of power (whether the feeling be ersatz or not is unimportant at the moment). This in turn gives the individual a sense of significance. No human being can exist for long without some sense of significance. No human being can exist for long without some sense of one’s own significance. Whether one gets it by shooting a haphazard victim on the street, or by constructive work, or by rebellion, or by psychotic demands in a hospital, or by Walter Mitty fantasies, one must be able to feel this I-count-for-something and be able to live out that felt significance. It is the lack of this sense of significance, and the struggles for it, that underlies much violence. Writing in the Report to the Nation Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence appointed by the president after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the historian Richard Maxwell Brown makes sobering statements about American violence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
“The first and must obvious conclusion is that there has been a huge amount of it. We have resorted so often to violence that we have long since become a trigger happy people. It is not merely that violence has been mixed with the negative features of our history such as criminal activity, lynch mobs, and family feuds. On the contrary, violence has formed a seamless web with some of the noblest and most constructive chapters of American history.” The aftermath of the 1968 political assassination saw a bevvy of opinions and researches spring up on the causes of violence and its cures, consisting largely of debates between those emphasizing nature, and those emphasizing nurture. The former (stemming back, in the main, to Dr. Freud) held the general viewpoint that aggression is instinctive, part of the genetic equipment of mortals, and human beings are inherently aggressive. According to this view, it is a cross we must bear, an expression of the old Adam inevitably tainting human beings, and the most we can hope for is to control this evil in our hearts or let it out in wars and other culturally approved forms of violence. The other chief view, nurture, claims that aggression is a cultural phenomenon, caused—or at least augmented—by mass communication, faulty education, and especially TV. It is to be attacked and gotten rid of by changing our educational methods and controlling programs on TV. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
What all too often is tiresomely ignored is that these two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Aggression is part of the basic equipment of mortals, but it is also culturally formed, exacerbated, and can be, at least in part, redirected. Out culture is not simply a given, but is also us. We “homo called sapiens,” as Edna St. Vincent Millay put it in her sonnet, are the kind of creatures who create a vast TV and other forms of mass communication and, using these means, covertly teach aggression to our children. At the same time we endlessly sermonize against aggression. The contradiction this creates adds to the impotence everyone feels and to the hypocrisy with which we surround the issue of power in our culture. However, the real argument against many of these either/or explanation is that they leave out of the discussion exactly what is most important in the problem—that is, the question of the values, rooted in both nature and nurture, that link the two and are bound up with aggression and violence. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Richard Maxwell Brown concludes his part of the Report to the Commission on Violence by citing two problems which confront us: “One is the problem of self-knowledge…When that is done…we must realize that violence has not been the action only of roughnecks and racists among us but has been the tactic of the must upright and respected of our people. Having gained this self-knowledge, the next problem becomes the ridding of violence, once and for all, from the real (but unacknowledged) American value system.” However, is there not a flagrant contradiction in this? If violence has been part and parcel of “our highest and most idealistic endeavors” and had been the tactic of the “most upright and respected” people, should we not inquire whether these people find something, perhaps unconsciously, in violence that they value? Furthermore, one can never change a value system by willing it changed or by other conscious means, as though plucking weeds from a garden. The roots of values lie deep in the archetypal and unconscious symbols and myths of the society. Changing the values system first of all requires a probing into the questions: What does violence do for the individual? What purposes does one achieve through aggression and violence? #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
In the utopian aim of removing all power and aggression from human behavior, we run the risk of removing self-assertion, self-affirmation, and even the power to be. If it were successful, it would breed a race of docile, passive eunuchs and would lay the groundwork for an explosion in violence that would dwarf all those that have occurred so far. Thus oversimplifying the issue, we talk as though our choice were only between aggression on the one hand and a race of eunuchs on the other. Caught in the contradiction which this breeds, it is not surprising that we wake up with bad dreams, sensing that the essence of ourselves, the self-affirmation and self-assertion that makes us persons and without which we have no reason for living, is taken from us. What we have failed to see is that aggression has been, on the beneficial side, in the service of those values of life which would, if discarded, leave us bereft, indeed. “How many ways can you break my spirit down…again and how many times have I peeled my face up off the ground…for you. In case that you are starting to think you can run my life…I would think again. Or cripple my faith, when you judge and criticize me…but I am still standing. I do not know if I can say I have lived through everything, but I have walked this Earth with bare feet broken in the snow and my father said to me it never seems to be a simple walk down an icy cold broken road. I will fight with what is inside of me…this warrior spirit inside of me,” Broken Road by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
It has long been my belief that understanding aggression and violence requires that power be seen as basic to the problem. I believe, also, that the data given to us by depth psychology cast an especially revealing light on the springs of human power and on aggression and violence. In my concern with power, I am tying to reach a level below both the nature and nurture theories, below both the instinct and culture arguments. I am seeking the answer to the question: What does individual person achieve through aggression and violence? If the pre-industrial World was in many ways no less insecure than our own, at least work and community life were ordered on a human scale. First of all, most mortals lived in small, tightly knit communities in which the family was the productive unit. Second, the tools that mortals used, the pace of work, the distribution of things that were made—all of those were controlled by human capacities and needs. Perhaps most important, instead of being separated from what we now call leisure activities, work itself—ordinarily some craft—was closely integrated in the total life of individuals and communities. Some call this the World we have lost. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
It was by no means an idyllic Word, but time was, and it was all time up to 250 years ago when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, know and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors. Different chiefly because of the technological revolution with its transformation of working conditions, the communities in which mortal life, and the whole complex social order that governs our lives. What happened, however, was companying change in human personality or character; and companying change in human personality or character; and it is the characterological revolution which must be understood if we are to determine whether alienation today differs in form and degree from the miseries of which earlier mortals complained. However, like the scientific and political upheavals which is accompanied, this characterological change had no sudden beginning or point in time at which earlier mortals complained. However, like the scientific and political upheavals which it accompanied, this characterological change had n sudden beginning or point in time at which spontaneously modern mortals replaced feudal mortals. History here is inadequate, and our evidence largely intuitive, or derived from literary works with their descriptions of social types, or from language itself. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
As much as anything else, one needs personal freedom in this search after truth. Every form of interference and obstruction comes from sources which have acquired only a partial or false insight into truth. However, such freedom is permitted only insofar as one is good enough, wise enough, balanced enough, judicious enough, and discriminating enough to use it properly. Otherwise it leads to non-truth and self-deception. One must learn to think for oneself and to practise discrimination for oneself, if one want to find one’s way to truth. “A veil of sparkling white soothes and bathes me in the light, it feels me with the Suns and visions of the ancient ones. Descend to me, and sooth my disarray, and so it is done—hear my words Avalon. Fields are swaying like dancers in the Moonlight, rivers field with dreams-Unbroken and still promising. Warm inside-open the way in flat into the night—embrace what is to be, Avalon” Avalon by Sully Erna. Avalon is the mythical island, in Arthurian legend. The island’s legendary healing powers were said to restore King Arthur after he was injured in a major battle. His sword, Excalibur, was forged there too. It is a utopian paradise where the legends of English knights and political wholeness unite in a kingdom lost in the mists of time. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
If a seeker find no one in one’s surroundings, contacts, or society near enough to one’s level of spiritual interests, then one must accept one’s loneliness, because one has chosen to draw away from the common preoccupation. For in order to be a working philosopher, a mortal must go one’s own way. This demand for individuality requires courage and wisdom. If one lack higher knowledge, intuitional feeling, and intellect—whose combination is wisdom—then one must seek to develop them and this demands works. Meanwhile, one can take help from personal guides and superior books. Without wisdom, or at least genuine efforts to work towards it, one’s course could be wrongly set to arrive at disaster. To withdraw from sectarian community life and walk alone requires qualities that only few possess. There is security, comfort, mortal and Worldly support in it. To be able to abandon these things a mortal must have strong inner urge as well as a continuous clear perception of philosophy’s meaning. “Breathe deep, bracing and strong, coming alive. Take back all that is lost, honour your pride. Time stops, silence is now, moving around hands raised fading to black, fall to the ground. From within, you will begin to feel the rise!” (The Rise by Sully Erna) #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The weakling cannot walk this path. A mortal needs strength to follow out what one’s deep intuition tells one to do, especially where it departs from the allegedly rational or the socially conventional. If one’s guided attitude or actions meets with criticism or opposition, what is that to one? One is not answerable for what other people think about one. That is their responsibility. One is answerable only for what one oneself thinks and does. Only the mortal who has a passion to acquire the certainty of truth, who has the courage to hold unorthodox views and come to independent conclusions, who lives in an atmosphere of original thought, and to whom the charge of heresy is no charge at all, is at all likely to find one’s way to the truth. In truth, however, the pure relation can be built up into spatiotemporal continuity only be becoming embodied in the whole stuff of life. It cannot be preserved but only put to the proof in action; it can only be done, poured into life. Mortals can do justice to the relation to God that has been given to one only by actualizing God in the World in accordance with one’s ability and the measure of each day, daily. This is the only genuine guarantee of continuity. “Time is so wasted it wastes away, resurrect me Jesus Christ, I am so lonely for you. Taken away the innocence of live. Deliver me. Deliver me out of this pain and I will live through you again,” Eyes of a Child by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Randolph Harris II International Institute 