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A Succession of Lies Necessary to Make the World Go Forward
If you do not take interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools. From other quarters the principle of competition was defended with new subtleties. In the 1890’s, although competition was increasingly thrown on the defensive, two popular writers entered the lists on its behalf and once again attempted to fit competitive ethics into the evolutionary scheme. Two new currents in the intellectual atmosphere provoked a change in the tone of evolutionary apologetics: the growth of social protest evident in the Henry George and Edward Bellamy movements, the publication of the Fabian essays, and a growing general familiarity with Marxism; and in the field of biology the publication of August Weismann’s researches into the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Weismann had developed what he thought was conclusive evidence against such inheritance. If he was right—and most biologists believed he was—the Lamarckian features of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy were no longer tenable; men could no longer hope to evolve an ideal race by gradual increments of knowledge and benevolence handed down to their children; social evolution must be redrawn along stricter Darwinian lines; if there was to be any process at all, it must come from a severe reliance upon natural selection. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Progress results from selection and that selection inevitably involves competition. Therefore, the central aim of a progressive civilization must be to maintain competition. For the great masses of men, however, for the underrepresented everywhere, the incentives to maintain competition grow slighter and slighter. That is why throughout history we have had swelling cries of protest. [Man’s] interests as an individual have, in fact, become further subordinated to those of a social organism, with interests immensely wider and a life indefinitely longer than his own. How is the possession of reason ever to be rendered compatible with the will to submit to conditions of existence so onerous, requiring the effective and continual subordination of the individual’s welfare to the progress of a development in which he can have no person interest whatever? Why should the red Indian or the New Zealand Māori, undergoing extermination before the advance of more progressive peoples, have an interest in progress? Or, more important for western civilization and its future, what rational sanction can there be for the “great masses of the people, the so-called lower class,” to submit to the person trials and tortures incident to social progress by way of the competitive system? #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
They are already becoming more and more aware that their individual rational interest is clearly to abolish competition, to suspend rivalry, to establish socialism to regulate population and keep it “proportional to the means of comfortable existence for all.” This antagonism between the rational interest of the mass-individual and the continued progress of the social organism cannot be reconciled by reason. However, let philosophy abandon its attempt to find a rational sanction for conduct—then the problem is seen in a new light. At the same time the social function of religion is made crystal clear. One common characteristic underlies all conceptions of religion: they revel man in some way in conflict with his own reason. The universal instinctive religious impulse serves this indispensable social function: it provides a supernatural, nonrational sanction for progress. All kinds of religious systems are associated with conduct, having a social significance; and everywhere the ultimate sanction which they provide for the conduct they prescribed is a superational one. Religion as a social institution has survived because it performs an essential service to the face: it impels man to act in a socially responsible way. Such an impulse is absent from all merely rational ways of thought. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
There is no rational sanction for altruism; its sanction is superrational, and runs counter to individual self-interest. No wonder that it is so often found in close association with the religious impulse. The altruistic impulse should be heeded, and is being heeded, for there is a growing tendency to strengthen and equip the lower and weaker against the higher and wealthier classes of the community. This is the best possible answer to the threat of socialism. Socialism, abandoning competition, would result in degeneracy and inundation by more vigorous societies. These effects of charities, and of the general trend toward strengthening the masses to compete by means of social legislation, is to stimulate competitive tension. Thus, the social efficiency of western society is increased. All future progressive legislation must lift the masses into this energetic competition. As state interference widens, mankind will paradoxically move further and further away from socialism. The state will never go so far as to manage industry or confiscate private property. From all this progressive movement will come a “new democracy” higher than anything yet attained in this history of the race. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
It was a peculiar mixture of obscurantism, reformism, Christianity, and social Darwinism that enthralls the masses. Among religious folk who want a rational foundation for their beliefs, among social Darwinists of older laissez-faire stripe, orthodox Spencerians, trained philosophers and sociologists, and rationalists of all kinds, they believer that the intellectual foundations of religion have slipped away from the orthodox church. They are not rationalists, most of them have never seriously examined the rational basis of their creed, but the disturbing influences of rational criticism have reached them in the shape of his vague uneasy feeling. Now these people, morally weak because they have relied upon dogmatic supports of conduct, are ready to grasp eagerly at a theory which will save their religious systems in a manner which seems consistent with the maintenance of modern culture. The state should equalize the chances of competition but not abolish it. Many people understress the tendency of the unfit, even without organized social assistance, to survive and grow more fit rather than suffer elimination. The wealthier classes have been inadequately understood in evolutionary philosophy. The great fault of current sociology is it speaks grossly of “mankind” or “the race” or “the nation,” without refining these terms into classes and individuals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
With all the talk about the evolutionary progression of the whole mass society, Spencer and Kidd are guilty of disparaging the great man and losing sight of his contribution and achievements. They fallaciously belittled the stature of great leaders by attributing their deeds to the whole of society and its inherited skills and accomplishments; by the same logic the great masses of men could also be shorn of credit for their petty performances. The great man, in Mallock’s scheme, was certainly not to be identified with the physically fittest survivor in the struggle for existence. All you could say for the physically fittest survivor was that he manages to live; and while this does undoubtedly contribute to the progress of the race, it is slow and unspectacular. The great man, on the other hand, galvanizes society by acquiring unique knowledge or skill and imposing it on the mass. The physically fittest promotes progress by living while others die; the great man promotes progress by living while others die; the great man promotes progress by helping others to live. The struggle of ordinary workers to find employment is a social equivalent of the struggle for existence; it contributes but little to progress, for the greatest forward steps in the development of man have been accomplished without any improvement in the breed of its labourers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The industrial struggle that really promotes progress is the battle among leaders, among employers. When one of two competing employers succeeds in conquering the other, the working men of the vanquished are absorbed in the employ of the victor, and lose nothing; but the fruits of the successful leader’s skill are bequeathed to the community. It is, then, not the virtue struggle for existence but the war for domination among the well-to-do that results in social progress. Domination by the fittest is of the greatest benefit to society as a whole. In order to facilitate the process the great man must be impelled by strong motives and granted the instruments of domination. Fundamentally this is an economic problem. The great man can exert his influence by one of two economic means—the slave system and the capitalistic wage system, can do so only by founding a slavery system. They could not eliminate the struggle for domination; they could only enclose it in their cumbrous and wasteful order. To progress, a social system must retain competition between the directors of labour, the contest for industrial domination. No matter what happens to society, the domination of the fittest great men—capitalistic competition—must be ensured. Such men are the true producers. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The fundamental condition of social progress is that these leaders be obeyed by the masses. In politics, as un industry, the forms of democracy are hollow; for whole executive agencies are designed to execute the will of the many, the opinions of the many are informed by the few. When we consider the problem of information in face-to-face groups, we must ask (a) how the necessary information can be transmitted to the group for which it is relevant and (b) how our education can increase the student’s capacity for critical thought rather than to make him a consumer of information. It would not be useful to go into details of how this type of information can be transmitted. Given sufficient concern and interests, there are no great obstacles to developing adequate methods. A second requirement for the functioning of all face-t0-face groups is debate. Through the increasing mutual knowledge of the members, the debate will lose an acrimonious and slogan-throwing character and will become a dialogue between human beings instead of a disputation. While there will always be fanatics and more or less sick as well as unintelligent people who cannot participate in this kind of debate, an atmosphere can be created which, without any force, eliminates the effectiveness of such individuals within the group. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
It is essential for the possibility of a dialogue that each member of the group not only try to be less defensive and more open, but also that he try to understand what the other person means to say rather than the actual formulation he gives to his thought. In every fruitful dialogue, each participant must help the other to clarify his thought rather than to force him to defend formulations about which he may have his own doubts. Dialogue implies always mutual clarification and often even understanding the other better than one understands oneself. Eventually, if the group did not have the right to make decisions and if these decisions were not translated into the real process of that social sector to which they belong, the information and debate would remain sterile and impotent. While it is true that to act, man must think first, it is equally true that if man has no chance to act, his thinking withers and loses its strength. It is impossible to give a blueprint of what decisions the fact-to-face groups in enterprises should be called upon to make. It is obvious that the very process of information and debate has an educational influence and changes the people who participate in it. Hence, they are likely to make more wrong decisions in the beginning than after many years of practice. It follows that the area of decision making should grow while people learn how to think, to debate, and to make judgments. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
In the beginning their decisions might be restricted to the right to ask their respective bureaucrats to explain decisions, to give specific information which is desired, and the right to initiate plans, rules, laws for the consideration of the decision-making bodies. The next step would be the right to enforce reconsiderations of decisions by a qualified majority. Eventually, the face-to-face groups would be entitled to vote on fundamental principles of action, while the detailed execution of their principles would remain essentially a matter for the management. The decision of the face-to-face groups would be integrated into the whole process of decision making, implementing the principle of central planning by the principle of the “subjects’” control and initiative. The consumer should also be represented in the decision-making process. The concept of unconscious forces determining man’s consciousness, and the choices he makes, have a tradition in Western thought going back to the seventeenth century. The first thinker who had a clear concept of the unconscious was Spinoza. He assumed that men “are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.” In other words, the average man is not free, but he lives under the illusion of being free because he is motivated by factors unconscious to him. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
For Spinoza this very existence of the unconscious motivation constitutes human bondage. However, he did not leave it at that. The attainment of freedom, for Spinoza, was based on an ever-increasing awareness of the reality inside and outside man. The idea of unconscious motivation was expressed in a very different context by A. Smith, who wrote that economic man “is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” Again in a different context we find the concept of the unconscious in Nietzsche’s famous saying: “My memory says I have done this. My pride say I have not done it; my memory yields.” Actually the whole trend of thought which was concerned with uncovering the objective factors determining human consciousness and behaviour is to be looked upon as part of the general trend to grasp reality rationally and scientifically, which has characterized Western thought since the end of the Middle Ages. The medieval World had been well ordered and seemed to be secure. Man had been created by God and was watched over by Him; man’s World was the center of the Universe; man’s consciousness was the last mental, indubitable entity, just as the atom was the smallest, indivisible physical entity. Within a few hundred years, this World broke to pieces. The Earth ceased to be the center of the Universe, man was the product of an evolutionary development starting with the most primitive forms of life, the physical World transcended all concepts of time and space which had seemed to be secure even a generation before, and consciousness was recognized as an instrument for hiding thought, rather than being the bastion of truth. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
When “growing opinion” says that I am the product of my class, this makes no sense to me. Certainly, this can and does happen, but it does not have to happen. I have been conditioned, and there are ways in which I am still conditioned. However, I know when my conditioning is getting in my way, and I have been learning to do my own brainwashing. I had discovered that, although I cannot yet do it all the time, still I can, for a short period—in some circumstances longer than in other—de-condition myself by flicking my mental switch and non-cold matter-of-factly deal with the facts and persons present. My “hope for education” includes the possibility that we might begin to learn to do this in the first grade, or even in kindergarten. If education were turned “upside down,” it seems to me that education would find itself right side up. Then, it would take place through the interaction of what is inside with what is outside, which the inside coming first. We seem to forget that that is where things came from in the first place. When my daughter was twelve, I discovered that she had done a real and thorough job of research on the American cowboy. She started out just by linking cowboy stories. She read every one that she could get hold of, quite indiscriminately, but then discrimination began to take place. The one to go to was Zane Grey because “I can tell at the beginning of the book how it’s going to end.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
She became more interested in factual accounts, and in stories which were accurate in their information. In reading for her pleasure, she noticed that in different parts of the west, different names were used for cowboys’ gear and even for the cowboys themselves who were “buckaroos” in Oregon. She noticed that the gear varied from place to place, according to the terrain and the influence of the Indians and the Spaniards. All this time she had put it down so neatly that it could be grasped immediately, together with her own sketches where illustration was possible. For the first time, I thought of “research” was something not “out there” that must be learned from others, but something that in the first place came out of people in just the way that it had come out of her. How else could it have happened. Now, recalling Clare, after a while, it became clear to her that her efforts to escape humiliation had injured her dignity more than anything else. These efforts had been particularly pernicious since they involved not only an uncritical bending to Peter’s wishes but also an unconscious inflation of her feeling for him. She realized that the more her actual feeling for him diminished, the more she had worked it up to a pitch of false emotion, thus ensnaring herself still more deeply in her bondage. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Clare’s insights into the needs that constituted this “love” had lessened the tendency toward an inflation of feelings, but it was only now that her feelings dropped sharply to their actual level; in all simplicity, she discovered that she felt very little for him. This recognition gave her a feeling of serenity that she had not had for a long time. Instead of wavering between longing for Peter and wanting to take revenge she took a calm stand toward him. She still appreciated his good qualities, but she knew that it would be impossible for her ever to be closely associated with him again. With this last finding to be reported here Clare tackled dependency from a new angle. The work done up to this point was a gradual recognition that she was dependent because of her huge expectations, this working culminating in the analysis of the “private religion.” Now she saw in addition how the loss of spontaneous self-confidence had contributed to the dependency in a more direct way. The crucial finding in this regard was the recognition that her picture of herself was entirely determined by the evaluation of others. It is in accord with the significance of this insight that it struck her so deeply that she almost fainted; the emotional recognition of this tendency constituted an experience so deep that for a short moment it almost overwhelmed her. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The insight did not itself solve the problem, but it was the basis for recognizing the inflation of her feelings and the far-reaching significance that “rejection” had for her. This piece of analysis also paved the way for a later understanding of her repressed ambition. It enabled her to see that to be accepted by others was one way of lifting her crushed self-regard, a purpose that was served from another direction by ambition to excel others. Albert Ellis developed an approach to psychotherapy that he calls rational-emotive therapy, to highlight the fact that he is concerned with feelings, but no less concerned with sensible thinking about life problems. He regards neurotically disturbed people as individuals who talk nonsense to themselves, who refrain from vital living because they dread catastrophic consequences for ordinary self-assertiveness. They do not think clearly, and they do not check the validity of their thinking. For example, a painfully shy and lonely person may be saying to himself, “I would like to ask that girl for a date, but she might refuse me, and that would be awful.” Dr. Ellis might reply to this patient, “Well, supposed she does refuse you; what’s so terrible about that? You are ‘awfulizing,’ and that interferes with life.” By virtue of such arguments with a patient’s excuses for diminished living, and for not changing self-defeating patterns, Ellis is often able to convince the patient to try ways to live that generate satisfaction and growth. Ellis provides a wholesome reminder that, although excessive thinking can rob a life of feeling and action, wrong thinking can paralyze life itself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Among the moral self-restraints which an aspirant is required to practice is that of truthfulness. There are several reasons for this prescription. However, the one which affects his quest directly is the effect of untruthfulness upon his inner being. It not only spoils his character and destiny but also deforms his mind. In the lair’s mouth the very function of language becomes a perverted one. He renders defective the very instrument with which he is seeking to make his way to the Overself; it becomes spoiled. If he meets with any mystical experience, it will become mixed with falsity of hallucination. If he finds spiritual truth, it will not be the pure or whole truth but the distortion of it. Where situations are likely to arise which make truth-telling highly undesirable, the earnest aspirant should try to avoid them as much as possible by forethought. The pattern of indifference to truth-speaking must be broken up. The pattern of scrupulous respect for truth-speaking must be built up. The discipline of his ego must include the discipline of its speech. His words must be brought into correspondence with his ideals. Every word written or uttered must be diamond clad truth. If the truth is awkward or dangerous to say, then it may be advisable to keep silent. May he tell a small white lie to liberate himself from an awkward situation? “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Not only will he refrain from telling a conscious lie of any kind, but he will not, through bragging vanity, exaggerate the truth into a half-lie. Any tendency in these directions will be crushed as soon as he becomes aware of it. He will take the trouble to express himself accurately, even t the point of making a fad of the careful choice of his words. Let him not maim his heart nor deform his mind by formulating thoughts which are false. If philosophy be the quest of ultimate truth, if the rule be broken, then it is certain that such a quest cannot be carried to a successful conclusion. We have begun to question Nature and we must abide by the consequences. However, we need not fear the advancing tide of knowledge. Its effects on morals will be only to discipline human character even more. For it is not knowledge that makes men immoral, it is the lack of it. False foundations make uncertain supports for morality. As psychiatry, psychology, and social work have tried to contribute directly to the demand for psychotherapy, they have suffered serious dilution of their basic and unique contributions. If these disciplines will take joint initiative toward the creation of a new, socially efficient and socially responsive profession, they will maintain proper consultative authority for that profession, they will help to meet the social need, and they will create the means whereby they may be freed for intensified, specialized efforts in accordance with their respective, unique and interdependent skills—to the end that we may gain better understanding, better treatment, and better prevention of mental suffering. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
As firefighters, the Sacramento Fire Department faces monumental risks in their jobs every day. There are a few ways of getting around these risks and therefore preventing many of the firefighter injuries and deaths. “In those days our training school was in a real old building, and we did our outdoor training, our ladder work, at Municipal Stadium. It was a six-week school. We run a much more extensive training school now. I was a cadet for seven years at my first station, which was a long time. My father-in-law tried to take care of me by sending me to a station that wasn’t very busy. We didn’t take many men into the department in those days, and not many guys retired. So I had to wait. It was a good learning experience. I took a promotion exam, but I didn’t do too well, because my wife had a child right before the exam and I was baby-sitting rather than studying. In those days, getting promoted was no big deal. I enjoyed what I was doing. But then you get to the point where you figure, hey, I want to improve myself. The first job we had was about three hours after I came to work. It was a mattress fire on the third floor of an apartment house. It was scary, smoky. You couldn’t see. I remember that most. I think the first really serious fire was in downtown, which turned out to be an all-nighter. Shortly after that, we had another apartment house fire. It was seven o’clock on a winter morning. We took like 117 people out of the building over ladders and down stairways. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“I was scared as all hell when I saw so many people in real trouble, scared about doing things right. Fortunately, we had a couple of old-timers there who were pretty sharp. We carried fifty-five-foot ladders at that time. I always think about it. Under the standard now, we carry forty-foot ladders. In that particular fire, if we didn’t have a fifty-five-foot ladder, we would have lost another five people. We used the fifty-five-foot ladder, with a twelve-foot jack ladder, to get people off the sixth floor of the building. There was no access for an aerial on that side. Things just happened so fast, I didn’t then realize the magnitude of it. I just worked hard. Fortunately, this apartment house had balconies on the side. The fire was pretty well involved when we got there. I remember putting a lot of ladders up. It was icy. We put fifty-five up with four men. One of them was the captain. It was a wooden ladder than weighed about 350 pounds. Normally you use five men, and some books talk about six. Putting that ladder up under good conditions was a difficult task. This was a cold, icy morning in December. Even putting a thirty-three-footer up was tough at the time. But, we were able to get that ladder up, somehow ‘cause your muster up extra strength when you have no choice. Over the years I still think about that fire. The guys did a super job.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Imagine if the Sacramento Fire Department fought fires like they did 60 years ago, with the equipment and knowledge they have now, injuries and fatalities would be a fraction of what they were. One way you can help reduce the loss of life and property and help firefighters under stressful conditions is by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. The time may come when one must choose between one’s ethical life and his material livelihood. In this agonizing experience he may choose wrongly unless his hope and belief in the benevolence of whatever Powers there be is firm and strong. However, a wrong choice will not dispose of the problem. Sooner or later, it will present itself again with more compelling insistence. For a glimpse of truth once given is like a double-edged sword: a privilege on one side, a duty on the other. A man’s allegiance to Truth must be incorruptible. Be sure to raise your children to love America, love God, respect law and order, and be kind to their elders. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. For happily the government of the United States of America which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasion their effectual support. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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The memory of past wrong-doing whether to others or to self may make a person shrink with shame. Only if it creates a counter feeling, then is such a feeling valuable. It should originate a positive attitude: the remembrance or belief or recall of Plato’s archetypal ideal of The Good. This should be followed by new determinations. Not out of someone else’s bidding but out of his own inner being he may lay this duty upon himself. The willingness to say, at least to himself, “I was wrong. What I did was done under the influence of my lesser self, not my better one. I am sorry. I repent” may be humiliating but will be purifying, when completed by attention to self-improvement. Until a man freely admits his need of true repentance, he will go on doing the same wrongs which he had done before. Some over-anxious aspirants fall into the error which the sixteenth-century Roman saint, Philip, warned against when he said that prolonged expression of remorse for a venial sin was often worse than the sin itself. I think he meant that this was a kind of unconsciously disguised and inverted spiritual pride. Since he is called upon to forgive others, he must likewise forgive himself. He need not torment himself without an end by the remembrance of past errors and condemn himself incessantly for their commitment. If their lesson has been well learnt and well taken to heart, why nurse their temporary existence into a lasting one by a melancholy and remorse which overdo their purpose? #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The ethical process can be compared to the work of the gardener: the state of the garden is not that of “nature red in tooth and claw,” for the horticultural process eliminates struggle by adjusting life conditions to the plant instead of making the plants adjust to nature. Instead of encouraging, horticulture, and ethical behaviour circumvent the raw struggle for existence in the interest of some ideal imposed from without upon the process of nature. The more advanced a society becomes, the more it eliminates the struggle for existence among its members. To practice natural selection in a society after the fashion of the jungle would weaken, perhaps destroy, the bonds holding it together: It strikes me that men who are accustomed to contemplate the active or passive extirpation of the weak, the unfortunate, and the superfluous; who justify that conduct on the ground that it has the sanction of the cosmic process, and is the only way of ensuring the progress of the race; who, if they are consistent, must rank medicine among the black arts and count the physician a mischievous preserver of the unfit; on whose matrimonial undertakings the principles of the stud have the chief influence; whose whole lives, therefore, are an education in the noble art of suppressing natural affection and sympathy, are not likely to have any large stock of these commodities left. However, without them, there is no conscience, nor any self-restraint on the conduct of men, expect the calculation of self-interest, the balancing of certain present gratifications against doubtful future pains; and experience tells us how much that is worth. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
What is called the struggle for existence in modern society is really a struggle for the means of enjoyment. Only the desperately poor, the pauperized, and the criminal are engaged in a struggle for actual existence; and this struggle among the submerged 5 percent of society can have no selective action on the whole, because even the members of this class manage to multiply rapidly before they die The struggle for enjoyment, while it may have a moderate selective action, is in no way analogous either to natural selection or to the artificial selection of the horticulturist. Then the need of mankind is not acquiescence to nature, but a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to the State of Nature, the State of Art of an organized polity. Many would agree that in the struggle, created in a meaning for life. A second factor in evolution, equally important, is the Struggle for the Life of Others. The Struggle for Life springs from the requirements of nutrition; reproduction and its resulting emotions and relationship are the foundation of the Struggle for the Life of Others. Found in the family is the basis of human sympathy and solidarity, for it is there that the Struggle for the Life of Others begins. There is a natural foundation for moral behaviour. Because of the teleological interpretation of the evolutionary process in which the Struggle for the Life of Others, has been seen as a Providential device for securing perfection. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
In this way, the continuity of natural evolution and morals has been restored and has saved spiritualism for mechanical interpretations of evolutions. The path of progress and the path of Altruism are one. Evolution is nothing but the Involution of Love, the revelation of Infinite Spirit, the Eternal Life returning to itself. There is a certain analogy between the industrial. It is but one or two removes from the purely animal struggle. However, with the growing advance of technology, the struggle is losing its animal fierceness. Yet, when I had been in Northern Asia, I saw an impressive measure of mutual assistance among the rabbits, birds, deer, and wild cattle of Siberia, which brought forcibly to my mind the absence of a bitter struggle for means of subsistence among animals belonging to the same species. From ants, bees, and beetles, through all the mammalia, there is found sociability and cooperation within the species-unit. Birds, even birds of prey, are sociable, and wolves hunt in packs. Rabbits work in common, horses herd together, and most monkeys live in bands. With the survey of mutual assistance in man—primitive, barbarian, medieval, and modern we see violence, and unnecessary violence because of competition. Man must learn to find better fields for activity. Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual assistance and mutual support. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Do not compete—competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it! That is the tendency of nature, not always realized in full, but always present. That is the watchword which comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. Therefore—combine—practise mutual assistance! That is the surest means for giving to each and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, moral. That is what Nature teaches us. No decision, no action is really unimportant and none should be underrated. By the light of this view, no event is a minor one, no situation is an insignificant one. A man may display negative traits in the littlest occurrence as in the greatest; the need for care and discipline always remains the same. An excuse for one’s action is not the same as a reason for them. The first is an emotional defense mechanism, the second is a valid, logical justification. If the aspirant has any grievance against another person or if he be conscious of feelings of anger, resentment, or hatred against another person, he should follow Jesus’ advice and let not the sun go down on this wrath. This means that he must see him as expressing the result of all his own long experience and personal thinking about life and therefore the victim of his own past, not acting better only because he does not know any better. The aspirant should then comprehend that whatever wrongs have been done will automatically be brought under the penalty of universal law. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Consequently, it is not his affair to condemn or to punish the other person, but to stand aloof and let the universal law take care of him. It is his affair to understand and not to blame. He must learn to accept a person just as he is, uncondemned. He certainly should try not to feel any emotional resentment or express any personal ill-will against that person. He must keep his own consciousness above the evil, the wrong-doing, the weaknesses, or the faults of the other man and not let them enter his own consciousness—which is what happens if he allows them to provoke negative reactions in his lower self. He should make immediate and constant effort to root such weeds out of his emotional life. However, the way to do this is not by blinding himself to the faults, the defects, and the wrongdoings of the other. Nor is it to be done by going out of his way to associate with undesirables. Since a mistake will not rectify itself, he must go on, write to the person he has wronged and humbly make an amendment and apology. He should not be satisfied with being contrite alone. He should also do something: first, to prevent his sins or errors happening again and, second, to repair the wrongs he had already done. The first aim is fulfilled by learning why they are sinful or erroneous, perceiving their origin in his own weaknesses of character or capacity, and then unremittingly working at changing them through self-improvement. The second aim involves a practical and sacrificial effort. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Whatever mistakes he had made, whatever sins he had committed, let him learn their lessons, correct his thinking, improve his character, and then forgive himself. Let him joyously receive Jesus’ pardon, “Go thou and sin no more!” and accept the healing grace which follows self-amendment. If he engages in honest and adequate self-appraisal and blames himself for the inner fault which really accounts for some outer trouble, and if he sets out to correct that fault, he will in time gain power over that trouble. You will learn the truth about your character in easy stages. No one can take it all at once: one might suffer from psychosis and/or neurosis or even a physical sickness. The truth must be given gradually for safety’s sake. A point is reached when remorse has served its purpose, when carried further it becomes not only a torment but useless. This is the time to abandon it, to lose it in the remembrance of one’s inner divinity. His character improves whether or not he tries to impose disciplines upon it. The process is spontaneous and proportionate to the improvement in his point of view, in the disengagement from the ego’s tyranny. When I make myself do what is not in accord with me, I am the driver, driving me—and often driving other people too. However, the real driver comes from people outside me, telling me what to do. Although I do not know that and think that I am doing it myself, I feel that I am the driver, but actually I am being driven. When my mind is cleared of outside intervention and I flow along, then I feel like a passenger, who does not have to clutch the wheel and watch the road. There is no car, no road, no driver. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
However, we repress not only impulses for pleasures of the flesh or affects as hate and fear; we repress also the awareness of facts provided they contradict certain ideas and interests which we do not want to have threatened. Good examples for this kind of repression are offered in the field of international relations. We find here a great deal of simple repression of factual knowledge. The average man, and even policy makers, forget conveniently facts which do not fit into their political reasoning. For instance, while discussing the immigration question in the spring of 2021 with a very intelligent and knowledgeable newspaperman, I mentioned the fact that in my opinion we had given the president reason to believe that we were willing to compromise on the immigration question in terms which had been dealt with in the Foreign Ministers’ conference in 2020, those of symbolic boarder agent reduction and building a wall. The newspaperman insisted that there had been no such conference, and that there was never a discussion of such terms. He had completely repressed the awareness of facts which he had known less than two years before. Not always is the repression as drastic as it was in this case. More frequent than the repression of a well-known fact is the repression of the “potentially known” fact. An example for this mechanism is the phenomenon that millions of Germans, including many leading politicians and generals, claimed not to have known of the worst Nazi atrocities. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The average American was (I say “was” because the Germans were once our closet allies, and hence all these things are looked at in a different way than they are now) prone to say that they must be lying, since they hardly could have helped seeing the facts in front of their eyes. Those who said this forgot, however, man’s capacity of not observing what he does not want to observe; hence, that he may be sincere in denying a knowledge which he would have, if he wanted only to have it. This phenomenon is called “selective inattention.” Another form of repression lies in remembering certain aspects of an event and not others. When one speaks today of the “appeasement” of the thirties, one remembers that England and France, being afraid of Germany, tried to satisfy Mr. Hitler’s demands, hoping that these concessions would induce him not to demand more. What is forgotten, however, is that the conservative government in England under Baldwin as well as that under Chamberlain, was sympathetic to Nazi Germany as well as to Mussolini’s Italy. Had it not been for these sympathies, one could have stopped Germany’s military development long before there was any need for appeasement; official indignation with Nazi ideology was the result of the political rift, and not its cause. Still another form of repression is the one in which not the fact is repressed but its emotional and moral significance. In war, for instance, cruelties committed by the enemy are experiences as just another of his devilish viciousness; the same or similar acts are committed by one’s own side, not even regrettable but perfectly justified. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The center of Dr. Freud’s thought is that man’s subjectivity is, in fact, determined by objective factors—objective as far as man’s own consciousness is concerned—which act behind man’s back, as it were, determining his thoughts and feelings, and thus indirectly his actions. Man, so proud of his freedom to think and to choose is, in fact, a marionette moved by strings behind and above him which in turn are directed by forces unknown to his consciousness. In order to give himself the illusion that he acts according to his own free will, man invents rationalizations which make it appear as if he does what he has to do because he has chosen to do so for rational or moral reasons. However, Dr. Freud did not end on a note of fatalism confirming man’s utter helplessness against the powers which determine him. He postulated that man can become aware of the very forces which act behind his back—and that in becoming aware of them he enlarges the realm of freedom and is able to transform himself from a helpless puppet moved by unconscious forces to a self-aware and free man who determines his own destiny. Where there is Id, there shall be Ego. Now, referring to Clare, she had become concerned more directly with her revolt against being alone. Her attitude about this problem had changed since her analysis of the “private religion.” She still felt the sting of being alone as keenly as before, but instead of succumbing to a helpless misery she had taken active steps to avoid solitude. This sensitivity to rejection had nothing whatever to do with whether she liked those who rejected her, but concerned solely her self-esteem, was brought home to her by a memory from college. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
There had been in college a group of snobbish girls who had formed a close clique from which they had excluded her. She had no respect or liking for these girls but there had been moments when she would have given everything to belong to them. In this context Clare also thought of the close community between her mother and brother, from which she had been excluded. Incidents emerged in which she had been made to feel that in their eyes she was only a nuisance. She realized that the reaction she discovered now had actually started at the time when she had stopped rebelling against discriminatory treatment. Up to that point she had had a native assurance that she was as good as the others, and had spontaneously reacted against being treated like an inferior being. However, in the long run the isolation inevitably engendered by her opposition was more than she could stand. In order to be accepted by the others she had knuckled under, had accepted the implicit verdict that she was inferior, and had begun to admire the others as superior beings. Under the same stress of overwhelming odds, she had dealt the first blow to her human dignity. She understood then that Peter’s breaking away from her had not only put her on her own, at a time when she was still rather dependent, but in addition had left her with a feeling of utter worthlessness. The combination of the two factors was responsible for the deep shock effect of the break. It was the feeling of worthlessness that had rendered it intolerable to be alone. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
This feeling had first called for a magic remedy and had then produced an obsessive desire for a close friend as a means of rehabilitation. This insight brought about an immediate change. The wish for a man friend lost its compulsive character and she could be alone without feeling uneasy; she could even enjoy it at times. She saw, too, how her reaction to being rejected had operated during the unfortunate relationship with Peter. Retrospectively she recognized that Peter has started to reject her in subtle ways soon after the first excitement of a love affair was gone. Through his withdrawing techniques and the irritability he showed in her presence he had indicated in ever-increasing degree that he did not want her. To be sure, this retreat had been disguised by the assurances of love he had given her simultaneously, but it could be effectively disguised only because she had blinded herself to the evidence that he wanted to get away from her. Instead of recognizing what she must have known she had made ever-increasing efforts to keep him, efforts that were determined by a desperate need to restore her own self-regard. Now it was clear to her that these very efforts to escape humiliation had injured her dignity more than anything else. Humans alone have the capacity to choose their behaviour and hence to shape their “essences,” that is, their fundamental characteristics, at any time. Healthy adult personalities take responsibility for their actions; make decisions; and seek to transcend the determining, limiting effects on their behaviour of limitations, social pressures to conformity, extreme stress, and biological feelings. They become aware of the pressures these impersonal forces impose on actions, but they choose whether or not they will yield to them or oppose them. Only humans can thus choose, and hence make themselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The healthy personality displays courage to be. This term implies knowing and disclosing one’s feelings and beliefs and taking the consequences that follow from such assertion. It implies freedom to choose between hiding or faking one’s real self and letting others know one as one is. Healthy personality means regarding oneself as a person, as free and responsible, not as a passive instrument of impulses or the expectations of other people. In dealing with other person, a healthy personality treats them as persons too, rather than as objects or tools. They life in dialogue with their peers in a relationship of “I and thou,” rather than between “I and it.” The health personality becomes aware of finitude and sees life and what is made of it as his or her own responsibility, not the responsibility of others. A person becomes most keenly aware of time-bound existence when he or she squarely faces the fact of death. From the existential point of view, average people and the mentally ill both suffer some degree of estrangement from their own being, from nature, and from people. They find the responsibility of freedom too frightening, and so they let their lives be lived for them by impulses or by social pressures to conformity. In the process, they lose themselves. Humans are supposed to be free and responsible for the fulfillment of values and meaning in existence. Life is to be lived, and each person is called upon to fulfill creative values, through productive work; experiential values, through enjoying the beauties and pleasures that can be sought and found in life; and finally, when creative and experiential values are not to be found—when a person is lying on the death bed, or has been condemned to live and die in a concentration camp—attitudinal values. The person is responsible at these times for giving unique meaning to his or her own suffering and death. From neurotic suffer arises a loss of the sense of life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Based on the facts, the informed, thoughtful, and critical citizen can get the basic information which he needs to form a picture of the fundamental issues in life. It is widely believed that since we lack access to secret information, our information is woefully inadequate. I believe that this view overestimates the importance of secret information, not to speak of the fact that the data which secret intelligence offers are often plainly erroneous, as in the case of the invasion of Cuba. Most of the information one needs to understand the intentions of other countries can be gained by a thorough and rational analysis of their structure and their record, provided that the analysts are not biased by their own emotions. Some of the best analyses of Russian, China, the origins of World War III, etcetera, can be found in the work of the scholars who had no secret information at their disposal. The fact is that the less one trusts the penetrating and critical analysis of the data, the more one demands secret information, which often is a poor substitute for analysis. I am not denying that there is a problem; secret military intelligence that informs the top decision makers about questions like new missile sites, nuclear explosions, etcetera, can be of importance; yet if one has an adequate picture of the other country’s aims and constraints, often such information, and especially its evaluation, is secondary to general analysis. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Secret information has no importance, but that of a thorough critical analysis of the available data makes it possible to have a basis for informed judgment. It should be added that it is an open question whether there is a real need to keep as much information secret as the political and military bureaucracies want us to believe. First of all, the need for secrecy corresponds to the wishes of the bureaucracy. It helps support a hierarchy of various levels, characterized by their access to various kinds of security classification. It also enhances their power, for in every group, from primitive tribes to a complex bureaucracy, the possession of secrets makes the owners of the secrets appear to be endowed with a special magic, and hence superior to the average man. However, aside from these considerations, it must be seriously questioned whether the advantages of some secret information (both sides know that some of their “secrets” are known to each other anyway) is worth the social effect of undermining the confidence of the citizen and all members of the legislature and executive—with the exception of the very few who has access to “top secrets”—in order to fulfill their decision-making roles. It may turn out that the military and diplomatic advantages gained by secrecy are smaller than the losses to our democratic system. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Returning to mental health, ideally, in the interests of a total educational program that would prepare for early entry and effective functioning in a professional role, the recruitment process should begin in high school. Potential psychotherapists should be encouraged as junior and senior high school students to become familiar with the field of mental health, the problems of mental illness, and the nature of the resources used in combating emotional disorder. They should have the opportunity for field trips to hospitals and mental health clinics. They should be able to hear at first hand about the work of the psychiatrist, psychologist, and social worker, and they should be given an overview of the problems and challenges of psychotherapy. Ideally, as seniors, they should be able to elect introductory courses in general human psychology and in sociology. Their undergraduate works (perhaps leading to a bachelor’s degree in psychology, sociology, social work, educational psychology, or possibly anthropology) should provide them with an orientation to the range and variety of individual differences in mental ability, personality, and subcultural memberships. They should be exposed to the general facts concerning the physiology and psychology of emotion. They should learn about attitudes, their determinants, and their effects. They should study the laws of habit forming and breaking. They should learn something about the forms of mental illness and the theories of etiology and psychopathology. They should be introduced to the principles and techniques of interviewing, and the problems of person-to-person communication. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
During their first two years they should be encouraged and assisted in finding opportunity to function as volunteer-workers in some community social agency; hopefully in this context, they would have opportunity to observe experienced workers in a variety of therapeutic conversations. Not later than their senior year they should have a formal course in psychotherapy which should include the opportunity to hear taped interviews by skilled therapists. With this much concertation on psychological subjects there would naturally be reduced time for study in other liberal arts and sciences; specifically, the undergraduate student preparing for a career as a psychotherapist would take fewer courses in mathematics, history, and foreign languages. The Fire Department is another career that should consider early recruiting. For nearly one hundred years, the Sacramento Fire Department has trained millions of first responders as fire, law enforcement, public health, public works people. They have provided training through various methods. “You get sworn in in the morning, they give you the badge, and they say, ‘Take a hike out to the firehouse you’re assigned to see the captain.’ This sounds archaic, but I didn’t even own an automobile. So I had to take the subway and a bus out to this single-engine company that did a grand total of about eight hundred runs a year. Now picture this: I’m twenty-two, and I introduce myself to the captain. He used to be a state trooper, and he just stands there, and growls at me, ‘Huh, look what they send me! You’re too young. Go home.’ #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
“I’m shocked. I’m saying to myself, Wait a minute, you don’t understand. I swam the hundred yards and everything. I just practically conquered the World to get out here, and this is what happens. Then I went to drill school, which in my case was four weeks, Monday through Friday. Then you spent Saturday nights in the firehouse. I thought the training was great. The most difficult thing for me was the Pompier ladder, the scaling ladder. The fire department doesn’t use them anymore, but they were used as a training exercise in teamwork and building confidence in your buddy. I didn’t have a lot of upper body strength, because I was skinny. That was a pretty good challenge, raising that Pomp from floor to floor on the outside of the building, because there was no way I was going to let go of that ladder, have it drop or slip. The rest of it was just practice, you know, running lines, dogging the ladders. I was never permitted to handle the nozzle, just be a spectator. I just couldn’t wait to get there every day, it was more fun than anything else. They were trying to tell us, watch out for this, watch out for that. But I didn’t pay too much attention because I was pretty high off the ground, thinking, “Wow, here I am!” The instructors did their best. They came from the busy sections of the city, and a lot of them were bent and broken from always being in the busy companies. That was partially the reason why they were there. They were trying to convey to us in four weeks what they had learned in over thirty years. It was always interesting to listen to them, but we just couldn’t envision it until we actually hit the firehouse and started experiencing it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
“The captain didn’t put me in his group. Instead, he put me with a lieutenant. I can’t say it was because he didn’t want me, just that it was where the opening was. I was in that engine company for fourteen months, because they wouldn’t let a probie transfer in the first year. But it wasn’t busy enough for me. What are you going to do in eight hundred runs a year? It drove me bananas. On my first run we go to a car accident, and on the way back we stop in a parking lot next to a supermarket. And I think, ‘Wow, he must have found another fire or something.’ And then I look beyond the fire trucks. I can’t believe this! The lieutenant is rummaging though the charitable donation box looking for a pair of shoes! This was difficult to take. The image of the heroic firefighter was slightly diminished, but what are we gonna do, right? That company was only good for relocating on multiple alarms, they were practically never first due at decent fires. And anyway, I went like three months before we got a job. It was a fourth alarm, in a church. All we did was double up with another engine company, dragging a two-and-a-half up to the choir loft, and the fire was pretty much knocked down by the time we got there. I was disappointed. I realized I had to be on the first alarm to see any action. Those fourteen months were difficult. I didn’t even want to sleep during the night tour. I used to volunteer to take the other guys’ night watches, because I couldn’t sleep anyway. I’d say to myself, ‘We only went out once last night. Give me a break, will ya? This is ridiculous.’ #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“I finally got transferred to another engine, a kind of mixed area. There’s politics in the fire department. You had to know somebody really well to get transferred to where you wanted to go. And I didn’t know anybody. The fact that my dad was a firefighter didn’t mean a thing. Too bad about that, ‘cause firefighters are the greatest. I could ramble on about the politics, but that’s another story.” Be sure to show the Sacramento Fire Department some love and make a contribution. Your donation could help save lives and property. Charity is the pure love of Christ, and the Saviour is our ultimate example of how to love others. The crowing expression of charity was His infinite Atonement. In relationships with family members and others, we can strive to love as He loves, with unfailing compassion, patience, and mercy. Charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Having a Christlike love is a commandment and is essential to our salvation. Teach your kids to love America, love God, and respect law and order. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. It hath been told thee, O man, what is good, and what the Lord doth require of thee: Only to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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The Strongest are the Best
Whatever may be said against the principle of “natural selection” in other departments, there is no doubt of its predominance in early human history. The strongest killed out the weakest as they could. Since any form of political organization was superior to chaos, an aggregation of families having political leadership and some legal custom would rapidly conquer those that did not. The caliber of early political organization was less important than the fact that it was there at all; its function was to create a “cake of custom” which would bind men together, holding them, to be sure, in whatever place in the social order birth had given them—form organization originate in a regime of status and only long afterward evolves into a regime of contract. The second step, after organization, is the moulding of national character. This came about through the unconscious imitation of a chance “variation” displayed by one or two outstanding individuals. The national character is simply the naturally selected parish character, just as the national speech is the successful parish dialect. Progress, habitually thought of as a normal fact in human society, is a rare occurrence among peoples: the ancients had no such conception, nor do the Asians; and it is hard for some to become enlightened to the ways of the established World. The phenomenon occurs only in a few nations of European origin. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Some nations progress while others stagnate, because under all circumstances the strongest prevail over others; and the strongest are, in certain marked peculiarities, the best. Within each nation the most appealing character, usually the best, prevails; and in the now dominant western part of the World these competitions between nations and character types have been intensified by “intrinsic forces.” Of the existence of progress in military art there can be no doubt, nor of its corollary, that the most advanced will destroy the weaker, that the more company will eliminate the scattered, and that the more civilized are the more company. An advance in civilization is thus a military advantage. Backward civilizations, being more rigid in the structure of their law and custom, kill out varieties at birth, but progress depends upon the emergence of varieties. Progress is only possible in those happy cases where the force of legality has gone far enough to bind the nation together, but not far enough to kill out all varieties and destroy nature’s perpetual tendency to change. Early societies were in a grave dilemma: they needed custom to survive, but unless it was sufficiently flexible to admit variations they were frozen in their ancient mould. Modern societies, living in an age of discussion rather than rigid custom, have found a means of reconciling order with progress. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Darwin’s task of finding natural roots for man’s moral feelings and for the sympathy that underlies persistent social cooperation was taken up by John Fiske in his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874) and The Meaning of Infancy (1883). After reading Alfred Wallace’s account of his observations in the Malay Archipelago, Fiske had been struck by the thought that one thing that distinguishes humans from other mammals is the very long duration of their infancy. In general, there is a correlation between the complexity of a species’ potential behaviour and the proportion of its behaviour that is acquired by learning after birth. The human infant acquires the smallest proportion of its ultimate capacities during gestation; it is born less developed than the young of other species, and must undergo a long plastic period in which it learns the ways of its race. What makes the human species progressive, Fiske reason, is the fact that the infant does not come into the World with his capacities “all cut and dried,” but on the contrary must early slowly and is therefore able to learn an infinitely wider range of behaviour. The necessity of seeing infants through this long period prolongs the years of maternal affection and care and tends to keep father, mother, and child together—in short, to found the stable family and ultimately the clan organization, the first step toward civil society. From being merely gregarious, man become social. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Once the clan is organized, natural selection intervenes to maintain it; for those clans in which the primeval selfish instincts were most effectively subordinated to the needs of the group would prevail in the struggle for life. In this way the first germs of altruism and morality, manifest in the mother’s care of the infant, become generalized into wider and wider social bonds until they form sympathies broad enough to support the communal life of civilized man as he is not known. The moral sense has its foundation in the primitive biological unit, the family, and the social cooperation and solidarity of men is nothing if not natural. Fiske’s philosophy attempted to give the higher ethical impulses a direct root in the evolutionary process. A somewhat different—and, to most of his contemporaries, a less satisfactory—note of moral reassurance was struck by T.H. Huxley in his famous Romanes Lecture on “Evolution and Ethics” (1893). Unlike Fiske, Huxley accepted at its value the Hobbesian interpretation of Darwinism and acknowledged that “men in society are undoubtedly subject to the cosmic process,” which includes, of course, the struggle for existence and the elimination of the unfit. However, he flatly rejected the common practice of identifying the “fittest” with the “best,” pointing out that under certain cosmic conditions the only “fit” organisms would prove to be low ones. Man and nature make altogether different judgments of value. The ethical process, or the production of what man recognizes as truly the “best,” is in opposition to the cosmic processes. “Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Active participation in the affairs of the country as a whole and of states and communities, as well as of large enterprises, requires the formation of interpersonal groups, within which the process of information exchange, debate, and decision-making, respectively, let us look at the characteristics such interpersonal groups will have. The first is that the number of participating people must be restricted in such a way that the discussion remains direct and does not allow the rhetoric or the manipulating influences of demagogues to become effective. If people meet regularly and know each other, they begin to feel who they can trust and whom they cannot, who is constructive and who is not, and in the process of their own participation, their own sense of responsibility and self-confidence grows. Second, objective and relevant information which is the basis for everyone’s having an approximately clear and accurate picture of the basis issues must be given to each group. The problem of adequate information presents many difficulties which forces us into some digression. Are the issues with which we deal in foreign and domestic policy or in the management of a corporation not so intricate and specialized that only the highly trained specialist can understand them? If that were so, we would have to admit that the democratic process in the traditional sense of the citizen’s participation in decision making is not any more feasible anymore; we would have to admit, furthermore, that the constitutional function of Congress is also outmoded. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The individual senator or representative certainly does not have the specialized knowledge which is assumed to be necessary. The president himself does seem to be dependent on the advice of a group of highly trained specialists, since he is not supposed to understand problems of such intricacy that they are outside the grasp of an informed and educated citizen. Briefly, if the assumption of the insurmountable complexity and difficulty of the data were correct, the democratic process would be an empty form, covering up government by technicians. The same would hold true in the process of management also. If top managers could not understand the highly complex technical problems they are called upon to decide, they would simple have to accept the decisions of their technical experts. The idea that data have become so difficult and complex that only highly specialized experts can tackle them is largely influenced by the fact that in the natural sciences such a degree of specialization has been reached that often only a few scientists are capable of fully understanding the work of a colleague in their own field. Fortunately, most data which are necessary for the decision-making in politics and management are not of the same order of difficulty or specialization. In fact, computerization reduces the difficulties because it can construct different models and show different outcomes according to the premises which are used in the programing. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
In psychoanalytic terminology, one speaks of “the unconscious” as if it were a place inside the person, like the cellar of a house. This idea has been reinforced by Dr. Freud’s famous division of the personality into three parts: the Id, the Ego, and the super-ego. The Id represents the total of instinctual desires, and at the same time, since most of them are not permitted to arrive at the level of awareness, it can be identified with the “unconscious.” The Ego, representing man’s organized personality inasmuch as it observes reality and has the function of realistic appreciation, at least as far as survival is concerned, may be said to represent “consciousness.” The super-ego, the internalization of father’s (and society’s) commands and prohibitions, can be both conscious and unconscious, and hence does not lend itself to being identified with the unconscious or the conscious respectively. The topographical use of the unconscious has certainly been stimulated further by the general tendency in our time to think in terms of having. People say that they have insomnia, instead of being sleepless, or of having a problem of depression, rather than of being depressed; thus they have an Ultimate Driving Machine, a Victorian House, a child, as they have a problem, a feeling, a psychoanalyst—and an unconscious. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
This is the reason why so many people today prefer to speak of the “subconscious”; it is till more clearly a region, rather than a function; while I can say I am unconscious of this or that, one could not say, “I am subconscious of it.” Jung’s use of the term “unconscious” has not helped to discourage the topographical usage of this concept. While for Dr. Freud the unconscious is the cellar full of vices, Jung’s unconscious is rather a cave filled with man’s original but forgotten treasures of wisdom (although not exclusively so), laid over by intellectualization. Another difficulty in the Freudian concept of the unconscious lies in the fact that it tends to identify a certain content, that instinctual strivings of the Id, with a certain state of awareness/unawareness, the unconscious, although Dr. Freud was careful to keep the concept of the unconscious separate from that of the Id. One must not lose sight of the fact that one is dealing here with two entirely distinct concepts; one deals here with certain instinctual impulses—another with a certain state of perception—unawareness or awareness. It so happens that the average person in our society is unaware of his desire to incorporate another human being, the psychotic is quite aware of that or other archaic desires, and so are most of us in our dreams. If we insist on the separation between the concept of archaic content and that of that of the state of awareness, or unconsciousness, it will clarify the understanding of “the” unconscious. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The term “the unconscious” is actually a mystification (even though one might use it for reasons of convenience, as I am guilty of doing in these pages). There is no such thing as the unconscious; there are only experiences of which we are aware, and others of which we are not aware, that is, of which we are unconscious. If I hate a man because I am afraid of him, and if I am aware of my hate but not of my fear, we may say that my hate is conscious and that my fear is unconscious; still, my fear does not lie in that mysterious place: “the” unconscious. In the beginning of my struggles, it was discouraging because I could not see the whole scene in the way that I express it now. I knew only that in this situation something was wrong and I had to correct that. This went on…and on…and on…seemingly with nothing ahead and with no end to the going. However, when I had gone through it enough times in different circumstances, then something that all the instances had in common began to show itself to me. I began to grasp in a total way the distinction between what others had put into me and what came out of myself. What had been a knotty tussle with one blindness after another, each one gone through in isolation from the others, began to be more flowing, with a more steady awareness of myself. Each time, something of myself came through, and something that was not myself got pushed away. There seems to be “no end to it” now, but the meaning of the words has changed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
What began as one battle after another, so wearying, so full of pain, has now become frequently enjoyable, like the joy that a child has in his growing and in his growing knowing. Sometimes it is not like that, but even then there is the knowing that I will come through, which certainly was not with me earlier, when I did not even know what was pushing its way through. It is often true now that “I do not know what I am going to do, but I am going to do it”—not only in work and things like that, but in my relations with other people, too. Now, we have been following Clare for some months now and many of us can relate to her. Most recently, she was concerned because she realized that she revolted against being alone. Her attitude about this problem had changed since her analysis of the “private religion.” She still felt the sting of being alone as keenly as before, but instead of succumbing to a helpless misery she had taken active steps to avoid solitude. She sought the company of others and enjoyed it. However, for about a week she was entirely obsessed by the idea that she must have a close friend. She felt like asking all the people she met, hairdresser, dressmaker, secretary, married friends, whether they did not know a man who would be suitable for her. Everybody who was married or who had a close friend, she regarded with the most intense envy. These thoughts assumed such proportions that it finally struck her that all of this was not only pathetic but definitely compulsive. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Only now was she able to see that her incapacity to be alone had greatly increased during the relationship with Peter, and had reached a climax after the separation. She realized, too, that she could endure solitude if it was of her own choosing. If it was not voluntary, it turned out painfully; then she felt disgraced, unwanted, excluded, ostracized. Thus, Clare realized that the problem was not a general incapacity to be alone, but a hypersensitivity to being alone. Linking this finding with her recognition that her self-evaluation was entirely determined by the evaluation of others, she understood that for her the mere absence of attention meant that she was thrown to the dogs. Each is so accustomed to obeying the lower ego that he finds his greatest comfort in continuing to do so, his greatest discomfort in disobeying it. Insofar as the quest seeks to bring about such a reversal of acts and attitudes, it becomes the most difficult enterprise of his whole life. Much new thinking and much new willing are required here. To accept our moral weakness, to overlook our failure to practice control of thoughts, and smugly to condone this unsatisfactory condition by calling it “natural,” is to show how powerful is the ego’s hold upon us. When a man comes to understand that he has no greater problem than the problem within, he comes to wisdom. The fact that he is becoming aware of this weakness more acutely and that he now sees egoism in himself where he formerly saw virtue, is a revelation made by his progress towards truth. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Many people suffer in adult life because they will not grow to adulthood, but insist upon struggling, sometimes with ingenious cunning and subterfuge, to get other people to cater to their needs and wishes the way they wanted their parents to serve them during infancy. The sneaky ways in which persons stive to exploit others have been documented. Thus, an adult might play the game of “wooden leg”—asking for deference from others, and seeking to justify failures, by calling attention to real or imagined disabilities: “If my stomach had not been hurting me all those years, I could have been more successful in my career.” The healthy personality consists of affirming one’s personal worth (“I am OK”), making reasonable demands upon others as befits an adult, and developing simple honesty in one’s dealings with others—living a relatively “game-free” existence. When a man comes to understand that he has no greater problem than the problem within, he comes to wisdom. The fact that he is becoming aware of his weakness more acutely and that he now sees egoism in himself where he formerly saw virtue, is a revelation made by his progress towards the truth. If he considered it aright and understands it as it really is, even temptation can nourish a man, make his will stronger, and his goal clearer. To make amends and fast, acts as purification after sin. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
While a mental health counselor could undoubtedly make a valuable contribution in meeting our society’s mental health needs, he would not represent an optimal answer to the pressing demand for psychotherapy. The only thoroughly logical answer to that demand, in view of the utter impossibility of its being supplied by the present profession, is to create a new profession—to train properly selected persons to function specifically and exclusively as psychotherapists. What would constitute the ideal program of training for the psychotherapist? How should candidates for this training be selected? What personal characteristics should they manifest?? No one can say with certainty. And it would be a mistake to propose a highly restrictive set of specifications for this new profession, for this would constitute a premature attempt at authoritative rigidification of standards of a kind that is already proving embarrassing to the existing mental health professions. In thinking about selections and training of members for this new profession, it would be well to hold clearly in mind what their ultimate function and setting would be: they would work in hospitals, in mental health center, in child guidance clines, and in various social agencies where they would be under the general direction of and have continuous consultation with the senior professional staff in psychiatry, psychology, and social work; their primary and exclusive responsibility (except for special work entailed in research collaboration) would be to provide therapeutic conversation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
It is perhaps easier to specify those properties which would not be pertinent to their recruitment and training than to list those which would with certainty be applicable. A high level of academic performance would be less critical than substantial evidence of sound general intelligence. Modest intellectual endowment would perhaps prove a more positive qualification than extremely high intelligence. A balanced record of good scholastic achievement couple with extracurricular interests and reasonable number of effective social pursuits, including group participations, would probably make for a better candidate than would an outstanding academic record in the absence of non-scholarly interests and pursuits. Evidence of measure social interests and welfare motivations rather than of strong scientific interests and material motives would be pertinent. The young person who had revealed both interests and aptitudes for working effectively with others in personal settings would probably be a good bet. Thus, the person with a record of leadership in school activities, in camping, scouting, boys’ clubs or girls’ clubs, settlement house or other volunteer service activities would reveal some promise for effective response to training. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The Sacramento Fire Department is also trained to deal with mental health crisis. They get many calls where people are simply in distress and want a ride to the hospital. Unfortunately, those rides are extremely expensive, but the Sacramento Fire Department goes out of their way to keep the community safe and to preserve lives. If you have a firm grasp on your value system, mission, mandates, and vision of your department’s desired future, most departments realize that they have an ever-increasing workload, often without the correlating increase in resources (money in the budget and more personnel). “I really feel that is firefighting is what somebody really wants to do and they take the time to get the proper training, anybody can do it. You’ve gotta want to do it. I’ve had 240 hours of training, plus I went to the National Fire Academy. I’ve been there about ten times for different classes. I paid for everything myself, because the classes at the academy are taught by the best trained people in the field. I feel that the more knowledge I get, the safer my life is going to be. I know that bookwork can’t always help you in an actual fire situation. You have to have the experience. But hopefully my book learning, my training, plus now the experience I’ve had will get me out of a lot of bad situations—or prevent me from getting into one. It took anywhere from nine to twelve hours to get to the academy, depending on weather. I’d leave about five Friday morning and return about four in the morning on Sunday. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
“I’ve taken public fire education, firefighter safety and survival, fire service management, initial company tactical operation, fire service suppression—that’s increasing personal effectiveness—and fire service supervision—that’s increasing team effectiveness. I’ve also taken a class over at Santa Clara University on investigating the juvenile arsonist. I’m a juvenile counselor. I love that. The kids really open their arms to me. It’s a wonderful feeling. These are children who have actually set fires, and the parents bring them to me. A lot of the parents say things like, ‘Scare them, and tell them never to do this again.’ But when I sit down with these kids and talk to them, they understand where I’m coming from. They know I’m a firefighter and that what they did was wrong, but they can trust me and talk to me about it. We’ve had a real good record with these kids not repeating fires. There was a mentally [disabled] boy who was playing with a lighter on his bed, and he set his mattress on fire. He was an eighteen-year-old who, when he was five, had fallen off a curb and gotten hit by a car. Some people wanted the police to talk to the boy and shake him up by telling him, ‘You’ll get arrested if you do this again.’ It was one of the police officers who asked me to handle this child, who had a six-year-old mentality. So I talked to him and had a real good session with him. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Nine months later I was involved with a club, taking disabled kids to the arena for one of the games. And this boy was one of the kids in the group. I went up to him and said, ‘Hi, (name was used but is being withheld for safety and privacy reasons), do you remember me?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ Then he said, ‘I don’t play with lighters anymore.’ And I was just so tickled, to think that he would remember all those months later. And his mom was grateful for how I handled the situation. In your original training class, when you go into an actual burn for the first time, you get scared. You think, ‘What in the heck am I doing? Why am I doing this?’ But I had great confidence in my instructors. I trusted them completely, because they weren’t going to take a class of twenty people into a burning building and endanger their lives. The neatest part for me was having the breathing apparatus on. I’d never had anything over my face like that. That was exciting. I would challenge myself to see how little air I could use in the training session. I got to the point where I would just relax, and it doesn’t bother me to have the mask on. I’ve come a long way since then, but I think anybody would be foolish to say they weren’t scared. I still am, at times. At some fires I feel that that darn thing is a lot smarter than I am. It’s a constant game. It’s like I say, ‘Okay, who’s going to be smarter this time, you or me? Who’s going to win this fight?’ You have to treat a fire with respect. Because if you don’t, that’s when you get hurt.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Today’s firefighters use a variety of technology, and they provide many services that go beyond putting fires out. They are actively working in our communities and counseling people in an effort to prevent fires. These programs are vitally important. You can help save lives by contributing to the Sacramento Fire Department. Also, I like how the firefighter that was interviewed actually talked to the youths and let them know that someone cares and why fires are dangerous. When people take their oaths serious, it can really prevent bad behaviour from becoming contagious. Parents, be sure to teach your children to love America and respect authority, obey the law and love God so we can also preserve the harmony in our community. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Justice, justice shalt thou pursue, that thou mayest live in the land which God giveth thee. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Proclaim liberty throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof. Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports….where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religion obligation deserts the oaths, which are the caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The Winchester Mystery House
Mrs. Winchester, about one hundred and thirty years ago, or more, became a little disquieted. However, not anything much remarkable yet, unless about a young servant girl who was pluckt by the thigh by a cold hand in her bed, borne through the air, and died within a few days after. Some weeks after this, Satan, in the form of a tall dark man conveyed thither and most often let the house by way of the chimney. One morning, the mother of the young servant girl was standing by the door, Mrs. Winchester asked her how she was doing. To whom she answered, with a sorrowful countenance, that though she was in tolerable health, yet things went very ill. Mrs. Winchester’s house being extremely haunted, especially above stairs, so that she was forced to keep in the lower rooms. She also said that one evening she walkt out about a mile from the mansion and there came riding towards her three persons upon three broom-staves, born up about a yard and half from the ground. Two of them she formerly knew which was a Witch and a Wizard. “Well,” Mrs. Winchester said, “if you will but stay a while, you may chance to see something more.” And, indeed, the servant had not stayed any considerable with her.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
If Nature is Hard, Truth is Cruel
Life can be difficult for people who do not have peace in their homes or environments due to the increase of people who are living with untreated mental illness. Unlike when people are committing crimes, and one has the option to call the police, when an individual or a group of people are displaying extremely immature behaviour and displaying symptoms of mental illness, there is no one to call. Close to 66 percent of adults with mental illness and adolescents with major depressive disorder do not get treatment. Nearly 1 in 7 California adults experience mental illness, and one in 26 has a serious mental illness that makes it difficult to carry out daily duties. Mental health challenges can impact anyone, regardless of education, geography, faith, calling, or family. They are nothing to be ashamed of and should be met with love. More than half the World’s population lives in cities, and the number is expected to continue to increase in the coming years. Living in urban areas has been associated with increased risk for mental disorders, including anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. Research using functional magnetic resonance imaging had identified changes in the brain indicating that urban upbringing and city living are linked to social stress processing. Among the potentially contributing factors to poorer mental health in urban areas are air pollution and other exposure to toxins, increased noise, lack of open space, crime and social inequalities, and the stress of sensory overload. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Extreme heat has been associated with a range of mental health impacts. Research indicates that when people must endure extreme heat, this increases irritability, symptoms of depression and an increase in suicide. It can also affect behaviour, contributing to increased aggression, incidence of domestic violence, and increased use of alcohol or other substances to cope with stress. Also, rural people and/or those who are unemployed, and united rented to multiple individuals who are related do not tend to do well in high-rise buildings. High occupancy of these types of people in high-rise buildings turns the atmosphere into one like a jail or mental hospital. People do not respect personal space, private property, nor do they follow the laws or rules in their contracts. They start to feel like everyone is their family and friend, many people stop caring about how people perceive them, people do not clean up messes they make in common areas, and a lack of respect spreads and animosity throughout the community because of a loss of autonomy. However, high-rise buildings where rules are enforced, and people follow the laws tend to be more peaceful. And cities can provide advantages, such as better access to health care and education, and potential for social interaction. Mental health problems are common, so it is important to be aware of possible signs. Feeling worried, depressed, guilty, worthless or feeling an exaggerated sense of “high” may be signs of a mental health issue. If signs do not go away after two weeks, although there may not be a serious problem, it is best to seek help from a professional. If someone talks about suicidal thoughts or is engaging in high-risk activities, do not ignore this. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
A mental health disorder may start out as subtle changes to a person’s feelings, thinking and behaviour. If they have ongoing and significant changes, it could be a sign that they are developing a mental health disorder. If something does not seem “quite right,” it is important to have a conversation about getting help. An important part of good mental health is the ability to look at problems or concerns realistically. Everyone has days when they feel sad, stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed by life’s challenges. If you continue to struggle for several weeks or longer or your symptoms begin interfering with your daily life—at home, work, school, or in your relationships—seek help. Addressing mental health concerns early and often is the most effective approach and can help prevent a crisis in the future. Struggling with your mental health does not indicate a weakness in your character or spirit. Earthly situations may not be ideal, man’s spiritual DNA is perfect because his identity is as a son or daughter of God. A diagnosis connected to mental health should not be viewed as any less real than another medical diagnosis. Think about the following as you consider talking with a mental health professional: How long have you experienced these challenges? How much do these symptoms affect your daily life? Are you aware of others in your family who have experienced similar challenges? Are these problems causing significant distress in your life? Are your own attempts to make yourself feel better not helping? Has anyone who you trust mentioned something about your mood or behaviour? As you talk with someone working through mental health challenges, the most important things you can do are to listen and show empathy. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
However, you are not expected or encouraged to diagnose or provide treatment to others struggling with mental health issues. Yet, you can help them feel welcomed and included, find meaningful ways to contribute, and deepen their faith in Jesus as the Christ. Pray for guidance on what to say. Comforting someone can be intimidating, but it is most often better to reach our an say something than to say nothing. It is important that people who are working through mental health challenges know you care and want to support them. However, also let them know that happiness is a choice. No one else is to be regarded as responsible for man’s troubles, irritations, or disabilities. If he will analyse them aright, that is, with utter impersonality, he would see that the responsibility is not really in the other person, who apparently is the agent for these calamities, but in his own undisciplined character, his own egoistic outlook. The very fact that he has become aware of these faults arises because the light has come into existence and begun to play upon the dark places in his character, thus generating a conscious desire for self-improvement. This awareness is not a matter for depression, therefore. To wish one’s history to have been different from what it was, to pile up blame for one’s bad deeds, choices, and decisions, is to cling to one’s imaginary ego although seeking to improve it. Only by rooting up and throwing out this false imagination which identifies one with the ego alone can the mind become freed from such unnecessary burdens. You are to be penitent not only because your wrong acts may bring you suffering but also, and much more, because they may bring you farther away from the discovery of the Overself. To repine for past errors or to wish that what has been should not have been has only a limited usefulness. Analyse the situation, note effects, study causes, draw lessons—then dismiss the past completely. If the ego is discarded, all regrets over past acts are discarded with it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
He may be ashamed of what he did in the past but then he was that sort of man in the past. If he persists in identifying himself with the “I,” in time such feelings will come to him and cause this kind of suffering. However, if he changes over to identifying himself with the timeless being behind the “I” there can be no such suffering. If it is to effect this purpose, repentance must be thorough and whole-hearted. He must turn his back upon the former way of life. If Nature is hard, truth is cruel. It is unsparing to our egoistic desires, merciless in ferreting out our personal weaknesses. If it is right to forgive others for their sins against us, it must also be right to forgive ourselves and not constantly condemn ourselves to self-reproach. However, we ought not do so prematurely. When a man becomes aware of his wrong-doing and realizes its meaning for himself and its effect upon others, he has taken the first step towards avoiding its inevitable consequences. When he becomes deeply repentant, he has taken the second step. When he tries to eliminate the fault in his character which produced the evil conduct and to make amends to others, where possible, he has taken the final step. The quest will uncover the weakest places in his character, one by one. It will do so either by prompting him from within or by exposing him from without. If he fails to respond to the first way, with its gentle intuitive working, he must expect to endure the second way, with its harsh pressure through events. The only protection against his weaknesses is first, to confess them, and then, to get rid of them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
The constant nagging of those with whom he is compelled to live, work, or associate, so far as there is any truth in their exaggerations or misunderstandings, can be made to serve a most useful purpose by arousing in him the necessity of change and self-improvement. However much of his self-love is wounded and however long it may take to achieve this and to correct his faults, he will only profit by it. With his success a separation may occur, and they may be set free to go their own way. It may be brought about by their own voluntary decisions or by the compulsion of destiny. When a relationship is no longer useful to evolution or justified by universal law, an end will come to it. This acceptance of other people’s criticisms, humbly and without resentment, may be compared to swimming against the current of a stream. Here the stream will be that of his own nature. In this matter he should look upon the others as his teachers—taking care however to separate the emotional misunderstandings and egoistic exaggerations from the truth. He is to regard the others as sent by the Overself to provoke him into drawing upon or deliberately developing the better qualities needed to deal with such provocations, and not only to show him his own bad qualities. Out of the shadows of the past, there will come memories that will torment as they teach him, pictures that will hurt as they illustrate error, sin, and weakness. He must accept the experience unresistingly and transmute it into moral resolve and ethical guidance for the future. The seeker should try to regard his weakness and faults from a more balanced and impersonal point of view. While it is correct for him to be ashamed of them, he need not go to the other extreme and fall into a prolonged fit of gloom or despair about them. Since repentance, coupled with an unswayable determination to prevent further recurrences, is the philosophic way to deal with them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
To have discovered a sin in oneself, and to have gone on committing it, is to sin doubly. We civilized men do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. Thus, the weak members of civilized society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. However, a ruthless policy of elimination would betray the noblest part of our nature, which is itself securely founded in the social instincts. We must therefore bear with the evil effects of the survival and propagation of the weak, and rest our hopes on the fact that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound. All who cannot spare their children abject poverty should refrain from marriage; the prudent should not shirk their duty of maintaining the population, for it is through the pressure of population and the consequent struggles that man has advanced and will continue to advance. Primeval men and their apelike progenitors, along with many lower animals, were probably social in their habits, and remote primitives practiced division of labour. Man’s social habits have been of enormous importance in his survival. Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected. Man’s moral sense to be an inevitable outgrowth of his social instincts and habits is a crucial factor in group survival. The pressure of group opinion and the moral effect of family affections is ranked with intelligent self-interest as biological foundations of moral behaviour. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
In the question of the possibility of making the unconscious conscious, it is of the foremost importance to recognize factors which obstruct this process. There are many factors which make it difficult to arrive at insight into the unconscious. Such factors are mental rigidity, lack of proper orientation, hopelessness, lack of any possibility to change realistic conditions, etcetera. However, there is probably no single factor which is more responsible for the difficulties of making the unconscious conscious than the mechanism which Dr. Freud called “resistance.” What is resistance? Like so many discoveries, it is so simple that one might say anyone could have discovered it—yet it required a great discoverer to recognize it. Let us take an example: your friend must undertake a trip of which he is obviously afraid. You know that he is afraid, his wife knows it, everyone else knows it, but he does not know it. He claims one day that he does not feel well, the next day that there is no need to make the trip, the day after that there are better ways to achieve the same result without traveling, then the next day that your persistence in reminding him of the trip is an attempt to force him, and since he does not want to be forced, he just will not make the trip, and so on, until he will say that it is now too late to go on the trip, anyway, hence there is no use in thinking any further about it. If, however, you mention to him, even in the most tactful way, that he might not want to go because he is afraid, you will get not a simple denial, but more likely a violent barrage of protestations and accusations which will eventually drive you into the role of having to apologize, or even—if you are now afraid of losing his friendship—of declaring that you never meant to say that he was afraid and, in fact, ending up with enthusiastic praise of his courage. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
What has happened? The real motivation for not wanting to go is fear. (What he is afraid of is of no significance for the purposes of this discussion; suffice it to say, that his fear could be objectively justified or the reason for his fear merely imagined.) This fear is unconscious. Your friend, however, must choose a “reasonable” explanation for his not wanting to go—a “rationalization.” He may discover every day a new one (anyone who has tried to give up smoking knows how easily rationalization comes) or stick to one main rationalization. It does not matter, in fact, whether the rationalization as such is valid or not; what matters is that it is not the effective or sufficient cause for his refusal to go. The most amazing fact, however, is the violence of his reaction when we mention the real motive to him, the intensity of his resistance. Should we not expect him to be glad, or even grateful for our remark, since it permits him to cope with the real motive for his reluctance? However, whatever we think about what he should feel, the fact is that he does not feel it. Obviously, he cannot bear the idea of being afraid. However, why? There are several possibilities. Perhaps he has a narcissistic image of himself in which lack of fear is an integral part, and if this image is disturbed, his narcissistic self-admiration and, hence, his sense of his own value and his security would be threatened. Or perhaps his super-ego, the internalized code of right and wrong, happens to be such that fear or cowardice are bitterly condemned; hence to admit fear would mean to admit that he has acted against his code. Or, perhaps, he feels the need to save for his friends the picture of a man who is never frightened because he is so unsure of their friendship, that he is afraid they would cease liking him if they knew he was afraid. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Any of these reasons may be effective, but why is it that they are so effective? One of the answers lies in the fact that his sense of identity is linked with these images. If they are not “true”—then who is he? What is true? Where does he stand in the World? Once these questions arise, the person feels deeply threatened. He has lost his familiar frame of orientation and with it his security. The anxiety aroused is not only a fear of something specific as Dr. Freud saw it, like a threat to the genitals, or to life, etcetera; but it is also caused by the threat to one’s identity. Resistance is an attempt to protect oneself from a fright which is comparable to the fright caused by even a small earthquake—nothing is secure, everything is shaky; I do not know who I am nor where I am. In fact, this experience feels like a small dose of insanity which for the moment, even though it may last only for seconds, feels more than uncomfortable. It seems quite feasible that many functions of the art of medicine can be taken over by computer, like diagnosis, treatment, prescriptions, etcetera. However, it appears doubtful that the capacity for highly individualized observation, which the outstanding physician has, can be replaced by the computer, exempli gratia, observation of the expression in a person’s eye or face, a capacity impossible to quantify and to translate into programming language. Outstanding achievement in medicine will be lost in a completely automatized system. However, beyond this, the individual will be so completely conditioned to submit to machines that he will lose the capacity to take care of his health in an active, responsible way. He will run to the ”health service” whenever he had a physical problem, and he will lose the ability to observe his own physical processes, to discern changes, and to consider remedies for himself, even simple ones of keeping a diet or doing the right kind of exercise. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
If man should be relieved of the task of being responsible for the functioning of the productive and administrative system, he would become a being of complete helplessness, lack of self-confidence, and dependence on the machine and its specialists; he would not only be incapable of making active use of his leisure time, he would also face a catastrophe whenever the smooth functioning of the system was threatened. In this respect, even if machines could take care of all work, of all planning, of all organizational decisions, and even of all health problems, they cannot take care of the problems arising between man and man. In this sphere of interpersonal relations, human judgment, response, responsibility and decision the machine cannot replace human functioning. There are those, like Marcuse, who think that in a cybernated and “non-repressive” society that is completely satisfied materially there would be no more human conflicts like those expressed in the Greek or Shakespearean drama or the great novels. I can understand that completely alienated people can see the future of human existence in this way, but I am afraid they express more about their own emotional limitations than about future possibilities. If there are no materially unfulfilled needs, the assumption that the problems, conflicts, and tragedies between man and man will disappear is a childish daydream. The young lady we have been discussing for several weeks, Clare suffered from an incapacity to be alone. Clare could have started from the consideration that her spells of misery had already decreased markedly within the last year. They had decreased to such an extent that she herself dealt more actively with external and internal difficulties. This consideration would have led to the question of why she had to resort to the old technique at just this point. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Granted that Clare was unhappy alone, why did solitude present such an intolerable distress as to call for an instantaneous remedy? And if being alone was thus distressing, why could she not do something actively about it herself? Clare could also have started from an observation of her actual behaviour. She felt miserable when alone, but she made hardly any effort to mix with friends or to make new contracts; instead she withdrew into a shell and expected magic help. Despite her otherwise astute self-observation Clare overlooked completely how odd her actual behaviour was on this score. Such a blatant blind spot usually points to a repressed factor of great potency. However, if we miss a problem it catches up with us. This problem caught up with Clare some weeks later. She then arrived at a solution by a somewhat different route from either of those I have suggested—an illustration of the fact that also in psychological matters there are several roads to Rome. Since there is no written report on this part of her analysis, I shall merely indicate the steps that led up to the new insights. The first was a recognition that she could see herself only in the reflected light of others. The way in which she sensed that others evaluated her entirely determined the way she evaluated herself. Clare did not recall how she arrived at that insight. She remembered only that it suddenly struck her so forcibly that she almost fainted. The average person, like Clare, comes to fear living and experiencing the here and now. Rather, she tends to live mainly in the past, through obsessive remembering, and in the future, through obsessive remembering, and in the future, through anxious expectations of catastrophe. The average person is chronically self-conscious and dreads spontaneous action. Experiencing the self as dependent and helpless, this person turns to others for support and becomes angry when they do not live up to expectations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Much of our understanding about healthy personality has come from those who had been intimately acquainted with unhealthy personality. These include present-day counseling theorists such as Carl R. Rogers and original psychotherapists such as Dr. Sigmund Freud, who dedicated their professional lives to the alleviation of emotional suffering. While it is important to search out the unique characteristics of the healthy personality, the high-level functioning person, there is a wealth of learning that is derived from those clients or patients who have shared their innermost anxieties, fears, and sorrows with counselors. The healthy personality struggles to emancipate itself from morbidly dependent relationships with others and is capable of direct awareness of perceptions and feelings, rather than engaging chronically in abstract thinking, in recall, or in wishful or anxious imagination. The healthy personality can trust itself to be spontaneous in action. Sometimes dreams are focused on in therapy because every aspect of a dream represents some dimensions of a person’s experience, much of which the person disowns. By identifying with the different parts of the dream, the person could increase self-awareness, which, in turn, would increase the sense of vitality and foster continuing personal growth. Self-sufficiency, standing on one’s own two feet rather than relying on others for one’s security is extremely important. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
We must all understand that there is no one to blame, and all that I can do is get to work on myself now and break the chain, so that I will not do unto others what has been done to me. It is not enough that I simply know this. I can know without any action taking place either within me or outside me. (The one follows upon the other.) I can feel superior to someone who does not know what I know, without being one white a better person for my knowing. I must undo what has been done to me, by doing in another way. That is where the scary part comes in, in my experience: I can find it comforting to know, and almost terrifying to do. However, it is in the doing that I change too. When I moved to a town a thousand miles away where I knew no one, the doctor who had been recommended to me by his training would not cooperate with the regime which the previous doctor I have found—through painful trial and many errors—worked for me. I decided that it would have to get alone without one. This went well for a while, but then I hit a phase when I got worse in a way that I knew meant that the dosage of cortisone should be adjusted. I could not tell whether I should take more or less. I wanted to telephone the previous doctor for help. I did not and I felt noble about not calling him. This was the first time that I latched onto what has since proved to be a fact of my life, that when I feel noble about not doing something, it is not myself who is doing it. I got worse and worse and felt nobler and nobler. I thought that I was not calling the doctor, and in the objective or physical sense this was true: this person, this body, did not make the phone call. However, the inside World is not so simple as that. It could be, but it has an enormous capacity for getting mixed up because other people have got into me through their directives. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
I had a dream which made this clear to me. It is really beautiful, the way that something inside me goes on seeing clearly, even when what I call my “conscious” mind is so mixed-up that it is hell I live in. In my dream, I came into a room where a young lady sat rigidly on a bench with her eyes tight shut, in paint from sunlight that was glaring through a window in a band across her eyes. I thought how silly she was to sit there in torment, when all that she had to do was move and then she would be relieved, and her eyes could open. I (feeling very superior about acting), went to the window and let down the venetian blind, to free her. There were many people sitting around a refectory table absorbed in their conversation with each other. They had no interest in us. When I woke up, I lived with that dream until I knew that the foolish young lady was me—or that part of myself which programmed by other people, my robot self. I was not making the expensive phone call that would relieve me. The people who did not “care” about us were the gossipers who criticized people for being “extravagant” and “neurotic.” At this time, I had paid off my major debts incurred during illness, including fifteen months of back mortgage. I had a thousand $10,000 in the bank. However, I was still haunted by the years of being heavily in debt when I was criticized for expenditures and for being neurotic. The doctor I had not gone back to had told me that I was neurotic. Everyone knows neurotic people plague doctors with telephone calls. I was not going to. It was a completely unreal World that I was living in because the previous doctor did not think I was neurotic to call him when the cortisone needed to be changed, and as for the cost of the call, it would be less than the cost of going to a local doctor, which I would have felt no qualms about doing if I had had confidence in the doctor. When my mind gets mixed up, it just does not make sense. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
When I understood my difficulty, I started toward the phone. However, when I had taken a few steps, I stopped as though I had been stopped—not as though I had stopped myself. I could not go any farther. So I walked away, thought and did other things, and tried again. And got stopped again. When this happened, the effort of making myself take even one more step seemed too much, like trying to push a steam roller out of the way. It seemed foolish to try. Then my mind said to me, over and over, that it was all right, that if I understood what was wrong and knew what had happened to me, everything was fine. It was very convincing, although this told me nothing of what to do about the cortisone. This went on for two days before I fully knew that I had to put an end to it, that there was a battle going on in me that I had to win. I made myself go to the phone. When I heard the doctor’s voice, I said, with quavers that are not reproducible on paper, “This started out to be a medical call, but it has wound up as a psychiatric one.” Then we got around to the cortisone. Ater that, I had some difficulty about calling the doctor, but none that I could not break through fairly easily. After the first several times, I phoned him if I needed his help, and not if I did not, and that was all there was to it. This freedom was very beautiful to me, as it always is when I am free to act in accordance with the total circumstances on my own authority, not on what someone else thinks or says or has thought or has said that I or someone else should do. I live directly with the facts themselves. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In this blend of analysing the results of past actions, reasoning about the probable results of present tendencies, measuring up to the standards of spiritual ideals, and obeying the quiet whispers of intuition, man will find a safe guide for shaping his future course of conduct. One should be eager and quick to judge, condemn, and correct himself, reluctant and slow to judge, condemn, and correct others. When he can bring himself to look upon his own actions from the outside just as he does those of other men, he will have satisfied the philosophical ideal. His errors and shortcomings can be excused by his sincerity and intentions, but that is not enough. He may accept such excuses but life itself will not. The explicit psychotherapy needs of our population are currently being served primarily by the members of three major professions. No one of these professions trains primarily and emphatically for the practice of psychotherapy. The trainings of the members of each of these professions is lengthy, expensive, and provides them respectively with unique skills and knowledge which are either irrelevant or at best tangential to the practice of psychotherapy. While there are a variety of schools of psychotherapy, diverse techniques and approaches to therapy, and different theories as to how it works, there is no evidence that the differences in these academic properties are significantly related to differences in the actual effectiveness of the psychotherapies carried out within them. As a matter of fact, the sheer amount of experience in doing therapy appears to be a major determinant of how the therapists think about or conduct theory. Major differences are found among the least experienced therapists; experienced therapists are more alike in their conceptualizations and practices than they are different. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
As yet a very limited amount of practical research has been conducted into this phenomenon. It has not yet been demonstrated to the general satisfaction of behaviour scientists that psychotherapy is in fact effective in relieving neurotic symptoms or achieving major and lasting re-orientation of disturbed personalities. The need for research is great and, in terms of the numbers of persons participating in therapeutic conversations, the opportunities are equally great. However, the highly trained experts who should be devoting major portions of their time to collaborative research are prevented (or dissuaded) from investigation by virtue of the pressure they feel to render those services whose efficacy is yet uncertain. If we are going to do more and better research, we must provide more therapy and at the same time permit our most highly skilled experts to do less direct therapy. Obviously, we need more therapists—and the only logical way we can hope to get them is to develop a more efficient program for training therapists. A host of persons untrained or partially trained in mental health principles and practices—clergymen, family physicians, teachers, probation officers, public health nurses, sheriffs, judges, public welfare workers, scout masters, county farm agents, and others—are already trying to help and to treat the mentally ill in the absence of professional resources. With a moderate amount of training through short courses and consultation on the job, such persons can be fully equipped with an additional skill as mental health counselors. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Each aspect of today’s fire service requires skill in mental health and the development of basic strategies. The Sacramento Fire Department does some kind of planning. Whether it called budgeting, prefire planning, long-range planning, comprehensive planning, five-year planning or strategic planning, the fire service has a long history of trying to look into the future to predict what will be needed. “My first firehouse turned out to be the same engine company my father had been in. A relatively quiet house. When he got sick and had to retire, that created the vacancy the commissioner appointed me to fill. It was nice of him, he didn’t have to do it. I actually took my father’s locker and everything else. My father was proud to see both my brother and me in the fire department, although he never pushed us to it. It was a great thrill to walk in the door of that firehouse as a fireman for the first time. I don’t know if I even touched the pavement. It was the realization of a lifelong dream. Neither my brother, nor I had dreamt of being an officer. But after a while, through the encouragement of other officers, we got to studying, and we studied together all the time. The tough part of our studies was the laws and ordinances. They were challenging and full of legal terminology. The interesting part, of course, was the firefighting tactics and all the fire hazards. Even the building construction information was interesting, I thought. At least it pertained to the job. But exactly how many feet a fire escape ladder must be from the ground and how many pounds a certain beam must support, that was very important to learn. Over the years the questions come up, and you do remember it, even if you have to look it up to be sure. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“The tests are a sort of elimination contest, and winning involves a combination of two things. You have to do a lot of studying, and you have to be lucky. I don’t care who you are, they can always ask you about things you don’t know. A lot of fellows do all the work and still don’t make it. My brother ended up a battalion chief, and I made it to division chief. As I said, I never expected to be an officer, and this is just frosting on the cale all the way.” The World has surpassed the visions of our forebearers beyond their wildest dreams. The fire service is no different in this respect. The combined resources of the fire service, support from the community, and its peripheral industries have created a service that is beyond the wildest dreams of the fire chiefs of even a few short years ago. To help the Sacramento Fire Department continue to thrive, you can make a contribution. The range of one with a goodwill excludes none, includes all. One recognizes no enemies, only unloved men. To help preserve America and create more patriots, teach your children to love America and respect law and order. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Have we not all one Father? Hath not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously, a man against his brother? We, the people of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish a Constitution of the United States of America. #Randolph Harris 20 of 20
The Winchester Mystery House
Mrs. Winchester was having her tea in the morning one early on a Sunday. Suddenly an extraordinary volley of noises broke out throughout the entire house. She described them as “banging, thumping, the whole place shaking.” The dog, Zip, was shut up in the library, while Mrs. Winchester took refuge in the Daisy Bedroom; the dog whined in terror as the noises increased in volume and in violence. Suddenly the noises ceased. When Mrs. Winchester looked up, she saw a woman in grey, with about half of her figure passed through the bedroom door. She ran to the door, but it was stuck. It was clear that this was no normal haunting.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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Many Have an Expectation of Heaven on Earth
Typically, it is thought that incapacity prevents man from becoming a capitalist. It is characteristic of the higher species to be less wasteful in having progeny. Civilization replaced natural selection with selection by intelligence. Yet, it is believed that the wealthy are the most fit to survive and that they must propagate more freely to promote civilization. Although some people have contempt for the value of human life, the sympathetic party is all for alleviating the condition of the working class by social legislation. However, the masses cannot be artificially saved from their own incompetence without social disaster. American society, under the influence of the philanthropists of the sympathetic party, is being deluged by a flood of immigrants and dragged down by an increasing proportion of incapables. The scientific party would defend the principles of competition, conformity to the law of supply and demand, and a fair field for the experiment of the survival of the fittest. The divisions among us are rather a process of natural selection. You will see, as you get better acquainted with the workings of our institutions, that there are no arbitrary distinctions here, but the fitness of the work for the man and the man for the work determines the social rank that each one holds. You know we are a sort of fatalists here in America. We are great believers in the doctrine that it will all come out right in the end. The crowding of the World, by stimulating industry and forcing men to develop their capacities by crushing the unfit, by casting out the unworthy and raising the worthy to prosperity and power, acts as the greatest motive power of progress. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
One may come to self-approving attitudes, but only after one has plumbed the depths of self-distrusting ones. Regardless of what the great minds think, humanity dictates the preservation of all, weak or strong, who come into existence, and even modern warfare selection for survival of the weak, cowardly, and superannuated and destroys the fit. Therefore, education demands a high standard of comfort, which in turn demands the limitation of reproduction to the true needs of the race. Every time one takes the harder way of acknowledging a fault, repenting a wrong, and then earnestly seeking to make reparation to whoever has suffered by it, he will be repaid by the sudden descent of gratifying peace, of a happy serenity absent from ordinary hours. His attitude towards those situations in life which are difficult or trying will show how far he has really gone in the Quest. If he has not undergone the philosophic discipline, he will either analyse these situations in a wrong egoistic way or else avoid analysing them altogether. Tolerate weakness in others but not in yourself. If this process of self-examination is to bear fruit, the disciple must pick out those virtues which he lacks or in which he is partially deficient and he must set to work, as a practical exercise, to cultivate them. If his practice is to be complete it will take him into the emotional, intellectual, and volitional parts of his being. He should constantly strive to think, to feel, and to do what he should be and do. So long as a man carries a flattering picture of himself, deterioration of character waits in ambush for him. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
We have, indeed, an unbounded imagination and initiative for solving technical problems, but a most restricted imagination when we deal with human problems. Why is this so? An obvious answer is that we do not have the knowledge in the field of the science of man that we have in the natural sciences and in technique. However, this answer is not convincing; why do we not have the necessary knowledge? Or, and this is even more to the point, why do we not apply the knowledge we do have? Nothing can be proved without further study, but I am convinced that to find a practical solution for the integration of optimal centralization and optimal decentralization will be less difficult than to find technical solutions for space travel. The real answer why this kind of research is not done lies in the fact that, considering our present priorities, our interest in finding humanely more acceptable solutions to our social organization is only feeble. Nevertheless, while emphasizing the need for research, we must not forget that there has already been a good deal of experimentation and discussion about these problems going on in the last decades. Both in the field of industrial psychology and management science, one finds several valuable theoretical discussions and experiments. Another objection, often combined with the previous one, says that if there is an effective control of decision making on the political level, there is no need for active participation in a corporation, since it will be properly supervised by the legislative and executive branches of the government. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
This objection does not consider the fact that today government and the corporations are already so interwoven that it is difficult to say who controls whom—furthermore, that government decisions themselves are not under effective control by the citizens. However, even if there existed a satisfactory active participation of the citizens in the political process, as it is suggested here, the corporation itself must become responsive to the will, not only of the participants, but of the public at large because it is affected by the decisions of the corporation. If such direct control over the corporation does not exist, it will be very difficult for the government to exercise power over the private sector of the system. Another objection will point out that the double responsibility in decision making which is proposed here will be a source of endless friction between the top and the “subjects” and will be ineffective for this psychological reason. Talking about the problem in an abstract sense, we may easily find it formidable, but once such changes are accepted, the resulting conflicts will be far less sharp and insoluble than they are if one looks at the picture in an abstract way. After all, the managers have an interest in performing, and so have the participants in an enterprise. As soon as the bureaucrat becomes “vulnerable,” that is to say, begins to respond to desires and claims from those subject to him, both sides will become more interested in the problems than in preserving their positions either as authority or challenger. That this is possible has been shown at several universities in the United States of America and abroad where once the participation of students was accepted, there was little friction between administration and students. This has been demonstrated in the Yugoslav system of the self-management of the workers and in the experience of the many cooperative moments all over the World. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
If the bureaucratic mode were changed from an alienated to a humanistic one, it would necessarily lead to a change in the type of manager who is successful. The defensive type of personality who clings to his bureaucratic image and who is afraid of being vulnerable and of confronting persons directly and openly would be at a disadvantage. On the other hand, if the method of management were changed, imaginative nonfrightened, responsive persons would be successful. These considerations show how erroneous it is to speak of certain methods of management which cannot be changed because the managers would not be willing or capable of changing them. What is left out here is the fact that new methods would constitute a selective principle for managers. This does not mean that most present managers would be replaced by the new type of manager. No doubt there are many who under the present system cannot utilize their responsive capacities and who will be able to do so once the system gives them a chance. Among the objections to the idea of active participation of the individual in the enterprises in which he works, perhaps the most popular one is the statement that, in view of increasing cybernation, the working time of the individual will be so short and the time devoted to leisure so long that the activation of the individual will no longer need to take place in his work situation, but will be sufficiently accomplished during his leisure time. This idea is based on an erroneous concept of human existence and of work. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Man, even under the most favourable technological conditions, must take the responsibility of producing food, clothing, housing, and all other material necessities. This means he must work. Even if most physical labour is taken over by the machines, man has still to take part in the process of the exchange between himself and nature; only if man were a disembodied being or an angel with no physical needs, would work completely disappear. Man, needing an assimilating nature, of organizing and directing the process of material production, of distribution, of social organization, of responses to natural catastrophes, can never sit back and let things take care of themselves. Work in a technological society may not be a “curse” anymore, but that paradisiacal state in which man does not have to take care of his material needs is a technological fantasy. Or will the solution be, as Brzezinski predicts, that only the elite will have the privilege of working while the majority is busy with consumption? Indeed, that could be a solution to the problem, but it would reduce the majority to the status of slaves, in the paradoxical sense that they would become irresponsible and useless parasites, while the free man alone would have the right to live a full life, which includes work. If man is passive in the process of production and organization, he will also be passive during his leisure time. If he abdicates responsibility and participation in the process of sustaining life, he will acquire a passive role in all other spheres of life and be dependent on those who take care of him. We already see this happening today. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
Naturally, while every kind of experience can be repressed, it follows from Dr. Freud’s theoretical frame of reference that in his view the strivings which are incompatible with the norms of civilized man, and first the incestuous strivings. However, according to Dr. Freud, hostile and aggressive strivings also are repressed since they conflict with the existing mores and the superego. Whatever the specific contents of the repressed strivings are, in Dr. Freud’s view they represent always the “dark” side of man, the antisocial, primitive equipment of man which has not been sublimated, and which contrasts with what man believes to be civilized and decent. It must be stressed again that Dr. Freud’s concept of the unconscious, repression means that the awareness of the impulse has been repressed, not the impulse itself; in the case of sadistic impulses, for instance, this means that I am not aware of my wish to inflict pain on others. However, this does not necessarily mean that I do not inflict pain upon others without being aware that they suffer from my actions. There is also the possibility that the impulse is not acted upon precisely because I could not prevent myself from being aware of it, nor find a fitting rationalization. In this case the impulse will still exist, but the repression of its awareness will lead to its suppression as far as acting upon it is concerned. In any case, repression means a distortion in man’s consciousness, it does not mean the removal of forbidden impulses from existence. It means that the unconscious forces have gone underground and determine man’s actions behind his back. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
What, according to Dr. Freud, causes repression? We have said already that those impulses are prevented from becoming conscious which are incompatible with existing social or family mores. This statement refers to the contents of repression; but what is the psychological mechanism through which the act of repression is possible? According to Dr. Freud, this mechanism is fear. The most representative example is Dr. Freud’s theory is that of the boy’s incestuous strivings toward his mother. Dr. Freud assumes that the little boy becomes afraid of his rival—father—and, specifically, that father will castrate him. This fear makes him repress the awareness of the desire and helps him channel his desires in other directions, although the scar of the first fright never entirely disappears. While “castration fear” is the most elementary fear leading to repression, other fears such as that of not being loved or of being killed or abandoned can, according to Dr. Freud, have the same power as the original castration fear, namely, to force man to repress his deepest desires. While in individual psychoanalysis, Dr. Freud would look for the individual factors of repression, it would nevertheless be erroneous to assume that his concept of repression is to be understood only in individual terms. On the contrary, Dr. Freud’s concept of repression also has a social dimension. The more society develops into higher forms of civilization, the more instinctive desire become incompatible with the existing social norms, and thus the more repression must take place. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Increasing civilization, to Dr. Freud, means increasing repression. However, if Dr. Freud never went beyond this quantitative and mechanistic concept of society and he did not examine the specific structure of a society and its influence on repression. If the forces which case repression are so powerful, how did Dr. Freud ever hope to make the unconscious conscious, to “depress” the repressed? It is well known that the psychoanalytic therapy he devised serves precisely this end. By analysing dreams, and by understanding the “free associations,” the uncensored and spontaneous thoughts of the patient, Dr. Freud attempted to arrive, with the patient, at knowing what the patient did not know before: his unconscious. What were the theoretical premises for this use of the analysis dreams and of free association for the discovery of the unconscious? Doubtlessly in the first years of his psychoanalytic research, Dr. Freud shared the conventional rationalistic belief that knowledge was intellectual, theoretical knowledge. He thought that it was enough to explain to the patient why certain developments had taken place, and to tell him what the analyst had discovered in his unconscious. This intellectual knowledge, called “interpretation,” was supposed to effect a change in the patient. However, soon Dr. Freud and other analysts had to discover the truth of Spinoza’s statement that intellectual knowledge is conducive to change only since it is also affective knowledge. It became apparent that intellectual knowledge as such does not produce any change, except perhaps in the sense that by intellectual knowledge of his unconscious strivings a person may be better able to control them—which, however, is the aim of traditional ethics, rather than that of psychoanalysis. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
If the patient remains in the attitude of the detached self-observer, he is not in touch with his unconscious, except by thinking about it; he does not experience the wider, deeper reality within himself. Discovering one’s unconscious is, precisely, not only an intellectual act, but also an affect experience, which can hardly be put into words, if at all. This does not mean that thinking and speculation may not precede the act of discovery; but the act of discovery is not an act of thinking but of being aware and, still better perhaps, simply of seeing. To be aware of experiences, thoughts or feelings which were unconscious, does not mean thinking about them, but seeing them, just as being aware of one’s breathing does not mean to think about it. Awareness of the unconscious is an experience which is characterized by its spontaneity and suddenness. One’s eyes are suddenly opened; oneself and the World appear in a different light, are seen from a different viewpoint. There is usually a good deal of anxiety aroused while the experience takes place, while afterward a new feeling of strength is present. The process of discovering the unconscious can be described as a series of ever-widening experiences, which are felt deeply, and which transcend theoretical, intellectual knowledge. We have spent a lot of time talking about Clare and her process of discovering the unconscious. She was on the verge of recognizing an important clue to her dependency. However, she started to argue against her findings on two grounds. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
One was that it was nothing unusual, after all, to expect friendliness from a friend in bad times. What else was the value of friendship! If you are gay and contented, everybody is good to you. However, with your sorrows you can go only to a friend. The other ground for disapproving of her finding was a doubt that it was applicable to the misery of the evening on which it had emerged. She had exaggerated her unhappiness, to be sure, but no one had been there to impress, no Peter could be telephoned. She could not possibly be so irrational as to believe that help would come merely because she made herself feel that most miserable of human beings. Yet sometimes when she felt bad something good did happen. Somebody would call her up or invite her out. She would receive a letter, her work would be praised, music on the radio would cheer her up. She did not immediately notice that she argued for two contradictory points: that it was irrational to expect help as a direct result of feeling distressed; and that it was rational. However, Clare saw the contradiction when she reread her notes some days later, and then she drew the only sensible conclusion, which was that she must have attempted to argue herself out of something. She tried first to explain her equivocal reasoning on the basis that she felt a general distaste at finding in herself anything so irrational as an expectation of magic help—but this did not satisfy her. This was an important clue. If we find an irrational area in an otherwise rational person, we can be sure that it hides something important. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
The fight that is often put up against the quality of irrationality is usually in reality a fight against having its background uncovered. This held true here, too. However, even without such reasoning Clare realized soon after that the real stumbling block was not irrationality per se, but her resistance against facing her findings. She recognized that a belief that she could command help through misery had a strong hold on her. Within the next months she saw with a gradually increasing measure of lucidity and in great detail what this belief did to her. She saw that she unconsciously tended to make a major catastrophe out of every difficulty that arose in her life, collapsing into a state of complete helplessness, with the result that despite a certain front of bravery and independence her prevailing feeling toward life was one of helplessness in the face of overwhelming odds. She recognized that this firm belief in forthcoming help had amounted to a kind of private religion, and that, not unlike a true religion, it had been a powerful source of reassurance. Clare also acquired a deepened insight as to the extent to which er reliance on someone else had taken the place of reliance on herself. If she always had someone who taught her, stimulated her, advised her, helped her, defended her, gave her affirmation of her value, there was no reason why she should make any effort to overcome the anxiety involved in taking her life into her own hands. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Thus, the dependent relationship had so completely fulfilled its function of allowing her to cope with life without having to rely on herself that it had robbed her of any real incentive to abandon the small-girlish attitude entailed in her compulsive modesty. In fact, the dependency had not only perpetuated her weakness by stifling her incentive to become more self-reliant but it had actually created an interest in remaining helpless. If she remained humble and self-effacing all happiness, all triumph would be hers. Any attempt at greater self-reliance and greater self-assertion was bound to jeopardize these expectations of a Heaven on Earth. This finding, incidentally, sheds light on the panic she felt at her first steps towards asserting her opinions and wishes. The compulsive modesty had not only given her the sheltering cloak of inconspicuousness, but it had also been the indispensable basis for her expectations of “love.” Clare realized it was merely a logical consequence, then, that the partner to whom she ascribed the godlike role of magic helper—to use a pertinent term of Erich Fromm’s—became all important, and that to be wanted and loved by him became the only thing that mattered. Peter, through his peculiar qualities—apparently he was the saviour type—was particularly fitted to play this role. His importance to her was not merely the importance of a friend who can be called upon in any time of real distress. His importance lay in the fact that he was an instrument whose service she could demand by making her need for them sufficiently great. As a result of these insights, she felt much more free than ever before. The longing for Peter, which at times had been excruciatingly strong, started to recede. More important, the insight brought about a real change in her objectives in life. She had always consciously wanted to be independent, but in her actual life had given this wish mere lip service and had reached out for help in any difficulty that arose. Now to become able to cope with her own life became an active, alive goal. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
When I notice that I am feeling selfish, then I notice also that I need to be selfish at that time, and the clear statement of my need comes out matter-of-factly, without appeal or demand. There are no implications. Of course, sometimes when I notice that I am being selfish, I see that I do not need to be, that it was all very silly and I can easily give it up. The noticing in the way that I have attempted to describe seems at arrive at the truth of the moment is free, not bound by anything. To me, this is spontaneity, which includes humour too, but this humour is rarely possible to convey to someone else in anecdote, because it is so much a part of the unique circumstances of the moment that all the circumstances have to be described, and then the humour is lost because it is the coming together of everything in one moment that is funny. This is a bubbly way to live—I mean the kind of bubbles that come up through soda water. When we strive for bubbles—which seems to happen often in my own society—it seems to me more like what comes out of the top of a percolator under full steam. To acknowledge past perceptual error, to confess intellectual mistake, and to retrace one’s steps accordingly may be bad policy for politicians, but it is sound policy for truth-seekers. The superficial or the conceited may feel that they lose in character thereby, but the earnest and the humble will, on the contrary, know that they gain. No one else is to be regarded as responsible for his troubles, irritations, or handicaps. If he will analyse them aright, that is, with utter impersonality, he will see that the responsibility is not really in the other person, who apparently is the agent for these calamities, but in his own undisciplined character, his own egoistic outlook. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
A useful exercise at this point is for the reader to ask, “What do I think my best possibilities are? To what extent do I approximate these conceptions of healthy personality? What changes might I make in my life to grow more in the direction of my better possibilities? What do I believe is preventing me from further growth? Who are the people who seem to bring out the best in me? What experiences do I long to have that will help me to know my potentialities in work, in my career, in loving and being loved, and in caring for others? How effective is my communication with others? Do I hide my feelings or do I let others know me?” Descriptions of human beings do not just describe—they prescribe; that is, they can function to limit our perceptions of ourselves or to encourage us to transcend or exceed previous limits. I suggest this because it is now apparent that what a person believes to be his or her strengths, weaknesses, and limits are self-fulfilling prophecies. If we are convinced that we have reached our limits, then we will struggle no more. If we will struggle no more. If we believe there is no end to our limits, we may keep struggling. Human beings always striven for personal perfection. Throughout history, this quest has been religious in nature; the goal has been named salvation, purification, redemption, liberation, enlightenment, and rebirth. We only pursue what we believe is a possibility for us. Growth centers have been founded where people who are not sick can go to explore further dimensions of their growth. A healthy personality is a way for a person to act, and guided by intelligence and respect for life, so that as his or her needs are satisfied, the person grows in awareness, competence, and the capacity for love of self, others, and the natural environment. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
This country is home to a great diversity of people. In the future, most of the population will look different, in large part due to immigration from Central and South America and from Asia. As baby boomers age, the proportion of older people within the population will increase. This segment of the population will require new programs to meet its unique fire and life safety needs. The larger number of senior citizens will require specially targeted education. Many may live in new types of arrangements designed for the elderly that will have special fire and life safety requirements. Outreach appropriate to the lifestyle and concerns of this group will be needed. “My fire training at that time was right at the fire station. We had one station that was supposed to be the training academy. We just called it the training department. It was only eight weeks long. Now they have a regular school, a regular academy. Basically, it prepared me for the job. It gave me probably 25 percent of the knowledge I needed just to get on the truck and respond to a fire. Working in the fire station was different. I had just come back from Vietnam, and I was still getting over the trauma of that. There were some practical jokes, like guys would shut the hot water off while you were taking a shower, or short-sheet your bed, little things like that. It was all in fun. To learn about firefighting, I asked a lot of questions. I followed the people I thought were competent and asked them. I watched how they operated. I couldn’t believe the hospitality I got. I got a little bit more than knowledge. Sometimes knowledge kind of scares you. The first time I was in a dangerous situation, I was only on the job probably about a year, and I got turned around inside of a closet. That scared me. I don’t know how I got turned around, a lot of it was from inexperience and not really knowing what I was doing. Because I was unaware when I first came on. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
“All I could think about was running out of air. It was a big closet, about ten by ten. The ironic thing was that I was right by the door all the time. I did not panic, or may I wasn’t in there long enough to panic. It was black, I was on my hands and knees, trying to find my way out, couldn’t see anything. Even with the flashlight on, I couldn’t see anything. I know when I was in Vietnam and I got myself in a couple of bad situations, I was really scared. I don’t think I was so much scared of dying, I was much more scared of being captured. But on the firefighting job, I think I was afraid of dying. And it seems like the older you get, the more concerned you are. But when you’re young, you’re kind of foolish, maybe.” No man can follow the Quest faithfully without finding that the very weaknesses which he conceals from other men will eventually be brought to the forefront of his attention by the play of circumstances, so that he will be unable to postpone work on them any longer. The very fact that he has become aware of these faults arises because the light has come into existence and begun to play upon the dark places in his character, thus generating a conscious desire for self-improvement. This awareness is not a matter for depression, therefore. Adapting to the new and changing environment will require the expansion of fire department programs. You can help the Sacramento Fire Department by donating. Also, it is important to raise your child(ren) to love America. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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The Most Noxious of All Wild Beasts is the Wild Man
God ordained rational creatures to act voluntarily and of themselves. When we believe in His son, and have assurance that Jesus as the Christ exists, a correct idea of His character, and a knowledge that we are striving to live according to His will, we are blessed with His infinite power, intelligence, and love. While, as we have seen, many men were uncertain how much of their religion would be left standing after natural selection had been fully accepted, others were quite as troubled by questions about what Darwinism would mean for the moral life. Spenser and the evolutionary anthropologists promised them that it would mean progress, perhaps perfection. The Malthusian element in Darwinism, however, pointed to an endless struggle for existence regulated by no sanction more exalted than mere survival. While some expected a new and higher morality, others feared a complete collapse of moral standards. Senator Gore, one of the characters in Henry Adams’ novel Democracy (1880), which was set against the dissolute and money-mad atmosphere of Washington in the Gilded Age, expressed the essential aimlessness and sterility of what many men feared would be the dominant values of the future: “But I have faith; not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new ones; faith in human nature; faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest. Let us be true to our times, Mrs. Lee! If our age is to be beaten, let us die in the ranks. If it is to be victorious, let us be the first to lead the column. Anyway, let us not be skulkers or grumblers.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Men with a deeper sense for traditional ideals hoped for more than this. Did Darwinism really justify brutal self-assertion, the neglect of the weak and the poor, the abandonment of philanthropic enterprise? Did it mean that progress must be dependent upon the ruthless elimination of the unfit, in an expanding population forever pressing upon the bounds of subsistence? In a nation trained in Christian ethics and fortified by a democratic and humanitarian heritage, such a Nietzschean ransvaluation of values was out of the question. Spencer’s econciliation of evolution and idealism, with its forecast of a transition from militancy to peace and from egoism to altruism was the commonest answer. Yet Spencer often spoke in rude selectionist language which could satisfy few who were not uncompromising defenders of a strictly competitive order or who were not willing to make drastic concessions to a naturalistic ethic, bare of all the warm and familiar theological sanctions. In The Principles of Sociology, he declared: “Not simply do we see that in the competition among individuals of the same kind, survival of the fittest has from the beginning furthered production of a higher type; but we see that to the unceasing warfare between species is mainly due both growth and organization. Without universal conflict there would have been no development of the active powers.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
In the light of all this talk about “unceasing warfare” and “universal conflict,” what was the value to those interested in the here and now of Spencer’s promise of a remote social Nirvana? One philanthropist asked: “Would not mankind take chloroform if they had no future but Spencer’s? No individual continuance, no God, no superior powers, only evolution working towards a benevolent society here and perfection on Earth, with great doubt whether it could succeed, and, if it succeeded, whether the end would pay.” “Herbert Spencer’s ethics will certainly be the final ethics,” wrote another critic, “but with question does press itself upon us, what is to be the ethics for the time now present and passing?” “What are we to do,” queried James Cosh, “with our reading youth entering upon life who are told in scientific lectures and journals that the old sanctions of morality are all undermined?” In 1879 the Atlantic Monthly published an essay by Goldwin Smith with the significant title “The Prospect of a Moral Interregnum,” which faced the troublesome questions raised by naturalism. Religion, Smith believed, had always been the foundation for the western moral code; and it would be idle for positivists and agnostics to imagine that while Christianity was being destroyed by evolution the humane values of Christian ethics would persist. Ultimately, he conceded, an ethic based upon science might be worked out, but for the present there would be a moral interregnum, similar to those which had occurred in past times of crisis. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
“There had been such an interregnum in the Hellenic World after the collapse of its religion brought about by scientific speculation; there had been another in the Roman World before the coming of Christianity gave it a new moral basis; a third collapse in western Europe following the Renaissance had produced the age of the Borgias and Machiavelli, the Guises and the Tudors; finally, Puritanism in England and the Counter Reformation in the Catholic Church had reintroduced moral stability. At present another religious collapse is under way: What then, we ask, is likely to be the effect of this revolution on morality? Some effect it can hardly fail to have. Evolution is force, the struggle for existence is force, natural selection is force, the struggle for existence is force, natural selection is force…But what will become of the brotherhood of man and of the very idea of humanity?” What would keep the stronger races from preying on the weak? (Smith had heard of an imperialist who said, “The first business of a colonist is to clear the country of wild beasts, and the most noxious of all wild beasts is the wild man.”) Or, is a tyrant should seize the reins of power in any of the great states, what could be said against him, consistently, under the survival doctrine? (Had not Napoleon been selected for survival?) What would happen to nineteenth-century humanitarianism? How were the passions of social conflict to be abated? To these questions Smith had no answer, but he was sure that the impending crisis in morals would bring with it a crisis in politics and the social order. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The basic principle of the humanistic management method is that, despite the bigness of the enterprises, centralized planning, and cybernation, the individual participant assets himself toward the managers, circumstances, and machines, and ceases to be a powerless particle which has no active part in the process. Only by such affirmation of his will can the energies of the individual be liberated, and his mental balance be restored. The same principle of humanistic management can also be expressed in this way: While in alienated bureaucracy all power flows from above downward, in humanistic management there is a two-way street; the “subjects” of the decision made above respond according to their own will and concerns; their response not only reaches the top decision makers but forces them to respond in turn. The “subjects” of decision making have a right to challenge the decision makers. If enough “subjects demanded that corresponding bureaucracy (on whatever level) answer questions, explain its procedures, such a challenge would first require the decision makers to respond to the demand. At this point, so many objections to the foregoing suggestions will have accumulated in the mind of the reader. The first objection probably is that the type of active participation of the “subjects” would be incompatible with efficient centralized management and planning. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
This objection is plausible (a) provided one does not have any compelling reason to think that the present method of alienated bureaucracy is pathogenic; (b) if one thinks only of the tired and proven methods and shies away from imaginative new solutions; (c) if one insists that even if one could find new methods, the principle of maximal efficiency must never be given up even for a time. If, on the other hand, one follows the considerations offered in this essay and recognizes the grave danger for the total system of our society inherent in our bureaucratic methods, these objections are not as compelling as they are to those who are satisfied with the operation of our present system. More specifically, if one recognizes the difficulties and does not start out with the conviction that they are unsurmountable, one will begin to examine the problems concretely and in detail. Here, too, one may arrive at the conclusion that the dichotomy between maximal centralization and complete decentralization presents an unnecessary polarization, that one can deal with the concept of optimal centralization and optimal grass-roots participation. Optimal centralization would be the degree of centralization which is necessary for effective large-scale organization and planning; optimal participation would be the participation which does not make centralized management impossible, yet permits the participants the optimum of responsible participation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
This formulation is obviously rather general and not sufficient as a basis for taking immediate action. If a problem of such a magnitude emerges in the application of scientific knowledge to technique, the engineer is not discouraged; he recognizes the necessity of research which will result in the solution of the problem. However, as soon as we deal with human problems, such difficulties tend to discourage most people of they flatly state that “it cannot be done.” Whenever a conscientious student first investigates abnormal psychology, he or she inevitably finds characteristics of the abnormal that also seem part of the student’s self. Can you also see in yourself some of the healthy characteristics described by the many thinkers and researchers in this area? Here are some of them: Openness to new ideas and to people. Care for self, for others and for the natural World. Ability to integrate negative experiences into the self. Creativity. Ability to do productive work. Ability to love. It does no harm to measure yourself in these terms. And if one does come up with some deficiencies, there are ways to earn to improve and develop oneself. Some of the traditional ways involve getting into counseling or psychotherapy, finding friends who are constructive and facilitative of one’s growth, even reading and practicing what is recommended in authentic self-help books and working with a behaviour-modification “manager” permits you to change aspects of yourself that you chose, rather than making changes dictated by social pressures from friends or authorities. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
New institutions of learning and healing have emerged in the past decade, which aim to promote a person’s education and training beyond a typical upbringing. There are now growth centers, where people can go to learn greater autonomy, creativity, and authenticity. One of the first of these—Esalen Institute—was founded in 1962 at Big Sur in California. Since then, more than two hundred have sprung up in the United States of America and the rest of the World. We are living in an age when the population is increasing to the point beyond which the Earth may not support live. Human beings have destroyed each other by the millions, sometimes praying to the same God, through the same clergy, for guidance for more effective ways to do this. In the nature of economic development, people have destroyed entire civilizations; animal species; and the soil, water, and air, making life an uncertainty for the generations that follow, and of dubious quality for those now living. We need now to identify those people who can reverse these processes. If not impossible, it is difficult to give a succinct definition of a healthy personality. Nevertheless, for purposes of orientation, we offer this as a preliminary effort: Healthy personality is a way for a person to act, guided by intelligence and respect for life, so that personal needs are satisfied and so that the person will grow in awareness, competence, and the capacity to love the self, the natural environment, and other people. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Our friend, Clare, who many have come to know and love other the weeks, has been an interesting case study that many can relate to. Whether Clare would have recognized the full severity of her entanglement without the external pressure exerted by Peter’s breaking away from her is a question some have been wondering about. It might be thought that Clare, having passed through the development that occurred before the separation, could not possibly have stopped permanently at an essentially untenable compromise solution, but would have gone on sooner or later. On the other hand, the forces opposing her final liberation had great strength, and she might still have gone to considerable lengths to make further compromises. If it did not touch upon an attitude toward analysis not infrequent among analysts as well as patients, this would be an idle speculation not worth mentioning. This attitude is an assumption that analysis alone can solve everything. However, when treatment is endowed with such omnipotence it is forgotten that life itself is the best therapist. What analysis can do is to make one able to accept the help that life offers, and to profit from it. And it had done exactly this job in Clare’s case. It is probable that without the analytical work that she accomplished she would have reached out for a new partner as soon as possible, and thus perpetuated the same pattern of experience. The important point is not whether she could have freed herself without outside help but whether, when that help came, she was able to turn it into a constructive experience. And this she did. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
As to the content of Clare’s findings in this period, the most important one was the discovery of an active defiance against living her own life, feeling her own feelings, thinking her own thoughts, having her own interests and plans, in short against being herself and finding the center of gravity within herself. In contrast to her other findings, this one was merely an emotional insight. She did not arrive at it by way of free association, and there were no facts to substantiate it. Nor did she have any inkling of the nature of the opposing forces; she merely felt their existence. Retrospectively we can understand why she could hardly have gone any further at that point. Her situation was comparable to that of a person who is driven from his homeland and confronted with the task of putting his whole life on a new basis. Clare had to make a fundamental change in her attitude toward herself and in her relations with others. Naturally she was bewildered by the complexity of this prospect. However, the main reason for the blockage was that, despite her determination to solve the problem of dependency, there were still powerful unconscious forces preventing a final solution. She was, as it were, in mid-air between two ways of dealing with life, not ready to leave the old and not ready to reach out for the new. In consequence the following weeks were characterized by ups and downs in quick succession. Clare wavered between times in which the experience with Peter and all that it entailed appeared as part of a far-distant past, and others in which she desperately longed to win him back. Solitude, then, was felt as an unfathomable cruelty perpetrated on her. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
In one of these latter days, going home alone from a concert, Clare found herself thinking that everyone was better off than she. However, she argued, other people are alone, too. Yes, but they like it. However, people who have accidents are worse off. Yes, but they are taken care of in hospitals. And what about the unemployed? Yes, they are badly off, but they are married. At this point she suddenly saw the grotesqueness of her way of arguing. After all, not all the unemployed were happily married; and, even if they were, marriage was not a solution for everything. She recognized that a tendency must be at work which made her talk herself into an exaggerated misery. The could of unhappiness was dispelled and she felt relieved. When Clare began to analyze this incident the melody of a song from Sunday school occurred to her, without her being able to recall the text. Then an emergency operation she had had to have for appendicitis. Then the “neediest cases” was published at Christmas. Then a picture of a huge crevice in a glacier. Then a movie in which she had seen that glacier; somebody had fallen into the crevice and was pulled out at the last moment. Then a memory from the time when she was about eight years old. She was crying in bed and felt it was unthinkable that her mother would not come and console her. She did not know whether a quarrel with her mother had gone before. All she recalled was the unshakeable conviction that her mother would be moved by her distress. The mother did not come, and she fell asleep. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Presently she recalled the text of the melody from Sunday school. It declared that no matter how great our sorrow, God will help us if we pray to Him. She suddenly saw the clue to her other associations and to the exaggerated misery that had preceded them: she had an expectation that great distress would bring about help. And for the sake of this unconscious belief she made herself more miserable than she was. It was shockingly silly, yet she had done it, and had done it. And she remembered any number of occasions when she had felt herself the most abused of all mortals, only to realize some time later that she had made matters much worse than they were. When she had been in the spell of such unhappiness, however, the reasons for it looked, and even felt, real. At such times she had often telephoned Peter, and he was usually sympathetic and helpful. In this regard she could almost count on him; here he had failed her less than anybody else. Perhaps this was a more important tie than she had realized? However, sometimes Peter had not taken her unhappiness at its face value and had teased her about it, as her mother and brother had teased her in childhood. Then she had felt deeply offended and was furious with him. Yes, there was clear pattern that repeated itself—exaggerated misery and at the same time an expectation of help, consolation, encouragement, from her mother, from God, from Bruce, from her husband, from Peter. Her playing the martyr role, apart from everything else, must have been also an unconscious plea for help. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
There seem to be two levels of guiltiness. The deeper one is when I am not true to myself. My deeper self, then, seems to be reproaching me. The other guilt comes when I do what is in accord with me, but without seeing clearly (sometimes not seeing at all) the distinction between what I want and what others say that I should want. When I do what is in accord with me without this clear seeing, I feel “wrong” or “bad” and that I must be somewhat unsane or disreputable to like what I do. The introjected values are like a monitor saying to my own responses, “You must not do that!” When I act in accord with me and know clearly what I am doing, then I am freed of both guilts at once: myself no longer reproaches me (it expresses content by a feeling of ease and innocence), and the reproaches of other people seem to have nothing to do with me. Which of course they do not. One of my clients told me, “The real truth of the matter is that I’m not the sweet forbearing guy that I try to make out that I am. I get irritated at times. I feel like snapping at people, and I feel like being selfish at times, and I don’t know why I should pretend that I’m not that way.” This statement could seem to mean that it’s good to snap at people. I know some people use me as their authority for popping off with the first thing that comes into their head. However, it is no good for one to pretend that they are not a certain way. When one notices that they are pretending, and removes oneself from that dishonesty, then one is free to notice that one feels like snapping. (If one thinks that one is not a snappy person and one’s mind is on that, how can one notice that one feels like snapping? This seems to be simple mechanics.) #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
However, if one notices that one feels like snapping and snaps, as the snapping people do, then one has not noticed oneself in a way that brings about a basic change. When one notices that one wants to snap that is simple acceptance of the fact, without opinion. If one thinks that it is good to snap, one is in the same fix as one is if one thinks that it is bad to snap. If one notices that one wants to snap at or about, this is still the wrong noticing. If one feels justified, one is in the wrong place, too. One must go more deeply inward, and notice simply the feeling of one’s irritation. When one notices one’s irritation in this inward way, something changes. One does not know anything about brain circuits, but one must be able to use a switch in some way because when one has done this noticing, even if one says the same words that one might have said otherwise, they do not sound the same, and the sound is part of the message. The “switch” seems to be the same one that one uses with someone one loves very much, when one wishes to hurt and at the same time one’s love comes through. This is not the same as repressing one’s hurt. In the pause, one does not review things and thinks what one is going to say. It is more like an officer putting his hand to stop the traffic in one way so that the traffic the other way can come through. One choose to let one’s love come through, and that is one’s own choosing, having nothing to do with commandments from the Christian Bible or anywhere else. One’s love comes from one and that is a love an individual can like. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
When we consider a father with sadistic impulses, who tends to punish and mistreat his children, he is convinced that he beats them because that is the only way to teach them virtue and to protect them from doing evil. He is not aware of any sadistic satisfaction—he is only aware of rationalization, his idea of duty and of the right method of bringing up children. Here is still another example: a political leader may conduct a policy which leads to war. He may be motivated by a wish for his or her own glory and fame, yet one is convinced that one’s actions are determined exclusively by one’s patriotism and one’s sense of responsibility to one’s country. In all these instances the underlying and unconscious desire is so well rationalized by moral consideration that the desire is not only covered up, but also aided and abetted by the very rationalization the person has invented. In the normal course of his life, such a person will never discover the contradiction between the reality of one’s desires and the fiction of one’s rationalizations, and hence one will go on acting according to one’s desire. If anyone would tell one the truth, that is to say, mention to one that behind one’s sanctimonious rationalizations are the very desires which one bitterly disapproves of, one would sincerely feel indignant or misunderstood and falsely accused. This passionate refusal to admit the existence of what is repressed, Dr. Freud called “resistance.” Its strength is roughly in proportion to the strength of the repressive tendencies. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
In 1955, the United States of America’s Congress passed the Mental Health Study Act which provided for the establishment of a Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health. This commission was changed to make a thoroughgoing appraisal of the extent of mental illness, the availability of resources for treatment and research, and the needs for the future. The following statement appears in the commission’s final report: “Persons who are emotionally disturbed—that is to say, under psychological stress that they cannot tolerate—should have skilled attention and helpful counseling available to them in their community if the development of more serious mental breakdowns is to be prevented. This is known as secondary prevention, and is concerned with the detection of beginning signs and symptoms of mental illness and their relief; in other words, the earliest possible treatment. In the absence of fully trained psychiatrist, clinical psychologist, psychiatric social workers, and psychiatric nurses, such counseling should be done by persons with some psychological orientation and mental health training and access to expert consultations as needed.” The Joint Commission recognizes the vital preventative and treatment potential of persons other than the acknowledged “experts.” The above statement seems to suggest that it is as an unfortunate artifact of the “absence” of the psychiatrist and his colleagues that the important task of secondary prevention “should” be done by others. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
It would be more positive and realistic to emphasize that preventive counseling can be and is done efficiently by the non-experts, that it must be done by persons with something other than a stereotyped “full training,” and that it is the effectiveness of these invisible therapists that keeps the experts from being completely swamped. It is time to recruit actively the assistance of these people, to encourage positively their important contribution rather than to acknowledge it reluctantly as better than nothing, and to provide reasonable avenues whereby their skills and sophistication may be enhanced. Exciting empirical support for the feasibility of the Joint Commission’s proposal has been generated by an experimental project at the National Institute for Mental Health. Under the direction of an experienced clinical psychologist, a group of mature housewives without previous professional training but with serious interest in mental health work was selected for a two-year program of part-time study and practice of psychotherapy under close supervision. Careful evaluation by three experts of the recorded therapy sessions of these women led to the conclusion that their skills were equal to those of psychiatric residents, analytic institute candidates, and graduate students in clinical psychology. On an objective, written examination in psychiatry prepared by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology these women scored above the national average. Upon completion of their training, all were employed in local mental health agencies. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Everything that belongs to the ego and its desires or fears must go. For some men it is hard to put aside pride, for others it is harder to put aside shame, but both feelings must go. His thoughts, his feelings, and his actions must work in combination to effect this great self-purification which must precede the dawn of illumination. And this means that they must work upon themselves and divert their attention from other persons whom they may have criticized or interfered with in the past. The aspirant must reserve his condemnation for himself and leave others alone to their karma. If you have analysed its meanings and profited by its lessons, you are right to shut the door on the past, but not otherwise. It is a useful practice, both for general moral self-improvement and for combatting our ego, every time we become aware that preoccupation upon ourselves and let it deal with our own faults, which we usually overlook. After we have judged ourselves, only then have we earned the right to judge others. However, although the aspirant will be greatly helped by a calm analysis of the transiency, suffering, and frustration inherent in life, he will be greatly hindered if he uses it as an excuse for a defeatist mentality and depressive temperament. The gallant inspiration to go forward and upward is indispensable. The self-righteousness which prompts him to criticize others, and especially his fellow-questers, is a bad quality which ought to be excised as quickly as possible. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The Sacramento Fire Department is about readiness, people helping people, rescuer safety, and doing good for the greatest number. “The first time I was in a dangerous situation was a few years back. We had a tough job at a three-story dwelling. When we pulled up, there was heavy smoke and fire on the first floor, which was a store front. Fire was blowing out and up, and each window had people in it. We put ladders up to the sides of the windows and started to get the people out. A couple of the people lunged at us while we were still coming up the ladder. One fell on the guy who was our driver at the time. He just stuck out his arm and caught the girl right across the belly. It was just his brute strength that held her. He got her down, and we pulled a couple more out. Some had gone back into the building. In those days we were using all-service air masks. I had the mask on, and the chief said, “Get in, get in.” The ladder is here, and the window is to the right about three feet. Okay, get in. Sure. But I’ve got to look this situation over because I’m going to have to jump from this ladder to the window, and there was no way of rolling over because we still had some fire. When I leaped over to the windowsill, I was dangling from it. Somehow, unbeknownst to me, the nipple with the filter on the top of my air canister was lifted up, so I had no filter whatsoever. I went in and crawled around, found a young boy, and brought him to the window to one of the guys. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“I was taking on smoke, and I didn’t realize why. I checked the face piece, and it seemed okay. It baffled me that I was taking on smoke, and the smoke was getting heavier. I went back a second time and found some older guy, who was in the back room, and I dragged him out. By then, I was so dizzy I didn’t know what I was doing. I got out to the ladder, and as soon as I took the mask off and the cold air hit me, I collapsed right there. The next thing I knew, I was in the hospital, lying right next to one of the guys we had rescued. I heard the doctor say, ‘Give me a scalpel, I have to do a tracheotomy.’ I immediately started breathing well. I mean, I was pumping up in panic. I thought there was no way in hell that he was going to cut my throat for a tracheotomy. So he did the tracheotomy on one of the victims we had pulled out. The fellow lived, by the way. But I didn’t know how bad I was. I knew they had brought me in because I was overcome by smoke. I sure in hell didn’t want no trache done on me, so I started breathing like a new machine. That was the first time that I thought this job might be a little difficult.” The imagination of the Sacramento Fire Department is in creating the blueprints that will outdistance their resources to build solutions. Creating and maintaining strategic alliances that work in an intelligent, orchestrated fashion will help them apply their limited resources where they will make the most difference. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. It is also important to raise your child(ren) to love America. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Ascent at Montelena
11977 Cobble Brook Drive, Rancho Cordova, California 95742
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The Haunting of Llanada Villa
The sun began its slow descent from the sky. The wind was blowing shrill and shrewd. As Llanada Villa settled, it started to rumble and grumble. The last glimmer of daylight died away. Everywhere, twilight released shadows. The night was bitterly cold and gloomy. As I sat by the fire, forms and faces from the past, from the grave appeared from a deep gulf. The wind was rumbling in the chimney and howling in the house. The footsteps in the dark from unseen entities were no longer as entertaining as they used to be. I had a feeling there was a tragic cloud hanging over the premises. Something must have happened long ago that left a very vivid psychic impression here…something very terrible. With more than $300 million at stake and not wanting to make light of the spirits, I discouraged any visits, especially those of thrill seekers. The walls and mirrors of Llanada Villa were draped in rose-coloured silk, and the mantles were decorated with poinsettia blossoms and lilies. In a doorway between the ballroom and the parlor, there was an umbrella covered with moss sprayed over with carnations with a fringe of gilded cypress cones. At the dinner table, however, I still kept a centerpiece of an old stain scarf border with blue plush and embroidered with begonia leaves to appease my spirit guests. Along the table were silver vases with roses and a tall silver candelabra. The names of some of the spirits guests were on cards painted with pink poppies. Llanada Villa itself had been readied to receive persons of wealth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
Although I have been experiencing unforeseen difficulties for some time now, the spirits had become very real to me. I was getting used to having them around. Besides, some of them were less trouble than some people I knew. Along with the day-to-day difficulties of conducting any kind of business, I had to deal with “the way things are done in California.” One incident involved a monthly payment to be made to a “railroad superintendent” to ensure my rail cars and carriages made it safely to my estate. There had been several frightening attempts at extortion. The disgruntled renegade demanded a payment. He “needed the money.” I refused to pay him. He left my home, uttering and glaring. Shortly after, a letter arrived at my home.
Mrs. Sarah L Winchester:
We’ve investigated you and know you can pay. We want $67,588 in hundred-dollar bills—and we want it soon so get it together and we’ll contact you again. If you go to the constable, we are going to blow up your whole house with everybody in it—and take care of your family too. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
I disregarded his warning. This, after all, was a clear and present danger, not ghostly footfalls on the path or in the hallways. The constable agreed to work on the case. I told them about the dissatisfied client. They only succeeded in letting the renegade know that the authorities were after him. I was livid! Now that my extortionist knew I had made contact with law enforcement, he would probably carry out the rest of his threats. I had an army of bodyguards and vicious dogs guarding my estate. I refused to fan the fires of anybody’s superstitions, but there was always a guard just waiting inside the mansion with a cocked Winchester. “Well, Mrs. Winchester,” the butler said, mollified, “I’m glad you’re takin’ the serious. This could be trouble. We’ll take some axes and cut us a supply of firewood while it’s still dry.” “Very well,” I said. It was good that they wasted no time, for the rain began well before nightfall. There was a chill, driving wind, and the horses and mules took shelter in a stand of pines that were on the estate. The chimneys drew well, and roar fires did well to life the spirit of the house. I lit a candle and went over the long halls thoroughly, finding nothing. However, a careful examination of the floor revealed nothing except a reddish-brown stain that might have been blood, long since dried. The storm raged on, unabated. There was a crash of thunder that shook the house that immediately frightened the servants. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
Then, on the heels of a clap of thunder, like an echo, came the unmistakable bark of a Winchester. Three of the deadly weapons added their voices to the fury of the storm, and taken by surprise, the guards fought back with their Winchester’s. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the fuselage ended. The thunder had diminished, and in the lightning flashes there were revealed three huddled bodies. With trembling hands, I stepped out the door and stood on the veranda, staring grimly into the rain-swept darkness. I marveled at how rapidly events could take a turn for the worse. We were suddenly free of any threat of the troublesome band of renegades, but three of them lay grievously wounded. There were sinister shapes in the shadows. The Observational Tower alone, rising toward the dark rolling clouds, was eerie enough with its deep apertures suggesting the chilly blackness that lay within. I did not envy the butler who had to climb those stairs in the dead of the night to make sure it was secure. When he had entered the nine-story tower, he found every item of furniture smashed or upset. Blood had been smeared over the walls and holy pictures. The tables had been overturned. Every gasolier has been ignited. However, he had come upon no intruder. Whoever—or whatever—had been in the tower had vanished, leaving behind only more wrecked furniture. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
If the butler had not been so obsessed with the idea of “demonic possession,” then perhaps the local constabulary would have become involved. There was someone out there, someone moving through the garden. Using a good deal of stealth, too. And headed for the tower. I sat near the back of the darkened library, screen partly by a mahogany pillar. The only light came from the high stained-glass windows each time night clouds slid from the face of the moon. My hands were tucked deep inside my overcoat pockets. I shivered. Then heard a sound somewhere in the darkness. A breeze flickered against my face. A door had bene opened. And there it was, a black form, somehow misshapen, moving among the shadows. I kept still, curious to see that the intruder would do. A match was struck, the sound harsh in the cavernous mansion. A candle was lit. Then another. The figure moved—glided, it almost seemed—around the table, lighting more. That area of the mansion grew brighter and I sank down in my seat, even though I was still in the shadow, for now the intruder’s true shape was more discernible. It was bent, as if hunched back, and it wore some kind of robe, the head covered by a large cowl. I now understood why the figure had appeared crooked, for now it was lifting something. Something heavy. As I watched, the intruder raised the container and began to pour liquid over the table. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
I waited by the door and only when the figure I had been watching had disappeared from view did I enter. My teeth clenched tight when the door groaned on its hinges. I hurried through. I reached the other side of the room and peered round. There was no sign of the person I had been watching. A noise to my right caught my attention. There it was, a shape dodging around the hallways. However, it was headed to an exit. My eyes narrowed. Christ, the thought of it all made my skin crawl. It was cruel. I was as jumpy as a bear scenting humans. A wind went whistling through the room. The room had darkened more, and I clearly heard footsteps. There was a heavy and gloomy shadow gathering. It turned colder, too. There was a chill and a dismal feeling in the air. I took a lantern and went on, through the long, dark passages. As the gloom and shadow thickened behind me, in that place where it had been gathered so darkly. The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange than horrible, but it took me by surprise to see a ghastly cold, and colourless face dressed in a gloomy nightgown, motionless without a sound. Then I noticed there were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trapdoors. I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I saw. My home seemed so limitless. There were almost endless leagues of rooms two hundred feet wide. They differed greatly in aspect. Many of these rooms seemed so limitless that they must have a frontage of several thousand feet, while there were stairs that shot up to the steamy heavens. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
I could not resolve this impression into details. In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed far above any of the other structures. They were built of a completely bizarre masonry, and tapered slightly toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in this part of Llanada Villa could I find traces of windows or other apertures save huge oak doors be found. My omnipresent home was almost terrifying in its strangeness, with bizarre and unfamiliar architecture. Abnormally, this night, my home had grown curiously. Through the countless miles of this haunting city there were French reception rooms in Renaissance and Louis VX taste. The spirit may not have been here to harm me, but were showing me how to build. Vivid blossoms embossed in the windows. Terrance and roof-top gardens to suggest artificial breeding. Here and there enormous domes and arches. Certainly, many persons have dreamed intrinsically stranger things. For some time, I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had never before been an extravagant dreamer. In the course of some months, however, these elements came to life. Carpenters worked day and night to unfailingly create my dreams with accumulating force. My home reflected the curious impressions regarding time, the sense of an exchange with my personality, and, considerably later, the inexplicable emotional grip of these spirits. It disturbed me so vastly to find that my dreams had been so closely duplicated; especially since the ideas came from apparitions. Many of those accounts supplied with detailed explanations. This despite the fact that I was and still am ignorant of the languages involved in the creation, which appeared to be a fairly consistent mixture of myth and hallucination whose scope and wildness left me utterly dazed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
The Winchester Mystery House
This excessive, if not bizarre home of Sarah L. Winchester combined with Victorian and Gothic styles, at one time contained as many as 600 rooms. Building and furnishing the home consumed approximately $5 million. The house now contains 161 rooms. The vast mansion required employment of about one hundred servants, including chefs, cooks, maids, housekeepers, maintenance workers, carriage men and hostlers. Its unique floor plan resulted in operational efficiencies and many unusual features.
“One occasion, I heard a door open and heavy footstep slowly walking through the house. I checked on the lowest level of the house a door which is never opened—it was nevertheless fully open. Evidently, the ghost knew I was coming.” -Caretaker 5
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
What I Have is Good and Still I am Unhappy
Our Heavenly Father wants us to love ourselves, to see ourselves as He see us: we are His cherished children. When this truth sinks deep into our hearts, our love for God grows. Berating others does not help them progress; it only discourages them. Along with correction, they also need encouragement. The goal with self-love is never to justify omission, rationalize sin, or slip into complacency. I recognize that certain negative feelings can help me, such as godly sorrow—but I should not wallow in it, because that is not progression. Guilt has an important role as it awakens us to changes we need to make, but there are limits to how far guilt will help us. Guilt is like a battery in a gasoline-powered BMW. It can light up the Ultimate Driving Machines, start the engine, and power the headlights, but it will not provide the fuel for the long journey ahead. The battery, by itself, is not sufficient. Ans neither is guilt. I must be intentional not to slip into negative thinking patterns and should instead focus on loving Jesus as the Christ. I once had an image of myself as a fish. My fish image was that I was a fish, struggling to swim against the stream. I was not able to do that yet. I was held where I was, which gave a chance to learn how to swim against the stream (go the way that I wanted to go) by two shadowy figures on a bridge, each of them holding a line which I was hooked like a fish. This kept me from being swept away by the swiftly moving stream. I know that the two figures were the doctor and Aldous Huxley. Neither of them understood everything, but each of them understood enough to be helpful. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
When I got worse physically, the doctor got me back to some degree of steadiness. When, through experimenting with my mind, I got into something that neither the doctor nor I understood, so I was afraid to go on with it, I wrote to Huxley and he explained it. These two men kept me from being swept away while I thrashed around, learning how to swim against the stream. This was a persistent image that I lived with for about a year. These men were also people to whom I could tell anything and they would not “call the cops.” This meant to me that they would not call men to lock me up. I thought of being “locked up” as being in a madhouse, but it was not a mental hospital that I was afraid of, although I did not know what the “madhouse” was. It meant being pushed back into what I was struggling to get out of. Other people tended very much to do this to me, so I lived more and more alone and when, at last, I was just barely able to travel I went to a place where I knew no one, and kept myself alone, so that I could get together with myself. I wanted desperately to be with someone who understood more than I did about what I was trying to understand, but since I could not do that, I could at least remove myself from people who were confusing me. After all that, some of my present knowings seem small and perhaps ridiculous, but I know now that they are not “unimportant.” I am living near the beach in an apartment which has an outside deck with a railing. When my son was here, he started to throw his damp swimming trucks and towel over the railing, then said, “The management probably wouldn’t like that—I can see why.” I agreed, and his statement was accurate, but whose seeing was the seeing why? When I agreed, in my mind there was an image of the uncluttered railing as described, something that I like. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
However, a few days later when I walked past a building with a railing draped with swimsuits and towels, I knew that I liked this, that to me it looked gay and human, alive with an activity of people. Then I knew how much I missed seeing clothes on lines blowing in the wind, people working untidily in gardens, sweeping sidewalks, dashing out of houses half-dressed to do something that should be done right now, or a woman drying her hair in the sun. When I looked out on the tidy street with no sign that anyone lives behind the curtains in the windows of the houses, it seems so lifeless. The alwaysness of this tidiness tires me the way that hunger does; something is missing from my intake. If no one else feels as I do, this still is the way that I feel, and when I think that I do not, I am not together with myself. If I could deceive myself completely by accepting other people’s values, then there might be an argument for giving up and letting other people tell me what to do. However, my inner valuing does not cease: it just gets buried to my knowing and is forever in conflict with the values that I have accepted from outside. When I had not noticed my own valuing of the street on which I live, there was nothing that I could do about it but be irked without knowing why, and feel that I must be ungrateful because “what I have is good” and still I am unhappy. Now that I have noticed, I feel happy. The conflict in me has been removed. Having accepted myself, I can accept other things too, in a way that is very different from “making the best of it.” It is the way I lived from age 12 to 16, when I wanted to quit school but the law would not let me. So, I lived with what was around me, including school, until the time when I could leave. The circumstances are different now, but the feeling is the same. I do not feel trapped. I do not feel that something has been done to me (victimized). And I do not feel guilty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Currently in the United States of America there has been a lot of resentment to people who have immigrated illegally. Because of that, anyone who looks like they could be of Hispanic background have been facing a lot of discrimination. However, even if someone has illegally immigrated, it is not right to treat them less than human. If you do not like people being allowed to immigrate illegally, then that that up with your government, stop voting democrat. It is not your place to judge them. All individuals are children of God and part of His divine family. As His children, we all have divine potential and are precious in His eyes/ The scriptures teach that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men,” and “all are alike” unto Him. He does not love one race or culture more than any other. The gospel of Jesus as the Christ is for all of God’s children. The Book of Mormon teaches that the Lord invites “all to come unto Him and partake of His goodness; and He denieth none that come unto Him, black and white, bond and free, male and female.” Our standing with God depends on our devotion to Him and His commandments, not on the colour of our skin, our ethnicity, our citizenship status, or other attributes. Because we are children of God, we are all brothers and sisters. God has commanded us to “love one another.” In the parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus Christ taught that the commandment to love our neighbour transcends ethic, cultural, and religious differences. The Saviour exemplified this teaching. He “went about doing good,” teaching and healing people of all backgrounds. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Manifest Destiny; the belief that it is our duty, as Americans, to settle the continent, conquer the World and prosper. The idealized settlers who reached the promised land of the West were ordained by God to expand the boarders of America from sea to shining sea. The settlers overcame death to reach the American West, bathed in a welcoming golden light. There was a price to be paid, however. Frontiersmen had to be willing to face the risks inherent in migration—but had their parents not faced similar risks in coming to America? They had to be willing to do the backbreaking work required to turn a wilderness into prosperous farms and towns—but had their ancestors not done that as well? They had to be willing to break with the familiar and comfortable, and even face hardship—perhaps even death. They created the blueprint to expand America’s dominion over the entire planet, and perhaps one day there will no longer be any boarder and people can travel freely to whatever part of the World they wish. So many people want to come to America because it does have a lot of freedom and law and order. With Manifest Destiny, this freedom and law and order will spread to other parts of the World. I am grateful that the heart of the gospel revolves around love. The love of God, love of others, and love for myself. It would be a grave error to believe that philosophy is merely the practice of reflection over lofty or lovely thoughts. It is also the shedding of tears over low or unlovely ones, the remorseful weeping over past and present frailty, the poignant remembrance of errors and incapacities. We who practice it must examine ourselves periodically. This means that we should not, at any time, be satisfied with ourselves but should always recognize the need of improvement. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Hence, we should constantly strive to detect and remedy the moral, temperamental, and mental defects which disclose themselves. We will need to look into our hearts more deeply than ever before, and search their darker labyrinths for the motives and desires hiding away from our conscious aspiration. We are called upon to make the most searching criticism of ourselves, and to make it with emotional urgency and even profound remorse. If it meant only looking at our human frailty and mortal foolishness, this advice to look within would be idiotic. A morbid self-obsession, a continuously gloomy introspection and unending analysis of personal thoughts and experience is to be avoided as unhealthy. Such ugly egocentricity does not make us more “spiritual.” However, the advice really means looking further and deeper. It means an introspective examining operation much longer in time, much more exigent in patience, much more sustained in character, than a mere first glance. It means intensity of the first order, concentration of the strongest kind, spiritual longing of the most fervent sort. Although philosophy bids us avoid morbid thoughts of depression, doubt, fear, worry, and anxiety because they are weakening and because they represent only one side—the dark side—of a two-sided situation, this counsel must not be misunderstood. It does not bid us ignore the causes which give rise to such thoughts. On the contrary, it bids us take full note of them, face up to them, frankly, examine them carefully, and understand the defects in our own character which led to them. Finally, we are to adopt the practical measures needed to deal with them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
However, this once done, and thoroughly done, we are to turn our back upon them and let them go altogether to keep our serenity and contain our spiritual detachment. In every painful problem which is ultimately traceable to our own wrong-doing, the best way to rid ourself of the worry and anxiety it brings is first, to do what is humanly possible to mend matters in a practical way; second, if others are concerned, to make such reparation to them as we can; third, to unmask our sin pitilessly and resolutely for what it is; fourth, to bring clearly into the foreground of consciousness what are the weaknesses and defects in our own character which have led us into this sin; fifth, to picture constantly in imagination during meditation or pre-sleep, our liberation from these faults through acquiring the opposite virtues; sixth, and last, when all this has been done and not until then, to stop brooding about the miserable past or depressing future and to hand the whole problem with its attendant worries into the keeping of the Overself and thus attain peace concerning it. If this is successfully done, every memory of sin will dissolve and every error of judgment will cease to torment us. Here, in its mysterious presence and grace, whatever mistakes we have made in practical life and whatever sins we have committed in moral life, we need not let these shadows of the past haunt us perpetually like wraiths. We may analyse them thoroughly and criticize ourselves mercilessly but only to lay the foundation in better self-knowledge for sound reform. We must not forget them too soon, but we ought not hug them too long. After the work of self-analysis is well done, we can turn for relief and solace to the Overself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
We have been discussing Clare and her journey through self-analysis. During her period of inner turmoil, she obtained a new lease on life and a renewed incentive to work at the problems she was having in her interpersonal relationships. However, several questions arose. If the loss of her intimate partner, Peter, could still upset her as deeply as it did, what about the value of the foregoing analytical work? Two considerations have a bearing on this question. One is the insufficiency of the previous work. Clare had recognized the fact that she was compulsively dependent, and had seen certain implications of this condition. However, she was far from reaching a real grasp on the problem. If one doubts the value of the work accomplished one makes the same mistake that Clare herself made during the whole period before the climax, underrating the import of the neurotic trend and therefore expecting too quick and easy results. The other consideration is that overall, the final upheaval was itself of a constructive nature. It presented the culminating point of a line of development that runs from a compete ignorance of the problem involved, and the most vigorous unconscious attempts to deny its existence, to a final full realization of its severity. The climax brought it home to her that her dependency was like a cancerous growth which cannot be kept within safe boundaries (compromises) but must be eradicated lest one’s life be gravely jeopardized. Under the pressure of acute distress Clare succeeded, too, in bringing into sharp conscious focus a conflict which had hitherto been unconscious. She had been entirely unaware of being torn between wanting to relinquish her dependency on another person and wanting to continue it. This conflict had been camouflaged by her compromise solutions with Peter. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Now Clare had faced it, and was able to take a clear stand as to the direction in which she wanted to go. In this regard the phase she was now going through illustrates a fact mentioned in the past, that at certain periods in analysis it is necessary to take a stand, to decide. And if through the analytical work a conflict has sufficiently crystallized for the patient to be able to do this, it must be reckoned as an achievement. In Clare’s case the issue, of course, was whether she would immediately try to replace the lost pillar with a new one. Naturally it is upsetting to face a problem in that uncompromising way. And here a second question comes in. Did Clare’s experience produce a greater danger of suicide than it would have without analysis? For consideration of this question, it is relevant that she had indulged in suicidal notations at previous times. She had never, however, been able to terminate them so decisively as she did this time. Formerly they had simply faded out of the picture because something “nice” happened. Now she refunded them actively, consciously, and with a constructive spirit. Also, as mentioned above, her first reaction of gratefulness that Peter had not withdrawn earlier was in part a genuine feeling that she was now more capable of coping with his desertion. It seems safe to assume, therefore, that the suicidal tendencies would have been stronger and more persistent without the analytical work that was done. Human nature is universally frail; Clare’s is no exception. Nevertheless, if she is appalled at her mistakes, of this anguish is doubled because what she has done wrongly is irreparable, is there nothing else left to do than to give herself up to helpless despair? The true answer is more hopeful than that. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
I know that if one keeps patient while cultivating humility and silencing the ego’s pride, one shall grow away from old weaknesses and overcome former mistakes. This should be the first stage of her new attitude. For the next one, Clare can at least go over the events of the past and amend them in thought. She can put right mentally those wrong decisions and correct those rash impulsive actions. She can collect the profits of lessons expensively learnt. The first value of self-confession of sin is not so much getting rid of an uncomfortable sense of guilt over a particular episode or series of episodes as getting at the weakness in character responsible for them, and then seeking to correct it. Merely to remove the sense of discomfort and to leave its moral source untouched is not enough. Any priestly rite of forgiveness is ineffective until it is done. If it is to be real, if it is to be successful in purifying her character, it must produce repentance and that in its turn must produce penance. The second value of the confession is to induce the sinner to make amends or restitution to those one has hurt and thus balance one’s karmic account with them. Humans commit many sins and fall into many errors before the failure of their own conduct finally dawns upon them. By raising one’s point of view regarding any grievous situation, whether it involves oneself alone or other persons, one attracts the entry of a higher power into it which will work for one’s benefit and in one’s favour. One will learn to endure the blows of misfortune with a bravery heretofore unknown and a serenity heretofore unexperienced. It is better for one’s real progress that one’s eyes should fill with tears of repentance than with tears of ecstasy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
A healthy personality comes from the optimal self, which refers to a person who is functioning at the highest level. There are modes of human fulfillment, or characteristics of the optimal person. Efficiency: functional competence (being able to do things well), effective work autonomy (being able to work independently), and commitment to projects of concern outside of oneself. Creativity: experiences familiar things in fresh ways; openness to the novel, strange, and socially unacceptable; creates new style of life. Inner harmony: likes self; need for some amount of privacy or solitude. Relatedness: compassion, to be genuinely transparent, making self available to receive what others seek to communicate. Transcendence: mystical unity with a larger whole, relationship to some all-encompassing totality, to nature or God. Psychologists have been too timid and guarded in identifying the high-level functioning or healthy personality. We have disguised the true, human image of this person behind language that is so stiff that the person in the description is lost. The healthy personality is a “beautiful and noble person” (BNP). The beauty described here does not refer to physical beauty, although that may sometimes be found in the healthy personality. It more specifically describes someone whose behaviour and work is such that the effect upon self and other is one of producing an essentially aesthetic feeling. Nobility also, of course, does not refer to parentage but to the kinds of behaviour and acts performed by such a person. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
While some have argued that even psychotic people may sometimes be thought of as healthy, Ted Landsman insists that the BNP must first be normal—perceive reality essentially as it is and to be free of bizarre symptoms (such as hallucinations, grimaces, and so on). The first stage in the evolution of the BNP is described as the passionate self. The passionate self is seen as someone who truly likes, even loves himself or herself, someone who enjoys being alone, and who respects and accepts self. This is not the same as selfishness, but rather is an awareness of self as a worthwhile person. Bragging and possessiveness are avoided. The second stage involves a concept not dealt with in detail by most other writers: the environment-loving person. A passionate caring for the physical environment is seen in the person at this stage. The human relates to mountains, flowers, music, buildings—the entire physical environment—with appreciation and with joy, preserves it, nurtures it, and delights in it. The final stage in the evolution of the BNP is described as the compassionate self. This is a person who deeply loves others, who cares about people who hurt or are in need, and who acts, often at a great personal risk, to help others. The compassionate person does not only feel for others, but acts to alleviate or remedy their pains or injustices. There are major positive experiences that lead to the development of the beautiful and noble personality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
There are experiences that lead to the development of the beautiful and noble personality: Positive experiences in childhood. Experiences of joy, delight, ecstasy at all levels, not just peak. High levels of intense positive feeling. Negative experiences that have been made positive in effect. These are important painful experiences, such as disgrace, failure, death of loved ones, automobile accidents, being fired from a job, which the person has been able to “turn around” and make into significant learning or growth experiences. The following, collected by Smith, is written by a female prisoner: “Coming to prison. Never thought it would happen to me. Anyone else but not me. It happened. I’m glad I’ve stopped and reviewed my life up to age 17. Complete destruction for me. I was destroying myself and going at it at top speed. I’ve met beautiful people here. I’ve learned a lot about me. This experience I would not change if I could. I need this. Now maybe I can be a better person. I can stop and think and reason with myself….Had I not served time I would still be going at top speed I’m sure. Only what would I be into now?” The solitude experience. Instances in which an individual can escape from the immediate pressures—social, job, interpersonal—and explore the self, one’s own feelings, one’s relationship to others, to the World. Opportunities to think freely and clearly are usually accomplished in solitude, in intentional isolation, such as a short walk in the woods, or a year’s living in the desert alone. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
The authentic dialogue. This, in a sense, is the obverse or “flip side” of the previous experience. You seek the opportunity to converse, deeply, freely, without guile or pretense, with someone you trust totally. Both persons in the dialogue must be committed to authenticity and openness, which differs somewhat from most counseling or psychotherapeutic approaches, where only the silent is the communicator about self. The transcendent experience is one in which you achieve far beyond what you would normally expect of yourself: writing an unusually beautiful open, being far more sensitive than one would expect, performing a physical feat such as lifting a beam from an injured person or winning an athletic contest. These experiences are difficult to predict or create, but when they do occur, they give you the sure confidence that you have possibilities and potential of which you never dreamed. The approach to beautiful and noble personhood stresses openness, relationship to self and to others. It builds up Maslow’s system of peak experiences to suggest the importance of a whole range of experiences, especially the positive, and inserts the importance of the relationship, a passionate one, with the physical environment, music, mountains, flowers, lakes, and so on. When a mane lets go of his ego, all the virtues come submissively to his feet. If he can let it go only for a little while, they too will stay only a little while; but if her can make the parting permanent, then the virtues are his forever. However, this is a high and uncommon state, for it is a kind of death few will accept. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The social character which makes people act and think as they must act and think from the standpoint of the proper functioning of their society is only one link between the social structure and ideas. The other link lies in the fact that each society determines which thoughts and feelings shall be permitted to arrive at the level of awareness and which must remain unconscious. Just as there is a social character, there is also a “social unconscious.” By “social unconscious” I refer to those areas of repression which are common to most members of a society; if the society with its specific contradictions is to operate successful, these commonly repressed elements are those contents which a given society cannot permit its members to be aware of. The “individual unconscious” with which Dr. Freud deals refers to those contents which an individual represses for reasons of individual circumstances peculiar to his personal life situation. Dr. Freud deals to some extent with the “social unconscious” when he talks about the repression of incestuous strivings as being characteristic of all civilizations; but in his clinical work, he mainly deals with the individual unconscious, and little attention is paid by most analysts to the “social unconscious.” The conflict between the unconscious reality within ourselves and the denial of that reality in our consciousness often leads to neurosis, by making the unconscious conscious, the neurotic symptom or character trait can be cured. Dr. Freud believed that this uncovering of the unconscious was the most important tool for the therapy of neurosis, his vision went far beyond this therapeutic interest. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Dr. Freud saw how unreal most of what we think about ourselves is, how we deceive ourselves continuously about ourselves and about others; he was prompted by the passionate interest in touching the reality which is behind our conscious thought. Dr. Freud recognized that most of what is real within us is not conscious, and that most of what is conscious is not real. This devotion to the search for inner reality opened a new dimension of truth. If he says what he knows, the person who does not know the phenomenon of the unconscious is convinced he says the truth. Dr. Freud showed that we all deceive ourselves to a larger or smaller degree about the truth. Even if we are sincere regarding what we are aware of we are probably still lying because our consciousness is “false,” it does not represent the underlying real experience within ourselves. Dr. Freud started out with observation on an individual scale. Here are some random examples: a man may have a secret pleasure in looking at pornographic pictures. He does not admit any such interest to himself but is convinced, consciously, that he considers such pictures to be harmful and that it is his duty to see to it that they are not exhibited anywhere. In this way he is constantly concerned with pornography, looks at such pictures as part of his campaign against them, and this satisfies his desire. However, he has a very good conscience. His real desires are unconscious, and what is conscious is a rationalization which hides completely what he does not want to know. Thus, he is enabled to satisfy his desire without sensing the conflict with his moral judgment. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Success in the 21st century will require new ways of doing things. Innovation requires the Sacramento Fire Department to systematically identify changes that have already occurred—in business, in demographics, in values, in technology or science—and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires them to abandon rather than defend yesterday—something that is most difficult for existing companies to do so. “I worked with the Sacramento Fire Department for seven years. We had an eight-week basic firefighter course. We also attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and earned fire science degrees. They have a rather good fire science program. I was fortunate to have started at a very young age in a quite active fire department and had experience in just about every aspect of the fire service. I remember one of those biggest fires that I had ever seen. I was on the first ladder, second alarm. Two spectators and a fire policeman died. The scene was utter chaos. Conditions were deteriorating rapidly. The building was just being taken. It was beyond anything we could ever control. There was a downwind, the fire created more wind, all the characteristics of a conflagration. The thing was made completely out of wood. Our truck company did a lot of repositioning. We set up our aerial ladder and the ladder pipe at the end of the building, then the fire got hotter and hotter and we had to back out. It was amazing, the progress the fire made. It was self-propagating, and we repositioned three times. Rescues were made from ladders, a lot of people were rescued. Our company was at the scene at least thirty-six hours, but others were there a good three or four days. It taught me that firefighting would never be an easy job. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
“Before becoming a firefighter, I was already an emergency medical technician. On a typical day, we start by running several miles and then do a series of, let’s say, eight exercises, moving from one to the other. Then it would be classroom session. Then, in the afternoon, drill tower training, more classroom sessions, or actual fire simulation. What was nice about it is that this was Monday through Friday. On weekends I could ride on one of the busier engines or trucks in town. I had to retake emergency medical service training here as part of the program. We have to maintain our EMT status by taking a new test every two years. We put in hours, do a full day of practical work, and then we take the test. It’s an ongoing process.” Not only does the fire department save lives and reduces property loss, but they also prevent harm. Preventing harm covers many areas, including specialized rescue, health and wellness of citizens, and injury prevention. Protecting property includes protecting community resources—people, property, natural resources, the environment, and the community infrastructure—from harm and loss. Also, protecting property includes mitigation of natural and technological disasters. Simply put, preventing fires, injuries, and disease is the most effective means of “preventing harm.” Public education and prevention is of equal importance to fire suppression in the role of the fire service in the community. You can help the Sacramento Fire Department’s mission by making a contribution. Americans love to see America prosper. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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If Life is Not to be Trivial, it Must be Hard
Several people say they turn to the TV news to figure out what is going on in the World. However, only 20 percent of Americans regularly attend church, but 57 percent of Americans tune in to TV news. The Christian Bible is the account of God’s action in the World, and His purpose for creation. Therefore, it is more logical to attend church and learn more about the World, yourself and God. Psychology is a nice supplement to religion. Maslow continuously pondered what humans might become, in the hope of learning how more of us might grow toward those seemingly Utopian levels of being. Maslow’s work remains as one of the most helpful sets of principles governing the development of the healthy personality. He suggested the existence of two kinds of motivation: B, or being motivation, and D, or deficiency motivation. D-motivations are those that grab us when we are deeply deprived or have a loss of some basic need, such as the burglar who may be driven by hunger or the coward who may be driven by fear for personal safety. In contrast, the self-actualizing person is seen as motivated by the being needs, to be the fullest possible self, to be able to sing, create, work at highest capacity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The peak experience concept has met with a great deal of interest. Maslow suggests the existence of these marvelous experiences that overwhelm the person and are great heights of delight and joy or meaningfulness, awesome experiences that may occur to a self-actualizing person but are not exclusively confined to that kind of person. Here are two contrasting examples of the more moderate peak or positive experiences collected from tenth-grade students: “Mine happened just last night. I love the summer and hate the winter. So last night when I stepped outside and found how warm it was I just couldn’t go back into the house. I walked around the house and then looked around. You can see all the houses around from our house and just looking around at them and hearing the sounds of the night relaxed me and I felt like I was watching over the whole World. It was a gentle feeling and gave me a little bit of a thrill.” “Yes, in the winter I love to walk out in the snow and let it fall lightly on my face. When this happens it seems to make a strange sort of happiness fall on me also.” Deep philosophic courage is a power not easily gained. A man must overcome much within himself, must hold his spine unbending and his effort undeviating. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
All those negative qualities which act as encumbrances to true understanding of situations, occasions, events, and persons must be guarded against in attitude and action. Amid his gross brutalization and maniacal exaggerations, Nietzsche’s evil mysticism expressed some truth. He affirmed rightly that if life is not to be trivial, it must be hard. His quest of the Overself must be an untiring one. It is to be his way of looking at the World, his attitude toward life. It is far more important to develop the strength within himself needful to break the spell than to be for preventative protection against it. In the first case, he progresses enormously and rapidly; in the second, he is static. Each difficulty surmounted, each weakness resisted will fortify his will and increase his perseverance. It will evoke the better part of his nature and discipline the baser, and thus fit him more adequately to cope with the next ones. He must be equally steadfast in adhering to this attitude whether other people utter complaints against him or make compliments to him. We must retain our determination and our loyalty to the quest in all circumstances. Physical pains, climatic extremes must not deter us. We must console ourselves with the thought that these things are certain to pass away. They are mental figments, ideas which will be negated, whereas the truth and reality we seek belong to the immutable, and can never be negated. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Few of us can withdraw from the World and most of us must engage in its activity. However, that is no reason for accepting the evils which are mixed in with this activity. Tenacity of purpose is a characteristic of all who accomplish great things. Drawbacks cannot disgust him, labour cannot weary him, hardships cannot discourage him in whom the quality of persistence is always present. However, to the man without persistence every defeat is a Waterloo. Indecision of purpose and infirmity of will must yield to the resolute mind and the determined act. The person who sways uncertainly between one side and the other misses opportunity. The student’s inner reactions to outer events provide him with the opportunity to use his free will in the right direction. His attitude towards his lower nature, that is, how far he encourages or discourages it, is another. And his recognition of what are good opportunities and what should be avoided, together with his acceptance or rejection of them, is still another. Mental indolence and moral lethargy are hardly likely to waft us into the high haven of spiritual peace. We must learn to think fearlessly and courageously about every problem that faces us; we must try to elevate our hearts above the level of the moral lepers and spiritually disabled of our time. He will learn to endure the blows of misfortune with a bravery heretofore unknown and a serenity heretofore unexperienced. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
If he is to achieve a full self-mastery, the strength of will which can lead a man to command of his desires for pleasure of the flesh cannot stop there. It must also go on to his diet and feelings, his speech and habits. However, many people, including the less affluent not only practice age discrimination, but they also advocate a lower-class bias. Class-stereotype is ambivalent, describing lower class people both negatively (less competent, less human, more objectified), and sometimes positively, perhaps warmer than upper class people. At a variety of levels and life stages, social-class stereotypes reinforce inequality. Sometimes, people who have benefited from Affirmative Actions like to uplift people of their culture, but discriminate against others as an act of revenge for bias that have faced. Social class matters, as a social construction, can be described in terms of what persons do; their jobs, habits, hobbies, lifestyles, but also in terms of what other people expect from them, their personality traits, life choices, aspirations, motivations. These oversimplified characterizations (id est, stereotypes) entail descriptions and prescriptions that impact individuals’ achievements, self-evaluations, and well-being. However, some of the elite feel a certain personal alienation from the dominant characters and opinions of American intellectual life, which doubtlessly quickens their championship of those who are thought to have little chance of succeeding in life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Some think that free silver is a poor social remedy, and it will only lead to monetary inflation like what many are experiencing since the COVID pandemic. There are also those who think the proper way to deal with poverty and inequality is by advocating careful elimination of the unfit and dependent, chiefly by eugenic methods. While others believe that education is a great way to end inequality. Proponents of equality want a field that shall be broad enough to embrace the whole human race. However, as it stands, we are assimilating a mass crude material from the bottom and they are just exacerbating conditions of racism, agism, discrimination, harassment, and facilitating the expansion of criminal activity. This is leading many to believe that society is doomed to hopeless degeneracy. Yet, it is possible to take another view. The only consolation, the only hope, lies in the truth that so far as the native capacity, the potential quality, the promise and potency of a higher life are concerned, those swarming, spawning millions, the bottom layer of society, the proletariat, the working class, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, nay even the denizens of the slums—that all these are by nature the peers of the boasted aristocracy of brains that now dominates society and looks down upon them, and the equals in all but privilege of the most enlightened teachers of eugenics. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
In the past, sociocracy, or the planned control of society by society was considered a solution. Under sociocracy, purposeful social activity, or collective telesis, could be harmonized with individual self-interest by means of attractive legislation designed to release the springs of human action for socially beneficial deeds by positive rather than negative and compulsory devices. Where individualism has created artificial inequalities, sociocracy would abolish them; and while socialism seeks to create artificial equalities, sociocracy would recognize inequalities that are natural. A sociocratic World would distribute its favours according to merit, as individualist demand, but by equalizing opportunity for all it would eliminate advantages now possessed by those with underserved power, accidental position or wealth, or antisocial cunning. We need to arrive at a better understanding of the importance of feeling in human motivation. The unique and artificial character of social organization and social processes are an odd inconsistency to deck out sociology with physics, chemistry, and biology, and to set it in the framework of a cosmological system. Some are not only ahead of the masses in point of time, but they are head, shoulders and hips above the general population in many respects scientifically. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
All the efforts which are made to develop and maintain the mental hygiene practices of our citizens help to restrain what would otherwise be an ever-growing demand for psychiatric services. The role of the family in contributing to emotional stability is a most crucial one and the programs in parent education which are offered under a variety of auspices play a vital role in contributing to sound psychological environments in the home. We would do well to give all possible support to programs in parent education and to resources for parent consultation; we should be particularly concerned to provide programs for parental guidance in those areas and communities in which they are presently lacking. The psychiatrist and psychologist can find especially effective avenues for their services as consultants in clinics or other programs for parent education. Next to home, the school provides a universal setting with potential for teaching and demonstrating sound mental hygiene principles. If the schools have been less than optimally effective in this responsibility in the past it is partly because they have been uncertain of the relative priorities of the provision of subject-matter instruction versus the stimulation of the pupil’s total personal growth. While the contribution of the individual teacher can occur in a variety of way, ranging from early detection of emotional distress and referral to provision of “emergency” tension relief and even relationship therapy, the optimal participation of teachers in mental hygiene activities is greatly enhanced in those schools that have provided for formal integration of mental health services, with the consultative assistance of professional workers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Better preparation of teachers for their opportunities, responsibilities, and limitations as mental hygienists can help much to reduce the demand for specifically psychiatric or psychological treatment. Such resources for expert treatment of childhood problems are even more severely restricted than are those for adult patients, and there must be increasing attention to the development of consultative skills—on the part both of teachers and experts. The potential of the church and the clergy in helping to promote mental health and to render assistance in cases of milder personal maladjustments is presently only partially realized. Based on a questionnaire survey, it was found that the average clergyman devotes only about two hours per week to personal counseling. Fewer than one out ten spend as much as ten hours a week on this activity. There is, considering the readiness of the distressed person to turn to his clergyman, a clear need to augment the preparation of the minister for this activity and to support him in his endeavours to render assistance, especially by giving him access to consultation. Increasing the effectiveness of our public education toward positive mental health and working toward more effective utilization of the front-line troops in early recognition and treatment of emotional upset constitute two ways of holding down the always excessive demand for psychiatric help. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
A third avenue deserving careful consideration would consist of efforts to educate the public more specifically as to the precise nature of psychiatric treatment, specifically of psychotherapy, to try to lower the public’s presently naïve and immodest expectations of what occurs in and what can happen because of psychotherapy, and to encourage a proper appreciation for therapeutic conversation. As an important part of this effort, both psychotherapists and potential patients should be helped to recognize that there is neither magical cure nor specific expert treatment for the philosophical neuroses. If all of these methods of reducing the demand for the psychotherapeutic services of psychiatrist, psychologist, and social worker are vigorously pursued, the problem of manpower shortage will be alleviated but not solved. There will still be a fully “legitimate” call for individual psychotherapy exceeding the supply available through the present and future supply of the acknowledged specialist. Is there a rational and socially conscionable answer to this problem? The man who seeks to release himself from moral responsibility for his actions or his fortunes can in no way make any real progress on the spiritual path. He may improve his capacity to mediate, he may become more sensitive physically, but his real battle—against the ego—remains unfought and therefore unwon. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
We have looked at social character as the structure through which human energy is molded in such specific ways, that it is usable for the purposes of any given society. It is also the basis from which certain ideas and ideals draw their strength and attractiveness. This relation between character and ideas is easy to recognize in the case of the individual character structure. A person with a hoarding (anal, according to Dr. Freud) character orientation, will be attracted to the ideal of saving, he will be repelled by ideas of what he would call “reckless spending.” On the other hand, the person with a productive character will find a philosophy centered around saving “dirty,” and will embrace idea which emphasize creative efforts and the use of material goods is concerned, the relationship between character and ideas is the same. Some examples ought to show this relation clearly. With the end of the feudal age, private property became the central factor in the economic and social system. There had been, of course, private property before. However, in feudalism private property consisted largely of land, and it was connected to the social situation of the landowner in the hierarchic system. Since it was part of the social sole of the owner, it was not salable on the market. Modern capitalism destroyed the feudal system. Private property is not only property in land, it is also property in the means of production. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
All property is alienable; it can be bought and sold on the market, and its value is expressed in an abstract form—that of money. Land, machines, gold, diamonds—they all have in common the abstract money form in which their value can be expressed. Anybody can acquire private property, regardless of his position in the social system. It may be through industriousness, creativeness, luck, ruthlessness, or inheritance—the ownership of private property is not affected by the means of its acquisition. The security, power, sense of strength of a person does not, as in the feudal system, depend any longer on a person’s status, which was relatively unalterable, but on the possession of private property. If the man of the modern era loses his private property he is nobody—socially speaking; the feudal lord could not lose it as long as the feudal system remained intact. As a result, the respective ideals are different. For the feudal lord, and even for the artisan belonging to a guild, the main concern was the stability of the traditional order, the harmonious relation to his superiors, the concept of a God who was the final guarantor of the stability of the feudal system. If any of those ideas were attacked, a member of feudal society would even risk his life to defend what he considered to be his deepest convictions. For modern man the ideals are different. His fate, security, and power rest on private property; hence for bourgeois society, private property is sacred, and the ideal of the invulnerability of private property is a cornerstone in its ideological edifice. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Although the majority of people in any of the capitalist societies do not own private property in the sense used here (property in the means of production), but only “personal” property such as a BMW, television set, etcetera—that is, consumer goods—the great bourgeois revolution against the feudal order has nevertheless formulated the principle of the invulnerability of private property so that even those who do not belong to the economic elite have the same feeling, in this respect, as those who belong. Just as the member of the feudal society considered an attack against the feudal system immoral, and even inhuman, so the average person in a capitalist society considers an attack against private property a sign of barbarism and inhumanity. He will often not say so directly but rationalize his hate against the violators of private property in terms of their godlessness, injustice, and so on; yet and often unconsciously, they appear to him as inhuman because they have violated the sanctity of private property. The point is not that they have hurt him economically, or that they even threaten his economic interests realistically; the point is that they threaten a vital ideal. It seems, for instance, that the repugnance and hate which so many people in capitalistic countries have against communist countries is largely based on the very repugnance they feel against the outright violators of private property. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
There are so many other examples of ideas which are rooted in the socio-economic structure of a society that it is hard to select the most representative ones. Thus, liberty became the paramount idea for a middle class fighting against the restrictions that the feudal class imposed upon them. “Individual initiative” become an ideal in the highly competitive capitalism of the nineteenth century. Teamwork and “human relations” became the ideals of the capitalism of the twentieth century. Since “fairness” is the basic law of the free market in which commodities and labour are exchanged without force or fraud, fairness became the most popular norm in capitalist society. At the same time, the idea of fairness became identified with an older norm, “love thy neighbour,” via the popularized version of this norm in the form of the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The theory that ideas are determined by the forms of economic and social life does not imply that they have no validity of their own, or that they are mere “reflexes” of economic needs. The ideal of freedom, for instance, is deeply rooted in man, and it is precisely for this reason that it was ideal for the Hebrews in Egypt, the slaves in Rome, the German peasants in the sixteenth century, the German workers who fought the dictators of East Germany. On the other hand, the idea of authority and order is also deeply implanted in human existence. It is precisely because any given social order can appeal to ideas which transcend the necessities of this order that they can become so potent and so appealing to the human heart. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Yet why a certain idea gains ascendance and popularity is to be understood in historical terms, that is, in terms of the social character produced in each culture. One more qualification must be made. It is not only the “economic basis” which creates a certain social character which, in turn, creates certain ideas. The ideas, once created, also influence the social character and, indirectly, the social economic structure. Social character is the intermediary between the socioeconomic structure and the ideas and ideals prevalent in a society. It is the intermediary in both directions, from the economic basis to the ideas and from the ideas to the economic basis. Many people are confronted by a confusing false dichotomy. They believe that the choice is between an anarchic system without any organization and control and, on the other hand, the kind of bureaucracy which is typical both for contemporary industrialism. However, this alternative is by no means the only one, and we have other options. One option is between the “humanistic bureaucratic” or “humanistic management” method and the “alienated bureaucratic” method by which we conduct our affairs. This alienated bureaucratic procedure can be characterized in several ways. First, it is a one-way system; orders, suggestions, planning emanate from the top and are directed to the bottom of the pyramid. There is no room for the individual’s initiative. Persons are “cases,” whether welfare cases of medical cases, or, whatever the frame of reference is, cases which can all be put down on a computer card without those individual features which designate the difference between a “person” and a “case.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Our bureaucratic method is irresponsible, in the sense that it does not “respond” to the needs, views, requirements of an individual. This irresponsibility is closely related to the case-character of the person who becomes an “object” of the bureaucracy. One cannot respond to a case, but one can respond to a person. This irresponsibility of the bureaucrat, feeling himself part of the bureaucratic machine, most of all wishes not to take responsibility to make decisions for which he could be criticized. He tries to avoid making any decisions which are not clearly formulated by his case rules and, if in doubt, he sends the person to another bureaucrat who, in turn, does the same. Anyone who has dealt with a bureaucratic organization knows this process of being sent around from one bureaucrat to the other and, sometimes after much effort, coming out at the same door which he had entered without ever having been listened to except in the peculiar way in which bureaucrats listen, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes impatiently, but also always with an attitude which is a mixture of their own helplessness, irresponsibility, sense of superiority toward the “petitioning” subject. Our bureaucratic method gives the individual the feeling that there is nothing which he can initiate and organize without the help of the bureaucratic machine. As a result, it paralyzes initiative and creates a deep sense of impotence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Firefighters are important because they save lives. The Sacramento Fire Department is a highly skilled organization which makes huge contributions to the community. “I was lucky enough to make a rescue after eight or nine months in the volunteers. Luck is a factor because, you have to be at a fire where somebody needs to be rescued. Then you have to be at the right place at that fire. You have to have enough knowledge to know how to do it and then be lucky enough to successfully pull it off. You can’t plan it. I don’t believe in fate per se, but I think there are certain things in the cards. I was fairly young. I was on a pumper, and we were the third or fourth pumper there. The truck company was pretty heavily engaged, and there were a number of people on the fire escapes. Sacramento is basically a bedroom community. You know, little private dwellings. All of a sudden, we had an -apartment house fire, which was taxing. It was a nine-story building, and the fire was in the cellar, so the whole building was at risk. My pumper pulled up, and another fellow and I reported to the chief. “What do you want us to do?” He said, “I’ve got a report that there’s a baby in that apartment.” A baby, right. It happens so often it seems to be a cliché. So we went up the hallway, it was pretty smoky, and we came to two doors. I had a feeling that the baby was to the right. The other guy said, “I’ll go straight.” I went into the room at the right, it wasn’t extremely hot, but it was smoky. On my first search I didn’t find anybody, but I figured I better do it again. The second time around, I found the baby lying on the floor between a night table and a bed, I guess he rolled off the bed or something, I’m not sure. He had on a little green-and-white-striped shirt and Pampers. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
“Right then, when I took him out, I knew that the rewarding feeling was similar to putting a fire out, only more so. Shortly after probie school, I was assigned to Engine Company 2 in Midtown Sacramento. There I was fortunate enough to be involved in my first City of Sacramento rescue. You make your own luck in many instances. It was very unusual for a probie in an engine company to be put into a search with an officer. We were at a false alarm when the dispatcher asked us if we were available. The battalion chief gave us the go-ahead, and we were first at the fire by a good fire minutes. It was a high-rise apartment building. Being a gung-ho probie, I had gotten completely geared up for the false alarm. I had a mask on and everything. The other guys, because it was a hot summer night and although this was a known false alarm box, hurried to the scene. People at the apartment were screaming that there was a baby trapped. Another baby, right. People leave them behind like old bathrobes. The lieutenant, seeing I was a new guy said, “Let’s go.” We went up the elevator part of the way, then ran up the stairs to the hallways leading to the fire apartment. The door was open, and the smoke was nearly to the floor. It was hot. We went in the direct of the heat. Again it was another one of those, he went to the left, and I went to the right, and I found this little boy on the floor. He was conscious, and I removed him to the street and took him to the hospital. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
“The sad part was that there was another child in the apartment, the lady’s nephew. A guy, I think he was from another truck, went in off the aerial ladder, got in the window, cut himself on the glass, and made a real spectacular rescue of the child. The kid was badly burned, and he didn’t make it. It was just one of those things again. You just go along doing your job, and there you are. It was unusual for me to be there, because the truck company is in charge of forcible entry, going in and searching for victims, and they work more or less independently. Whereas in an engine company the people work together in one group to fight the fire. It was not so much aggressiveness on my part, it was my ‘gung-ho-ness.’ I was serious about every aspect of the job, even cleaning the brass, and every time we went out the door, I wanted to be fully prepared. And it paid off. Sure, putting out a fire is satisfying, there’s nothing like it except making a grab, rescuing somebody. But even in a busy area, some companies don’t make one grab a year. While a nozzle man in a busy area is going to put out three, four fire a night. There’s a lot to be said for that. That’s an enjoyable part of it, too.” Life safety is the primary job of the Sacramento Fire Department. You can help save lives by making a contribution. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Frightened Restitution
The thought has crossed the minds of many that humankind faces a fate of evolutionary destruction of self. However, it is plain to see that others continually strive for the higher aspects of their own possibilities, to be more compassionate; loving; creative; to create great, beautiful parks and vast, wild, free lands; more exquisite poetry and buildings—to perfect themselves and the World about them. There is a struggle, the movement of humankind is heading toward the development of the self to levels of superb functioning for perhaps a few persons who become models of human effectiveness and for higher levels of living, joy of living, for much greater numbers. Humans have sought to perfect themselves throughout history. Early Christians sought purification of self in the face of temptation, salvation, and underwent training to be reborn in Jesus as the Christ. It is recognized that humans are capable of states of being that far surpass present levels of beauty and goodness. The term healthy personality is used here to describe those ways of being that surpass the average in actualization of self and in compassionate relationships with others. The human can be studied as a natural phenomenon, with methods appropriate to the study of zoology or ethology. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
However, humans have the capacities for speech and for self-consciousness. People give meaning to their World and can communicate meanings to other persons. If we wish to understand human behaviour, we must not view it as we would the behaviour of animals struggling to survive in each environment; we must regard behaviour as action, as a kind of speech. Humans “say” something to the World and to their companions by their actions. If we wish to understand humans in their existence as human beings, we must find out what they mean to say, and how they say it in words, action, and even in physiological responses. Of course, we also find out what they mean by asking them to tell us. Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver. Nearly always, giving is a selfish pleasure, and in many cases, it is a downright destructive and evil thing. One has only to remember some of our wolfish financiers who spend two-thirds of their lives clawing fortunes out of the guts of society and the latter third pushing it back. It is not enough to suppose that their philanthropy is a kind of frightened restitution, or that their natures change when they have enough. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Such a nature has enough, and nature does not change that readily. I think that the impulse is the same in both cases. For giving can bring the same sense of superiority as getting does, and philanthropy may be another kind of spiritual avarice. Pure altruism is a rare and difficult quality, remote from the actuality of human condition. The cautious person is also entitled to ask whether it is justifiable, whether a man is not entitled to do justice to himself as well as to others. The obvious reply is that there is no reason why his own good should not be included in that of the whole community. Although we must admit that He acted most generously, it is an arguable question whether God did the right thing by sacrificing His son. He may love mankind without being in love with mankind. He may act with unwearying altruism and compassion towards them and yet with clear sight of their moral uglinesses and mental deformities. An intellectual enlightenment not accompanied by moral purification, can lead only to a meagre result when turned to the service of humanity. The altruist must educate his own character before he can influence effectually the character of others. Only then are false steps and dangerous missteps less likely to be taken. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
If the motive is pure, a generous act not only helps the beneficiary but ennobles the doer. The wisdom of the act is, however, a different matter and requires separate analysis. When some scientists dare to study the human being, they think of the subject as being like a laboratory rat. At least it would seem that way from the large amount of research in psychology based upon that animal. And there is no doubt that many things about the white rat are similar to aspects of the human being, including some motivations—pleasures of the flesh, hunger, safety, and so on. However, another image of the human being has been expressed in the Psalms (Psalm 8.5), that of being “just a little lower than the angels.” This implies many powers and capacities and almost suggests “sainthood” capabilities. However, we are exploring the “normal” person. There is a group of persons who are entirely mortal, who have their imperfections, and yet have discovered a way of life that is beyond what most people attempt to create for themselves. One of the characteristics of such people seems to be that they do have compassion, or caring, for others; but it is a very human kind of love. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
People who care about themselves, respect themselves, and like to present their best self to others also take care of their bodies. They jog or exercise in some other way, watch the intake of their food, and avoid either smoking or being where heavy smokers are taking up the good air. They recognize that having a healthy body is in great part controllable by the individual. Similarly, having a healthy personality is in greatest part under the control of the person who owns it. While there are genetic factors that seem to influence the personality and there are environmental forces that influence one’s style of interacting with people, the humanist also recognizes the tremendous power of the person to affect his or her own personality-destiny. This is perhaps the most important reason for studying a healthy personality. All of us want to be as fully functioning, self-actualizing, and healthy as we can be. Knowledge of what constitutes a healthy personality should help you to develop this type of personality. Secondly, the impact of the environment, especially of the people in your environment, has a great effect upon your personality. This still does not leave you helpless in the face of the influence of your friends, because you can choose your friends and even choose many other aspects of your environment. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
There are those people, friends, relatives, teachers, companions, who, when you are with them, make you feel that you are growing, becoming. These kinds of persons are known as “personality growth facilitators.” And there are also those who can destroy you psychologically. We call these “lethal personalities.” Thus, the second reason for the study of the personality is so that you may truly distinguish those people who are personality growth facilitators and find ways to be close to them. What about your effect upon others? How do you influence others so that they will feel they are growing? Almost all of us will have some role in raising children in our lifetimes, either through being parents, teachers, or neighbours. A third reason for studying the healthy personality is to be better able to have a good effect on the people who are close to us, particularly friends and children. If only for the reasons of pure curiosity, science claims the privilege of exploring the unknown. Science searches for basic laws and principles that may have no immediate benefit or that might be explored without any specific benefit in mind. Often those discoveries of basic principles and laws do have important applied use. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
More often, however, the advantages and benefits are not immediately apparent, and legislators impatient for solutions are prone to cut off funds for all but the most applied research. Even if there is no longer a trunkful of diamonds deep in the darkness of The Winchester Mansion, science for its own sake, for the sake of pushing back ignorance and obscurity, is a viable reason for studying the healthy personality. The origin of organized society was caused by the conquest of one race by another. Caste system had developed out of such conquest, and society had then passed successively through five stages: the mitigation of caste coupled with the survival of inequalities; the consolidation of relationships through the growth of law; the origin of the state; the gradual cementing of the groups into a homogeneous people; and, finally, the development of patriotism and the national form of social organization. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Progress has frequently resulted from the forcible fusion of unlike elements. As much as one may deplore the horrors of war, it has been a necessary condition of race progress in the past, and the conquest of backward races is inevitable in the future. In advanced societies, rational and peaceful forms of social assimilation may supersede the genetic and violent method of the past. It is possible that a friendly pacific age is about to dawn—just as Spencer’s militant type of society gives way to the industrial—but it is doubtful that the World has yet reached the point at which war ceases. Whether the cessation of conflict would even be desirable was an open question to Ward. His adherence in these respects to the conflict school did not in the least alter the fundamental structure of Ward’s melioristic sociology. The fact is that man and society are not. Except in a very limited sense, under the influence of the great dynamic laws that control the rest of the animal World. If we call biologic processes natural, we must call social processes artificial. The fundamental principle of biology is natural selection, that of sociology is artificial selection. The survival of the fittest is simply the survival of the strong, which implies and would better be called the destruction of the weak. If nature progresses through the destruction of the weak, man progresses through the protection of the weak. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
A study of the system of Man can lead to the acceptance of objectively valid values, on the grounds that they lead to the optimal functioning of the system or, at least, that if we realize the possible alternatives, the humanist norms would be accepted as preferable to their opposites by most sane people. Whatever the merits of the source of the validity of humanist norms, the general aim of a humanized industrial society can be thus defined: the change of the socioeconomic, and cultural life of our society in such a way that it stimulates and furthers the growth and aliveness of man rather than cripples it’ that it activates the individual rather than making him passive and receptive; that our technological capacities serve man’s growth. If this is to be, we must regain control over the economic and social system; man’s will, guided by his reason, and by his wish for optimal aliveness, must make the decisions. Given these general aims, what is the procedure of humanistic planning? Computers should become a functional part in a life-oriented social system and not a cancer which begins to play havoc and eventually kills the system. Machines or computers must become means for ends which are determined by man’s reason and will. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The values which determine the selection of facts and which influence the programing of the computer must be gained on the basis of the knowledge of human nature, its various possible manifestations, its optimal forms of development, and the real needs conducive to this development. That is to say, man, not technique, must become the ultimate source of values; optimal human development and not maximal production of the criterion for all planning. What we have failed to do in all this is to ascribe operational meaning to the so-called desirables that motivate us, to question their intrinsic worth, to assess the long-range consequences of our aspirations and actions, to wonder whether the outcome we seem to be expecting does in fact correspond to that quality of life we say we are striving for—and whether our current actions will lead us there. In other words, we are in the deeper sense failing to plan. Aside from this, planning in the field of economics must be extended to the whole system; furthermore, the system Man must be integrated into the whole social system. Man, as the planner, must be aware of the role of man as part of the whole system. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Just as man is the only case of life being aware of itself, man as a system builder and analyzer must make himself the object of the system he analyzes. This means that the knowledge of man, his nature, and the real possibilities of its manifestations must become one of the basic data for any social planning. In speaking of the socioeconomic structure of society as moulding one’s chaactrer, we speak only of one pole in the interconnection between social organization and man. The other pole to be considered in man’s nature, moulding in turn the social conditions in which he lives. If we start out with the knowledge of the reality of man, his psychic properties, as well as his physiological ones, and if we examine the interaction between the nature of man and the nature of the external conditions under which he lives, and which he must master if he is to survive, only then can the social process be understood. While it is true that man can adapt himself to almost any condition, he is not a blank sheet of paper on which the culture writes its text. Needs like the striving for happiness, belonging, love, and freedom are inherent in his nature. They are also dynamic factors in the historical process. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
While it is true that man can adapt himself to almost any conditions, he is not a blank sheet of paper on which the culture writes its text. Needs like the striving for happiness, belonging, love, and freedom are inherent in his nature. They are also dynamic factors in this historical process. If a social order neglects or frustrates the basic human needs beyond a certain threshold, the members of such a society will try to change the social order to make it more suitable for their human needs. If this change is not possible, the outcome will probably be that such a society will collapse, because of its lack of vitality, and its destructiveness. Social changes which lead to a greater satisfaction of human needs are easier to make when certain material conditions are given which facilitate such changes. It follows from these considerations that the relation between social change and economic change is not only the one which Marx emphasized, namely, the interests of new classes in changed social and political conditions, but that social changes are at the same time determined by the fundamental human needs which make use, as it were, of favourable circumstances for their realization. The middle class which won the French revolution wanted freedom for their economic pursuits from the fetters of the older order. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
However, they also were driven by a genuine wish for human freedom inherent in them as humans beings. While most were satisfied with a narrow concept of freedom after the revolution had won, the very best spirits of the bourgeoisie become aware of the limitations of bourgeois freedom and, in their search for a more satisfactory answer to man’s needs, arrived at a concept which considered freedom to be the condition for the unfolding of the total man. When students are permitted to be in contact with real problems; when resources—both human and technical—are made psychologically available by the teacher; when the teacher is a real person in his relationships with students and feels an acceptance of and an empathy toward his students, then an exciting kind of learning occurs. Students go through a frustrating but rewarding process in which gradually responsible initiative, creativity, and inner freedom are released. The kind of personal and intellectual change which comes about has many parallels with the changes which occur in psychotherapy. The nature of these changes has to some extent been investigated empirically. For the most part, modern culture does not, operationally, want persons to be free, despite many ideological statements to the contrary. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Both two main streams of modern life—Western and Communist—are extremely fearful of and ambivalent about any process which leads to inner freedom. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the surest roads to World catastrophe are individual rigidity and constricted learning. If we prefer to develop flexible, adaptive, creative individuals, we have a beginning knowledge as to how this may be done. We know how to establish, in an educational situation, the conditions and the psychological climate which initiate a process of learning to be freed. Learning to be free is something that our beloved Clare so desperately needs to learn. The whole area in her personality that consisted of arrogance, contempt for people, need to excel, need to triumph, was still so deeply repressed in her, even after therapy, that it had only been illuminated by flashes of insight. Even before she had started her analysis, she had occasional realizations of her need to despise people, of her great elation at any success, of the role ambition played in her daydreams, and it was a fleeting insight of this kind that she had now. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
However, this whole problem was still so deeply buried that its manifestations could scarcely be understood. It was as if a shaft learning into the depth was suddenly lit up, and soon after obliterated by darkness. Thus, another implication of this series of associations remained inaccessible. The picture of extreme solitude as presented in the tower in the desert referred not only to her feeling alone without Peter, but to her isolation in general. Subversive arrogance was one of the factors responsible for it, as well as resulting from it. And fastening herself to one person—“two on an island”—was a way of escaping from such isolation without having to straighten out her relations with people in general. Clare believed that she could now cope with Peter in a better way, but soon afterward a double blow came which brought her problems to a climax. First, she learned indirectly that he was having or had had an affair with another woman. She had barely received that shock when Peter wrote to her that it would be better for both if they separated. Clare’s first reaction was to thank Heaven that this had not occurred earlier. Now, she thought, she could stand it. The first reaction was a mixture of truth and self-deception. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The truth in it was that a few months before she probably could not have endured the stress without grave injury to herself; in the months to come she not only proved that she could stand it, but came closer to a solution of the whole problem. However, this first matter-of-fact reaction apparently resulted also from the fact that she did not let the blow penetrate beneath a defensive armour. When it did penetrate, within the next few days, she was thrown into a turmoil of wild despair. She was too deeply upset to analyze her reaction, which is understandable. When a house is on fire one does not reflect on causes and effects but tries to get out. Clare recorded two weeks later that for a few days the idea of suicide kept recurring to her, though it never assumed the character of a serious intention. She quickly became aware of the fact that she was merely playing around with the idea, and she then faced herself squarely with the question whether she wanted to die or to live. She wanted to live. However, if she did not want to live as a wilting flower, she not only had to ride herself of her longing for Peter, and the feeling that her life was smashed to pieces by losing him, but also to overcome radically her whole problem of compulsive dependency. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
If someone were to tell you ugly things about yourself, would you take heed to their words and try to make changes to yourself or would you blow them off and boot them out of your life? Why or why not? It is not always easy to see when someone is playing mind games with you. If they are adept at it, it is nearly impossible to see it, until it is too late. The principles and practice of group psychotherapy (several patients having a simultaneous session with a single group leader-therapist) have been in existence for some time. This approach to psychological treatment of emotional illness has been continually assigned a secondary role. It has been considered by many authorities to be a desirable adjunct to individual psychotherapy, but it has not generally achieved the status and prestige in the eyes either of the professionals or of patients which has been accorded to individual psychotherapy. The general preference for and greater effectiveness presumed for individual therapy is not founded on any rigorous research that has properly compared the relative efficacy of the two approaches. It is quite plausible that such a study might demonstrate group methods to be of at least equal potency to individual therapy. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
If it is incumbent upon psychiatrists and psychologists to do therapy, until this is adequately disproved, they would do better to extend their skills to the larger numbers treatable in a group setting. Experts who have had extended experience in individual psychotherapy will have acquired some sensitivities, skills, and insights that can be usefully applied in group therapy. Those persons administratively responsible for the treatment programs of clinics and hospitals should provide increasingly for group approaches to psychotherapy, with a corresponding deemphasis of the one-to-one therapeutic conversations. Where both forms of treatment are to be offered there should always be provision for careful evaluation of their relative effectiveness in producing significant changes in the patient. Firefighting is an interesting career. “There are a lot of strict requirements in the company, professional liability being what it is these days. We’re trying to weed out those who don’t come to work, those who don’t come to training, who don’t know what’s going on or how to use the new equipment. When you get someone with a new air pack who trained on an old, outdated model the last time he went to fire school ten years ago and hasn’t attended an update since, he goes into a fire situation and doesn’t know how to use the equipment. They have to take time out and go to the state fire school for thirteen consecutive weeks.” You can help prevent fires by contributing to the Sacramento Fire Department. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The Winchester Mystery House
Today marks the 50th anniversary of Winchester Mystery House being designated a historical landmark in California. Let’s celebrate this important milestone and pay tribute to the legacy of Sarah Winchester, the visionary behind this remarkable architectural masterpiece 🏰
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 